Petty Coercion -2 Truth

Not too long ago, Jim Carrey starred in a movie called, "Liar, Liar." He fell under a horrid enchantment, the effect of which was that he couldn't "tell a lie" for 24 hours. During the time of his enchantment, he said some really awful things that were called "truth" and that were supposed to conform to the comedy format. I didn't think they were funny, even though I recognized that a lot of people would, because they were embarrassing and I just don't happen to find embarrassment funny. My bad. But I didn't think they should be called "truth" either, because I distinguish between truth and candor. By candor, I mean expressing however you happen to feel at the time. By truth, I mean being careful not to mislead people when it is important that they know what you mean.

This post concerns the second of Marilynne Robinson's emphases in her essay, "Petty Coercion," (there is a hyperlink to the full chapter in the previous post, but no citation: it is from her book, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.) Having dealt with public courage and private courage at the beginning of the essay, she goes next to truth.

Let us say that the sort of courage I wish to consider can be defined as loyalty to truth. I am not entering any epistemological thicket here. The kind of truth that interests me is the type sometimes represented in the statement, "The house is on fire."

She does have a more political statement in mind. It is this.

"...the disparity between rich and poor in this county exceeds any previously known in American history (putting aside the marked economic disparity between plantation owners and slaves) is to say something falsifiable--that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case, arguable.

The people I read, Paul Krugman, for example, ordinarily say "the worst...since the decade before the Great Depression," but let's leave that aside. It isn't Robinson's concern anyway. This is her concern:"But such statements are now routinely called "Bush bashing." In other words, something that is true--"arguable" is the lowest of the standards she cites--is set aside because it is a slur cast by a hostile subgroup. If she were not as articulate as she is, would say, "Bashing, schmashing. Is it true or not?"

I think she's right. The Republican party during the Bush administration presided over the continuation of the polarization between rich and poor. I'm not saying they caused it because it was going on before they got there. I will say they furthered it and they justified public policies that exacerbated it. So it's "true" using Robinson's standard.

It is the setting aside as a partisan slur that really irks her. If they said, "Yes, the people with the lowest incomes have indeed suffered under our economic policies, but there is a larger logic to it," I would understand. I wouldn't like it, but I would understand. If they said, "In the long run, the public treasure we heap on those who have acquired private treasures will, in the long run, provide the jobs that will help to close the equality gap," I would understand. What they did, in fact, accuse the Democrats of was "playing the class card," or, sometimes, "urging class warfare." The logic of this defense is what Robinson says it is, "Don't ask whether it is true or false, ask only what the intention behind it is."

Doesn't that just irk you? A Congressman gets caught blatantly breaking the law. The person who points it out is accused of having a "political motivation." The accusation is "politically motivated," they say; they don't ask whether it is true and they don't care. It is that attitude that focuses a clear light on what Robinson means by "truth." She cares, in this instance, whether the Congressman did or did not violate the law.

This is a question that has some deep emotional roots for me. I think I can tell this story briefly. I was raised in a culture where blacks were casually derogated. There weren't any actual black people in the little town where I grew up, but "They" were available in jokes and political comments and cultural presuppositions. "That's mighty white of you," is, for instance, a compliment that belonged within the cultural complex I am describing.

So naturally, when I became liberal, I rejected it all and the racial part of the rejection was the position that black people are just white people with unusual amounts of melanin. "Skin color" was the only allowable criterion. All others, even differences that everyone could see for himself, were said not to be true and the people who said that there were other differences were, simply, racists.

Then, one Sunday, I was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine. The black owner of a men's clothing store in Harlem was telling the reporter that the clothes they sold were actually designed for blacks. The reporter didn't understand what he meant. "Well," the owner said, he seemed to me to be feeling for the right words for this ignoramus, "you might have noticed that a lot of black people have rounder butts than white people. We design clothes that take that into account and they fit better." I was humiliated. My face burned. I wanted to look around to see if anyone could have seen me running smack into the wall the reporter ran into.

