Palin and Obama [UPDATED]
Tonight I’m thinking about how much these two politicians are alike.
Of course, they are the figureheads of diametrically opposed tribes and worldviews. But the way they serve in their respective roles is uncannily alike. They are of the same generation, a generation weaned on symbols in an age in which the din of symbols (often clashing) drowns out substance. Humans may once have found symbols in the forest along with food, but modern humans live in a forest of symbols. They’re a large part of what we hunt, make, consume, and trade.
Obama and Palin are both magnetic screens for projection, both positive and negative. A broad range of people can see in Barack or in Sarah what they want to see. And that makes both of them extraordinarily polarizing: you either love them or hate them (and if you love one you hate the other). They’re held up as either redeemers or wreckers. Both are remarkably well suited to be seen as exemplars and embodiments of the values they stand for: cosmopolitanism in Obama’s case, frontier faith and fortitude in Palin’s. Underneath, both are more complicated than that. Both combine lofty ideals, apparently sincerely, even zealously held, with an ability to be pragmatic, and even ruthless, amoral and cronyistic. Even their names are weirdly symmetrical, contrasting little morality plays — notice where the stresses are, the tone color of the vowels — in almost the same number of letters.
There’s an apocalyptic sense that the armies of these two worldviews are in a fight to the death, captained by these charismatic young avatars. Yet the complete triumph of one, and destruction of the other, is impossible — and would be a disaster.
UPDATE: The Anchoress says much the same thing:
We live in a very polarized age wherein we too often and too-willingly segregate ourselves with an “us good, them bad” mentality. That is not new, of course. Humans have always drawn their lines of demarcation between themselves and others – mostly either because of ethnicity or language or creed. Lately, as ethnicities blend and languages fade, the lines seem increasingly to be drawn mostly over ideologies disguised as creeds. Or creeds disguised as ideologies.
It’s distressing to see. It is terribly distressing to watch what appears to be an inexorable move toward national self-destruction in the pursuit of “squashing the other side,” when in fact both sides are America’s, and an America without healthy discourse and respectable, honorable and loyal dissent will not need an outside enemy to render her impotent and eventually inconsequential.
Photo by Shocked, Shocked . . .
. . . conservatives are, to find out that Obama was a student radical. Funny: plenty of them were, too. But because Obama has been unevenly outgrowing his youthful radicalism instead of stridently repudiating it and ricocheting to the other extreme, he isn’t given credit for moving an inch; he must still be right back there.
Uneven outgrowing, however, presents serious problems of its own.
This was my comment at Anchoress:
I’m shocked, shocked, to discover that he was a student radical — so were many of today’s repentant neoconservatives, and some of them were shriller than young Obama. His juvenilia means no more than anyone else’s. Do you want to be held to and hanged by yours?
The question is where he stands now. I do not think he’s remained a secret radical; I think he’s genuinely evolved towards the center. My fear is that he’s a work in progress and doesn’t know yet WHERE he stands, so his views are a contradictory jumble from all along the spectrum.
A “contradictory jumble” should not be mistaken for a mature synthesis. My own biggest fear about Obama remains what it always was: he wasn’t ready to be president. He is green and uncured.
The Bizarre Life of Aafia Siddiqui
Terror mastermind, alumni of Room 101 or just plain sad? Having read a few accounts of Aafia Siddiqui’s competency hearing, many of which seemed at odds with one another on basic material facts, I went chasing around the intertubes looking for the real story (using wikipedia’s entry and a Boston Magazine story as my basic texts – heaven help me), only to conclude, for the umpteenth time, that the internet is at war with the notion of objective reality.
Settled Facts: Aafia Siddiqui moved to the United States from Pakistan in 1990, attended the University of Houston then transferred to MIT. She graduated from the latter in 1995. A marriage to a Pakistani anesthesiologist was arranged shortly thereafter. She went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brandeis in 2001.*
Settled Facts Subject to Inpretation:
1. She was a devoted Muslim, and evidently hoped that the United States would be converted to Islam. She and her husband donated (naively or not) to organizations that the Feds came to believe were terrorist front operations.
2. Her husband was questioned by the FBI in 2001 regarding the purchase of night vision equipment, body armor, and other suspicious gear. The attention of the Feds was also drawn, it seems, by odd financial transactions that may or may not have been completely innocent.
