[in Seacoast Sunday (Portsmouth Herald) as an op-ed under their different title ("Voters have power to clean up political process") and in slightly different form: 9-6-09]
The Politics of the People
Most of the people I know love this country but hate its political style: the seemingly endless yelling, manipulation, misrepresentation, lying, malice, domination by money, and frequent placing of party ahead of the national interest. In a democracy, one writer said, you get the government you deserve. I'm not sure about that, but we do get the political culture we deserve, because we help to create that culture by tolerating it, even if we do not directly add to the noise. We can deserve better.
The ideas that follow do not touch the content of specific political issues like health care, energy, environmental degradation, criminal justice, or marriage. What they touch is the way the political professionals, the media, and the people carry on the conversation that shapes elections, which in turn determine legislation. My hope is that these ideas might appeal to conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, or even Republicans and Democrats. If we agreed on these principles, we would improve the political world itself. The alternative is continually increased misinformation and cynicism, which should be unacceptably bitter fruit for a free society.
A lot of what I'm talking about is political advertising and campaigning, but I'm also thinking about the sources of news and political analysis. MSNBC, Fox News and many bloggers and talk show hosts are often as adversarial as the national parties; they are like opposing lawyers. CNN (except for Lou Dobbs), CBS, NBC, ABC, and the newspapers--and eventually the voters--are a sort of jury. But in the months before the elections, before we vote, we the people are the presiding judge. It is our court. It's time to issue some instructions to the jury, some reminders to ourselves, and some contempt-of-court rulings.
For me the most disappointing and alarming moment in the 2008 campaign occurred when candidate Obama ducked this whole issue during the Presidential debate moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. The campaign as a whole had fallen to a dismal level. PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reality check on candidates' and partisans' claims, had judged at least one of the Obama ads as "Pants on Fire"--that is, even below the level of False, which lay below Barely True and Half-true (as well as Mostly True and True). Eighteen of his campaign's claims had been rated as False. Schieffer asked the candidates to comment on the level of nastiness that had become pervasive in the campaign. Obama said, "We expect Presidential campaigns to be tough." That is, he essentially accepted the nastiness as inevitable and ignored the falsehoods. In other words, just about anything goes. What disappears first under this banner is the truth, which means the integrity of our processes and ultimately of our elections. Is our democracy indifferent to that?
The McCain campaign was worse, far worse. It "won" many more "Pants on Fire" awards; at one point in the final weeks before the vote, 40% of the McCain campaign's claims had been rated as either False or Pants on Fire. (However in McCain's best moment he unambiguously rejected a supporter's wild claim that Obama was personally traitorous.)
Why should the electorate accept such a miserable standard in the first place? This issue is fundamental to our ability to ground policy choices in reality. To deal with it by saying that campaigns are tough is to throw in the towel, to treat truth and responsibility in campaigning as an impossible ideal. We do not do that with truth in advertising. Even though we depend on corporations economically, we hold them to a standard of honesty in the claims they make as they seek our dollars. Why should we be less insistent that seekers of our votes must meet at least a minimal standard as well?
The practical answer is, ironically enough, the First Amendment. It is all but impossible to separate freedom of speech from the freedom to spin, or even to lie--if one is talking about laws or regulation. But with one exception I am not talking about laws or regulation. I am talking about pushing back against unscrupulousness and cynicism--pushing back through every form of self-expression our society offers, creating a different and more empowering kind of argument, so that the next time a candidate is challenged on his or her campaign's falsehoods or other distortions, he or she will have to respond in a serious way.
