Challenging the Right, on both sides of the Atlantic

Before I get to the political Right -- Murdoch, Breivik and Boehner -- I am compelled to take on religious conservatism, specifically of the papal variety. An Taoiseach, Enda Kenney, a politically and religiously conservative man and practicing Catholic, pulled no punches in lighting up the Vatican last Wednesday. Speaking on the floor of the Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, in reaction to the publication of the Cloyne Report on sexual abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach loosed all the righteous rage and indignation of a people that have been more completely under the spell -- and the thumb -- of the Church of Rome than any other in Western Christendom. I can't encourage you enough to read his whole speech (it's not very long, and linked above).

"It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children," said an Taoiseach in his preamble.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic…as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism....the narcissism .......that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”......the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

All true, and all damning of the Church's way of operating. Till now, the Vatican has been in the business of obscuring, obfuscating, demurring, clamming up and outright lying in order to protect itself. If the Church is going to maintain any credibility at all, indeed, if it has any intention at all of preaching the Gospel and holding us all to a higher moral standard and encouraging us to be our best selves with a straight face, it had better get out ahead of the crisis and start begging forgiveness instead of buying and/or enforcing silence. When a person or organization speaks in absolutes, as Rome is wont to do, it is necessarily hard to retract from those positions. This is even more the case when one speaks in infallible absolutes. The Great Commandment, on which the Church was founded, is to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It is not to "cover thine ass for all thou art worth."

The only person in the Irish Church who has come through the scandal with any shred of dignity intact is Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who has been routinely passed over for election to the College of Cardinals and received an official cold shoulder for his efforts at reconciliation. Where the rest of the Church, from the Pope to the parish priests, has pointedly refused time and again to accept any blame whatsoever or to issue even a sincere apology for its sins, Archbishop Martin has demonstrated in the most elemental ways he can how sincere are his remorse and desire to reconcile with his flock. With Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, he famously washed the feet of several victims of clerical abuse during a public Mass. Moreover, he has not only apologized sincerely, but recognized (during the foot-washing service) that apologies only go so far: "Someone once reminded me of the difference between on the one hand apologising or saying sorry and on the other hand asking forgiveness. I can bump into someone on the street and say “Sorry”. It can be meaningful or just an empty formula. When I say sorry I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness however I am no longer in charge, I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me. I, as Archbishop of Dublin and as Diarmuid Martin, stand here in this silence and I ask forgiveness of God and I ask for the first steps of forgiveness from of all the survivors of abuse."

The day that Benedict XVI -- or his successor -- stands in silence and in supplication of the forgiveness of God, survivors of abuse and Catholics everywhere, instead of in his usual infallible indignation and indifference, will be the day the Church may truly begin the healing process at last. The tables have turned, Your Holiness: for the first time in over 2,000 years, it is time for the Church to go to her flock in confession and accept the penance given. And it's going to take more than a few "Hail Marys" and "Our Fathers;" for starters, I don't think a Vatican III for the 21st Century would be asking too much...

***

To tell the truth, I have not followed either the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain nor the Norwegian terror attacks allegedly perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in every intimate detail. With the rest of the world, I'm repulsed by both men and their actions (or the actions of their underlings, in Murdoch's case), sorry for the victims and concerned about the wider implications of each.

And we can't deny that there are wider implications for, or perhaps even indictments of, our culture inherent in both the Murdoch and Breivik cases. Neither are truly "lone wolves" in the sense that they cooked up in their twisted souls or unhinged minds actions that have no precedent and no demand. Murdoch's News of the World was not some unread right-wing rag, but a popular mainstream tabloid. Breivik, for all the apparent insanity of his actions, does not strike me as either truly insane nor as a lone Islamophobic crank. I am not about to claim that he is mainstream, but it is chilling that he has maintained that the world will understand his actions in a matter of decades.

Much as I sincerely hope that does not come to pass, we -- by which I mean mostly white, well-off Europeans and Americans -- do need to appreciate that Breivik is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is not nearly as foreign as we would like to tell ourselves it is. Others have already drawn the parallels between Breivik's attacks and Jared Loughner's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (remember her?) and to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but I want to draw the connection between Murdoch, Breivik and the insidiously creeping monism and xenophobia that threaten our vaunted Western cosmopolitan values.