3. She and her husband went back and forth to Pakistan at least once in 2001-2002.
4. In 2002, eight months pregnant with her third child, her marriage falls apart. Now back in Pakistan, she moves in with her mother and father. Her husband attempts to present a divorce request to the family, an argument ensues. In the excitement, her father dies of a heart attack. Note: this account is disputed by the husband who paints a picture of a moody, aggresive wife (but he would say that, wouldn’t he?)
5. Her third child is born.
6. She travels back to the U.S. again late in 2002, either to look for a job or to set up a dead drop P.O. Box for terror suspect Majid Khan.
6.1 Allegedly, she is married for a second time. To a nephew of Khalid Sheik Muhammed.
7. Well, this one’s the kicker: In late March or early April 2003 (a month after the arrest of Kalid Sheik Muhammed, who alledgedly implicates her as a member of Al Queda), she disappears. Possibly she is picked up by the Pakistani Police or intelligence at the behest of the FBI. Possibly she went underground to work for Al Queda. Possibly she just bummed around Pakistan and Afghanistan, pursuing terrorism as a hobby and going completely crazy. Lots of possibilities here.
8. On May 26, 2004 John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller issue a terror alert, naming Siddiqui along with several others in connection therewith. Which would be an odd thing to do, if they already had her in custody. Unless of course, they’re just that evil. Or, unless Cheney was somehow pulling the wool over their eyes so that he could give her the treatment alledged in point 2 at bottom. Over to you, Andrew.
9. Siddiqui is captured in Afghanistan, under very curious circumstances, in 2008. Apparently caught wandering around the residence of the Governor of Ghazni with a satchel full of terrorist literature, sounding like some extreme version of a Muslim Scientologist, she is detained by Afghan authorities.
And now we pass into the realm of the factually weird sounding stuff.
1. American soldiers and officials visit the detention center. From the reports, they were apparently there to talk to Siddiqui specifically. They enter a room with a curtain partition. Siddiqui is apparently being held unsecured behind the partition. An officer lays down his M-4 on the ground. She picks it up and fires a shot at the soldiers. The officer responds with pistol fire, striking her twice. Maybe it’s not that weird. This is, after all, Afghanistan we’re talking about.
2. The Gray Lady of Bagram: Here I’ll just cut to the chase and quote Wikipedia directly:
Moazzam Begg and several other former captives have reported that a female prisoner, prisoner 650, was held in Bagram.[18] According to The Daily Times and Adnkronos news service the former captives report she has lost her sanity, and cries all the time. Ridley wrote about Bagram’s “Prisoner 650” and her ordeal of torture and repeatedly being raped for over four years. “The cries of (this) helpless woman echoed (with such torment) in the jail that (it) prompted prisoners to go on hunger strike.” Ridley called her a “gray lady (because) she (was) almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her.
Needless to say, the relevance of this story to Siddiqui is hotly disputed. And, from what I can glean, Ridley comes across as a minor league nut case herself. Nevertheless, the tale’s poignancy (along with the spectral imagery) and the simple fact that it’s out there lends it a certain force, irrespective of it’s truth. The same kind of eerie sensibility hanging over the grassy knoll.
But, I hope it goes without saying that this, like the Kennedy assassination, is a serious story; in cases like this, poignancy, shock value, or even service to one’s ideals ought to count for a lot less than truth. I suppose that we’ll have to wait for the results of her trial (if there is one) to know anything approaching the truth about Aafia Siddiqui. For me, a gut feeling has begun to precipitate out of the mess of contradictions. An intelligent but troubled woman. 9/11. A bad marriage. Psychosis. Some activity on behalf of terror organizations.
The state may produce, or for all I know, has already produced indisputable evidence that she was a real player, a terror mastermind. To me she sounds like a crazy ( and very likely dangerous) wannabe. But that’s just what she’d want us to think, wouldn’t she?
-Ennui
* Asked if her work in neuroscience might have relevance to terrorist acts, a member of her dissertation committee laughed, “I can’t see how it can be applied to anything,” he says. “It’s not very applied work. It didn’t have a medical aspect to it. And, as a computer expert, she was competent. But you know, calling her a mastermind or something does not seem — I never saw any evidence.” That just had to hurt.
The Blogging Wave Has Ebbed.
