Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.

Two Blockbusters

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” ain’t much.

I had been looking forward to seeing two blockbuster movies of the summer, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, partly so that movies would bring large audiences back to the theaters where they belonged with wide screens and amplified sound and darkened auditoriums, which has always been the right way for a hundred years to see movies, now that covid was over. And the audiences came, the gross net of the two movies now close to two billion dollars. That's not chopped liver. But I was disappointed with both of them and it made me wonder why people liked them so much.

“Oppenheimer'' was at a disadvantage for me because I like stories that start at the beginning and move along until you get to the end, flashbacks only happening when it is necessary to bring up the past as a present juncture, as when Darcey tells about how Mr. Wickham had engaged with Darcey’s sister when he finally explained to Elizabeth why he so distrusted the cad. It struck me that “Oppenheimer'' was jumping around in time, especially in the beginning and so the film was choppy, without a narrative flow, and I thought difficult to understand unless you were already familiar with the details of the history as I was because the security  clearance hearing took place when I was in high school and had already learned the lore concerning the development of the A bomb. I was disabused when my daughter was able to follow the story even without having already learned its history. I thought that Roland Joffe’s “Little Boy and Fat Man”, the movie of 1989 that just concentrates on the essential and contained story of the Los Alamos project, was much superior to “Oppenheimer'', and Paul Newman had stolen the show as General Groves. Newman should have won an Oscar for one of his post-pretty boy roles.

The movie “Oppenheimer” was also sloppily edited. A critic said that two nude scenes were exploitative rather than liberating, as if those were the only two possibilities. The scenes showed intimacy and jealousy, which are certainly traits of sex. But the story was not elaborated as to whether Oppenheimer was a highly sexual creature rather than  that he had a young love he could not get over. Similarly, a moment when Kitty Oppenheimer lapses into child neglect to the point that her husband puts his child with another family for a while is not expanded to show that his wife was generally a poorly functioning person. Either expand it or drop it. 

The final judgment of Oppenheimer made by the movie, though it may not be the one the director Christopher Nolan wanted, was when the movie has President Truman say that Oppenheimer was a cry baby because, after all, the blood was on Truman”s own hands because he had dropped the bomb rather than on Oppenheimer’s, who just made it. Truman’s character always looms large in most comparisons and so Oppenheimer is presented as a wavering reed  rather than to be taken as a man plumbing a deep moral dilemma. The movie provides no comeback to the Truman remark.

A major failing of the movie to me was that it was not set in the proper historical context. Louis Strauss and J. Edgar Hoover were agents but not the impetus for the vendetta against Oppenheimer. This was the McCarthy era and the idea of Communism was enough to get people at bay. Remember the House Un American Activities Committee and the espionage trials and finally the Army McCarthy Hearings which brought the era to its end, Eisenhower sure that McCarthy would be overwhelmed by the military even if he had reused on the campaign  trail in 1952 to defend his mentor George Marshall for accusations that Marshall  was a disgrace to the uniform. Oppenheimer was just someone else who was abused for communist ties and had never betrayed his trust, though my high school history teacher thought it was naive to have thought that. I still want a movie that goes over McCarthy, whose paranoia and hate are reborn as Trump but without the ideology, even though the story was very well told by Richard Rovere’s book and by the Edward A Murrow telecast at the time.

I was even more disappointed with “Barbie” which I thought would analyze in a humorous way the plight of women so that I could defend the male point of view. But the movie was such a mishmosh of ideas that there is no way to take a purchase on it. I guess I was hoping for “Major Barbara” which I found very unsettling when I first read it as seeing munition makers as progressive. Or where, in “Pygmalion”, a poor flower girl can become the appearance of a princess, able to confront men as equals, through hard work and being exposed to men who treat her as a lady. Consequences are the result of causes. But causes are absent in “Barbie”. Instead, Barbie Land has an all woman Supreme Court. Does that mean society is equal because four of the current Supreme Court are women? What is the basis for inequality? All men do when Ken takes over Barbie Land is turn his home into a man cave rather than a girlie place. There is a speech whereby “mean” Barbie lists the degradations to which girls are subject. Women are supposed to look adoringly at men who sing while strumming their ukuleles. But men also fawn on women, complementing them on how pretty or accomplished they are, just to please them. Flattery is the stock in trade of courtship. What is the substance of male domination? It could be job discrimination or reproductive rights or the male threat of physical abuse. The movie never says. I wish the screenwriters for “Barbie'' had taken the time to straighten out its ideas rather than just look at the visuals so as to create a franchise set of pictures about Mattel. But they got what they wanted, which was sufficiently superficial so  that everybody could have a good time.

A female friend said that Barbie, the doll, was historically important because it showed women could be anything they wanted to be, which was not possible previously. I hardly think dolls are all that important even if they are invoked as such, as was the case when Kenneth Clarke said that black girls shunned black dolls (which was not true) and so showed a stigma about being black. It is similar to when people said that boys would be less violent if they didn’t have toy guns. Boys just took up twigs and called them guns. Gender is deeper than just toys. Now Barbies, which are just toys, are taken to make girls free to be what they want, as if that weren’t happening since Seneca Falls. And the availability of the pill at the same time when Barbie made its way seems to me to be a more powerful change in the relation of women to men.

