Category Archives: Politics

Lewis Hamilton, Barack Obama, and black role models

Cars, Politics

Lewis-Hamilton (1)I was watching the British Grand Prix a week or so ago and the camera panned to a small boy holding up a sign that said It’s hammertime Lewis. This was a home crowd for British driver Lewis Hamilton who is generally considered  the best race car driver in the world – as an aside, I say British but I am not sure of the British/English rules, so I only suppose he is British and not English. I once introduced Marion Kaplan, Michele’s cousin who was born in England, as English. Later she corrected me, saying It is not like America where you are American if you are born there, I am British, not English. She went on to explain that English means one’s heritage is English and her heritage is eastern European. End aside – but Hamilton is a crowd favorite almost everywhere.

When I was a boy/man getting interested in cars and racing, my hero was Stirling Moss who was pasty English white guy and my President was primarily Eisenhower, another pasty white guy. Today, my idol would probably be Lewis Hamilton – well, duh! even as an adult, he is – and my president would be Barack Obama, two black guys. I keep thinking how much different this would be growing up than when I was a kid.

 

My Obama fantasy

Americana, Politics

Several days ago, I listened  to President Barack Obama’s eulogy of Reverend Clementa Pinckney. He gave it a week ago but I didn’t hear it until after the weekend. The eulogy thrilled me – and I hope that thrill isn’t too irreverent a way to put it – both as a sincere, heart-rending, eulogy and a suburb political speech. For a while, I forgot about the whistleblowers and the drones and remembered the Obama for whom I had walked precincts in Reno, almost seven years ago. About 9 minutes into that eulogy, Obama says What a good man…he is talking about Reverend Clementa Pinckney but when Obama says,  sometimes, I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you are eulogized…after all the words, recitations, and resumes are read…to just say somebody was a good man, I think his hesitation, his body language, is Obama being self reflective.

During both summers just before both of Obama’s Presidential elections, Obama seemed to go AWOL. The same thing has happened several times during Obama’s presidency. The good thing is Obama is a clutch hitter.

I think that we are going to see an awakened Obama, an energized Obama, an Obama acting from his heart, rather than politically, for the next 570 days. I hope so.

Listening to the entire eulogy, I think that this is one of the major speeches of this presidency. Maybe of this time. And if you haven’t heard it in its entirety, do yourself a favor, when you can take the time, maybe after dinner, whatever, pour a glass of wine, sit down, and listen, let it engulf you. It is one of the best religious speeches I’ve ever heard and one of the best political speeches.

Congratulations America,

Americana, Politics

the Supreme Court has agreed that Equal justice under law means Equal Rights under law. After so much resistance for so long, the United States made a seismic shift to the left in this week’s two major rulings. As far as I am concerned, it is a seismic shift for the better.

The Right to Marry who we want is not a right that the Supreme Court has the prerogative to give, still, it is great to see them confirm the self-evident truth that all people are created equal with certain unalienable rights (to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence).

The Supreme Court does have the prerogative to rule that Obamacare, as now practiced, is the Law of the Land and their ruling has saved health insurance for millions of Americans (and, as an added bonus, I love the irony that Obamacare – first put out as a derogatory putdown – seems to have become the preferred name for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).

The Right to be offended while Black is not the prerogative of the Supreme Court and it is not a Right that has been practiced in the United States for most of our history but that may be changing. The realization that the Confederate Battle Flag is offensive to many citizens is starting to sink into our national conscience and that hateful flag is starting to come down.

It has been a great week made even greater by Obama lighting the White House to show his approval of the ruling.

Photograph by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

 

We are all the same

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

We are the same (1 of 1)

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

We are tribal and have been for a long time. According to suppositions made from our DNA, about 50,000 years ago, humankind was down to around 1,500 individuals composed of ten to twenty isolated tribes. Several tribes, about 600 individuals in total, left Africa and, over the last 50,000 years, they have populated the rest of the world. If they were like today’s hunter gatherer tribes and, the evidence suggests they were, the tribes were constantly fighting over territory (which was probably a primary driver to human dispersal). None of that is very controversial.

