NEWSWEEK:Your grandfather was Muslim, but you are a Christian. What did you think of the pope’s original comments about Islam and how the reaction played out?
Barack Obama: Well, I think that we live in a time where there are enormous religious sensitivities, and I have no doubt that the pope did not intend to offend the Muslim faith any more than many of us sometimes say things in a different context that aren’t intended to cause offense. But I think all of us, particularly religious leaders, have to be mindful that there are a lot of sensitivities out there. Now, the flip side is that there are those in the Muslim community who are looking to take offense and are constantly on the lookout for anything that would indicate that the West is somehow antagonistic toward Islam. Did he say anything that he needed to apologize for?
You know, I leave it up to the pope. He made an apology and I wouldn’t challenge his judgment on it. Did you read what he said?
I read what he said. And, as I said, I think he is mindful that he did not want to cause offense or pain, and to the extent that he did, I think he felt it necessary to apologize. My point, I guess is that all sides in the current environment have to be very careful how we talk about faith. I gave a speech recently in which I said that Democrats, for example, should not be afraid to talk about faith. But I think we’ve got to do so in a way that admits the possibility that we are not always right, that our particular faith may not have all the monopoly on truth, and we’ve got to be able to listen to other people. You know I think one of the trends we are seeing right now, and which I think is causing so much political grief both domestically and internationally, is that absolutism has become sort of the flavor of the day.
And lukewarm water will dilute it, I guess. He’s completely right that Democrats need to get with the program and recognise that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. All this absolutism has got to stop. It’s a big problem for us:
Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to evanglical Christians in preparation for his possible Presidential campaign is running into very stiff resistance from the Christian right. As the Chicago Tribune reported recently, Obama is set to attend a huge evangelical gathering in California on Dec. 1, at the invitation of megachurch Pastor Rick Warren, the evangelical superstar who wrote The Purpose-Driven Life. Analysts have interpreted Obama’s scheduled appearance as a sign he’s working much harder than Dems ordinarily do to win over Evangelicals.
But the appearance is now provoking an intense backlash from leaders of the Christian right. They are calling on Warren to disinvite Obama from the event because of his liberal positions, especially abortion rights — or as one of those leaders put it, Obama’s support of “the murder of babies in the womb.”
Obama’s efforts are running into fierce resistance. For instance, an open letter from a group of Christian-Right figures — including Phylis Schlafly, Tim Wildmon and others — criticizes the invitiation by citing Obama’s pro-choice stance and his support for condom distribution in answer to the AIDS epidemic, “not chaste behavior as directed by the Bible.”
Then there’s this press release from the National Clergy Council, an umbrella group representing various conservative denominations. In the release, Rob Schenck, president of the group, did not mince words: “Senator Obama’s policies represent the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality, not to mention supreme American values.”
Obama’s attempted inroads with evangelical voters may end up being successful, but not without a significant struggle from leading figures in that movement.
Not a problem. Democrats just need to stop being so absolutist about abortion, birth control, free speech, civil rights and religious freedom and then everyone will be Democrats. (Except liberals, but who wants to be in the same party with those losers anyway?)
Let me be clear about this. I do not dislike Obama nor do I think his conciliatory tone is necessarily incorrect. There is utility in showing the religious right’s fundamental intolerance if nothing else. I do find his split-the-difference, triangulation tiresome, however, in the same way I find the news media’s he said/she said analysis lazy. It does not clarify anything, it obscures reality and it makes it difficult for Democrats to take a stand on the social justice issues that might just inspire some people of faith. You will notice that in his statement above about absolutism he only calls out two groups by name — Democrats and Muslims. Yet, there is no more intolerant group of people in this entire country than the religious right. By failing to “include” them by name in his call for conciliation he validates their phony argument that they are the victims of intolerance.
I don’t have any sense that he really understand what he’s up against with the right, but it looks as though he’s going to find out. I will be very impressed if he goes into the belly of the beast at Warren’s church and resists the temptation to trash secular liberals to make cheap points before a hostile crowd. I’ll be even more impressed if he takes it as an opportunity to challenge their assumptions about themselves.
