The Passionate Moderate Manifesto

The Last Liberal

The idea of civilization either “progressing” or “conserving” itself is useless. Sometimes doing what’s “good” for the world and its inhabitants needs something radical. Other times, it requires holding onto something traditional.

Long ago, G.K. Chesterton said:

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.

So don’t commit to being a “Progressive” or a…

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A Bouquet of Yellow Butterflies for Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There are some people you mourn personally, even though you didn’t know them “personally”. For me Gabriel Garcia Marquez was such a person. When I was a young reader, he formed neural pathways in my brain in ways that fed the best of what I have of a “self”; so, really, I knew him in a way that was deeply “personal” to me. How do you say “rest in peace” to such a man? My friend Pritha Kejriwal found a way. A beautiful one.

Skepticism or Delusion?

Skepticism is healthy… but dogged resistance to overwhelming objective evidence is NOT skepticism. It’s paranoid delusion. And it’s anything but healthy.  Take, for example, this woman’s eloquent personal story…

Welcome To My Blog!

Once upon a time, I had a little blog called “thought oven”;  I wasn’t always regular with it.  It was more about sharing when I wanted to rather than trying to keep up with some perceived standard of what “successful” blogs are supposed to do (although, in spite of my own recognized priorities, I did often feel a strange compulsion to keep it “updated” …”active”… “relevant” …etc.).  For the most part, I enjoyed blogging.

Then I realized  — not one day in a flash of insight, but gradually over a significant period — that everyone is always talking these days!  Just yapping endlessly and assuming every little thing that occurs to them will somehow be fascinating to the world.  It also seemed that while everyone is talking, very few are listening.  There seemed to be more bloggers than blog readers.  I just didn’t want to be yet one more talking head in a cacophonous Babel-world.  So I stopped.

But the thing is, conversation is a good thing!  We don’t all have to be shouting at each other. We could actually be talking and listening, reading and writing… and doing so with a real intent to exchange ideas. Discourse has always been one of my favorite things in the world.

I for one, DO read other people’s writing! I DO think about what they’re saying. I genuinely DO try to be open to persuasion. So, why should I choose to drop out of the conversation?  Instead, I can simply choose to be someone who speaks — not to advertize myself — but to share a thought or experience that I sincerely believe someone else might find interesting.

So, I’m restarting.

(and I’m randomly importing some of the content from the old Thought Oven blog for kicks… please see below if you’re interested.)

That’s Why They Call It “Memorial”

   

Does the drowsy yet relentless passage of time really heal all wounds?  Should it?

For the first time since that fateful day eight years ago, I woke up, got ready, and walked out of the door without clutching a flag, without remembering what day it was. When I realized that I’d forgotten, I got a brand new ache in my heart.

Now that the pain is abating. . . are we turning it into another empty ceremonial event, like we did to Memorial Day?

It’s not that I want to wallow or be immobilized by the horror and loss of that day. In fact, I’m troubled by the tendency of some to fetishize it (I once I saw something on TV called “100 most significant moments in TV history” wherein even the moon landing came in second to the images of those attacks).  I wince when politicians shamelessly appeal to the painful memory of that day to push their worldviews on us.

But… I don’t want to forget.

I haven’t yet – and I doubt I ever will – forget December 2nd, the day my father died. In a sense I have nurtured that particular wound in my heart instead of letting it scab over. Because while his soul may be celestial and eternal, I love and miss the finite bodily form of him, the man, my father, made of flesh and blood, a man with a voice and a smile and a touch. Records remain of his insights, his language, his great wit, his ideas (and his memory that “lives on in me” as countless people told me after he died, well meaning people, with their parents still alive, trying their best to help me “snap out of” my pain). But that pain is the one of the few authentically extant parts of my real relationship with the real man. It’s the thing that most accurately recalls him by keeping alive his absence, by refusing to substitute his actual presence with echoes and abstractions of him, however beautiful those are.