I had seen a lot of black bodies by then and I knew how characteristic that rounded butt was. I knew how much effort I had put into "not noticing," or, when necessary, "denying" it. Because noticing this particular truth is "racist" and I was not prepared at all to deal with this question on the basis of whether it was true. I was busy being liberal and I wanted to see all the truth I could see without being racist and without giving up my moral superiority to the people who said forthrightly what we could all see. I didn't have the courage to see what was there to see.

There are two sides to this virtue. I may be courageous in continuing to argue for the truth even when people don't like it and when I may be subject to retaliation for doing it. This is not, except in the rare "whistleblower" case, a matter of public courage. It is more often private. That means it is a kind of courage that people will have to define for themselves, all over again in each new situation. It is costly. I have to be willing to be a "Bush basher" or a "class warrior" even if I am sure I am not.

The other side is the passive side. On this side, I might be someone associated with the Bush administration or a pro-Bush Republican, and when a social critic brings up the economic equality crisis, I say, "That's a point that is worth attending to." It is easy to dismiss the critic as a Basher, but I don't.
There's a beautiful example of this in the amazing movie, Invictus. President Mandela is out on an early morning walk with two black guys who have been his public protection for a long time. They stop to see a newspaper headline, which says, "He can win an election, but can he govern a country?" One of the guards protests, "Not even one day on the job and already they're after you." Mandela responds, "It's a legitimate question."

Petty Coercion -1 Courage

I hope this will be the first of several posts dealing with Marilynne Robinson's essay, "Petty Coercion." I have been stalled for several days now because it is an essay that has touched me powerfully and on quite a number of sides. The posts I have written (none sent) have been really long. So let me try just one part: Courage.

I have two ideas here. The first is that courage is always good. That's true in an easy sense, but also in a hard sense. The easy sense is that "courage" is positively connoted and if you don't like any particular manifestations of it, you just call it something else. Stubborn, pigheaded, insensitive, imprudent, etc.

The hard sense is that courage itself is always good. Courage on behalf of a bad cause is unfortunate, but that is because the cause is bad. The courage itself is still good. From a social standpoint, it is a good thing that, say, an anti-abortion activist with a gun lacks the courage to assassinate a doctor who provides abortions. But in celebrating the outcome (the doctor lives) I do not celebrate the cowardliness of the man with the gun. I don't think cowardliness should be celebrated.

That brings up to the lip of some statements you never hear. You could say, to pick notoriously caricatured examples, that Hitler showed courage in launching the Holocaust, that Stalin showed courage in killing off his top generals, and that Mussolini showed courage in attacking Ethiopia. No one says those things because the causes are so awful, but if we follow the line I am following here, in separating the internal attribute (courage) from the external action (genocide), it is a reasonable thing to say. It is not different in the least from saying that Martin Luther King Jr. showed courage in leading civil rights marches right into the teeth of segregationist rage.

Just don't say it in public. Or if you do, don't make a reference to this post.

The second point distinguishes "public courage," which is socially defined and socially supported, from "private courage," which is not. Marilynne Robinson's example of the first is the courage of a firefighter. It must be really really hard to go into a burning building, knowing that you might never come out. But it is not confusing. In a general way, everyone knows what "the courage of the firefighter" looks like and everyone knows it is good. The individual firefighter does not need to define the meaning of courage from one emergency to the next. This kind of courage is easy on the individual because the implications are clear.

Private courage is hard. From a formal standpoint, I want to take the time to say that it is hard for all the same considerations that make public courage easy. There is no generally accepted definition of private courage. If you are committed to acting courageously, you will need to define in each new situation, what "courage" is and whether, in this instance, it should be superseded by some other virtue, say, "tolerance" or "generosity." I want to distinguish as well between active courage and passive courage--although those might not be the best terms. By the first, I intend continuing in an action, although uncertainty or cowardice counsel you to quit. By the second, I intend continuing to hold a position although the context in which you live is hostile to that position and people will see to it that you pay the price for holding it. The first might be called persistence; the second endurance.

To keep our focus, with Robinson, on "petty" coercion, we need to remember that major hostilities are not being enacted. This is not martyrdom. No one is getting fired or beaten or excommunicated. You might get brushed in a hallway, or lumped unfairly into a category of people to which the lumpers know you do not belong, or derided as someone who takes seriously what everyone knows is just a joke. Those are "petty."