A male friend of mine who reads literature carefully was taken by the “Barbie” point of view that women had engaged in self-discovery when, until recently, they had not. I couldn’t disagree more, which is the real nub of the issue. Men, I think, are traditionally supposed to be only one thing throughout the eons of history. They are solid, which means reliable, reasonable, stoical and moral and to be otherwise is to be a cad or over emotional, or a wuss, like Hamlet, or a reprobate. No exceptions to the approved type, whether in Homer or “Genesis”, and whether that type is admired or seen as limited. Macbeth and Othello are different but both are doomed for violating the male stereotype. Women, on the other hand, can be anything they want to be. Delilah is a lover and also a betrayer. Chaucer’s wife of Bath adopts her nature to the circumstances as she gets older. Elizabeth  Bennet is both ambitious as well as outspoken.

So why these two blockbusters for two inferior movies? A good answer is offered by Pauline Kael, the longtime New Yorker film critic, in commenting on “The Sound of Music”, a much inferior of the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, thin on plot and a but ludicrous in plotting in that, as Kael observed, what if one of the children did not want to be a chorister? And yet “The Sound of Music” was, at the time, the tenth greatest movie gross of all time. Kael’s answer for the big attendance was merchandising rather than art. The title and tone had been pre sold by its history and advertising and so was what people were prompted to view. But I have a less cynical but more dourfull explanation, which is that people like poor efforts which do not work their plots out even though they also like some that do, like “Casablanca'' and “The Best Years of their Lives”. “Oppenheimer” treats the hero as anguished when he is driven because it is easier to think that way rather than to think of him as like Werner von Braun, who cared more about rockets than about politics. “Barbie” is fuzzy on ideas because Feminist ideas are fuzzy, cliches a substitute for reasoning. Being both artful and familiar to a movie’s level of meaning is very hard. I hope Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon" will turn the trick of showing the protagonist as both cruel and progressive and so memorable, providing a valuable insight into what great leaders can be.

Faulty Indictment Arguments

Don’t expect some bombshell facts to be revealed in the indictment of Trump for the events concerning January 6th. Sometimes something new arises in a cause celebre where so many facts and strands of possible history are assembled, as when years later the real espionage was revealed that cleared Dryfuss of his name. Looking into the details of a political cause celebre usually ends in nothing, as when Jim Garrison tried to figure out who killed JFK and what happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas. We never did find out why Nixon had gone along with the Watergate cover up. Maybe it was his bad demons overcoming his statesman-like alternative instincts, as bloody as he required it to be in dealing with Vietnam. What can be said about the indictments of Trump is that they reveal just the facts covered by the House Jan. 6th Committee with added on details that a political junkie might relish.  Of more interest and moment is how arcane and contrary to ordinary psychology are the legal proceedings themselves and those will not be addressed, except here, much less reformed.

Distinguished commentators on the law, ex judicial officials themselves, say that the reason for offering up those people who worked at Mar a Lago is to show he had a guilty intent in that he was covering up his having government documents and so must have known it was wrong to take those papers. Jurors might be inclined to think that Trump must have known he had no right to those papers, quite aside from his admission that the one he flaunted around was still unclassified in that as an exPresident he could no longer do so. But we don’t know what he was showing around. Maybe it was just  boasting and there would have to be witnesses to testify that they had read the plans to invade Iran. Maybe just Joe McCarthy shuffling papers about the non existent names of those State Department Reds. 

Anyway, that is false psychology. A person can truly believe that they are in the right and therefore feel free to hide their doings so as to protect what they think is their right as happens when Huck schemes with Tom Sawyer to free Jim. The legal claim that evasion is evidence of guilt is just an assertion that is useful just so as to incriminate someone. Lawyers offer a reason so as to treat it as a proof. That does not mean there is no way to assess whether Trump was allowed to have secret papers in his possession. He could make the case that he could indeed declassify papers simply with a mental act to do so, but no lawyer is willing to say so in a court of law. Or he could explain why he needed these documents and offer proof that the Defense Department were warmongers against Iran but as an aside rather than as an explanation in a report or address that he was a whistleblower doing his duty as an ex-President, but he hasn't done that. The lack of an excuse is not an excuse and so his retaining the secrets is either vain or slovenly orf to sell for money or for any other number of reasons to which one can speculate, none of them legitimate or to be tested as legitimate.

The same false psychology and the more palatable reasons for thinking Trump criminally liable are also operative in the central case having to do with the insurrection that was regarded as justified because the election had been stolen from him. Prosecutors may offer witnesses that show experts and key politicians told Trump that he had legitimately lost the election and conclude that Trump lied about the election results. But that would just mean that Trump should have known that he rightly lost. It does not prove he believed he had lost, whether for vanity or an inherent conspiratorial nature. Most people would follow the experts, but it will be Trump on trial and so it is necessary to prove in a particular case rather than as a general practice people in such circumstances are liars. Moreover, even if prosecutors can show that Trump admitted the election was not rigged, that would not settle the matter because Trump is a notorious liar and so might be lying at some occasion for lying that the election was legit, Trump has the liar’s defense, which is that you can’t trust anything he says. Checkmate. But not quite. If he believed the election was rigged, then he might not assert that as a fact but offer the reasons for thinking so in  a statement or an interview, which he never has. You might think him incapable of the rational thought required to prepare or read such a report, but that may well be the ultimate defense, which is Trump’s mental incapacity to think through thoughts, something clear since he announced in 2015, and then the national electorate is to be chastised for ever having voted for so damaged a person, but that means Trump can and should be defeated by an electorate rather than a judiciary that would put him in an asylum rather than a jail but left off because he is harmless so long as he does not run for public office, Michael Cohen to have been blamed for his own troubles because he did not shy away from the guy as soon as getting wind of him.

