The 47% Solution

About six weeks from election day, Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark has taken center stage in an election campaign heretofore bereft of a whole lot of pizazz (the antics of the long since departed Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann aside). As is by now well known, Romney’s remark divided the nation between the “takers” and the “makers” in a private fund-raising session, but it got loose, as such statements have a way of doing, and the GOP candidate was faced with an apparent choice: try to explain the remark away, or stand behind it and push.

Characteristically, Romney did both. He first admitted that the remark was “inelegant”, but no sooner did we start to ponder what that really meant when Romney decided to push too. The New York Times captured Romney’s challenge that the country should have a real debate between the “redistributionist” big-government Obama point of view and the self-reliant, smaller government Romney point of view.

Well, okay, what else could the man have done? Retreat bares the buttocks to unfriendly fire, and that’s no good. So better to double down and hope that the appearance of confidence trumps the literal foolishness of the “inelegant” statement.

Why foolish? David Brooks said it about as well as it can be said. Who are these freeloading 47 percent? They very much include veterans of America’s wars, who “take” from the VA. They include the elderly, more Republican than Democratic, who “take” by redeeming their life-long contributions to the Social Security reservoir. They include the handicapped and those who are poor through no fault of their own.

Does the 47 percent include some actual freeloaders, and those who have been sucked into a dependency culture by misbegotten government policies?  Absolutely, yes. But Romney, like Ronald Reagan before him, with his outrageous depictions of “welfare queens”, tries to make it seem like the entirely of the 47 percent are in some fundamental way undeserving of public assistance of any kind and are in fact less than upstanding, fully moral human beings. They are the undeserving “takers”, the hand-out masters, the smarmy manipulators, pure and simple—and they amount to nearly half the entire American population.

Yes, it’s absurd, but that’s what the man said and now has essentially repeated. That is why Brooks was right to criticize Romney for not knowing much about American culture, not knowing much about the political culture, not recognizing the existence of a social compact, and not knowing much about ambition and motivation either.

Does Romney really believe this nonsense, or was he just pandering to big-money Randian nitwits? Before he doubled down on the 47 percent meme, one could have reasonably given him the benefit of the doubt. That’s harder now, and in that light I’d like to add an observation or two that Brooks, for one reason or another, omitted in his commentary.

First, if one wants to go pointing fingers at those who are sucking off the ample teats of big government, one ought to reserve a finger or two for those fat on corporate welfare: the giant corporate beneficiaries of agricultural subsidies; the insurance industry that has for years managed to con Congress into suspending anti-trust laws concerning healthcare coverage; Big Pharma, whose sweet mega-lobbied deals with government enable its companies to make outrageous profits well beyond what is reasonably needed to protect proprietary research; and hedge-fund managers who get to count their earnings as capital gains instead of income. Above all there are the federally chartered banks, which have the government’s charge to be vessels of the Fed’s monetary policy largesse in return for being, in essence, public utilities whose interests align with those of the economy as a whole—except that they no longer do, preferring instead to make their fortunes on commissions, casino derivative wagering, unproductive credit card debt and student loan scams. I could go on, but if I merely listed every pro-corporate tax loophole, tax credit and subsidy now in play we would be here for a week.

Second, and more pungent it seems to me, let’s just consider for a moment why so many Americans rely on the VA, why many formerly middle-class Americans have fallen into forms of dependency above and beyond the percentile figures of a quarter century ago, and why so many Americans aren’t well enough educated to secure what jobs there are. Is it because these sectors making up Romney’s 47 percent are filled with the “underserving poor” who are famously, in the words of John Locke, “quarrelsome and contentious”?

Who made the decisions, rightly or wrongly, to launch the wars that created America’s needy veterans? The common men and women of the land, or the foreign policy/national security elite? Who made the decisions to outsource American manufacturing jobs, invest instead in Chinese and other foreign production platforms, and thus create the basis of the growing income inequality of the past quarter century? Quarrelsome and contentious commoners, or the American economic and business elite?  Who made the decisions that led to our most needy young people not getting the support they have required and deserved to succeed in school and then in their careers, and to keeping too many of our schools de facto separate and unequal all these years? Common ordinary people, or America’s political elite?