That's as far as I can go today. I'm in favor of distinguishing personal courage from the cause it supports. I'm in favor of courage. I'm in favor of good causes and opposed to bad causes. I recognize that not everyone agrees with me about what is good and what is bad. I'm OK with that.

Biting the outstretched hand

Here's a curiosity. When Republican politicians end a major speech, they say, "God bless America." The Democratic form is "God bless the United States of America." That difference has been stable for many years now. You can check it for yourself.

Of course, both terms mean the same thing, but the flavor is different. We'll never hear a song, "The United States the Beautiful." "America" is the heartland, the fatherland/motherland. The United States is a more governmental designation. "The United States" is a member of the United Nations. "America" knows better.

Today's New York Times led with a story about the controversy swirling around a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero (Ground Zero?) in Lower Manhattan. If American politics interests you at all, there's a lot to like here.

Right in the crosshairs of this decision is the Anti-Defamation League. (Let's hear it for people who are in favor of defamation!) The League has been denouncing "bigoted attacks" on plans for the Muslim center. Finally, Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, had to say, "It's the wrong place. Find another place."

I see two interesting questions being labored over here. The first is, "Who attacked the United States by flying passenger planes into the Twin Towers?" Here is a set of correct answers. Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden. Middle Easterners. Dark-skinned people. Muslims. Religious fanatics. Only the answer "Muslims" is relevant to the controversy in New York. On the other hand, "Christians" fire-bombed Dresden.

There is a politics that gathers itself around this issue. Some of it represents the highest values of Americans. I'm going to collect them around the next question. I want to look at the others here. Sarah Palin has urged "peace-seeking Muslims" to reject the center. C. Lee Hanson, whose son Peter was killed in the attacks, said, "When I look over there and see a mosque, it's going to hurt. Build it somewhere else." Mr. Hanson, it's going to hurt wherever they put it. There needs to be a better reason to say no.

The second question is, "Who are we?" The question is asked of "us" New Yorkers and of "us" Americans. Mayor Bloomberg said, "What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?" Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said, "Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does (he has Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed center in mind), he is treated with suspicion."

These two questions have liberal and conservative overtones, but it really isn't a liberal v. conservative question. It's an identity question. Are Muslims really Americans? Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers in Manhattan. It is supposed to have a board of directors composed of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders and is supposed to be a model representing moderate Islam. Those are the "peace-seeking Muslims" Ms. Palin is asking to reject this. This is the outstretched hand we have just bitten.

Another question is, "How shall we treat the feelings of the victims' families?" That's the question that finally stumped the Anti-defamation League. The fact is that the families of the victims don't all have the same feelings. Public references to "the feelings of the families" are always about the angriest of the families. Should we "honor" those feelings? Should we "pander to" those feelings? Should we comfort those families and help them move on? Should we try to focus those feelings on Al Qaeda and not on "Muslims?"

Abraham Foxman of the ADL is a Holocaust survivor. Here's where he came out. "Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational. Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted." This same entitlement belongs to the victims' families. The proposed location is "offensive to the families of the victims of 9/11;" they should look for a site a mile away.

I'm sympathetic to the Anti-defamation League. I'm sympathetic to their organization's dilemma. I'm sympathetic to their cause. But I think what Rabbi Kula said is better, "the ADL should be ashamed of itself." As long as we are going to have feelings, we are going to have irrational feelings. There's nothing wrong with having irrational feelings. But as persons and as citizens we have a duty not to act on our irrational feelings. We need to know that they are there and to do something useful with them. That's what politics if for.

It's All About Me

Some years ago, I read a scathing review of Mitch Albom’s book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The devastating lesson we learn in “Heaven,” said this reviewer, is that heaven is just like earth: “It’s all about me.”

That would be a truly awful thing to learn about heaven, I think; it’s bad enough as a focus here on earth. It is, nevertheless, the cast of mind and heart with which we are born and one of the first and most difficult developmental steps is to learn that it is not true. It is, actually, not “all about me.”