Show us the money, Obama. Psycho-babble platitudes about “listening” are not going to carry you to the White House. Start talking.
After reading all about Arlen Specter and the Military Commisions Act, which revokes habeas corpus and permits evidence obtained by torture to be admissible if the military, without oversight, says it doesn’t violate Geneva, I was truly hoping the article would end with an exciting statement from the Dems that they would make reversing this montrosity a major priority. Hah!
Leahy, the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, voted against the Military Commissions Act and denounced its habeas provisions in especially harsh terms. But there are no signs that the new Democratic majority will take on habeas corpus anytime soon. Few Democratic politicians seem enthusiastic about proposing legislation that will principally benefit accused Al Qaeda terrorists, and, in the unlikely event that Democrats passed such a bill, it would face a certain veto from President Bush. The Supreme Court – not Congress – is likely to be the only hope for a change in the law.”This is definitely not going to be the first thing out of the box for us,” one Democratic Senate staffer said. “We make fun of Specter, but we’re basically leaving it up to the Courts, too.”
“Principally benefit accused Al Qaeda terrorists?” Exactly what are they accused of doing? Oh, sorry, that’s right, I have no business asking that question, do I? And by the way, why do I want to know? Better turn myself in now…
This is a time bomb, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans.
And there you have it, specific proposals from the right and the left about what to do in the Middle East. Blow it up? Or put it back the way it was? Let’s put on our most somber mien and discuss it!
And they call those of us who knew this thing was crazy from the start “third-rate minds.”
No wonder “sober centrists” congeal around adding 20,000 troops and waiting one more Friedman Unit to see what happens. If these are the only alternatives on the table – because the people who were right all along are all but entirely excluded from the mass media and the government – is it any wonder that the middle position between two stupid ideas is an equally stupid idea?
Special note to the cognitively impaired who read the above and concluded I think Chait somehow represents the left or liberals. I am well aware that while Limbaugh accurately represents the right in all its Cro-Magnon stupidity, Chait is speaking only for himself. However, in the msm, Chait is the prototypical liberal hawk. So his semi-serious – according to him – proposal to return Saddam to power will be considered as a liberal idea, and denounced as, you’ve got it, a perfect example of how unserious and dictatorial liberals are. Kee-rist, what a fucking moron.
Following up on my post below, I just noticed that Kevin Drum has cautioned the liberal blogosphere not to rely too heavily on populist gut instinct just because the tiresome punditocrisy has lifted “centrism” to some position of worship. He’s right, of course.
But as I write below, I would actually posit that the real problem is the liberal punditocrisy which reflexively rejects anything that is tainted by its association with grassroots populist sentiment. Particularly now, when many experts were marginalized because they failed to support the war and many liberals of both the netroots and grassroots were proven right, it behooves the establishment to open its minds to thinking from outside the usual suspects in the beltway. That doesn’t mean they should trust us liberal bloggers’ “guts.” We would not ask them to. It means they should stop trusting their own. Their guts, like Bush’s, are defective.
When I read Jonathan Chait’s piece in the LA Times from yesterday, I assumed he was making a Swiftian modest proposal. I read his piece to be a satirical left hook to the notion that the Baker Commission was going to find some magical solution to the Iraq quagmire and conclude that the only formula that would work would be to put Saddam back in charge.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I just saw him on Matthews explaining that he was engaging in “a little bit of hyperbole but I think there’s something to it” and “maybe we should put it back where we found it.”
Chait said “almost everyone with a brain says we shouldn’t have gone in the first place” but later admits that he was for the war but on different grounds than the neocons who were delusional about spreading democracy. He was for the war because he thought “weapons of mass destruction were the rationale” and said “I didn’t pay attention to, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to the possibility of a completely failed state. When the Bush administration talked about democracy I thought they were lying they way they lie about everything else that they do.”
