The Global Citizen |
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We make our friends. We make our enemies. God makes our neighbors. G.K. Chesterton
Is there a great moral nation, The Global Citizen is published in conjunction with The McGill Report, where international news is a good local story.
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2.28.2003
WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF GREAT JOURNALISM? My passion and my mission is to write articles for my local newspaper, for The McGill Report, for The Global Citizen and elsewhere that illuminate my community's connections to the wider world. When I sat down yesterday to articulate the strategies I've used to generate those stories, I realized that I needed first to understand, in a fundamental way, the purposes and ideals of journalism as I try to practice it. I came up with:
WHAT IS JOURNALISM?
2.27.2003
GOODBYE, MR. ROGERS: This beautiful man once said "the greatest gift a person can give a child is just to give themselves. I'm just myself with the children on my TV show, and if some people don't like the way I am, that's too bad." He also said "it's our task to remind people in as creative way as possible that there are some universal verities that sustain us."
One of the songs he sang to the kids on his show went like this: "I'm taking care of you,Politicians, academics, polemicists, and partisans all have their takes on nationalism and identity politics and why we can't all get along. Here is Fred Rogers' take: "To be able to offer a whole smorgasbord of ways of saying who you are and how you feel, that was part of our mission. Because there are ways of saying those things that don't hurt you or anybody else. And that's one of the paramount messages of the Neighborhood. If the whole world could learn all these comfortable ways of saying who you are and how you feel that don't hurt anybody, I think we'd be in a lot better shape."The man was a global citizen and an American saint. With tears, Mr. Rogers, goodbye!
2.25.2003
FOUR MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE GUYS WRESTLE OVER IRAQ: An anti-war e-mail petition is making the rounds, and it stirred four of my friends yesterday to either sign it or not sign it, while attaching notes of explanation for either choice. We are middle-aged, middle-class white guys, three of us living in Minnesota and one from New York, and all of us either liberal or left-leaning in our politics. Here are our responses:
"Is War Sometimes Necessary?" The Iraq problem is a difficult one for me. I don't look forward to war. But, I don't hear much from war opponents about effective policy. All they are saying is... "give peace a chance". But, hey. That's not policy. What do we do with Saddam? Left alone, what will emerge in Iraq in the next 10-15 years?"Going to War Will Slow Progress on Other Priorities" I am not prepared to support the U.S. going to war with every fascist. I am convinced that we have far greater priorities, such as, 1) Fighting terrorism; 2) Working for peace in the Middle East; 3) Dealing with North Korea (which looks to me to be a far greater threat to our interests); and 4) Rekindling the U.S. economy. Going to war in Iraq will hurt our progress on all of these priorities. And, I am especially troubled by the rank cowboys who don't seem to care what the rest of the world thinks, and seem prepared to proceed to war without backing by the UN."I'm Keeping a Distance from My Leftie Friends" I feel ambiguous about the "peace" movement and the war. I went on the peace rally here in NYC on the 15th and found myself getting in a series of arguments with people and wondering just how much in common I share with these so-called “lefties.”"Fundamentally, Saddam Has to Go" I see a parallel between the fact that we are basically already in WWIII, and the fact that we are also already at war with Iraq. So from this perspective the "No War" crowd seems even more to be irrelevant, missing the point. My mouth hangs agape when I see the celebs and others trying to make their case, which to me is no case whatsoever because I see no logic or rigor or contemporary awareness in it.
2.23.2003
THE FORESTS UNDER FIRE: When not prosecuting the buildup for war with Iraq, George Bush is working to roll back forest and wildlife protection in the United States, says Save National Forests. P.S. The right wing propaganda machine has conspired to leave a bad taste in the mouth whenever the words "Save The ..." are spoken. Any chance we could improve the name of this group?
2.20.2003
DEPRESSION AND BEAUTY: I caught a few minutes of a radio show today called “The Soul and Depression.” Andrew Solomon, who wrote the remarkable book about depression called The Noonday Demon, was being interviewed. The subject was whether antidepressants take away an essential part of a person’s personality. Put a depressive poet on Prozac and the next thing you know he’s cheerful – and there go his beautiful sad poems and maybe his career as well.