Russell Hoban’s A Birthday for Frances is a story about that. It is about transcending the self-centeredness with which we are all born. At a certain age, a child learns that others see things differently, know different things, and feel differently about them. Frances may even have learned this lesson as a general matter, but sometimes when the going gets really tough, we forget the lessons we learned as a general matter.

In this story, the tough going is provided by Gloria’s birthday. Gloria is Frances’s younger sister and the two haven’t been getting along. We know that not so much by learning that the sisters have had conflicts (hello! reality check!) as by how long the grievances have lasted.

Here is an exchange between Frances and her mother. There are three important elements here.

Frances: Gloria is mean. She hid my sand pail and my shovel and I never got them back.
Mother: That was last year.
Frances: When Gloria is mean, it was always last year[1]

The first element is that the grievance is long-standing. Or that it comes back quickly when times are hard. It’s hard to say which one applies to this story.

The second is that Frances’s defense against Mother does not take a personal form. That’s odd for a child. We would expect something like, “You always take Gloria’s side.” But there is no “You…” in Frances’s response. There is, instead, the description of a “system” which is fundamentally unfair.

The third is that defending your behavior by claiming that the system isn’t fair is like climbing on a horse you won’t be able to control. If “the system” is messing with reality, what behavior of Frances would not be justified? What path to reconciliation is left open? Those are two sides of the same question, I think.

Frances is just a little girl having a hard day, but the “unfair system” critique can take on a life of its own and when you are on a horse that big and it takes off, you go with it. If this remark were a lifestyle rather than the petulance of an unhappy little girl, I would say that paranoia would be right around the corner.

The next step is this drama is easy to pass by, so I would like to pull over and park there for a little while. That will give us a chance to see it better. And since it is something that does not happen, it isn’t easy to see.

Frances climbed up on one of the porch rocking chairs and looked through the
window at the boxes Mother was wrapping. “What is Gloria getting from you and
from Father for her birthday?” asked Frances.

This question is the beginning of Frances’s way back into the family. It is the beginning of her ultimately successful participation in Gloria’s birthday. In this scene, we see that there is still "something going on." It is something Frances will be able to join. Frances’s nose is out of joint, but the birthday preparation continues nonetheless.

And what does not happen? These four things. Frances’s unhappiness does not become the new focus. There is no notion that the party might be postponed until Frances is more favorable. No one asks Frances to feel differently than she does feel. No one even asks her to behave differently.

This party is going to happen. Frances gets to choose how to respond to that. In the context of this story, that is the gift of wise parents. The practice of “not responding,” of ignoring children who have grievances or emotional needs, has never been uncommon. Some parents are so caught up in their own lives that their children’s needs seem more a casual irritant than a crucial task. Parents who would do better if they could, but who are working three jobs, also wind up ignoring the emotional needs of their children. As I say, it isn’t at all uncommon.

But it isn’t what is going on at the Badger house. Mother continues to relate to Frances as she works on the party. In the process, she takes some lip from Frances that she really shouldn’t have to take. Mother continues to support the reality that, hard as it is for Frances today, the way we do it here is that Gloria is celebrated on her birthday and Frances on hers.

As a result, a tradition that the adults believe to be fair and appropriate is affirmed and defended. This gives Frances something to stand on. The party is not pre-empted by her pique. So her complaint turns out to be no more than the last gasp of the natural self-centeredness of a child. It is one of the first and hardest deaths of “it’s all about me.”

Frances joins the birthday event to the extent of buying Gloria a Chompo Bar. She is not reconciled to Gloria and does not want to be, but “Gloria’s Birthday” is the family project on this day and her choice is to be a part or not. Her father helps her to move forward although she is clearly wavering.

There are three little exchanges with Father; three ways to get out of actually giving the
Chompo Bar to Gloria. Father heads off each one. He doesn’t have to absorb Frances’ petulance as Mother did, but his job, like his wife’s, is to cap off Frances’s attempt to rescue “it’s all about me.”

Frances: Are you sure it is all right for Gloria to have a whole Chompo Bar?
Father: Not every day. But today, for her birthday, it will be fine.

Frances: Probably Gloria could not eat more than half of one.
Father: Gloria loves sweets. I am sure she can eat a whole Chompo Bar.

