In other words...

Rereading my last post made me realize that I may need to tweak my approach to writing. I appear to be long on ambition and short on pith. I wish I could bear to take the necessary time to cogently tie up all my loose ends. I probably should have divided it into a post on levity and a post on special interests too. I'm not even entirely clear on why I thought those two were so closely connected. I guess the very act of writing gets my imagination going and leads me off topic. At least I think I'm avoiding the imprecision, vaguery, and general slipperiness I see from the politicians and interests I'm berating.



Anyway, this cartoon from Thursday's Economist sums up many of my thoughts from my last post, except that I would probably have drawn some obsequious charlatans goading the Tea Party on and labeled them as special interest groups.

Levity is the Soul of Thought

We are being manipulated. We are all tools. We are not smart enough to have much, if any, real freewill. Powerful forces are working harder than we know to control our thinking, and too often they are succeeding. There are some that seek our money or our vote, but there are others who seek our soul.

Since it is true that we always notice character flaws much more readily in others than in ourselves, I am better equipped to explore this problem as it affects a group that has been irritating me particularly of late: the tea-party protesters.

I actually agree with a fair number of things that the tea-party movement hold dear. I like my independence. I am a lover of our country’s founding documents and a firm believer in living within our means. I even sympathize with their fear of liberal special interests and of conceit among policy wonks who think they can develop a government solution to every problem. However, when I see the tea-party slogans at the rallies and hear the calculated rhetoric of their elected representatives, I silently rage at how simplistic and deceptive the logic seems.

Populism and populist slogans are never the genuine voice of the people, but are quickly co-opted by demagogues and special interests. These political high-rollers are too obviously biased to speak for themselves, but they are spending enormous sums of money in the hopes of getting other people, people like you and me, to speak for them. The sad thing is that when we get caught up in certain causes we think we are speaking with a pure voice, which makes us all the more ardent in our tacit support of these special interests. This is true both of liberals and their teacher’s unions and conservatives and their crusade against entitlements.

Recently I watched a debate on Jim Lehrer’s Newshour where I again heard the specious GOP argument that we need to lower taxes on the wealthy because lots of them are business owners and they will start hiring people if they have more money. I suppose this version of trickle-down economics might sound good at first, but the rationale defies belief. I haven’t been to business school, but I’m pretty sure that you hire people when your business needs more people in order to operate well, not when you happen to be taking more money home in profits. I can see how business taxes can hurt business, but the idea that keeping personal income taxes low for the rich (a Republican demand that Obama acceded to in December) is going to help business is ludicrous. I kept the books at my step-dad’s machine shop for a couple of years and I know that during hard times he would actually loan money to his own company, even while the business was getting clobbered by Multnomah County business tax. It might surprise John Boehner to learn that this had absolutely no effect on whether we hired new people or not. Businesses don’t hire employees because there happens to be extra money laying around, and especially not because the owner is making a good profit. They hire workers because they have reason to think that at a given time more employees will produce more income.

We are actually electing people who are pitching stuff this inane to us on a regular basis. Why are they doing it? Because they have no shame and they know it will get them re-elected. How can constantly repeating trite, vacuous platitudes get you re-elected? Because special interests like it and will give you money for your re-election campaign. How does money win elections in a democracy? Because we are too easily manipulated by flashy advertisements and acknowledgment of our pet political issues. Intelligent people have known why since this book was published. (Um, I haven’t actually read it myself.) Mancur Olson argues that it is really hard to fight for vague public good, but special interests are very effective at fighting for themselves. In other words people lack incentive to expend energy fighting for benefits to society at large. We have much more incentive to fight for benefits for an exclusive group to which we belong, like a religion, an ethnicity, or an industry.

