Better Angels

As an American liberal of a certain age—34, to be exact—I am old enough to remember when accusing your fellow citizens of treason was frowned upon.

When George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq in 2003—ostensibly to avenge the attacks of September 11, in both cases—I was told that anyone who held half-hearted or otherwise ambivalent views on the matter were effectively siding with the enemy and should be condemned and ostracized accordingly.  As the president famously put it at the time, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

While that particular intonation was directed at foreign governments and not American citizens, it didn’t take long for the sentiment to course its way through the domestic bloodstream, whereby Bill Maher’s assertion on “Politically Incorrect” that the 9/11 hijackers had exhibited more courage than the U.S. Defense Department led the White House press secretary to warn, “All Americans […] need to watch what they say.” 

In those frightful early days, weeks and months of the so-called “post-9/11 era,” to suggest that Osama bin Laden and his gang were slightly less than the embodiment of pure evil—that their actions were, in fact, a direct consequence of several decades of foolish foreign policy decisions on the part of the United States—was tantamount to swearing an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In this clash of civilizations, no one could remain neutral, let alone pollute the national discourse by, say, introducing historical nuances or attempting to understand our enemies’ point of view.

It was a disgusting posture for the leaders of a free society to strike, effectively tarring millions of Americans as traitors for having the temerity to think critically about the single most consequential foreign policy decision in a generation and—perhaps more to the point—for not simply taking it on faith that the United States was always and forever on the right side of history. 

Indeed, but for the abject messiness and incompetence of our twin Middle Eastern adventures over time, there is every reason to assume the liberal critique of 21^st century American interventionism—specifically, the view that America lacks the historical moral standing to tell other nations how to behave—would have remained toxic within polite society and rendered the entire Democratic Party unelectable for decades to come.

With all of that in mind, it comes as one hell of a plot twist to wake up here in 2022 and find that certain Republicans are now the ones introducing moral relativism and complexity into the national discourse and—more shocking still—that mainstream Democrats have become the McCarthyites smoking out disloyalty and sedition amongst their more deplorable countrymen.

I speak, of course, about the insane, reckless invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the unspeakable human carnage it is wreaking at this very hour.  While virtually all Western leaders have condemned Putin’s move as a barbaric, senseless act of aggression against a country that posed no threat to him or anyone else, a non-trivial contingency of American politicians, voters and TV personalities—largely from either the far-right or the far-left—have expressed sympathy and approval for Putin’s brazenness and flair, while simultaneously criticizing the Biden administration for lacking the strength and resolve that such a geopolitical challenge would require.

In short, these critics seem to regard Russia as more admirable than the United States and its allies and—by implication—would not be particularly bothered should Putin manage to conquer half of Eastern Europe by the time his wild misadventure is through.

Personally, I do not share this perspective.  While I largely agree with the center-left consensus that expanding NATO all the way to Russia’s borders was an unforced historical error that helped to precipitate the present conflict (not that everyone agrees with that, either), I am equally convinced that Putin is an irrational, brutal, malevolent crazy person with little regard for human life and an increasingly precarious grip on reality, and that rooting for him to succeed is functionally indistinguishable from rooting for a world war that (given the available weaponry) could conceivably result in the destruction of all life on Earth.

But here’s the catch:  As a non-expert and non-historian, I am not completely sure that I’m right about those things, nor that the Putin empathizers in our midst are categorically wrong.  As we re-learned after 9/11—albeit slowly—the argument that America is unambiguously good and our so-called enemies are unambiguously evil might be emotionally satisfying at the outset of a great conflict, but the course of human events almost always reveals the all-too-obvious complications lying just beneath the surface.

Never forget:  Nearly everyone who was eventually vindicated about the nature of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was called a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer when the operations began, and barely any of the folks who slandered them have since apologized, let alone acknowledged their own mistakes and miscalculations.

As the United States is drawn into yet another ruinous military clash—one whose trajectory will likely prove exponentially more unpredictable and deadly than any of us currently appreciates—allow me to make a simple plea that, amongst ourselves and within our own borders, we forego the reflexive accusations of disloyalty and other high crimes and instead adopt the magnanimous and conciliatory tone of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, as embodied in its most famous and profound clause:  “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

However this war shakes out—assuming it doesn’t go thermonuclear and kill everyone, that is—we Americans will continue to coexist side-by-side whether we like it or not, and it would behoove us to try our merry best to come out the other side of this horror show without hating and distrusting each other even more than we already do.

Is this a vain hope?  Of course it is.  After all, accusing each other of treason is as old as the nation itself and has found a home in every war we have ever fought.  Indeed, in the Adams and Wilson administrations, it was even codified into law.

All the same, one is compelled to ask:  In a free and open society, what exactly is the purpose of stigmatizing dissenting views about a world-historical event that might well result in thousands—if not millions—of deaths?  What is being accomplished by condemning anyone who questions the conventional wisdom about the Russian threat as a fifth columnist acting in bad faith?  Why are we so sure that the majority view of this conflict is correct, and why are we so afraid of unpopular, contrarian takes?

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that in moments of great uncertainty—when the fate of humanity itself lies in the balance—the widest possible suite of perspectives should be aired, up to and including the notion that our adversaries are no less rational or self-interested than we are.  Would we not want them to feel the same about us? Might doing so possibly even make it easier to win the damn war?

In the fullness of time, the truth of the matter will be revealed, and those who judged the situation correctly will have their well-deserved moment of vindication, while those who were wrong will open an omelet factory from all the eggs dripping off their faces.

Until then, a healthy dose of modesty by all seems the most prudent posture with which to approach the cataclysm that lies before us, knowing—as we do—that the future is forever uncertain and that the worst consequences often spring from the best of intentions. 

I.F. Stone famously wrote that history is a tragedy, not a morality tale. Let’s not make it worse.

Citizen Hitch

If I were to rest my entire political philosophy on a single YouTube video, it just might be a 21-minute clip from a 2006 debate at the University of Toronto, which concerned the question, “Does the freedom of speech include the freedom to hate?”