Rather than the recondite aspects of the indictment, look at what is obvious on the face of it as its central features however many years it takes for a person to become aware of what is obvious and therefore undeniable and conclusive. It isn't that the meeting at the Willard Hotel of conspiratorial figures doesn’t show that the attack on the Capital was planned rather than just a protest that got out of hand, but that even better evidence of Trump’s malign intent is available on tape out of his own mouth for all to see. Jack Smith has avoided these issues so as not to be open to the accusation that what Trump did was an expression of free speech, but I will dig into that because it is the heart of the matter. Trump in his speech to the crowd on Jan. 6th was inciting riot if you pay attention to the rhetoric of his words even if he did not say explicitly that the followers should riot. He said that they should be strong. Maybe that is a reference to be clear in their determinations, to be resolved that their beliefs were proper, but it is also to say that they are determined to prevail in preventing the certification of the electoral vote, and what else were they doing milling about except to do just that when he was told to. Being just short of incendiary words does not make the words incendiary. 

Further, when Trump finally asked the rioters to go home, to cease rioting after having Trump for hours watching on tv that they had been rioting, Trump says to them that he loves them. “Loves them” for what? For merely being partisan? No, an easy inference is that he was endorsing what they had done, which was to threaten the elected Senators and Congresspeople. That is the clear meaning of the language and that is his crime, to egg on and afterwards praise an insurrection. Not just unstatesmanlike but also criminal. That is the gist of the case even if Alan Dershkowitz thinks Trump was just letting off blather. Moments count. They reveal the real motive. Words tell you what people say in their Jack Smith pile up the illegal activities Trump and his associates engaged in. What Trump said is something about which he did not lie and places him as what he was: a destroyer of the Constitution. hearts and that is enough. 

Prosecute Trump. I want him shamed though he likely won’t live long enough to go through the appeals process so that he will ever have jail time. Nixon tried to rehabilitate himself during the eternity between resignation and his death. Trump will not try rehabilitation because he will be a martyr to his cause, himself. We will just be rid of him if even his supporters decide he is too sullied to be dealt with. So I am already bored and passed beyond the indictment or future indictments to the 2024 election because the Constitution cannot protect thbed people if thbe people have gone sedriously astray.

Abraham

Morality, a harsh taskmaster, is the key to religion.

I have had an understanding of Abraham, the father of modern religion, that seems both clear and obvious and hardly worth noting except that Christians, in  particular, might find my view strange and querulous, and for reasons I will explain. My basic premise is that Abraham fashioned God to be invisible and omnipresent because he had identified God with morality, which is also invisible and omnipresent, and so distinctly different from pagan religion, where there were spirits in trees and rocks and mountains and in idols and where the gods might or might not be moral, more akin to human beings than to the supernal, to the otherness of God, just a more or less powerful god.God always had to be moral even if people could not always see that He was such because being moral was an essential characteristic rather than just a quality of some god character, like Odesseus sly and Achilles brave, when people and gods did not have to be that but God did.

There are a number of advantages to thinking of God this way. It means that God speaks and is a matter of words in that moral rules, which bind the past to the future, something else a  supernal god can do, are set out in words, in pronouncements, and so they are portable, con vegetable in a holy ark, written down in words, and also enunciated through the words imagined by great men like Noah and Moses, for whom words come to them about what should be done. That is different from the God who prefers the offerings of Abel to Cain and with such terrible consequences. An earlier god could make a choice out of pique or favoritism and never have a moral explanation as to why. So morality is not just an acquisition by religion so as to manage the ordinary lives of stable  congregations, which is what Weber thought. It is a revolution in what it is to be religious, their religious yearning for the all powerful. To be accomplished through being moral, an internal state of being rather than mere compliance.as indicated in rituals and prayers and adoration.

It is no wonder, then, that the story of Abraham and Isaac is problematic for Jews because God seems to be planning to kill Isaac. Put aside the platitudes that God was just testing him and  didn’t really mean to carry it out. That would have been cruel and it seems clear that Abraham was willing to go through with it. Abraham had made no objection though Abraham did intervene with God to lessen the judgment on Sodom, compelling God to meet his own moral standards. Couldn’t he have weeded about his own son? Maybe what was being tested was Abrahan’s loyalty to God, as when Job is loyal to God but still wonders about the ways of the world. But the Abraham Isaac situation begs the question about whether God can be immoral rather than inexplicable.

