Friday, July 24, 2009

Henry Gates, Obama: Mistakes, Misjudgments

President Obama has made a troubling mistake and misjudgment in his comments about the arrest of Professor Henry Gates by Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley. It was a personal and political mistake--a big one--because it was a factual error, an uninformed emotional response, and a serious political misjudgment. He has hurt himself with many supporters, even 'in-the-tank-for-Obama" supporters like me.

I am deeply disappointed with both Professor Gates' and the President's representation of what happened. Having read everything available, including the Cambridge Police Department incident report, having heard the personal accounts of both men involved and the findings of relevant police organizations, I am persuaded that Professor Gates has misrepresented what occurred, and recast a simple case of an officer trying to protect Gates' private property as a racial incident. In light of the facts, it appears evident that Professor Gates overreacted, straining the events and facts to create one.


I've long been a fan of Professor Gates. Among my graduate degrees is a later-in-life masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Professor Gates is a revered figure on the Harvard campus, and rightly so. And I was among those who lionized him. But what I saw in the picture painted by the various reports of this unfortunate situation was not the response of a black man or white man,
but the response of an arrogant, privileged man who felt he was above being accountable, respectful, and cooperative with a police sergeant who was trying to do his job. In that spirit, Gates was apparently verbally abusive and willing to dramatically play the race card as well. It's especially ironic and troubling when you consider that this respected sergeant was in fact trying to protect Gates' property.

I am aware of similar incidents that have occurred over the years in my neighborhoods and those of friends. My instinctive response and those of my neighbors and friends were to understand that the police were dutifully responding to a concerned call from a diligent neighbor. More, the instinctive responses most often were to be grateful for the quick action of both the neighbor and the responding officers. Also understood was the need to respond to the officers respectfully, and that they had to confirm the identity of those they found there--to be assured they were in fact the owners. They had to follow the procedures set out to complete the job and report it thoroughly. The responses of the police officers were welcome and assuring to the owners, and most often acknowledged with appreciation.

The only people I know of who respond to such situations in the way Professor Gates did are the arrogant, self-important people with notable personal issues regarding status and privilege. They think that by virtue of their success, status, prestige, wealth--whatever--they are above the inconveniences or implications of submitting to the requirements of police officers doing their jobs--even when it is to protect them. I know the good professor was tired after a long trip home from China. We all can have a bad day. But his pride has kept him from setting things straight, acknowledging a more balanced account of the events, and his contributing culpability as well. Professor Gates' halo has tarnished and fallen, to be sure.

I am also disappointed at the emotional, uninformed response of President Obama. I'm still "in the tank" for his agenda, but the president needs to respond with one of his more characteristically thoughtful and balanced assessments of things. He needs to retract his uninformed statement, apologize for reacting without all the facts, and apologize for the implication that this event was in any way related to the unfortunate history of law enforcement and minority peoples in some places.


(Just a little while ago today, the President more-or-less addressed the first two points--although it was only his choice of words that he retracted. He otherwise issued no apologies and admitted no error. He failed to acknowledge substantive misjudgment on the facts or to back away from the third point on inherent underlying racism in the incident. If this was a "teachable moment," it was perhaps most appropriately one for the good professor and the president.)

The President must also correct the appearance that because Professor Gates is a personal friend, and a respected scholar on race, he must be supported in this case, regardless. So far, that appearance remains. If it is clear that it is not yet a post-racial America, it is now equally clear that our president is not as even-handedly post-racial as we wanted to believe either.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Peggy Noonan (WSJ) On Sarah Palin


Peggy Noonan is a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and a best-selling author. A trustee of the conservative Manhattan Institute, Edmund Burke and Ronald Reagan are among the political figures she most admires. In fact, she was a primary speech writer and special assistant to Ronald Reagan. Ms. Noonan also wrote the speeches for George H.W. Bush that introduced the memorable phrases, "a kinder, gentler nation" and "a thousand points of light," along with the unfortunate declaration, "Read my lips: no new taxes," in his 1988 presidential acceptance speech. She is a Republican voice that commands attention, a principled conservative thinker and spokesperson--and she has concerns with Sarah Palin's newfound prominence in the Republican Party.

From her recent column in the WSJ:

Palin was bad for Republicans--and the republic.

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence....

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it....What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits....

"The elites hate her." The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." ...Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan....

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think....

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.

--"A Farewell to Harms: Palin was bad for Republicans--and the republic," by Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal (7.11.09)

I didn't say it. Peggy Noonan did--a Republican voice of impeccable credentials. But if I were still a Republican, if my views had not changed so on the need for education, healthcare and regulatory reform, if George W and his team had not succeeded in alienating and running off thoughtful Republicans whose eyes were cast more toward a fast-changing future than myopically at the same old 19th-20th century cultural, economic and government model--if I thought there were a chance to update their DNA and redeem the Republican Party (and I don't)--then I might have cared enough to say it, too. But the Republican Party is quickly becoming a cultural and political anachronism. And unless it surprises me and changes dramatically, it will rightly remain one.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html

Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Five-Foot Shelf: The Great Books, Classics

First published in 1909, the Five-Foot Shelf was conceived by the Harvard president Charles W. Eliot as "a good substitute for a liberal education" for a growing middle class eager for knowledge. All the big names and important ideas were here: Sophocles, Chaucer, the Constitution, three treatises on smallpox for good measure. Ordinary men and women who had never set foot in Harvard Yard could now stake a claim to the peaks of Western civilization.