Matthews reminded him that in 1991 Baker and Powell had warned about the break up of Iraq if the US invaded and admitted that he got tired of hearing about that and now knows they were right. Chait, however, disagrees. He says that the post war was “bungled as badly as you could have, they had no plan, Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next general who said, ‘what do we do about Iraq’ in the post war. They didn’t have enough troops, they broke up the Baathist bureaucracy, they broke up the army, they did it as badly as you couldn’t have, so you know, I think what they could have had was a stable, you know … last vicious dictatorship.
Matthews asked if he would have gone with the INC and Chait responds, “No, no, I thought what they would do all along was keep the Baath Party in place, get rid of Saddam, get rid of his sons…”
Matthews interrupted as he always does and moved on to another point, so perhaps Chait had something else to say, but I have to admit I was astonished by his point of view throughout the exchange. I had thought his op-ed a rather unsubtle piece of satire and it turns out that it was only barely exaggerated version of what he thought should have happened to begin with and what he still thinks should happen now. He’s making a real argument.
Jonathan Chait, you’ll remember, wrote the seminal essay on why liberals should support the war in October of 2002 in TNR. Apparently he forgot to mention what he “really” thought the Bush administration was going to do. (That’s probably because it was as illiberal as it’s possible to be and even Henry Kissinger would have found it to be beyond our ken.)
Here’s what Chait had to say back then:
When asked about war, they [liberals] typically offer the following propositions: President Bush has cynically timed the debate to bolster Republican chances in the November elections, he has pursued his Iraq policy with an arrogant disregard for the views of Congress and the public, and his rationales for military action have been contradictory and in some cases false. I happen to believe all these criticisms are true (although the first is hard to prove) and that they add more evidence to what is already a damning indictment of the Bush presidency. But these are objections to the way Bush has carried out his Iraq policy rather than to the policy itself. (If Bush were to employ such dishonest tactics on behalf of, say, universal health care, that wouldn’t make the policy a bad idea.) Ultimately the central question is: Does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does.
Liberals and conservatives share many foreign policy values in common: encouraging democracy and capitalism, responding to direct aggression, and so on. That is why, for instance, both overwhelmingly supported overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In the post-cold-war era, though, liberals have centered their thinking around certain ideals with which conservatives do not agree. Writing in these pages in 1999, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer identified three distinctly liberal principles: advancing humanitarian (rather than merely national) interests; observing international law; and acting in concert with international institutions, such as the United Nations. Krauthammer cited these three principles in order to dismiss them. I disagree. Underlying all three is an understanding that American global dominance cannot last unless it is accepted by the rest of the world, and that cannot happen unless it operates on behalf of the broader good and on the basis of principles more elevated than “might makes right.”
This article was widely discussed at the time and many of us chewed it over in some detail. I remember his argument quite well. (The bit about international law was particularly incoherent.)So you can imagine how startling it was to hear Chait say today that he always thought the Bush administration was lying about what it planned to do in Iraq — and that he backed an invasion that would result in the installation of a friendly dictator. All in the name of liberal values.
Wolfowitz said long ago that WMD was the argument they could all agree upon, but the “liberal” argument was not completely ignored. We certainly got it from TNR and in the pages of the major newspapers. Indeed, it was the official liberal argument in favor of the war. Only realist misanthropes and dirty hippie throwbacks argued that the democratic domino theory was a crock. We were borderline racist and hated America for even suggesting that it might be just a tad unrealistic.
To be sure, Chait based his argument most fully on the WMD threat, but for all his skepticism about Bush’s honesty in other areas, it apparently didn’t cross his mind that they might lie about that. Neither did it occur to him and all the other liberal hawks that Saddam might have had good reason to exaggerate his arsenal for regional or domestic purposes, something that the thin gruel Powell presented to the UN and the continuous debunking of “proof” (as with the aluminum tubes and the drone planes) should have made thinking people at least consider.
