January 4, 2017--It's Culture, Stupid

Some friends have poked me for not continuing to write about why Hillary Clinton lost the election and what that might say more generally about the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party.

It is not that I have lost interest in the subject, just that I needed a break from that depressing subject.

All the while, during that break, friends continued to attack the Trump presidency even before it commences. There is a lot to be depressed about, friends say, and I half agree.

To prove their point about how dire and scary things are, they tell me how Steve Bannon is hovering and as Trump sinks further into Alzheimer's (some very smart people I know have come to that diagnosis to explain his contradictory behavior) Bannon is itching to "run the show." Sort of like Edith Wilson, after her husband Woodrow had a debilitating stroke, in charge of things during the final years of his presidency. But of course times were simpler then and much less dangerous. North Korea, for example, did not have a nuclear arsenal and a certifiably unstable Supreme Leader threatening to unleash it.

So here goes--one more attempt to explain what happened in the last election and why Clinton and other Democrats were overwhelmed. Yes, I know she won the popular vote by a wide margin, but still Trump will be the one inaugurated in two weeks.

The excuse-makers continue to point to FBI director Comey's two letters about Hillary's emails and more ominously, the effects of the Russians hacking Democratic National Committee's emails.

Neither helped, but even if that hadn't happened Hillary still would have lost in the Electoral College.

Less conspiratorial-minded progressive analysts have come to conclude, as James Carville quotably did during the 1992 election that, "It's the economy, stupid."

Under ordinary circumstances, national elections are about the economy. Particularly how people view their own economic circumstances. This time around, to the struggling majority, things did not look so good.

But as I try to understand what happened, as powerful as economic issues were and continue to be, the reason Democrats have fared so poorly since 1980 when the Reagan era commenced is that more than the economy It's about culture, stupid.

Yes there were eight years of Clinton's presidency and another eight with Barack Obama in the White House, but that masked the political churning going on at the same time below the surface at the state and congressional levels where election-by-election Republicans won more-and-more governorships, congressional seats, and pulled off an astonishing gain of 900 local legislative seats. The latter, all during Obama's time in office.

By culture I am not thinking now about the Culture Wars that have been simmering and at times raging since at least Reagan times. Combatants fought about flag burning, prayer in school, creationism in the curriculum, same-sex marriage, abortion, bias in the media, climate change, science itself.

At the moment, many of these battles have been muted and a few even resolved. Same-sex marriage is now constitutionally protected with an astonishing 70 percent of Americans believing people should be able to marry who they love. And those who want their children to pray in school either have enrolled them in religious institutions or are homeschooling them.

This is not so say that what has divided us in this war has either gone away or been abandoned. I am suggesting that the worst of it may be over and yet a cultural divide continues to exist, even widen. I see this to be a cultural alienation that derives from socioeconomic and geographic causes.

To use Carville's rubric again, "It's the elites, stupid."

In this view, the heart of the cultural problem it's how the professional class, made up mainly of affluent progressives and Democrats, has distanced itself from any empathetic contact with struggling, less educated, less successful working people, except when they encounter them as patients, viewers, readers, clients, constituents, customers, recruits, students, or miscreants. And how it is primarily through these encounters that the liberal elites communicate their disdain for the needs and what they see to be in the supposed best interests of those beneath them on the meritocratic scale.

It is at these times when we professionals say or imply that, "We know better than you what's good for you."

This ranges from claiming to know what your children should learn (Common Core), how you are to receive health care (Obamacare), how you should gather the news (CNN and New York Times), what sports teams to root for (Yankees and Steelers), how much you should weigh, even what you should eat (anything that includes kale).

In all of this, too many professionals evince a form of moral superiority that "average" people feel as criticism and even condemnation.

This election cycle they finally said, ENOUGH. You're not going to tell us who to vote for. In fact, to assert that we will not be politically intimidated, we're going to vote for and elect, from your smug point of view, the most preposterous orange-faced candidate ever. And in this, rather than being offended by his vulgarity and sexism, they flung it back at us as if to assert their own imperviousness, basking reciprocally in his politically incorrect "inappropriateness."

It was a year of in-your-face and f-you.

As evidence of how culture of this kind is playing itself out politically, look at the map of where Duck Dynasty is viewers' favorite TV show.

                                      

It is also a map of Donald Trump's America.

And, as with Duck Dynasty itself, watching it, embracing it and its values is one more way ignored Americas are expressing their anger, culture, and power.

F-us indeed.

August 4, 2014--The War Against Culture

This is not a culture war as we in the United States know it. It's not about matters such as same-sex marriage or if evolution should be taught in public schools. Our culture "wars" seem trivial in comparison to what is being fought over in the center of Iraq.

There, in Mosul, in the country's second-largest city, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has seized control and is imposing strict Islamic law--sharia. ISIS is also waging war on culture itself, on history, and on people's identity.

The headlines have been about ISIS extracting vengeance against the Shiites who are their historic enemies. How they have been rounding up and summarily executing anyone with the taint of having served in or supported the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

All of this is sadly familiar. What is different is that ISIS is deliberately and systematically obliterating everything that makes Mosul Mosul and everything that connects the people there to their 8,000-year history and culture.

Mosul is one of the most ancient of cities and was once the capital of the Assyrian Empire. For centuries, at the crossroads between East and West, it was fought over and conquered in turn by the Persians, Arabs, Turks, and others, all of whom left evidence of their occupation.

Now ISIS has seized control and rather than adding their imprint to this cultural mix they are doing all in their power to obliterate all evidence of the past, especially destroying any Assyrian, Jewish, Christian, and even every Islamic shrine, the presence of which, according to their beliefs, are heretical.