Solomon, a writer who suffered a catatonic depression, says anti-depressants saved his life and “returned me to myself.” That sounds just right to me. I’ve had depressions on and off throughout my life and when I’ve had them, one of the big questions I’ve had was where, during the depression, “I” was. One gets to feeling so sapped and empty and blank during a depression that you wonder who “you” are. (You feel compelled to start putting quotations marks around the word “you.”) You feel strangely distant from yourself. You will be talking with somebody when you are depressed, and you’ll notice that entire sentences are coming out of your mouth, and the person to whom you are speaking appears to understand. But somehow you can’t believe that it’s you who’s putting those sentences together. It’s as if there is someone else in your brain who is secretly hammering the world together, at least enough to make a sentence and spit it out. Given that your conscious mind feels so shut down and paralyzed during a depression, the question arises, who or what is doing the carpentry on those sentences? When I was in college and got depressed, it got so bad that I felt asleep while awake, and I could not sleep, and I had no desire for food or sunsets or nice warm baths or any other pleasure in life. I felt emotionally null. In all vital dimensions, flatlined. It was scary. But one thing helped to save me: in the odd hours that I did manage to drift off in bed, I’d dream the wildest dreams. Then I’d awake and remember the dreams in vivid detail, and I’d run off to the campus coffee shop and I’d write them down. Then I’d read what I’d written and I’d marvel at the color, the imagination, the humor, the zest of my dreams, so filled with the qualities so missing in my life. Realizing that my dreams at least were whole and alive gave me great comfort. From those crazy dreams I realized there was something, or somebody, who was working away in my brain and living a wonderful life of fun and magic and exploration. Knowing this, I could relax a little bit. This is where my take on depression differs with Solomon’s. To me, it’s not like the soul disappears during a depression, or is even sick in any really essential way. Rather, it’s just gone somewhere different than where it usually abides. In fact, if anything, the soul becomes far more active in depression than at any other time. It’s almost as if the soul just loves depression. A depression is like a mud pit in which the soul lolls and lingers. Many poets, artists, and creative people of all kind understand this. A great many of them love their depressions so much they are reluctant to part with them via anti-depressant drugs. They see the drugs as career ending, uniqueness-ending, identity-robbing. And they have a point. What beautiful poems and prose have come from depression – at least those that stopped short of causing catatonia. Think of Robert Burton, John Keats and the romantic poets, or the tortured modernists Lowell and Bell and Berryman, and on and on. Probably these artists marveled at the literary gems that emanated from their pens, while inwardly feeling as empty as shells or, perhaps the better metaphor, bells. Perhaps they wrote for a reason similar to why I jumped up to write down the fever dreams I had while still in college. Perhaps they, too, needed to reassure themselves that at least one part of themselves was intensely alive and imaginatively leaping. But you don’t need to be depressed to get the insights that so frequently are cited as automatic adjuncts to depression. There are other ways to access such insights, some of which are as dramatic as depression, and some not. Life-threatening illness famously induces a sensitivity to life’s fragile beauty. When Dennis Potter, the British writer, was dying of cancer he looked out his bedroom window one morning and noticed a white apple blossom on a tree. “It was the blossomest blossom that ever was,” he said. Yet we can discover and appreciate life’s beauty well before we land on death, or depression’s, doorstep. And if we can do it, we should, if only because the wear and tear is so much less on ourselves and others. One way I’ve found is simply to remind oneself, as one reminds oneself to unplug the coffee pot when one goes out, that life is short, and death is close, and that each of us is living and dying at the same time. Zoloft, specifically, taught me this lesson. Long after my college years, when I found myself depressed again, my experience was that sadness came in great rhythmical heaving waves, very much like the waves of physical nausea. It felt as if I were literally vomiting grief. I was excruciatingly sensitive, as a person with a migraine headache is sensitive to small beams of light, to every last glint and sparkle of life that I perceived around me. Every sign of beauty or humor or living movement was a reminder of death; and the signs of life that sent me into peristaltic grieving could be comically slight. A grin, a single word, a flash of light off a windowpane – all were heavy portents of the inevitability of black, eternal, universal death. One of these intimations would then link in my brain to another one, and then another, and another; until all these noticings linked into every slight and hurt and resentment that I’d ever stored away in my brain; and all these tiny correlations would then verify the nihilism that I had begun a serious flirtation with; and soon that flirtation had became a death-grip romance that was hurtling me towards a self-fulfilling doom. At that point I became a mote swirling within some existential whirlpool that was flushing me into infinite cold depths. (The image of myself, hands raised above my head in desperation as I was being flushed down some galactic porcelain toilet bowl, made me chuckle slightly and pulled me back from the abyss a bit.) It was while I was in this state that I considered the question of “me, not me” on anti-depressants. I agonized and I thrashed for a while and then I finally decided that a lifetime of access to such poignant, comical, and very often clichéd insights, made possible by my depressions, were hardly worth the price. So I got myself on Zoloft. Now that I’m on the drug, I still feel those surges of sadness that well up in inside me like a nausea from time to time. I will be going about my business and suddenly be struck as if by a plank from behind, or maybe a fast-acting virus. O! The infinitely fragile essence, the delicate perfumes of this great earth, do I perceive in the quartered sections of my morning orange! Ah! The tragically finite heat of life itself do I feel while holding my pet cockatiel, Grace, in the palm of my hand! And so on the heavings come. In the old days, pre-Zoloft, such perceptions would link in a flash to other intimations of doom and I’d soon be circling down the drain. I still feel those same poignant feelings, and I feel them often, but on Zoloft they don’t start me spinning down the whirlpool of the existential toilet. I have them, but they go only so far and no further, and then they stop. I can make note of them or not, whichever I choose. And I can get on with my life. Whether I choose to linger in this state or not, I am still always able to apperceive the cosmic rightness of the marriage of death and beauty; and I am left awestruck and admiring and grateful for life. Yet also I am left whole and awake and not weeping. When I go for a few days or weeks without that familiar eruption of poignant feeling, then just a gentle reminder to myself of life’s brevity and fragility is all that I need to remain empowered by my melancholia. I don’t weep for the loss of my old self. I rejoice that I still have him – in fact that I still am him – and yet that I also feel new.
