I once spent a summer as an apprentice to an auto mechanic because I wanted to know how cars worked. Harvey was a high-school dropout and a delight to work with, a curly-bearded and effervescent guide to what I’d seen as the mysteries of mechanics. He was under no illusion that a car was anything but an assembly of component parts, or that it had any resemblance at all to a human being. He worked on autos; he didn’t identify with them. And he saw nothing hard about the jumble of multi-colored wires snaking throughout the engine compartment and the chassis. “Just follow the spaghetti,” he said, and he was right: it was usually just a matter of a loose connection.

Yet the idea of humans as being “hard-wired” persists. A headline in today’s Huffington Post reads “Experts say liberal and conservative brains are wired differently.” It could have said “think differently,” but then of course we’d see that it was merely stating the obvious. In fact a dismaying amount of psychological research appears to do just that, “proving” what we already know. So to make it feel “new” and “modern,” the HuffPo editors fell back on the “wired” meme, as though human minds were merely a network of automatic connections. Flip the switch, and off they go.

But what’s so new or modern about the wired meme? It’s downright odd that one of the leading tech magazines in this wireless age is still called Wired. Can they not come up with a better name?

As linguist George Lakoff pointed out in his book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors aren’t just for poets: they’re built into the language we use daily, and thus shape the way we think. So if you think of humans as wired, you’re more likely to assume that we’re just a bunch of reflexes. Press a certain point on the knee, and presto: it jerks.

The knee-jerk reflex works on many levels, but especially that of jerk. The “hard-wired” argument has been used by sociobiologists to explain a lot about men in particular, from sleeping around (“spreading their genes”) to fighting to “protect” their genes in the form of women and children. This argument, made by men, apparently sees men as Iron-Age remnants. Presumably those who then murder women and children, let alone other men, simply have faulty wiring, which goes no way at all to understanding the astounding nihilism of terrorists (uppermost in my mind today in the wake of the Brussels attacks). And besides, what does all this make women? Soft-wired?

It’s an easy fallacy (most fallacies are, which is why they’re so common). Think of humans as matters of cause and effect, and you imagine you can indeed just follow the spaghetti of wiring in order to fix whatever’s wrong. Such reductive materialism takes no account of the complex of personal, educational, social, economic, and political experiences that enable some people to tolerate uncertainty and doubt (or, like me, to revel in it), while others flee into the steely arms of certainty and conviction.

I’m certainly no fan of Jeffrey Goldberg (okay, I think he’s a pompous ass), but once you get past his inflated sense of self-importance, his long profile of Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic reveals a presidential mind wary of seemingly easy solutions, and fully conscious of the complexities of unintended consequences and of the limitations of brute power. Whoever the next president will be, I will miss Obama’s subtlety. One way or another, I’m afraid we all will.

Because as Harvey taught me, there’s nothing subtle about wiring.

Unless you have the misfortune to live under their flight paths, it’s easy to push drones to the back of your mind.  That’s what’s so perfect from a US military point of view:  remote-control warfare, with the emphasis on ‘remote.’  See no evil, know no evil. What does an operator sitting in a bunker in Nevada know of what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan?

What do you?

While you might have registered the fact that US drone use in Pakistan quintupled in the Obama years from the Bush years, you’ve probably avoided dwelling on it.  You almost certainly haven’t thought through the personal and political havoc these drones are wreaking.  And you probably don’t want to even consider reading Living Under Drones, a 165-page report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Center at Stanford and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU (that mouthful of authorship is off-putting enough).

Enter Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani writer whose deliciously wicked novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist touched the raw edge of western anxiety, and whose newly published satire How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is a well-deserved best-seller.  Hamid has the novelist’s ability to bring you inside experience that otherwise remains… remote.  So it was a savvy move when the New York Review of Books asked him to review the Stanford/NYU report, even if they then published his piece under the almost perversely understated headline ‘Why Drones Don’t Help.’  If you don’t read the report itself (there’s a summary here, and the full report is downloadable), at least read Hamid’s review of it.

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is any misconception that the drone strikes are primarily counter-terrorist in nature, aimed at key leaders of international terror networks, this can be dispensed with [….]  The elimination of ‘high-value’ targets — al-Qaeda or ‘militant’ leaders — has been exceedingly rare:  fewer than 50 people, or about 2% of all drone deaths.  Rather, ‘low-level insurgents’ have been the main targets [….]