The speaker, arguing in the affirmative and invoking sources ranging from Voltaire and John Milton to Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, argues forcefully and succinctly that, in a free society like the United States (and perhaps even Canada), “It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard.  It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear.” 

After all, he goes on, if even a single person in a crowd held a different opinion from everyone else on a given question, the full and free airing of that perspective would benefit all—either by compelling them to reexamine their preexisting assumptions or, conversely, by reinforcing and solidifying the rightfulness of their supposedly enlightened consensus view.  Hammering this point home, the speaker then cites famed socialist Rosa Luxemburg, saying, “The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.”

That speaker was Christopher Hitchens, the English-born journalist, polemicist and general raconteur who died 10 years ago this week.  Beloved and reviled in roughly equal measure, he and his writings continue to exert a greater impact on my own worldview—indeed, on both what and how I think—than all but a small handful of individuals and, for me, would be perhaps the most obvious response to the classic question of whom—among all people living or dead—I would invite to a dinner party of my dreams.  That is, assuming there’s enough Johnnie Walker Black to get us all the way to dessert.

Hitchens came in for a lot of criticism throughout his public life, much of which was thoroughly deserved.  After all, he was the guy who argued as vehemently as anyone that the war in Iraq was a good idea and that those who thought otherwise were carrying water for bin Laden and the rest of his jihadist gang—assertions he carried more or less to his grave, insisting that while America’s adventure in Mesopotamia might’ve been poorly executed, the invasion itself was necessary and just.

And yet, even on this issue, his take (however misguided) was always worth reading, since he had plainly come to his conclusions about Iraq independently of the Bush administration and his reasons for invading were often quite different from theirs.  As such—and as with all matters with which he concerned himself—we could be sure he really meant what he said, that he was not a mere partisan shill and that—at least in his own mind—he was defending high-minded principles that transcended whichever political factions happened to agree or disagree with him at a given moment in time.

That, in so many words, is the model of intellectual honesty Hitchens epitomized in his better moments and to which we should all aspire.  Hitchens was never troubled about holding an opinion contrary to that of everyone else in the room.  If anything, he relished it and was prepared to defend his position for hours on end—as he famously did on innumerable occasions.

Indeed, Hitchens was that most singular breed of American who believed to his boots that argument constitutes the highest form of dialogue between individuals, and would often go out of his way to identify points of conflict between himself and his interlocutors—purely for the joy of hashing those differences out in public.  For him, the point wasn’t who ultimately won the debate. The debate itself was the point.

While the focus of Hitchens’s passions shifted and evolved quite dramatically over the course of his public career—at different junctures, he associated himself with everything from socialism and anti-imperialism to neoconservatism and anti-clerical atheism—his North Star remained a devotion to free expression and freedom in general, combined with a fanatical hatred of any and all forces that would impede or limit the exercise thereof.

In this way, he was the quintessential American:  A man born of English stock who came to regard “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as infinitely preferable to subjection under a hereditary monarch and who acted accordingly.  In 2005, he published a short biography of Thomas Jefferson whose subtitle, “Author of America,” aptly reflected his appreciation of the United States as a nation founded upon ideas and principles—a rarity in world history—and he became a U.S. citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial the following spring.

The great question among Hitchens admirers today is:  Had he not been felled by esophageal cancer in December 2011—the natural consequence of decades of smoking and boozing that he himself rationalized as indispensable to his chosen profession—what might he have said about the prominent leaders and events of the last decade of American life?

The secondary—and, to me, far more compelling—question is whether he would’ve been allowed to voice those opinions without being run out of town on a rail.  Even in his own time, both in style and substance, his public pronouncements proved both highly politically incorrect and hysterically funny and ironic—the qualities most likely to get one “canceled” here in 2021.

Knowing the inherently provocative and controversial nature of his output—and how amused and unfazed he was by the blowback they inevitably produced—one can only assume that, had he lived another 10 years or more, Hitchens would’ve been subject to a white-hot Twitter mob on a fairly regular basis, that he would possibly have faced pressure from his editors and publishers to explain himself and/or tone the rhetoric down just a smidge, and that his response to all of this—in the spirit of Logan Roy—would have been to tell everyone to fuck off.

He will continue to be missed.

The Long View

The first time I ever heard the word “Afghanistan”—or at least gave it any real thought—was on September 11, 2001.  Specifically, when my dad and I reached the summit of Turkey Mountain in our then-hometown in northern Westchester County to behold the distant, smoldering remains of Lower Manhattan some 40-odd miles south.  Among the several dozen gawkers present (on a typical hiking day we’d have the entire mountain to ourselves), one guy turned to us and said, matter-of-factly, “Bush is declaring war on Afghanistan—he’s not waiting around.” 

As a 13-year-old with no history education to speak of, I had no earthly idea what he was talking about.  To the extent I was aware Afghanistan was a country, I certainly couldn’t have told you where it was located or what its relationship might have been to the mayhem that had unfolded that morning.  All I knew for sure was I would never get to visit the observation deck of the World Trade Center again.

Indeed, on this 20^th anniversary of the most cataclysmic assault on the American homeland this side of Pearl Harbor, I confess I haven’t quite gotten around to understanding what the nation of Afghanistan has to do with any of it.  Like everyone in those tense early days, I was shortly made aware of this group called the Taliban and this other group called Al-Qaeda and this man called Osama bin Laden and they’re Muslim but not the good kind of Muslim and something something something we’re invading Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the core meaning of America’s involvement in that country—and, later on, in Iraq—has remained something of a black box in my consciousness in the two decades since a quartet of hijacked airplanes altered the course of world history in the span of 102 minutes on a crisp Tuesday morning in September.

To this day, I’m not sure I’ve yet expressed a definitive opinion about American foreign policy post-September 11, 2001.  When our twin Middle East engagements were launched, I was simply too young and naïve to form any kind of intelligent view.  Once I was old enough to be theoretically capable of thinking for myself, each of those endeavors had devolved into such a pointless, unholy mess that no such assessment was necessary:  The sheer grand incompetence of the thing had rendered all other considerations moot.