WHAT THE MEDIA IS DOING TO HOW WE THINK: Nothing more, really, that what we as humans have been doing to each other since we first uttered a cliche to avoid the trouble of really thinking; or told a white lie to avoid hurting someone's feelings; or burnished a story with fictional details to hold an audience. The problem is, when translated into the scale at which the media works today, all these natural and useful ethical shortcuts turn vastly dysfunctional. They are creating a society of consumer automatons who are shopping, eating, and entertaining themselves to death on diets of entirely non-caloric junk in all categories.
The social critic Andre Codrescu describes how this works: The restraints of society are generally beneficial to most people. They share neither sorrow nor joy, but platitudes. Time-tested platitudes keep things humming along without highs or lows. The universe of platitudes is vast and impersonal and is constantly enriched by the media, by schools, by families, by a whole complex machinery that produces them in order to maintain social order.Codrescu clearly sees the social usefulness of platitudes when they are imbibed, like hard spirits, in moderation. He'd agree with Northrop Frye who said that situations, like bodies, are supposed to be decently covered. But the media today acts too often like a vast blanket that covers the situation of the whole world. Reality bites; so it's systematically defanged before it's re-presented. That kind of ignorance -- or translation in Codrescu's terms -- can only hurt us in the end.
2.15.2003
GLOBAL CITIZEN THOUGHT FOR THE DAY -- I love to read popular cosmologies for the nuggets of metaphors they contain. It’s crazy to try to follow the science, and what you realize after a while is that even the scientists can’t follow all the science. Everyone has a drop-off point at which only other scientists, and usually only very specialized ones, can follow the science.
As a lay reader, what I try to take away from the cosmology that I read is the metaphor, the big picture, that certain cosmologists give us to try to explain their ideas about the world. Relativity, space-time, and the “curvature of space” are such metaphors that have been around a long time. What’s fascinating is that the past couple of decades has seen an incredible profusion of new metaphors offered – e.g., strings, multiverses, wormholes, the inflationary universe, the anthropic principle, quantum gravity, etc. Rather than purely speculative notions dreamed up in an ivory tower, all of these ideas have at least some observable data, such as those gathered from super-powerful telescopes or sub-atomic particle colliders, which appear to support them. What interests me from a global citizenship perspective is that these new metaphors for the nature of our universe seem to me like powerful sources of consciousness change. Elsewhere I’ve written about how the view of the earth from space offers a powerful stimulus for rethinking our fundamental ideas about the nature and organization of our life on earth. Once this change in perspective is embraced, the decisions we make in our daily lives will naturally follow. The hard work is making that first step, that change in consciousness; yet if it’s done, many other steps necessary to making our life on earth more stable, more creative, more peaceful, and more productive will happen naturally. The connection with the cosmologists is that they’ve made this first step. In having done so, they are a model for the rest of us. Also in taking the trouble to describe in ordinary language what life in the universe looks like, after having taken that first step, they again offer a good model. Finally, it’s even possible that the metaphors they offer, and the insights they have gleaned from their perspectives are actually true. That is, they may actually be providing a more accurate picture of the way the universe really is. If that’s so, then only one thing can follow from aligning our own lives and thoughts according to these models: there will be less conflict because we won’t be fighting reality so much. One astrophysical metaphor that’s captured my imagination greatly is the one offered by the British scientist and philosopher, Julian Barbour. According to his research, there is actually no such thing as time. Instead, the universe is static – a giant glacial block of something. The components of this giant, static, glacial block of something are irreducible elements that Barbour calls “nows.” Our experience of time, he says, is actually an illusion caused by the perception that we are moving through a sequential series of static “nows.” An analogy is that of a flip book or a movie, both of which create the illusion of a story that unfolds in time but which, in reality, are nothing more than a sequence of still pictures, with each picture differing only slightly from the next. Now consider the impact on our lives if Barbour’s conception of the universe turns out to be true. It would be as revolutionary as Copernicus’ discovery – which started out as a theory that sounded every bit as cockeyed as Barbour’s does to most people, although not perhaps to most astrophysicists, today. One way we could imagine the possible impact of Barbour’s theory on human life is to find out the impact it has already had on Barbour, who has been working on this idea for three and a half decades. He recently described how this idea has changed him on The Edge: ”What I feel for myself is that by concentrating on the things that we know are in the world, it makes one think about the actual world more, and I would say cherish it and value it more, and perhaps take a more relaxed attitude toward life and sit back and enjoy it more. I'm aware of savoring the moment more than I when I was young. And it's partly influenced by my idea that really the universe is static, and the only things that are real are Nows, in one of which we now are.It’s not too much of a stretch, I don’t think, to believe that the world outlook described by Barbour could one day link up with, or help to create, a global citizenship consciousness that channels the energies released by individual contemplation on the real nature of the universe, into political and social groupings similarly based on the real. That is, not based on superstitions or hijacked theologies and rabid ideologies, but rather, extending the Enlightenment project, based on the way things really are. Which could only be for the good, right? Just some thoughts.
