Back in the U.S. Again

A few thoughts on the usual things while awake on Ireland time...

I flew back to the U.S. yesterday after a five-week return trip to Europe, and I feel compelled to comment on my fellow Euro-traveller, one Willard Mitt Romney. (To even things out, I've got something to say about Obama and the Dems, too, but let's start with the juicy stuff.)

Without meaning to be all Euro-snobbish about it, it was frankly embarrassing to be travelling at the same time as the former governor. The quick recap is that he visited three very friendly countries (England, Israel and Poland), and managed to step in it in each place he visited. Dissing the Brits' Olympics preparations practically the moment he landed was...deft. As the Guardian pointed out, he both blew "an easy date" and did more to unite the Brits behind their Games than any Brit politician had done. Then there was the "Mr Leader" flop with Labour leader Ed Milliband.

Lest he let foot stray too far from mouth, Romney went on to promise each Israeli 40 acres and a suitcase nuke (or something like that), further saying that Palestinians' economic woes have mostly to do with inferior "culture". If we think that economic sanctions have enough oomph to give the Iranians pause in their quest for the nuclear grail, don't we think that occupation and sanction might have some kind of limiting effect on Palestinians? Finally, in Poland, a Romney staffer stole the headlines from the boss by telling reporters to kiss his ass and "shove off" after yet more requests for comments from the candidate. (Mitt answered exactly three questions in the six days, all of them hastily fielded outside 10 Downing St).

People, we have seen this movie before. And "Neo-Cons 2: Return of the Ignorance"is not a sequel I particularly want to see. I know I'm howling at the moon by asking this country to look one or two meters (what's a meter?) beyond its own navel, but we simply can't have another No Apologies president right now -- preferably ever. Anybody who wants to claim American exceptionalism and "light unto the nations" status should at least be able to find those other nations on the map and know one or two things about how to interact with them. Insulting the world and ginning up a war in the Middle East were the hallmarks of a certain Republican administration of the not-too-distant past, and we know how those worked out. You don't have to like Obama, but let's not elect another neocon puppet to remind ourselves of why we were so desperate to elect the guy in the first place.

Speaking of Obama and the Democrats -- come on, people! A few days ago it was announce that Bill Clinton will have a major role at the upcoming nominating convention/love-fest, a move that was billed as a way of exciting the base and injecting some life into the campaign. As a fellow Hoya and something of an admirer, I'd be happy to hear what Bill thinks, but the fact that he's getting center stage at the convention is a bad sign.

Four years ago, Obama played a Greek god at the convention and came up with the oratory to match. You couldn't get a base or the independents much more excited than they were at that stage. Four years later, the candidate of our dreams can't come up with ideas exciting enough to dominate the convention himself? The Republicans want to replay the 2000's; the Dems want to bring back the 90s. Don't we know better than both of those by now? I hate to say this in the run-up to a convention -- and more importantly an election -- that Obama really needs to hit out of the park, but a Clinton retread (of the male variety) is a bad sign that the Dems are just as out of ideas and backward-looking as the Republicans. Isn't Hillary doing a good enough job at State to get some air time? How about Chelsea, whose name is already being batted around for a convention of her own in a few years? Can anybody focus on the future right now, or is it so bleak that we need to go back to the 90s? Don't forget, Bill was the man who caved to the Republicans' privatization-of-government thing by turning welfare into TANF and SNAP. But hey, the economy was booming then. What could go wrong? Thanks to deregulation, assistance to needy families isn't looking so temporary and there's a lot of supplemental nutrition that needs delivering.

The moral of the story, as always, is that we're better than this -- or at least we could be if we want to be. If the only plan for the future is to appeal to competing idealist visions of an ideal past, decline is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we get serious about the future -- get the money out of politics and into innovation, get education happening, get moving, get serious about protecting the environment -- we can lead. Frankly, the most surprising thing about decline is that no one has yet been more eager to give our pedestal a good shove and see if it cracks. There are good reasons for this -- being the world's reserve currency helps a lot -- but that's hardly a defense of exceptionalism.

If we turn politics over to the wealthy and corporate executives, they'll soon go the way of economics: grossly enriching a few at the tippity-top, who keep the rest of us going with the promises of democracy just as empty as the myth of boot-strapping entrepreneurship.

A Petition and a Reflection

First things first: After reading Nicholas Kristof's NYT op-ed today about a bunch of fourth-graders who struck a blow for The Lorax against a major film studio by using a Change.org petition, I decided to make one myself. Click here to check it out; sign it if you think it's semi-reasonable. If you sign, please forward it to folks -- you never know where these things will go, but they never get far if no one knows about them. If you think you can write a better one (maybe including a more specific request), do that and I'll be the first to sign it!

***

On to the reflection. This is a revised, expanded and re-phrased version of a speech I gave on Monday night at a dinner commemorating the efforts of all of us who contributed to the Junior Year Abroad Network blog hosted by the Berkley Center (where I work) last year. It got a pretty good reaction when I spoke it, so I'd like to share it with you as a text. Familiar readers will see some familiar themes, but there's some new stuff in here, too. Enjoy!

***

Think how the world has changed in the past 18 months. Since we JYAN correspondents departed for our various study abroad locations, the world has seen a deepening Euro crisis, the IMF in the Euro zone, riots in London and Athens, an ever-intensifying war in Mexico, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a British royal wedding, the death of Usama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, the rise of the 99 Percent and #OccupyEverywhere. We were, more even than the average JYAN group, witnesses to history.