September 11 has important echoes and abstractions. We’ve learned things about intolerance, about repressive religious doctrines, about unfathomable hatred, about compassion and solidarity, about selfless acts of kindness and courage, and about loss, on a grand scale. President Obama is right to call us to serve our country and our communities – it’s the best way to honor the fallen and to rekindle the flames of the great American civic spirit. But for me, September 11 can’t help remaining a day of mourning as well. A day of remembering the injury and the loss – of three thousand people, of the physical integrity of a great city, and of our collective innocence about what can happen to us, right here in America.

I don’t want us to be paralyzed by loss but I don’t want us to be anesthetized against it either. I want to continue to mourn it in some small and reverent way so that we never confuse the lives that once were with the tributes that we pay them, however beautiful and touching those are.

In fact, I’d like us to resurrect the true meaning of Memorial Day. It’s chilling that we’ve turned it into the national day of beach and barbecue. I know it was a century and a half ago, but the Civil War was the deepest trauma our country has ever lived through and though its memory is dim, its legacy is real. Also, given the alarming rifts that have been forming in our polity in the last decade and a half, there are really urgent reasons to remember and mourn that particular past.

Incidentally: say what you will about secular liberalism, but, as I’ve explained before, secular liberalism is the reason you don’t see people like me (and you?) go and drive a plane full of innocent people into towers full of innocent people in someone else’s country just because they don’t share our belief systems.

Paranoia In Shifts

Some people will believe the very worst about others.  Well, not all others, just some others….

People will believe that president Obama would euthanize their grandparents. They will believe that he “hates white people.” They will cry in public and ask for their “America back” — when to most of us America doesn’t look all that different from last year. That is, unless there really is no place in one’s America for a black president — but I don’t honestly believe that’s what that woman was thinking. Even if race played into her fears, I’m pretty sure it was subconscious.

So why is it that people are willing to believe such extreme things about Obama and the Democrats? Why are they willing to believe, not just that they have misguided ideas, but that they have such actively evil intentions? It seems incredible to me.

A friend of mine asked me an interesting question the other day. “Do you think this is how conservatives felt during the Bush years?” She wondered. “That they couldn’t figure out why so many were fearful of the administration’s policies — not just disapproving, but fearful?”

My friend, much like me, is a “liberal” in her values, without being committed to any technocratic or partisan political agenda. We are liberals because we believe in freedom and compassion and fairness. We want things like poverty and discrimination to be eradicated without necessarily being wedded to particular policy approaches. We love the founding fathers and will fight any white supremacist who tries to appropriate them for their own sick visions of “their” America. We are willing to be just as hard on the government under President Obama as we were on the one under President Bush on all the same issues: state secrets doctrine, extraordinary renditions, military tribunals, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, wall street bailouts with practically no strings attached. . . etc.

And yet, we too, are willing to accept that the Obama people aren’t dangerous in ways that maybe we weren’t always absolutely certain about the Bush people. (Although sometimes I do think Tim Geithner is the devil, but that’s a different post).

I will say this, though: the whackos on the left — the ones that used to peddle anti-Bush theories that 9/11 was an “inside job” or that the delay in responding to Katrina was a result of Bush “hating black people” — never really got traction with mainstream or influential liberals. Not one factually unproven conspiracy-type theory about the Bush administration was taken up by anyone prominent enough that I can recall his/her name. Dan Rather doesn’t count — he relied on the wrong documents but his charge, that Bush didn’t fulfill his National Guard duties, was true and substantiated; and even if he does count, that’s just ONE. On the other hand, mainstream, influential conservatives — Bill Kristol, Lou Dobbs, Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity — don’t seem to have any qualms about giving credence to complete fabrications about “death panels” and “Kenyan citizenship.”

I will also say this: for all the conservative accusations of inadequate liberal respect for our erstwhile “commander-in-chief” — no liberal ever actively wanted President Bush to fail as a president. We just wanted him to be a better president. Rush Limbaugh actually said he wanted Obama to fail (and Fred Thompson and Bobby Jindal defended him in this). Can you imagine the Fox News response if someone had said that about Bush? Despite the conservative alarm at liberals not caring about the security of our country, it was a conservative that wanted Osama bin Laden to attack our country.