In the media, the term ‘militant’ is often used in describing drone casualties.  The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people.  A ‘militant’ who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a ‘militant’ who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat top his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the ‘current administration’s apparent definition’ holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed.

In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant.  Your death in a drone strike is all the proof that’s needed of your guilt, and thus of the right to have killed you.

Neither Orwell nor Kafka could have dreamed up better.

Hamid continues:

This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are ‘extremely rare’ or have been in ‘single digits’ since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children.

This includes so-called ‘signature strikes’ which attack unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise “behaving like militants” as well as people trying to bring aid to injured victims of strikes.

Hamid goes on to look closer at the harrowing experience of those affected, and at the widespread Pakistani revulsion at the use of drones.  And with the US now intensifying its drone campaign elsewhere, as in Yemen, he cogently makes the case that their use only weakens already weak governments and thus severely undermines America’s own foreign-policy interests.

In other words, this isn’t counter-terrorist; it’s counter-effective.  What’s touted as “clean” technology (for the man in the bunker) is in fact as dirty as ever.  And the depressing conclusion is that the Obama administration is as stuck as its predecessor in the self-defeating meme of a military “war on terrorism.”

Could it have been clearer?  The United States is being held hostage by the National Rifle Association, which has enough senators in its deep pockets to block even the most basic attempt at meaningful gun control.

President Obama called the Senate’s capitulation yesterday “pretty shameful.”  Make that totally, horrendously shameful.  Just two days after carnage in Boston, the US Senate had not had enough death.  Instead, it ensured that there’ll be more Newtowns, more kids mown down, more “senseless tragedy.” In fact the Senate has essentially written the script for it.

Since a few readers seem to think that I get “too angry” at times — Zen meditation never was my thing — I’d like to point out that the New York Times praised Obama for his evident anger, and that the lead editorial in today’s paper is very close to my current anger level.  Titled “The Senate Fails Americans,” here’s how it begins:

For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.

Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers.  It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.

Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”

Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.

Polls show that an ever-increasing majority of Americans — 86% just last week –want at least proper background checks for those who buy guns online or at gun shows, yet the Senate denied even this most elementary precaution. Which means that this Senate does not represent the will of the people. Only that of the NRA.

Conservatives are angry at President Obama’s initial avoidance of the word “terrorism” for yesterday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon.  (Today he finally used the word.)  I’m angry at him for that too, but for a very different reason.

Obviously I know as little as you do about who made and placed those two bombs, but it was clear from the get-go that this was a terrorist attack. That is, a planned, concerted attack on civilians, in a crowded space, designed to kill and maim as many people as possible at random, and to spread fear and panic.

So why avoid calling it what it was?  The reason given by White House insiders yesterday was that they didn’t yet know who did it and why.

Excuse me?  What exactly does that reasoning imply? That the bomber’s identity defines his actions? That “domestic” terrorism is somehow less fatal than “foreign” terrorism? That if the bomber turns out to be anything other than Muslim, then it’s not terrorism?

A similar tack was taken by many liberal online commenters. “Let’s hold off on determining if this is terrorism until we know more,” they kept saying.  But it seems to me that their caution was based on the same underlying assumption — that what they meant was “Let’s hold off on calling it terrorism unless the bomber turns out to be Muslim.”

In effect, they were acting as a kind of mirror image to Fox News, where the instant assumption was that since this was terrorism, the perpetrator could only be Muslim.

So to use one of Obama’s own favorite phrases, let me be absolutely clear:

If the bomber turns out to be a lily-white right-wing Christian whose ancestors came off the Mayflower, he is still a terrorist.  As clearly a terrorist as the stock image of the jihadi in a suicide vest.

Moreover, this was not “a tragedy,” as Obama called it — thus prompting countless television reporters to fall back on stock phrases like “a tragic day” and “this terrible tragedy.”  This was murder.  Mass murder.

“Tragedy” implies that it could not have been avoided, that it was somehow fated.  That was the whole point of ancient Greek drama, where the idea of tragedy was invented.  But terrorism is deliberate.  It’s a cold-blooded decision made by humans (or rather, people who pass for human).  And to call it tragedy is to imply one way or another that the perpetrator is somehow not quite responsible for his actions.  (Yes, almost certainly ‘his’ and not ‘her.’)