An especially egregious example is the insurance industry. In the first three months of 2009 health insurance companies spent millions of dollars of YOUR INSURANCE PREMIUMS lobbying congress so they wouldn’t have to compete against a government-run public option for YOUR BUSINESS. Aetna spent just shy of $1 million. Blue Cross/Blue Shield spent just shy of $2 million. Drug companies spent even more. The health insurance lobby, led by Karen Ignagni, fought hard to make sure there would be no public option. Lobbyists threw around their weight around, misrepresented the data, and gave portions of YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUM PAYMENTS to key politicians (like $2.5 million to powerful Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus) to make sure their interests as insurers took precedence over YOUR OWN INTERESTS as the insured. And the worst part of it is, they convinced millions of ordinary Americans that a cartel of for-profit insurance companies doing these kinds of things to maintain their stranglehold on the industry will serve you more ethically than the government; that it would be better for you to have a claims adjuster between you and your doctor than a government bureaucrat. Ironically, the only reason that most Americans aren’t more sour on private insurance companies is that they don’t have health problems so they don’t have to use them. Tea-partiers put up with (and even defend) government-run Medicare and Medicaid, so why not have a government option for people who don’t get sick that often.

It’s not just the private companies that are to blame though. Their relentless lobbying has a profound effect on Washington politics. According to George Crile, Charles Wilson’s career was funded by American Jews, though there were hardly any in his district who could actually vote for him. In the movie version of Crile’s book, Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, admitted that “congressmen aren't elected by voters, they're elected by contributors.” The only way that is possible is because the money is buying votes, your votes. The only reason that is possible is because we are selling our votes cheap, for the price of a few impotent words on abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, or lower taxes.

This kind of political cynicism and deception happens on both sides of the aisle and it is disgusting. However, in the case of the tea-party, I would just like to alert you that not only is the tea-party being attacked by liberals, but even responsible conservatives have had enough with their dubious logic and senseless brinkmanship. Just last week a reputable conservative magazine called down shame on them for their sophomoric recklessness and “economic illiteracy.” A conservative columnist devoted a whole column to his worries that tea-party ideologues are an internal existential threat to the Republican party that could lead to its downfall. Untethered to reality, they are “more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.” Ironically his major concern was their fanatical inability to engage in the time-honored American virtue of compromise, a foundational American doctrine that these Constitution-loving fanatics have ostensibly jettisoned along with their tea.

But the tea-party might be doing more than just abandoning core American values. They may also be jettisoning their souls. That’s because they take themselves too seriously. Despite the depressing tone of this article I believe there is one hope for the tea-partiers and every other uncompromising ideologue who is actually the unwitting political tool of special interests: levity. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but levity is the soul of thought. We must take ourselves lightly and recognize our limitations or we will begin to believe we really have a complete understanding of what is going on, which is the surest path to embarrassment. A full understanding of what is happening in politics and what we ought to do about it is light years beyond what any of us can fathom. If we are foolish enough to think we see it all clearly, we will start to believe in radical widespread conspiracies and lose sight of the real threat, which is within us. Having chosen a side we’ll view everyone not similarly aligned as a threat. Their perceived agenda will frighten us rather than inform us. Rather than judging the merits of their ideas on a case by case basis, we won’t even consider them because we have already passed judgement on the source. That’s why Chris Wallace doesn’t understand Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly doesn’t get Stephen Colbert, but it also may be why Stephen Colbert gave short shrift to Rick Perry this week, why Chris Matthews isn't known for his laugh, and why liberals rarely have much patience with religious conservatives. It’s also why tea-party wackos write impartial economic experts off as part of the liberal establishment.

I don’t dare to hope that we all will collectively plunge ourselves into analyzing every political issue, challenging every hypocritical statement, and exposing every special interest acting behind the scenes. That sounds kind of boring anyway. I think the real hangover cure after a hard night of tea-partying is a little laughter. Look at the world around you and try to find what is funny about it rather than focusing on what is tragic. We should zealously fight for what we think is right, but we will quickly get manipulated into fighting the wrong battles if we fail to love our enemies or laugh at ourselves while doing it. If you can’t laugh at the funny stuff, you probably can’t accurately diagnose the tragic. As Chesterton said, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly...Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness.” You may not like them and you may have good reason, but if you can’t laugh with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, the problem might be more internal than external.