I will say this, too: I wouldn’t have any reason to be paranoid about President Bush if he didn’t actually lie to us about the reason we went to war with Iraq; if he didn’t try to usurp legislative power with elaborate “signing statements”; if he didn’t have guys like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Bybee, and Yoo working for him (I know, I know, Tim Geithner. . . but he’s kind of a lesser devil, like Phil, The Prince of Insufficient Light).

Nevertheless, I think my friend has a point. What we tend to see as “flawed” rather than “evil” may often be a product of our own invention, at least in part, and this might apply to even the least partisan, most fair-minded and judicious among us. That’s bad enough, but what’s really scary is that so very many of us these days are deliberately, and gleefully partisan with absolutely no intention of being fair-minded or judicious.Maybe it’s “their” turn to be paranoid. So much for the post-political neo-camelot.

Big City, Dim Lights

 

I was in India this January. I kept “in touch” as much as possible -we live in a small, virtually-wired world. But I completely missed a little regional story that is nothing short of momentous for me, but that went completely under my global-sweep radar on the other side of the world.

The Amato Opera in Manhattan’s East Village is closing. I am devastated.

I can’t claim to have grown up with Tony and Sally Amato’s “tenement opera” that’s been a community fixture for six decades.  I started going there in the late 1990s when I first moved to the area and immediately fell in love.  It’s a microscopic space with cheap champagne and a pre-performance dinner option (e.g. pasta and what tastes like grocery-store bought red sauce) and an absolutely spellbinding charm. It’s a place that has promoted young local talent and given newcomers like me an instant stake in our New Yorker-ness.

I remember my third time. They were performing Manon. Tony Amato spoke of his wife, who had recently died, and mentioned that he had considered retiring. I think he said his decision to continue was influenced by his niece taking over some of the functions. I breathed a sigh of relief. The Amato was one of those hooks that New York dug into me early. I needed to know it was there to feel all was right in the world.

Like Tony and Sally’s families, I was an immigrant to New York and, in some sense an immigrant to America, although I was born here, because the rest of my family had repatriated to their own home country; I have for years felt a strange sense of generalized rootlessness everywhere in the world. That rootlessness is not without its allure, but it sensitizes you to the savor of whatever semblance of a home you encounter in your hydroponic life.

I was in law school. I was poor.  I never paid more than $25 for family circle tickets to experience the grandeur of the Metropolitan Opera House (as awe-inspiring as that is), but I thought nothing of plopping down 120 bucks (a FORTUNE for me at the time) to spend my then-boyfriend’s birthday sitting in a cramped little auditorium with questionable acoustics, sated on Ragu and Brut, surrounded by people who all seemed to know each other and to welcome us into their world. People of all ages, mingling in a way that Americans my age and younger are generally unfamiliar with and the way we imagine came naturally in the time of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Speaking of Our Town, I’ve always thought a big city neighborhood was a lot like a small town. Amato is a great example. Perhaps it could not exist in an actual small town.  Only a bustling metropolis like New York generally has the money – I’m not talking “big money” but multitudes of people with small money – to keep alive this little self-supporting art vendor, entrepreneurial yet noncommercial, traditional yet upstart, unostentatious yet unerringly refined in the art it peddles. And yet, like the corner grocery store clerk who remembers to ask when your mother is coming back from India for her next visit and the bar where everybody knows your name, the Amato is a big-city-neighborhood establishment that makes you feel safely rooted in your surroundings in that way that small town folks always talk about.

Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town as if celebrating continuity, when it was really mourning its passing, grasping longingly at a vanishing way of life.  All the remaining shows at the Amato, of course, are sold out. Since I now live in Washington, I can’t very well camp out at their door before each remaining performance in the hope of a last minute cancellation. All I can do is look lovingly back and say goodbye.

Life Is Short

They say life is short. They don’t mean to be depressing when they say it. On the contrary, they intend to encourage appreciation for the fullness of the moment. The exquisite preciousness of it all.

But what if “life is short” is not an abstracted universal truth? What if your doctor essentially tells you, that YOUR life might be winding down?

What if you have been battling a chronic degenerative illness for years, using every last drop of your energy to be “normal” and to avoid attracting pity or being a burden on others and then, one day, they tell you, that your systems are starting to degenerate so rapidly that you might die or become severely impaired in the next few years?

Someone I know is going through this. In the last couple of years, the frayed edges of her fortress have really started showing. She has had trouble keeping up the charade. She doesn’t like having to lean on anyone too much. When she tries, it fails – perhaps because she lacks conviction in “leaning” and the effort comes across forced, too intense. Perversely, it even comes across to some people as weak and pathetic because one is so accustomed to seeing her strong and vibrant that, when she finally cracks, it seems “sudden” and out of nowhere. We don’t see the great effort it takes to be what she is; we assume that’s automatic. So, when the levee breaks, her ocean of pain doesn’t strike us as real. It seems like so much whining.

But people love her. And when she isn’t resisting the crumbling of her walls, some of them can see through to a shining light kept heroically alive in long gathering winds and still struggling to burn when the storm finally hits big. And they want to reach out and shelter the little flame for as long as it lasts, however long or short that may be.

It seems some of us – perhaps ultimately all of us – have to figure out how best to honor a very literal version of that old, ironically upbeat piece of wisdom: life is short. 

All Eyes On Dark Places

Last night I tasted a really nice Montepulciano and read the torture memos. How did you spend YOUR Saturday night?

Stop staring at me.

Anyway, so I come home early last night, trying to get a little rest (no, I don’t have swine flu, thanks for asking) because I’ve been suffering from an allergic eye condition that’s left me a little drained. But can I just shut them and listen to music or something like a normal person? No, I have one recurring, irrepressible thought: “I should read the torture memos.”

“I’ll read them slowly,” I assure myself, “and I will rest my eyes in between pages or paragraphs if necessary.”

Then came the shock.

Absolutely nowhere on the web could I find the memos in either printable form or in a font size that can be anything but, you know, torture, on ailing eyes like mine.I supposed they had to do it this way to prevent people from trying to get at what’s in the classified portions. Why can’t someone come up with a foolproof (and evil-genius-proof) way to redact text? As Seinfeld would have said… “they can put a man on the moon…!”

Maybe it’s in extremely poor taste to be writing so lightheartedly about acts of torture – and whether they were committed by the public servants of this country that I adore especiallybecause it’s the kind of place where things like this are not supposed to happen (and yes, wingnuts, this makes for a better patriot than loving it just because you were born here and shouting about how it’s the greatest nation on earth while doing everything in your power to turn it into your own version of Afghanistan under Taliban rule).

But really, sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh, or you go crazy. Jon Stewart has kept me sane (arguably) for the last eight years.

Lest I sound partisan, I assure you, I’m still holding my breath on this new administration. . . . I applaud them for taking certain steps, but I have my concerns. Besides, it’s relatively easy to do the mea culpa thing on behalf of your predecessors with whom, despite the succession of office, you truly don’t identify yourself (and everyone knows this). But precisely because of the enormously enlarged executive the Cheney Administration has bestowed on its successor, we need to watch Obama with HAWK EYES.We can be lenient on his effectiveness with the economy and such things – he inherited a bigger mess, after all, than is reasonable to expect any government to fix overnight. But we have to be ABSOLUTELY vigilant in holding him to his promise of “conducting our business in the clear light of day” and not “corroding the character of our country.”

We have to demand to shine a light into any activity that starts to become shrouded in darkness as they did so often in the last administration.

Mr. Obama, I don’t just want to hear you say “we won’t torture.” That’s only one letter from what Mr. Bush told us. I want other people, neutral people with top security clearance – judges, members of congress (including Republicans and Independents), and senior military people – to say in public that they are being briefed on what’s going on and they agree with you that: We. Don’t. Torture.

ps, I did manage to get through a couple of the of the memos. And found the others reproduced in enlargeable text. . . I’ll talk substance in another post soon.

Just Between Us Bleeding Hearts

My last post was a rare tribute – or as close as I’ll ever get to one – to a supply sider. Today, I want to pay my respects to another one. I note the passing of one Mr. Jack Kemp, the “bleeding-heart conservative.” I never liked your economic ideas, but you loved our country and you hated racism and oppression, and for that I thank you and wish you a fond farewell.