I've written before (and I'm certainly not the only one) that there is a fundamental disconnect in the European project as it currently stands regarding who exactly qualifies as "European." For the cosmopolitan Eurocrats who have been dreaming and imagining the European community for sixty years, that is a theoretical, intellectual and/or geo-political debate. But on the national and even more so on the individual level, it is a personal question. That is more a result of microeconomics than of pure nationalism, though nationalism plays an important role. But nationalism simply proves that "when it's not about the money, it's about the money," as one of my professors like to say. Or, to paraphrase a German friend, individual "European-ness" goes out the window the moment one's own taxes and, more importantly, state entitlements are brought into question. If states extend their social-democratic munificence to immigrants, that means there are more people clamoring for a piece of approximately the same pie as there were before. And when that pie is composed of individuals' tax money, the potential for resentment is understandably high.

I do not exempt the Americans from this criticism, either. We take an equally charitable view towards Mexicans and other Central and South American immigrants as Europeans do towards Muslims and North Africans; anyone who still remembers the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy will moreover have to admit that we can indulge in the occasional bout of Islamophobia ourselves. (That, and the fact that passing a Constitutional amendment to quash the creeping danger of Sharia law remains an arguably higher -- though somewhat stealthier -- priority of the current U.S. Congress and many state legislatures, but we'll get to that.)

Both Murdoch's and Breivik's transgressions were undeniably wrong and have caused a tremendous amount of grief and hurt to a lot of people. But before we get too carried away with cheering the downfall of the media's Mr. Potter or rooting on the Norwegians in hastily upping their maximum allowable prison term from 21 years (!!) so that Breivik could not be set free at the age of 50 (into a world that would understand the actions that got him locked away in the first place?), we need to take a harder look at the bigger picture. And I quite literally mean "we," gentle readers: all of us big-name-college-attending, Polo-wearing, Volvo-driving, Northeastern liberal faux-European stock are quite often part of the problem. Either we don't understand ("Hmph! I read the New York Times, never the Daily Mail!"), or we don't pay enough attention or give enough credence to the machinations of the "other guys" whom we probably don't understand anyway (care to guess how many U.S. states have considered legislation banning Sharia law or other "foreign" legal systems? Twenty-two!! Yep, nearly half of all these United States have seen fit to debate outlawing Islamic law in these days of 10 percent unemployment, self-imposed debt crisis, etc.)

So, if you're a Massachusetts or New York resident whose morning routine involves pulling on some Ralph Lauren or Land's End number, grabbing a Starbucks, commiserating with Paul Krugman about the latest affront to "the conscience of a liberal" and patting yourself on the back for living in a state that has legalized gay marriage, you're too comfortable. If you're proud to have a black(ish) President but don't personally know or interact with any black or Hispanic people (who are, it was announced yesterday in a statistic that sounded more like an Onion headline, suffering more from the current economic environment than are whites), you're too comfortable. And most of all, if you don't fundamentally understand what's going on with the U.S. economy (i.e. what 10 percent unemployment really means to your fellow Americans and what a crime this self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis is), what's going on with the Euro-crisis and its potential ramifications in Europe and the world, and/or what the real ramifications of default or downgrade of the U.S. would be (and how criminally insane it is that our government is trying its damnedest to turn us into Greece by choice), then you're too...feckin'...comfortable!

Much as Europeans need to do some serious soul-searching to determine what an appetite for the News of the World so ravenous that it reached (so far) from Scotland Yard to the prime minister's cabinet and a cultural xenophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik (look up his manifesto and confession online for lists of the ultra-reactionary militant groups he drew inspiration from, from Britain to Scandinavia) say about their society, Americans need to do the same in response to the debt-ceiling crisis and its outcome. I'll leave the culture wars to fight another day. What is most important right now is to look -- really look at and understand -- where we are, how we got here, what's happening, what options are on the table and what they would each achieve if passed.

I'm not going to run through all the messy details. From a factual standpoint, most of what you need to know about where we're at today is contained in two of today's Times editorials, on the choices on the table (which are"between bad and worse"), and the "denial of reality" that is standard operating procedure in the Republican camp. Here are the basic facts to keep in mind:

1) The crisis is self-imposed. If the (Republican) Congress hadn't/didn't draw a line in the sand on the formality of raising the debt ceiling, there is no problem with our current credit as such. There are undeniably long-term policy problems with our borrowing, which is what the Tea Party-coddling Republican strategy is nominally reacting to, but in the short term all that stands between us and default is a congressional OK, which has previously been rubber-stamped ever since Congress got a say in the debt ceiling decades ago. The bottom line is that if we go Greece, we've no one but House Republicans to blame for it, and blame them we must.

