Absurd

Defending the Game

entrope, , , , , 1 Comment

Our institutions matter.  Our Constitution matters.

No, our system of Government isn’t perfect.  But point me to a better one.  Okay, maybe we could vote differently, or set up representation in a way that made more sense.  Nevertheless, the Constitution is there to protect everyone, in recognition of a democracy peopled by the feisty, the iconoclasts, the oddballs, the convicted.

So its understanding of who constitutes everyone has rightly expanded, the truth remains: America was colonized by rabble-rousers, risk-takers, greedy mofo’s who didn’t like rules, and petty empire-builders.  To paraphrase: England didn’t send us its best.  England sent criminals and dissidents, those who refused to bend to the status quo, hardliners, greedy bastards, outcasts, and the occasional rapist.  And for that motley crew to peacefully co-exist, we all had to agree to some baseline propositions.  Namely, you do you, and I’ll do me, and instead of killing each other over a dispute, we’re going to build this system of laws and courts that ultimately allows society to function in a way that enables capitalism.

And so it went with three branches of government, equal in power, checking and balancing itself out.  Disagreeing parties grappling over power in proscribed ways to ensure that, when the tables turned, the disadvantaged could trust the advantaged to respect the institutions.  All of it based in a common understanding of reality: we are always going to disagree.  There will always be tension between chaos and order.  A pluralistic society is a nightmare to maintain peacefully, and yet we do it because we like the outcome of all of this more-or-less peaceful coexistence.  We aren’t tolerant because we are good, we are tolerant because we need others to give us the same courtesy we are extending by minding our own damn business.

We don’t have to like how others use their freedom.  Football players can protest any way they see fit.  Barbie pundits can complain about how said protest is carried out.  The pundit is allowed to look stupid defending her right to criticize how someone else is executing their right to free speech by claiming her right to free speech.  The protest goes on indifferent to opinion, because the opinion is breath and vibration and is gone, while the law remains.

We can wish to convert the whole country to a single belief system and to justify laws based on those beliefs.  But we can’t, and we should be grateful.  Because my inability to force everyone to be strictly rational about everything means that the local Christian Scientists couldn’t deny my mother medical care in the face of cancer.  And I’ll happily bow to the Constitution limiting my right to enforce my belief system on others because it equally denies the Christian Scientists the ability to dictate my life according to their beliefs.

We can want a Supreme Court that rules according to our religious beliefs.  (How is a Christian wanting a Supreme Court to uphold religiously-motivated laws any different than a Muslim wanting a legal system that enforces Sharia law?)  But the risk to the system as a whole to throw a temper tantrum about the rules not breaking your way this time ignores the fact that the system means the rules will break to your preference in another way, at some other time…  It is shortsighted and jeopardizes the one thing that makes a pluralistic society work: the agreement to play one game according to one set of rules.  We aren’t going to get a monolithic society, so chucking the ground rules is beyond dangerous.  You might as well replace the foundation of your house with wonder-bread.

There will be consequences.  This backlash ultimately won’t be partisan, it won’t skip the Fox News crowd…  What we are dealing with here isn’t the second coming of the Third Reich, it is the redux of the French Revolution.  The peasants are rising, some initially called by seductive falsehoods (it is all someone else’s fault), but eventually the entire political spectrum will feel this truth: there are more of us than there are of them.

We can disagree about substance.  That’s what we do in America.  But we used to play by impartial ground rules set up in the Constitution, fleshed out in the Bill of Rights, and strengthened by decorum, norms, and 200 years of legislation.  Not out of the goodness of our hearts, but in the recognition that anything I can do to you, you can do to me when the balance of power shifts.

The power will shift.  If the GOP is smart, it will start reigning itself in, re-asserting the rules for itself that it wishes the Dems to abide by, and valuing the rules of the game to the same degree they seem determined to win the game.

American Democracy is the game.  If one side wins, the game ends.  Don’t forget: Game over isn’t a good outcome.  For anyone.

Defending the Game

Style vs. Substance

entrope, , , , 1 Comment

This is bound to be unpopular, and I’ll start by admitting that I don’t have any answers.

