Battle Ribbons for the Elderly

I’ve been through some very tough times. Like you, I know people who have been through harder times than I have (although precisely how “tough” a time was depends a good deal on the person experiencing it). Some of them just happened to me. Some of them I brought on myself.
When I look at my body, I remember where I got that scar. It was a chip from a misplaced strike of an axe. I’m lucky I still have that foot. And I’ve got crows feet at the outer edges of my eyes—or, on a good day, “laugh lines.” And I’ve got scars from surgery and bad knees and bad shoulders and white hair. And so on. Those are the reminders I carry of the engagements I have fought so far in my life.

So I got to thinking. There isn’t a system of ribbons, really, to proclaim what battles I have fought and survived. Like these.

Not all such wounds are anonymous, of course. There's this glorious promise from Shakespeare's Henry V.

"He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
“These wounds,” he will say,

“These very wounds I had the day I fought beside the king and prevailed.”

Alas, not even I know the battle where I “had” this particular wrinkle. Or how I lived so long that I earned liver spots. Or where the cartilage went that used to superintend the operation of my knee. But if I did know, how really cool would it be to show up in a gathering of old people like yourselves and look at the ribbons and recognize three commemorating childbirths, and three commemorating marathons, and one symbolizing marital fidelity in a very difficult situation, and one recognizing (not celebrating) tirelessness in prayer. I’m thinking of the man who wouldn’t let his neighbor alone until he got a sandwich to share with a guest.

A gathering like that would REALLY be a gathering, don’t you think? And any young people who strayed in would look at the battle ribbons and think, probably for the first time, how few they themselves had and maybe look forward to the engagements in their own lives when they will earn their own.

Redemption 2

I'm going to have to put "Christian Theology" in the label box below and I almost hate to. This is as much wordplay as anything, but who knows what it will grow into?

Also--and I really am serious about this part--one of the wonderful things that happens when I find a good strong metaphor and ride it until we are both exhausted, is that I sometimes get to my own home by a route that is entirely strange to me. Now THERE is a buzz I recommend for anyone. You are entirely alone and in entirely strange territory and then you come around a little bend and there, right in front of you, is home. That has happened several times in this exercise.

I started all this back during Advent, when I noticed that Jesus' parents took him to the temple to "redeem him." Knowing that he is "the Redeemer" in our theology, it struck me as odd. The reason he needed to be "bought back from God" was that he was a first-born male--not a first-born male child, but a first-born male anything. They all belonged to God by virtue of being born first and God, who passed over all the first-born of Israel when they were in Egypt, has a permanent claim on them. As a rationale, that seemed oddly weighty to me; fundamental.

As I began to pursue the word--in Greek, there is a collection of words beginning with lytr- with meanings like "ransom," and "redeem"--I discovered that the reason given for the redemption of an Israelite in slavery or any of the land of Israel that had been bought by an Israelite from another tribe of by a Gentile, was that the Israelite and the land of Israel belonged to God through the Covenant. The act of redemption is not really about them. It is about restoring to God what belongs to God, both the land and the people.

Now is the time I climb on the back of the stallion and he takes me wherever he wants to go.

So if, according to the Old Testament, Israelites must be redeemed so that God is not defrauded of his people, and if, according the the New Testament, all who put their faith in Jesus Christ are "his people" and "belong to him," then on what grounds should we speak of the redemption of any others?

The big time theological question is often put as "Who then can be saved?" See Mark 10 among other places. That's not the question I am asking. Were I the most narrow of fundamentalists or the most broad of universalists, I would still need to ask the question of rationale. If others, beyond Israel in the Old Testament and "the church" in the New are to be saved, on what gounds. Do they "belong to God" more than by creation? Are they "children of God" in some way so that, as the Israelite slave, their redemption is "not about them?"