But now we find out that certain liberal hawks (or Chait at least) always had their own “cakewalk” fantasy. The US was going to invade, get rid of the WMD, install our own friendly dictator and then get out. Who knew?
Matthews rather acidly asked him if we shouldn’t just pick sides now that the whole mess had devolved into civil war — or maybe just back Moqtada al Sadr for president of Iraq and let it go at that — and Chait looked flummoxed. (Of course, it was Matthews incoherently shouting, so you can’t really judge from that alone.)
But it does raise the question: do liberal hawks think that this is still a solution to the problem? Chait indicated that he was exaggerating to get people “thinking.” But perhaps his “bring Saddam back” was as serious a piece of advice as his earlier exhortations that liberals should support the war. I would suggest that it has just as much merit.
Update: Chait just appeared on Tucker and expanded on his thesis:
We’ve learned that there are worse things than totalitarianism and one of them is unending chaos…My argument is not an entirely cynical argument… One of the things that foments chaos is the expectation of chaos, when people’s behavior changes, when they don’t see any established order, and one of the few things we’ll be able to do, I was sort of supposing, would be the return of Saddam Hussein — he has high name recognition, people know who he is, they know what he’s capable of doing and you have, it’s still a recent enough that he was in charge of the state, that you still have the Baath army units and the infrastructure to put in place. So I was hypothesizing that this may be the only force capable of actually ruling the country, not that we want that by any means, it was horrendous, but simply that you have order, I mean it might be the best of some very, very, bad alternatives.
TC: Best for us. It seems to me the one thing about Saddam, as deranged as he may have been, he did have something to lose, he didn’t want to die, and he wasn’t a religious nut, he was incredibly brutal. Does that tell us something about what we would need to do in order to secure Iraq. I mean, he killed people with poison gas, Was that something he had to do? Was that required?
Chait: No I don’t think so. But look, he’s psychotic so you can’t assume that anything a psychotic man does is something he rationally had to do. And he would still be psychotic if he was in power. There would be no doubt about it. I mean, it certainly would be better for us,
We wouldn’t have the Iranian influence and you wouldn’t have Iraq becoming a potential terrorist haven, both things that threaten us a great deal, if we had Saddam in power. You would have someone who would brutalize his own population but again you’re getting that right now anyway and you might be getting less of it if he returned.
TC: Obviously we’re not… because there is a civil war, and according to NBC it officially begins today, that kind of implies we ought to pick a side. And in fact pick a strongman to preside over the country in a less brutal way than Saddam did, but in a brutal way nonetheless and keep that place under control? Should we pick a side?
Chait: I don’t know. I think I’m probably like you. You read all these proposals about what to do with Iraq and there all people who specializing in the topic and know more about it than I do and probably more than you do and it just doesn’t sound that convincing and when they pick apart the other guy’s proposal, when they say “here’s why we need a strongman and here’s why partition won’t work” and you say “that makes a lot of sense” and the other person says “here’s why we need partition and why the strongman won’t work” and that seems right also, so that sort of the mode I’m in. I just don’t know what to do. The only time anyone seems convincing is when they say why everything else won’t work.
I hate to be a profane blogofascist, but that is just chickenshit nonsense. This guy makes a living as a pundit. He wrote an extremely provocative article saying that we should re-install Saddam (or some other strongman.) And then he cops out by saying he’s confused because the “experts” don’t have any easy answers.
This kind of thinking has permeated the establishment from day one. Plenty of people said in advance that the war was a mistake for exactly the reasons that Chait is now so surprised by. Nobody listened to them then and nobody is listening to them now. In fact, they were and are derided and marginalized. Today allegedly liberal pundits are rather seriously discussing the merits of installing friendly dictators now that their fantasies failed to become reality. How ridiculous.
Update II: One thing that should be noted is that Chait, like many of his DC brethren, has what seems to be temperamental aversion to the dirty hippies of the left. During the Bush years he has gone slightly cuckoo over Deaniacs, anti-war protesters, Lieberman ousters and grassroots troublemakers in general. I don’t know the guy, but from reading his stuff it appears to be the result of a reflexive emotional reaction.