Deportation.  The past few weeks have been ugly when it comes to the question of immigrants, visa holders, and brown folk trying to move forward with any plans that involve the United States of America.  Racial profiling is the obvious means for seeking out immigrants.  You might miss some Aryan specimens here illegally, but the bulk of the people leaving home these days aren’t escaping a famine in Ireland.  The trouble is in Somalia or Syria or el Salvador.  And most of the people from Somalia or Syria, or el Salvador aren’t blond and blue-eyed.

As a country, we’ve proven that we can’t be trusted to make good decisions based on the color of someone’s skin.  I’m not for it.

And yet.  Deportations aren’t new.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were deporting people under Obama, and as far as I know, the process hasn’t changed that much.  Nogales, Mexico sees a lot of the deported and what happens when ICE pushes someone across the border isn’t pretty.  Nogales is full of people seeking to exploit the vulnerable, and the recently-deported are vulnerable.  Women and children delivered to human traffickers, men with no options and plenty of reason to embark in some dubious scam to get quick money to finance a return home, whether north or south of the border.  The story doesn’t end well.  It didn’t end well under Obama either.

Yet few showed up at the airports, even fewer took to the streets.  For the deported, there can’t be that much difference in the experience of deportation from one President to the other.  But what has changed?

Style.  Obama did it without openly demonizing brown people.  He did it quietly, with no fanfare.  One wonders if he had glorified his deportations more, had more aggressive rhetoric, insisted that we use ACA instead of Obamacare to refer to a law that helped millions…  would those disaffected bubble-dwellers in rural white enclaves have loved him better?   (If you can spend a whole day and only interact with people who look like you, go to your church, and watch the same TV shows as you, you are living in a bubble.)

But I digress.

Drones.  Raids.  Civilians killed.  ISIS.  Guantanamo.  Poverty.  Hunger.  Water.  DAPL.  Lobbyists.  Wall Street.

Obama put a measured, careful face on all of the above.  And I’m not categorically attacking or defending that list.  Life is muddy and complicated.  Global politics don’t have much to offer purists or ideologues.  Reality intrudes.

The left complains that Obama didn’t do enough on one hand, and too much on the other.  He already expanded Presidential power in a way that is terrifying if you don’t trust the President.

Just ask Fox news.

If you agree with the man in the oval office, the Presidential powers aren’t expansive enough.

Just ask Fox news.

Here is the problem.  The rational among us need to take ownership of our tribalism and quit with the positioning that these things are only okay if we are doing them.  The standard must be that we aren’t going to do what we would be outraged if our opponents did.  Power grab in North Carolina.  Gerrymandering.  Muzzling free speech.  We must not carry on with positions that depend on style, not substance.

Don’t get me wrong.  45 is terrifying in both style and substance.  And style does matter.  How you shake hands with a foreign leader matters.  Decorum matters.  Appearing to take things seriously matters.

But it isn’t more important than substance.  In substance, we must believe what we believe, even when those principles deliver results we aren’t fond of.  This goes across the board.  If private e-mail servers are disqualifying for one side, then disqualify everyone who uses one.  If botched military action justifies years and years of expensive hearings, then every botched military action should be treated the same.  If connections to Wall Street are distasteful, then anyone who has connections to Wall Street should be held to the same standard.

Across the board, just don’t let style blind you to substance.  The left liked Obama’s style, and he spent 8 years relatively untroubled by backlash from the left.  Progressives don’t like Trump’s style, and the protests follow.  Trump’s die-hard voters love his style, and are blinded to the ways that he is covering for Republicans seeking to destroy every program that makes life better for a white man with no college degree.

Watch the substance.

Style vs. Substance

Fundamentalist Nihilism

entrope, , , Leave a comment

This is probably going to be a long one: brace yourself.

Seventh-Day Adventism, the religious system of my formative years, is a little oddball.  Perhaps not quite as oddball as Mennonites, who are unmistakable even to an untrained eye.  Not quite as thorny as the Jehovah’s Witnesses – Sevens aren’t expected to cut off apostate family members – not quite as far out of the mainstream as the Mormons – Sevens don’t wear special underwear, don’t have a history of polygamy, and can claim a conviction in the equality of all humans that goes back to our founder in the 1840’s – Sevens are nevertheless kind of oddball.

