Morning Fog

History Lashes Back

Events in Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, and on the U.S.-Mexican border have captured our attention in recent months.  Although they are unfolding in different parts of the globe,  they have certain features in common.  

First, of course, each vies to be singled out as the best example of man's inhumanity to man.  Irredentist Russian nationalists in Ukraine have resorted (first) to an uprising against their government with Russian support and (second) to warfare against unarmed passenger aircraft.  (Here, we might excuse the latter as just a tragic accident, had they confessed the deed and cooperated with international investigation. They have not.)  Meanwhile, parents of children in Central America have made a lamentable decision to abandon and endanger their children by sending them north.  A cadre of Muslim zealots began, and continues, a war that will kill lots of the very people they claim to be fighting for. 

All these fomenters of trouble share both a sense of desperation, and a cynicism about using other people's lives to advance their own purposes.

It can also be argued that each of these crises arises from various past attempts to "correct" history.  The state of Israel was created and imposed by WWII Allies with total disregard for the reality on the ground at the time, a reality that had itself been created by the Ottoman Empire.   The American southwest was effectively stolen from Mexico (which in turn had stolen it from the native American inhabitants).  The exactly boundaries of "Ukraine' as a national construct have never been clear, but Russia under Stalin defined them as a ploy to gain additional votes in the UN, including areas of very mixed ethnicity; and subsequently in the Soviet period, Russia encouraged the settlement of ethnic Russians in Ukrainian areas.  

Land grabs and the migration of peoples are a part of the tapestry of history.  Sometimes they form a new reality that lasts for centuries; sometimes they are less permanent.  But History doesn't like to be "corrected." Those who attempt it can find themselves in difficulty.   

     

Uber-Extreme - A Necessary Evil?

I've said it before (and yes, I'm going to say it again);  Michael Gerson is one of the few columnists of either stripe who can regularly be objective rather than doctrinaire. 

His most recent effort, "The Tea Party Risks Scaring Away Voters," is about the ridiculously extreme positions being taken these days by the most ardent tea-party politicos, for example, the demands of Sarah Palin and others to impeach Obama basically because his policies aren't theirs, or the one-shot wonder Chris McDaniel who hoped but failed to replace Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, making accusations that the election was stolen.   

Gerson says these attitudes are self-delusive, and he's right.  He says their proponents aren't really "conservatives" in the traditional sense, which is true. He worries that they will scare voters away from Republican candidates. 

I suspect he's corrrect on that point too, though I'm less concerned than he is about the effects.  Gerson is worried about the next election, when he thinks voters in general, turned off by the shortcomings of the Obama approach, will be taking another look at the GOP, and be turned off.  Perhaps so (I hope so!) but my sense is that the tea party has a destiny to fulfill, but the time isn't ripe.  We won't restore a healthy two-party system by dissuading them now from taking these wacko positions (as if we could, anyway).  Their fate is to make themselves so self-evidently unthinkable that they are utterly repudiated at the polls and fade into oblivion.  We may need one more election to do that.  Sarah, keep talking. 

 

Crossing the Town-Country Divide

Today in the U.S. of A., you have to be over 40, at least, to recall a time when the prevalent view among politicians was that our two major parties share quite a lot of basic "American" values, and that compromise and understanding between them are possible. 

Yet occasionally, somebody in Congress still tries to plant a tiny seed in the sere landscape left behind by the incendiary blaze of our political "dialogue," hoping to grow a beanstalk.   For example, those guys who were going to work out a bipartisan compromise on the deficit -- it was just about 18 months ago but do we recall their names?  Senior Congressional leaders were working on an immigration reform bill that both parties could accept?  Yeah, sure.

So, perhaps it's better to start small, go for a blade of grass rather than a beanstalk.  That's the way I see the collaboration between Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz and Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings, who have agreed to attempt to understand each other's constituencies a little better, via an exchange of visits, in the hope it might enable them to work fruitfully together. 

Let's be honest: This attempt will probably fail, or at best, it will produce nothing more than two guys who will have a little greater respect and understanding for each other's views. 

What I like about it though is that it gets at what I see as one of the underlying causes of the bitter divisions in our natinal political life:   Often, it's not so much Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative, or progressive vs. regressive, that separate us, but urban vs. rural.   The very different milieux from which Cummings and Chaffetz have grown is a microcosm of how we're different on many issues. 

The way we see many issues is colored by our environment, and it may be difficult to understand what we can't conceive of.   Our attitudes toward guns, immigrants, social services, poverty, crime, traffic, and many other issues of the day are formed ... and reinforced ... by what we see around us every day, to the point that I think often solutions need to be regional, or even local. 

If these two Congressmen truly do manage to see and understand both sides of the equation they will have accomplished something worthwhile, if only on a small scale.

 

 

Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose

On this day when we in the United States of America celebrate our political independence and our civic freedoms, it is indeed heartening to see the Roberts Supreme Court working so hard not just to protect existing well-defined freedoms but to expand them. 

Specifically, in their most recent decisions, the Supremes have declared that there is no limit to a religious group's imposing its views on others who do not share them, even if those "others" are damaged thereby.    

Thus, a corporation ("They're good people!") like Hobby Lobby may impose its owner's religious views on others, by depriving even its non-superstitious employees of forms of health care the law says they're entitled to.  Oh, and by the way, the court adds, those who religiously oppose abortion are free to verbally (and in reality, also physically) intimidate those who choose to terminate a pregnancy. 

Well, the good news is that in the long run, the court's new ukases may collapse because of their weak underpinnings.   Corporations aren't people; nor is the owner of a corporation (who advocates certain religious beliefs) the same entity as his corporation (in fact, by created a "corporation" he has gone to great lengths to avoid being the same). 

And circumstances may change.  I particularly like the notion that the Hobby Lobby right-wingers have strengthened the case for "liberating" all employers from providing  health insurance and moving to a single-payer system.   Hah! Just desserts.   

But the Justices themselves are not exempt from the having their freedom curtailed by freedom, either.  An interesting recent review notes the surprising increase of "unanimous" decisions by the court, but it turns out that unanimity results from browbeating by Roberts because, well, just because he'd like to see more unanimous decisions.   Legal experts are saying this doesn't make much difference, because when justices "concur," they may still indicate opposing views.  

But a forced unanimity can become a bad habit, and I'm skeptical that the court's current conservatives would be willing to concur if they were the minority.  Meanwhile, it seems to me that future generations may tend to view these "unanimous" decisions more seriously than warranted, no matter how many concurrences are registered.

So the current court reminds me a bit of the Soviet bloc in the old days. They always referred to themselves as the "freedom-loving" countries of the world, though they were anything but.