The Decline and Fall of Every Man's Empire

Yesterday, I watched a lone wolf separate a caribou fawn from its mother and then chase it through miles of subarctic tundra until the fawn finally made a mistake, losing its footing in the rough terrain. It slowed down just enough that the wolf could catch its tuft of a tail in his jaws and pull. The fawn collapsed seeming too enervated to even struggle. As you might imagine I felt dismay and a bit of terror grip me as the wolf, also tired from the chase, caught its prey and made a couple of lazy but decisive bites into the neck and back of the fawn. I was reminded briefly how cruel and harsh nature can be, but once the Planet Earth editors thought we had seen enough, I was left with a choice: to push the unpleasant scene from my mind or ponder its significance.

I think it is hard for us to deal with the death of large mammals. Perhaps we are more squeamish than most societies. Perhaps we are more refined. Perhaps too few of us have ever looked an animal in the face before we have eaten it, or participated in the process that brings it to our table. Perhaps we too often anthropomorphize animals so that we can see our sappy selves reflected in more of nature. Perhaps we have been so domesticated by our plush surroundings that we feel safer if we can domesticate all of nature, if only in our minds.

In another scene a mother polar bear leads her two hungry cubs out toward the sea after emerging from hibernation so she can get them some food. This means she will have to stalk and kill some seals, but we root for the hunter this time, because we are as disturbed by the starvation of the hunter as we are by the death of the hunted.

The problem, then, isn’t that we care more about prey than predators, but that we have a hard time dealing with the death of able-bodied creatures, especially if it looks painful. We are much more comfortable with long, slow death from old age. Partially, this is because we know that the old have had a fair chance to enjoy life already, but mostly it is because the old seem inured to pain and psychologically prepared for death. Their slow decline has put them in a state close to death, so death isn’t such a shock. We epitomize this haunting Emily Dickinson poem.

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

The poem seems to start out hopefully. We start out seeking new experiences and taking risks in pursuit of pleasure. However, this inevitably causes some pain and soon we abandon our optimism and zeal for self-awareness, slowly giving up on life. By the end of the poem death seems like the next logical step, rather than an abrupt change.

Too often we are dead before we die. In a physical sense this is natural. We do slow and mellow as we age. But in other areas of life we adopt this attitude much sooner. It dictates some of our most pernicious collective habits. We are hazardously tolerant of slow, imperceptible, ill-defined deterioration and much prefer it to sudden, potentially catastrophic change. In the latter case the threats are obvious and easy to wrap our minds around, but in the former case the threats are harder to understand and much more tempting to discount.

Consider our driving habits. Although this is not true in other parts of the country, in the Northwest everyone who owns a large SUV (say a Suburban, Expedition, or Tahoe) has to develop an arsenal of explanations as to why they own such a large, inefficient vehicle. Certainly, there are valid reasons to own one, but I am convinced that the primary reason that suburban families drive these cars around is because they feel it is the safest thing that they can do for the kids. This may be true, but it is also possible that global warming may be a much bigger threat to their kids. People with large SUVs often scoff at global warming alarmists and feel threatened by the “liberal elite” trying to take away their freedoms. They may have a point, but a casual observer would rarely be convinced that their assurance that global warming is a hoax is based on their careful consideration of the facts and a conclusion that the case against it is airtight.

I am not taking a hard position here on what cars people should own. I am simply writing against a certain near-sightedness that seems so prevalent in the world. Many people seem anxious to define the world in simple enough terms that they can easily live in it without having to continually question their assumptions or wondering if they are breaking any important rules. We construct for ourselves a conception of reality that allows us to stop doubting ourselves or asking if we have to make any major changes. We are either too lazy or too afraid of ethical failure to allow our ethics get too complicated. We would rather continue playing ethical Minesweeper, using simple rules to mindlessly chart a course through life, than move on to a more complex game that we might not be as good at.

“Global warming can’t be a serious threat,” we tell ourselves, “because if it were, the potential for global disaster and anarchy would be so great that I would not only feel inclined to give up my SUV, but I would have to confront some smug liberals and encourage them to find a better solution than their Hyundais, which still burn 500 gallons of gas for every 700 my Tahoe burns. Next thing you know I will have to change my shopping habits and try to convince others to do the same.” That kind of introspection and potentially radical life change is scary. Truly understanding the situation is really difficult. People will probably make mistakes and look foolish while trying to figure it out. Who wants to deal with that?