But there’s one event I’d like to highlight most of all. It was the event upon which the last year – and some of our own study abroad programs – hinged, and it may well be the real start of the 21^st Century.

That event is the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17^th December 2010.

Try to picture it for a moment: a young man, about five years older than most of us, decides one day that enough is enough. He’s been humiliated by the police for the last time. So he does what most of us would do: he goes to the governor’s office to complain. Refused admittance, he does something few of us would do: he screams at the official’s closed door, “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself!” Then he gets a can of gasoline, goes out into the street and does just that.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation was ultimately a cry of voicelessness that has since translated into almost every language on earth. Looking at what has happened since then – spreading Arab Spring revolts, pro-democracy protests in Russia, democratic movement in Myanmar, Occupiers demanding a fair shake from the “One Percent” – it is clear that Bouazizi’s death was really a witness to the voicelessness that defines so many of the seven billion lives on this planet. The social-media revolutions spurred by that event are remarkable not for their media but for their message: the growing voice of people who never thought to have a say in their own affairs.

I’d submit a few aspects of my own year abroad as evidence. I spent the autumn in Georgetown’s villa in Turkey, a four-month sojourn in paradise on the Mediterranean coast. Part of that program – perhaps for the last time – was a week-long study trip to Syria. We drove east following the coast, then turned 90 degrees south into Syria and kept driving as far as Damascus.

While there, we travelled with a local guide and had special strictures on what we could wear and even on how we could act. We could not point at the omnipresent pictures of President Bashar al-Assad. Most of all, we had to remember that we were under constant observation by the many uniformed police we could see and most of all by the un-uniformed ones we could not. (It was the one time that having a group of 11 women and four men was genuinely stressful.)

Upon crossing the border back into Turkey, we all breathed a sigh of relief and discovered we both knew and liked the Turkish language far better than we believed just a few days before. We could not know it then, but within a few months the Syrian people themselves would rise up against those strictures that have defined their entire lives. Over ten months later, there is a news story nearly every day about more killing and repression as the same Assad whose picture we could not point at guns down his own people to keep them safely silent.

Though it was not nearly as explosive, I likewise felt stirrings of popular resentment in Ireland. Feelings of voicelessness and chafing at others’ meddling in one’s national affairs are almost congenitally Irish, but it is indicative of the globalized world we live in that the Queen of England was welcomed warmly and without incident on her first visit to the country but every time I left my flat, I passed a wall on which someone had spray-painted “IMF SCUM OUT!” in three-foot-high letters. In the age of government by “technocrats” never put to a ballot, meddling and misrule are no longer restricted to monarchs.

I am sure all of us correspondents saw, lived or were in some way affected by voicelessness last year. But I suspect most of us saw reasons for hope in the midst of all that. As I see it, the very fact of our all being safely back in Georgetown is a tremendous reason for hope. Think of all that we gained individually in our travels and reflections on them. Now multiply that by 55 – the number of us who participated in last year’s JYAN. By my count (assuming we averaged six months per person per trip), that comes out to 27.5 years of international experience, at least 110 blog posts, 110 reads and comments on each other’s posts, 55 faculty responses to our writings, probably over half the world’s countries visited and a couple of dozen new languages (or parts thereof) learned. That is a tremendous amount of voicefulness.

And we have been heard, thanks largely to a university that is willing to send us all over the globe and to literally bet money that we’d have worth-while observations to make on our travels and those of our fellows. The beauty of JYAN is that it transforms 55 individual junior years abroad into a network of people whose voices will only grow in reach and impact as our generation assumes responsibility for this earth that we’ve crisscrossed in our travels.

As the JYAN experience attests, when we travel (per Georgetown’s core Jesuit values) as “contemplatives in action” and “women and men for others,” we are able to realize that it was not just Georgetown that bet on us last year. None of our experiences would have been possible without the hospitality, compassion and capacity for kindnesses small and large of more people than any of us can count…times 55. Even the sometimes-unrecognizable kindnesses of the RyanAir staff helped – or at least gave us extended opportunities for cultural exchange in transit between where they think Paris is and where we think Paris is. But even when things were not quite as predictable as we expect them to be in the States, plenty of people were willing to help us get where we going or help us in some way even when they had no apparent reason to do so other than seeing another person in need.

Thus we learn through travel to trust our fellow human beings. In making new homes in new cultures we expand both our horizons and our perspective. If there is one thing that JYAN brought home for me, it is that the globalized world is not flat, but rounder than it has ever been. Yes, bigger and faster linkages are growing between people, countries and corporations like never before, but what is becoming ever clearer in those connections is that the real world is just like Networld: one global societal fabric. Skype lends a quality to the transatlantic friendships I made last year that snail mail never could – I acknowledge in a very real way the roundness of the earth every time I have to calculate time zones to set up a video chat.

Unfortunately, the global world looks just as flat in daily life as it always has. Even on Georgetown’s Hilltop campus, it takes a certain amount of willfulness to remind oneself that the world is indeed bigger than our selves or our little gated corner of Washington, D.C. To successfully navigate the (round) globalized world, we will have to literally expand our horizons of experience and compassion. For me, that process could not begin in earnest until I travelled and lived abroad.

Though I have read the newspaper every morning for most of my life, it took the expansion of my physical horizons beyond the visual horizon of the east coast of the United States before I could truly start to understand simultaneously how big and how small the world really is. Based on visual horizons alone, our daily experience supports a flat-earth – or worse, literally egocentric – worldview. Until and unless human horizons of compassion are expanded through experience to match the full 360 degrees of the earth, we cannot hope to realize the scale of global co-operation we will need to achieve in this century.