Of all the things Mitt Romney does not understand, the nature of social causality itself has to rank way up there. In Romneyland there is no past, there is only now—only the slick, polished tabula rasa of the lighter-than-air libertarian imagination. So come on all of you underserved young adults, you semi-skilled unemployed whose livelihoods have vanished, you vivacious retirees and you disabled vets: Stop whining about rising food, energy, healthcare and housing costs; refuse all those lucrative government handouts; don’t become ill; stop making excuses and pull yourself up by those bootstraps of yours. And above all, vote Republican on November 6.

Catalyst, Not Cause

Sept. 15:

More blood has been spilled, American and other, in Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere in the so-called Arab and Muslim “worlds” in recent days. (I say so-called because, as others have pointed out, to speak off-handedly, especially to Americans, of an “Arab world” or a “Muslim world” is to dangerously conflate nations and societies whose differences are generally more important than their similarities.) A torrent of ink and electrons has already been loosed on the curious, the convinced, the credulous and the occasionally cretinous, and this before many critical facts are in about what has happened and is happening still. I want to speak briefly less about what happened, that being already very well known, and more about what it means and what has been said of it. Lastly, I want to make a general point about an ur-source of such sadness, which keeps pouring itself out like a serial nightmare draped over the collective history of our species.

The violence that has broken out across much of the Arab world and beyond was touched off by the appearance of an Arabic translation of a scurrilous film attacking the Prophet Muhammad. The 14-minute video, “Innocence of Muslims” in Arabic translation first appeared in Egypt and spread thereafter around the region. But the film is the catalyst, not the cause, of the violence.

The cause of the violence, as captured by Robert F. Worth in the New York Times, is the cultural war going on in most Muslim-majority societies. Insults real or imagined emanating from the West about Islam function as props in this struggle, and the various reactions, especially of the nativist elements, are calculated as tactical assaults in that culture war. That well describes the pre-9/11-era affair over Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, the famous Danish cartoons incident, 9/11 itself, and these most recent events. Islamist nativists, employing religious symbols to fight a contemporary culture war, are primed to quickly leverage any perceived insult into a weapon against their local adversaries. By far the most sophisticated analysis of this general phenomena that I know of is contained in the series of two essays written many years ago in The American Interest by Anna Simons (here are parts one and two).

That said, I do not exonerate in any way the evil men (and possibly women, for all we know) who were involved in the production of this scurrilous attack on the central symbol of Islam. The film seems to be the work of some tiny group of right-wing evangelicals in Southern California, but the involvement of some radical Coptic Christian émigrés living in the United States also seems likely, at least in preparing the Arabic translation and its dissemination to Egypt. I would not go so far as to accuse these nutbags of direct responsibility in the death of American diplomats in Libya, but they are certainly indirectly responsible for them.

It’s important, too, for non-Muslims who are not especially well tutored in such subjects to better understand why traditional and otherwise post-modernly pious Muslims get so irritated when anyone attacks the integrity of the Prophet. This is not a result of mere cultural pride or a standard defense of a revered figure. Nor does it have anything to do with Islamic law as such. Rather, as Lawrence Rosen explained in “Protecting the Prophet: Understanding Muslim Reactions to the Danish Cartoon Controversy”, a chapter in his book Varieties of Muslim Experience, it has to do with the way that intentions are ascribed to those who make potentially blasphemous utterances or otherwise portray others, not least sacred figures, in socially harmful ways.

Muhammad is understood by Muslims not just as a prophet but as a triple master: a tribal head, a war chief, and an arbiter. His unique qualities to this day resonate very deeply in Arab cultures: Muhammad is a model of personal emulation, the quintessential symbol of piety, compassion, dignity and leadership. All of this is described in detail and at length in the sira literature, the epi-biographical narratives about the life of Muhammad. It is the duty of all Muslims to learn as disciples from their masters, whether in divine matters or in everyday matters. Therefore, to attack Muhammad personally is to attack all of these values, and to threaten not only to the truth of his role as God’s messenger, but his role as the ultimate legitimizer of the master-disciple relationship that helps define the Arab social order.

I think it is reasonably safe to say that the aforementioned nutbags who made this disgusting film are, shall we say, insufficiently sensitive to this analysis. 

It is also worth pointing out the difference between the official Libyan and Egyptian reactions to the events of recent days. Libyan officials have been sincerely sorrowed by what has happened, and there is no reason to doubt their resolve in wanting to help us find and bring to justice the perpetrators of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi. The problem is not their resolve but their capacity. It is good that we are deferring symbolically to the Libyan government’s taking the lead on this case, but given the anarchic state of affairs in Libya, with dozens of heavily armed militias running around, most of them more powerful than government forces, the chances are that American special forces will in the end have to do the heavy lifting here—and, of course, the sooner the better.

If that’s the way it must be done, so be it . The United States cannot afford not to find and punish those responsible for what has happened. Everyone in the region is watching, and we dare not encourage a sense of our impotence. That will only produce a feeding frenzy against our interests across the whole region and beyond on the part of unfriendly governments and “streets” alike.

The initial reaction of Egyptian officials, however, was unconscionable. They “understood” a little too easily the sentiments of the mob, and had little to nothing to say initially about the need to respect foreign diplomatic legations. For that reason President Obama telephoned President Morsi and, according to press reports, had an intense twenty-minute conversation with him. He then said publicly that he will not refer to Egypt as an "ally", at least for now.

There is a larger lesson here, however, and it is not the obvious one reported in the press: that the current Egyptian government needs to play to the sentiments of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as keep reasonably healthy its relationship with the United States. That’s sort of obvious, isn’t it? No, the larger lesson here is that the U.S. government should not expect its "alliance" with Egypt to remain even remotely on a level with that of the past three or four decades. Yes, the United States and Egypt retain some important interests in common, but an alliance touches on the softer part of international relationships, too. The differences in basic outlook between President Morsi and President Obama are so wide as to be unbridgeable, and the two of them stand as exemplars of an underlying division between Egyptian society and American society (not that either is monolithic). There has been much talk in recent days about coolness at the top in relations between the United States and Israel, much of it brought on by some foolish public remarks initiated by the Israeli Prime Minister. But that relationship is vastly more convivial in broad social terms than the one that is emerging between the United States and Egypt, and that fact matters.

It matters particularly when strategic relationships are not dominated entirely by elite exchanges. And in that regard, Egypt has changed, and so therefore has the way the alliance, such as it is, is going to work. But it doesn’t help matters that that Western press exaggerates and oversimplifies this change. To hear the media tell it, we’re supposed to sympathize with the alleged fact that President Morsi’s dilemmas have supposedly been brought on by his having to operate in a democratic setting. The press has now decided that because Egypt had an election, it is a democracy. The basic gist here is that because Morsi got elected, he must be a devoted democrat in a democratic environment. This is true only in the most desiccated sense imaginable. Morsi is no democrat, and democracy in Egypt, if it can be said to exist at all, is at an infantile stage of institutionalization. The official Egyptian reaction to the anti-American violence of recent days is something we need to get used to, because we’re bound to see it again and again and again as long as a Muslim Brotherhood-supported government exists in Cairo. Indeed, as I have suggested before, the more democratic (read, populist) Egypt becomes, the less we’re bound to like it.

When it comes to what has been said in the past few days about the terrible events of Wednesday night and Thursday, the breakdown is fairly typical. There are those who can only focus on the human-interest side of the story and who know little and care less about the wider context. It’s as though what happened was like a hurricane or earthquake. There are those intent on using the tragedy for parochial or partisan purposes, whether those purposes are surgically discrete or more broadly accusational. We are used to this cacophonous dribble by now, or should be.

