The Prince and the Prophet

There's alot we can learn from India. When I think of the countries that are most like our own, India comes in about 5th, behind England, Israel, France, and Germany. But that's another blog.

There is one specific parallel from Indian history that we can see today in our country. All movements have two types of leaders: princes and prophets.

Prince are executive or military leaders, subject to all the powers and pitfalls of those positions. Prophets, on the other hand, don't have the burden of leadership, so their clear and articulated conscience serves as a motivation for, or a warning to, the princes.

In India, the prince was Nehru and the prophet was Gandhi.

Gandhi's prophecy was so powerful that he actually achieved the ends usually reserved for princes: he expelled the occupier. He did so without official office and without force. But once this was achieved, somebody had to run this continent masquerading as a country. A prince was needed.

India's prince was Nehru. While imprisoned by the British, Nehru wrote a 5,000 page history of the world which became a bestseller in the West after his release. He had access to zero books while he wrote. Yeah.

So anyway, Nehru takes over and, lo and behold, is immediately confronted with difficult decisions. Decisions which often did not offer any option that would be approved of by the prophet. And this is the price of power.

Once power is seized in a democracy, ideals lose all practical value. By definition, all democracy is compromise. Even if all 300 million Americans want pizza, we probably don't all want the same topping. Governing is compromising.

This compromise is often taken for treachery by "purists", but compromise is literally the most human impulse after survival. Gandhi was a pacifist. But Nehru had to govern a country surrounded by well-armed antagonists. Peace out, pacifism, time to arm.

America's prophet and prince did not coexist as did India's, but there are some interesting parallels.

Gandhi and King led the largest successful non-violent political movements in history, and they did so against the most well-armed adversaries imaginable in both cases. In a very real sense, both men liberated "their" people with remarkably little bloodshed and were subsequently assassinated before they could witness the fruits (or the horrors) of their triumphs.

Suffice it to say, Gandhi and King were great men, and among the very few great men with no blood on their hands. Nehru was a great man as well, a man mostly unknown in this country but whose influence outweighs many historical figures who we know well.

And as for the Ameican version of the prince, Obama is no Nehru. Not yet. This blog is actually directed at those who made the mistake of mistaking Obama for King redux. Obama is no prophet. He never was one. He could, however, become a prince.

The first clue that Obama is a prospective prince rather than a prophet is that he decided to run for president. Let us not underestimate the level of je ne ce quas that it takes to make that decision. It's not arrogance or egomania necessarily, but it is obviously a willingness to compromise.

When a person decides to run for president, he or she has implicitly sacrificed his or her ideals by choosing to lead a democratic government which will necessarily compromise on everything, even if it is ruled by a single party.

Obama is not a revolutionary. He is not a prophet. King was. Can we imagine King running for president? No. And not just because he couldn't have been elected in his time. King would never have held any political office. Martin Luther King wouldn't have run for mayor in an all-black Baptist village in Georgia.

And if King had been president, rest assured, he would have found it very difficult to "end" the immoral war he would have inherited, a war which he had opposed from the beginning, an ideological and moral lobotomy launched by a reckless Texan. No, something tells me that King's 1969 Vietnam policy would look a lot like Obama's 2009 Iraq policy.

The problem with American politics today is that princes and prophets have become indistinguishable and, as a result, we are left with a deficit of both.

aRougeAgency Says What?

It's been a real treat watching this water boarding business unfold. Such spineless equivocating, such translucent straw men, such shameless diversion from the matter at hand....it really does make for good theater until you realize the actors are the elite cadre of a supposedly great nation.

This Pelosi business....did she know people were being water boarded? Well, let's think short and hard about whether that really matters. It would be like insisting upon prosecuting a casual viewer of a crime (as in the finale of Seinfeld) rather than the criminal. Of course Pelosi knew. She's obviously full of shit. But so is everyone else. If these people had enemas, you could fit them into a cigarette pack.

First of all, this obsession upon the specific tactic of water boarding obscures the fact that thousands of detainees have been abused, if not tortured, by American spies and soldiers. The Pentagon (not the op-ed board of the Daily Worker....the fucking Pentagon) has acknowledged upwards of 20 murders of detainees by Americans.

But what of water boarding? Well, we now know that this torture tactic was used not to prevent an imminent attack on the United States. Rather, the CIA was ordered to torture detainees in order to elicit "confessions" regarding Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD and ties to al Qaeda. Neither of those propositions were true, of course.

So, torture was not used to prevent violence upon Americans. It was used to justify violence perpetrated by Americans upon people who had never attacked them. How Henry the 8th of US.

We tortured people in order to get them to confess to things that weren't true, which is historically the most common motivation of torture.

500 years ago, the "Holy" Church would torture people until they "admitted" that they sun revolved around the Earth.

400 years ago, "civilized" countries would torture people until they "admitted" that they were possessed by the Devil.

70 years ago, Stalin would torture people until they "admitted" that they were American spies.

60 years ago, Chinese and North Koreans tortured American soldiers until they "admitted" that they were war criminals and that North Korea was a socialist paradise.