The exception, one place where law and regulation do have a constitutionally feasible role, was demonstrated recently in a chilling prelude to the 2010 campaigns, which are already beginning. One of the industry-sponsored players in the debate over clean energy legislation distributed fake letters allegedly from grass-roots organizations--organizations that did not actually support the coal industry's position. The level of concreteness as well as bad faith in such dirty tricks should be recognized in the criminal code, just as slander, libel, and defamation of character--other abuses of free speech--are. Such gross perversions of our politics should be treated at least as severely as deliberate falsehood in advertising is. But whether or not we can bring more such flagrant abuses of democracy into the courtroom, we can at least bring them and other false and irrational claims into a steadier light and hold the perpetrators accountable. Otherwise honesty, accuracy, and good faith will be increasingly endangered species. We need to protest, not acquiesce, when surrogates and candidates--even our own candidates--demonize or offer cartoon versions of their opponents or their opponents' positions. The public needs to pay more attention to the trustworthy truth squads like PolitiFact and thus to give them more leverage on the campaigns. If we do not do better at this than we did in 2008, the corruption of our political process will accelerate, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
journal 8 15 09 -- tennis ethics
Yesterday I saw two emblematic moments on sports TV. First Novak Djokovic practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
To me the no-brainer commitment to victory over the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. It's one reason why (after growing up as a baseball, football, and basketball fan) I now watch only tennis, golf, and track. Duping officials is the sports equivalent of plagiarism.
In golf players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in cases where the infraction was so marginal that they would probably have gotten away with it. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament. But yesterday's second moment, which was in a golf program, was of a more philosophical sort. Padraig Harrington was playing a round with a reporter who was also quite a good golfer. As they went around the course, Harrington explained how he saw his various options for how to play each shot. At one point he had missed a fairway, and there two quite different kinds of rough very close together in the area where his ball had come to rest. Before he hit his next shot, he explained the difference, not just in terms of its consequence for shot selection but as an instance of how chance plays such a powerful role in golf, since one kind of rough posed a much more difficult challenge than the other. "Golf isn't about being just," he said. He observed that most modern course design and course preparation and maintenance are calculated to make things as fair as possible. His point was that such efforts, while well intentioned, contradict the nature of the game. One player may hit a great shot that ends up in a divot; his opponent of the moment may flub a shot and watch it bounce off a tree into the heart of the green. Harrington said that for him one of the central aspects of golf as an experience was that it required you to accept and deal with whatever chance, no matter how seemingly malevolent, sends your way. While he felt some pride that his success owes a lot to his ability to maintain his equilibrium, and to sustain his pleasure in the game, no matter how the day's breaks are going, there was also a deep humility in his recognition that important things were not in his--or anyone else's--control. It's true that he saw such acceptance as a competitive advantage, just as confidence is. Each sport has a psychology as well as an objective discipline. But he also seemed to be saying that it was a pleasure and privilege to accept golf on its own terms and that those terms were the context within which he played.
These are things that are hard to talk about without sounding moralistic. To make matters worse, I will quote Thoreau, who was something of an absolutist (single quotes because this isn't verbatim): 'If you are in deep water after a shipwreck and have wrested a floating plank from another survivor, you must return it to him though you drown yourself.' The stakes in sports cheating (or its repudiation) aren't so dire, but such choices are shaped prior to the game itself, and they define it, and the player.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
To me the no-brainer commitment to victory over the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. It's one reason why (after growing up as a baseball, football, and basketball fan) I now watch only tennis, golf, and track. Duping officials is the sports equivalent of plagiarism.
In golf players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in cases where the infraction was so marginal that they would probably have gotten away with it. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament. But yesterday's second moment, which was in a golf program, was of a more philosophical sort. Padraig Harrington was playing a round with a reporter who was also quite a good golfer. As they went around the course, Harrington explained how he saw his various options for how to play each shot. At one point he had missed a fairway, and there two quite different kinds of rough very close together in the area where his ball had come to rest. Before he hit his next shot, he explained the difference, not just in terms of its consequence for shot selection but as an instance of how chance plays such a powerful role in golf, since one kind of rough posed a much more difficult challenge than the other. "Golf isn't about being just," he said. He observed that most modern course design and course preparation and maintenance are calculated to make things as fair as possible. His point was that such efforts, while well intentioned, contradict the nature of the game. One player may hit a great shot that ends up in a divot; his opponent of the moment may flub a shot and watch it bounce off a tree into the heart of the green. Harrington said that for him one of the central aspects of golf as an experience was that it required you to accept and deal with whatever chance, no matter how seemingly malevolent, sends your way. While he felt some pride that his success owes a lot to his ability to maintain his equilibrium, and to sustain his pleasure in the game, no matter how the day's breaks are going, there was also a deep humility in his recognition that important things were not in his--or anyone else's--control. It's true that he saw such acceptance as a competitive advantage, just as confidence is. Each sport has a psychology as well as an objective discipline. But he also seemed to be saying that it was a pleasure and privilege to accept golf on its own terms and that those terms were the context within which he played.