Thus far they have leveled statues of Abu Tammam, a revered Arab poet, and Mullah Othman, a famous and popular 19th century musician and poet. And they have driven all Christians from the city, obliterating their holy places or forcing their conversion to ISIS's form of Islam. A form so severe that even Al-Qaeda has denounced them.

They also destroyed the grave site and shrine to the prophet Jonah whose life story plays a prominent part in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Residents fear that ISIS is planning to tear down and reduce to rubble the city's ancient leaning minaret. It is older than the Leaning Tower of Pisa and its image is represented on Iraq's 10,000 dinar bank note.

    Wrecked grave site of the biblical prophet Jonah

When ISIS militants entered Mosul in June, government troops stripped off their uniforms, threw away their arms, and attempted to blend into the civilian population for at least two reasons--to save their lives and because they felt that ISIS rule would be less oppressive than that imposed by the Maliki regime.

But with their history and culture imperiled, according to the New York Times, resistance to ISIS has emerged and Mosul residents, taking up arms, are coming forward to resist further desecration of their historical and religious shrines.

This is a reminder that culture trumps politics and economics every time.

There is a lesson here for those of us who, above all else, believe in reason and are reluctant to see the geopolitical force of emotion and belief. And thus we frequently fail to understand the power of culture.

Belief systems, history, national narratives, language, customs, arts, collective memory are more powerful than flatscreen TVs, Nikes, or iPhones.

OK, maybe not iPhones.

February 11, 2014--Again Mommy, Again

Some years ago I listened in as my New Jersey sister-in-law read a story to her four-year-old daughter.

What struck me was not so much the story--I think a weasel was prominently featured--but the rapt attention my niece paid to it. Also, though she could not as yet read, she appeared to be mouthing all the words. Clearly she had heard the story before. Certainly, many times to be able to lip-sink it so seamlessly.

And then at the end, I was fascinated to hear her say, "Again, mommy, again." At which time her mother without a shrug or sigh, read it again. And again. And then again. By which time my niece was fighting to fend off sleep.

That contributed to my lifelong interest in stories. Not just my loving to listen to them, or telling them, or attempting to write them, but by the seemingly universal interest all peoples have in stories. More fundamentally, appear to need them. Perhaps particularly those they have heard before like my niece, many, many times.

Can you name one society, one culture, one tribe--pre-historic, ancient, or contemporary--that does not depend upon stories? Not just for pleasure, not just for tribal or communal bonding, but perhaps even for survival.

Because if stories are so ubiquitous in evolutionary terms they must be "adaptive," which means they are needed for species survival. Equally as important as food, language, music, belief systems (which all have stories at their heart), rituals, mores, and social arrangements.

If true, all humans have, actually must have the same propensity, the same, may I say, biological need for stories as my four-year-old New Jersey niece.

Some claim that we shape our sense of personhood by the stories we tell and exhibit about ourselves. We shape into stories experiences for the purpose of sculpting a Self. There is no Self possible, it is thought, if one does not do this. There is no reality about ourselves except that which we create in this story-generating way.

Since post-modernists assert that reality is socially constructed--and not discoverable in any absolute way and then passed along as Truth--to me a persuasive contention--this fits the notion that we each socially construct who we are. Stories are the warp and weft of that life-long effort.

My earliest experience with this transformative, self-building process--beyond the stories my mother must have read to me that I was too young to recall--were the accounts of adventures my Cousin Chuck pursued as much for the stories he made of them as the adventures themselves.

There was one time when he and I camped overnight in a state park in the Catskills. I was a cub scout and knew about making fires and pitching a tent. He knew about neither. In fact, he was the least out-of-doors-oriented person I knew. To him, the out-of-doors was the neighborhood schoolyard. But he insisted on going camping.

So my father drive us to the site, said his goodbyes, wished us well, and said he'd be back for us in the morning.

I pitched a tent by myself, having sent Chuck out to gather firewood. He asked if he could have my cub scout knife in case he needed to defend himself.

I told him there were no bears for at least 20 miles but to indulge him and to get him out of the way so I could pitch the tent without his interference, I gave him the knife.

He returned after 15 minutes with a few twigs and branches. Barely enough for me to heat up the baked beans and grill the hot dogs my mother had packed for us.

As only beans and frankfurters cooked and eaten in the woods can taste, we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner, scattered the embers, slid into our sleeping bags, and proceeded to sleep like proverbial logs.

My father arrived right on time and found us packed and ready to go.

On the way home, during that 45 minutes, Chuck, in response to my father asking how we did, told a story, created a story worthy of James Fenimore Cooper. How the evening began with his struggle to subdue a grizzly bear that had penetrated out campsite and attempted to steal our food and how, after driving the bear back into the woods, we were attacked by swarms of bats and later lay awake all night listening to the howls of a nearby wolf, Chuck ever on-guard, protecting me, his younger cousin, with his 12-inch Bolo knife.

And then when we got back to the house the family was renting, my Dad had him tell the story over and over again to assorted cousins and aunts and uncles who had gathered for the weekend.

By the fifth telling, every one of which I listened to and savored, the one bear had become three, the lone wolf had become a pack, and his knife had grown to 14 inches.

This story lives on in family lore though Chuck prematurely departed this life. It not only reflects the self Chuck constructed but also has helped define our larger family. In the alchemic possibilities of America (also largely created through a national narrative more fiction than fact), we transformed ourselves from shtetl Jews into full-blooded Americans. Eager to take on whatever came our way. To become who we wanted to be. To become how we defined ourselves largely through our shape-shifting stories.

This all reminds me of Woody Allen's joke at the end of Annie Hall--

A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, "Hey doc, my bother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken!" 

Then the doc says, "Why don't you turn him in?" 

Then the guy says, "I would, but we need the eggs."

Indeed, we need the eggs.