It’s obvious now. And official. So there if you gave me grief, back when I wondered if it was just me.
The Wisdom of Humility on Abortion
I’ve linked to this post before, in which popular blogger and “Brazen Careerist” Penelope Trunk talks frankly about her two abortions and how they were related to her career ambitions.
There are more than 450 comments on the post to date, and they run the gamut on the issue. This new comment today really impressed me. The author identified herself only as “Me” (it’s not me).
Author: Me
Comment:
Its interesting how this post brings out the anger from people on both sides of the fence. Pro-lifers saying “how dare you have an abortion, twice.” Pro-choicers saying “how dare you say that people will regret it.”I think to the point of regret, its important for a woman to examine and know her self thoroughly, you run a very real risk that you will regret an abortion for your entire life. Not that all will, maybe not even the majority. But you probably shouldn’t care about all, or the majority in this case. You should know if you, yourself, will regret it.
Another thing I will add is that I have never heard a parent say they regret having kids. I’ve never heard someone say, “I love my kids, but I really would have preferred [insert sport or University education or Job title] instead. They wonder about it, but not necessarily regret.
I am of pro choice sentiment, but my choice would always be life. I also don’t believe its my choice to choose what other people do. If God gave you the choice to sin, who am I to try and take it away?
Anyways, my soapbox is unsteady, im gonna get down now.
“Obama is Already Over.”
Would someone care to explain to me convincingly (i.e. without resorting to noise, sneers, and flying spittle) why the following is not true? I’d really like to be convinced, and contemptuous dismissal or diversion by food fight is not going to do it.
Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.
On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama.
Only the Republicans are barely any better. We have yet to hear any original ideas from them and there isn’t a real leader on the horizon, mostly retreads like Gingrich and Romney and disappointments, to put it mildly, like Mark Sanford. I write this only hours after Sarah Palin’s announcement of her resignation as Alaska governor and don’t know yet what to make of that. I certainly agree with those who say the attacks on her were unconscionable, but I challenge her most staunch defenders to say that this is really the kind of person to lead us out of our Twenty-First Century malaise.
Of course, you could argue that it’s just Obama’s honeymoon that’s over. Now the actual marriage to the handsome, seductive stranger begins. Probably both parties to the marriage are going, “What have I done??!”
Happy 4th!
The Declaration of Independence, signed on July 2 and published on this day in 1776, was largely a list of grievances against the English monarchy. When we got around to forming the current government, eleven years later, protections against those excesses of government were, for the most part, contained in the Bill of Rights. What we call Constitutional law is, to a large degree, Constitutional amendments law.
If there was a Constiturional Convention today, is there anyting you would want to change? Would you drop the Second Amendment? The Electoral College? The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Would you impose term limits on Congressmen or remove them for Presidents? Would you require the President to be a natural born citizen of the United States?
And a Little Ragged Group Believed It . . .
This has meant the Fourth of July to me since 8th grade, when an inspired music and English teacher, Rose Klowden, got a motley crew of 13-year-olds to perform it. If we could amend the glaring (and telling) omission of the original dwellers in the land, it would be a stirring vision of what America could and should become. Maybe someday.
BALLAD FOR AMERICANS
(Original Version)
(Music: Earl Robinson / Words: John LaTouche)
In seventy-six the sky was red
thunder rumbling overhead
Bad King George couldn't sleep in his bed
And on that stormy morn, Ol' Uncle Sam was born.
Some birthday!
Ol' Sam put on a three cornered hat
And in a Richmond church he sat
And Patrick Henry told him that while America drew breath
It was "Liberty or death."
What kind of hat is a three-cornered hat?
Did they all believe in liberty in those days?
Nobody who was anybody believed it.
Ev'rybody who was anybody they doubted it.
Nobody had faith.
Nobody but Washington, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin,
Chaim Solomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette. Nobodies.
The nobodies ran a tea party at Boston. Betsy Ross
organized a sewing circle. Paul Revere had a horse race.
And a little ragged group believed it.
And some gentlemen and ladies believed it.
And some wise men and some fools, and I believed it too.
And you know who I am.
No. Who are you mister? Yeah, how come all this?
Well, I'll tell you. It's like this... No let us tell you.
Mister Tom Jefferson, a mighty fine man.
He wrote it down in a mighty fine plan.