These are things that are hard to talk about without sounding moralistic. To make matters worse, I will quote Thoreau, who was something of an absolutist (single quotes because this isn't verbatim): 'If you are in deep water after a shipwreck and have wrested a floating plank from another survivor, you must return it to him though you drown yourself.' The stakes in sports cheating (or its repudiation) aren't so dire, but such choices are shaped prior to the game itself, and they define it, and the player.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
good pieces on the Gates-Crowley conflict
I was struck by Bob Herbert's op-ed in the Times today (Sat. 8/1). His characteristic voice is thoughtful and analytical; he is perceptive and responsible. I'm not saying that his furious piece today necessarily violates any of those values, but it's in a different voice. Like Eugene Robinson's tv appearance last week and Anna Deveare Smith's piece on the Huffington Post, it expands one's sense of where Professor Gates was coming from in his confrontation with Sgt. Crowley. I want to see what happens with the policeman who wrote the racist and misogynistic stuff to the Globe reporter. I hope the union and the general politics of Boston don't force the mayor to back down. I respect unions' determination to make wrongful dismissal as difficult as possible, but in pursuing that goal they sometimes achieve wrongful reinstatement. Frank Rich's piece (Huffington Post 8/2) seems spot on to me.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
recommended books
I've been reading more books since I retired. I got to know a couple of the following titles earlier, but they fit here, and most of the following are ones I've read in the past year. Please see the note at the end about two books that are important to me but are not mentioned here (except in that p.s.).
Fiction: David Grossman, Someone to Run With. A hair-raising but hopeful story of how a relationship between young people from different communities might play out. It also has a dog who is a major character. I should read it again and write at more length and in more detail; I am making it sound kooky. I think it's a great book.
Helen Humphreys, Afterimage and The Lost Garden. HH lives in Canada but was born in the UK, where both of these novels are set, one in the early twentieth century and the other during WWII. I haven't often read two novels by the same writer unless I was reading for school. I'll read at least one of them again.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living. A first novel, published (by FSG) this year, by a Kentuckian with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. It is very original and frequently very compelling in its style and is also exceptionally interesting in the way it treats its characters, whom it respects but holds accountable for their substantial limitations and failings. The two main characters live together and eventually marry. One of the most striking things to me was the way Morgan places sexual explicitness within her larger concerns. That is, she isn't coy or evasive, but her main interest is in the way Aloma experiences her and Orren's lovemaking, if that's the word, in the context of their relationship and her emotional needs. Each of the two main characters is unable to recognize and honor the needs of the other until they have been through a time of violation and hurt. Then something better becomes possible. But first Morgan gives to characters she cares for a large license to experience and express self-pity, blind anger, and other products of isolation and grief. But summary distorts this book, slim as it is. It has a remarkable voice, a challenging logic, and a series of moments that would be worth reading it for even if the book weren't as strong overall as it is. I haven't even mentioned the minister who may be its most interesting character.
Laura Moriarty, The Center of Everything. This original, affecting story has a very young narrator, who is giving us her experience from when she is ten to her last year of high school. The narrator's voice is completely convincing. She has a lot of hard things to deal with, but her evolution into a promising adult is natural and unforced. There is quite a lot of humor, much of which the narrator seems unaware of, though it's hard to tell because she's smart and she works at being funny when she is with her friends. The humor is important to the tone of the novel, and it put me in mind of Moriarty's unimaginably wonderful 2001 non-fiction story in volume two of A Book of Meditations (Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 2005), since in that piece too she finds a healing humor in very difficult experiences without being sentimental or contrived. She's a terrific writer whose second novel has also been published; I look forward to reading it.