The same thing is apparent in our national energy consumption. In the US we have been slow to adopt nuclear energy as the backbone of our energy production and instead have relied on coal. Many look at the potential disaster in Japan right now and think we should give ourselves a pat on the back for our foresight. We fear catastrophic nuclear meltdown- as well we should- but when did we stop counting the cost of coal power? They say about 13,000 people die per year from coal power pollution in the U.S., not to mention the tragic deaths of coal miners and the potential for long-term consequences (global warming, etc). Are we so foolish? Like a frog in a slowly heated pot will we fail to balk at the slowly rising threat around us? Maybe nuclear energy isn’t the answer, but at what point do we demand something different than coal?

Unfortunately, this usually takes a long time because it is hard to get mad about the status quo. I think that’s why I am so excited about the political changes in the Middle East. A dam has finally burst, sparked by the desperate self-immolation of a Tunisian 26-year-old. It’s not hard to protest a sudden imposition, but the slow devolution of power to aging dictators across the Middle East was hard to counteract because even if people were getting angry, they couldn’t be sure that enough of their neighbors were also sufficiently angry to risk joining a protest. But this year, they finally had their Network moment. They decided together that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. It's like clouds. They should form whenever the air reaches 100% humidity, but water has a lot of surface tension and can’t take the first step of condensing into tiny, highly curved water droplets until there is more than 300% humidity. If it weren’t for natural aerosols in the air for water droplets to coalesce around we would rarely see rain.

So while I am thankful that the world is endowed with aerosols, Howard Beales, and Mohamed Bouazizis to spark change (usually quite a bit later than would be ideal) I would much rather that we had some collective foresight. In our democracy we don’t even need to summon up the courage displayed in recent weeks by the Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Syrians because our politicians will respond to our demands for political change and our businesses will respond to our shifting spending habits. But we do need to summon up the courage to put aside our pride and our sloth and our distractions in order to sit down and consider what is really going on in the world around us and what we ought to do about it. If we did this we might find some things to live for, to fight for, maybe even to die for and we wouldn't be so anxious to deaden ourselves to pain. Exposing and refusing to accept the long slow decline of circumstances around us will invigorate us as individuals and help us counter the natural decline going on within us. Oh that when I die my death would be a shock.

Book Review!

Yesterday I finished The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. Great book! In this book, Chabon aspired to combine the genres of noir police thriller, redemptive love story, and religio-political critique. He did admirably well on all three fronts. It is the story of Meyer Landsman, a faithless, self-destructive, but talented Jewish shammes (detective). He reminds me of the jilted Rick Blaine who goes on a bender when Ilsa Laszlo walks into his Casablanca gin joint. However, Meyer and his ex-wife are imagined in a parallel universe. It is 2008, but the Jews lost the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the flood of Jews heading for Palestine ended up settling for rainier pastures in the Alaskan panhandle, turning backwater Sitka into a metropolis of 3 million.

Since getting together, Alexis and I have read many of the same books as a way of keeping on the same page relationally. Let’s see: East of Eden, Gilead, Carter Beats the Devil, Pilgrim’s Regress, Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, The Mystery of Marriage, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Million Miles and a Thousand Years just to name them all. Although I recommend this for any married couple that can find books agreeable to both parties, I would have been interested in reading these books anyway. A couple of people have recently expressed surprise that I read fiction at all, I suppose because they had me pegged as a wanna-be-know-it-all who spends all his time trying to get the facts straight. Although I do have a healthy appreciation for a set of facts whittled to a fine point, I have always felt there is something more valuable, though less quantifiable, about good stories. The blunt edges of a story can’t always go straight to the heart of a matter, but can be useful for a wider variety of life-essential tasks than simply piercing falsehoods or skewering other people’s arguments. As with many things in this world, the things that most benefit us are not always the things for which we can track the benefits most easily. Neither the most important things in your life nor the most dangerous can easily be recorded as debits and credits in the ledger of your well-being.