 And put aside the anthropological question that the story is a benchmark for religion moving away from child sacrifice. That would just rob the story of moral significance, just a moment of cultural evolution, in which things move on and nothing has permanent significance. But in morality it is not so easy to change as when it is clear that some people still think homosexuality an abomination. All moral religion thinks there is an old time religion by which people should take their stand and including those humanist religions who think that the respect of personhood is bedrock and so means accepting what were recently taboo as part of the holiness of all humankind.”Who am I to judge?” says Pope Francis.

A Christian, especially if influenced by Kierkegaard, would have a very different reading of the Abraham and Isaac story. It is about faith rather than loyalty. A true believing Christian has faith that however contrary the story presents itself may be, the believer is convinced, has faith, that there is reason for what Abraham was required to do, that shrouded by the mysterious ways of God. There may have been a reason to sacrifice Issac or God to spare him, even if He will not say what it was. The story is less a test of Abraham rather than of the ordinary believer that all is right in God’s world, while the Jewish believer is apt to question God’s wisdom, however less he may be than God.

I think that Kierkegaard and many Christians confuse faith by compounding two very different things. There is faith in the sense of beliefs or a credo, like the Virgin Birth or the Nicene Creed, which means it is a set of propositions about supernatural and also moral themes, such as when a fetus becomes human or whether homosexuality is an abomination, and then there's faith in the sense of the basis for believing in that creed or proposition, Catholics having largely lost the proofs of God’s existence, the reasons Anselm and Aquinas founded or justified their creeds, and relying rather on faith as an emotional confidence in those truths, a deep sense that they must be true because they believed so since childhood and are unwilling to be disabused by their disloyalty, that most primitive of attributes that are already present in the Old Testament. 

Christian believers rely on their faith  and confuse that with what they believe. The problem with that is that faith as a creed can cover a lot of supernatural things that can't be tested, such as the Virgin Birth and can, in their heart of hearts, just regard such beliefs as a formula to assert whatever their misgivings while avoiding reducing the belief into merely a symbolic one, for then one might ask why such a belief was today so reactionary in that women who have human procreation are not to be thought therefore impure. And moral standards are then regarded as also formulas to which a person assents for the sake of loyalty even of disregarding it as a practical activity in that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi regard themselves as good Catholics even though both of them support abortion. Faith as a feeling becomes narrow when it can exclude beliefs that are not compatible.Faith as confidence is far from Kierkegaard because it can exclude whatever it cares to and is left with supernatural matters that are outrageous but non contestable while aligning with an overall sense of confidence or faith that people are always getting better or using Jesus as a benchmark for how humane people should be. But politicians like FDR were embarrassed at discussions of religion. That was to go into deep waters and most American politicians do not want to step into that ocean,largely unequipped to do so, concerned as they are with local district chairmen and matters of social policy, there being few exceptions, like Bill Clinton, who could explain his view on abortion rather than just weigh it as a campaign  point.

Pre-Protestant Christianity became so encrusted with so many beliefs, articles of faith, that it rivaled paganism with alluring stories and certainties that defied the imagination that had created it. You can know about the gods without ever going around to rationalize them as spirits or forces to be reckoned with, such as wisdom  or bravery. Similarly, pre-Protestantism had invented doctrines that it was difficult to be certain about, such as whether the Holy Ghost was coterminous with God or in some sense was a product of God. You can argue about such matters by arguing philosophically about what was metaphysically necessary or, in a more literary way, playing on what it meant for God to somehow begat Jesus when that is a metaphor for something deep because God cannot literally begat a son, even if pagan gods could. Either way, this reasoning is a stretch and it is reasonable for Bart Ehrman to regard theologians as presumptuous and arbitrary, himself retreating to being a mere historian who chronicled and compared what people in  texts say. Theologians can get out whatever they want to, a harmless pastime in that the laity doesn’t care about that but the base meanings to which they do subscribe.

Protestantism, for its part, went back to basics by dealing with the moral engagement of God to every single person in  his own soul and consciousness, elaborating on  the Abrahamic relationship between God and Abraham, the two sparring with one another about what morality requires, by adding the idea that the human soul has to open up his consciousness, like a witness swearing to tell the truth, so that he or she is pure enough, sincere enough, to engager such a tussle, purified so as to see the morality of things. Very daunting indeed in that it means a faith without the adornment of bells and smells. I am not at all sure this is not so high a standard to place on congregants so that the can apply moral reasoning, but I am not at all sure that it is better to think that following Talmudic law, whether by those of the Orthodox or Reform, and so sufficient to make you morally engageable. Can’t anyone engage with morality? If morality is invisible and everywhere evident, as is the original idea of Abraham, then there is no need for a set of gatekeepers into morality. But that may be my democratic and idealistic way of approaching matters. Christians are more aware than I am of how awful human souls can be and so there are those bereft of moral reasoning while I think that people try to be good, most of them, even if there are monsters among them.

Not that Protestantism does not get encrusted or diminished over its centuries, far from the standards of moral righteousness which is its bedrock. First of all, in America at least it became political, Evangenicals supporting Trump because he was a means to the end, which was accomplished, which was to reverse Roe v. Wade, but at what cost? You have bartered away your soul to someone reckless and a miscreant even if you have preserved millions of souls from murder, Is that a God would think a moral tradeoff? Why should God have to endorse such a deal as a legitimately moral one? Only the devil requires you to make Sophie's choice. They knew he was a bad man even if they did not expect he would try to overturn the Constitution out of p;ique and greed. A Protestant would think that character really counts.

And second of all, Protestants can debase their own gold by trivializing what they claim so that Christianity is reduced to what is allowed for children to understand, when Children catch on to what goes on in life. Protestants are less willing to understand than Catholics do just how lurid can be representations of the crucifixion. That is real suffering however much I think it trivial to suffer a bit before freeing people from their Original Sin. Cheap swap. Abraham would have agonized more about Isaac than God the Father over the fact that Jesus will be restored to the throne next to Him. This is just pagan imagery of slaughter and revenge.

And the Protestant impulse is also diminished by repeating the mantra that “Jesus is your friend” because you can rely on his advice and appeal to your better nature, like a doll cradled in your arms or vice versa. However cuddly the image, Jesus is not your friend. He is much too alien from you, more than the difference between lord and peasant. Jesus is bringing to Earth a new moral dispensation of love over law and you should be properly scared if you are not up to that new standard. Jesus is up to bigger things than comforting you. He is not just agreeing with moral standards but making new ones, just like the judges in Oresteia. The universe shakes, but that is a meager metaphor, and that is why, despite myself, I have to admit that Kierkegaard captures a lot of the enormity and anguish of morality.

Disengagement

A theory that was current in gerontology when I was a young man teaching that course was the theory of disengagement which was not really a theory but only a single proposition rather than the linking of a number of propositions, but never mind that. The proposition was that people as they got older disengaged from their social affiliations and so became more isolated from one another staying in their own rooms or houses, people dying off around them, and withdrawing from friends still living. People shrunk from their social contacts in preparation for death. That does not seem to me an accurate picture of what old age is like, now that I am there from the inside, while other findings at the time, such as that old people are often thought to be losing their mental acuity when all that is happening is that they are becoming hard of hearing, a point which is something to which I can attest, though that might have been a geriatrics insight rather than a gerontological one.

It does not seem to me that old people disengage, even though, obviously, some of their friends and spouses die and people retire from their vocations. But many  oldsters stay at work for as long as possible and retire into alternative occupations without remuneration so as to keep active. Oldsters keep touch with old friends and cultivate people of the younger generation and engage in the same things they did while young, which for me was keeping up with politics and movies. Old buddies are precious because they share a point of view and their bygone experiences and are also because they are associated with those people who have died. Oldsters are not just waiting in the vestibule of death.

But there is something deeper that lurks behind the specter of disengagement that explains better what it is to be an old person. People shed their grieve]nces as they get older perhaps because under the light of eternity it is just not worth holding a grudge or because the  oldster is no longer in the battles that made grievances meaningful, such as a battle over academic prestige or who will run the corporation, thinking someone else acted unfairly and got the slot you wanted. Old people can accomplish a little bit of serenity because, after all, the  winner in life is not the one who has the most toys, but the one who lasts longest while remaining comfortable, because you will no longer have any trinkets of wealth, power and prestige once you are as dead as a doornail even if the Egyptians and other religionists thought and think otherwise, grievances as well as successes reaching into the afterlife because that is iust what happens, is the substance of living life. So people disengage from their bad feelings and only that though not everyone takes advantage of being so liberated.

Shedding grievances is included in religion because it is part of human experience. Bill Murray in that very wise movie “Groundhog Day” says that God may just be a very old person who has seen everything. Like an old person, He gives past grievances because the grievances no longer matter. That is different from the Christian view that elevates shedding grievances into a doctrine of forgiveness, which is to erase past grievances as if they didn’t happen and, indeed, take it as a virtue to abolish the past so that you are a better person for forgiving your trespassers even though it is obviously impossible to erase away a murder or a hurting insult, just find a way to go past it. Indeed, God in the Christian view, does the sublime event of forgiving mankind for its original sin by having His own Son suffer for mankind’s deeds, becoming, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, the scapegoat for mankind, as if Jesus whatever they were, which might be a tendency to perverseness, which is hardly the most ultimate flaw, and Jesus suffered just a whit, three days in a tomb, for redeeming all of mankind. A mighty cheap bargain.

Think rather of every old person having a magic wand whereby the person  can change the world by changing an attitude and so transform  other people and oneself into being fully human by forgoing their grievances. And why not? Old people are also free because if they are run over by a truck they can think the pain wouldn’t last long and they have anyway lived out the vast majority of their lives. Old people are therefore invincible even if they are fragile. Nothing much can happen to them and so shedding grievances is a minor part of the situation of being old. Every day is a joy and a vacation.

That doesn’t mean to be aimless. You can still write a book or be nice to people. But those are added virtues rather than what have  been the burdens of your identity, what shaped you and what you know to have characterized you. It is all now gratis, a gift more precious than Jesus could offer because Jesus was compelled by his Father to do that.

Make use of this liberation while being old with regard to people in the midst of their lives, full of struggles and things to lose and matters about which to grieve. As an adult, you can be kinder to others, be only moderately competitive, and just neglect the small stuff. Enjoy the breeze while the  kids are in the playground. That is not asking people to be saints, which are singular accomplishments of rectitude, but simply the pleasures available to ordinary life. All people want to be pleasant except for those few who want to be mean and even those who are mean find an excuse for being so or regarding themselves and not really mean, though only a lover can appreciate that. That is what David Hume thought and that is contrary to the Christian view which is, deep down, people are just louses, cockroaches, meanies. What can a belief in original sin otherwise mean? 