The Church’s interpretation of the Bible is strictly literal.  Their distinctive observation of the Jewish Sabbath is tied directly to the fact that God never changed the day of worship in the Bible.  That change came by decree from…  was it Justinian?  No, Constantine.  The change from Saturday to Sunday made Christianity more palatable to the heathen sun-worshipers, but it didn’t come from God, therefore the Sevens worship on the seventh day.  (Hence: Seventh-Day Adventists.  The Adventist part comes from the belief that God’s return is eminent.)

Actually, the Adventist part is particularly relevant.  Sevens emerged after the Millerite movement of the early 1840’s.  William Miller believed that he had a secret mathematical formula that allowed him to calculate the day of Christ’s return.  October 22, 1844 came and went without the promised return of Jesus.  To the Millerites, this was known as the Great Disappointment, and the true believers spent a very hungry winter, having forgone planting and other preparation to feed themselves after October 22.

Sevens emerged from the wreckage of the Millerites.  They kept the conviction (and hope) of the imminent return of Christ.  They also developed a deep distaste for prediction.  The Bible says no man knows the day nor the hour, and the Sevens are behind that 100%.

So in their obsession with the Apocalypse as described in Revelation, the Sevens share a great deal with their Evangelical brethren, but this deep humility about not having any sway or ability to predict the end of the world saves them from some of the worst excesses of Evangelical Nihilism.

Let me explain.

Revelation predicts the end of the world, the violent demise earthly affairs that takes place right before God comes back.  Wars, rumors of wars, famine, pestilence, world government, persecution of Christians, earthquakes, Jerusalem will once more be the sole domain of the Jews… etc. etc. etc.

For the fundamentalist believer, absolute faith in Christianity leads to a profound nihilism.  All hope is pointed towards the afterlife.  The apocalypse isn’t something to be avoided, it is something to be embraced, forced even.  By the simple state of faith, nothing earthly matters or counts.  The means to achieve the ends don’t have to matter, because accepting the martyrdom of Jesus absolves all sins: past, present, and future.

Now, were this consistent, we would see it played out in Evangelicals pushing for an Atheist government.  Instead, you see them interpreting the legal protection of people they don’t agree with as evidence that they are being persecuted.  If there were consistency, there would be great support of the UN, for world government is one of those things that is part of the promise of Revelation and the UN is seen as the beginning of that world government.

Instead, we see Evangelicals picking and choosing which part of the Apocalypse they wish to bring on.  Evangelical support of Zionists and Israel having complete control over Jerusalem?  That isn’t because they support Jewish people in general, that support has a specific end: Jewish domination of Jerusalem is an event that the Bible says will take place right before God comes back, therefore the Evangelicals are for it.

A new world war?  Bring it on.  All the better if it is framed in terms of Christians against everyone else, because that is another bit of Revelation fulfilled, indicating God’s return.

All the elements prophesied in Revelation are no longer understood as prophecy, but conditions to be met.  And if nothing matters, because the whole point of being here on earth is to arrive at the point where you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior as quickly as possible and then get to heaven immediately thereafter, then there isn’t much to live for once you’ve been saved.  Meanwhile, the Nihilist Christian is picking and choosing which parts they pay attention to, ignoring those bits that remind them that all of this is up to God and not dependent on man’s will, breezing right past all the warnings of false prophets…

Nihilism.  The belief that nothing matters.  Christian nihilism: the belief that nothing on earth matters because Christ.  Not much of a distinction for those of us who think the drive to create the conditions for God’s return is a fool’s errand.  A big distinction for those who believe that God’s forgiveness is theirs, no matter the hubris, no matter the casual cruelty, no matter the willful disregard for the example of Jesus they disregard in the life they live.

Incidentally, I believe the Islamic fundamentalists are infected with the same nihilism, to the same degree, and that from this perspective the fundamentalists of both persuasions are actually working quite well together for a single shared goal: bringing their version of the end of the world to fruition.