To break out of daily perspective requires expanding experience. One of my favorite examples is modern Europe’s attempt at a borderless society and common currency. Whereas my mother told me horror stories of having to change lots of money and endure dozens of border checks as she took trains across Europe 30 years ago, I could withdraw cash from any Bank of Ireland ATM, fly to the Continent, get one passport stamp and travel wherever I wanted from there. It struck me that this would be impossible without the implicit trust of each country that everyone else’s economic and border-security practices were good enough for all. The Schengen and Euro agreements that govern travel and commerce on the most fought-over piece of territory on the planet are not only a tremendous boon to tourists and businesspeople, but bets on humanity itself. That they obtain on a continent that has seen an ethnic cleansing campaign in my own lifetime is truly remarkable; I cannot imagine my grandparents would ever have guessed that one would be able to travel the Continent on one currency and one passport stamp within their lifetimes.

To those of us who travel, however, it is now the reversal of that condition that is truly unthinkable. That has not stopped fear and ignorance from threatening both the border agreements and the currency agreements now that the going is tough, however: “average” people – especially those who do roam the Continent like Americans abroad – now feel voiceless in the elite-driven politics of Europeanization, fearful of their neighbors (or their neighbors’ immigrants) and terrified at the possibility that some other country’s fiscal woes will sink their own economies. The Eurocrats have created a brave but fragile model of international co-operation, but the current economic crisis has shown that the “European project” cannot and will not succeed unless its ideals can be picked up by the majority as well as the Continental elites.

Spending time in other countries and cultures can also help us to more productively criticize our own. Many of us have returned with a much deeper sense of what we appreciate about the United States and the ways in which we would like to see it improve. This is vital – we will only be able to grow and improve upon experience if we can take criticism. There is nothing so off-putting in a relationship as one-way communication, particularly if it is often critical. Proposing that the United States adopt a policy of no apology and no retreat is as ludicrous as suggesting that a person take the same attitude towards the people he or she lives with. That person, no matter how powerful he felt, would find himself without friends in short order.

Thus, it is equally vital to realize that America’s voice in the world is weighty, easily distorted, but above all influential. That influence can be used for good or ill; as long as we remain a bright star on the world stage, it is incumbent upon us to consider carefully how we play our role. We have an unsleeping audience of seven billion people. We owe it to them and to ourselves to play it well. After all, as the world finds its voice, we will be emulated or “exceptional” to the degree that we effectively wield the soft power of our morals rather than the hard power of our arms.

This is the real lesson of Mohamed Bouazizi. His death marked the beginning of the defining social trend of the 21^st Century: the struggle to make their voices heard of all seven billion people with whom we share both a planet and a destiny. The defining image of this century will more likely be the human megaphone than the mushroom cloud. Truth will out – whether on Twitter, YouTube or WikiLeaks.

If that is indeed the case, we might do well to re-discover the old wisdom that our two ears and one mouth mean that we are to listen twice as much as we talk. Adding several billion people to the global conversation is going to be complicated and contentious, and great courage will be required of us if we are to succeed – i.e., survive. In the words of John F. Kennedy, “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Finally, as the class of 2012 prepares to graduate and begin to assume responsibility for this world, let us remember the perceptive and prophetic words of Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that are inscribed in the Intercultural Center: “The age of nations is past. It remains to us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside the old prejudices and build the Earth.”

It IS Our Problem

I kinda-sorta saw the Washington Post article yesterday detailing Newt Gingrich's ex-wife's assertion that has has something to answer for regarding his conduct in the sacrosanct institution of heterosexual marriage if he wants to become president of the United States. I'm already so cynical about the man's personal history that I didn't pay it much mind -- sure, he's a cheat and a liar, but what else is new?

What else is new, as it turns out, is the level of Gingrich's vitriol when confronted with uncomfortable questions about his past. This morning, I saw this video from last night's GOP debate in South Carolina (I'll start referring to the debates as presidential when the attendees start acting that way):



"Appalled," sir? Really? Surprised, perhaps, that the county worries a little bit that a man who seeks to have himself elected our moralist-in-chief has one moral code for us and one for himself -- and that his is slipperier than a congressional staffer in heat? Is it really so despicable or unimaginable that we whom you would rule are a bit concerned about your own apparent lack of any capacity for self-rule whatsoever?

At long, long last, Newt: have you left no sense of decency, sir?


When the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, was integrated, a white man from a rural Arkansas town took out a full-page advertisement in the newspaper the next day showing this photograph:

With it ran this caption: "If you live in Arkansas, study this picture and know shame. When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds a voice, God help us all."

If you live in America today, study the video above and know shame (especially if you are one of the people who hooted their support for Gingrich throughout, or feel similarly). When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds a voice -- saying things like black people are to blame for their poverty and President Obama is a "food-stamp president" -- God help us all.

That Gingrich thinks it is acceptable or even advantageous to say the things he says and take the tone he does is unconscionable. The level of hubris and hypocrisy inherent in his positions is truly breath-taking. This is a man who has made a career of telling this country that the federal government is too intrusive in our daily lives and that we must starve the beast to get it under control. It is now clear what his alternative is: forget the Fed, Daddy Newt himself will tell us all how to live our lives! It's not the government's business how we should approach health care, marriage, abortion, stem cells, climate change, or any of the other hot-button moral issues of our times. Oh no. It's Newt's business.

