Category Archives: Americana

The Obama I expected and didn’t get until now

Americana, Obama, Politics

When Michele and I started working on the Obama Campaign in 2007, I was drawn to Obama by his message of change. The idea of change that he represented and promoted. During the primary, he said We can’t change the way Washington works unless we first change how Congress works. and It’s not just enough to change the players. We’ve gotta change the game.

In December of 2007 in Des Moines, he said We can’t afford to be so worried about losing the next election that we lose the battles we owe to the next generation.  The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.  And that’s a risk we can’t take. Then he got elected and chose the same Washington players and pretty much got the same results.

But yesterday, Barack Obama nominated Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim to be head of the World Bank. He is Change we can believe In. Way to go Obama. And, if you have any doubts, check out his resume and video below (starting at about 2:00 for the impatient).

Ulysses S. Grant, General Order No. 11, and Judaism in America

Americana, General U.S. Grant

General Order No. 11, issued by my hero – General Ulysses S. Grant – was the most notorious anti-Semitic official order in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”

I first read about Order #11 in Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton – maybe, twenty five years ago – and I just sort of ignored it. Ignored it as in in pretend it wasn’t there. I sort considered it a mote in Grant’s otherwise perfect veneer. I did know the root of Grant’s Order #11, but I didn’t know the aftermath except that Lincoln immediately cancelled it. That mote as well as its aftermath are the subject of an interesting article by Jonathan D. Sarna. It turns out that the story ended very differently than it started.

General Grant had a very strained relationship with his ill-tempered father, Jesse Grant, who owned a tanning company for which Ulysses Grant worked before the war when he was out of work and desperate. He hated the work and, by all accounts, he did not get along with his belligerent and overbearing father. Father Jesse was also a little bit of a operator, for lack of a better word, and – in December of 1862, twenty one, or so, months after Grant had left his employment – visited his son, now Major General Grant, hero of Fort Donaldson. Father Jesse accompanied several members of the Mack family of Cincinnati. They were Jewish clothing manufacturers trying to purchase cotton and they had formed a secret partnership with Jesse Grant. He was to get 25 percent of their profits for his work acting as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton.”

According to an eyewitness, General Grant was upset and embarrassed at his father’s attempt to profit from his son’s new military status. He took his anger at his father out on the Macks and enlarged that to all Jews expelling them from his war zone. Once again, the Jews were being treated as a different and separate class to be discriminated against.

Even though the order was quickly cancelled,  Sarna points out that the memory of what his wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order” continued to haunt Grant to his death….the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. Grant apologized publicly and privately told people that he been wrong.

In this day and age – probably every day and age, actually – lots of people apologize for some stupid thing they said or did with a lame statement like If I offended you, I am sorry or I may have used the wrong wording, but my point was.… Grant apologized and changed his behavior. As president, he made more Jewish appointments than all previous presidents put together. In an effort to help the plight of the Jews of Romania, who were being terrorized by Russian pogroms, he appointed a Jewish ambassador to Romania. As president, he attended the dedication of a synagogue further legitimizing and empowering American Judaism.

Grant cultivated friendships with some of the foremost Jewish leaders of the time, inviting them to the White House and entertaining them socially. All this was during a time when much of the United States was becoming reactionary. It was a time of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a time when the Christian National Reform Association was making headway into getting a Constitutional Amendment to make the United States a Christian Nation. It was a time, much like today, when the forces trying to turn the clock back were gaining power.

Grant believed in the Constitution – took it’s deeper meaning seriously – fought to save it, and then became the first  Civil Rights president. The ONLY Civil Rights president for almost seventy-five years. Twenty three years after General Order #11, at his funeral march – witnessed by over a million people – the pallbearers included Union generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan, Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner, and Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. The following day, the Jewish Record reported  Seldom before, has the kaddish been repeated so universally for a non-Jew as in this case. General Grant would have been proud.

 

What is our goal in Afghanistan?

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings, War

I really don’t know and I don’t think anybody else does either. I guess that our goal is to beat the forces of the Taliban; to have the forces of of the old Northern Alliance – you know, the same Northern Alliance that the Russkis backed1 – be in some sort of stable control. I don’t think that anybody really thinks we are fighting for Jeffersonian democracy, in fact we may be hindering the re-establishment of the kind of ruling by consensus of elders or loya jirga that probably was closer to democracy than the rigged elections we are now backing.

Part of the problem is that we think that there is only one right answer on how to run a country and that is our way. This week has been a perfect storm of information – that is not the right word, maybe experiences? maybe events? – that has left me feeling our national hubris is staggering and we are not going to accomplish anything lasting in Afghanistan. The events revolve around, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, and Korea.

Over at the Foreign Policy Magazine’s website, on Tom Rick’s Blog – The Best Defense – a former soldier has a post entitled Some reflections on the Vietnam War after visiting where my battalion was cut off and surrounded near Hue during Tet ’68 in which he says, among other things, while visiting Vietnam,  Not only are there no Americans on the roads, in the air or in the fields, doing what Americans do, the Vietnamese seem perfectly in control of their own destinies. Maybe they were then too, but we were too driven to notice. He goes on to say This makes me think about the American Way of War — maybe best expressed as “you move over, we’re taking over.” It is an interesting comment and worth reading.

Over the weekend and again this afternoon, I saw the Iranian movie A Separation. It was the best movie I have seen in a year, maybe longer. If you like movies or if you are just interested in relationships, see it. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language film but it should have won the award for best film. A warning, though, it is a devastating story about a couple getting separated. Much of the movie takes place in court or, at least, in front of a judge. As somebody who has gone through the American – really Californian – divorce legal system with lawyers making more money the longer they can string out the case and argue with each other, I was taken by how much better the Iranian system seemed to be. I am obviously not a Muslim – or a Christian for that matter – and didn’t agree with all the legal conclusions, but, it seemed more humane than our system which is built on confrontation and has pretty much left compassion at the door.

Then I read that some Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan has gone tragically amok killing, among others, sleeping children. Sleeping children!

Lastly, on the way home from the movie, we went out of our way to stop at a Korean market in Daily City to pick up some tasty Korean marinated meat and some kim chee. I spent a year in Korea, as a Sergeant in the Army on a HAWK Missile site looking down on Koreans2.  Americans felt superior and most GIs let the Koreans know it. Most GIs didn’t like their food and didn’t like their customs, we even didn’t even like their women although we were willing to pay to have sex with them. The Koreans in the unit I was in were relagated to being dog handelers and generators operators; they were not let near the radars or missiles. Strangely enough, when the Koreans helped us fight in Vietnam, they were considered superb troops. Oh! by the way, have you checked out the new Hyundai Elantra? It is awesome.

After all this rambling around, I do want to make a point. The world does not need us to be its nanny. Afghanistan does not need us to tell them how to run their country. No country does, not Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Iceland. No country! We are not doing very well with our own country and we certainly should not be trying to pull a Terri  Schiavo on other countries.  The Republicans seem to be worse in this regard than the Democrats, but both sides are culpable.

We should get out. Just get out!

 

1. This is somewhat of a simplification, but not much.

2. Something that, today, I am loath to admit.


Government spending and the economy

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

I often wonder if the people who say that The government can’t make jobs. are just bullshitting or if they really believe it. I wonder the same thing when I hear Romney talking about President Obama – although he rarely uses President when referring to Obama – wanting to make the United States weak. My gut reaction is that they really do not believe it and they are just bullshitting but I am not so sure.

As an aside; this is one of the positions that people seem to come to from the completely opposite position without ever having stopped in the middle. When I was a young boy, Negros were Uncle Remuses that sort of sat around – rather than working hard because they didn’t have the Protestant ethic like White People – being kindly; then, with no stop in between, they became Black Panthers who were scary. In the same way, it used to be that Roosevelt – people who thought this didn’t call him President Roosevelt – didn’t end the depression, the depression only ended because we started spending lots of money – government money – on the war; now the same people say spending government money will not end a recession. End aside.

Anyway, it does seem self evident to me that the government can  make jobs. When the government hired companies to build the Golden Gate Bridge, they, in turn, hired workers. When the Obama Administration gives money to California for the Highway Department and they hire companies to rebuild the rest stop at Black Mountain Road on Highway 280, those companies hire workers. The additional work results in additional jobs.

But, somehow, by saying The government can’t make jobs. over and over again, people start to believe it. (I used to think that the left’s constant yammering about the right wanting to overturn Roe vs. Wade was similar, but, after seeing the anti-contraception – not to mention anti abortion – legislation passed in Republican majority legislative bodies, I am ready to admit I was wrong.)

Even if the meme does work, even if the people saying The government can’t make jobs. really do believe it, it is still bullshit. The Obama Administration created jobs with the Stimulus Bill and definitively made the Great Recession a little better.

Wanting to be right

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings
In writing about Andrew Breitbart’s death and life on his blog Ta-Nehisi Coates writes

….by neglecting to research Sherrod before putting up a clip of her talking, by electing to see her as little more than a shiv against the hated liberals, he deprived himself of knowledge, of experience, of insight, of enlightenment. That he might learn something from Sherrod, that he might access some power from her life, and pass that on to loved ones and friends, never occurred to him. Publicly, he lived to make himself right–a tradition that is fully empowered in our politics. Breitbart didn’t invent the art of making yourself right. But he embraced it, and then advanced it.

That is what took me to sadness. I have experienced curiosity as a primarily selfish endeavor. It originates in the understanding of the brevity of life, and the desire to see as much of it as possible, from as many angles as possible without doing too much damage to my morality. The opposite of that – incuriosity, dishonesty, the opportunistic deployment of information – is darkness. Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.

There is much more to the blog post titled On Making Yourself Right and I encourage you to read it, but my take away was It is so easy to hang on to being right and it is so destructive. At least it is so easy for me: maybe I should say It is so easy to make somebody, who doesn’t agree with me, wrong. Maybe a week ago, I linked to a less than flattering article on Meryl Streep and then I wrote a blog post on Viola Davis a day or two later. Karen Amy took exception – mildly and politly – on my Facebook page and I could just feel myself  wanting to argue. Wanting to be right and wanting to make Karen wrong.

Around the turn of the century, Peter Kuhlman recommended an alternate history novel 1632 by Eric Flint. As I recall, he described it as amusing, but I ended reading and interpreting it as a dream with all the characters representing different facets of myself. To me, the book was all about taking down walls, letting in the outside world, listening to the other and be willing to see their point of view. All about being willing to be influenced by the world.

One of the reason that the characters in 1632 were able to let in the outside world, is because they were confidant in who they were at their core. For a long time, I kept thinking that it would make a good movie, but – now – I don’t think so. It is too last century, when we, as a nation, felt confident is who we are. It was before Bush the Younger and the disaster of Iraq, before the Great Recession, before the our national feeling of decline.

Ironically – and counter intuitively, I guess – when I am most confidant in who I am, it is easiest to hear the other person. My strong suspicion is that Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh – for that matter – are so loud because they are afraid. And they are afraid because – as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently writes – they are living in darkness.