This is one of the fault lines that exists in liberalism today — the knee jerk assumptions by the elites about the grassroots populists and vice versa. The problem for the party, however, is that opinion makers like Chait are taken seriously by policymakers while the grassroots troublemakers are not and the result is that their visceral dislike of our ilk comes into play in important ways. I happen to think that Chait’s disgust with the activist left leads him to make incorrect decisions. He’s not in the same league as someone like Richard Cohen, but then Richard Cohen has become something of a joke, whose inexplicable sinecure on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post mostly serves as fishwrap. TNR, on the other hand, is listened to by Democratic policymakers and Chait’s overheated reactions to the grassroots should be addressed.
He and others — he’s far from alone — should try to see things with clearer eyes. This is not the early 70’s and grassroots progressivism in 2006 isn’t a youth or a social movement. It is passionate and it is populist, at least in a stylistic sense but it is not radical or anti-intellectual. The liberal pundit class is making a number of errors in judgments at least in part because they are emotionally recoiling from being associated with what they see as dirty hippies. This is a problem.
At the end of his interview with Chait, Matthews said something like “what’s going on with you guys at “The New Republic?” You’re going liberal.” Chait responded, “we’ve always been liberal.”
Mark my words, soon it will be said that when the going got tough the liberals said we should bring back Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows that the left are totalitarians from way back.
Recently, the term “christianism” seems finally to have caught on to describe the political movement that exploits Christian symbols for secular gain. And with its acceptance has come the usual denials and attacks from the right.
Glenn Greenwald, for example, takes on Ann Althouse who claims to find the term offensive as well as Glenn Reynolds who calls it “a variety of bigotry.” In an update, Glenn notes that Hugh Hewitt characterizes “christianism” as “hate speech.”
I can’t improve on Glenn’s summary of the issue and his rebuttals but I would like to add this:
Now you know why I wrote “Voices of Light.”
My respect, even admiration, for many religious traditions is deep and genuine. I find much that is beautiful and even true in these traditions. “Voices of Light” is, among many other things, an expression of that admiration. And it’s not limited merely to Catholicism, the specific religion within which the events of “Voices of Light” take place. I’ve used texts from many different traditions in other works.
Naturally, when you take the time and effort to write a large piece of music, you have many reasons to do so. One reason that was very important to me was that I felt that I had something to contribute to the American discussion of religion and spirituality, namely that there is a huge difference between the desire to understand what is meant by God and political acts undertaken in the name of God. Failure to discern the two can be, and events have shown, is, very dangerous for American democracy.
However, I well knew that the public discourse on religion was overrun with hateful ideologues who would rather beat you to death with a Bible (metaphorically speaking) than practice the mercy of Christ (literally speaking). I wanted to make sure that before anyone presumed to speak up for what I stood for, I had made it crystal clear that my respect for religious tradition is deep and sincere. I think that even if you don’t like “Voices of Light,” it is hard to argue that the person who wrote it didn’t take Joan seriously and with great respect, as well as respect the religious traditions she practiced.
Regarding my possible personal beliefs, or possible lack of same, I felt then, and still feel, they are irrelevant to a serious discussion of religion in a public space. What is important, the only thing that is important as far as I’m concerned, is that it is clear that I have no interest in undermining religious beliefs (or unbelief) but totally respect them and try to learn what I can of many different traditions. By the same token, I have zero interest in promoting any religious system (or lack of same).
I have a very different attitude towards the political exploitation of religious symbolism and belief. To be blunt, I find it immoral that anyone would dare to corrupt the religious impulse – which, for so many, is crucial to their understanding of their lives – for cheap, secular, partisan gain. I’m talking Pat Robertson here, Jerry Falwell,followers of Rousas Rushdoony, Joseph Morehead, Randall Terry and the whole sick crew of sleazy political operatives eagerly working to wreck the American system of government and establish a theocracy.