2) In less than a week, on 2nd August (or thereabouts), there simply won't be any money left to pay the bills. Unimaginable? Yes. But it's the new reality of the Tea Party-influenced Great Recession country we live in. Either get used to it or get angry and tell Congress where to stick its misplaced, sudden and utterly hypocritical debt puritanism. If you read the second NYT editorial above, you'll get a glimpse of some of the utter BS the Republicans are spewing right now -- there's billions squirreled away somewhere; default ain't no big thing; we're not really going to run out of money because the Treasury is really just a tool of that communist Mau Mau Muslim of a President we've got, so it can't possibly be telling the truth; etc. You can't make this shit up, and no one is calling them on it. They say these things with absolute impunity because no one has found the cojones or moral courage or whatever to look Palin, Bachmann, T-Paw, Cantor, Boehner and the lot square in the eyes and say, "At long last, have ye no decency?"

3) This is major-league politics with major-league consequences, and it's being conducted by a bunch of bush-league freshman representatives. In short, U.S. government default ends the world economic system as we've known it since WWII. The slightly less ominous prospect of a credit rating downgrade will permanently increase borrowing costs on the Federal government and by extension on state and local governments and on consumers. Planning to take out a mortgage on a house or a car? Those rates are tied to Treasury rates, and they'll be going up if we get downgraded, which may happen whether or not we raise the debt ceiling. (Side note: just who the hell are these all-powerful ratings agencies and who elected them lords of the world economy? Vague threats from S&P's, Moody's and others have kept the Euro-crisis unfolding, cast a pall over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and kept the markets in uncertain flux since 2008. Like the Tea Party, no one seems willing or able to tell them to take a hike.) In any case, paying an extra $200-$400 a month on a $200,000 mortgage might not amount to diddly-squat if you've "gone rogue" to the tune of a few million dollars (Palin), spent $4,700 on your hair and makeup since you started campaigning (Bachmann) or spend whatever Boehner spends on his tan, but in real-people terms, another Benjamin lost to interest every week or two is real money.

Politics is one thing. Playing party politics (which both sides are doing) is another. But outright lying with a straight (bright orange) face is another. Remember when the punditry got all worked up about how Obama had "lost control of the narrative" to the Republicans? Think what an understatement that really is. If Obama is willing to sacrifice entitlements, health care, tax reform and who knows what else from the liberal agenda and that's still not enough for the Tea Party, what does that say about each side? Think for a minute about how completely the New Right has seized control of not only the congressional narrative, but the vocabulary of daily life: we can't say the words "liberal," "entitlement" or "tax (increase)" without flinching or embarrassment; things like cost-cutting, "best practices" and supply-side economics are firmly entrenched in our way of looking at the world; no one in politics is willing to admit that there is 10 percent unemployment, much less deal with it (despite my Paul Krugman jibe earlier, he's been on a roll lately as one of the only serious and respected voices dutifully reminding us a couple of times every week that unemployment is the clearest and present-est danger to the economy); we can't regulate anything or anyone worth a damn and refuse to prosecute anyone but private citizens who cheated on the order of thousands of dollars in the wake of the crash; we instinctively deride "Obamacare" as creeping un-American socialism; and we let politicians of all stripes but especially Republicans lie through their teeth about everything from the President's citizenship to the death of Osama bin Laden to the real reasons for the debt crisis. How anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is solely responsible for the Great Recession and the biggest spending binge in history is absolutely beyond me. The crash started during and was a direct result of the administration of George W. Bush, and the earliest and most expensive stimulus measures were passed by the Bush administration. Besides, basic economic principles demand more government spending (yes, deficit-funded spending) in recessions to stimulate demand, not government cut-backs. To suddenly "get serious" about debt after cheering the Bush tax cuts and two unfunded boondoggles in the Middle East is the height of hypocrisy.

To be fair, I have lost a lot of faith in President Obama as this crisis has worn on. His willingness to concede fundamental points and programs to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship and compromise has been uninspiring and unimaginative. His speeches have been likewise. His patrician whining has been exasperating and unproductive (if you're the only adult in Washington, sir, act like it -- teach, cajole and/or spank the "kids" into line, don't cry about it to the voters). I had hoped that the election of the first independent President in modern times (let's face it, he's not really a Democrat, as evidenced by congressional Democrats' howls of protest at being shut out by the Oval Office) would bring with it a new, 21st-century chief executive who had a plan and the energy and bare-knuckled political will to educate the country about it and then set about enacting it in vintage Jackson/T. Roosevelt/F. D. Roosevelt style. Sadly, we got the compromiser-in-chief.