Father: You would not eat Gloria’s Chompo Bar, would you?
Frances: It is not Gloria’s yet.
Father: Maybe I should take care of the Chompo Bar until you are ready to give it to Gloria.

Now the party has started and Frances is there and has bought Gloria a present. There is one step left. It’s huge. Frances needs to patch up the relationship with Gloria and she needs to give wholeheartedly the present she has so far been prepared to give only grudgingly. This is not something she is going to be able to do by herself, but she gets help from Gloria.

Gloria’s birthday wish is that Frances would be nice and not mad because of the sand pail and the shovel last year. She concludes, “And I am sorry, and I will be nice.”[2] Frances has had all the room she needed to express her displeasure. Mother gave her that. Every avenue of escape has been blocked by Father. Through it all, the event proceeds and finally, Frances has to fish or cut bait. Gloria has acted on her own to move the relationship back toward reconciliation. A lot of good things have happened for Frances. Then finally, this.

Frances finally gives it up. “It’s all about me” loses again. “Here,” she says after one final squeeze of the Chompo Bar, “You can eat it all, because you are the birthday girl.”

[1] This is not the only instance of what I am calling “the system defense.” When Frances is singing “Happy Thursday” to her invisible friend Alice, Mother points out that it is Friday. Frances says that it is Thursday for Alice—a “reality” only Frances controls. When Mother says that Frances’s birthday is only two months away and that she will be celebrated then, Frances says, “That’s how it is, Alice. Your birthday (i.e., Frances’s birthday) is always the one that is not now.”
[2] If anyone from BP is reading this, that’s how it’s done.

Old and Smart

First a small complaint. I use the phrase "getting old" in the label for this post. The more recent usage as been "getting older." Or, sometimes, "aging." Aging is what happens to the patients in the neonatal ward just as much as in the Alzheimer's ward. Ditto for getting older. Getting old, on the other hand, is reserved for the veterans of many campaigns, during some of which we acquired wounds. It's not a word I want to give away. I also don't want to use it apologetically or to avoid it.

I've puzzled for some years how many of the increasing debilities of old age make me feel savvy and competent. It doesn't seem that they should. I began thinking about this in the 1970s when I noticed that my head got cold in cold weather if I didn't wear something on it. As I experienced it, this is a sequence of three steps. One, I am young and hotblooded and my head doesn't get cold when I expose it to cold weather. Or I don't care that much. Two, I don't cover my head in cold weather and I get cold and something bad happens to me. Three, I know I am going out into cold weather so I am careful to wear something--usually a ballcap--and nothing bad happens. It might happen to other old guys who don't have the understanding and foresight I do, but it doesn't happen to me.

It's that sequence of steps that caught my eye. If we went directly from one to three, it would probably feel like a loss. But moving from two to three feels like I figured something out and now I'm making it work. It's not that my head is vulnerable; it's that I'm so smart about adapting to it. It's all sleight of mind, really.

Nearly all the physical ailments I have acquired--these are like the campaign ribbons I alluded to above--follow this pattern. I'd rather not have them (stage one compared to stage two) but I have mastered some aspect of the effects (stage two compared to stage three). And so on through a list of ailments any old man (I speak from my own experience) can produce and that will make nearly any younger man (I speak from my own experience) roll his eyes and wait for the deep mine of complaints finally to peter out.

So as I acquire new debilities, I acquire new knowledge of how to manage them better than I did when they were new. The constraints surrounding the way I live my life increase, but I don't notice the constraints as much as I notice the high quality adaptation to them. It's amazing.

On the other hand, think of it this way. If you had a new car, you would get in and turn it on and drive away. It's effective but it's largely unconscious. But if you had an old car, a car you had owned for a long time and which you knew well, it wouldn't look like that. You would get in (kicking the door once, at the front edge, usually frees up the latch in the door); you would turn it on (crank it twice, then hold the accelerator pedal down for about five seconds, then crank it the final time); and drive away (the elastic band which you have passed through the steering wheel and attached to the lever below the driver's seat will keep the car from drifting persistently to the left).

Now see there? You really aren't unconscious about the old car. You can't afford to be. Each liability is something you have learned to overcome, something you take pleasure in overcoming. Getting in this car and driving it away is an exercise in sophistication and mastery. What's not to like about that?