2.14.2003
GLOBAL CITIZEN THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: In the past 24 hours, two small words have perfectly crystallized for millions of Americans the idea of global interconnection, the notion that what happens halfway around the world vitally affects us here within our borders. They've brought to each of us with a stunning concreteness how practical, and even lifesaving, it would be to know more about the people and cultures who live in faraway lands. Because to know about the world far from our shores would erase the necessity of using these two words, whose inherent absurdity evokes our visceral fright. For once, the ideal of global citizenship doesn't seem so dreamy, thanks to the gut punch delivered by that ridiculous canard, duct tape.
TONY BLAIR & IMMANUEL KANT: Jason Cowley recently started off an essay in The New Statesman last year with two quotes, one from Immanuel Kant and one from Tony Blair, as follows:
"All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through the common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically." -- Immanuel Kant, 1784 "Round the world, 11 September is bringing governments and people to reflect, consider and change. There is a coming together. The power of community is asserting itself. I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in." -- Tony Blair, 2001Is there progress and direction in history? Can war really, through some paradox, bring nations closer and make the world safer? Kant thought so; it seems Blair thinks so too. We'd better hope they're right or, as a second best option, just work hard as hell as if we did.
"WE REALLY NEED THIS INSTITUTION:" The Bush administration's position on the United Nations, like on so many things, is bullying. One minute they cite a breach of UN Resolution 1441 as the casus belli for war, the next minute they say "Let the UN prove that it's still relevant in this world." They show little concern for the UN's weakness, to the point of possible fracture, over the French and German reticence on the war. On Charlie Rose this week Tom Friedman came to the UN's defense:
If you care about the United Nations, Saddam has been a serial violator of UN resolutions going back 12 years. I think there is an argument that says if we walk away from this, after this latest crescendo, I believe it will do serious damage to the UN. And we need the UN more than ever. We need it, the united states, in order to in some ways cushion our power in the worold, by buffering it in UN resolutions. And I believe the French and the Russians and the Chinese need the UN more than ever to manage our power and to create a certain international forum as a counterweight to it. We really need this institution. I’d hate to see it broken over Saddam Hussein.In the same interview Friedman made this point: I’m very troubled when I hear someone who I take very seriously like Secretary of State Colin Powell saying that the latest Bin Laden tape, because it calls for Muslims in Iraq to rise up against an American invasion, proves somehow conclusively that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are in cahoots, that Al Qaeda is tied in with Iraq, and they are all behind 9/11. I don’t think it proves any such thing and I find it both insulting and disturbing that this administration is trying to stretch the truth. If we are going to go to war, we’ve got to know exactly why we are going to war. We cannot lie to our people, we cannot lie to the world, we cannot lead in the world by making false connections and claims, or at least claims where there is no hard evidence.he said this, which, obvious though it is, is refreshing to hear so bluntly stated: I don’t think [this admistration} is very good at diplomacy. I think they don’t have a lot of patience for it. Their impulse is to order people around. Their impulse is not basically to embrace others and sit down and listen to what other people have to say.
2.13.2003
A NEW REALISM, PLEASE: Living overseas for a decade, during which time I lived in Japan, England, and China, left me with a taste for realism that I did not have when I left American shores as an unconscious liberal. By that I mean, I was a person who had unconsciously imbibed the liberalism espoused by the two American institutions that had shaped me as a thinking being to that point -- the educational system and the mainstream media. The third thing to shape me as a serious thinking person was travel, which showed me the reality of the world, as opposed to reality as seen through the lens of a badly flawed philosophical system. So realism, therefore, is one thing that appeals to me greatly in conservative thought. For example, I find little to argue with in this summation by Mark Steyn about why it’s a good thing to kill Saddam (the full interview is here):
The best reason to hang Saddam is pour encourager les autres. If he gets off, the North Koreans and Syrians and the more devious princes in the House of Saud will draw entirely reasonable conclusions about their freedom to operate.In China there is a saying, "Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys." It's often used to justify capital punishment and the practice of jailing a few dissidents to keep a whole population in check. Say what you will, it works, and it's the way of the world in the vast majority of the world. Its brutal effectiveness should be acknowledged if not, in every case, embraced. And yet I disagree very much with Steyn’s next conclusion, which he provides in answer to the question, “What will be the consequence to the UN, if the U.S. invades Iraq without getting UN approval?" The UN will survive but it will be greatly diminished, which will be a good thing. I don't want it involved in the war, or in the post-war reconstruction.I suppose that logically, realism connects these two positions. Still, because I believe that a supranational body enforcing global policies and laws will be needed to make the world work in the 21st century, I’d like to imagine, or to create, or to see created, a new form of realism that allows the wisdom of Steyn’s first conclusion, but that disallows his second.