6 years ago, we tortured detainees until they "admitted" that they had been trained by Saddam Hussein in chemical weaponry.

So, there's that. All this ticking bomb business? Yes, the bomb was ticking. But the bomb was in Baghdad. And its fuse was lit in Washington.

And as for the CIA, let us examine their contention that they told Pelosi they were torturing (as is that would make it legal). The whole point of this clusterfuck is that we will NEVER know who was told what because of the very rules, or lack thereof, surrounding the CIA.

The CIA is the only government agency whose budget, employees, and operations are not public. In other words, it operates entirely beyond public purview, which violates every premise of a free country. Is it a necessary evil? Perhaps.

But still, consider the arrangement. When the CIA decides to do something (or, as is more common, is told to do something) it is required to inform a handful of senators. The catch is, no notes or any other form of recording are allowed at these briefings. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this creates opportunities for nefarious ploys of all sorts.

The CIA is, by definition, a rogue agency. The common trope is that the CIA's successes are secret but that its failures are public. Perhaps.

Since we can never know about these "private successes", let us consider some of their public failures. Out intelligence agency has failed to predict in my lifetime: the fall of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam's very advanced WMD program in 1991, Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons, the 9/11 attacks, the location of Osama bin Laden, Saddam's total lack of WMD in 2003. That's the short list.

So we know the public failures. And that's all we know. And we're supposed to be scandalized by the proposition that the CIA misled a member of Congress in a secret and unrecorded briefing?

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the CIA. Surely they do good work. Maybe they saved us from Martian invasion last month. Too bad they wouldn't be allowed to tell us if they did. Keep those successes private, boys.

Golden Garbage

What do you do when some of the best art you've ever experienced comes swathed in shit? Personally, I choose to love it anyway. If I didn't I couldn't possibly be the conisseur of rap that I have become.

But the difficult thing about being a rap fan is squaring the love of the art form with the contempt most decent people would feel for most of the content. It's a constant intellectual and cultural and moral and racial battle. But great art always emerges.

And Eminem has emerged from this turmoil. There are several ways to gague a rapper's strengths, but if the standard were rhyming, Eminem would be in a league of his own, with Lil' Wayne an extremely respectable 2nd place.

There is rhyming. There is content. There is flow. There is production. There is wit. There is voice. And so on. But in terms of rhyming, Eminem bends the English language to its most improbable limits.

The content is usually utterly worthless. But the genius is undeniable. How do we square that circle?

All that said, consider the ferocious precision of this rhyme:

I'm just a hooligan who's used to usin halucenogens
CAUsin illusions again, BRAin contusions again
CUttin and bruisin the skin
RAzors, scissors and pins
JEsus when does it end?
PHAses that I go through
DAzed and I'm so confused
DAys that I don't know who
GAve these molecules to
ME what am I gonna do?
Pay the prodigal son, The Diabolical one
Very methodical when I slaughter them

Who Cares?

There are certain issues that do not receive nearly the adequate amount of attention or level of impassioned debate in our culture. Among the issues taken far too lightly are foreign policy, energy policy, and health care. There are other issues, however, which receive far too much attention when weighed against their actual import.

These other issues, which become obsessions for many, are gun rights, abortion, and gay marriage.

I understand the importance of gun rights (it is, after all, the 2nd amendment to the constitution) and I understand the intense emotion surrounding abortion (after all, if you take a certain view of what life is, abortion is murder, pure and simple), but these issues are often used as political bludgeons, the "solutions" to which are beyond the horizon; they simply serve as campaign fodder every few years.

Gay marriage is in this vein. People who are passionate about gay marriage one way or another suffer from a tunnel vision that utterly distorts the larger importance of this issue. Put simply, who cares? Why do we need to be concerned with 2 men or 2 women getting married?

The first justification for being passionately anti-gay marriage is biblical. And that's fine. If you take a literal reading of the Old and New Testaments, and if you think gay marriage is supremely important, you are well within your rights to refuse to perform marriages for gays in your private church.

But that should have absolutely nothing to do with civil statutes, with the law of the land. The dictates of religion obviously inform some of our laws (e.g., no killing), but these laws would be obvious even without religion, as such. Even god-hating bohemians require safe streets.

The problem with using the Bible to "guide" the ban on gay marriage as it "guides" the bans on theft and murder is that there is NO non-biblical reason to discriminate against gays. As noted above, there ARE non-biblical reasons to ban murder and theft. No so for gay rights.

If any church in this country thinks the Bible should explicitly and directly be reflected in our civil statutes, they should move to 15th century England. Or at least start paying taxes.

So, religion is out. That leaves civil reasons. There are certain moral precepts which are legislated by civil authorities, despite the common canard that it's impossible to "legislate morality".

For example, a man can only have one wife at a time. That is a restriction on the liberty of polygamists in the interest of broader order, a reasonable sacrifice of individual liberty in the interest of the whole if their ever was one.