Not that old age is a long set of epiphanies. You are busy managing your pills and being sure not to eat what will upset your delicate digestion. You need not have gone beyond ambition or anger, but those qualities seem to have been stoked. But you can look at the vast expanse of human creation and sometimes say “This is good ''.

The Politics of Drag Queens

There would seem to be a rage for drag queen events such as Drag Queen Story Time where Michelle Tea, in drag, tells stories to young people which tell them to be kind to people who are different and disclaim that the children aged three to eleven are not being groomed for sexual activities. And there are drag queen shows where families bring their children, though I don’t think I would have found that back then, but Republicans are supposed to believe that families should decide how they should conduct their children, but escorting children to drag shows was apparently a bridge too far. I do not know if such exhibitions have any impact on the children but the Republican Congress is outraged at the events, quizzing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a committee hearing about whether they are taking place at military bases, he responding that no government money was being used, while avoiding the question of whether these events were facilitated by the military and whether soldiers retained the right to engage in free speech when off duty. Even so august a figure as a defense secretary goes out of his way to be as non confrontational as possible with Congresspeople lest he chide them for their grandstand plays, which is what I suspect they are. I sometimes wish witnesses at congressional hearings would talk back and call the Congresspeople outlandish and ridiculous rather than allow them to mouth off, always reclaiming their own time so as not to let witnesses answer the largely rhetorical questions. Ah well, the purpose of committees is, after all, to bloviate rather than develop information.

A suspicion that  politicians are out to engage in false rather than true outrage, that theory are lambasting gays because that is a group their constituents think they will like to be picked on, is evidenced to me by the long ago time when Gerald Ford, then a Michigan congressman, tried to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to be impeached because he had included a serious article within the pages of “Playboy”, a way for Hugh Hefner to claim it was not just a magazine of girlie pictures. I remember on camera a colleague telling Ford not to expose the pictures that were next to the Douglas article because they were so raw, however outraged Ford might be inclined to do so. But I knew Ford had been a ballet dancer as well as a football player and so probably not a prude but just hypocritical, faux angry at what would later be called a cultural issue.

But what if the current politicians are as honest as they can be about being outraged at displays of drag queen theatrics, especially including children, is not only seen as a danger to the children but also to the moral fabric of the nation? I would think then that there had indeed become a sea change in morals in that this generation had become within conservative precincts to have become much more prudish about sex since, let us say, when  women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts following the First World War. Consider a point in World War II when it seems men and women were copulating like crazy before men got shipped off to war. There was a film of 1941, just before that, called “All American Coed” starring Frances Langford about a slightly misspelled Princeton which included a drag team as part of its extracurricular activities showing off their skills, to comic effect, set to compete with an all female review of beauty queens out to strut their stuff as ringers employed by a girl college, a misspelled Bryn Mawr. Being in drag was good humored fun and children were allowed to see the movie because no qualitative ratings system had arrived. Would that movie today not be allowed? Is this today a serious enough issue on which to engage Congress?

Let us raise the ante and treat this as dealing with an issue about the morality of voting. An acquaintance of mine recently told me that she voted for the best candidate regardless of party which seemed to show that she was objective and therefore not swayed by political rhetoric. I certainly do require character and competence as bedrock or minimal standards for voting, though I remark that Republicans are more apt than Democrats to nominate questionable figures as their standard bearers. But there is also the question of the party agenda, its issues and programs, that are in a current election and persist over decades as their visions of the world. Stick to the party, I say, that has the point of view I espouse, and so be partisan. Sure, there are fringes of a party that I find I object to. After all, I came up with a party dominated by segregationists, though the Republicans were not very forward minded at the time on civil rights and that the squad of four, even though I disagree with Ilhan Omar and AOC on one or another of issues, these are serious people while Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green are not, and though I disagree with some of the Democratic agenda which seem to me wrongheaded, such as with regard to climate change, on the whole I can endorse the Democratic view, while the Republican view is anathema, as in the present instant, sincere or not, as opposing gay and transgender groups, exhibiting a meanspiritedness not likely to earn my support, not a likely prospect, even should a more moderate standard bearer emerge.  Republicans are rightly not looking to court my vote but to court the acquaintance of mine who will let and see the qualities of the person nominated. I, on the other hand, will foreclose candidates who don’t just excoriate Trump but also excoriate those who malign the minority communities that now include drag queens, who are also just human beings even if a bit quirky in how they prance around. Is it really all that difficult?

The Mer A Lago Indictment

There was already last night remarks from cable commentators on the Trump indictment regarding purloined secret documents. MSNBC pundits agree of the enormity of having an ex-President indicted for violations, among other things, of the Espionage Act, no other President ever having been accused of subverting the nation. It is a sad day that we've found ourselves in this situation, distasteful to think of anything similar to the authoritarian regimes that regularly throw in jail their defeated political opponents, which was the case in Russia and recently in Pakistan. Here is a response and a few comments on what has been said in the past day since the event of the indictment.