Think about that for a second. Suddenly, strapping the family dog to the roof of your car for the long drive to Canada seems like such small potatoes.

For the continuing saga of Newt's self-love, we as a country deserve a share of the blame. Don't pretend for a second that someone, somewhere in this land hasn't created a market for this act. No matter how comfy-cozy your liberal/academic/coastal bubble, understand this: the people woofing at Gingrich last night carry the same passport you do. (Well, they probably don't carry passports. But they do vote for the same presidency you do.) Yes, Newt is the closest thing to despicable I can imagine on the national political scene, but hate has been unleashed and bigotry has found a voice thanks to the efforts of all kinds of populist movements, from the often-overtly hateful Tea Party anti-Sharia jihadis to the leaderless-messageless-spineless-changeless Occupy folks. Look at that video, America, and then look at yourself. And know shame.

God help us, indeed. But please don't let it be Gingrich's god. For it is his poisonously small-minded Catholicism that bears the other half of the blame for this phenomenon. Gingrich's is the type of Catholicism that is too often the logical outcome of the focus of the last two papacies (on top of the last two millennia) of too much focus on the trees. To be fair, this phenomenon is found in plenty of religions, especially Christian denominations, but since Newt has finally figured out thanks to his third wife that the Catholic Church offers some of the strongest and slipperiest hypocritical "truthiness" in the business, that's what we have to confront.

Gingrich is the type of Catholic who thinks you can pick and choose your own Gospel According to You. Most people don't know their Bible word for word; fewer still understand all of it; almost none live it literally. That's all fine and good -- as long as we don't spend our whole lives telling other people how to live according to lights that we ourselves don't live up to. That's Gingrich's schtick, and it is despicable.

Let's face it: Newt's so fond of the sacred institution of marriage that he's gone and thus sanctified himself three times. Last time, he allegedly asked for an open marriage the night before he gave a speech on family values -- in order that he might continue to carry on with the conservative Catholic Callista, who "didn't care" about sharing somebody else's man.

Now, raise your hand if you think Newt and Callista were Catholically cuddling in a way that did not replicate or allow the possibility of procreation?

Right. Me neither. Pretty sure he's had sex with that woman, and I haven't seen any kids yet.

One of the points the Church is clearest on is that, infallible or not, it sure as hell ain't Burger King: you can't chop the teaching down to a bite-size bit that doesn't challenge your own beliefs or life-style in any way. Newt has committed the ultimate heresy of hubris: he's developed his own pocket-sized Gospel of Newt that he can wield indiscriminately to prove any point he wants to make and that he can wave like a magic wand to wipe away his sins of the past.

That is the really scary type of religion in which the believer is bigger and better than God. The a la carte Catholicism that Gingrich espouses is the worst of the absolutist mediaevalist mind-set and the uniquely American "have it your way" approach. As Gingrich -- now on his third religion -- demonstrates, where that path leads is to the absolute love and infallibility of Me.

There is no problem with Newt's past because, in his mind, he has done nothing wrong. There is no need to apologize to anyone for the same reason. There is no contradiction between his personal profligacy and his public ambitions because his overriding love of country -- what drove him into his mistresses' arms in the first place -- absolves him of all responsibility. How dare a lowly low-life like you, me or John King question the personal ethics of this selfless servant of America, even and especially when those ethics are a national story?

As the current president might say, let me be perfectly clear: I care deeply about this country, and I am grateful beyond words for the Catholic and Jesuit Georgetown experience that is changing me and shaping me even at this very moment. But a patriotism that stems from a love of country so great it has to be practiced on the nearest staffer, combined with a faith that worries over all of the teachings except the last and greatest, "to love one another as I have loved you, and your neighbor as yourself," is a terrible black mark on both this country and the Catholic Church.

Any believer of little qualitative faith but great quantitative faith -- Gingrich Catholics, Perry evangelicals, Orthodox Israeli men who spit on eight-year-old girls because they're not dressed "modestly" enough, al Qaeda, whomever -- is a danger. Such a "believer" following his "call" into politics is all the more so. The time has come for the Church to lose the mind-set of the Polish seminary, in which last week's wank or Saturday's condom use is a bigger moral obstacle than slandering the 15-plus percent of people in this country who live in poverty. That is the mentality that says that gays must marry under no circumstance but three heterosexual marriages born on desks in the House office buildings are A-OK (in fact, we'll just go ahead and annul the first two to make sure). That is the mentality that says that it's possible to square a notion of "one holy, catholic [i.e. universal], apostolic church" with an American exceptionalism that spits on our neighbors to the south.

People are fallible. They screw up. Sometimes literally. They change their minds. All of that can be dealt with and often forgiven if we're honest with ourselves and each other. It's fine to quibble with Romneyan flip-flopping -- it may very well not be presidential. But, Mr Gingrinch, I humbly submit that your personal life is very much my (and our) problem in proportion to the degree to which you hit us over the head with the infallible sanctity of same. We've bashed Romney's change of mind and run Christie out of town because if he couldn't control his appetite at the buffet he couldn't possibly govern responsibly. We all know what happened to Cain at the whiff of suspicion. You're next, Newt. Remember how fun it was to impeach a certain philandering former president? Karma is a bitch.

But no matter what karma has in store for Newt, don't forget to think a little about what it might have in store for us who have, through what we have done and what we have failed to do, unleashed hatred and given bigotry a voice. Don't commit the same heresy Newt has with regard to this country: if some fellow citizens think it is all right to cheer for Newt's hatred, you can't wish that away and tell yourself you're really a European who accidentally got born into some U.S. coastal enclave with a decided liberal bias. The New Yorker, in its own way, is just as much an echo chamber as the Gospel of Newt.