All this came back to me in the last few days as I remembered an old Arnie Palmer Pennzoil ad. Arnie had been an old golfer for quite a while by the time of this ad. He still had Arnie's Army around him and was a very popular athlete. The ad showed him tooling around the golf course he designed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, sitting in a very old tractor. He explained that the tractor still worked so well because he had always taken care of it with Pennzoil. He closed with a rueful laugh, and the line. "...and I believe in taking care of the old equipment."

I thought it was funny because he was the "old equipment" he was actually referring to and everyone knew it. The fact that there was a tractor in the picture made misunderstanding possible and therefore made understanding more fun.

Preparing the Voters

Every now and then, I drift into sounding scholarly on this blog. I try to block it out, but it occasionally insinuates itself and I need to take just a moment to set the record straight.

I begin this political lament with a quotation from the British statesman, Edmund Burke. It is taken from a speech he made on November 3, 1774 to his consituents, who are referred to as “the electors of Bristol." (If you want to google it, that's what to enter). Here is the only line of that speech I have ever heard quoted.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Since this event belongs squarely in my own discipline, it ought to be familiar to me in the context of contituent relationships. In fact, it is nothing so scholarly. I know it because it shows up in 1776, the musical about the Declaration of Independence, which I watch every July 2 just to keep the event fresh in my mind. This quote is given in full by the single member of the Georgia delegation as his reason for voting for the Declaration, although he is aware that his constituents might not have chosen that. In the movie, it takes place in the middle of a very bad night and the drama of it is allowed free rein.

Here are the values to be aligned. Contrast the representative’s “industry,” or hard work v. the representative’s “judgment,” or his own well-informed convictions. He “betrays” instead of “serving” when he does what they want him to do, rather than what he thinks is best to do. And “his judgment” v. “your opinion.”

This is a resounding defense of what political scientists call the “trustee model” over the “delegate model” of a political representative’s job. The most recent polling data I have seen shows that the overwhelming majority of voters prefer the “delegate model” in which they instruct their representative and he carries out their wishes. Legislators overwhelmingly prefer the “trustee model” in which the voters send him or her to the capitol to study, attend hearings, reflect, and cast a vote informed by all those activities. So, oddly, everyone wants to be in charge. Is this a great system or what?

Earlier this week, Matt Bai of the New York Times wrote a very perceptive piece on how the Democrats and Republicans are approaching the midterm elections this November (236 years and a day since Burke’s speech). Bai’s article contrasts the Democratic approach to the election--make it a choice between the two parties' approaches--with the Republican approach--make it a referendum on the Obama administration. The political logic is unassailable. "The people" are implacable (that means, literally, that there is no way to please them) so the only real question is where to place the blame. If the election is a "referendum" on Obama, all that anger goes to defeat Democrats. If the election is a "choice of ideologies," the Republicans can be blamed for getting us into the mess that Obama is laboring diligently to get us out of.

My own view is that the most important role of an election is to prepare the voters to understand, support, and critique the policies of the leaders they have chosen. Daniel Yankelovich calls it, in a book I feature every time I teach American government, "coming to public judgment." Matt Bai is more specific. The Democrats, he says, campaigned on "change."

The problem with this strategy was that "change" meant wildly different things to different people, and neither of these elections amounted to a mandate for any discernable set of choices. The stimulus bill (sic) and the health care law may or may not have been good policy, but the sheer scope and cost of those agenda items seemed to jolt a lot of the independent voters who had conditionally supported Mr. Obama. Having failed to establish a rationale for such expansive measures during the campaign, Democrats were easily caricatured by their adversaries as a bunch of 1970s liberals who would spend money wherever they could.

The Democrats, in giving in to political expediency (and gaining the White House and House and Senate majorities) failed to prepare the voters for the support of their agenda. They did not follow a process that would have allowed the voters to "come to public judgment," as Yankelovich would have it. The Democrats in failing to prepare the voters, handed to the Republicans the club with which they are now being beaten on the head by the likes of John Boehner of Ohio and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

The Republicans, when in office, do the same thing for the same reasons. Demonizing the opposition party and playing on the people's implacability is the surest way to prevent an election from being a referendum on how well you have handled the responsibilities of power and choice. And that's why everyone does it.