When President Biden announced the complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan by the end of August—and stayed true to his word, more or less—I silently applauded his nerve in overruling the prevailing (and seemingly insurmountable) assumption within the military-industrial complex that the United States would remain there indefinitely, no matter how many times the official rationale for that presence might need to be changed in order to justify it.

Indeed, the more one learns how much our military and intelligence apparatus have baldly lied about the Afghanistan war in recent years, the more Biden’s decision to wash our hands of the whole business is vindicated.  More than a decade after Osama bin Laden was killed, one is justified in wondering what exactly the purpose of our continued financial and human expenditures in this proverbial “graveyard of empires” could possibly be, and whether the ultimate “lesson” of 9/11 is that there was no lesson at all.

In any case, as much as the September 11, 2001, attacks proved a lasting national trauma, they did not exact an equivalent psychological toll on me, despite my relative geographic proximity at the time.  As an eighth grader with plenty of academic and hormonal matters with which to concern myself, I regarded the assault as an unnerving but exciting diversion from the mundane routines of suburban middle school life, and I found it quite easy to carry on with those activities in the ensuing weeks, months and years without much of a blow to my jaded, detached teenage psyche.

And yet, here in 2021, nary a month goes by that I don’t go to sleep and dream of standing atop the World Trade Center—be it the old one, the new one or some fanciful dreamworld mashup of the two.  In real life, I rode the superfast elevator to the roof deck of the South Tower on three separate occasions prior to 9/11, and in 2017 I made the vertical pilgrimage to the “One World Observatory” of the new place, which afforded the same breathtaking view of New York City and its environs—plus or minus a few feet—as the dear departed original.

That I can’t seem to shake that image from my mind—albeit my subconscious, nocturnal one—must surely hold some greater significance.  Maybe the experience of witnessing the Twin Towers’ destruction contemporaneously—both on TV and, however distantly, in person—left me more scarred than I’m letting on.  Maybe my general fixation with tall buildings (which predated 9/11) runs deeper than I know.  Maybe that fixation is, itself, a mere Freudian compensation for my diminutive 5’4” frame.  Maybe—to quote Rick Blaine—it’s a combination of all three.

I’d like to think we Americans—at least those, like me, who suffered no personal loss—are capable of truly moving on from 9/11, much as the World War II generation managed, in a comparatively short time, to put the bombing of Pearl Harbor behind it.  Yet I suspect—based on 20 years of evidence—that we are fated to return to that horrible moment and its seismic aftereffects for the rest of our days, grasping desperately for a brighter, clearer future but ultimately—to quote another national icon—borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Questions For Hillary and Donald

The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is Monday, September 26, at 9pm.  Here are some questions I would like to ask both candidates:

Mrs. Clinton:  On policy, do voters have any reason to think you won’t be serving President Obama’s third term?

Mr. Trump:  Is it true—as one of your ex-wives has claimed—that you once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches as your bedside reading?  If so, what did you learn from them?

Mrs. Clinton:  You have said there is no conflict between your pledge to regulate big banks and the fact that you have received millions of dollars in speaking fees from those same banks.  Do you truly not understand why many Americans cannot take your “tough on Wall Street” posture seriously?

Mr. Trump:  You have praised President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which resulted in hundreds of U.S. citizens being illegally detained and deported because they were of Mexican descent.  Do you also support President Roosevelt’s initiative to hold more than 100,000 U.S. citizens in internment camps because they were of Japanese descent?

Mrs. Clinton:  You consider yourself a champion of the LGBT community.  However, you publicly opposed full marriage rights for same-sex couples until March 2013—exactly one month after retiring as Secretary of State.  When did you decide that gay people are equal to straight people with regards to marriage, and did it ever cross your mind that supporting marriage equality as America’s chief diplomat might have been helpful to the LGBT community?

Mr. Trump:  Earlier this year, you suggested that any woman who has had an abortion should be punished in some way.  Do you still think that today?  If not, what made you change your mind?

Mrs. Clinton:  You have expressed regret for saying that one-half of Trump’s supporters constitute a “basket of deplorables.”  Upon reflection, what do you believe the true figure to be, and how will you win the trust of those people once in office?

Mr. Trump:  When physical violence erupted at several of your campaign rallies, you lamented how such clashes don’t happen more often, saying, “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.”  How do you reconcile this philosophy with your pledge to bring “law and order” to America’s most violent cities?

Mrs. Clinton:  Why do you think you lost the 2008 Democratic primaries to Barack Obama?  If you lose the 2016 election to Trump, do you think it will be for the same reasons?

Mr. Trump:  In an interview, you claimed to be a highly religious person on the grounds that many evangelical Christians support you.  Are you religious in any other respect?

Mrs. Clinton:  If it were politically feasible, would you repeal the Second Amendment?

Mr. Trump:  You have disavowed the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke.  Is there anything you two actually disagree about?

Mrs. Clinton:  Are you ever concerned about your propensity for appearing to have violated the law, even when, in fact, you haven’t?  Whom do you most blame for this perception—the voters or yourself?

Mr. Trump:  If a poll came out tomorrow saying that a majority of your supporters now oppose building a wall along the Mexican border, would you drop the whole idea and never mention it again?

Mrs. Clinton:  You have said you regret using a private e-mail server because of all the trouble it has caused your campaign.  Is that the only reason for your regret?

Mr. Trump:  You say you have a plan to defeat ISIS, but you intend to keep it a secret until after you win the election.  If Clinton wins instead, are you going to keep it a secret from her as well?

Mrs. Clinton:  Is there any major issue about which you think the majority of the public is dead wrong?  If so, have you ever said so in public?

Mr. Trump:  In your convention speech, you said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”  If that’s the case, why didn’t you run in 2012?  Or 2008?  Or 2004?