Allowing two men to marry each other would not upset that precept of monogamy, long accepted throughout most cultures on earth, a staggeringly consistent practice across space and time and cultures. Marriage would still be between just 2 people. Laws regarding the minutiae of taxation, inheritance, divorce proceedings and so forth would not have to be changed at all.

So there really is no purely civic rationale for preventing two adult men or women from marrying in a civil ceremony (or in a friendly church, if one can be found). The only remaining rationale, therefore is social.

This is a familiar beast, this ritualized and normalized and "scientific" and "natural" order in even the most civilized countries where certain people are treated as second-class citizens with the most casual moral certitude.

"Scientific" and "psychological" constructs of gays have been discarded just as "scientific" and "eugenic" constructs of blacks were discarded. The only "reason" remaining for their insult is the unfortunate truth that society as a whole has contempt, if not hatred, for them.

Alot of people, especially men, hate gay people. And if they don't hate them, they feel like a "good" white southerner would have felt between 1776 and 1965: "I don't mind the blacks...they're not bad folks....I just wish they wouldn't be so loud about everything".

Dignity, of course, is just about the only thing worth being loud about, and the critical mass of Americans has yet to see the gay rights issues through that prism, seeing it instead as gays seeking "special" dispensations, akin to feeling that the right to vote for blacks 40 years ago was some sort of gift granted by a benevolent dictator.

I acknowledge my own discomfort with many aspects of the gay lifestyle. To be perfectly honest, the idea of two men being sexually intimate with each other turns my stomach. It does. And I have seen many displays of the "homosexual lifestyle", especially on college campuses, where "free speech", "gay rights", and utterly inappropriate sexually explicit material in public were blurred together in a shameless erection of straw men (pun intended).

But my own hang-ups have nothing to do with whether gay men should enjoy the same rights I do. Of course they should.

Freedom is not about respecting the rights of others to do things that you approve of; people have that "freedom" in North Korea. Freedom is about the charity and the discipline to accept all the beautiful and confusing and absorbing and distasteful things that make up human beings and to accept that each individual is free to be exactly what he or she was born to be unless and until he or she threatens the life or property of another.

It's as simple as that. You don't have to like it. But you must defend it.

Not In My Back Yard

Every human being is familiar with hypocrisy; it's the price of admission to the human race. But there is a special type of hypocrisy reserved for European societies of the past half-millennium. Despiser of white guilt that I am, I must make it clear that Europeans were simply in the right place at the right time; had the Chinese dominated the Earth for the past 500 years, they would be guilty of the same sins.

This brand of hypocrisy can be branded the "not in my back yard" ideology. Usually, this phrase is applied to things that a person wants no part of. In this context, these are things that we ABSOLUTELY want part of; we just don't want to see it. It's like the old saying about how everybody likes sausages (I'll update it to hot dogs) but nobody wants to see how they're made.

For example, the Europeans had a "moral" objection to American slavery between the Revolution and the Civil War. And while slavery was indeed morally objectionable, the most cursory assessment reveals the "not in my back yard" component to this stance.

For while the Europeans denounced their American cousins for slavery, the Europeans were enslaving the entire Southern Hemisphere of the Earth. The Americans enslaved millions of Africans. The Europeans enslaved Africa.

So, the real objection of the Europeans was that it was somehow vulgar for the Americans to practice slavery in their own back yard. The kidnapping, forced relocation, enslavement, and arbitrary murder of Africans was not the issue; the issue was the lack of taste and class in making those hot dogs where you slept.

The Holocaust arouses universal condemnation from all civilized people. But what faux outrage from the Europeans. The Europeans had spent centuries invading small, defenseless countries and exterminating all or part of countless societies lost to history. But Hitler had the poor taste to do these things IN EUROPE. And that's just barbaric.

"No blood for oil" is a (usually) self-righteous cry du jour at any anti-war rally. But why are Americans so repulsed by blood for oil, when our entire postwar "richest country in the history of history" run has been literally fueled by oil whose absurdly low prices are ultimately guaranteed by the very real threat of blood?

So, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, we let loose the bloodbath because he had us by the balls in terms of oil prices. And there was outrage among some in this country, including myself.

But why are oil-rich countries responsible for 90% of the dictatorships left on Earth? In part, it's because no democratically responsible government would ever sell oil at such low prices.

So we recruit dictators. And where was our outrage when Saddam Hussein was using American guns, money, and intel to murder Iraqis who opposed him (especially communists)? There was none, of course, because those hot dogs were being made at an appropriate distance from American mouths.

And what of when we go to Wal-Mart? Americans assume that $20 mp3 players are their birthright, but many of them are horrified at the prospect of the people who make the things Americans consume actually being allowed into this country.

I think guilt trips are usually pointless and often narcissistic, but introspection is a different and necessary beast. We should think about how the hot dogs make their way to our tables. Personally, I don't eat hot dogs, but I drive, I wear clothes, and I occasionally use a computer.

Free people for all time have had their freedom made more secure and luxurious by the enslavement of others. But when one man is in chains, none of us are free. And if we were all truly free, the American standard of living would plummet. Sorry for the buzzkill.