The Catholicism I've encountered on the Hilltop says the following: 1) it's all about relationships; 2) specifically, it's about "you and me in the context of us;" 3) social justice and the "preferential option for the poor" are non-optional; and 4) the meaning of life -- and the greatest commandment -- is love. That's what GU teaches, no matter what faith tradition (if any) you approach it from.

Go ahead, Gingrich: put that in your teleprompter and smoke it.

Living the Dream?

Thinking about the nature of "American Exceptionalism"


I'm not letting this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day go by without another mention of the state of the Dream, if you will. Particularly given how much we've heard and will hear about this concept from presidential candidates, I think it's time for some real reckoning about the nature of the "exceptionalism" we love to talk about. Chalk it up to my philo-classical phase, but if we're going to spill so much ink and anger over what this is and what it means, we might at least try to understand the true nature of it. Without further ado, a list of unconventional and uncomfortable thoughts on the matter:

Exceptional is not immutable: Or, exceptional beginnings do not guarantee exceptionality for ever and always. Yes, America had a storybook beginning. After more than 200 years of polishing, it's really storybook now, but even still the Revolution and the Constitution are still kinda cool. We don't genuinely do not see history littered with such events. But time catches up to all things -- just as it would be preposterous to think that Michael Jordan could still dominate the NBA today at his age simply because he was a pretty exceptional ballplayer once, it is that much more absurd to think that a good start guarantees America success today. It's this fundamentalist attitude of Constitution-waving Tea Party "patriots" that makes them unable to govern today. News flash to those in tri-cornered hats: the country has moved on. (Since it's MLK day, I'll mention here that we no longer have such peculiar institutions as slavery, Indian wars or non-suffrage of women.) Trying to turn back the clock on 200 years of genuine progress would actually remove much of the "exceptionalism" that we think of today and gives rise to the magical/wishful historical "truthiness" that assumes the Founders were greatly pained by slavery and/or it was some kind of ennobling institution. They weren't and it wasn't. One of the best shots ever taken at our white-washed historical imagination of our Constitution comes from Thurgood Marshall, speaking to commemorate that document's bicentennial:

I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever "fixed" at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

A "frozen chosen" interpretation of American exceptionalism is one of the greatest dangers to both the country and whatever "exceptionalism" we may enjoy. Please take a few moments of your holiday to read the rest of Chief Justice Marshall's dose of reality here.

Exceptional is as exceptional does: Try to think seriously about how this country is perceived by the rest of the world for a moment. We're still digging our way out from under a couple of wars fought on largely-fraudulent premises, everyone's still cleaning up the mess we helped make with the financial crisis, the tenth anniversary of the Guantanamo detention camp just passed last week, and we're lagging behind most or all of our friends and competitors on many of the societal indicators we pride ourselves on as integral to the American dream. Oh, and has anyone taken a look at the (non)functioning of our current and potential representatives in this city? The rest of the world is not going to tally all that up in the "con" column, then put down 1776 and 1787 in the "pro" column and come out pro-America. That's gross over-simplification, but no one ever accused popular opinion of hewing too closely to nuanced interpretation of fact or long historical perspective.

Currently, there are a number of ways in which we are indeed exceptional amongst developed countries: we have the least-developed national health service. We have less social mobility than anyone else (in other words, your success in this here classless society depends more directly upon your father's than it does in any of those hopelessly European-socialist countries or Canada). Team America still hasn't ruled out some of the nastier bits of national-global security like torture, detention and rendition. Our educational system, as most presidential candidates will tell you, frankly sucks -- unless of course your great-granddaddy pulled you up by your bootstraps into the American aristocracy meritocracy. Oh, and we're exceptionally cavalier with the environment and economy, phenomena fueled in large part by our exceptional insistence on our own facts and superstitions in the face of the decided liberal bias of science and fact.

An exceptional foreign policy these days might actually include some honest apology (!!) for wrongs committed, the closure of the Gitmo detention camp and perhaps return of the base to Cuba (maybe lift the Soviet-era travel embargo while we're at it), and a wee bit more willingness to co-operate with other countries and long-shot liberal institutions like the UN. At home, we might consider a sensible immigration policy, put a little money into public education, reform the tax code, buy vote in a government that works, see if we can't get Dr. King's dream going in a societal that is integrated rather than "post-racial" (racism that's not PC to talk about) and make gasoline $10 a gallon by 2015 (and rising). Faced with the exceptional growth of the Chinese economy, such policies might give us an exceptional leg up on that future we're so desperate to win with tired old policies.

Exceptional is not infallible: The American experiment has accomplished some great things. But we've also stepped in it more often than we like to tell ourselves, and we'd do well to remember that. Our treatments of Indians and black slaves border on genocidal; we've lost a few wars that we don't count because we have yet to fight an actual war in the perpetual-war era that has obtained since the abolition of the Department of War, water-boarding and Abu Ghraib really didn't look that good on our resume, and there's the whole Depression 2.0 thing. I've probably neglected a peccadillo or two. Again -- and I can't emphasize this enough -- I genuinely think America has on balance been good for the world and I would absolutely take our hegemony over that of China or another "development-sans-democracy" country. But we should think about the power vested in us by fate or chance and use it wisely and in (re)cognizance of our misuses of same.

