The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: politics

  • The true America-haters

    I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time, but it turns out that Cenk Uygur got there first and said it well: The people in power, who wrap themselves in the flag, don’t really love America. They don’t even understand America — and so, not understanding it, they hate it. They hate it virulently and passionately, with all their might and will. They wish it would go away, revert to an ordinary nation. They identify America with the patch of land it happens to occupy, but they don’t grasp the true identity of America as a beacon of human dignity and freedom. Freedom offends them, unless it’s carefully circumscribed so that only the “right people” have a say.

    Here’s where he hits it dead-center:

    I mean that they philosophically never bought into the concept behind the country. America isn’t a bunch of rocks that happen to be on a certain longitude and latitude. America isn’t a bunch of people who happen to live in certain states between 1776 and 2007. America is a noble and grand idea. And it is that idea the Dick Cheneys of the world work hard to tear down every day. It is that idea that they do not trust, do not believe in and that they commit ideological treason against.

    I know that, in the next two years, there will sadly be reason to revisit and resay these fundamental truths. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one out there seeing and saying them.

  • Where’s Our Rosie?

    For no particular good reason, I was trawling on the Net about Rosie the Riveter, an icon from World War II. If you don’t know about Rosie, you really should check out the Wikipedia article. Another good page on Rosie can be found at the eponymous website. I’ve always liked Rosie because she represented not only American can-do spirit but — perhaps without anyone realizing it at the time — she pointed to a time when the United States would more fully live up to the ideals it claimed to be fighting for. I am always fascinated with what I call the “Gorbachev paradox”, when cynical leaders conscript high-sounding and idealistic words to cloak their pragmatic and sometimes nefarious deeds… and then get hoist up on those same words, forced to live up to them by people who’ve had the gall to actually believe the noble sentiments.
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  • Cross-comment: Does the Left “Hate” America?

    Through the Daou Report, I wandered (against my better judgment) over to Dr. Sanity to read the post “Go Wide Mr. President“. Then I read the comments and I was shocked to see something I actually agreed with, posted by someone named GnuCarSmell replying to someone named Garry:

    You have it exactly right. It is literally impossible for the jihadists to defeat America in Iraq (or anywhere else) and they know it. It is possible, however, for us to surrender. An American defeat can only be self-inflicted.

    Totally. We can only lose in the struggle against terrorism if we surrender… if we surrender our history, if we surrender our decency, if we surrender our fundamental rights and our habits of freedom. We can lose only if we parlay a losing war of choice (launched under false pretenses) into an epic struggle of us against everyone. We can lose only if we give up our history of tolerance and tradition of fair play.

    If Iraq is “the central front in the war on terror”, it is only because President Bush made it so. And if we are losing, it is only because he and his cronies completely flubbed the war they chose. The left doesn’t “hate America”. We hate seeing America made over into less than it should be, we hate seeing American soldiers squandering their lives on a war we didn’t have to fight and which our “leaders” chose to fight poorly. We hate seeing the future of our country, in a genuinely dangerous century, being decided by ideologues with willful blinders on, people who can’t “go wide” because they can’t see the imbraglio they caused without reason or justification.

    Hate America? If we hated America, we’d be cheering on the Rabid Right as it paves our way to destruction…

  • Health of the Republic down 3.3%, to 30%

    After hearing that the President of the United States has asserted his untrammeled power to read even physical mail, without warrant or other legal constraint, I have decided to move the Health of the Republic bar to 30%. It’s only a 3% shift because in the end this is only slightly more outrageous than the earlier warrantless wiretapping to which the President has already admitted. Also, today, the Democrats return to the majority and, perhaps, oversight returns to Washington.

  • Congress, the Koran, and Oaths

    So for about a month there’s been a tempest-in-a-teapot “raging” over the decision by newly elected Democratic Representative Keith Ellison to use a Koran in his private swearing-in ceremony. Some loudmouths, including Rep. Virgil Goode, have decried this and insisted that Mr. Ellison use the same traditional book as all previous representatives, to wit, the good old Christian Bible. Never mind that Mr. Ellison is a practicing Muslim. Never mind that there are as many “one true Bibles” as there are sects of Christianity. Never mind that no representative swears on a Bible — they take the public oath in, well, public and without swearing on any book. (Mr. Ellison plans to use the Koran at the also-traditional, private photogenic ceremony.)