Not only do I think this is a good book, but I would recommend it to anyone who has achieved a tenth grade reading level. It has something for everyone: action, intrigue, love, philosophy, religion, and it will help you brush up on your Yiddish. It struck me while reading it, that it could make a great movie. I just looked it up and apparently the Coen brothers think so too. The movie is in pre-production.

One thing the movie won’t be able to capture is how well Chabon crafts his metaphors. Although less-experienced writers (like myself) regularly construct sprawling, gaudy, and architecturally flawed metaphors for the sheer fun of it, Chabon attempts daring and complex turns of phrase without ever breaking the flow of the paragraph. He develops analogies that seem doomed to implosion only to shock you with how well the comparison seems to fit in once you swallow it. He is the Gaudi of the metaphor.

The great thing, though, is not just that his periphrastic pen doesn’t harm the action of the story, but that it actually enhances it. He keeps the action moving at exactly the right pace the entire novel. It’s as though he has set the cruise-control on the narrative so that no matter what he does with the steering wheel you are moving at just the right speed. In the introduction to my copy of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was described as having “perfect pitch” in a literary sense; perhaps not the most creative or brilliant writer ever, but he knew how to tell a story. Chabon does too.

I won’t give it away here, but Chabon’s plot is a great one, with much opportunity for poetic and philosophical pondering about the position of Jews in the world, the human need for redemption, and the politics of power. Chabon fills you in on just enough of these details to let you know that he has thought about them carefully, but he doesn’t weigh the story down too much with his musings. I get the impression, however, that if I sat down with some English majors we could find all kinds of intriguing parallels, analogies, and ideas tucked away in the book.

Since every good book review seems to have some kind of negative angle on the book, I will simply say that Chabon’s picture on the dust jacket bears an eerie resemblance to a misanthropic and rodent-like person I once knew. That remains my least favorite page.

Surrender or Lose

A few weeks ago when everyone was obsessed with Cordoba House (aka - the ground zero mosque) I wrote a post explaining why I thought it wasn’t American to protest its construction. Well, I also happen to be a Christian and, despite what some protesters would say, I don’t think it is very Christian either. Protesting the Cordoba House is not Christian because Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. Some Christians, like Peter, would cut Islam’s ear off only to watch it grow back anyway. It may seem Christian to fight for Christ, but as Peter learned, it isn’t. I am a Christian. I do not like Islam. I think it is a false religion. But as Christians we cannot afford to let our opposition to any particular system become an excuse for imposing our will on individuals. The New Testament is crystal clear about promoting the worship of Christ by means of winsome love and not by coercive force.

It seems that one of the many paradoxes of Christianity is that as the church gains political power in the world it loses its spiritual power. This is what Augustine argued in the City of God. Our citizenship is in heaven, not in the earthly city. We are aliens and strangers here. Things just seem to get really confusing when we operate out of a position of power rather than a position of service. I think that’s why Jesus told us to leave the wheat and the tares in the ground until the harvest. Pulling up the tares becomes a really tricky proposition. To do it well requires a degree of discernment about societies and individuals that we don’t even possess with regard to ourselves. It seems that once one undertakes the gnarly business of decreeing how the world should be cleaned up rather than just cleaning up one’s little corner there is no telling what one might be forced to do. Like the dictators in my last post our hubris often leads to moral bankruptcy. In pulling up the tares we must define ourselves as the wheat, pure and wholesome. That may be true in some future heavenly sense, but right now that requires us to ignore Solzhenitsyn’s realization that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” Or if you prefer something more biblical, “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin.” (Rom 3:9)

I think born-again Christians are especially susceptible to the hubris of believing they can see with God’s eyes because they can see better than they did before. They have experienced an internal shift from darkness to light, from blindness to sight. Because of this, it is sometimes hard to temper a new Christian’s overweening zeal for reform in order to keep him from annoying everyone around him. Luckily, the one doctrine that is up to the task is central to the faith. Original sin’s stain may be gone, but its habits are a tenacious reminder that our hearts still straddle both heaven and hell. That’s why a bishop/overseer/pastor “must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgement as the devil.” (1 Tim 3:6)

Governments are successful when they take this into account. In the U.S. our Constitution takes people as they are (greedy, selfish, and near-sighted) and builds a political system that suits them, rather than imagining how people could be and building a system that might just be able to make them better. So we as Christians must know ourselves as well as our founding fathers did. You will stumble if you begin exerting power over your neighbors by treating the “good” and “bad” ones differently. Instead “love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” (Luke 6:35) Another of the paradoxes of Christianity is that we can only fight for our faith by surrendering to our enemies. So put down your signs and take up your cross.