Exceptionalism is path-dependent, too: We got a pretty good start in the world (with an assist from those funny-talking socialist Frenchmen), but we've also got lucky over and over again. I can't say this enough, either: our exceptionalism inheres not in our founding, but in the decisions made over the past 200-plus years by Americans great and small. If we don't choose to be exceptional, we won't be. The Founders themselves referenced "Providence" often. From a semantic viewpoint, I'd submit that that word choice might reflect a world-view more inclusive of good fortune than the Jesus-fest that has established a de facto "religious test for office" in politics today. Running for office because Jesus told you to is anathema to the kind of private reverence that says, "Thank Providence we won that Revolution and got a chance to put our ideas to work in the world. Let's make the most of this..." The former lives in dialectic with the id of our famous individuality that too quickly assumes that we as persons and as a nation are special, always have been, and always will be. It's that kind of thinking that blames poor people for poverty, assumes that our society is still mobile, and thinks that Mitt Romney started from the same point as a black girl born to a single teenage mother in poverty. We interact with the world as we interact with other drivers as we ply the roads of America alone behind the wheels of our SUV's: lost in our own heads and convinced of our righteousness. Ensconced in a Suburban, it's easy to miss feedback that maybe we're not the only person on the entire highway who knows how to drive; equally unassailable in our hegemony, we miss feedback that we are neither the only democracy nor the only one that knows how to do it on the face of the planet.

Exceptionalism has to be re-imagined and re-iterated: From age to age and generation to generation, we're only as exceptional as we choose to be. No matter how great our head-start, we're going to get caught if we stand still (or go backwards). We are neither guaranteed exceptionalism by the past nor entitled to a perpetual patent on it. Yes, the one and only Constitution of the United States of America (R) was developed on these shores. But two years later, the French had a little fuss and brought republicanism to the western Continent and the rest is history. Today, constitutions from the Democratic People's Republic of North Kleptofascistan to the UN evoke our own. To the extent that that has created a more peaceful, progressive and democratic world, that is a genuine, positive-sum Good Thing. It also stands as acceptable proof of our exceptionalism: we developed the model of governance that has come to predominate the aspirations and increasingly the politics of much of the world over the last two centuries. Even the arch-conservative Salafists in Egypt -- you know, them with the Sharia -- are competing for votes in a brand-new constitutional, bicameral government. Go figure.

All of that is to say that, while we had a good idea a while back, we must not forget either that it has only turned out to be worthy of emulation through the luck that has smiled upon us and good decisions of leaders past and present or that we must approach our somewhat exceptional history as positive-sum stewards rather than as zero-sum patent-holders. That's why we don't "spike the football" when we kill Osama. That's why we have rules of engagement. That's why we can't piss on dead Taliban in a war that we're fighting for the very ideas we place at the heart of our "exceptionalist" tropes. (After WMD and Osama disappeared 10 years ago, what did we have left for justification but ye olde "Freedom Agenda?" We're now reaping the whirlwind sowed by fighting for our ideals rather than from them -- it turns out ideals are not well-armored against insurgency.)

As we enter the age of soft power and influence-based politics, it has become imperative to clean our own house. Barring an act of monumental stupidity, we will not fight another land war in this century. Rather than waging industrial war, we will be fighting the battle of ideas and ideals. Influence will be directly proportional to the observable lived worth of our ideals. It will be measured by others at least as much as by ourselves. And like Republicans in marriage, our ideals will be judged by our actions and vice versa. In short, we're not competing with China on who can manufacture the most cheap lead-laden crap, but whose model of governance and modernization is the more conducive to human flourishing. They're gaining now because of the ruthless efficiency of non-democratic government. Others are emulating them because a system with 10% approval rating, deep poverty and crushing inequality does not appear worthy of emulation. We surrender that long-term vision at our peril: even if we win a Pyrrhic victory of the "prosperity Gospel" and figure out how to out-manufacture the Chinese once and for all, the American experiment will have failed if this comes at the cost of either our systemic influence or the earth itself (recall that production is rather resource-intensive).

In short, we are now perched on the precipice not between Left and Right or a perfect white-washed (in every sense of the term) vision of the Founders and an all-consuming, Sharia-based, apology-making, Euro-socialist disaster, but (as always) on the fence of free will. The choice is this: can this generation choose to accept, steward and strengthen the truly exceptional American dream by dreaming it bigger, or committing the moon-shot fallacy of the generation now in government and go down with the ship of past glories in the vain assumption that they have much bearing on present or future success.

The world only spins forward. The American Dream has expanded from a colonial idea to a more perfect union, but it's not perfect yet. Such perfection as we have achieved has come only from (sometimes painful) growth of the dream itself. The fact that you're sitting at home reading this today is a tribute to the expansion of the American dream to include Dr. King's dream. That didn't happen because somebody re-read his Constitution and said, "Hmmm, they said they'd probably get rid of slavery and the three-fifths fudge sometime" but because Dr. King and a whole lot of other people saw the dream inside the Constitution and said, "You know something? 200 years after a bunch of slave-holders wrote that, I think it's time this country started treating us as more than 3/5 human."

We are at a similar juncture today. Can we expand and enliven the dream, or will we let the Tea Party Congress shut it down along with the government? It will take thinking from both the right and the left if we are to succeed (as even prominent lefties know). It will require a balancing of continuity with the good ideas of the old and change to accept the best of the new. It will require an honest assessment of the true nature of our exceptionalism, the responsibility it imposes, and our own desire to live up to that responsibility. It will require some classical virtues (self-rule, moderation, pursuit of the Good); some biblical virtues (compassion, peace, loving-kindness, humility, humor); and some modern virtues (using modern tools to build and maintain influence through teamwork and transparency, non-zero-sumness, etc). It's also going to require a massive collective effort to get out of our own heads.