But I have to say that the way this tragedy dropped into the presidential campaign produced a reaction by Governor Romney that is unique for its maladroitness. The first reaction the GOP candidate had, after 10 p.m. on Wednesday, went like this, even before all the basic facts were collected: “The Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

This statement is not borne out by the facts. Nothing the President or the Secretary of State said can be  reasonably construed in such a fashion. At a press conference the next morning, Governor Romney was given an opportunity to retract or to conditionalize or soften his statement, and he demurred. The point here is that even if such a statement described a truth, it still would have been unseemly and politically counterproductive to say it. At times of national tragedy, we gather round the flag and stand together, and any politician on the make who doesn’t get the message and marches off to the beat of a different drummer ends up marching off a cliff. It remains to be seen how much this strange statement will hurt him, but my suspicion is that, on top of the extremely awkward remarks he made in London about Olympic security, it’s going to hurt him quite a bit. The Governor has now given ample evidence that he is diplomatically tone deaf, and some voters, at least, are not going to forget this between now and November 6.

Finally, as promised, a general observation about this sort of tragedy. Those who made this disgraceful film and those in the Middle East and beyond who have reacted to it with murderous violence have something most unfortunate in common: They cannot seem to distinguish individual actors and behaviors from the larger groups with which they are identified. So there are some Muslims, a small minority, who have fanatical and murderous intentions toward Americans. And there are some Americans, a small minority, who hate Muslims and disparage Islam. And what we have witnessed in recent days is an example of what happens when those among these vanishingly small minorities think that their opposite numbers are in fact majorities. Muslim fanatics imagine that basically all Americans and Westerners hate Muslims and Islam and that the U.S. government is at war against Islam. Anti-Muslim fanatics in Southern California and presumably elsewhere imagine that all Muslims have fanatical and murderous intentions toward Americans. These two bizarre beliefs join in a dance of death, a dialectic of insanity that produces bombed-out consulates, dead diplomats and Lord-know-what else to come.

I remember being warned off this kind of “thinking” in Virginia when I was about 11 or 12 years old. The lesson went something like this. There was a black neighborhood called Hall’s Hill sandwiched between more affluent and completely white neighborhoods. It turned out that there were at one point a lot of bicycles stolen from the white neighborhood, and it turned out that pretty much all the thieves were black. Note that when I was 11 or 12 years old this was 1962 or 1963, not all that long after desegregation had been enforced, and there were still a lot of confused and very hard feelings all around, at least among adults. The conclusion that a lot of whites reached as a result: Blacks are thieves. But if you think about it for about five seconds, you understand that the fact that the vast majority of bicycle thieves in that neighborhood were black did not mean that the vast majority of blacks were thieves—as in all spoiled apples are apples but not all apples are spoiled. This was a lesson in basic logic, yes, but it was also a lesson meant to protect against ambient bigotry.

I took to this lesson without a lot of trouble because I had already understood some of the social anatomy of anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Some Jews in certain professions dominated by Jews (like the jewelry trade, for example), comprising a few percent of the whole community, practiced “sharp” business tactics. That did not mean that all Jews were sharpsters, but some entrepreneurial bigots proved quite successful in effacing that logic, and we all knew what happened next. Ah, mutatis mutandis, I got the point.

Unfortunately, certain amateur filmmakers and certain Muslim fanatics have yet to get the point. And every time something like what happened earlier this week happens again, they get ever further from getting the point, because they interpret reality as confirming their delusions.Whether this is because they are emotionally disturbed or just dumb as dog shit, or some combination of the two, I don’t know. Maybe, probably even, they never will get the point. And that’s a tragedy for all of us.

On Imagination

A few weeks ago I found myself on the campus of Michigan State University. That campus is large and, as befits a land grant college, studded with a variety of gardens that almost literally make your head spin. I was there in mid-August, and much was in bloom.