It's a puzzle and there are a lot more where that one came from. Let me try one more. In the tidy little blueprint I devised to help me think through this, there are five elements: initial condition, redeemer, ransom, current owner, and final condition. In the case of the Israelite slave ransomed by a kinsman, that would be: slavery, redeemer, payment, slave owner, freedom. It's so palpable; the steps are so discrete.

But there is a lot of New Testament language that travels in the wake of these images. Here's one. Paul says, in 1 Cor 7:23, "You have been bought at a price; do not be slaves now to any human being." The context is confusing. Paul is addressing Christians in the church at Corinth, some of whom were free and others of whom were slaves. His argument here is that the members should stay in the social condition where they currently are. Why? Well, those of you who are actual slaves are metaphorically "free in the Lord" and those of you who are actually free are metaphorically "slaves of Christ."

I'm not objecting to the theology, but the argument is so convoluted that it makes me yearn for the bad old days when "a slave" was a person who had been bought by someone else and when "free" meant that you weren't a slave any more.

It could be argued, as Paul does elsewhere, that we are "slaves to sin" and that we are redeemed from sin to be slaves of Christ. But this changes the momentum of "redemption" entirely. In the bad old days (BOD?), "free" meant "free from." You were not a slave anymore; you could go where you would and do what you could. The weight of Paul's use is on "free to." In the BOD, you were a slave of sin and were not free to live as you wanted to live or as you should have wanted to live--Paul was a pastor; he had to deal with both those conditions--but now you are free to live as a member of the body of Christ and of the family of God. "Free from" is only a precondition. It's "free to" that Paul wants to talk about.

The Israelite kinsman who redeemed a slave would have been dumbfounded if, on every day after becoming free, the former slave went back to the home of his old master and took up again the work of his servitude. But, as I said, Paul was a pastor and he did see the newly freed of his congrgations go right back to their servitude. He was incredulous. Or at least he pretended to be. "How can you DO that!?" he asked.

It's a good question.

Is President Obama Sincere?

Probably he is. Sure. Why wouldn't he be?

I've been reading analyses of what the President intends to say for several weeks now. The New York Times today reported that a video "previewing themes" had been sent out. The video "made plain that his speech would be geared more broadly toward the political center, to independent voters and business owners and executives alienated by the expansion of government and the partisan legislative fights of the past two years."

So we don't know yet what he is going to say, but we know who he is going to effect and what state he thinks they are in (alienated). It's hard for me to see how anyone can give a speech and expect to be really heard when we know already the effect he hopes to achieve.

So I got to thinking how that would work on a date. I've had to do some dating recently and it's still fresh in my mind. Ordinarily, you might think I want to know how my date is feeling, what has been happening in her life, what she wants to eat or drink, what she has read recently that has interested her, and maybe whether she'd like to go to a movie with me. That sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it?

Now imagine that she has an earpiece and a hidden microphone and a girlfriend sitting at another table. The girlfriend gives me the treatment the press is giving the President, i.e., she says what effect I am trying to achieve by saying what I am saying. So my questions, in order, might look like this. He is trying to represent himself as genuinely interested in your welfare. He's trying to establish that you haven't been dating much or working too much. He's looking for a chance to buy you something hoping that you will have to sit here until you are done with it no matter how badly things are going. He's trying to imply that he is a cultured person--a reader of books--and checking on your reading choices at the same time. He's trying to get a commitment to a later date before you have a chance to assess this one.

The girlfriend didn't give me credit for much; she is wary on her friend's behalf. But the real damage is done, not by her implications that I am up to something sinister, but by presuming that my words have no meaning in themselves. Apparently what I am saying ought not be judged by what I actually said, but by what I probably meant. Everything I say is an attempt to achieve some goal or some leverage that can be used to achieve a goal. It is useless, apparently, to assume that I actually mean what I say. Or even that I mean what I say AND hope to achieve a certain goal.

That will be a very tough first date, but I think public officials--not just President Obama--get that all the time. What they say they mean is routinely set aside in favor of what the reporter thinks the speaker is trying to achieve. I'm sure that makes the reporter seem knowledgeable, but it makes the speaker look like a charlatan. If the speaker really does mean what he is saying, which I think we ought to admit is possible, it is a shame that so little attention will be paid to it.