Exceptionalism is not an immutable state but a transitive condition -- we are exceptional to the degree that we individually and collectively determine to be so. If it is to succeed, this project will have to be national and eventually global. It must not be the affect of coastal liberals and anathema to mid-American "values voters." And on this day of all days, we might well turn again to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. to inspire us towards that goal. For "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly...this is the interrelated nature of reality." On that view, "if we are to go forward, we must go back and discover those precious values -- that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control."

It's not too late for one more New Year's resolution. This year, highly resolve to be exceptional and to work for the building up of an exceptional United States of America. It doesn't have to be big, but if you consciously do at least one exceptional deed every day and get a few people to follow, who knows where you -- and we -- can get. After all, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."


So go ahead: Shed a little light. Dream your own dream. Share it. Be exceptional. Just "take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." (MLK)

Thoughts at the Beginning of the End of Georgetown

Three days into my final undergrad semester here on the Hilltop -- where did the time go? -- I'm behind as usual on my blogging, but here's a collection of observations to start the semester off with...

Live your vocation with joy


For Christmas, I received Fr James Martin, SJ's new book, Between Heaven and Mirth. The book deals with the role of humor in religion (yes, there's a good case to be made for that!) and in life in general. If you're looking for a quick-reading work of popular theology, I highly recommend it; it's flying off bookstore shelves everywhere these days.

Reading it, I was of course heartened by the primary argument: in faith as in life, humor is the key to health. If you can't laugh at it, it's probably worth re-considering whether or not you can believe in it. After all, faith is necessarily concerned with this human project we're all involved in; that project is usually called "life" and we all know we'd better not take it too seriously -- we'll never get out alive, anyway. Humor, Fr Martin argues, is integral to most faith traditions and to healthy faiths. It knocks us down a peg and makes the world (and faith) manageable. It's also where a lot of really good insight happens: humor is deeply embedded in the human psyche, and much of our laughter (Daily Show or Colbert Report, anyone?) is directed at things that tell truth in a particularly ironic way that points out our own absurdity.

Side note: if you're not aware of or up to date on Stephen Colbert's super-PAC, "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," Google it. It's terrifyingly hilarious and provides quite a lesson on the mistake that was Citizens United.

But, me being me and the world being a bit larger than Georgetown, I started thinking about the implications of Fr Martin's thesis in national political life. At the risk of repeating Herbert Hoover, I really do think that what the country needs is a good laugh. Americans are a serious lot in general -- as the book points out, we don't extol the "Protestant play ethic" -- and no more so than in times of crisis. Most gloomy of all are folks like you and me: disaffected one- to 10-percenter middle-class liberals, who are age to age convinced that our age really is the worst that's ever been. How many times have you thought to yourself in the last day, week or month This country's going to hell in a hand-basket? Watching the GOP debates and the White House inactivity/ineptitude/immobility, I can't quibble with you: ours actually is the worst age that's ever been. (That's a joke. I think.)

So here's my modest proposal to political leaders of every size, shape and stripe: give a speech that makes us laugh every once in a while. And it has to be on its own merits: we all remember Bushisms and "oops," which were funny, but in more of a "Holy Shit!" sort of a way.

I'm reading Aristotle for a class now, and his Ethics starts from the premise that the end of humanity is happiness. His next assertion is that politics is the highest art of man, since it is how we pursue happiness together. I've banged on about the economics of happiness in this space once or twice before, but I'd like to take a moment and re-frame it in terms of Heaven and Mirth. In his book, Fr Martin recounts an encounter with the former Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach. Concerned at the low numbers of vocations to the order, the young Fr Martin asked his Superior General what was the best way to set about increasing callings to the Society. Fr Kolvenbach's "answer was as surprising as it was memorable. He said, 'Live your own vocation joyfully!'"

I'd argue that Congress has an approval rating as dismal as it does and the rest of the inside-the-Beltway crowd are as popular as heartburn in large part because I can't think of a politician today that is clearly living his or her vocation joyfully. Yes, money and super-PACs and partisanship and the nature of the system and the fact that we're living in the worst iteration of humanity ever all have a role to play in that phenomenon, but  what really scares me is that most of our politicians are motivated more by hatred than joy. Easiest way into the Beltway? Hate on the Beltway. Easiest way to lock up the Gods/guns/gays vote? Spew hatred about Mexicans, poor people, black people (or whatever Santorum called them), Democrats, foreigners, atheist-Muslim-Mau Mau-socialist-communist-Great Apologizer presidents, and whomever else. Of course no-one wants anything to do with a Washington of that culture. Yes, partisanship is bad, but it's natural. What's new and terrifying is the ultra-partisanship of hatred, in which the other side aren't assumed to be fully human, dignified, intelligent, sentient or whatever. That's a step backward in Washington and a really scary step backward for mankind. This November, please send someone joyful to Washington. It's our last best hope to prove the Mayans wrong about the end of the world.