One of the special attractions of the MSU gardens is the Children's Garden--a garden created specifically for the pint-sized set. But it is not just the scale that makes the MSU Children's Garden, or any children's garden for that matter, work as intended. It is the attention given to the stimulation of imagination. For example, in the MSU Children's Garden there is a hidden "secret garden", with a little door just like you imagined the door in Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1910 story of the same name. Just to give you an additional idea, in the absence of photography, of how the MSU Children's Garden designers plan for imagination stimulation, there are fence posts around part of the garden painted like crayons. I think it probably helps to be or to have been a parent of young children to truly appreciate the wonderful shrewdness of this garden's design, but I suppose anyone can appreciate it if they study it long enough.

As I made the rounds of this garden an idea suddenly occurred to me, or rather not so much an idea as a simple discovery.  It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that if a person does not learn to trust, use, appreciate, revere and even fear his (or her) imagination between the age of about two and a half and perhaps ten years of age, he probably never will. That is why imagination must be cultivated before it is named in the mind of the person, for the naming comes in a particular context, which by definition is limited. And the context, being limited, can stultify the expansionist tendencies of imagination––the tendencies that make imagination, after all, what it is. Naming is reifying, and reification is a form of death. 

This is why it is so very important that parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and older siblings and cousins and even whole communities take responsibility for stimulating the imaginations of all young children, and one can hardly begin too soon. The failure to include even one child, to allow even one child to miss the chance to learn how to dream, makes all of us poorer. Whatever else families and communities do, they need to become expert aviation engineers, specialists in flights of fancy. 

How's that Again, David?

In my running commentary on Syria over the past year and more, I have occasionally had recourse to mention, and sometimes to criticize, not just mainstream press accounts of events, but sometimes also specific commentators. One of these has been David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His column in yesterday’s paper marks a new low, however, and must not pass without further critique.

The subject of yesterday’s column hinges on an interview Ignatius recently conducted in Paris with Manaf Tlass, of whom I have spoken before. In the column, titled in the paper, “A Way Out of Assad’s Syria”, Ignatius allows and enables Tlass to characterize himself as a conflicted Syrian elite apostate who early on separated himself from the atrocities committed by the regime. Ignatius takes what can only be characterized as a fawning attitude toward Tlass. Not only is Tlass humanly emotional (he has to leave the room in tears at one point, Ignatius makes a point of noting), but he is also a man of “rugged good looks” that made him a “charismatic military leader.”

Ignatius makes Tlass out to be humble, as well. He seeks no position in a new, post-Assad Syrian leadership, we are told. All he cares about is preventing ethnic and sectarian bloodbaths between Alawis, Sunnis, Kurds, Armenians and other Syrian communities. Ignatius further pleads Tlass’s case, saying he is “wise to disavow political ambition, as his wealth, secular lifestyle and prominent background (his father was defense minister) makes him a target for a populist, Islamist opposition movement.” Presumably for this reason, Ignatius doesn’t say where in Paris the interview took place. Crazy populist Islamists might be gunning for Manaf, after all.

It is hard to know even where to start taking apart this incredible, absolutely huge load of crap. Let’s start with a basic Syrian reality check.

Manaf Tlass is not only vulnerable at the hands of crazy Islamist fanatics; just about every upstanding Sunni family in Syria thinks of the Tlass clan as the ultimate turncoats, the quislings of Syria, traitors to their own people as the running dogs of the Alawi dictatorship. Not only that, the clan is flatly criminal in the eyes of most Sunnis, since Tlass’s father Mustafa was Defense Minister during the spring 1982 mass murder (estimates vary between 10,000–40,000 killed) of mostly Sunnis in Hama. Indeed, Mustafa Tlass was instrumental for more than thirty years in ruthlessly supressing dissent of any and every kind against the Assad regime.

Manaf was 19 years old at the time of Hama, hardly a child. Yet he had no hesitation about following in his father’s footsteps to join the Alawi-based elite as its preeminent boot heel of repression. The Sunni community in Syria knows all this, and Manaf knows they know it. Everybody knows it except, for all appearances, David Ignatius.