You can't expect to transform Washington by expecting it to compromise on its own. That's business-as-usual to a fault, and if the past three years haven't made that abundantly clear, I don't know what will. Though the Tea Party is completely out of touch with reality, it has hit upon something in seizing on constituent concerns and politicking for all it's worth to respond to them. That those expectations are ginned up, trumped up and hypocritically misrepresented is inexcusable, but at least the Tea Party has set an agenda and fought for it. I do not for a moment wish to see a President elected who would embody or follow the morally bankrupt Big Lie tactics of the Tea Party, but it cannot be denied that it is much easier to control the narrative when you actually have a narrative. Obama isn't trying to get even or get ahead; increasingly, he's not even getting mad, just whiny. Though we should have been doing so long ago, appealing to the nation to call their representatives and demand a deal when you, the President, can't get one done, is hardly the "adult" way of going about things.

Just like individual complacency regarding anti-Sharia initiatives, racial/socio-economic disparity, unemployment, and failure to be informed of and understand what's really going on in the world must be made uncomfortable, political complacency with lying, cheating, stealing, moral bankruptcy and focusing on the wrong issues for the wrong reasons must be made uncomfortable. If President Obama finds it less uncomfortable to let the Republican narrative go unchallenged and their intransigence stand than to confront them ("You want to bang on about birther/truther/deather/debt-puritan bullshit when we've got 10 percent unemployment, a broken economy, a hurting environment and an unsustainable population to worry about? Get out of my sight, and get the hell out of office!"), we as citizens need to start calling the White House as well as the Capitol and reversing his order of preferences. If Congress can't figure out how to "just say no" to pork, Laffer curves, non-regulation, pointless legislation and self-inflicted intransigence (even senior Republicans were admitting last week that their pledge-signing and apocalyptic/absolutist rhetoric had put them in a bit of an ideological Alamo), then we need to vote 'em out. Representatives are up for election every two years. If, as the current batch have, they have been an embarrassment to themselves and their country while in office, they need to go.

But most of all, if we can take anything from the events of the past several weeks, it is the lesson that it is long, long past time to open a serious, adult (though I hesitate to use that word), moral conversation in this country and the world. The Vatican must be put on notice that it's "Blessed are the peacemakers [Abp. Martin]," not "Blessed are the obfuscators [Benedict and pretty well everyone else involved]." Europeans and Americans need to start feeling uncomfortable about the privileged, wholly-unsustainable bubbles we live in. We'd better figure out how to deal with people who don't look, act, dress or believe the same as we do, and we've got to sort out how to stop conspicuously consuming resources at a rate that would require 2.5 Earths to sustain before we exhaust the one Earth we've got. And politicians everywhere have got to start either feeling uncomfortable about being crooks and/or cowards on their own, or we've got to make them uncomfortable.

Let's face it: we're not going to "win the future" with moon-shot platitudes when we don't even operate a space shuttle any longer. The longer we tuck ourselves in at night with the comforting thought that we once made it to the moon, the further out of reach we put the future. I'm not worried about maintaining "American exceptionalism" for its own sake, I'm worried about making sure that we demand the honesty, honor and moral courage of ourselves and our politicians to ensure that we create and hand off a better America -- and a better world -- to our children and their children. That's winning the future, and it's not mutually exclusive, either. In fact, it can't be: if being "exceptional" requires living beyond our means on the sweat of the rest of the world, we're not that exceptional nor admirable, and the world literally cannot cope with others aspiring to or achieving our level of "exception." If, however, being "exceptional" means that we're engaged in bettering our selves, our country and our world and making sure that we have the freest, most democratic, most welcoming society we can create, that's worthy of admiration and emulation, and it won't be zero-sum. Everyone can aspire to that and the world will be a better place for it.

I hope to hell you're uncomfortable by now. I hope you're squirming and the Starbucks next to you is growing cold. I hope you read the NYT's editorial page, call your congressman and bike to work. I hope you challenge yourself to be your best self and see what difference you can make. And, lest you think I'm just an angry, hopeless crank, I hope you'll read and take to heart the three most important reactions to the attacks in Norway. If we can all -- citizens, politicians, religious leaders, whomever alike -- take these to heart, we might actually benefit from the tragedy. From Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg: "Our response is more democracy, more openness and more humanity." From the Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang: "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect." And finally, from a young girl who survived the shooting spree on the island of Utoya: "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness [sic] can create." Amen.

(Oh, and I hope you watch this video, filmed on Shop Street in Galway.)