A love letter to Europe


Lest you think the Georgetown Jesuits have completely captured my mind and my bookshelf, I'd like to briefly highlight another book I got for Christmas, The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco's latest novel. Like his other books, this one is popular fiction that reads like a college course in semiotics. Small wonder, given its author, but the really crazy thing about this one is that it's fiction, but with only one fictional character. The book is set in the late 1800's as Europe roils and republicans fight monarchists, the fallout of the revolutions of 1848 shakes the Continent, Masons and Carbonari and sundry devil-worshippers real and imagined pull the strings behind the scenes, and the fictional protagonist concocts the sine qua non of modern forgeries, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Protocols is an entirely fictitious document published first in Russia around the turn of the 20th Century that tar the Jews with the worst batch of slander since the "blood libel" of the Crusading era. Although recognized in relatively short order for the forgery that it was, the Protocols proved persistent enough in the collective imagination to be cited seriously by the Nazis, the Soviets and many other persecutors great and small of 20th-century Jewry the world over. Eco's genius is to take this document, around which so much suspicion and intrigue has swirled, and ascribe it to his fictional narrator, who spends 400-some pages meandering the Continent encountering people who really existed speaking words they actually spoke while he nurses his hatred of the Jews and builds his argument against them.

The point is this: the Europe I got to know and love last year is an historical anomaly that is, if anything, vastly under-appreciated. Think about it: on the world's most fought-over piece of real estate, modern democracy didn't emerge till the mid-19th Century, was secured west of Germany a century after that, and wasn't really a sure thing until 20 years ago. Nazis and Soviets were butchering millions only 65 years ago; the Soviet Union collapsed within my own lifetime; and former Yugoslavians of all sorts were tearing hell out of each other as recently as the mid-1990s. Circa 2010-2011, I could move about the vast majority of the Continent without ever showing a passport and could withdraw money from a Bank of Ireland ATM and use it in 16 other countries.

Doubtless you see already where this is going. Considering the history of Europe, the Continent I travelled last year is nothing short of a miracle. The Euro and the Schengen Zone, for all their many faults, have been instrumental in making the blood-soaked plain of Europe the oasis of peace it is today. Even a recently-downgraded France is not about to go to war with Germany (God forbid!), but both -- with a little help from their friends -- are perpetuating economic war against the peripheral PIIGS countries, and that's casting the future of the Euro and in some ways the Schengen Zone into deeper and deeper doubt.

Yes, massive mistakes were perpetrated by the PIIGS countries. They committed fiscal "original sin" by denominating their debts in someone else's currency; they (especially the Greeks) treated the Euro as a credit card with no limit and no payment date; and to a greater or lesser extent they allowed informal economies, lax regulations and shameful political cultures to persist out of habit. But the core countries aren't blameless. As a Times op-ed pointed out a while back, Germans holiday in Greece precisely because it's a place where they can get away from their Protestant work ethic for a few weeks a year. They could have demanded that Greeks become Germans before or shortly after the cradle of European civilization went on the European currency (a move made largely out of culturo-historical sentiment rather than fiscal realism in the first place), but the Germans still wanted a relaxing beach destination. Someone could have told Italy that keeping Berlusconi and his bunga-bunga simply because that's the way things had always been might be a bad deal, but no-one seemed to bother himself too much over that country in the boom days, either.

So, as a tourist and once-and-future resident (I hope) of that part of the world, I would like to issue my little cri de coeur to Europe's leaders to keep a good thing going. These are the good old days on that continent, and they will rue the day they let the common-currency and borderless-society experiments fail for lack of backbone or a better idea, should it ever come to that. Going off the Euro for want of some spine and a bit of imagination and compassion would do terrible, awful, no-good, very bad things to the world economy as well as the European project. We know that. What's less talked-about -- and what really worries me, even though it appears less immediately threatening than a Euro collapse -- is the back-tracking and potential revocation of the Schengen Agreement, which removed border controls within the Continental EU. Should that fail, or should countries like Denmark be allowed to unilaterally back down from or even out of the treaty, that would spell the end of the socio-cultural-political dream of modern Europe. Countries aren't likely to flip-flop very much or often as to whether or not they want to secure their borders; if the Schengen Zone starts to crumble, that will mark a huge and probably irrevocable step back from the unprecedented integration and concomitant peace and prosperity enjoyed in Europe over the last few decades.

"The politics of envy"


Here's Charles Blow's weekly column from today's Times: "The bitter politics of envy?" As always, I encourage you to read it every week, but this one's particularly good. It's not Mitt Romney's Mormonism or his flip-flopping that worries me -- heaven forbid we ever elect a president secure enough to change his mind once or twice over the course of a lifetime -- it's his disconnection from the everyday reality of too many Americans. In a society with deeper poverty and and less social mobility than any of our peers -- particularly the "socialist" neighbors to the north and east that we make so much fun of -- it is beyond unconscionable to joke about how gratifying it is to be able to fire someone. It's a shame the community organizer currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. hasn't been organizing this community of ours to change that lately, but at least he has some practical experience with people who don't think taking a picture with their pals wearing tuxedos and $100 bills is self-deprecating humor.

As you read, note how the Elizabeth Warren quotation is educational as opposed to inflammatory: the hallmark of good politics is that it gets people to succeed themselves by educating them towards the "better angels of our nature," as Lincoln put it. Everyone says President Obama is "professorial," but he hasn't been doing a good job actually teaching the country anything. That's why us liberals think the end is nigh instead of celebrating universal-ish health care, two wars wrapped up (also -ish), and a full-blown economic depression avoided. Let's hope Warren, an actual Harvard professor with a relatively hard-scrabble background, a) gets elected and b) doesn't end her teaching career when she does.

Happy long weekend:


"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- MLK

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." -- MLK

"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could do it no better." -- MLK





We shall overcome.