[Rhodes22-list] Re: Commitment to war

[brad haslett]

Stan,

It's very rare that I find myself agreeing with
something published in the San Francisco Chronicle but
this is just too good, and on subject.

Brad

    
        www.sfgate.com        
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leaving the left 
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of
self-styled progressives -- people who once championed
solidarity 
- Keith Thompson
Sunday, May 22, 2005 


Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have
finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and
defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession.
The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a
long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not
from a person but a cause: the political philosophy
that for more than three decades has shaped my
character and consciousness, my sense of self and
community, even my sense of cosmos. 

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American
cultural left and what it has become during our time
together. 

I choose this day for my departure because I can no
longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled
progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all
the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet
implode. 

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the
corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more
than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's
all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace"
movement are actually cheering against
self-determination for a long-suffering Third World
country because they hate George W. Bush more than
they love freedom. 

Like many others who came of age politically in the
1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the
left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed
the danger that I would have to describe it
accurately, first to myself and then to others. That
could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the
other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to
keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror. 

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think
Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift,
without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my
perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring
for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I
learned to suppress now has my rapt attention.
"Something strange -- something approaching
pathological -- something entirely of its own making
-- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How
did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping
point. The time has come to walk in a different
direction -- just as I did many years before. 

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative
was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther
King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat
of oppression," he could have been describing my
community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down,
and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was
unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and
right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but
when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I
instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out
were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and
"progressive thought"). 

The people on the other side were dedicated to
preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo.
This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to
know. The knowledge carried me for a long time.
Mythologies are helpful that way. 

I began my activist career championing the 1968
presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene
McCarthy, because both promised to end America's
misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm
worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose
and environmental protections, signed up with George
McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest
delegate ever to a Democratic convention. 

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard
Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying
liberal, although I never actually got a card.
(Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.)
All my commitments centered on belief in equal
opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of
the individual and solidarity with people in trouble.
To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to
Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive
spirit at its finest. 

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day
Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as
the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world.
The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use
of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to
annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might
not make it to dessert. 

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives
of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders
of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a
word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of
the sort you might expect if someone had casually
mentioned taking up child molestation for sport. 

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to
bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table. 

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my
departure from a left already well on its way to
losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with
astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a
telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by
American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was
straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of
civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept.
11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other
considerations. 

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in
self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the
nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics. 

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of
the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead
of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The
events of that day were likely premeditated by the
White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky
insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated
no terror greater than American foreign policy on a
mediocre day. 

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's
anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in
January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in
the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and
against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their
lasting credit. But many had since made clear that
they had also changed their minds about the virtues of
King's call for equal of opportunity. 

These days the postmodern left demands that government
and private institutions guarantee equality of
outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be
considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of
factors such as personal motivation, training, and
skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive;
but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real
sense it may be the last card held by a movement
increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for
group-specific rights and the subordination of
citizenship to group identity. There's a word for
this: pathetic. 

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I
laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on
the main lines of the cultural left. 

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona
has forbidden discrimination based on "individual
style." The University of Connecticut has banned
"inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University,
sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment
"may be intentional or unintentional and still
constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking
"subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your
thoughts ...). 

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on
black parents to explain to their kids why they are
not likely to get into medical school speaking English
like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson
countered that the time was not yet right to "level
the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people
can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that." 

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia
mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to
get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a
guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich
spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would
argue that so long as women are powerless relative to
men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is
misguided." 

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years,
as have America's political landscape and cultural
horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator
with today's best voting record on human rights would
be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas
Republican Sam Brownback? 

He is also by most measures one of the most
conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about
how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped
by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted
on justice for "all of God's children." 

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs
different medicines at different times for different
reasons, this also holds for the body politic. 

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing
down walls that prevented equal access and due
process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and
we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written
into law, today the body politic is crying for
different remedies. 

America must now focus on creating healthy,
self-actualizing individuals committed to taking
responsibility for their lives, developing their
talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering
emotional and moral intelligence, all in all
contributing to the advancement of the human
condition. 

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the
recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the
ever renewing society will be a free society (whose]
capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who
make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner
believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative,
versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give
them room to breathe." 

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I
became a liberal in the first place to break from the
repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary
hometown. 

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle
when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new
version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new
clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and
the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as
an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of
demands for conformity and adherence to any point of
view through silence, fear, or coercion. 

True, it took a while to see what was right before my
eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from
grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable
of and responsible for making the principle decisions
that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the
contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as
passive and helpless victims of powerful external
forces, hence political wards who require the
continuous shepherding of caretaker elites. 

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of
citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be
expected to grasp the importance (not least to our
survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial
developmental advances that gave rise to our own
capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality.
A left averse to making common cause with competent,
self- determining individuals -- people who guide
their lives on the basis of received values, everyday
moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain
common sense -- is a faction that deserves the
marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for
so many years. 

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly
join with others who have discovered for themselves,
that the single most important thing a genuinely
liberal person can do now is walk away from the house
the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that
deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely
with each step in a better direction. 

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of
"Angels and Aliens" and "To Be a Man." His work is at
www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at
insight at sfchronicle.com. 