So.  If you want to know why the GOP is so dismissive of climate change, it isn’t because they believe the outliers of the scientific community.  It is because there is an unholy alliance between the Conservatives who are primarily concerned with small government, big business, and narrow interpretation of the Constitution, to hell with the little people; and the Evangelicals.  The two exist symbiotically: the capitalist Conservatives don’t really care that much about the social issue one way or another, and the Christian fundamentalists don’t care about the capitalist issues, so they use each other to maintain power.  It is entirely possible that the Conservatives, being smaller in number (if wealthier) are being consumed by the Christian fundamentalists.  This election would certainly point in that direction.

Anyway, if climate change meets one of the *conditions* of Revelation – remember, they have stopped interpreting prophecy as prophetic and are treating it as a list of conditions to meet – by bringing about famine, pestilence, and other natural horrors, then feel free to open up the oil reserves and just light the wells on fire.  The Conservatives make money; they’re fine with it.  The Evangelicals get one step closer to the Apocalypse.

If you want to know why the threat of nuclear war as the natural end of a Tantrump doesn’t scare the GOP’s Evangelical base…  it is because World War III is a condition to be met.  Fracking causing earthquakes?  Another condition to be met.  Legal restrictions on Christians being discriminatory assholes?  One more on the checklist of conditions.  Because *that* is what being persecuted for your identity looks like, not the hundreds of Trans folks who get tormented brutally and murdered every year.

Somewhere in there, you also have a deep corruption of the message of the New Testament.  Christianity has been bent into nearly unrecognizable contortions to align it with Capitalist values.  God’s blessings come with dollar signs these days.  Megachurches encourage donations under the logic that tithing to God makes God return abundance to you.  (If only they took this understanding and applied it to taxation.)  Kindness is no longer a pre-requisite.  Withholding judgement of others based on the humility associated with knowing one’s self to be imperfect, also not really in play.  Stone-throwing is a new kind of specialty.  Hospitality, turning the other cheek, gentleness, meekness…  All have been abandoned in favor of larger homes, smaller tax bills, SUVs, and the gospel of the 401k.

Internal consistency doesn’t apply here.

I suspect that, particularly in those areas where the Evangelical Nihilists live in communities where they rarely encounter anyone of color, there is also this underlying feeling that whiteness is a defining feature of being heaven-bound.  That to be white is already a credit to your name on the rolls in heaven, just like being white gives you the benefit of the doubt when engaging with the police.  The rapture movies of my adolescent time in Bible study didn’t feature too many people of color, that’s for damn sure.

In short…  Those of us who experience the world with skepticism and a demand for some sort of intellectual consistency find ourselves baffled by the recent turn of events.  When the GOP told us they were ethical, we took them at their word.  Whey they said they valued Christianity, and honesty, and rule of law, and the Constitution, and high standards for conduct, we believed them.

And then DJT showed up.  He disrespected women, his base loved it.  He broke the rules, his base loved it.  He bullied people, his base roared its approval.  He lied, they cheered.  He cuddled up with Russia, they praised Putin as some kind of defender of white Christianity.  He stood proudly ignorant of the Constitution, they waved their flags.  He promised them the wholesale cruelty to refugees, and they voted for him.  He proved his Biblical illiteracy, they laughed it off.

And we are running around pointing out the disconnect between their old words and their new actions, the example of Christ and their current behavior, and expecting reason to work.

Logic doesn’t work here.  It won’t work.  This isn’t right vs. left, Conservative vs. Progressive.  This is Nihilism vs. Good Faith.  Hubris vs. Humility.

Because the false prophets are in charge and have been for a while.  Nihilism rules the day.  There is no moral compass left.  No objective standards, only tribal markers.  Fundamentalists of all stripes are pursuing a single goal – annihilation – and are happy to feed off of each other in their pursuit.  Israel will wipe out Palestine, and God won’t come.  We will have nuclear winter, and God won’t come.  We will frack California off the continent, and God won’t come.  ISIS will get its holy war, the martyrs will stack to the moon, and God won’t come.  And still they will persist.