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: I spent some time yesterday at The Edge. What an inspiring web site this is. What strikes me the most, as I read through the ideas and proposals and dreams of scientist after scientist, is how boldly imaginative they are. Today there are scientists exploring biological science that would eradicate horrible diseases and even (and this is slightly scary I agree) the aging process itself. Cosmologists are studying the first microsecond of the universe with objectively testable means. What's more, on this site, scientists are sharing their ideas and findings with others from around the globe. They are making full use of new technologies of communication and travel to maximize collaborative opportunity. My question is this: why can't a similarly high level of creative imagination take place in the realms of politics and civic life? Why, in these areas, do we continue to be bogged down in stupid old rivalries, polarizing and reductivist cliches, and motivated by nothing more transcendent than the ancient motivators of greed and fear? When things get to a final point of frustration, why do we seem to leave ourselves no option but raising the blunt instrument of war? To some degree, this boils down to a lack of leadership. Even in science, it's the leaders who lead the way. Not every researcher at the scientific bench thinks thoughts that in their dazzling brilliance pull the rest of us towards it in curiosity and wonder. Why are there no people like this in politics and civic life? Where are the visionaries of global civic life and peace and cooperation? I like to quote the astronauts because from the vantage point of their orbiting aeries, global citizenship snaps into view with stunning clarity. Ditto the earthbound scientists whose dreams take us all into new realms of exploration that keep us deeply committed to the living substrate that is our platform, our foundation, for all of our outward searching. We need to find, somehow, similar wellsprings of inspiration and desire for life -- for the life of us all on this earth -- amid the clatter of teacups and shouts of children, which is to say, within our ordinary daily lives. Which are not -- not even a little bit -- ordinary. Maybe drilling deeper into this area, somehow, could be the basis for an emergent global consciousness.
EVERY MAN A GAZILLIONAIRE: In Bush's vision of the American economy, every last truck driver and bricklayer and shoeshiner is a Bill Gates in the making. That's cruel and unusual and is so totally unmoored from reality that it makes you wonder. The "you can be whoever you want to be" speech that W no doubt got from his Pa has nothing to do with the real possibilities that life affords to Everyman in America. Thus to use it on the stump is cynical in the extreme. Bush's facial expressions when he invoke this dream makes me doubt that he even believes it himself. More important, setting forth the dream of untold riches taps not into fundamental humane values -- like hard work, dedication to family and community, and helping the less fortunate. Rather it appeals to greed and dreams of glory -- to the vain hope of winning the lottery. Boiled down, Bush's latest speech on the American economy says: "You too can own lots of stocks in big companies and get rich from dividend tax relief!" That's no way to get the best from people. Just the opposite. It's just sickening.
WHOSE JOB IS IT, ANYWAY? Christopher Hitchens makes the point, in this interview, that there doesn't need to be a proved link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The main reason he sites is that Saddam has violated the convention against genocide and therefore should be punished. So far, so good. Great idea. Sound idea. My only problem is that Bush is stepping forward to say the U.S. has appointed itself the world's enforcer of supranational law. Yet in so many other areas -- the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations, on and on and on -- the Bush administration has demonstrated no serious interest in helping to build a binding regime of international policies and laws. So why should we believe in his sudden conversion to this cause, in the case of Iraq? Isn't it obvious he's just citing the ideal of international justice in this particular case, because it's convenient? As soon as committment to this transcendant principle proves to be an impediment, out it will go. Just like the administration's basic position on the United Nations and Iraq: we're going to bomb Iraq because it's violated UN Resolution 1441. But if the UN fails to bless our chosen mode of punishment for violating that resolution, we're going to bomb anyway. Maybe Hitchens considers this a small point, i.e. that the larger good of eradicating Saddam overrides logical inconsistencies in Presidential demagoguery. He speaks later in the interview of the need for "a decent respectful hypocrisy and diplomacy" in these matters. Also he said admiringly of the Bush crew, "They are deadly serious about winning this war and are willing to be ruthless about it." So I suppose he would call my point a small one. But I haven't yet given up hope that principles and actions be aligned in the person of the President. Call me hopeless. So I remain bugged.
HITCHENS ON ISRAEL: It's just an answer to one question in the long interview mentioned just above, but it's an essay by itself:
There’s a flaw in Zionism. To me, it doesn’t solve the question of international Jewish vulnerability. Go back to the Balfour Declaration, which created Israel. The idea was, wouldn’t it be great to have a separate ghetto for the Jews? And it has this messianic quality as well, about bringing on the Messiah, which is why the Christian fascists like it. But when you’ve said all that you can against the project, you have to admit a lot of states are founded on dispossession of others. The Israelis are wrong to deny that they’ve inflicted injustice on the Palestinians. But can we allow it to be overborne by a revival of the Islamic empire? I wouldn’t want to see that.He sure got that right.