Public and Private Integrity

Abraham Maslow says that we desire to belong to a group and when we have done that, we desire to distinguish ourselves from the group. Perfectly natural. Jim Davies, my mentor at the University of Oregon, used to paraphrase those stages by saying that we want to be a part; then we want to be apart.

I have nothing good at all to say about lack of integrity, but I know now that it comes in more than one flavor. Integrity is hard to describe, but it isn’t hard to recognize. In math, we say that this number is an integer and that one is a fraction. Those are your choices so far as “numerical integrity” is concerned: whole or broken into pieces.

Davies provided me with another way of looking at the meaning of this word. He passed on a story about a political theorist we both knew—by that I mean that Davies knew him and I knew who he was—who was not highly thought of as a person. “He’s a horse’s ass,” went the punch line of the story, “and I mean that isotropically.” I didn’t have to look it up because one of the reasons Davies liked to tell the story is that he got to say what the word meant. My dictionary says, “having…properties that are the same regardless of the direction of measurement.”[1] This gives the sense of “consistency” to integrity.

I think the idea of integrity my father had in mind is that you are a) who you really are and b) the same person in one setting that you are in another. I think that’s the heart of it, but since the word is always used positively, let’s toss in the Boy Scout virtues as a coating: you know, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc. I learned that that was what integrity meant. Then I went into politics.

In my first job, I ran a campaign and I was never ever asked what I thought about the issues of the campaign. I was asked what the candidate thought and it helped if I said it as if I thought that too. Then I was a legislative assistant. No one cares about the views of the legislative assistant.[2] So I would say, “We don’t think that bill is fair to the environmental concerns that are being raised,” meaning that the legislator didn’t want to vote for it for any one of a number of reasons. It was important, of course, that I give the same reason he did. Then I was a lobbyist, and in that capacity wrote testimony for legislative hearings and delivered the testimony myself once my office got comfortable with the idea of my doing it. Now the “we” was: “Madam Chair, our position is that this bill removes from the committee a crucial power to decide what the State of Oregon will fund and what it will not.”

Those were hard days for me. I didn’t have any trouble doing the work, but I had trouble feeling good about doing it. That was when I discovered what I have, since then, been calling “public integrity. No veteran legislator thinks that when you testify, you are giving your own views and if he did suspect that, he would be critical of it. What the legislators want is for you to give the best pitch of your agency’s position you can give. They know what your agency’s interest is. They know what you really have to say. They want to know how listening to you can a) make it a better bill and/or b) help the committee or the caucus with the work they are trying to do. It is silliness to tell a legislature he will be better off doing what you are proposing when you and he both know he will be worse off. Why would you want him to think you are that stupid? It might be worthwhile telling him why everyone else will be better off if he supports the bill. He may not be able to take your advice, but he will know that you have looked at the effect on him before you gave your testimony.

I came to that logic—a publically oriented logic—slowly. Well before I formulated these ideas, I saw that the best public actors—legislators, committee staff, governor’s aides, and lobbyists—were people everyone admired. They were people who contributed to the process. They always represented the interests they were there to represent and they always told the truth. Well, they always told “a truth;” there many truths in politics and any one of them will be respected. Untruths are not respected.

These policy superstars were people who saw the whole process and contributed to it. They allied themselves to everyone they could make mutual agreements with and they construed “mutual agreements” broadly, so that they included the next legislative session, not just this one. These people helped combatants see other approaches to the common problems and other ways of dealing with each other. They had, in spades, what I am calling “public integrity.”