And if any of their belief systems hold up, eventually they will show up at Judgement, and God will want to know what made them think they could force the hand of the Divine.  God will ask how they treated the poor and the indigent, how they treated Jesus when he showed up as Travyon Martin, or Matt Shephard, or Fatemeh Reshad.  God will want to know how any of us could function as the instrument of terror, and pain, and cruelty, and not also understand ourselves to be on the side of Satan.  Is the word of God not clear enough on this point, no matter the religion, that those who claim God and mean it are called to be vehicles of light and kindness in the world?

I don’t have a good answer for how to deal with this madness.  I just think more people need to talk about what it is we are dealing with.

Fundamentalist Nihilism

#maga – 1955*

entrope, , , , , Leave a comment

*I said it before and I’ll keep saying it: If you believe that America was last great when you didn’t have to share a counter or a bathroom or a water fountain with your fellow American, I hope you will keep reading, but please be forewarned.  I don’t agree with you and that’s not what I’m talking about.

Union membership peaked in 1955.

Unions brought us the 5 day work week, limits on the number of hours you have to work every day, wage increases, worker protections…

What is a corporation but an organization of owners and vested financial interests cooperating to extract profit from the individuals who work for them?  The interest of ownership is always to drive down costs and increase profit.  When workers are unorganized, it is one person against money and therefore power.  When workers are organized, that collective power of the people running the machinery serves as a counterbalance to the power imparted by money.  Because the capitalist magnates want to make money.  They want to make as much money as possible.  If they have to give up some of the profit margin to keep making *some* money, they will, but only if forced.

Unions forced their hands.

It wasn’t Trump who negotiated to keep a Ford plant in Kentucky.  That was the Union using the collective clout of its workers to protect their jobs.

So yes.  Let’s #maga.  Join a Union.  Vote out people who are union-busters.  Unions didn’t force a climate where NAFTA was necessary to protect the profits of those poor company owners and shareholders…  that was the greed of those who believe that too much is never enough.  If there isn’t a Union in your industry, create one.  If you are currently unemployed and giving up, find some other way to organize.  Because the ballot once every four years hasn’t changed diddly squat thus far, and there is no concrete reason to believe this election is going to be any different.

 

#maga – 1955*

Strategic Threats

entrope, Leave a comment

​Racism and bigotry are strategic threats to America.  Why?  Because they are open to exploitation by geopolitical adversaries.  This is our Achilles heel, the kind of thing that state actors like Russia can use against us to install the leader of their choice to power and non-state actors like ISIS are using as a recruiting tool.

Our greatest strength – diversity – also our biggest weakness when we start pointing to people who don’t look like us and blame everything on them.  When we are more afraid of each other than we are of threats to the bill of rights…  we end up with a President who has openly stated his intention to curtail freedom of speech; who promised to drain the swamp of lobbyists and fire all the generals, then turned around and offered the exact same people jobs that make policy that potentially impacts us all; who promised to save jobs as the great negotiator and already is making deals that only look good on the surface, but fall apart as soon as you get into the details.  

We played ourselves and all it took was a wink and a nudge in the right (wrong) direction…
Also: just because Hillary was a terrible candidate and the Democratic party needs to be torn down to its bones and rebuilt as something other than a corporate zombie doesn’t mean that racism and bigotry aren’t a strategic threat to this country.  The two things can be true at the same time.   

Strategic Threats

Make America Great Again: 1950’s

entrope, , , , , 7 Comments

Ah, MAGA.

If you believe that America was last great when you didn’t have to share a counter or a bathroom or a water fountain with your fellow American, I hope you will keep reading, but please be forewarned.  I don’t agree with you and that’s not what I’m talking about.

A persistent and unanswered question for those Trump enthusiasts whose primary excitement isn’t going back to segregation is this: when exactly was America last great?

The 1950’s look good.  We’d won the second world war, you could have a middle class life in a one wage-earner household.  All that disruptive civil rights/anti-war/counter-culture/feminist stuff hadn’t taken place yet.

Guess what the effective tax rate was for the wealthiest top 1% of Americans in 1953…  49%.  As of 2015?  23%  When you get into the super wealthy, you go down to 17%.

Effective corporate tax rate?  50%

The sky didn’t fall.  The economy grew.  Companies re-invested in America.  Wages rose.