    But according to The Washington Post, Mr. Ellison’s gone one further: He’s requested (and been granted) that the Library of Congress loan him a special Koran — one owned by Thomas Jefferson. How’s that for polishing the symbolism? On issues of faith and politics there are few sources more hallowed than Jefferson. Take that, Virgil Goode!

    This does raise an important question, almost unthinkable a few short years ago: What if the Democrats are finally learning how to play the symbolism game on par with the Republicans? What if the Democrats stop automatically yielding the photogenic spotlight and the symbolic high ground? What if — Heaven astound us — the Democrats have learned to deal with matters of faith in public? Can you even imagine an America where the religious right has lost its default supremacy, where the symbolism tactics cancel out and people are forced to start talking about, you know, the issues again?

    That could well be the best gift Mr. Ellison could give his country.

  • Saddan is Dead: Can We Go Home Now?

    Today, Iraqui President and dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging after a conviction for atrocities committed in his name. Before going any further, let me clarify something so willfully obscured by some commentators on the right: Saddam Hussein was a Very Bad Man. He did terrible things and — while I am myself still uncertain of the ethics of state executions — he did receive a trial and was executed according to the laws of his nation. Opposition to this administration’s policies is not equivalent to admiring Hussein.

    All of which is prologue to the following: Now that George W. Bush has seen the conclusion of the twisted pyscho-drama that has occupied his presidency, will he now be able to cope, mentally, with the fact that the United States must move expeditiously to withdraw from Iraq?
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  • Death and The Pardon

    It was announced yesterday (2006 Dec 27) that Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States, passed away at the age of 93. I will admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for the Ford presidency, derided in popular culture as one of the least effective in history. I generally root for the underdog, so I was once in the habit of quoting the stats that showed how Ford had begun to get the economy back in motion, had begun the rebuilding of American military strength after the Viet Nam debacle, and so on. I still think Ford deserves more credit for doing a difficult, almost impossible, task and doing it with some grace. Also, Ford was perhaps the last of the civil service Presidents: someone who saw government as part of the solution and not a problem in itself; someone who thought that the greatest calling for a citizen is to serve his fellow citizens.

    On the other hand…
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  • Review: Interface

    Interface
    by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George
    (c) 1994
    Bantam Dell

    InstaRating: 3.5 out of 5
    An experimental biochip is implanted in a governor of Illinois after he suffers a massive stroke. Its stated purpose is to repair the connections in his brain, giving him access to speech and motor skills again. Unknown to many, the chip also gives him access to up-to-the-second live polling data, making him an unstoppable Presidential candidate. But more than that — the chip gives a shadowy network of power-brokers access to him — making him their perfect candidate…

    Lots of spoilers follow.

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  • Politics and Teaching

    So, Election Day has come and gone. I took time to talk about it in each of my classes today — and yes, I know I teach physics; more on that later — and I thought I’d ruminate some here. Full disclaimer: I am a lifelong Democrat who had been reasonably certain they’d find a way to screw it up yet again. (Who knew they could make Kerry disappear?) And I am ecstatic over the triumph of the Democrats in both the House and the Senate. But this isn’t a victory lap. It’s about politics and teaching.
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  • From 2001 October 7: I Want to Speak Now

    2001 October 7:

    I want to speak now.

    I have wanted to speak since September 11. The words would not come. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was, almost literally, unthinkable. And language is the substrate of thought. Scholars have often claimed that what you cannot say, you cannot think. I have learned, a little, that the opposite is true.

    The terrorists committed crimes on so many levels, it staggers the mind: on the global and personal level; publicly and intimately; on the field of history and transcending history. One more can be added to their list of offenses: They took away our voice. For too many days we as a people lost our voice. We were silent in shock or quiet from deference. We remained still because we had lost our confidence, our unspoken faith in a world that rewarded virtue and understood human frailties. We had our universe of discourse, our common cultural dictionary, ripped from us violently and tossed upon the dustbin of history.

    I want to speak now.
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