They deserve no respect, no quarter, whatsoever. It is very important to understand that whatever their personal beliefs – which are all but unknowable – they have made it clear through their public statements that they are dangerous political extremists who have celebrated the virtue of their intolerance on numerous occasions. Some have gone out of their way to excuse, advocate or even perpetrate murderous violence in the name of their utterly sick beliefs. They have generously funded elaborate efforts to undermine science with sophisticated marketing campaigns to teach cruddy lies to science students.
And they have blasphemously used the cross and other religious symbols as if they were trying to ward off vampires in a cheesy horror film. They degrade the cross, a symbol beloved and honored by millions who have nothing in common with these people. And they do so not to affirm their religious beliefs, whatever they may be, but in the most cynical fashion, merely to counter legitimate expressions of outrage at their hateful behavior or ideas.
For all these reasons, I think it is crucial that a distinction be made between the expression of religion and its political exploitation. Therefore, a few years ago, I proposed the term “christianism” to distinguish the political movement from Christianity. I urged others to adopt it. Other terms have been proposed such as Michelle Goldberg’s “Christian Nationalism” but I like the parallels between “christianism” and “islamism.”*
One word about the provenance of the term, which I would like to be clear about. I’ll post the links tonight, when I have more time. When I wrote the 2003 post, I was completely unaware, because I have, with rare exceptions, never read him, that Andrew Sullivan had used the exact same term with a similar definition a few days before I did. The first I learned about the Sullivan post was when William Safire discussed the term “christianism” about a year or so ago in the New York Times Magazine. Actually, the word has been used for centuries, I believe.
While it is more than possible that I used the term in comments on other blogs long before I wrote that June, ’03 post, I’ll cheerfully concede precedent to Sullivan (and when Dave Neiwert credited me at one point, I wrote to tell him that Sullivan preceded me). What is far more important is that finally, finally, American public discourse on religion has begun to acknowledge the important difference between genuine religious expression and the dangerous political operatives that are operating with impunity behind the robes of priests. If I have had even a small role in helping people make that distinction, then I’ll feel that all the dozens of blog posts I’ve written on the subject was well worth the effort.
*As my original post made clear, there are differences not only between Christianity and christianism but also christianism and radical christianism. And, of course, there are many kinds of christianisms, those that emphasize Catholic symbolism as well as those that focus on Protestant evangelical traditions.
PS Those of you familiar with Joan of Arc’s story surely realize that religious faith and its relationship to politics are central to that story. I am quite aware that Joan’s story poses very disturbing questions that often seem at odds with my personal values. It was partly because the story was so deep and ambiguous that I found it so irresistible a subject. Art, as I see it, is not supposed to tell you how to feel, but should provide an opportunity for you to examine and contemplate your feelings and those of others, including the artist. Art does much more, of course, but that is another subject for another time (grin).
A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney’s long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.
The real issue is not going to be serving subpoenas. Oh, they’ll serve them all right. Nor will the issue be whether or not the White House will obey them. They won’t.
No, the real issue is what will happen when the White House refuses to respond to nearly any subpoenas. One thing is for sure: Bush and Cheney are prepared to bring down the the US government rather than comply. What will Congress do then? And how far will Congress be willing to push?
[UPDATE: A question for all of you: Does anyone remember any article like this in the mainstream press or media back in 2000, that Dick Cheney has a long history of advocating replacing the president with an emperor and breaking the law? I don’t. Would’ve been nice for the American people to know that back then….]
How many of you folks speak Arabic? I count three, maybe four based on your names. Let’s be generous and say ten members are fluent in Arabic.
As for the rest of you, easily the majority, that don’t speak Arabic, how the fuck do you think you can contribute any truly substantive expertise about the situation in Iraq to the study group? Sure, some people need to be expert on things that don’t necessarily require Arabic language skills. But most of you? What kinda sense is that? Y’think you have expertise ’cause you recently skimmed a summary of al Jazeera broadcasts? That’s like thinking you can advise on heart surgery ’cause you watched Marcus Welby a lot when you were a kid.