Mrs. Clinton:  During the primaries, you opposed Bernie Sanders’s plan to make all public colleges tuition-free, arguing it would just be too darned expensive.  If you believed, in 2003, that it was worth funding the Iraq War with money we didn’t have, why doesn’t the same standard apply to higher education?

Mr. Trump:  You once said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”  Where did you come by this information and why haven’t you shared it with the generals?

Mrs. Clinton:  In recently hacked e-mails, Colin Powell wrote of you, “Everything [she] touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”  Did it surprise you to read this?

Mr. Trump:  The screenwriter of the Back of the Future movies recently revealed that the character Biff Tannen was largely based on you.  Do you take this as a compliment?

Mrs. Clinton:  Have you ever consciously lied to the American people?  If so, why?

Mr. Trump:  Based on how casually and frequently you have completely reversed your position on one issue after another, why should anyone believe a single word you say?

Mrs. Clinton:  When you entered this race, did it ever occur to you that you might lose?

Mr. Trump:  When you entered this race, did it ever occur to you that you might win?

Profiles in Cowardice

A major reason I supported Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries was his uncommon political courage.  Now that his candidacy has died, I worry that political courage itself has been killed off along with it.

If courage is defined as saying or doing something at risk to one’s physical or social well-being, then political courage is saying or doing something at risk to one’s job or reputation.  John F. Kennedy wrote a book about it in 1957, and the Kennedy Library has bestowed a “Profile in Courage Award” upon worthy individuals every year since 1990.

It’s a shame that instances of public valor are so rare that they require official recognition whenever they occur.  Even worse, perhaps, is how the American people’s expectation for such high-minded virtue in their elected officials is so low that the very concept has essentially become a relic—particularly in an election year like this one.

All the same, it’s worth asking:  Has Hillary Clinton taken a single risk in her entire public career?  Has Donald Trump?  If we are to elect one of these people leader of the free world, shouldn’t we expect them to have assumed a gutsy moral stand on something—even if just by accident?

Barack Obama passed this test eight years ago by having openly opposed the Iraq War in 2002.  As for Bernie Sanders, you could say his entire tenure in Congress has been an act of professional chutzpah—specifically, his dogged insistence on calling himself a “democratic socialist” at every turn, despite the obvious hazards of identifying with a political philosophy that is still seen by millions as outright un-American.

In the case of Trump, the issue is complicated—as all such issues are—by the inherent unseriousness of Trump’s entire candidacy.  Since the Donald has shown, over and over again, to believe in nothing but himself and to change his political positions on an almost hourly basis, there’s really no standard by which we can say he has ever risked his so-called principles for any higher purpose.

Oddly enough, if he were a normal candidate with even a glimmer of intellectual consistency, we could say—with absolute truth—that he has taken brave political stances on multiple occasions throughout this campaign.  Indeed, Trump has, at certain points, unambiguously said things that, up to now, were considered ideological treason by the Republican Party and were grounds for excommunication from the party and the campaign.

For instance, there was that time he asserted—at a GOP debate, no less—that “millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.”  Or his repeated claims that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein than with George W. Bush’s war.  Or his related view that 9/11 was essentially President Bush’s fault.  Or his assurance that if Caitlyn Jenner walked into one of his buildings, she could use whichever restroom she wanted.

Ordinarily, any of the above would register as political audacity of the highest order, since no GOP candidate could reasonably expect to rise to the top with such heresies as those.

Except for two things.  First—and at the risk of repeating ourselves—there is no reason to think Trump genuinely believes anything he’s ever said (even many of his own supporters have their doubts).  And second:  By the time Trump even bothered making substantive remarks of any kind, he was already ankle-deep in sexist remarks, racist remarks, Islamophobic remarks and anti-immigrant remarks—all of which only enhanced his standing in the polls, thereby insulating him from all the usual rules of political logic thereafter.

In other words, once GOP voters bought into the bigotry, paranoia and white male victimhood that comprise the entirety of Trump’s appeal, they essentially stopped listening to anything else that came out of his mouth.  And Trump, sensing this, became liberated to break with any Republican orthodoxy that he wished, knowing it would have no adverse affect on his poll numbers—and, therefore, no longer qualify as political courage.

With Hillary Clinton, the calculus is mercifully simpler:  As a public servant, she is wholly preoccupied with the objectives of her various constituencies and the minutiae of turning those dreams into reality.  As such, she is possibly the most risk-averse person who has ever run for president and, if elected, cannot be expected to make any inspired leap of faith on any major initiatives.

To wit:  She supported the Iraq War until it started going badly.  For all her gay-friendly bona fides, she didn’t publicly endorse same-sex marriage until March 2013—10 months after President Obama did the same.  Her views on America’s various trade agreements tend to oscillate based on popular sentiment at the time, as do her positions on gun control, immigration and Wall Street.

There’s an interesting and worthwhile argument going on about whether Clinton’s identity as a cautious, finger-to-the-wind incrementalist is a virtue or a vice.  (In the interest of time, we’ll save that debate for another day.)  In either case, it means she will not—under almost any circumstances—be ahead of the proverbial curve on any controversial subject.  Indeed, it is not clear whether she believes a president should be a pioneer of that sort, or whether she should merely go wherever the public takes her.

Drawing from her research on Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has said that the role of a president is to be a step ahead of the people, but to allow them to take that extra step on their own terms—that is, by nudging them in a certain direction without being pushy.

Would it be too generous to call that an accurate summary of how Hillary Clinton operates?  If pressed for a one-sentence appraisal of Clinton’s character, I’d offer that she has genuine political views—often shaped by trial and error—but that her deference to public opinion precludes her from sharing them until it becomes practical to do so.  Some would call this calculation.  Others would call it democracy.

In any case, hardly anyone would call it courage.  Clinton fancies herself “a progressive who likes to get things done,” and as appealing as that may sound (to progressives), it suggests a dull, single-minded efficiency that doesn’t allow for thinking too far outside the box, lest it distract from the central task at hand.

In the long run—and considering the historically impotent Congress we now have—maybe Clinton’s limited imagination will do the trick.  Maybe big and bold are luxuries we can’t currently afford and perhaps we’re better off not deluding ourselves into thinking otherwise.

After all, it’s not as if courageous decisions are an inherently good idea.  In the end, they are only as worthwhile as the person making them and the circumstances in which they come about.  If 2016 has taught us anything, it’s to be extremely wary of candidates who aren’t concerned about the consequences of their actions.

Nothing to See Here

The problem isn’t that Hillary’s burrito bowl doesn’t matter.  The problem is that it does.

Oh, it certainly shouldn’t be anybody’s concern that Hillary Clinton popped into a Chipotle somewhere along her magical mystery tour through the Midwest last week.  Contrary to popular belief, presidential candidates do occasionally eat lunch.  It’s not an inherently newsworthy event.

In fact, you’d need to be more or less clinically insane to be so invested in a potential president—19 months before the election—that you wonder where (and what) they ate this week.  Or ever.

Many words leap to mind.  One of them is “stalker.”

But, of course, that’s what our country’s venerable press corps spent its time doing in the opening days of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

From the moment the former secretary of state announced her candidacy in a YouTube video on April 12, a gaggle of reporters raced to her roving campaign headquarters—a Chevy Explorer named Scooby—and they’ve been holding her road trip under a microscope ever since.

When word came that Clinton had patronized a Chipotle without anyone noticing, the media couldn’t let it go.  Over the next several days, no stone of Burritogate was left unturned:  What Clinton ordered, whether she left anything in the tip jar, why she was there incognito and didn’t mingle with other customers.

This is probably the moment for us to wryly observe that if the media had been as maniacally vigilant about the Iraq War as they are about a former senator’s dining habits, the last dozen-odd years of Middle East calamities might have been avoided.  But that’s a cliché for another day.

The fact, in any case, is that the press is treating this early phase of the 2016 election pretty much as you’d expect:  By clinging onto every last microscopic detail of the two parties’ respective contenders and wringing as much meaning out of them as they can.

At bottom, this is the result of two simultaneous—and seemingly unavoidable—conditions.  First, the reporters in question apparently only exist in order to cover these sorts of things.  Because, you know, it’s not like there’s anything else happening in America that might provide a better use of their time.

And second, since the first primary ballots of the 2016 race won’t be cast for another nine months, they really have no choice but to cover literally anything the candidates do.  Thus far, Clinton is the only active campaigner on the Democratic side, so there you have it.

The logic of it, however depressing, seems airtight.

It’s not.  There is a choice involved here, both for journalists and for us:  The choice to look away.  To ignore everything to do with the 2016 election until—oh, I don’t know—the year 2016.  To wait patiently until something interesting happens, rather than trying to create interest out of nothing.

We could allow ourselves a scenario—if we so chose—in which presidential aspirants would go on their whistle stop tours of Iowa and New Hampshire for years on end, but without reporters and cameras breathing down their necks 24 hours a day.  Grant the good residents of these early primary states the attention of the candidates, but not of the entire country.  Really, what do the rest of us care?

There are those—particularly on the interwebs—who will insist to the last that early nuggets from the campaign trail can serve as insights into a candidate’s character and managerial style, and are therefore worth covering and commenting upon.

As much as I would love to dismiss this theory outright as a load of hooey—political pop psychology run amok—I am in the unfortunate position of agreeing with it.  At least some of the time.

For instance, it became clear in the early days of John McCain’s first run that his scrappy, welcoming attitude toward the press would make him an uncommonly congenial and entertaining nominee (a fact that, admittedly, didn’t quite hold the second time).  Conversely, I think Rand Paul’s already lengthy history of arrogance and condescension toward reporters asking him simple questions should rightly give pause to anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to make this guy America’s chief diplomat to the world.

I’m not convinced, however, that it requires two full years of coverage for the truth about these people to come out.  Indeed, I am as certain as I can be that a person who completely tunes out all “news” about the 2016 election from now until, say, next February will be no less informed of its essentials than someone watching The Rachel Maddow Show every night between now and then.

I should add that, so long as reporters continue hounding candidates day and night, I have no particular problem with viewers at home following it as pure, disposable entertainment.

Just don’t pretend that it’s anything else.

Personally, I think it’s kind of hilarious that Hillary Clinton has named her campaign van Scooby.  It’s goofy, whimsical and endearing—and possibly a latent grab for the stoner vote, considering whom it’s named after.

But I did not need to know that.  It’s not important, and it reveals nothing relevant about Clinton that I won’t learn through debates, speeches and actual primaries.

More to the point, I did not need a professional journalist to tell me the van’s name, knowing what that journalist might have learned and written about instead.

The key in covering a round-the-clock event that goes on forever is knowing how to distinguish the things that matter from the things that don’t.  When reporters treat everything equally—as if where a candidate eats lunch is just as important as what he or she thinks about climate change—they license voters to do the same thing, leading to a campaign that is dangerously trivial.

The trouble, you see, is that talking about a trip to Chipotle is a lot more fun than talking about, say, ISIS.  Given the choice, there isn’t one of us who wouldn’t secretly (if not openly) prefer the former, even though we know the latter is infinitely more consequential and pertinent to being president of the United States.

Which means that we can’t be given the choice.

We can’t have our laziest instincts accommodated by being told that following the most inane details of a presidential campaign makes us informed citizens.  It doesn’t.  It just makes us voyeurs and turns our candidates into exhibitionists.  To elevate irrelevant pablum to a level of respectability is to enable both us and them into being our worst possible selves.

As we well know, the cultural erosion this practice creates does not end with the campaign.  Think about how many precious TV hours and newspaper columns have been expended on the exploits of the first family, or on the president’s March Madness bracket.  Or the fact that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is still a thing.

The human need for trivia is plainly innate and inescapable—hence the proliferation of reality TV, People and the National Football League.

However, government and politics are supposed to exist outside the world of superficiality, not least because the future of the republic depends upon them.

Is it too much to ask that we take this one aspect of American life seriously?

If our press corps didn’t spend days on Hillary Clinton’s burrito runs and the like, would we really be unable the handle the stuff that really matters?

Don’t answer that.

Political Sniping

Warning:  The following contains spoilers about the movie American Sniper.  Proceed with caution.

Reading the various reactions to Clint Eastwood’s new movie American Sniper, two facts immediately leap out.

First:  No one can seem to agree on the movie’s point of view vis-à-vis the Iraq War.  Some say it’s neutral or apolitical, while others consider it a full-throated endorsement of the theory that American involvement in Mesopotamia was (and is) a good idea.

And second:  In nearly every analysis of what American Sniper is about—and whether it’s any good—the conclusion perfectly matches the politics of the person making the analysis.  Generally speaking, those who opposed the Iraq War also dislike the film, while those who considered the war necessary and just think the movie is great.  Those whose politics are ambivalent, private or nonexistent fall somewhere in between.

Joined with the debate about the movie’s version of Iraq is the depiction of its protagonist, Chris Kyle, the real-life Navy SEAL who killed more Iraqis than any other sniper and, as a consequence, spent the rest of his life struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder.  That is, until he was killed by a fellow veteran who was, himself, stricken with PTSD.

Does American Sniper portray Kyle as a pure All-American Hero and—far more interestingly—should it have?  Here, too, individual answers seem to track with whatever people happened to already think about these subjects.

What is clear, in any case, is that Kyle is given highly sympathetic treatment by Eastwood and is meant to be shown, in the end, as a Good Guy.  What is more, the movie is ultimately meant to be about Kyle and Kyle alone—his experience, his struggles—and is not necessarily interested in the world that is going on around him.

Is this a valid approach to filmmaking?  Can a movie like this be truly apolitical, as so many critics say it is?

In a fiery column in Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi says no.  Referring to “the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain” as “the real villains in this movie,” Taibbi argues, “Sometimes there’s no such thing as ‘just a human story.’  Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.”

Taking this theory a step further, I think it’s worth considering whether any movie can lay claim to being completely removed from politics of one sort or another.  Or, indeed, whether there is any point in trying.  My inkling is that it can’t and there isn’t, and it’s just as well that this is so.

As it happens, this is not the first time that an ostensibly “personal” Clint Eastwood project has been attacked for having a secret political agenda.

In 2004, Eastwood made a movie called Million Dollar Baby, about a woman who believes her sole purpose in life is to be a professional boxer.  (Warning:  Massive spoilers ahead!)  When she is sucker-punched by an opponent and left paralyzed below the neck, she decides she has no further reason to live, and pleads with her trainer and only friend (played by Eastwood) to unplug her life support and allow her to die.  After a period of struggle and a talk with a local priest, he does just that.

Because both the boxer (played by Hilary Swank) and the trainer are shown as sympathetic characters, the movie was considered by some to be an “endorsement” of assisted suicide, leading to a brief but intense national debate about both the movie and the issue itself.  How irresponsible, many said, for a serious film to portray assisted suicide in a sort-of positive light.

Against this wave of condemnation, the critic Roger Ebert offered the following rebuke:  “Million Dollar Baby raises fundamental moral issues.  At a moment of crisis, the characters arrive at a decision.  I do not agree with their decision.  But here is the crucial point:  I do believe that these characters would do what they do in this film.  It is entirely consistent with who they are and everything we have come to know about them.”

In other words, movies are about individuals, not causes.  Directors are free to have their characters behave however is natural to them, and it is up to us, the audience, to make moral judgments.  In all cases, however, we should understand such behavior as being specific to those characters—Chris Kyle included—and not infer them to be representative of any larger philosophy of life.

The problem, though, is that we just can’t help ourselves.  As Taibbi points out vis-à-vis American Sniper, movies do not exist in a vacuum.  It’s silly and naïve to think otherwise.

The truth is that everything is political, whether we realize it or not.  Politics is life.  The word itself, in its original Greek form, means “relating to citizens,” meaning every one of us is on the hook.  So long as you’re alive and occasionally leave the house to interact with the rest of humanity (tiresome as it can often be), then you are engaging in the art of politics.

As such, once a movie presumes to be about anything at all, it becomes a political document, and we are free—encouraged, even—to wade through any possible larger meanings it might hold, whatever the director’s intent.

In the current Oscar race, for instance, the big pre-Sniper controversy concerned whether Ava DuVernay’s Selma is unfair in its depiction of Lyndon Johnson circa 1965.  Because it’s about the Civil Rights Movement and its present-day parallels, Selma is political to its core.  (Its theme song, “Glory,” even includes a reference to Ferguson, Mo.)

However, take a deeper look and you’ll find politics intruding upon every last entry on the Oscar shortlist.

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is ostensibly about nothing more than the experience of growing up in 21^st century America.  But it’s also about single mothers, deadbeat fathers, alcoholic stepfathers, inspiring teachers, and the virtues of hard work.  Do you mean to tell me those are not political issues?  Open a newspaper:  When have they ever not been on the front page?

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman is a dark comedy about a washed-up movie star attempting to resurrect himself by putting on a Broadway show.  As such, it’s also about the nature of celebrity and fame, the integrity of art and (again) what it means to be a good father.  All political matters.

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is about an aspiring drummer and the terrifying music teacher who pushes him to within an inch of his life.  Which means it’s really about the costs of ambition and the lengths that some people will go to achieve greatness and immortality.  In America’s hyper-competitive culture, coupled with our meritocratic national work ethic, what could be more political than that?

And so forth.

So when people say that American Sniper is not a political movie, they are wrong twice.  First, in the view that the movie has no opinion about America’s adventures in Iraq (to wit:  could it really be a coincidence that the one soldier who questions the war’s purpose ends up getting shot in the face?).  And second, in the implication that a Navy sniper’s psychological profile has no political dimension.  As if killing Arabs for a living were a purely personal matter.

Indeed, if American Sniper were truly non-political, we would not be arguing about it at all.  We wouldn’t need to.  And what a boring, worthless movie it would be.

No, the film’s inherent relevance to our national conversation about foreign affairs is what makes it so valuable and compelling.

This doesn’t mean it isn’t a deeply personal story as well.  Of course it is.  That’s what the cliché “the personal is political” is all about.  Chris Kyle’s suffering is real, but it has a context that we must acknowledge in order for it to make any sense.  We can only heed Eastwood’s central message—America must take better care of its veterans—by understanding what makes their return to civilian life so difficult.  There’s no way to do that without returning, sooner or later, to the policies that sent people like Kyle to Iraq in the first place.

Eastwood has been rightly criticized for simplifying this narrative into an old-fashioned “good guys vs. bad guys” story (every Iraqi in the film serves no purpose except to be killed), but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should follow his lead.  Judging from the contentious response it has garnered thus far, we haven’t.  However unwittingly, American Sniper has re-ignited one of the most important debates in contemporary American life—namely, have the past dozen years of U.S. foreign policy been one giant dead end?

To that extent, the movie has served a useful purpose.  Through the profile of one person, however lionized, it has provoked people to think more seriously about a subject of global importance they would just as well ignore.

Not bad for a movie that isn’t interested in politics.

Baker’s Dozen

Roughly a year from now, I will have lived in a post-9/11 world longer than I ever lived in a pre-9/11 world.

Presumably this means nothing to you, but it sure scares the hell out of me.

Know what’s even scarier?  Last month I attended the bar mitzvah—the Jewish coming-of-age—of a cousin for whom the memory of the September 11, 2001, attacks is no memory at all, because he was two months old at the time.

Worse still:  Last week I shot hoops and played wiffle ball with another cousin, aged four and a half, who probably doesn’t yet know what “9/11” is, and when he does, it will present simply as one more event in history, much as Watergate and the Iran hostage crisis did for me.

To my fellow twentysomethings, I ask:  Have we already reached that point where we talk to young people about September 11 the way our grandparents always talked to us about World War II?  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but:  Where does the time go?

While debate still rages, up until now my own definition of what it means to be a Millennial is that the formative global event of your life—albeit if only viewed on television—was the act of evil committed in New York and Arlington, Virginia, 13 years ago today.  For me and pretty much everyone in my graduating class, it most certainly was, if only because nothing else was quite so interesting.

Yet here are members of my generation—contemporaries, as it were—for whom September 11 means nothing because they were born just a few years later than I.

Indeed, Richard Linklater’s seismic new movie Boyhood, which effectively bottles up the Millennial experience for all future generations to consider, begins sometime in 2002, with a protagonist just old enough to be aware of the attack but too young to understand what it means.

Even as the film progresses—it covers 12 years in all—the only allusions to 9/11 are indirect or after-the-fact, such as when a young soldier recounts his tours of duty in the Middle East or when the boy’s dad rants about how the Iraq War was one big scam.

But the event itself seems to have had no immediate effect on this family.  It’s just something that happened far away at some point in the past.  So far as the movie is concerned, the world prior to September 11, 2001, is not worth mentioning.

So perhaps I had everything all wrong:  When the dust clears and the timelines are adjusted, maybe Millennials will be defined not as the generation on which 9/11 had the deepest impact, but as the first generation on which it had none at all.

In any case, it’s not like September 11 has grown any less important over time.  Au contraire.  With each passing year, it becomes ever clearer how the reality of so much of today’s world, good and bad, is a direct consequence of that horrible day, whether it should be or not.

To wit:  With no 9/11, there would have been no Iraq War.  With no Iraq War, there would have been no opportunity for a young, charismatic state senator from Illinois to oppose said war and rise to national prominence just in time for the anti-Bush backlash in 2008.  And with no President Barack Obama…well, I leave you to fill in the blanks.

(This is to say nothing of the effects of the Iraq War on the Middle East itself, but in the interest of time, I’ll say nothing of them.)

Every big political event has a way of altering the assumed trajectory of history, but 9/11 is still the Big Kahuna of our time.  It may not have “changed everything” right away, but 13 years out, we find there is very little about our lives that it did not change.  Its shadow only grows.

So in a way, it almost doesn’t matter that an increasing proportion of the world’s population didn’t experience the attack in real time.  For those born in the late-1990s onward, the post-9/11 world is the only world they know, and since it’s the only world we now occupy, there is little cause for alarm.

As someone who was already a teenager on the fateful day, and who saw the smoke billowing from Ground Zero from the top of a hill in my hometown in Westchester County, I guess I just didn’t expect this moment to come so quickly.  I wasn’t prepared to treat my own personal memory of 9/11 as something precious—something that wasn’t also shared, in one way or another, by every other person on planet Earth.

For this emerging generation—Millennial 2.0, perhaps?—I don’t know whether to feel sorry or envious.  On the one hand, today’s teens have never known the relative peace, quiet and civil liberties of the pre-9/11 era.  On the other hand, they also do not know what it is like to lose them.

Embracing Limits

You don’t look to the State of the Union address for moments of illumination in the world of government and politics, but we got one nonetheless this past Tuesday night.  Not from President Obama, mind you, but rather from Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who delivered the “official” Republican Party response.

The United States, said Rodgers in her introductory remarks, is “a nation where we are not defined by our limits, but by our potential.”

What a silly thing to say.  And what a wholly dangerous thing to believe.

If there is one thing we have learned for absolute certain in the first 237 years of the American republic, it’s that nothing gets us in greater trouble than not knowing and working within our limits, both individually and as a nation.

During much of the George W. Bush administration, for instance, Washington, D.C., operated under the assumption that America’s military might was effectively infinite.  President Bush and company viewed the rest of the world as a laboratory in which the United States could test its theories about democracy at its leisure, with or without the consent of the people who happened to live there.  They truly believed—or at least professed to believe—that America was capable, in Bush’s words, of “ending tyranny in our world.”

However, in the fullness of time—and at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives—we realized that this triumphalist view was a trifle naïve and rose-colored on the president’s part, and that even the U.S. Armed Forces are not invincible.  That America’s resources to carry out its interests abroad are finite, as are foreigners’ willingness to bend to America’s ideological will.

And all because our country chose to define itself by its (supposed) potential rather than by its limits.

Oops.

I know, I know:  That’s not really what Congresswoman Rodgers meant.  Nor is it what all of our other public officials (not least President Obama) have in mind when they pass along the exact same sentiment regarding unlimited potential.

No, what they mean to evoke is the proverbial “American dream”:  The proposition that someone born poor can become rich.  That the most humble of origins can be transcended through nothing more than honest hard work and a little bit of luck.  That the daughter of an orchardist can become a member of Congress and a black boy born to a single mother can become president of the United States.

And they’re wrong about that, too.

Not about the dream.  Indeed, it is a matter of historical and contemporary fact that the circumstances of one’s birth do not necessarily determine the course of one’s entire life, even as the latest studies on the subject suggest that America’s economic mobility levels have essentially flatlined over the past four decades.

Sure, given the right circumstances, anyone can achieve greatness in America.  That point is valid as far as it goes.

But that has nothing at all to do with this essential concept of limits.

A limit is exactly that:  A ceiling through which one cannot possibly break.  The point where all resistance is futile.  The moment when one must accept one’s fallibility and find another way to achieve one’s objectives—if, indeed, they can be achieved at all.

If one proceeds to secure a particular station in life, then it wasn’t a limit in the first place.  Maybe you thought it was, but it turns out you were under a misconception that had never been properly tested or challenged.  You know, a misconception such as, “America will never elect a black president,” or, “Gay people will never be able to get married.”

These assumptions were only true so long as we kept telling ourselves so.  There was nothing preventing such supposed impossibilities from being realized except our own resistance to them.

However, there are some challenges in life that really are insurmountable, and the mark of true intelligence and sophistication is being able to recognize them when they appear and to know when not to push one’s luck.  It’s not always easy to distinguish a limit from a mere setback, but it should always be one’s goal to do precisely that.

I submit, in order words, that the United States should in every way be defined by its limits, and should take it as a matter of pride rather than a source of shame.  Understanding and working within one’s limitations is how all wise policy is made.

America cannot do everything, nor can individual Americans.  It’s high time we stopped acting like we can.

Spinning Wheels of War

The Office ended its run on NBC last May after nine seasons on the air.  However, many viewers felt in their hearts that the sitcom was never quite the same after the departure of its star, Steve Carell, two seasons earlier.

The moment Carell’s character, Michael Scott, chose Holly over Dunder Mifflin and flew off into the sunset seemed like the perfect, natural conclusion to the series.  In its final years, The Office was just “spinning its wheels,” as the TV parlance goes.  Sans Michael Scott, the show might have retained its charm, but it had lost its purpose.

While the real world is not generally as neat as the world of television sitcoms, Americans often view reality through the prism of their favorite fiction.  While this is not always helpful or terribly intelligent behavior, it can nonetheless help us to understand why we feel the way we do regarding our country’s place in the geopolitical universe.

Not all of these feelings are wrong.

To wit:  If one thing has been made abundantly clear amidst the United States’ almost-war against Syria, it is that the American people have had it up to here with military interventions in the Middle East, carried out under the banner of “the war on terror.”

Every last public opinion poll reflects the same general trend:  Americans prefer less involvement in foreign affairs, not more, and preferably none at all.  We have neither the time nor the cash to fix all the problems here on the home front, let alone to right every atrocity committed by others (and by us) overseas.

It is sensible enough to surmise, as we have, that the leading cause of this sentiment is the experience of watching the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars become a bit messier and more complicated than we initially thought, and learning that not every crisis can be solved with brute force—even when that force is exerted by the U.S. military.

But allow me to introduce an additional (but not necessarily alternative) explanation for our collective antipathy toward foreign entanglements:

So far as the American public is concerned, the war on terror is over, and has been for quite some time.

The war began in New York on a crisp Tuesday in September, and it ended in a lavish fortress in Abbottabad, Pakistan some nine-and-a-half years later.

Ever since a team of Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden and deposited his corpse into its watery grave, the American war machine has just been spinning its wheels when it comes to conducting the war on terror.

The fact is, we Americans like our wars to be black and white, with easily-identified heroes and villains and, more important still, beginning and ending dates that are clear and unambiguous.

We understood the September 11 attacks to be one bookend of a great worldwide struggle between civilization and fanaticism, and with the demise of Public Enemy No. 1 on May 1, 2011, we were provided the other one.

Deep down, of course, we know the world is not that simple.  We know, for instance, that al-Qaeda is not the sort of organism that ceases to exist once you cut off its head—if the group can be said to possess a head at all.

What is more, we were explicitly warned in the earliest days after 9/11 that our country was engaged in “a different type of war” that may well prove more open-ended than past conflicts, with an enemy that claims no particular home base and does not abide by the same rules of engagement as we do.

Yet we have nonetheless clung to the idea that war is finite.  That we embark upon a given conflict with a particular, concrete objective, and that once that objective is either accomplished or proved impossible, we can pack up and go home.

Simplistic and antiquated as this assumption might be, we have every right to continue holding it.

However noble the objective of massacring large numbers of al-Qaeda members might be, it has proved one that is limitless by definition:  For every jihadist we kill, another one sprouts up in its place, and the cost of bombs and bullets required to destroy them only seems to increase.  (Our current drone program attempts to rectify this, but drones have proved problematic in their own right.)

And so the question must continue to be asked:  How much longer will this go on?  Will it ever end?  Has the so-called war on terror eclipsed its natural lifespan, or does it simply not have one?

By continuing to actively repel the forces of fundamentalism around the world, does the United States fight a war with a real and worthwhile purpose, or is it just spinning its wheels?