So yes.  Let’s #maga.  Let’s take the tax rates from 1950 and apply them across the board and make America great again.

Make America Great Again: 1950’s

My Biases

entrope, , , 2 Comments

A fair point of criticism that could be lobbed my way is that my divorce has made me bitter.  

It is true that I didn’t want the divorce at the time.  I loved my ex-husband madly, without limits, and without reason.  In the final analysis, you could argue that it was his choice to end the marriage.  I certainly had shown no signs of giving up on him.  

From a certain angle, blaming our divorce on cultural differences might also be understood as a sign that I am looking for a scapegoat.  Anything to avoid saying out loud that he didn’t love me enough.

Well, he didn’t love me enough.  

Let me tell you about my ex-husband.  He was beautiful.  Charming.  Intelligent.  Funny.  Ambitious.  Good lord, was he handsome.   He spoke four languages.  I adored his mother.  His nieces and nephews were so sweet.  His siblings were endlessly kind.  I had experiences with him that I would have never had access to with another man.  

And yet.

Everything was always someone else’s fault.  He may not have graduated with a Bachelor’s yet, fifteen years after I met him.  And last I heard, that failure was everyone’s fault but his.  

He had all the pride in the world, but so little to be proud of.  

In the end, his sister-in-law said to me “Beda, we don’t understand.  We know what you did for him.”

I made him feel stupid.  When I asked him to think outside the box, he refused and leaned on a faceless, nameless Imam.  I asked him if God was going to come back.  He said yes.  I asked him if he was going to have to stand before God and answer for his time on earth.  He said yes.  I asked him if that Imam was going to put his hand up from the back, interrupt proceedings, and inform God that he, the Imam, was taking responsibility for my ex’s behavior.

“Why do you have to make me feel stupid about my religion.”

I remember that conversation.  Explicitly.  We were in the shower.  We’d been talking about having kids, raising them.  The specter of Ramadan and 12 year olds who were thirsty in the middle of summer and me having to tell them no, they can’t have water.  

Our marriage died in that shower, on that day.  It just took a long time to realize that it was irrevocably dead.  

I wasn’t perfect.  I was young and immature.  I was pragmatic when he needed me to be a die-hard romantic.  I had these ideas about what a marriage was supposed to be and I kept trying to turn us into the picture I wanted instead of accepting what we were.  I was inexperienced: I didn’t have another long term relationship as a point of reference.  I was hard-headed.  I fought to win.  

Before we were married, my Dad pulled him aside and said, “Son, there isn’t anything in 2,000 years of culture or breeding that has prepared you to be married to this woman.”  My dad was right.  Didn’t stop my dad from loving him, from mentoring him, from employing him.  But he was right.  

So…  sour grapes?  Maybe.  But also years of watching him and his friends in our home and in Morocco.  Observing their relationships disintegrate one by one.   Being a part of his family and therefore as much of an insider as I could possibly be.  I was there for Al Eid when the butcher came and slaughtered four sheep on the rooftop deck of his mother’s house.  Heard his family’s sympathy for his brother’s wife, who had married the crazy brother.  But no one could say that.  No one could confront him.  They just listened to the screaming in unhappy silence.  To do anything else would have been shameful.  Or the other brother, the alcoholic whose hands shook until he started drinking again at 10 and may or may not have been bisexual.  All this shit that they couldn’t talk about and so it just festered.  

I was there in a way that the analysts and the diplomats haven’t been.  Not that I know everything they know, just that they don’t know everything I know.  They haven’t slept in that bed and it’s different, once you have.  

Which is to say that Islam isn’t bad, or at least its holy text is on par with Christianity.  Muslims are people, just like any other people: some are wonderful, some are awful, most are somewhere in-between, or both in different ways.  Islamic culture isn’t …  Okay, it’s sub-optimal.  And I say that having fallen in love with walking your bread dough to the local bakers to have it baked while you go to the Hamam.  And avocado juice.  And easy smiles.  Helpful, generous, open people.  Promising young men living with a corrupt government, sitting around and playing cards for spending money because they couldn’t find jobs with their free university education.  Things stay the same because Inshallah is the answer to every question.  When do you want to meet?  <shrug> Inshallah.  Retirement planning?  Inshallah.  Address government corruption?  Inshallah.  