I have been reading A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade and in it he postulates that humans, H. sapiens, have continued to evolve, locally, to their environment, both in and out of Africa, since that diaspora. That we have continued to evolve is controversial, however. Wade further postulates that this evolution has resulted in five major races – with lots of slightly different regional gene pools – and that these five races are, each, slightly different with different abilities because they are evolving in different environments. This goes against almost everything that I believe.

Among many other things, Wade presents an excellent case that people living in Europe and Eastern Asia – China, Korea, and Japan – have evolved to be less violent because the greater population densities of those areas have pushed the evolving humans in that direction. The inference from what Wade is saying – and inference may be too soft a word – is that Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court ruling upholding a sentence of 1,000 lashes for jailed liberal blogger Raif Badawi, that we Westerners find so despicable, is not just a result of Saudi culture but also because the Saudis are genetically more violent.  This goes against our liberal mantra, We are all the same.

Everybody I have talked to about this has disagreed; vehemently (I haven’t talked to any white supremacists but I suspect that they would agree). Nobody has put their hands over their ears, saying I hear no evil, but damn near.  I know that feeling, for as long as I can remember, We are all the same has been at the center of my belief system. It is the main reason why I am against capital punishment (that and the practical matter that, because of all the appeals, it costs more and it delays closure).  We are all the same is why I get so bothered when people demonize whomever we are currently bombing as if they were not as human as us.

But, what if Wade is right, what if the Saudis are more violent than the English? What if young blackmen in the hood in Baltimore are more violent than young whitemen in Appalachia? Not just more violent because of culture or circumstances but more violent, as a group, because of their DNA? What if we aren’t all the same? What if different groups aren’t the same? Just writing this makes me feel uncomfortable and I have to keep reminding myself that we are talking about groups not individuals that can vary wildly within each group (only a fool would think Jalāl Rūmī was more violent than Joseph Goebbels).

Thinking about Wade’s thesis, I wonder if, in a way, saying We are all the same is sort of a cop out.  If everybody is the same, it is much easier for us to accept them, to not prejudge them, it makes it much easier to love them because they are just like us (and, we are certainly lovable). But if we are not all really the same,  will we still be able to accept The Other, will we be open to Love someone who is different? Will we still be able to judge someone for who they are rather than for what group they are a member? If they really are The Other, will that make a difference?

I don’t know, I like to think not but I don’t know, and I understand why this is such an explosive book.

There is a reason for everything

Americana, Politics, War

Armored Car (1 of 1)

In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons, we lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone. Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abbadi.

“Iraqi forces left hundreds of U.S.-supplied vehicles behind when they “drove” out of Ramadi, but were not “driven out,” in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. And now most of them are melted hunks of metal. On Friday, U.S. Central Command announced that airstrikes near Ramadi destroyed “five ISIL armored vehicles, two ISIL tanks, two ISIL vehicles, an ISIL armored personnel carrier…five abandoned tanks, two abandoned armored personnel carriers and two abandoned armored vehicles.” Quite a haul, and note the emphasis on the word “abandoned.” Juan Cole at Informed Comment.

I don’t want to sound too cynical about this, but I can’t remember when we have been on the winning side of a Civil War. I guess we can say that we fought North Korea/China to a draw, but we were the clear losers in Vietnam and Nicaragua. Yemen is turning into a clusterfuck and now the Iraqi army we have been training for ten years isn’t ready to go out and die.

Every time we lose, all the players talk about how this time it was a special case. If only we hadn’t backed that catholic, Ngô Đình Diệm, to be president, or Hasan al-Malikii for Prime Minister, if only we had done this or hadn’t done that. There is always a special reason and the pattern gets lost in the ground clutter.

The people fighting in a Civil War have their reasons too, they aren’t just running around at random. Yeh, sure, we usually like one side better than the other, maybe it is closer to our version of morality like the Northern Alliance educating girls in Afghanistan, maybe it is more stable – short-term, at least – like the generals in Egypt and we think that because we like it, it is better, and, if it is better, the side we like will win. We are blind going in, we only know what people with a vested interest tell us, thinking we know what is happening is delusional.

Put it like this: If you was in the first grade and you bit somebody every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter. Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen