Category Archives: culture

a singular failure

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It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.

Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.

When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.

But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.

Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.

Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.

While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.

Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.

The Gift Outright

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I sometimes sign online petitions.

Not that I sign all that come my way, and I don’t sign frivolously. Since I have once or twice walked into online hoaxes, I’m careful to check what I support, and I avoid petitions that strike me as extreme or merely inflammatory. I’m as skeptical as anyone else about the potential for effectiveness of some of the petitions I sign, and I don’t delude myself by thinking that I’m participating in grassroots democracy. But I think I have at least a couple of good reasons for signing petitions for causes I think are good.

One reason is, of course, that I think some causes are good. As a rule I support causes online to which I also contribute financially. It seems to me that very confusing and chaotic times such as ours call for the opposite of quietism. I sometimes think that it may be immoral not to take positions in times like these (perhaps even in the best of times as well). Certainly if one takes no position one has no skin in the game, as it were. It’s been a long time since I participated in an act of civil disobedience, but in lending my support to various small Internet insurrections I voluntarily assume a certain political risk.

For political hazard is different from mere financial risk, because it involves what Kierkegaard termed the suspension of the ethical. It has the potential to put one at odds with one’s friends and acquaintances. I’m squeamish about “sharing” my political participation online at Facebook, Twitter, etc., because in doing so I lay myself open to flaming replies from folks I know who disagree with me. And the most common reproof I receive accuses me of engaging in thoughtless, mob action—a charge to which I am sensitive. But it’s interesting, to say the least, to be accused of failing to stand up for one’s beliefs because one stands up for one’s beliefs in a public manner that makes use of one of the tools of popular culture.

Last evening a friend and I listened with absorption and pleasure as Richard Cohen and Morris Dees spoke of their work with the Southern Poverty Law Center to an audience at the Sheldon Concert Hall. I needed such a reminder that the work of preserving and extending the gains of the civil rights movement continues and sometimes succeeds. As my friend and I drove out to the League of Women Voters office to pick up my beloved for dinner afterwards—she had to skip the speeches for a meeting—we found ourselves remembering the work of another hero of the era of civil rights, Pope John, XXIII whose work, like that of Dr. King, is a favorite right-wing target. My friend (a Jesuit priest and one of God’s soldiers if ever there were such) and I surprised ourselves with the conviction that the work of John XXIII will survive present attempts to undo it.

The Jesus of Luke is said to have claimed in last Sunday’s gospel (Revised Common Lectionary) that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” I take this hard teaching to propound a choice like that of Abraham, when God demanded that he sacrifice his son, Isaac. In order to accede to God’s command Abraham must not only sacrifice his beloved son, but he must also abandon the ethical universe wherein dwell parents and spouses, children and siblings, friends and neighbors. It’s the call to heroic action, easy enough to deconstruct as hubris or self-will—or mere silliness.

I’m willing to be silly in a good cause, I guess. For Abraham gains the ethical by renouncing it. The justice envisioned by liberal hope is unattainable on its face. But as Kierkegaard’s Abraham morphs into The Knight of Faith, his choice proclaims that with God all things are possible. There was a good deal of snarky criticism of last month’s reenactment of the March for Jobs and Justice. If I were ten years younger, I’d have gone to Washington to stand in solidarity with others there. As it was, I contributed financially and expressed solidarity virtually. I continue to believe in the possibility, however remote, that our collective choices might turn towards the good in us and the world we have been given—in this life, on this planet.

None of us, after all, is here forever. But the world, and the gift of it, a gift that Robert Frost called “The Gift Outright,” though they may not be forever, will remain long after we and our categories are gone.

Seamus Heaney

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Today’s New York Times reports the death of Seamus Heaney, a fact that might serve to remind us that we have not lacked great poets even in a time when the death of poetry has become a commonplace. It was Hölderlin who asked the question that even in his own time was far from rhetorical: “What are poets for in a destitute time.” Martin Heidegger picked up the question and made it the center of little book of essays that has been translated as Poetry, Language, Thought. But the career of Seamus Heaney is both a better and a more comprehensive answer to Hölderlin’s question than Heidegger’s answer, perhaps because Heidegger wasn’t a very good poet and may not have understood that not all poetry is to be subsumed under the rubrics of German romanticism.

Of course, claims like the ones Heaney makes in The Redress of Poetry, a 1995 collection of his own essays on poets and poetry, have a kinship to Heidegger’s, because both speak out of a tradition that has identified poets with biblical prophets on the one hand and Socrates on the other. But Heaney’s thoughts about poetry seem fresher and more vital than Heidegger’s, which seem derivative instead. Consider this, from the preface to Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which has liberated that wonderful poem from its history for a generation of students:

Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator’s right-of-way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father’s, people whom I had once described in a poem as “big voiced Scullions.”
     I called them “big voiced” because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such as “We cut the corn to-day” took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives.

Heaney was a professor, at Queens University, Oxford, and Harvard, among others; but he was not an academic poet. His verse is accessible, earthy, and it often rhymes. He was as likely to claim kinship with Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop, as with other academics of his generation. Here is a montage of video recordings of Heaney reading one of his most famous poems, “Digging,” about his father, but also about his own sense of his vocation.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. His NYT obituary quuotes this encomium from an Irish Times editorial written in recognition of that achievement.

Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’ Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.

RIP Seamus Heaney . . .

more about voting rights

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I stayed up late two nights ago hoping for news of the resolution to Senator Wendy Davis’s courageous filibuster against current Republican attempts to shut down most of Texas’s abortion clinics. But it was morning before I learned that she had actually succeeded, with the help of a gallery full of supporters. Of course Texas Lieutenant Governor, David Dewhurst, was quick to claim that the solemn proceedings of the august body over which he presides had been disrupted by a mob, and to promise to fight another day (in a new special session already called by Texas Governor Rick Perry).

My Facebook news feed remains full of celebration of Senator Davis and of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, of which more later. But Senator Davis, though she has become a new national celebrity as photos of her pink shoes have gone viral on the Internet, may need to seek other public office than the seat in the Texas Senate she now holds. Voter suppression legislation, that Texas enacted just hours after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, redraws the Texas Legislative map in a way that effectively destroys Davis’s district.

The predictable Antonin Scalia has been widely noted, as he seemingly felt obliged to vent about his colleagues’ legitimation of “homosexual sodomy.” Declaring that he feels personally (and unfairly) stigmatized by the DOMA decision, Justice Scalia registered his discomfort at being thought a bigot. The very kindest thing that can be said about the good Justice, though, is that he is on the wrong side of this issue and the wrong side of history. Of course, his church is equally on the wrong side and entirely disingenuous in its official expressions of discomfort. Scalia is not disingenuous, just extreme. As a sidebar, the St. Louis Post Dispatch yesterday carried an op-ed piece by St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson again claiming that the Affordable Care Act infringes upon Catholic religious freedom.

I’m not hopeful about the voting rights issues. I do not think Justice Roberts’s claim that race no longer counts in our national politics is naive. I think it is calculated. Justice Roberts is surely aware that his court’s decision to weaken the voting rights act is as blatant an intervention into electoral politics as was Bush v. Gore. He is surely aware as well that present Republican strategy relies heavily upon attempts to disenfranchise minority, female, student, and elderly voters who tend to favor Democratic candidates. Republicans have hardly been secretive about this aim.

The conservative punditry are singing the praises of the voting rights decision, ignoring the fact that voter ID laws, which conservatives favor, aim to destroy the very success they (and Justice Roberts) claim that the Voting Rights act has achieved. Over the past several years voter protection groups, the League of Women Voters, and others have achieved some success in combatting voter suppression through legal means. Now much of this will have to be re-litigated. Reactionary state legislatures, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, and others are already announcing readiness to enact and/or reaffirm repressive new laws designed to disenfranchise voters who tend to vote for democrats. The Texas law, hurriedly announced by state Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has already been challenged legally. In states outside the South, such as my own state of Missouri, voter suppression has been given a new impetus.

The Roberts argument about race is grounded in the color-blind ideology (so-called) of aversive racism. It will be interesting to see how all these things play out in the next few weeks as the radical right seeks to express its belief in its own entitlement through voter suppression and liberals and progressives attempt to counter it. I don’t, myself, think we’re that far removed these days from the politics of Bull Connor. Blacks, Hispanics, and now people who look Muslim or have Muslim sounding names, are routinely targeted, beaten, and harrassed by police. Race and class-based repression are not localized in the South or directed solely at black people these days, but then they never were. Minorities are routinely subjected to selective law enforcement, including the death penalty. Our incarceration rate remains the highest in the world, with minorities overrepresented among our incarcerated populations. Texas has just completed its 500th execution since 1976, its eighth so far this year, executing Kimberly McCarthy, a black woman convicted by a jury that escaped being all white by including one black member. A good case can be made that we are not only resegregating our country, but rebarbarizing it as well.