Manaf’s recital of events, complete with quotes that Ignatius uncritically passes on, might be accurate—but I doubt it. More likely, Tlass was implicated in the regime’s crimes against the Syrian people until the tipping point at which he calculated that the regime might actually fall. Then he began hedging his bets, and when that seemed inadequate protection against the future, he plotted his exit into the lap of luxury he now inhabits in France, thanks to the money his father stole before fleeing the country and, of course, his sister’s enormous wealth, courtesy of the since-deceased, rather elderly Saudi billionaire she married. The idea that Manaf Tlass might be some sort of bedraggled refugee, moving from low-profile apartment to apartment in Paris, is simply bizarre.

We should also recall that, after Tlass made his exit from Syria across the Turkish border in early July (he didn’t stay very long in Turkey with the genuine Syrian refugees), a fair bit of time elapsed before he declared his supposed solidarity with the opposition. He may be sincere about this affiliation, but then again this may be just another aspect of his calculations aimed at self-protection. It’s a lot easier to run that drill from Paris, too, than from the Turkish side of the Syrian frontier. The very possibility seems to elude Ignatius.

There is one positive aspect to yesterday’s column: For the first time since the beginning of the Syrian upheavals, and despite all that Ignatius has written on them, he finally managed to get the word “Alawi” into one of his analyses. This is real progress. An otherwise untutored reader might now begin to understand that there is a sectarian element to what is happening in Syria. You wouldn’t know that from the basic line that Ignatius has held heretofore.

When the so-called Arab Spring first erupted, Ignatius was confident that the contagion would never get as far as Syria. In a February 2, 2011column entitled “The Arab Revolution Grows Up”, he wrote that: “That’s why Assad today is less vulnerable than Mubarak: His regime is at least as corrupt and autocratic, but it has remained steadfastly anti-American and anti-Israel. Hard as it is for us in the West to accept, this rejectionism adds to Assad’s power, whereas Mubarak is diminished by his image as the West’s puppet.” Oh well, so much for that theory.

In all fairness, Ignatius was not alone in taking this view. Thus said Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group around the same time: “I would see Syria having a relative advantage because the country’s foreign policy is broadly in sync with public opinion [and] its expansive informal sector mitigates economic difficulties to some extent. . . . But this definitely doesn’t preclude the possible expression of resentment in certain segments of society.” (Got to admire that last CYA-inspired remark…)

It’s one thing to be mistaken from time to time, and it’s no big deal in a deviously uncertain world. People who write as often as David Ignatius, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer and all the rest, are bound to be wrong from time to time; it just goes with the territory. But it’s another thing to be self-contradictory.

All through the crisis, at least until lately, Ignatius has steadfastly promoted active U.S. engagement of the Assad regime. It’s hard to say if his view influenced the Administration, which in the early months was still insisting that Bashar al-Assad was the best hope for reform in Syria. (Not one of Hillary Clinton’s greatest moments, true, but there have been so many…). The contradiction lies in the fact that Ignatius has insisted, as per the quote brought above, that Assad’s highly advantageous legitimacy derives from his opposition to the United States and Israel.  The premise is wrong, but let’s assume for a minute, just for the sake of argument, that it’s correct. So then how do we explain why, if Assad relies on his hostility to the United States to keep himself in power, the Obama Administration should expect to be able to build a useful relationship of trust and compromise with Syria, let alone waste time trying to broker a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement?

There is more. If Assad is so broadly popular as a Syrian national figure (or at least was so popular back in February 2011), then why is there now such a sharp sectarian divide in the country—between the mainly Alawi security forces and regime elite, on the one hand, and most of the rest of the country, on the other? How can “Assad the popular” morph into “Assad the sectarian leader” virtually overnight? Did the country itself change that quickly? (Relax, this is a rhetorical question, the obvious answer to which is “no”.)

What I don’t have a feel for is whether Ignatius is merely credulous or knowingly complicit in the story that Manaf Tlass—that sensitive, selfless, ruggedly good-looking, charismatic, humble and wise dude of yesterday’s column—is trying to peddle. Given the frailty of Ignatius’s Syria analysis all along, I lean heavily toward the former interpretation. I can barely wait for his next Syria dispatch.