Also Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose and, even more, Crossing to Safety.
Non-fiction: Peter Hessler's two books on China, Rivertown and Oracle Bones. Either would have been a worthy recipient of major national prizes. A Peace Corps volunteer who stayed on to learn more and to report for the New Yorker and other publications, he is a wonderful observer, thinker, reporter, adventurer, student, and writer. He wouldn't claim to have inherited the mantle of his teacher and friend John McPhee, but his work has many of the same strengths, which are rare ones.
The more I read of Oracle Bones, the more dazzled I am. Among Hessler's many strengths, and many kinds of strengths, is an eye for irony that is both subtle and acute but that doesn't carry him toward the laziness of cynicism. He is a devotee of the concrete (as I am, or try to be) and I think he would view cynicism as an abstraction or even an ideology. For me one of the many pleasures of reading his work is that it never goes there (to cynicism), either as a tone or as an idea. But he doesn't go to sentimentality or naivete either. One curious effect on me of Oracle Bones is that it is nudging me back to de Tocqueville. I want to test my hypothesis that that is where you would have to go to see something this good in the way of cultural analysis written by a foreign national.
Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me. An account of the learning, structured (in a lab) and otherwise, of a clever and opinionated African grey parrot. The bird is amazing, but apparently not atypical. Color me insensitive, but I found Alex's story more absorbing than the author's.
Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl. The author claims not just intelligence for her bird but personal attachment, wisdom, and even something approaching spirituality. You'll see why. There is also a wonderful chapter on the culture of the community of research biologists at Cal Tech. The writing in the book as a whole is somewhat unsophisticated, but there are substantial strengths including one memorable scene where O'Brien is challenged in an isolated spot during the wee hours by an unpromising group of young people who seem perhaps ready to give her a hard time but are won over by her interest in Wesley.
Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies. Part birder's autobiography, part history, part meditation on the relationship between our species and the natural world as a whole, as seen through the history of exploitation and attempts at preservation. Rosen's own birding is mostly in Central Park and the mid-East, especially Israel. There are chapters on Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is an original, thoughtful, convincing book, not least in its take on the debate over the possible survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Mark Doty, Dog Years. Like Rosen's, a book I will read again. It is part eulogy--not just to his two glorious dogs--, part celebration of dogs as human companions, and part meditation on mortality as seen through this lens. Doty is both a wonderful poet (see "New Dog" in Atlantis, e.g.) and a very strong prose writer; I think this is his fourth such volume, and I swear he writes beautifully and movingly about many things besides dogs.
P.S. I haven't said anything here about Kenji Yoshino's Covering or Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index. I reviewed both in print, in the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin, Covering I think in 2006 and The Suicide Index last year. Both are finding readers, I'm glad to say: Covering is required reading for incoming students at at least five colleges; and The Suicide Index was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Fiction: David Grossman, Someone to Run With. A hair-raising but hopeful story of how a relationship between young people from different communities might play out. It also has a dog who is a major character. I should read it again and write at more length and in more detail; I am making it sound kooky. I think it's a great book.
Helen Humphreys, Afterimage and The Lost Garden. HH lives in Canada but was born in the UK, where both of these novels are set, one in the early twentieth century and the other during WWII. I haven't often read two novels by the same writer unless I was reading for school. I'll read at least one of them again.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living. A first novel, published (by FSG) this year, by a Kentuckian with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. It is very original and frequently very compelling in its style and is also exceptionally interesting in the way it treats its characters, whom it respects but holds accountable for their substantial limitations and failings. The two main characters live together and eventually marry. One of the most striking things to me was the way Morgan places sexual explicitness within her larger concerns. That is, she isn't coy or evasive, but her main interest is in the way Aloma experiences her and Orren's lovemaking, if that's the word, in the context of their relationship and her emotional needs. Each of the two main characters is unable to recognize and honor the needs of the other until they have been through a time of violation and hurt. Then something better becomes possible. But first Morgan gives to characters she cares for a large license to experience and express self-pity, blind anger, and other products of isolation and grief. But summary distorts this book, slim as it is. It has a remarkable voice, a challenging logic, and a series of moments that would be worth reading it for even if the book weren't as strong overall as it is. I haven't even mentioned the minister who may be its most interesting character.