Cartoon found here.

In Defense of Dictators

Remember when I contemplated writing a defense of brutal dictators? Well, after reading a couple of interesting articles on Zimbabwe in last week’s Economist, I think now is as good a time as any to spill. As you may or may not know, Robert Mugabe (blue tie), who has ruled Zimbabwe for 30 years by deftly blending his brutality and blame shifting with his dazzling ineptitude at governing, was defeated at the polls 2 1/2 years ago by Morgan “buy a vowel” Tsvangirai (yellow tie). In the wake of the election, after some bloody reprisals against Tsvangirai’s supporters, he and Mugabe agreed to a “power sharing” agreement, in which Mugabe retains the power and Tsvangirai gets to do all the sharing.

But this story didn’t end like I expected it to and for the last 2 years I’ve had a little cognitive dissonance up in the old cranium when Zimbabwe comes to mind. I am curious as to exactly what Morgan Tsvangirai is doing on a day to day basis and also why he is still alive. Robert Mugabe may not be the most popular leader in the world, but he has been able to utilize black Zimbabwean resentment toward white Zimbabweans (whose land Mugabe forcefully redistributed to blacks) and toward current western sanctions to maintain enough popular support to supplement the usual thuggish instruments of autocracy: intimidation, forcible detention, torture, killing, etc. I assumed that Tsvangirai must have been surviving by employing the same kind of thuggish tactics in a region of Zimbabwe under his control and by staying away from the regions that Mugabe controls.

I was wrong. In the articles I read, I found out that Tsvangirai actually joins cabinet meetings with Mugabe every Monday, “apparently without rancour.” Though he himself has been imprisoned, “beaten to a pulp,” and had his skull “broken” by Mugabe’s supporters, Tsvangirai now meets with him regularly and has even become somewhat of an apologist for Mugabe’s behavior, refusing to criticize many of his policies. Since Tsvangirai is choosing his words so carefully it is hard to know what his intentions are, but a recent quote hints at his patient strategy, while offering insight on just how difficult it can be to be a dictator, or rather to stop being a dictator. “He’s an old man who wants to let go,” says Tsvangirai. “He’s looking for an exit strategy that restores his legacy in Zimbabwe and the world.”

I think the thing we fail to consider when we criticize brutal dictators is how hard it is to retire. The bigger the target that you have painted on yourself is, the harder it is to find an exit strategy. As many an after-school special can attest, it is easy for little lies to grow into big ones. It is also true that during any leader’s rise to power, it is easy for little moral compromises to grow into big ones. Many (perhaps every) leader who gains political power has had to make deals with numerous devils to do so. The worse you are at actually governing, the more deals you have to make. These deals will often get you what you want in the short run (i.e. power), but you will be paying down the mortgage of deception, conditional friendships, and indignant enemies for the rest of your life.

Consider Mugabe: as a young man he seemed to be a righteous warrior fighting to overthrow the white minority racist rule of Ian Smith. He was a political prisoner for ten years. But as he filled the power vacuum in the wake of Southern Rhodesia’s demise he was forced to battle a Marxist faction of former allies. You can imagine the progression.

1) The desire to overthrow tyranny makes you violent.

2) The desire to replace tyranny with the “right” brand of freedom tempts you to dabble in repression and demagoguery.

3) The desire to give your newly created society a chance to succeed induces you to institutionalize repression (think Gestapo, KGB, Comité de salut public)

4) The desire to avoid reprisals against you and your allies forces you to keep your hands on the levers of power indefinitely.