After I got clear on the two kinds of integrity, I began to look a little more warily at the kind I grew up thinking was “the only kind.” I began to see some dark corners I had not seen before. For one thing, the moral stance I learned when I was growing up was relentlessly self-referential. I needed for my motives to be pure and to be seen as pure, even if I didn’t know entirely what they were. And if they weren’t acknowledged to be pure, I needed to defend their purity because I saw my “integrity” to be wrapped up not so much in achieving good outcomes as in intending good outcomes. After a while, that didn’t seem like such a good tradeoff to me.
And if you are “a man of principle,” what do you do when the principle has to be modified in order to fairly treat other interests? Do you say, “I know that would be the best thing overall, but I can’t support it because of my principles? I’ve heard that said. If you are “an honest man,” does that mean you are limited to saying what you think to be true, no matter what the question is? I’ve heard that said too. If you have a “strong work ethic,” is it an ethic that will allow you to work invisibly so that someone more important to the whole process can take the credit for it? Or will you be out in the halls justifying the role you had in the achievement for fear you will be seen to have done less than you should have? I’ve seen a lot of that.

The condemnations in the previous paragraph were not just a list of bad behaviors. It was a list of the mistakes people are driven into by their understanding of all integrity as private integrity. These people aren’t glory seekers, but they do want to make sure that they don’t find their own thoughts or intentions or actions taken or actions foregone to have fallen short of their own standards. It’s the personal shortfalls, not the public achievements, that most draw their attention.

Dark corners, I said. They aren’t bad. They are the products of people like me who learned that “doing the right thing” comes in only one flavor. And when you find other flavors, you call them bad because they are different from “what it ought to taste like.” But if you can learn that there a lot of flavors that are good—there are still flavors that are bad—then you have learned a powerful and useful and…I might as well say it….humbling, lesson.

[1] The word I left out was “physical.” Everyone knew that “horse’s ass” was a social, not a physical, judgment.
[2] Actually, some do. The seasoned lobbyists who know that the legislator does or does not have room for a brief chat (just before the vote) is often determined on the spot by the lobbyist’s relationship with the assistant. Those guys care.

Why fixing the problems is not enough

Just a quick post tonight--it is Saturday Evening, you know. All day today, I have been circling around an important truth. I'm not sure what it is. I guess, if I were sure, I would stop circling. I do have an idea what I want to reject, however, and that may be enough for tonight.

The idea I want to reject is this: the good things and the bad things are on the same scale. It's true about some things. In football, losing 10 yards on a play is the same kind of thing as gaining ten yards on a play. The negative side of the scale and the positive side are mirror images. But it's not true about other things. You can't go to a really bad job and make it a good job by removing the bad parts. Say you talk to the employees and they say there are three things they really dislike about the job, and your idea is that you will deal with those three things and everything will be good. You are very much surprised when you return to that workplace in a month and find everyone as unhappy as before and the top complaints are things you have never heard before. Why is that?

The other way to approach the situation is to find out what is good about it and make the good things a lot better. When the bad parts have been pushed to the periphery by the abundance of good things; when the job or the marriage or the class setting are producing good things in abundance, you will find two things about the negative parts. The first is that they don't matter very much any more. The second is that they have now become easy to fix.

Good experiences drive out bad. Or relativize them. Gresham's Law states that bad money drives good money out of the market. It does that because everyone keeps the undeniably genuine money and uses the possibly counterfeit money in purchases. But I think the good experiences are the ones we want to keep and the bad ones the ones we want to get rid of. And if that's not what we want, maybe we should look at just why that is.

January 17: Day 75 of the 2012 Campaign

I realize that I pay more attention to this blog that most people do, having both to write it and to read it. But there are compensations, e.g., I get to read the comments. This post is about one particular comment, which was made to a post a long time ago and which I have just discovered. It is also about the question of what the 2010 election meant and what it is coming to mean.

So, a little background first. The maker of the comment is Bo DiMuccio, a friend of mine from my Pennsylvania days and a "friend since high school" of my son, Dan. Bo has a Ph. D. in political science from a very prestigious university (even though it is in California, which is not the way to an Oregonian's heart)and when he read my post about the likely effects of the 2010 election, he raised some questions I have not heard anyone else raise.