Laura Moriarty, The Center of Everything. This original, affecting story has a very young narrator, who is giving us her experience from when she is ten to her last year of high school. The narrator's voice is completely convincing. She has a lot of hard things to deal with, but her evolution into a promising adult is natural and unforced. There is quite a lot of humor, much of which the narrator seems unaware of, though it's hard to tell because she's smart and she works at being funny when she is with her friends. The humor is important to the tone of the novel, and it put me in mind of Moriarty's unimaginably wonderful 2001 non-fiction story in volume two of A Book of Meditations (Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 2005), since in that piece too she finds a healing humor in very difficult experiences without being sentimental or contrived. She's a terrific writer whose second novel has also been published; I look forward to reading it.
Also Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose and, even more, Crossing to Safety.
Non-fiction: Peter Hessler's two books on China, Rivertown and Oracle Bones. Either would have been a worthy recipient of major national prizes. A Peace Corps volunteer who stayed on to learn more and to report for the New Yorker and other publications, he is a wonderful observer, thinker, reporter, adventurer, student, and writer. He wouldn't claim to have inherited the mantle of his teacher and friend John McPhee, but his work has many of the same strengths, which are rare ones.
The more I read of Oracle Bones, the more dazzled I am. Among Hessler's many strengths, and many kinds of strengths, is an eye for irony that is both subtle and acute but that doesn't carry him toward the laziness of cynicism. He is a devotee of the concrete (as I am, or try to be) and I think he would view cynicism as an abstraction or even an ideology. For me one of the many pleasures of reading his work is that it never goes there (to cynicism), either as a tone or as an idea. But he doesn't go to sentimentality or naivete either. One curious effect on me of Oracle Bones is that it is nudging me back to de Tocqueville. I want to test my hypothesis that that is where you would have to go to see something this good in the way of cultural analysis written by a foreign national.
Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me. An account of the learning, structured (in a lab) and otherwise, of a clever and opinionated African grey parrot. The bird is amazing, but apparently not atypical. Color me insensitive, but I found Alex's story more absorbing than the author's.
Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl. The author claims not just intelligence for her bird but personal attachment, wisdom, and even something approaching spirituality. You'll see why. There is also a wonderful chapter on the culture of the community of research biologists at Cal Tech. The writing in the book as a whole is somewhat unsophisticated, but there are substantial strengths including one memorable scene where O'Brien is challenged in an isolated spot during the wee hours by an unpromising group of young people who seem perhaps ready to give her a hard time but are won over by her interest in Wesley.
Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies. Part birder's autobiography, part history, part meditation on the relationship between our species and the natural world as a whole, as seen through the history of exploitation and attempts at preservation. Rosen's own birding is mostly in Central Park and the mid-East, especially Israel. There are chapters on Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is an original, thoughtful, convincing book, not least in its take on the debate over the possible survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Mark Doty, Dog Years. Like Rosen's, a book I will read again. It is part eulogy--not just to his two glorious dogs--, part celebration of dogs as human companions, and part meditation on mortality as seen through this lens. Doty is both a wonderful poet (see "New Dog" in Atlantis, e.g.) and a very strong prose writer; I think this is his fourth such volume, and I swear he writes beautifully and movingly about many things besides dogs.
P.S. I haven't said anything here about Kenji Yoshino's Covering or Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index. I reviewed both in print, in the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin, Covering I think in 2006 and The Suicide Index last year. Both are finding readers, I'm glad to say: Covering is required reading for incoming students at at least five colleges; and The Suicide Index was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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