I’m not going to shed any tears for the plight of poor Robert Mugabe, but I can imagine how easy it might be to get backed into a corner even when you start out as a starry-eyed reformer. Mugabe is probably among the most hideous criminals alive today and justly deserves punishment. I think it is fascinating that Morgan Tsvangirai seems to be offering him a way to avoid that punishment, offering him that elusive exit strategy in exchange for a chance at democracy in Zimbabwe. Based on this week’s news, it appears that Tsvangirai is running out of patience. We can only hope that Mugabe’s moral degeneration (or his senility) hasn’t divested him of the last shred of his former idealism.

Shake Your Money Maker

You don’t have to watch many nature shows before you learn that bees, when they find a good stash of nectar or a sweet spot for a new nest, do a little waggle dance to show their fellow colonists where to find it. If they think the new nest site is exceptionally suitable their dance becomes even more vigorous. But do all bees have the same ideas about what qualifies as prime real estate? How do the other bees know they can trust the one boogieing? What if the liberal bees in the hive are attracted to the idea of hearing every possible iteration of Dark Star and choose a spot on a particular eave where they can do so while occasionally overloading on the wafting aromas from hotboxing hippies in the driveway? Or maybe conservative bees dance a frenzied jig when they find a spot in the cigar scented ventilation duct of the Federalist Society within earshot of the gun club.

But this does seem unlikely. Perhaps culture wars are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. But are the culture wars really representative of our culture? If they were, I suppose that would mean that somebody could win them, but the truth is that nobody would want to live in a “liberal” world and nobody would want to live in a “conservative” world. So that means the truth lies somewhere in between them, right? Well I’m not so sure about that either. I think the culture wars have oversimplified things.

All reputable news sources attempt to provide balanced coverage, which means they try to get views from people on multiple sides of every issue. Unfortunately, we usually think it’s a job well done if there are two views, one “conservative” and the other “liberal.” So Hannity has his Colmes and Paul Krugman has his David Brooks. It seems that the media reinforces the notion that our political landscape is all about conservative vs. liberal, Republican vs. Democrat.

I think the media gives us the false (and perhaps self-fulfilling) impression that our society is a political football field where one coach is a donkey and the other is an elephant. We either join a team and play by their rules or we sit and watch the game. There are two ways in which I think this bipolar simplification is wrong-headed.

First, I would argue that to a large degree there aren’t two poles, but one pole. An anarchist, a suicide bomber, and Ralph Nader would all agree that any apparent division between Democrat and Republican is insignificant. A growing number of apathetic voters would probably agree also. They see both parties as being part of the same system, a system with utterly misplaced values. Paramount among those values, predictably, is stability. Neither party has an interest in doing too much tinkering with the system that keeps them in power. It’s like trying to argue with Maradona and Pele that soccer is a dumb sport. Their mutual antipathy for each other will melt away into jubilant friendship as they deftly coordinate a prolonged session of kicking you in the shins. Democrats and Republicans have too many common interests to really be enemies. This is why real campaign finance reform won’t happen. And now that America’s most insane common law rabbit trail has led us to a place where corporations, exercising their God-given rights as people, can fund political candidates to their heart’s content we are not likely to see many politicians elected who would want to change that.

Second, there are certain issues where it is obvious that the truth doesn’t lie in either camp or anywhere in between. For example, Democrats will expend enormous time and energy to make sure people have the right to “die with dignity.” Republicans will expend enormous time and energy to make sure that suicide is not condoned. But when I’m on my deathbed I guarantee you that my phone records will show no last minute calls to the DNC or the RNC for some help on the infinitely more important issue of what’s going to happen when the lights go out.

So when politicians take up their causes, important as they may be, we must recognize that they are partly wrong (there is truth on “both” sides) and that they may not even be addressing the most important issues. The truth does not necessarily lie on a continuum between two lies. Life is much more complicated than that, and so is our country.

So next time you watch Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann shaking their beehinds (sorry, irresistible), pay attention because you are bound to learn something. But don’t be discouraged if you’re not ready to build a hive with either of them...or anywhere in between.