A NEW CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK: It's America's Future Foundation. I am simultenously admiring and puzzled by these young men and women who determinedly delve with high seriousness into the philosophical basis of our public life. It's a whole lot more instructive and inspiring and disciplined than anything I see on the liberal side, with only occasional exceptions. The Claremont Review of Books and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research are other outfits of similar ilk. At the latter, writers like Myron Magnet, Abigail Thernstrom, and Heather Mac Donald merge ideological committment with rational research and ethical journalism to a degree that's totally lacking in the commercial media. Three cheers! At the same time, I'm put off by the defensiveness, the huffy indignation, and the quaking anger that sometimes spews from these conservative founts. I know there is plenty to be angry about, what with the ridiculous crap that mindless liberalism has foisted on us all, sometimes mediated through the intellectually and morally corrupt university system, sometimes through the mainstream media, and so on. Yet conservative reaction at times is so emotional as to be irrational, it seems to me, and obstructively so. The other day on C-SPAN, for example, I saw a group of young conservatives -- John Fund, Michelle Malkin, and Grover Norquist -- discuss U.S. immigration policy. The emotion in the air was so thick and black it was hard at times to focus on what was being said. Grover Norquist at one point used the word "obscene" to describe a racist passage in a speech by FDR -- and promptly burst into tears. At this point, half the audience rose from their seats and applauded him wildly. John Fund endlessly baited and mocked an audience member who was asking him tough questions that challenged his immigration views. Fund, the interlocutor, and suddenly the emcee were all simultaneously grabbing for the nearest microphone and clamorously yelling "Let's have some civility here! Civility! Civility!" Michelle Malkin's speech was so angry and bitter I wondered what had left her so personally wounded and vengeful at such a young age? I mean, we are all suffering after 9/11. And the immigration situation in the United States is definitely dangerous, and unfair to immigrants as well as to citizens. So it needs repair. But there's something missing in the total conservative package that will make the task of repair more difficult than it needs to be. I believe the missing thing has something to do -- as long as we are searching for foundational principles here -- with understanding the essential qualities of true civility, of genuine compassion, and of real security.
ORWELL RIGHT OR WRONG? Louis Menand's infamous New Yorker essay on George Orwell, in which he informed that magazine's rich white liberal audience that George Orwell is not a proper liberal God, is right here. Now Leon Wieseltier has weighed in with a heavy counterattack. Should a person ever commit to a moral absolute? Or should one always hold back, fearing the fanaticism that could follow? Wieseltier is disgusted (his word) by Menand’s condescension towards anyone who believes in anything so quaint as objective truth or moral certainty. A typical stinging passage:
All certainty is like all other certainty, its content is insignificant, all that matters are its consequences. Menand has risen above substance. He is indifferent, and afraid. His fear is understandable: When one has renounced the inquiry into truth and falsity, certainty must seem terrifying. Every conviction must look like an absolute. And so he notes that "in defining the United States as a civilization in opposition to militant Islam, even President Bush found himself, in his speech before Congress right after the attacks, explaining that moral certainty is precisely what makes the enemy so dangerous." Do you follow? A war against jihad is itself a jihad. There is no distinction between a just war and a holy war. What a haul of irony!Don’t miss the rest. Wieseltier is the best liberal demolisher there is of the nonsense postmodernism that was hatched on college campuses, then used as multiculturalism's ideology. "There is no such thing as objective truth." My ass! (Objective if not pretty.)
2.12.2003
WHAT GETS ON PAGE ONE: When I was a reporter at The New York Times, I always knew one thing that would get a story of mine on page one without fail. Namely, if I could put the words "$100 million," or any number north of that amount, in the lead. What does that say about the news values of American journalism? This piece from Norman Solomon suggests an answer.
A SECOND YACHT FOR ALL THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE ONE: Fifteen economists, including ten with Nobels, explain why the dividend tax cut proposal is nonsense. Or listen to several of the economists explaining their positions in passionate detail right here.
2.11.2003
MOVING FROM LAND TO SPACE: Three beautiful paragraphs from Timothy Ferris on why space seems to us like our destiny (the full NYT piece here):
Watching the shuttle go over can make you feel like a savage seeing a ship. It's not terribly far away, typically less than 200 miles high. As Isaac Asimov used to say, you could drive the family car to space in an afternoon, if the car could go straight up. Yet, it's in space. The shuttle astronauts see Earth as it is, just one small planet. They see the atmosphere for what it is, a fragile membrane no thicker, relative to the planet, than the skein of tears that a blink bestows on the eye. And they float, weightless, like fish in the sea or an embryo in the womb. They may be "coasting," like the mariners of old who cautiously kept within sight of land, but the transition they are making could prove to be as epochal as the one that transpired when life first ventured out of the oceans onto land.
ANTI-WAR DOGGEREL: Just got this e-mail from a friend in Hong Kong with carats (those > thingies) suggesting that it's been bouncing around the world:
If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.Clever and too close for comfort.
WHY THE SHUTTLE?: The British cosmologist Martin Rees explains on The Edge that to explore is human:
The British I recall attending a lecture given, back in the 1960s, by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. A questioner asked him what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blastoff. He wryly replied "I was thinking that the rocket had twenty thousand components, and each was made by the lowest bidder".