Just asking.
Love,
tristero
h/t Glenn Greenwald who, in a typically brilliant post writes:
Back in 2002, when the U.S. was debating whether to invade Iraq, those who opposed the invasion were, for that reason alone, dismissed as unserious morons and demonized as anti-American subversive hippies. Despite the fact that subsequent events have largely proven them to have been right, and that those who did the demonizing were the frivolous, unserious, know-nothing extremists, this narrative persists, so that — even now, when most Americans have turned against this war — the only way to avoid being an “extremist,” and to be rewarded with the “centrist” mantle, is to support the continuation of this war in one form or another.
A desire to keep troops in Iraq even in the face of what is going on there may be many things, but “centrist” is not really one of them. Any Commission which commits itself in advance to keeping American troops fighting in Iraq for the foreseeable, indefinite future is itself “extremist” — whether that term is seen as a function of public opinion or assessed on its own merits.
A team of psychologists has discovered why money can’t buy happiness.
Pictures of dollar bills, fantasies of wealth and even wads of Monopoly money arouse feelings of self-sufficiency that result in selfish and often anti-social behavior, according to a study published in the journal Science. … Money makes it possible for people to achieve their goals without asking for help. Therefore, Vohs and her colleagues theorized, even subtle reminders of money would inspire people to be self-reliant — and to expect such behavior from others.
A series of nine experiments confirmed their hypothesis. For example, students who played Monopoly and then were asked to envision a future with great wealth picked up fewer dropped pencils for a fellow student than those asked to contemplate a hand-to-mouth existence.Money also influenced how people said they preferred to spend their leisure time. A poster of bills and coins prompted students to favor a solitary social activity, such as private cooking lessons, while students sitting across from posters of seascapes and gardens were more likely to opt for a group dinner.
The expected behavior of others comment reminds me of Ronald Reagan, who used himself as a model of how to rise from nowhere. If he could become president, anyone could achieve whatever they wanted. In a system that rewards self-interest, you just have to constantly act in your own self-interest, society be damned.
A lot of fascinating discussion in comments to this post on chickenhawks, a subject that has more odd angles than one might originally suppose. One of the most intriguing response to my post is that two regular commenters, Jose Chung and DavidByron, who I always assumed would never agree about a thing, both strenuously objected to the notion that willingness to serve in the military confers some sort of special status in opining about Bush/Iraq. Another was DavidByron and Jill Bains’ insistence that my opposition to both the Bush/Iraq war and the Afghanistan catastrophes is diluted by a barely disguised willingness to accept the premises of America’s manifest destiny trope. A lot of other folks also made interesting, thought-provoking observations as well, and they all made me refine, perhaps even revise, some of my opinions on the subject. Thank you, one and all, for your contributions.
1. Jose Chung and DavidByron both seem to believe (and I’m sure they’ll correct me if I’m wrong!) that the chickenhawk issue really is about whether only those with military service are qualified to opine on the subject of war. But that’s not quite right. Of course, military service, or the lack of, has no genuine importance to the worth of an argument pro or con the Bush/Iraq war.* The real issue is the total cluelessness of a particular group of war advocates whose drooling enthusiasm for war isn’t grounded in reality.
I tried to make it clear in my post – but it wasn’t clear enough, apparently – that the hostile question, “well, if you support the war so much, why doncha serve?” is no query at all, but an angry, exasperated, assertion amounting to saying, “You don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about, or you wouldn’t talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way.” So yes, as DavidByron says, the question is a nasty, sarcastic, ad hominem attack. What makes it appropriate is that the reasoning of the chickenhawks was beyond serious discussion. Thomas Friedman’s insistence that even if Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 or had WMD’s, “we” still oughta whack him because “we” can. George Packer’s utterly naive kumbaya-save-the-world attitude. John Podhoretz’ floating the suggestion that maybe US forces should have killed more young Iraqi males at the beginning of the invasion. And, of course, the 101st Keyboarders who talk as if Mr. Kurtz’s “Exterminate all of the brutes” doesn’t go far enough by half.