"In much wisdom is much grief," counsels the book of Ecclesiastes, and in Christopher R. Beha's tender intellectual memoir, we find plenty of both. By the time he set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics — known as the Five-Foot Shelf — Beha had already survived blood cancer and seen his identical twin brother nearly die after a car accident. And in a year that would take Beha from ancient Greece to the 20th century, illness and death returned once more, reminding him that no amount of learning can efface what Pascal called the "eternal silence of these infinite spaces."

A product of Manhattan private schools and Princeton, Beha seems an unlikely candidate for such earnest self-­improvement. But like the working masses who were Eliot's intended audience, he was desperately seeking a retreat from the mundane.

--A NYT Sunday Book Review (6.24.09) by Alexander Nazaryan of The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else, by Christopher R. Beha.


I haven't read this book. And it may be awhile before I get to it. But the story affirms again the value and power of a classical education, a Great Books Curriculum, or reading the classic literature of the ages. Ironic then, isn't it, that one reads again and again of colleges dropping the major in classical studies because of a lack of student interest and enrollment.

During my six years in the Marine Corps between high school and college, I organized my own self-help approach to an experience of higher education. I took upon myself the task, often the joy, of reading as many classics of different scholarly disciplines as I could manage to identify and acquire. For me, to this day, they are among the most important, most useful books I have read.

But, I had not heard of Charles Eliot's "Five-Foot Shelf," this being the first reference to it I've encountered. Still, I understood what a classical education entailed: the Latin and Greek languages, the history, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics and arts of Greece and Rome. Then, more generally, there were the classic works of literature and other disciplines which spanned the millennia from ancient Greece and Rome through the 20th century AD/CE. And recognizing the threat to a sound education in the classics, however defined, some colleges organized their undergraduate liberal arts curriculum around the "Great Books," the classics.

The idea of the Great Books curriculum emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. The University of Chicago is probably best known for trying to implement it, although the ideal was never fully realized there. Still, Chicago today retains a Great Books component to its core curriculum, and several universities offer a form of Great Books curriculum as an alternative. In addition, there are several small colleges that have adopted a Great Books approach to their liberal arts curriculum.

The best known and most respected Great Books program today is likely the 70-year-old curriculum at St. John's College, which has campuses at Annapolis, MD, and Santa Fe, NM. When my son and daughter were considering colleges, I at least acquainted them with St. John's as an alternative. They were not interested, but in the process I received some interesting information from the school. They listed 104 authors of classics from the Greeks to the 20th century. I couldn't help but take inventory of how well I had done against their list. Of the 104 authors listed, I had read 44. Not great, but not bad either. But most interesting, I had first read 38 of those 44 authors in my self-education process in the Marine Corps. Later in college, in a liberal arts program self-crafted to be as broad an exposure to the arts and sciences as I could organize, I would add only nine more of them.

A few years ago, in reading the book John Adams by David McCullough, I was reminded again in the letters of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other luminaries of their revolutionary time, how powerfully their classical education had informed them and served them. It provided the needed knowledge and intellectual discipline, the philosophical and political foundations, for planning and organizing the most enlightened democracy and effective market economy in the history of the world. America's best and brightest today could do worse than avail themselves of that same foundation of knowledge. And the universities that define how a broadly instructive and enlightening liberal arts education is constructed and taught might revisit these considerations as well. (Although we do understand, don't we, that universities now more often tailor curricula to what students want and will pay for, and students want what society and the marketplace value.)

But I am also reminded that I have unfinished business. I still have 60 authors to go, don't I? And while I have no illusions of reading them all, there are still many on that list that I truly want to read--perhaps now more than ever. Anyone care to join me?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/review/Nazaryan-t.html?_r=1

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Thomas Merton: Failings of Faith Life & Prayer

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Cistercian (Trappist) monk resident at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was a poet and, perhaps, the most prolific and authoritative 20th-century writer on the Christian contemplative life and tradition. His name and works were recognized broadly outside the cloisters of his monastic life and his Roman Catholic Christian faith. His best known work is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, but his most important work on the contemplative life is likely New Seeds of Contemplation.

Merton was also a scholar and sympathetic ambassador to the contemplative traditions of other faiths, particularly those of East Asia. He provided respected commentary on the Chinese Taoist Master in The Way of Chuang Tzu, along with English translations of his poetry. His book Zen and the Birds of Appetite provides an intriguing treatment of Chan/Zen Buddhism from the perspective of a Christian contemplative, and offers a fascinating, insightful dialogue between Merton and Japanese Zen Master and scholar D.T. Suzuki.