IRAQ'S TIES TO BIN LADEN: Can't get any clearer than this. It's proved now beyond a shadow of a doubt. At the same time, a couple of points. First, this is clearly a case of Bin Laden's opportunism, and not of any pre-planned arrangement between himself and Saddam. Indeed in his audiotape message, Saddam pointedly states his solidarity with the Muslims of Iraq and not with Saddam. And second, just as clearly, this would not be happening if it weren't for America's drive towards war with Saddam. If a dirty bomb goes off in Minneapolis or Atlanta or Seattle this week, it's because our administration drew Al Qaeda into the fight with Iraq, just as we drew Bin Laden to the microphone once again. There are dark days ahead. We'll be lucky to avoid another disaster on American shores. There's no question America will survive; and probably there is no question that in the long run, Al Qaeda will be crushed. But there is a question as to the cost. And also to whether the American public will forgive George Bush for having pushed the battle so hard that it brought mass death once again, possibly, to our shores.
2.9.2003
IRAQ'S TIES TO TERRORISM: If you're looking for one article on this subject, here's the one. Bottom line: The evidence is thin, but what's there is verified and troubling. Saddam is as wary of freelance terrorists as he is of anyone else outside of his control. Yet he always keeps a few of them around on a short leash, as he did Abu Nidal, who lived in Baghdad until his death, likely ordered by Saddam, by gunshot wounds to the head last year. These stateless terrorists holed up in Baghdad are just another weapon in Saddam's arsenal, which he keeps around because they might be useful to him one day in attacking Iraqi enemies like Israel, Iran, or ... the United States.
2.8.2003
FOUR WAYS TO OBJECT: A useful axiom is, no war until the major objections are overruled. Here's a good framework from Donald Sensing to be sure all possible objections are considered.
PAGLIA VS SULLIVAN ON THE WAR: First read this stunning interview by Camille Paglia and then this rebuttal posted today by Andrew Sullivan:
[Paglia] certainly cannot be dismissed as a Bush-hating anti-American. Her argument, I think, is that war could inflame the Middle East and spawn even more Islamic fundamentalist terror. I think she's wrong. My own belief is that terror relies on Western passivity, and is galvanized by Western weakness. That's what the 1990s showed. But of course, war is awful, unpredictable and deeply dangerous. Her preferred option - giving inspectors months more time in order to get a global consensus - strikes me as naive. It assumes the good will of countries like France and Russia. I don't. And it assumes that we can somehow dampen Islamist extremism by inaction or soothing words. Sorry, but the 90s proved that strategy wrong. We ducked and weaved and appeased - and the threat merely grew. A climb-down now would do more to strengthen the Islamo-fascists than any war. In fact, it would unleash a wave of terror the like of which we have not yet seen.Now read this speech by General Anthony Zinni (retired) on U.S. military policy in the Middle East, and then this article by writer Charles Krauthammer called "Don't Go Wobbly." Okay, where do you stand on the war now?
2.7.2003
GLOBAL CITIZENS, LEND ME YOUR LINKS!
If you send me links with a global citizen angle, I'll print them here. I'd like to make the site a sounding board for ideas that relate to global citizenship. The idea is to share news and views and links on such questions as: What does it mean to be a global citizen? Is it or could it be anything more than an abstraction? What are the goals of global citizenship? What are the modes and varieties of global citizenship? Am I less of a national patriot if I consider myself a global citizen first? And what specific kinds of actions can I take to express myself as a global citizen? So any news, views, essays, tidbits or links on any of these questions, send them along and I'll compile and print them. Let's see what this baby can do ...
ONCE A DAY AS THE SUN RISES: I'm coming to grips with the blog format. A daily update is part of the gig. That’s obvious. You go back to a blog to answer the question “What did Reynolds find on the web today? What is Lileks thinking about today? Who or what is Sullivan attacking today?” Yet I’m not built like Instapundit, who’s got link-searching in his genes; nor like Lileks, who can write a beautiful phrase with every breath he takes; nor like Sullivan, a natural polemicist. So where’s my niche? I'll stick with global citizenship as a point of view as nobody, including me, is interested in my every random thought. But it takes me a long time to read, to digest, and to write. I agonize before pushing the “send” button, asking time and again, “Does the world really need one more wadge of words?” Then I realize that it’s not about any one particular wadge of words making any big difference. That’s the old model. The new model is: think things out the best you can, once a day as the sun rises, and share it.
2.5.2003
ON TO MARS SAYS CHARLES THE K: Charles Krauthammer says the problem with the space shuttle is that it doesn't aim high enough. The best bit:
The way to consecrate the memory of those noble souls on Columbia is not to mindlessly repeat the past 20 years but to rethink the whole enterprise. For now, we need to keep the shuttle going because we have no other way to get into space. And we'll need to support the space station for a few years, because we have no other program in place.
2.4.2003
A GLOBAL CITIZEN'S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (1): Because I'm working at home these days I've usually got CSPAN going in the background with the audio on low. Today I turned it up when the memorial service for the Columbia astronauts came on. It knocked me out. Even Bush the Younger outdid himself. He'd obviously worked hard to pronounce Kalpana Chawla's name in just the right Indian way: Kulpna Chavla.