Neither party has been willing to take the electoral risk of preparing the voters for the sacrifices that will be necessary to extract us from the partisan deadlock and the fiscal profligacy which define our current dilemma. It is always seductive to imagine that Job One is to get "the good guys" into office. Once in office, they will do as many "good things" as they can. Telling the voters that the actions that are now clearly needed are going to hurt a good deal is thought to run the risk of turning office over to the bad guys. And, of course, it might.

But the alternative--THE alternative--to running that risk is to do what we are doing now: for one party and one administration after another to take office, preying upon an unprepared and uninformed electorate and guaranteeing that once in office, they themselves will be able to make only minor policy adjustments and grand symbolic gestures. As a nation, we are well past the time when those two responses will do the job that needs to be done.

Marriage Guarantors 1

Bette and I were married in December, 2005. We met in January and were ready to be married in June, but it took as long to assemble the family as to decide to choose each other as lovers and partners. The people we asked to attend the wedding received a letter addressed to "guarantors." I'm thinking of lines 4--33 for this essay. The rest of the letter is made up of short statements of the four principles and I'd like to take them one at a time over the next few months.

The theory was that no one would be invited who did not agree to be a guarantor of the marriage, but it struck quite a few of the invitees as an odd notion and we didn't push it. This post is about why I think it was a good notion, however odd it seemed.

Bette and I agreed early on the kind of marriage we wanted to pursue. There are four essential principles to this notion and by the time I met Bette, I had thought about them for so many years that I could actually say what I meant by them. We both knew that the specific form our pursuit of these goals would take would be defined by who we were for each other and who we could become for each other. So nothing about these principles is a formula that you can fit over two people who want to become a couple and direct their growth. On the other hand, it was clear to me that we wouldn't become that kind of couple if we didn't pursue the goals.

The implications of that pursuit were pretty clear to us, which is good because we were the ones doing the pursuing. It was the question of how it applied to the gurarantors that wasn't so clear. Here are two of the difficulties, as presented by the people who were asked.

1. You want to what? Come on, people don't just do that. What a weird way to make a commitment! Why don't you just start with loving each other and see what happens?

2. You want me to what? Let's see if I get this. You want me to "get" the kind of marriage you two want and to agree to give you the feedback on it that will help your pursuit. You want my active appreciation of the things you do that will help your pursuit and my cogent criticism of the things you do that will lead you in another direction. Right so far? And you want me to agree to do these things entirely apart from the question of whether I, myself, agree with them; based only on the fact that the two of you agree with them?

You can see now why we didn't comb through the list of potential invitees, weeding out those who couldn't come to grips with 1 or 2 above. But maybe you can see, too, why we wanted guarantors and why we needed them.

I've put the objections the way the potential guarantors saw them. Now I'd like to put our desire for guarantors the way we saw them. We wanted a kind of marriage that out culture allows, but doesn't really support. We knew that if only the two of us wanted it and knew what we wanted, we would be working at it alone. It's hard to work at it alone, even when it's all going well; it's really nasty to have to do that work when it's not all going well.

We didn't want to have to choose between "supporters," i.e., people who would help us have the kind of marriage they wanted us to have and "fans," i.e., people who would agree to like whatever Bette and I wound up doing. We wanted people who understood what we were after and who would agree, as friends of the marriage, to say what they thought was helping our efforts and what was hurting them.

It's a lot to ask of a friend. Friends who are perfectly willing to share their opinions, based as they are on their own preferences, are not always willing to share their judgments, based in this case on our preferences. But we couldn't think of a way to ask for less, so that's what we asked for.

Surely it is rare for a couple to go into a marriage--this was a third marriage for each of us--hoping to have just the kind of marriage the culture presupposes and will thoughtlessly support. I hope it is rare. We knew going in that some of the practices--treating compromise as a last resort, for instance--would not be supported by a culture that treats compromises as "the way to resolve differences." But we wanted to do it our way anyway and we wanted friends to help us. To me, it doesn't seem so odd when I put it that way.