Page C - 1 
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle 
 
--- stan <stan at rhodes22.com> wrote:

> Hi Steve,
> 
> You must be referring to Clinton helping out in
> Serbia et al when the 
> Republicans were all for not doing anything about
> the ethnic cleansing and 
> also got pissed off when Clinton refused to do it
> without NATO and without 
> losing any American lives.  Pretty ugly record.
> 
> You are right though, as a pinko bleeding heart
> liberal, I should be sending 
> GB profits to help George out with his unplanned
> mess but unfortunately GBI 
> also didn't plan ahead and turned out to be a non
> profit organization.
> 
> but love hearing from you and getting the broader
> perspective - even if I am 
> getting too old to change.
> 
> stan
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Steve" <rhodes2282 at yahoo.com>
> To: "stan" <stan at rhodes22.com>; "The Rhodes 22 mail
> list" 
> <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 10:23 AM
> Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Re: Commitment to war
> 
> 
> > Stan
> > Maybe some people just Recognize the need to help
> > people out when they are being murbered, raped,
> > sprayed with chemical weapons, etc.
> >
> > I support the war & any war that helps make people
> > free.
> >
> > Based on the comment you made about me below,
> since
> > you are for the terrorists, why don't YOU just go
> over
> > there and fight with the terrorists:-)  See Stan,
> > comments like this are stupid, they make no sense.
> > When you are the big dog on the plantet; this
> country
> > has to help people that can't help themselves.  I
> know
> > liberals only think about themselves and thier
> welfare
> > programs; BUT there are more important things to
> spend
> > money on than lazy Americans who won't work for a
> > living.  Now if the liberals really wanted to do
> > someting for thier fellow man; then they would
> give up
> > all earthly possessions to the government:-) Are
> you
> > going to donate your business Stan????????????  Do
> it
> > for the children!!!!!!!!!!! :-)
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > --- stan <stan at rhodes22.com> wrote:
> >
> >> thanks for the rare sharing, Rummy.
> >>
> >> Still waiting for Steve and friends to back up
> their
> >> bravado with enlisting
> >> or Bush to let his daughters sign up.  Maybe war
> is
> >> exciting and glamorous
> >> for some who stay home and hire others - but if
> it
> >> really, really, really is
> >> the right thing to do, as several on the List
> seem
> >> to think, then it should
> >> also be the right thing to declare war, have a
> fair
> >> draft for those asked to
> >> serve and rationing for the fully committed home
> >> front.  I for one would
> >> never allow my kids to be taken for any half
> hearted
> >> venture where the
> >> politically correct back up is tax cutting and
> >> magnetic symbols.
> >>
> >> stan, WW11
> >>
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message ----- 
> >> From: <R22RumRunner at aol.com>
> >> To: <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> >> Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 4:15 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Re: Commitment to
> war
> >>
> >>
> >> > Herb and all,
> >> >
> >> > Neither the body count or the number in country
> >> had anything to do  with
> >> > our
> >> > commitment or lack thereof in Vietnam. When a
> >> soldier is being fired  upon
> >> > and
> >> > has to radio for permission to return fire,
> that's
> >> a lack of  commitment.
> >> > Remember, we didn't have cell phones in those
> days
> >> and military  radio's,
> >> > as good
> >> > as they were, often couldn't contact anyone. I
> was
> >> with an  armored unit
> >> > in I
> >> > Corps (DMZ area) from 1970 to 1971 and saw a
> lot
> >> of strange  stuff, but
> >> > having to ask for permission to return fire is
> the
> >> one thing that  really
> >> > burned my
> >> > butt. Sometimes we just didn't ask for
> permission
> >> and pleaded  no radio
> >> > contact when questioned after the fact. It was
> >> easier and saved our  butts
> >> > on many
> >> > an occasion.
> >> > The one thing that concerns me when these
> >> discussions come up on the list
> >> > is
> >> > that I doubt that many people on either side of
> >> the issue know what
> >> > happens
> >> > to the human body when it is hit with a fifty
> >> caliber round or a grenade.
> >> > Or,
> >> > when a RPG hits a tank and burns through the
> >> armament and blows up inside
> >> > the
> >> > tank turning those bodies into chipped beef.
> War
> >> isn't pretty people. Part
> >> > of my  duties while in Vietnam were to identify
> >> bodies at the morgue when
> >> > they
> >> > were  brought in from the field. I still have
> >> nightmares about my
> >> > experiences,
> >> > and  don't talk about them very often. The
> >> decision to go to war has to be
> >> > taken very  seriously. People talking about
> body
> >> counts like your counting
> >> > cord
> >> > wood makes  me sick. Take a walk through a
> >> veterans hospital sometime and
> >> > meet
> >> > some of the  walking dead. Your thoughts on war
> >> will change, I guarantee
> >> > it.
> >> > War isn't good  for any living thing.
> >> > Time to step off the soap box and mix a drink.
> >> Coke has a new Diet Coke
> >> > made
> >> > with Splenda. No more Nutrasweet poisoning.
> Yeah!
> >> >
> >> > Rummy
> >> >
> __________________________________________________
> >> > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> >> www.rhodes22.org/list
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> __________________________________________________
> >> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> >> www.rhodes22.org/list
> >>
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
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> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > __________________________________________________
> > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> > 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> 
=== message truncated ===



		
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