For the first time since he became president, I was really proud of him. It was that kind of day. How had I forgotten how inspiring the NASA program is? How had I missed what incredible people these astronauts are? What great role models they are? How could I ever have forgotten the powerful perspective that space flight gives to humanity -- that from the viewpoint of space all mankind is one? And looking in the opposite direction, how obvious it is that there's something out there beyond the stars, some creator, some designer, some energy or intelligence or source that is awesome and generous and wise? Whatever it is, it made something out of nothing. What does any amount of our own genius as human beings amount to when compared to that? How arrogant are we to believe that any form of human inquiry can solve the ultimate questions? Maybe acknowledging that ultimate questions can never be answered -- or even that there are ultimate questions -- is the gateway to faith in a Creator that some of us are seeking. With the TV still going in the background, I jotted down these notes: "The memorial service today for the Columbia crew was beautiful. The families of the lost astronauts, sitting stoically in the folding chairs at the head of an enormous crowd, formed a perfect picture of loss fused with strength, heartbreak merged with resolve. The prayers read in Hebrew and English by Captain Harold Robinson were awesome. 'Eternal God, when we view our little planet from out in space we learn the unity of all humanity here on earth. We are one as you are one. Did you not teach us this from the very beginning?' The remembrances of each astronaut by Captain Kent Rominger, the chief of the astronaut staff, were especially moving. Astronaut Michael Anderson "was quiet except when asked about his family and his Porsche;" Laurel Clark “had a smile in her voice;” Kalpana Chawla "loved flying small airplanes with her husband and loved flying in space;" David Brown "loved cameras, and when he was filming folks he'd tell them 'Just act like a little brown squirrel;" Ilan Ramon wrote an e-mail from the shuttle saying “the quiet that envelops space only makes its beauty more powerful;” William McCool "enjoyed surprising people with flowers and Hawaiin leis;" and the sometimes whimsical Commander Rick Husband’s favorite saying was “You know, I feel more now like I did than when I first got here.” The one thing that shined through each brief portrait: these people, all so calm outwardly, vibrated inwardly with a passion for God and mystery and humanity that fueled their flight to the stars. “If something happens on this mission, don’t worry about me,” astronaut Michael Anderson said. “I’m just going on higher.” There’s the fearlessness of faith, the fire of curiosity. What things we have to learn, as individuals and as a nation, from these people! Fly upwards in joy and pray for all of us still here, brave seven."
2.3.2003
A GLOBAL CITIZEN'S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (2): They were Kalpana Chawla from India and Ilan Ramon from Israel. However, Chawla told the India Times in an interview from the shuttle:
“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” Seeing things this way is like a potential solvent, it seems to me, of entrenched nationalist hatreds, of corrosive over-identification with race and religion and all the rest. It seems good to think of oneself as coming not from Pakistan or the Fiji Islands but from here.
2.2.2003
THE DAY AFTER: I'll remember what Sen. Bill Nelson (Dem-FL) said on Larry King last night:
"We are a nation of explorers and adventurers, and if we ever give that up we become a second-rate nation. That's why it's so important we keep doing this."Also I'll remember the advice Laurel Clark's mother gave, in a press conference on her front lawn last night, to any young girl or boy who might be scared away from space flight after yesterday's tragedy: "Don't give up the dream."
2.1.2003
A GLOBAL CITIZEN'S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (1): When Laurel Clark woke up this morning to the sound of bagpipes coming over the shuttle's intercom, she said:
"Hearing that sound reminds me of all the different places down there on earth, and all the friends I have around the world." Ilan Ramon, in the Columbia crew's last press conference from space, said: "The world looks marvelous from up here. Flying over Israel, it looks so calm, so nice. It makes you wish that in Israel and the Middle East one day we can have the quiet and the peace we see up here, down there." Kalpana Chawla, during the same press conference, said: “The most amazing part of being in space is to stand by a window just after sunset and watch the stars in the big flat dome of the sky as the earth moves underneath. We had the full moon when we launched and there were several occasions when the whole spaceship was glowing in a silver light from the moon. You felt you were in a spaceship heading somewhere. Now that the moon is not full, we’ve been able to get some magnificent views of the Milky Way. The very first time I saw the Milky Way, it looked like a silver dust cloud. I said to my fellow crew members, “Hey, look, what is this?” And we were all saying “It could be this, it could be that.” It took us a couple of days to realize that “Oh, wow, that’s the Milky Way. It overpowers the rest of the sky which is very dark.” And Laurel Clark said: “I saw the orbiter as the sun rose and there was a flash, and the whole payload bay turns a beautiful rose orange pink, it only lasts for about 58 seconds, and it's very ethereal and beautiful and unexpected." As she was conducting her biological experiments, “I saw that our roses had opened, and it was so magical to have roses blossoming here in space. And one of the silkworm cocoons was also just opening, just puffing out. Life continues and life is a magical thing.”
 
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