Being there, drinking coffee, people-watching… it’s beautiful.  Perhaps even more so because it is doomed.  The trajectory of history seems to be pointing in the direction of reason, plurality, and technology.  The harder the lumpheads (of any persuasion) try to drag the whole thing backwards, the more certain we can be of a rebound.  Time moves forward, at least experientially.  The quantum physicists might have other views, but the rest of us experience the relentless march of time in a single direction.  We get smarter, and nothing is lost even if we fall, one-by-one, victims of that march.  

“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”  ― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

My Biases

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

entrope, , , , , , , Leave a comment

The quote goes back to Aesop, this notion that familiarity breeds contempt.  (For the record, he also said this: We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.)  Vice published a piece about the Military’s support for Trump – some at the leadership level, most among those who end up getting deployed.  Trump fans in the Military talked about drawing back on our intervention in the world, the fact that Trump appears to be decisive (I can’t, in any seriousness, call him decisive.)

What they don’t talk about is how Trump’s anti-Islam message resonates with those who have spent time in the Islamic world.  

Let’s start with this: I’m speaking in generalities.  What I am about to say isn’t going to apply to everyone, but it is a decent starting point.  The religion and the culture are intertwined in the minds of those who grew up in it.  Most westerners can talk about their religion in one silo and their culture in another, and their family in a third.  Most westerners can talk critically about one aspect or the other without feeling the whole edifice is about to crumble. It gets much harder to tease out the threads when you’re talking about the Muslim world.  

My expertise on this is as follows:  I married a Muslim man.  We divorced.  I have worked around former military, lived with and loved an Officer who deployed “downrange,” had a long term relationship with another former officer who also undertook multiple deployments.  And I can say with a high level of confidence that familiarity breeds contempt.  Skipping over the salacious bits (I imagine if you spend some time googling night vision videos from Iraq, you’ll find stuff you can never un-see), let’s talk about why that might be.  

First, the world we first think of as Muslim – North Africa, the Middle East – has a culture that cannot be understood academically.  Which means that our governmental approach to it is doomed from the beginning because there is nothing in an American’s education, culture, approach, or experience that prepares us to understand this culture.  We are the distillation of Western culture down to its bluntest components.  We are direct.  We strive to mean what we say and say what we mean.  We value consistency and authenticity.  We don’t respect sensitivity, particularly if it stands in the way of progress.  We take others at their word.  

None of which works in this world.  

Meaning is conveyed in the subtlest of shades.  Go to a paint store and consider all of the different colors that look white to you.  That’s how little difference there is between different shades of meaning in this world, but each of those shades conveys something specific, and important, and different.  Are you frustrated already, just thinking about it?  Most Americans (and even more American men) are going to throw their hands up and storm off saying “I don’t give a shit which white you choose, just leave me out of it.”  We don’t have the patience for nuance that microscopic.  (Which, incidentally, I am behind 100%.  I don’t see the value in 2,000 shades of white either.  50 shades of grey is at least 45 too many.)

Pride counts for more than having something to be proud of.  God help you if you miss one of those cues that came in 2,000 shades of white paint chips, because you will have damaged your compatriots pride so irrevocably that there is no going back.  Ever.  Why do you think there are honor killings?  Because pride is valued at a higher level than a daughter’s life.  Doesn’t make sense, does it?  You can say the words and nod, but that’s academic.  It’s like reading about mermaids and unicorns.  You can understand the words, they fit together, but on some level it doesn’t compute.  It will never compute.  And anything is on the table in service of pride.  Anything.  Pride is valued above honesty.  It is valued above authenticity.  It is valued above progress.  

Children are not chastised with bad (don’t do that, it’s bad), they are chastised with shame (don’t do that, it is shameful.)

There is the inside world and the outside world.  Inside is for family.  Women are inside.  Outside is for the men.  What is said outside may only have the thinnest tie to the truth, but it isn’t considered shameful to lie.  What would be more shameful would be to admit something that is true, but unflattering.  You tell the truth inside, but then maybe only to the men.  And probably not even to the men.  Maybe to your father.  Maybe.  And honesty with yourself about yourself… fuggetaboutit.  