And the rest all signed it with a mighty fine hand
As they crossed their T's and dotted their I's
A bran' new country did arise.
And a mighty fine idea. "Adopted unanimously in Congress
July 4, 1776,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain
inalienable rights.
That among these rights are Life, Yes sir!
Liberty, That's right!
And the pursuit of happiness."
Is that what they said? The very words.
That does sound mighty fine.
Building a nation is awful tough.
The people found the going rough.
And thirteen states was not enough
So they started to expand
Into the Western lands!
Still nobody who was anybody believed it.
Everybody who anybody they stayed at home.
But Lewis and Clark and the pioneers,
Driven by hunger, haunted by fears,
The Klondike miners and the forty niners,
Some wanted freedom and some wanted riches,
Some liked to loaf while others dug ditches.
But they believed it. And I believed it too,
And you know who I am.
No, who are you anyway, Mister?
Well, you see it's like this. I started to tell you.
I represent the whole of ... Why that's it!
Let my people go. That's the idea!
Old Abe Lincoln was thin and long,
His heart was high and his faith was strong.
But he hated oppression, he hated wrong,
And he went down to his grave to free the slave.
A man in white skin can never be free while his
black brother is in slavery,
"And we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain.
And this government of the people, by the people
and for the people
Shall not perish from the Earth."
Abraham Lincoln said that on November 19, 1863
at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
And he was right. I believe that too.
Say, we still don't know who you are, mister.
Well, I I've been trying to tell you...you see...
The machine age came with a great big roar,
As America grew in peace and war.
And a million wheels went around and 'round.
The cities reached into the sky,
And dug down deep into the ground.
And some got rich and some got poor.
But the people carried through,
So our country grew.
Still nobody who was anybody believed it.
Everybody who was anybody they doubted it.
And they are doubting still,
And I guess they always will,
But who cares what they say when I am on my way
Say, will you please tell us who you are?
What's your name, Buddy? Where you goin'?
Who are you?
Well, I'm everybody who's nobody,
I'm the nobody who's everybody.
What's your racket? What do you do for a living?
Well, I'm an
Engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher,
How about a farmer? Also. Office clerk? Yes ma'am!
That's right. Certainly!
Factory worker? You said it. Yes ma'am.
Absotively! Posolutely!
Truck driver? Definitely!
Miner, seamstress, ditchdigger, all of them.
I am the "etceteras" and the "and so forths" that do the work.
Now hold on here, what are you trying to give us?
Are you an American?
Am I an American?
I'm just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish,
Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and
Turk and Czech and double Czech American.
And that ain't all.
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh Day Adventist,
Mormon, Quaker, Christian Scientist and lots more.
You sure are something.
Our country's strong, our country's young,
And her greatest songs are still unsung.
From her plains and mountains we have sprung,
To keep the faith with those who went before.
We nobodies who are anybody believe it.
We anybodies who are everybody have no doubts.
Out of the cheating, out of the shouting.
Out of the murders and lynching
Out of the windbags, the patriotic spouting
Out of uncertainty and doubting
Out of the carpetbag and the brass spittoon
It will come again
Our marching song will come again!
Deep as our valleys,
High as our mountains,
Strong as the people who made it.
For I have always believed it, and I believe it now,
And you know who I am.
Who are you?
America! America!
Delighted
I’m delighted to see our president being standoffish to the pseudo-coup in Honduras. Not because I dislike the new president or like the old one. But because it shows America has finally left the Cold War mentality, when there always had to be someone we identified as “our bastard” who, however odious, would keep the place clean of Soviet spies and weapons. Those were real fears then. They’re not now.
Just as I was delighted when George W. Bush chose to overthrow a tyrant we had helped prop up, and let the dice of democracy roll in a place we could as easily have kept safe at a distance, with some ugly deals.
Probably I’m the only person alive who sees Bush II and Obama as a continuity. Not in all things important, but in the evolution of a Cold War America.
As for Honduras and its neighbors, probably it’s inevitable that they take a delayed plunge into all that silly neo-Marxist populist crap, just as it was inevitable for ethnic tensions to run red in Eastern Europe and Iraq when the lid was lifted on those pots at the end of the Cold War.
They’ll do what they’ve been yearning to do since 1945, and now we can let them romp down those foolish paths, like preachers’ kids suddenly out of the parental gaze.
Ambiance 