Lawrence O’Donnell said last night on MSNBC  that the indictment would have been less unsettling if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, allowing Nixon instead to have been indicted, and so a precedent for the idea that no one was above the law. But that context was very different. Nixon was disgraced and sorrowful of his own misdeeds. He said that he did wrong things even if his opponents had piled up on him. That was a lame excuse. Trump is unremorseful and running again for President and many of his supporters don’t care or disregard whatever he does. Commentators can find a number of people to blame for the present predicament but demur from blaming the electorate for having elected the scoundrel in the first place.  

Which leads to my own observation. The electorate for the 2024 election are not subject to the rule of law, including that Trump is innocent until convicted as guilty, when they make up their minds as to whether to nominate him again as President. They can use whatever evidence they want to use for judging a candidate, just a rumor or a bit of charm or a political disposition, or thinking that Hillary was haughty. And so there is enough evidence that Trump is a bad dude without waiting for the trial to proceed. Noone is entitled to be President even if everyone is entitled to a fair trial. So a public judgment can be made before the trial takes place. It is all up to the people again, they  having the final verdict on Trump’s political  fate.

The details of the indictment today also reveals the motive for the outrageous affronts committed by Trump to the nation. It was a simple and petty case of vanity. You would think that people who had been President were beyond this, but Trump, ever a petty man, wanted to show secret documents to political operatives only so he could show them off as in his own possession, which would have made him merely venal and amoral. Maybe he wasn’t planning to sell them to the highest bidder. How superficial can Trump be? That explains a lot of him.

The Republican leaders, for their part, are liars about the facts and, worse, unpatriotic in that they are craven to their constituents, unwilling to tell their constituents the truth, that being a higher calling than merely remaining electable, their higher calling being to lead a crisis through rather than obfuscate. It was ignoble for Trump as President to avoid what was happening with Covid, his excuse that he was shielding the people, when his duty was to speak the painful truth and many of his Republicans avoid the enormity of what Trump has done and claim, as did Nixon supporters, that everyone in politics did such shenanigans, which was not true, and as in presently the case where important Republican Trump defenders, do the same thing by conflating Trump’s appropriation of secret documents with Pence and Biden cooperating when documents were found inadvertently to have been sent to their homes.  Shame on the Republicans and don’t trust whatever they say about anything. This is the litmus test.

Bob Woodward on CNN today echoed Ben Bradley’s instruction after Nixon resigned of no gloating, and applied it to Trump. He is right in that even a Trump conviction would be just a recognition of a tragedy rather than  revenge satisfied. But don’t anticipate. Trump has weaseled out before from a lot of things managing just fines for Trump University and E. Jean Carroll. There is a long way before a  conviction much less a sentencing which I hope leaves him out of jail to live out his life without the remorse Nixon felt. That absence of humanity is on Trump.

Another observation of mine. In my generation, we turned on the television set to see if some additional major political figure had just been assassinated. Now, we await breaking news as to when Trump will be indicted in a different inquiry. Is this not progress rather than devolution?

Chris Christie

The moral thing is to vote for the one you believe in.

Chris Christie has announced that he is running for :President and the cable and New York Times commentators immediately opined whether he had “a lane” whereby he could become President, that meaning a combination of constituencies that could add up to a majority of convention delegates and decided that he couldn’t because he could never break into the Trump supporters but could only serve to unseat Trump and letting someone else inherit his following. That was the same reasoning that led none of the Republican candidates in 2016 to refuse to oppose Trump, making nice so as to inherit the booty when Trump would inevitably falter. Well, maybe there is no such  thing as a lane, only an opportunity whereby someone manages to catch fire, to capture attention. Both Obama and Trump made their own lanes when so many constituencies turned out in favor of them while Jeb Bush, with the money and the name, was never able to become a taste treat. The commentators are just trying to be objective and so all they can talk about is the horse race or, to use a different metaphor, all the carrom shots needed to get anointed a nominee, but all they do is show their preferences, Christie just a bully and not a serious person, given his poor performance as Governor of New Jersey and a whiff of the Bridgegate scandal, Underlying their political analyses is an assessment of the worth of the candidates.

 I want to pose the same question in a different vocabulary: who should someone vote for, given the dynamics on the ground, and my answer is that people should vote for the one who would make the best president regardless of the dynamics and so not a calculation of handicapping a winner however sophisticated they might think by second guessing who will emerge triumphant, Christie being intelligent and willing to work  across the two parties and sensing he would not take down the temple, whether through an insurrection or Pence’s evangelicalism, however sincere that belief might be, should be the same issue. My ideal is that both general nominees will be reputable enough that a voter can rest easy whichever one is  elected in that they both would manage respectably, aware of the stakes foreign policy and appreciating various ethnic and other status communities, even if, inevitably, a Republican president will cut taxes for the rich and cut services from the poor.

My mandate to support the candidate you believe in rather than play the horserace of who might win and how to strategically interpose in the process is moral rather than prudential because you can feel satisfied if you voted the way you believed in even if you lost. You had fought the good fight but might rue the day if you had miscalculated what your influence might inadvertently cause. That moral principle even applies in  spirit to those people who think that a Democrat should want Trump to be nominated because he was more likely to be defeated by Biden, my favorite, however much that mental experiment is ineffectual in that I do not vote in a Republican primary though people do switch allegiances in  political parties so as to make the worst candidate the nominee. I want the better person to win and I don’t want to bring into the tent a monster who might perchance prevail. Worry what you wish for. Look what happened in 2016 when people voted for Trump as a protest vote or Britishers had second thoughts about voting for Brexit as also a protest vote, not really expecting it would win. 

My view of being honest rather than scheming is very different from the usual Conservative patter, which is to say that Trump is unelectable, a three time loser and so people should move beyond his baggage. That is  too much of a calculation which is different from recognizing him for what he is, which is a fomenter of rebellion and people honest enough to admit that even if they prefer him still because they claim the election in 2020 was stolen. Be honest rather than obfuscate. Marjorie Taylor Green says what she thinks, which is to free the insurrectionists rather than just avoid that unpleasant issue. It may be that it does not bring peace to the dinner table to confront the Trump supporters but that at is not the goal of the political market, to hash things out, even if it results in having a wishy-washy moderate so as to avoid absolute opposition which is not an admirable or long term solution, as was clearly the case when the last few pre civil war presidents  obfuscated. Rather than dismiss Trumpites as mean spirited and largely ignorant, as mostly they are, tell them to tell the truth about why they like him, and clips of film interviews show them to tell the truth and want to go back before women got the vote or maybe to the Fifties except that segregation was indeed bad, though transgender people are now bad, Mega voters against any new ideas or practices as being unnatural. In that case, Trumpists are honest even if reactionary in that they posit a golden age of an ancient regime and so expound what Karl Mannheim said in 1929 was an ideology rather than a utopia, and I prefer otherwise, society becoming in the future increasingly enlightened as that is demonstrated in legislation and an increasingly humane spirit.

Here is what seems to be an exception to my rule to vote for the candidate you most prefer, offering yourself to the honest truth. What if there is a three contest race and you prefer the small third party candidate who is bound to lose. That is what happened when people voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore and Nader’s absence in the race would have given Gore the election. Should you have held your nose and voted for Gore as the lesser of the two devils? My answer is “no” and vote for Nader anyway but only if you are really sure that there is no difference between the two major candidates, both unacceptable, rather than just claiming that is the case. Really no different? Really and honestly?  In that case, go with Nader but the case seems to me a stretch. 

Democrats also face the problem of being honest with themselves. What about Biden? The Times said a few days ago that although he is showing his age, he still remains alert, clear on the issues, still mastering the details, and in charge of his administration, and I also think articulate even if his voice is weaker, and that his administration is the furthest left one since FDR, Biden having managed to turn narrow majorities and recently a minority in the House to major achievements though not all of them as I had hoped. But what happens if he starts drooling, which is a shorthand for significantly diminished powers that remain short of the requirements that could occur so as to evoke the 25th Amendment? Will Democrats just cover it up? It would be their turn to deal with a presidential embarrassment, something they have carried with Trump ever since he announced his candidacy and found themselves not able to unhorse him, or worse, find themselves unable to become unamored with him.

Here is a different scenario. One thing that might happen if Biden’s capacity diminished was to become a figurehead for the Presidency whereby the president reigned but did not rule, Biden heavily relying on a strong and able White House and cabinet. He might remain affable and give set speeches and smooch with the crowd and that would be all, his basic point of view continuing on. In fact that is the way Republican administrations often do their business, picking a candidate for name recognition, Reagan and George W. Bush clear examples, who delegated powers to a strong cabinet with Reagan and a strong vice president with George  W. The alternative party, the Democrats, had followed a very different course in that the candidates duked it out between  one another on different policies and personalities and if the Democratic nominee became the winner of the Presidency took over kit and caboodle and set up his own administration.  That is the substance of saying that Democrats  make “strong” Presidencies. It isn’t that Democratic administrations are more intrusive in society than are Republican administrations. Trump got three Supreme Court justices who would overthrow Roe v. Wade and that is plenty intrusive. But Democratic Presidents are strong in that they run their own administrations. Having a Democrat resign himself to doing what Republicans do would be a loss because Democratic Presidential leadership is less elusive but the alternative is nonetheless legitimate.

We don't have to consider this succession or rather “de-cession" for very long because what will happen if Biden falters all depends on when and how he deteriorates. If it happens early enough, there will be a scramble for who will replace him as the party nomination. If he falters close to Election Day then the focus will be on the Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harrris who I hope will be up to the task. If Biden is elected and then deteriorates, the American government can change over into the Republican model, a good question about who in the Biden circle would come to significant  power. Biden, however, might also deteriorate slowly and so last longer than he should have and become like Hindenburg or Biden might know enough and be brave enough to do what De Gaulle did, which was to resign over a minor matter because he knew he was failing because he could no longer memorize the long speeches he delivered and decided on his own that it was time to go.

Democrats will have to watch these developments carefully, deciding honestly when it is time for pressure to invoke the 25th Amendment, and disregarding the Republicans who already claim that Biden is on drugs that keep him barely functioning. As usual, there is a heavy duty on the citizenry to use their moral honesty to keep the nation afloat.