My goals for this post include: a) thanking Bo for raising the questions, b) summarizing the questions as I understand them, c) responding to the questions as best I can, and d) opening the forum for other readers who, I know for certain, have political views and may, just speculating here, be looking for a place to post them. I want to extend my remarks on only one of those goals. When I say I want to respond, I don't want to be heard to say I want to support or oppose them. I don't want to do either of those. I want to extend the implications so we can all look at them and see how we feel about them.

When I was in grad school (in that state just north of California) I either knew a guy or heard a story about someone who made decisions by flipping a coin. He wasn't simpleminded; quite the contrary, he was quite sophisticated. He knew that he had more definite feelings about what to do than he was able to access directly. So he would toss the coin and call "heads or tails," as everyone does, and then pay attention particularly to how he felt about the outcome. He might have thought he was fine with either option, but he noticed that when it came up "tails," he was disappointed. That surprised him. He hadn't known that he really preferred the "heads" option. But now that he knows it, there is no reason not to choose it.

My response to Bo's questions is like that. I'm going to toss my coin in this post and then see how I feel about it. I hope I will also discover how Bo feels about it and possibly how others of you feel about it as well.

So what did Bo actually say? He said he thought my explanation--that the same discontents that drove Democrats and Independents to the polls in 2008 to elect a bunch of Democrats drove Republicans and Independents to the polls in 2010 to elect a bunch of Republicans--was extreme. He wondered whether I really thought there was NO repudiation of the first Obama biennium. I think it's a good question and it isn't a question that is being asked among the people I talk to routinely, so I value it quite a bit.

I think the best short answer I can give the question is "No," but if I had a few more words under the word cap, I think I'd say, "Maybe a little." First, there is no question at all that a lot of people who were enthusiastic about Obama the candidate, full of promises and charisma, were not so enthusiastic about Obama the president, working to fulfill those promises and playing second fiddle to a lot of Democratic Senators with even less charisma than Joe Biden. In short, Obama the President really didn't turn so many people on. So far, I'd call that a reaction to the change in style.

I don't think I'd say that the 2010 vote was a repudiation of the work of the first two years. People really want a healthcare law. The polling on that was overwhelming. They aren't sure they like this particular healthcare law and a lot of people were turned off by the spectacle of Senate venality. My favorite is Senator Ben Nelson's agreement to vote for the healthcare bill provided all the states except his had to pay for it. Go Ben!

I think a lot of people are unhappy that the economy has begun so very slowly to turn around. You can tell that partly because only 11% of the people thought Obama was Muslim when he was inaugurated and by the end of this election cycle, 18% thought he was Muslim. What else, I say, trying to hit just the right tone of irony, would account for the lackluster performance of the economy?

It is also true that the Republicans scared the crap out of a lot of voters by threatening the imminent collapse of the Republic if the healthcare bill passed. The worst of those, I think, was the transformation of Earl Blumenauer's (D- Portland)proposal for early end-of-life discussions with physicians into "death panels."

I think people began to worry that Obama was going "too far," even though "too far" was arrived at by adding up the federal actions taken in a substantial variety of settings and many of which would have had to be done by a Republican administration as well. If the loss of early enthusiasm and the rising wariness about our prospects could be called "repudiation," then I'd have to agree with Bo that there was some. And there will be more under all scenarios whatsoever--except a rapid acceleration of the economy leading to an unprecedented pace of hiring. And that's not going to happen.

The model underlying Bo's question is a beauty. Of all the things he said, I am most pleased by that. What part simple off-year turnout and what part policy repudiation? Thanks, Bo. Stay tuned. I'm still working on it.

Israel. A U. S. Interest or an American Cause?

The puzzle of the right relationship of the United States with the state of Israel has been a puzzle for a long time. As the costs of the relationship continue to escalate, it has become a more irritating puzzle. As the prospect seems more and more to be perpetual stalemate, the irritation is continually aggravated.