There are various ways to respond to such garbage. Given an unlimited lifespan, I completely agree that we should examine each of the chickenhawks’ assertions in detail and respond in a logical, reasoned, way. But the truth is that life is short and Friedman, Packer, Podhoretz, and many others aren’t making arguments or assertions that are intended to be seriously discussed. These are crude, impulsive, thoughtless reasons to go to war – uttered from a virtual barstool – and they are usually accompanied with equally crude and thoughtless personal attacks on those who disagree: “you’re not with us, you’re against us!”
Since that is the level of the chickenhawks’ reasoning, it makes more than enough sense – to me, but maybe not to everyone – to respond, “okay tough guy, put up or shut up.” It’s another way of making the point that the chickenhawks – not necessarlily ALL advocates of Bush/Iraq who didn’t serve – aren’t serious people. It is mocking them, not asserting in any serious way qualifications for ALL discussions. And it is a terrible tragedy that those of us opposed to the war didn’t find ways to mock them earlier and in even nastier ways. Why? Because one of these profoundly unserious people is the president of the United States who was in a position to, and did, order US troops to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq.
Is sneering mockery the ONLY weapon against idiots like Bush, or the single BEST weapon? No, and no. But it is one tactic, nevertheless, and it has its place, and its uses. It may not discredit the chickenhawks in your view, dear reader, as you are knowledgeable enough to ask deeper questions, but it has the potential to do so with others.
2. Regarding the manifest destiny business, I am, unlike DavidByron, an American. It is possible that somewhere, somehow, I buying into that ugly, dangerous, myth of exceptionalism. But I truly doubt that some unacknowledged sympathy for manifest destiny influences my attitude towards Bush/Iraq or Bush/Afghanistan. I have been consistently and publicly opposed to both long before it was fashionable and have often framed the argument by saying America has no business spreading its cooties hither and yon. We are one great country among many great countries. But America has many serious flaws and has no reason to assume that its institutions are uniquely good for everyone, or that America has the right to do as it pleases in the world.
I fail to see how anyone can be serious in asserting that these are the views of someone who advocates manifest destiny, even without realizing it.
Jill Bains, however, tries to. She wrote, “If you fail to support the Taliban and whomever else is trying to physically expel the United States from Afghanistan, then, despite all your protestations to the contrary, you become a de facto supporter of the American occupation.” This is exactly the kind of false reasoning that leads others to conclude that if you’re opposed to Bush/Iraq, you’re “objectively pro-Saddam.” I reject it because it sets up an unnecessary and false dichotomy; it requires me to align myself with moral monsters in order to “prove” the seriousness with which I oppose Bush, an alignment I utterly refuse; and because it is needlessly tendentious.
Perhaps the best response to Jill Bains’ assertion is something close to what Arundhati Roy said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that a reasonable alternative to Osama bin Laden is not George W. Bush. Likewise, a reasonable alternative to Bush is not the Taliban. This, of course, goes without saying for most of us, but it bears repeating.
It is vitally important, in trying to articulate a 21st century liberalism, that liberals continue to insist upon finding and creating alternatives to this kind of false polarity. That is no easy job, but we’ve seen the kind of horror that quickly results when those alternatives are cavalierly swept off the table.
*Except, to a greater or lesser extent, in regards to technical issues. For instance, I am certain that General Shinseki’s considerable military expertise gave him a far better sense of what a reasonable level of troop deployment might be if Iraq was invaded and occupied by a US coalition than Paul Wolfowitz. That said, I maintain that no level of troop strength could possibly have led to a result much different than the one we see today. Bush/Iraq was a stupid idea that had no chance of an acceptable outcome.