But the work that speaks most directly to me is his instructive, profound reflections on Contemplative Prayer, published after his accidental death in 1968. And one of the characteristics of Merton that made him more real, a citizen in this world even if a monk, was his open, unapologetic commentary about the ills and failings of society, and the ills and failings of the organized Christian Church. A man after Christ's own heart, he lived the humble, compassionate life of an impoverished monk, yet never failed to take up his cross in calling out the religious Pharisees and vipers, the fakes and hypocrites of his day--and the misguiding expressions of their misappropriated faith.

This from Contemplative Prayer, Chapter 19, pp. 113:

Of course it is true that religion on a superficial level, religion that is untrue to itself and to God, easily comes to serve as "the opium of the people." And this takes place whenever religion and prayer invoke the name of God for reasons and ends that have nothing to do with Him. When religion becomes a mere artificial facade to justify a social or economic system--when religion hands over its rites and language completely to the political propagandist, and when prayer becomes the vehicle for a purely secular ideological program, then religion does tend to become an opiate.
It deadens the spirit enough to permit the substitution of a superficial fiction and mythology for His truth of life. And this brings about the alienation of the believer, so that his religious zeal becomes political fanaticism. His faith in God, while preserving its traditional formulas, becomes in fact faith in his own nation, class or race. His ethic ceases to be the law of God and of love, and becomes the law that might-makes-right: established privilege justifies everything. God is the status quo.
In the last book to come to us from the hand of Raissa Maritain, her commentary on the Lord's Prayer, we read the following passage concerning those who barely obtain their daily bread, and are deprived of the advantages of a decent life on earth by the injustice and thoughtlessness of the privileged:
If there were fewer wars, less thirst to dominate and exploit others, less national egoism, less egoism of class and caste, if man were more concerned for his brother, and really wanted to collect together for the good of the human race all the resources which science places at our disposal especially today, there would be on earth fewer populations deprived of their necessary sustenance, there would be fewer children who die or are incurably weakened by undernourishment.
She goes on to ask what obstacles man has placed in the way of the Gospel that this should be so. It is unfortunately true that those who have complacently imagined themselves blessed by God have in fact done more than others to frustrate His will....
In such cases, religion is understood to be at least implicitly misdirected, and therefore the "God" whom it invokes becomes, or tends to become, a mere figment of the imagination. Such religion is insincere. It is merely a front for greed, injustice, selfishness, violence. The cure for this corruption is to restore the purity of faith and the genuineness of Christian love: and this means a restoration of the contemplative orientation of prayer.
How, I wonder, might Thomas Merton view the hubris of those more politicized, triumphalist, and polarizing Christian church cultures of today?

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Warren Reaches Out to American Muslims. Christian Integrity. About Time.


Under fire from fellow conservatives, he addresses Islamic Society

WASHINGTON - Defying some of his fellow conservative Christian critics, one of the most prominent religious leaders in the country told several thousand American Muslims on Saturday that "the two largest faiths on the planet" must work together to combat stereotypes and solve global problems. "Some problems are so big you have to team tackle them," evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren addressed the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America. Warren said Muslims and Christians should be partners in working to end what he calls "the five global giants" of war, poverty, corruption, disease and illiteracy.

--"Evangelist Warren to Muslims: Let's Partner," Associated Press, as reported on msnbc.com (7.5.09)

At long last a credible voice is lifted up from the Evangelical Christian community to respectfully address American Muslims. It is a welcome voice, reflecting something of the spiritual integrity that all Christians are called to through their relationship with Christ and the abiding-in of the Spirit of God. Pushing aside the religion of cultural and political identity, Rick Warren takes a welcome step toward reflecting more of Christ's nonjudgmental love, humility, and compassion when engaging those in the world who approach their faith life from a different historical and cultural foundation. The Apostle Paul admonished the Christian faithful of his day to "walk by the Spirit," and more,

...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control; against such things there is no law.

Why, then, do so many so-called Christians who pray "Lord, Lord," reflect that spiritual identity only when it is convenient to them, and then only within the context of that narrow culturally and politically defined social space where they try to hold God hostage. Lord, Lord, indeed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31741969/ns/us_news-faith/

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Trilliums*

Every spring
among
the ambiguities
of childhood

the hillsides grew white
with the wild trilliums.
I believe in the world.
Oh, I wanted

to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there,
but there was none

that I could find
shaped like me.
So I entered
through the tender buds,

I crossed the cold creek,
my backbone
and my thin white shoulders
unfolding and stretching.

From the time of snow-melt,
when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,

I listened to the earth-talk,
the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy,
the dreams of lying

just under the surface,
then rising,
becoming
at the last moment

flaring and luminous--
the patient parable
of every spring and hillside
year after difficult year.


* in Dreamworks (1986), Mary Oliver