The cost is now so high and the likelihood of a satisfactory outcome so low, that it time to say that if sustaining Israel as an independent democratic nation in the Middle East is a “cause, “ then it is time to catch our breath and prepare ourselves to do whatever it takes. If it an “interest,” it is time to look more closely at the cost-benefit analysis. What do we get from continuing to do what we have been doing?

The U. S. government has not yet made either case. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has, of course, made both cases, but as the time drags on and the costs rise, this is a case we need to hear from the President. President Obama, so far, has done what all of his predecessors, reaching back in my memory to Truman, have done. He has invested a substantial part of our foreign aid budget in Israel’s ability to defend itself and he has invested a substantial part of his diplomatic attention in a “peace process.” The peace process is the most important part because it is the only thing that prevents some judgment from being made about what our interests are and what to do to further them. The "peace process" is a political snooze button.

Let’s look at the situation, then at the options.

Israel now has secure borders. “Borders,” of course, do not project the civilian population from rockets lobbed into Israel from Gaza; they do prevent any foreseeable land invasion. But Israel is not secure and will never be secure so long as there are neighbors—and I am not talking just about the governments of the neighboring states—capable of attacking Israel. The attackers will call them “reprisals,” of course, but the conflict has gone on so long that anything done by either side can now justly be called a “reprisal.”

But “Israel,”—I’ll come in a minute to why that word is in italics—wants two things it is not likely to get and at the moment, feels that the current level of conflict is preferable to giving them up. One is complete control of the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Muslim part. The second is a continually expanding eastern frontier, so more and more of Palestine comes under the control of the government of Israel. This second goal is probably not going to be acceptable either, but it has, in addition a “poison pill” provision. If Israel simply annexed the West Bank, a majority of her “residents” would not be Jews and the prospect would loom of a free and fair election putting in place a Muslim government. I call it a “prospect” only because that is where the population numbers lead and that is where the comparative birth rates lead as well.

Now are these two things "what Israel demands?" Yes and no. That is why I put “Israel” in quotes above. Israel currently has a conservative government. The coalition Benjamin Netanyahu leads is a majority because it has a number of far right parties included in it. They can pull the plug on his government any time they want to and they have not been shy about reminding him of that. A move to deal with Jerusalem by dividing it or sharing it or internationalizing it would bring about the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. Similarly, an Israeli commitment to forbid further settlement in the West Bank—these settlements are in a foreign country—much less to dismantle the settlements already built there, would also bring about an end of his government. So it doesn’t really matter whether these are things he wants to do. He couldn’t do them even if he did want to.

Similarly “Palestine,” (again, note the quotes) can neither recognize Israel diplomatically nor prevent attacks on Israel from its territory. Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza, but it doesn’t control the ability of militants to attack Israel from Gaza. This is true, again, even if they wanted to and their desire to do so comes and goes. Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party control the West Bank, but he is powerless to make “peace process commitments” as well. He cannot prevent Israel from continuing to take land in the West Bank and he cannot prevent militants from attacking Israel from the West Bank.

It is for this collection of reasons that I say the process has no foreseeable end. Any step toward peace will remove from authority the leader who takes that step. Should normal political processes prove inadequate, there is always assassination, which has proved effective in the past. So things are going to keep going the way they are going.

That means that the President needs to decide how long he is going to support this process. I will pass over the domestic political attractions to remaining “a friend of Israel.” If supporting Israel—at the moment, that means supporting Israeli practices that Jimmy Carter called “apartheid,”—is a moral commitment, then we need to prepare our citizens to continue paying the price. The price in American lives and American dollars continues to escalate. It is now so far out of hand that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, are talking about it in public. Those remarks are really important if we are looking at our relationship with Israel in a cost-benefit framework. Otherwise, not so much.

Either way, President Obama needs to say what is going to happen and how we are going to participate in it and why and for how long. He has not said any of those things and I have been listening really hard.