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone functions.  

Our cultures are oil and water.  And that doesn’t mean that we are at war with each other, it simply means that in the venn diagram, we think that the place where the circles overlap is bigger than it is.  Because we’re American.  We’re optimistic.  We’re direct.  We can do anything.  But only the Americans who have tried to get anything done in that sliver of overlap know exactly how small it is.  Find a soldier who has deployed and ask him or her about Islam.  Chances are they met some extraordinary people of courage.  Fellow soldiers.  Police officers in training.  Interpreters.  Leaders.  People they could speak with directly, trust completely, and work with effectively.  But overall?  I’d put money that their experience led them to believe that the whole thing was a clusterfuck from the start and we had no business getting involved because we didn’t know the terrain, human or cultural, and we had no clear objective.  Spreading democracy, incidentally, is not a clear objective.  Democracy isn’t smallpox.  

And I’d hazard a guess that most soldiers aren’t fans of Islamic culture, which gets shorthanded into Muslim people.  

This isn’t about religion.  Personally, I think organized religion is 99% bullshit.  Believe what you want to believe, connect with the divine in the way you see fit, and leave me alone to do the same.  The state of my soul has nothing to do with the state of your soul.  I don’t see how you can reasonably make the argument that religion isn’t its own culture.  In America, the national culture and the religious culture grow further apart every day.  I think this is to the good.  In the middle east, the culture and the religion cling to each other so hard we can only hope they suffocate each other entirely.  

Ooh.  Inflammatory.  I know I’m not supposed to say this.  I know I’m at odds with my basic liberalism which has no problem with democratic socialism, government regulation, socialized health care, mourning Bernie, end the war on drugs, etc., etc.

Of course, I’m American.  I would think this, but I’m firmly behind the notion that a culture should be judged by its outcomes.  By that measure, Western culture isn’t perfect.  There’s still too much racial bigotry, not enough logic (just listen to the people defending assault weapons), and too much religion trying to take over the public sphere.  However.  With all of its flaws, Western culture has demonstrably better outcomes for the vast majority of its citizens.  

You could call that relative, and question my measures.  Well, my measure are things like literacy; life expectancy; poverty;  transparency in government; equality under the law for men and women; the absence of child soldiers, child brides, and child factory workers; the absence of honor killings and feminine genital mutilation (we could legitimately get rid of circumcision here, just for the record); freedom of speech; and freedom of (and from) religion.

Perhaps if you were looking at social cohesion, then Islamic culture would come out on top.  Maybe for the fantastical architecture?  The sense of poetic despair?  Rumi?  The debt of gratitude we owe the Islamic world for hanging on to the world’s intellectual treasures while we the west went through the dark ages?  All of that is great.  But at what price for those who don’t fit in?  At what cost for the LGBTQ community?  The Saudi girl who wants to be an engineer?  The Somali girl who doesn’t want to marry the man her parents picked?  The Afghan girl who just wants to learn how to read?   Should they all be sacrificed for social cohesion or tradition?  And even then, the wars rage on between people who believe things that can only be differentiated by a few shades of white.  So much for social cohesion.  

Does Islam, by definition, prohibit female engineers, or girls who go to school, or homosexuals who live safely and openly in society?  Certainly no more than Christianity does.  But is the culture prohibitive of all of the above?  Absolutely.  

So yes.  By the measures described, Western culture is superior.  I don’t think anyone should die over this.  I don’t think we should drop bombs to stamp out a religion or a culture.  I don’t think anyone should be ostracized or excluded.  I’m not for a ban or a wall or profiling. The “don’t be an asshole” rule always applies.  But that doesn’t change the fact that our foreign policy in the middle east is hampered by our lack of visceral understanding of the culture we’re working with.  And it doesn’t change the fact that western culture produces better outcomes for a larger percentage of its population.

And if the Military has feelings that align with Donald Trump about how immigration from the Middle East should be handled, perhaps their feelings should be understood as having a foundation in experience that goes beyond bigotry and racism.

Okay, let the yelling begin.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt