Fair Game

"I travel around the country, I see people, I see their response to my husband... I think people know that he is doing what he thinks is right for the United States." *

You see her on The Tonight Show, greeting the host like an old pal ("Ohh, Jaaayyy!") You see her on Oprah, joined by her two incurably giggly daughters. She'll be seen in dozens of other venues -- gracious, cordial, impeccably yet tastefully dressed -- before all is said and done. Laura Lane Welch Bush, lover/helpmate/ nanny/enabler of the worst President in American history, is taking the grand (media) tour, hawking Spoken from the Heart, her tell-nothing memoir of life in the White House, a doorstop of a book glossing over her husband's criminal incompetence, promoting a blinkered, no, blinded view of his eight-year disaster...

Whoa, you say, hold on now. Surely it is unfair to tar any First Lady -- any wife -- with the brush of her husband's misdeeds; and that particularly applies to Mrs. Bush, who was probably the most powerless, uninvolved First Lady since Pat Nixon. Who can fault her, this nice, charming woman who spent most of her time encouraging kids to read, for marrying a jerk who drove his country into a ditch? After all, she wasn't the one at the wheel.

True, but neither was she kidnapped and tied up in the trunk. There are actually two good reasons not to let Mrs. Bush off the hook; one is about her in particular, the other about her role in a larger phenomenon.

Number 1: Reader, she married him. Whatever it was that made George W. Bush personally attractive to Laura Welch, she also knew (or found out soon enough) that he belonged to a rich, well-connected family which became more so when her father-in-law was elected Vice President. And for more than three decades, she reaped the benefits. A woman who might have had an unexceptional "Friday Night Lights" existence as a small-town Texas librarian wound up instead with (literally) a rose garden... not to mention world travel, state dinners, a personal entourage, etc. She has enjoyed the perks of being Mrs. George W.; how can anyone now look at her as a completely separate entity?

Besides, everyone who knows Mrs. Bush attests that she is no cream puff, that in some ways she is tougher than her husband -- "the steel in his spine," one of them put it. We've all heard the story of how she got him to stop drinking by threatening to walk out. Fine, but why stop there? Did she ever try to do anything about his bullying, frat-boy arrogance, his utter lack of intellectual curiosity, or the other traits that made him absolutely unsuited for the Presidency? Did she ever try to counter the Mafia-wife worldview of Barbara Bush, who taught her son to value loyalty over competence and treat dissenters as enemies? If she did, no evidence has come to light. He got sober, he never strayed, and she went back to the library. This was her choice, and it is fair to call her on it.

Number 2: She's Not Alone. I'm not saying that Mrs. Bush or her publisher timed it this way, but her book arrives as part of the recently launched (and inevitable) campaign to rehabilitate her husband's reputation. We've already had Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence, which caused even a Beltway hack like Mark Helperin, in an otherwise oh-so-respectful review, to raise an eyebrow over "[Rove's] portrait of Bush as a detail-oriented man of principle and accomplishment." And the Great Man's own memoir is supposed to come out soon.

But these can be dismissed for the partisan screeds they are; Mrs. Bush, with her Caesar's-wife reputation, invites a more "open-minded" view. The many readers who like her personally will open the book, curious to know more about her life and thoughts, and soon learn about the simple, honest, decent man who only wanted to protect America, who felt really, really bad about what happened to New Orleans, who cared deeply about poor people and workers and the environment... and over time, whenever his name comes up at a family gathering or a dinner party, perhaps the ensuing conversation will be a bit less, um, one-sided. Whether or not that was Mrs. Bush's goal in writing her book, there's no doubt her husband's gang will be using it to that effect.

And who's to say they won't succeed? A number of factors are working in their favor. First you have the roughly one-fourth of the voters who never stopped thinking Bush did a fine job, or who hate Democrats and liberals too much to care about the record. Add those "independents" who less than two years after voting for non-specific "change," now feel buyer's remorse because in their view, the change has been too specific. Throw in the notoriously short memories of the American people. Top it off with Obama's refusal (motivated, I would imagine, by his admirable but futile hope of achieving a "post-partisan" America) to fully air his predecessor's misdeeds or completely break with his policies. Thus the recipe for the comeback is complete. Before you know it, the only people still talking about Bush's unique awfulness will be the usual suspects... you know, those pesky lefties who hate him because he cut taxes, fought the terrorists and talked like a real American.

Listen, no one is lumping Mrs. Bush in with the true dragon ladies of modern history -- the Imelda Marcoses, the Xiang Qings (Mao Zedong's wife), the Eva Perons. No one is suggesting that like Mussolini's mistress or the wife of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu, she join her man in front of a firing squad. But neither does she deserve a free ride just because she wasn't in on the Iraq planning sessions.

I wouldn't condemn Laura Bush for not being Hillary Clinton or Rosalynn Carter. Yet Nancy Reagan at least tried to get her husband to do more about the AIDS epidemic. On the issues of her time, Mrs. Bush did not even do that much, either because she had no problem with any of Mr. Bush's policies or because she could not be bothered to say anything.

Which is why we should not bother to treat her differently from her spouse and the rest of his crew.

*Interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News, 2006

The Chasm

A reader asks, "What is your opinion of the tea-bag radicals, the lunatic fringe who, apparently, will terrorize their country and their elected officials to have health care reform repealed?"

The short answer is, I hate them. I hate their ignorance, their naked bigotry, their embrace of violence in word and deed, their selective reading of the Bible and the Constitution. Hell, I even hate their costumes -- a kind of demented cross between "Deal or No Deal" contestants and used-car salesmen doing President's Day TV spots.

And certainly, much of what we've learned about these folks has not done much for their image. You may have heard about the recent New York Times survey indicating that -- for all their yelling about economic oppression -- the majority of Tea Partiers are doing quite well financially. Their main complaint is not that they are too heavily taxed, but that the tax dollars are going to government programs (such as "Obamacare") for the benefit of certain people -- wink, nudge -- who don't deserve it. And the fact that the current president is one of those people makes them even angrier.

This is nothing new. As the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed: "The radical right appealed especially to the incoherent resentment of the frightened rich... It flourished particularly in states like California and Texas, overflowing with raw new money..." Schlesinger wrote this in the early '60s, describing the rise of groups such as the John Birch Society during the Kennedy administration.

So it seems that these are the same rich country-club racists who have been with us for at least the past half-century, if not longer. And since many of these folks are themselves long past the half-century mark, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that their days are numbered, that they represent the last gasp of a species of American dinosaur that can't or won't adapt to the realities of a new social order.

And yet, and yet... maybe it's my liberal's love of nuance and complexity, but I believe there is more to this story.

For surely -- as one can glean from even a random sampling of news stories -- not everyone in the movement fits the profile. The fellow who protested an appearance by Obama in New Hampshire with a gun strapped to his leg, carrying a sign calling for "the tree of liberty to be watered with the blood of tyrants," clearly had not driven up in a Porsche. The hardcore Palinites who cheer their heroine in spite (because of?) her numerous gaffes are unlikely to have big stock portfolios or homes in Palm Springs.

Their anger springs from a different source. Basically, it is the latest expression of the chasm between two species of Americans: those who live in small towns and rural areas and those who do not. This conflict is as old as America (think of the arguments between the pro-rural Jefferson and the urban booster Hamilton), but it has become even more intense, and angry, in recent decades.

Let's examine this in more detail (and please excuse the occasional oversimplification).

Put yourself in the shoes -- the mind -- of a small-town or farm-country American born, say, around the start of the baby boom. You grew up in a world of certainties, where family farms were still common, government was distant and irrelevant (no one thought of a teacher or a mail carrier as a "civil servant") and it was a good bet that everyone you knew was white and Protestant. A family consisted of a man, a woman and a couple of kids, though of course there was the occasional "maiden aunt" or the bachelor cousin who "just never found the right woman." Sex before or outside of marriage was frowned upon, which is not to say it never occurred; but if a woman found herself "in trouble," there were two acceptable options -- give the baby up for adoption, or leave town. From newspapers, radio, movies and TV, you knew that there was a world beyond yours, sharply different in many ways; but you shrugged it off. Red China and the USSR were not America. France and Germany were not America. New York and Los Angeles were not America. America was where you, and all the people who looked and sounded like you, made their home.

Now imagine how it felt to have the certainties shaken, one by one.

You went to Vietnam, or you knew someone who did, even if you weren't worried about the spread of Communism. It was a matter of duty -- Uncle Sam called, and you answered; so it had been for your father and grandfather and would be for your son. Then it was over, and not only had America lost -- shocking enough in itself -- but the war was being described as "a mistake," "a tragedy," even "a crime." You heard about returning veterans spat upon or called baby killers -- not in your town, of course, but still. And you learned of people using Vietnam as a basis for attacking America itself, questioning her greatness, denying her noble intentions, even as the rest of the world was thumbing its nose at us (the Arabs jacked up the price of oil, the Iranians took diplomats hostage).

Meanwhile, in your town, your state, your country, you witnessed bewildering, even frightening changes. You saw people who didn't look or sound like you take to the streets, loud and angry, shouting about "non-negotiable demands." You saw your taxes go up as your income stagnated, and every year, it seemed like there were more government forms to fill out. You saw the cousin and the maiden aunt "come out," declaring their right to have sex with people of their own gender. You heard other women insist that they could sleep with any man they wanted, whether married to him or not -- and if they got in trouble, they had the right to go to a doctor who would fix it, the baby be damned. You couldn't turn on the TV or radio or go to the movies without seeing explicit sex and violence or hearing filthy language.

And you were expected to cheer on these changes or if not, to keep your mouth shut. That was the message you got from all the smarty-pants types you saw on TV, the professors and lawyers and "advocates" and liberal politicians throwing around their ten-dollar words -- "feminism," "liberation," "empowerment," "diversity," "people of color." If you didn't get it, too bad. If you questioned any of it, you were a racist or a homophobe or a member of "the repressive patriarchy." You saw the values you cherished -- patriotism, religion, sexual "morality" -- mocked and disdained, and you and your friends dismissed as ignorant hicks because you lived in "flyover country" and hadn't gone to a fancy college. And all of this while family farms disappeared, swallowed up by agribusiness giants with no roots in the community, and factories closed or moved overseas.

Before long, you had gone from bewilderment to anger. You didn't take to the streets -- that was not your way -- but you voted for politicians, almost all Republican, who promised to fix things. You voted for Nixon, who promised to restore law and order; he turned out to be a lawbreaker on the grand scale. You voted for Reagan, who insisted that nothing had changed, America was still a great nation, and you felt good for a while... but then he was gone, and you saw that maiden aunts and family farms had not come back, and the people with demands were as loud as ever. You voted for George W. Bush, though you suspected he was a spoiled rich kid; he spoke your language, and the people who ridiculed you were ridiculing him. Even at the end, with two-thirds of Americans regarding his presidency as a disaster, you were proud to be in the other one-third. But if you were honest, you had to admit to yourself that things had not improved, and had probably gotten worse. And that was before October 2008.

Where did that leave you? You could never support a Democrat -- certainly not Obama, the black Muslim with the weird name, who sneered about how you "cling to guns and religion" and promised change, big change, of which you'd had more than enough. But you were sick of the Republicans as well, sick of them showing up at your county fairs and holiday parades, gobbling your food, signing autographs, promising the moon... then forgetting about you for the next four years. The truth is, you'd had it with politicians, period.

Your only solace, other than your friends at the VFW hall or the neighborhood bar, was Fox News. Every day, sure as the sunrise, they told you what you wanted to hear, what you needed to hear: that you were right and everyone else was wrong; that the liberals had no call to mock you -- your religious faith and common sense counted for more than their fancy college degrees; that America was still great, or would be if we could just get back to the way it was before the liberals messed it up, before Clinton or Kennedy or Roosevelt (or according to Glenn Beck, Teddy Roosevelt) imposed their power-mad schemes on the average American, before the big-city radicals stirred up the blacks and the homos and the women to make all those demands. Your country has been taken from you, was the daily message. Take it back.

None of this in any way justifies the words and actions of the Tea Party and the rest of the radical right. But to simply dismiss or condemn the entire movement without understanding the very real feelings -- of loss, of alienation, of pain -- driving many of its activists is to ensure that even after it loses strength or goes underground (as has happened in the past), it will someday rise again, perhaps even angrier and more violent.

I wish I had an easy or sweeping solution to propose (a national Beer Summit?), but none comes to mind. The chasm did not arise overnight, and bridging it will have to begin with small, incremental steps. Those of us on the left can support and learn from "purple state" politicians like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, media figures like Ed Schultz, religious leaders like Rev. Jim Wallis -- men who advocate for progressive causes without sounding at all elitist or condescending. We can also re-examine our own thinking on a number of "values issues" (patriotism, religion, sex and violence in popular culture) in the hope that -- who knows? -- there could be some small common ground to be found.

The wealthy retiree from Florida (that would be the state's western coast, the east being too Jewish for his taste) howling "get your government hands of my Medicare" is beyond redemption. But maybe, just maybe, the mechanic from Ohio, the small farmer from Iowa -- or their wives or grown children -- are open to talk, and to listen.

My former editor at Tikkun magazine, Michael Lerner, who has written extensively on this subject, put it best when he said: "I'm not worried about the 25 percent of Americans who are hopelessly racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, xenophobic -- I'm worried about the other 25 percent who sometimes vote with them." Reaching that other 25 percent would be a great thing for the progressive movement... and for America.

"The Living Would Envy the Dead"

In the fall of 1967, I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room when I noticed a copy of Look, a popular newsmagazine of the day. The headline on the cover read: "THIRTEEN DAYS -- Robert Kennedy's memoir of how the world almost ended." Intrigued, I read as much as I could before being called in for my appointment.

It turned out to be Kennedy's account of the Cuban missile crisis, in which, as his brother's Attorney General and adviser, he had been deeply involved. (His memoir was later published in book form and adapted for a 1999 movie starring Kevin Costner.) For me, this was something completely new -- five years earlier, I had heard adults speaking anxiously of "the Cuban crisis," but was too young to know anything of what it entailed.

Well, now I knew. The headline was accurate: over that period of less than two weeks, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war -- and as RFK and other historians have emphasized, it was only through a mixture of calculated threats and back-channel diplomacy that the world was saved. (In one crucial instance, President Kennedy chose to ignore a belligerent message from his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khruschchev, and responded instead to a more conciliatory one that came later.) Robert Kennedy himself met three times -- all in secret -- with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who died recently. The slightest miscalculation, the tiniest misinterpretation, and none of us would be here today.

I thought about this when I watched the video of President Obama and Russian president Medvedev co-signing an agreement to reduce both countries' nuclear arsenals by one-third -- a few days before Obama brought the leaders of 48 countries to the White House to discuss further reductions worldwide.

Obama has repeatedly made it clear that nuclear disarmament is high on his list of priorities. But what about the rest of us? I have no doubt that plenty of people missed these stories, or greeted them with a yawn: Nuclear weapons? That's so 20th Century. Didn't the problem end when Reagan and Gorbachev got together? Sure, I wouldn't want Al Qaeda to get hold of a nuclear device, but other than that...

Not so fast, folks. There are currently 23,000 nuclear weapons out there, 96% of them controlled by the U.S. and Russia. Under the Obama-Medvedev agreement -- which must be ratified by Congress, hardly a given these days -- reductions will take place over seven years; and even after they are completed, the total worldwide will be a "mere" 15,640. And that would include close to 1,000 controlled by other countries, some of them less stable, shall we say, than the two major players. The best we can say is that the possibility of all humanity being vaporized in a nuclear attack has significantly declined since 1962 -- the worst-case scenario now would involve "a second Hiroshima-Nagasaki" where the damage was isolated to one part of the world. But who among us would actually take comfort in this?

It's easy to see why nuclear destruction has moved to the back burner of our consciousness. Numerous other threats to the planet seem more immediate; these days the danger of nuclear assault only comes up in the context of terrorism, as mentioned earlier. And with the end of the Cold War, we've no longer had to contend with the idea of two superpowers having the capability, if not the desire, of annihilating the entire world in a matter of minutes.

Indeed, for most people, nuclear holocaust had stopped being a cause of anxiety long before the fall of the USSR. Ironically, this trend began in the aftermath of the Cuban crisis. Before 1962, plenty of intelligent people on both sides had seriously thought of nuclear war as inevitable... and in some quarters, winnable. (This was the era of underground "fallout shelters" and instructional videos telling kids to "duck and cover" when they heard the warning sirens.) After the crisis, there was an understanding that we had stepped up to the abyss and needed desperately to pull back. Within a year, Kennedy and Khruschchev (who supposedly said that after a nuclear conflict, "the living would envy the dead") had signed a treaty banning above-ground tests of nuclear weapons. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe depicted the horror of a nuclear "mistake." It was an unspoken article of faith that what Walter Mondale called "these God-awful weapons" could never actually be used.

Yet no one in power talked about getting rid of them. That's because winnable nuclear war had been replaced by a new concept: deterrence, or Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD indeed). In this scenario, if the U.S. or the Soviets (or the other members of the growing "nuclear club") got into a dispute, neither could use their nukes on the other because if attacked, each would respond in kind, thus starting a full-scale thermonuclear war.

MAD, however, created a new conundrum: Nation A can't use its nukes on Nation B, for fear of an awful retaliation; but neither can it destroy the nukes, because that would leave it helpless against any threat or demand by B. Even talking about disarmament is a no-no, because your adversaries might suspect that you've gone soft and see it as a temptation to attack. In short, what we had was a sophisticated game of chicken -- and if you remember the drag-strip sequence from Rebel Without a Cause, you know that such games don't end happily.

But until the end of the Cold War, this insanity was accepted thinking at the highest levels of government -- perhaps because no one could think of an alternative -- and people learned to live with it. Only when Reagan, in his first term, spoke more belligerently about confronting the Soviets did a serious disarmament movement spring up. And when he shifted gears and signed the pact with Gorbachev, it died down again. Though both sides retained a substantial nuclear arsenal -- old habits of thinking die very hard -- the nuclear threat had clearly diminished, and the world went back to sleep.

So this is where we find ourselves today. We know the nukes are still there, we know they're evil, we don't want people like Bin Laden to get one... but we can't rouse ourselves to take the next step, to say that nothing less than total disarmament is acceptable. We're too busy, or we're more worried about global warming or the Middle East or the economy; and anyway, we don't see the urgency, because we're the only superpower with nukes and of course we'd never use them. But without the U.S. taking the lead, no one else in the club -- not to mention wannabes like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il -- will have an incentive to disarm. (As an Indian friend said to me years ago, "You have the bomb. Who are you to tell us we can't?") And who's to say that a Fail-Safe scenario could never occur?

Let's face it: if Obama had not chosen to call attention to this issue, it wouldn't be in the news. So let's push our Senators to approve the treaty... but also keep in mind that the threat will not end until the last weapon has been dismantled. We must continue to speak up -- our silence cedes the debate to people like Rudy Giuliani, who recently argued in National Review Online that disarmament is a "radical left" idea.

Einstein famously observed, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking." It's not too late to prove him wrong.

A Damn Good Reason

If you're reading this right now... get back to work.

Seriously, I appreciate your coming here, for whatever cause. This is the first entry in what I hope will be a long-running, entertaining, provocative (or at least literate) blog, one that somehow manages to distinguish itself from the other 10,000,000 and counting already out there. By way of an introduction, check out the "profile" section. By way of an explanation -- that is, the purpose of this blog, or how I justify its existence (hence the above heading) -- well, read on.

Let me be brutally honest: part of my motivation for doing this is shameless self-promotion. I am a working freelance writer, which means that I never have enough work. In this society, when you choose self-employment, passivity is not an option. Thus I am always on the lookout for new ways to advertise my talents and services. My hope is that fine folks with discriminating tastes (such as yourself, of course) will read the entries -- really more like mini-essays -- in this space and pass my URL along the food chain until it reaches someone at The New York Times or Newsweek or Maxim or House and Garden who reads my work and exclaims, "This guy would be perfect for the new Kardashian profile... sign him up!"

None of this will happen, of course, unless I produce something worth reading. And that's fine with me, for it dovetails neatly with my other motivation: my interest in sharing my thoughts on culture, politics, society, and the places where they intersect. (The column, if you will, that I don't have on HuffPost or Salon.) Hopefully I can do this in a stimulating, original manner which stands out from the herd mentality pervading all too much of the blogosphere.

Thus, my subtitle: I don't consider myself a cynic -- cynicism in my view is just a short step removed from nihilism, from the "I don't give a crap, we're all going to die anyway" view of the world -- but rather a skeptic, one who takes very little at face value and doesn't sign on to anything without a meticulous reading of the fine print. I don't automatically trust the Will of the People, or the Verdict of the Market, or Oprah, or any other expression of what everyone should be thinking or doing or buying. It's in my blood -- I am a Jew, and historically the Jewish people (you could almost say it's part of our tradition) have been the ones standing in the back of the room when the Next Big Thing is announced and saying, "Are you sure about this? Have you thought it through?" We have often been vilified (and worse) for this, but I've seen enough examples of what happens when no one asks such questions to conclude that skepticism is a pretty useful thing, if employed judiciously.

Which is how I plan to employ it in this space. Like everyone I have my quirks and prejudices, the products of my life experience, the people I've known, the things I've seen; and I won't pretend that they never influence what I write. But as much as possible, I try to approach any topic with an open mind, an unclouded eye, and the realization that as the saying goes, "the only thing you need to know about God is that you're not." Among writers, my heroes are people like Swift, Twain, Bierce, Waugh, Orwell, Roth and Vonnegut -- men who listened to the prevailing cant of their era, the official story, the conventional wisdom, and responded, "Says who?" I can't say whether I have any of their talent, but I have committed myself to following their approach.

So when you read my postings, whether you feel like applauding or sending me a dead fish in the mail, at least be secure in the knowledge that I'm speaking for myself, not as an Spokesperson, Official or otherwise, for anything or anyone. My thoughts are my own, the product of one person's singular sensibility. Make of them what you will.

So thanks for your attention, and I hope you keep checking in. Now you can get back to work.