Of course I realize that Obama probably decided on “tragedy” out of the earnest desire to avoid spreading panic and thus terrorizing more people.  That’s part of the role of president, I guess:  the national reassurer.  But I was not reassured.  Sure, his first response beat continuing to read from “My Pet Goat” by several miles, but that’s setting the bar about as low as it can get.

The so-called “war on terror” has been a disaster for the US not least because even when it happens right under our noses, we still can’t recognize that it’s not who does it that makes terrorism, or why.  It’s what they do.

Whether they’re political or religious; white or brown or black; left-wing or right-wing; “domestic” or “foreign” or any combination of all of the above — if they target, kill, maim, and terrorize civilians, they’re terrorists.

And may every one of them — whether in Boston, in New York, in Oklahoma City, in Atlanta, in Beirut, in Jerusalem, in Baghdad, in Kabul, or in Benghazi — rot in whatever conception of hell you care to name.

Like we really needed this:

This is how to advance the cause of gun control?

What the hell was Obama thinking?  Why on earth did he feel the need to claim that he was into skeet-shooting “all the time”?  And then to kowtow to Fox News demands for “proof” by releasing this photo?

So go ahead, accidental theologists.  Let’s caption this photo.

Fire away!

Here’s a few that come instantly to mind:

— “Hey, see how tough I am — I can shoot lumps of clay to smithereens all day!”

— “Look, ma, I can make things go Bang!”

— “I’m the new Teddy Roosevelt.”

— “I shoot, ergo I’m American.”

— “I shoot, ergo I am.”

With thanks to readers who sent me this clip of Obama speaking to his campaign staff.

It’s good to be reminded that inspiration works both ways.

And that the president is a mensch:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/ptzAmuoDv2o]

I stood.  I paced.  I sat down and immediately hopped up again.  I fiddled with rubber bands until they broke.  I tried to follow six or seven websites at the same time — when I wasn’t staring at the two big screens set up at Town Hall Seattle.  Every now and then I’d sneak out for a smoke, only to stub it out after a few pulls because I had to rush back in again to check what was happening.

I tried to reassure myself by putting my faith in Nate Silver, the meta-analyst who’d repeatedly said to pay no attention to the pundits and who’d calmly analyzed the data and predicted an Obama victory of over 300 electoral votes.  I mean, I do have faith in Nate Silver, but hey, what kind of faith is it that never gets tested?

The signs were encouraging:  on the state level, bigots and rape-defenders and all-out idiots being defeated, and good, intelligent people winning. But that popular vote was still so close, and Florida kept changing from pink to baby blue and back to pink again, and I wanted to march up on the stage with a dark-blue marker and simply color it in…

So when the magic mark of 270 electoral votes came up far earlier than anyone expected, yes I cheered and whooped and hugged and high-fived both friends and total strangers, but what I felt more than anything else was relief.   Sanity had prevailed — narrowly, but clearly.  And decency had prevailed.

There was no cluster-fuck in Florida.  The right-wing attempt to suppress the vote failed, with people waiting for hours to cast their ballots (“we have to fix that,” said the president, and he might look to Washington state, with its all mail-in ballot system, for the fix).   And I confess it was a pleasure to switch occasionally to Fox News and see the somber faces.

Big money failed, and several billionaires were left holding a bad investment in Romney/Ryan.  Marriage equality passed in Maine and Maryland, and is ahead here in Washington state — the first time a majority of voters have endorsed it, as opposed to its being decided on by legislators.  Ditto with legalization of marijuana in two states, giving the lie to the so-called “war on drugs.”

Just two decades ago, all of this would have been unthinkable.  A black president being elected to a second term?  Laughable.  Gay marriage?  Absurd.  Legal pot?  Gimme a break…

So yes, we do move forward.  In fits and starts.  Three steps forward, two and a half steps back.  We fight off insanity, and redefine sanity:  not Obama’s dream rhetoric of “a perfect union,” but the real, down-to-earth and difficult work of balancing pragmatism and idealism.

No elation today, then, not here:  just a huge sense of relief.  And a renewed faith in the idea that one way or another, whatever the odds, sanity can prevail.

Today the NYT reports that “the United States and Iran have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.”

(I’m not at all sure what to make of that phrase “one-on-one negotiations.”  I’m assuming it means face-to-face meetings between American and Iranian officials as opposed to “back-channel” contacts, but in the land of diplo-speak, who knows?  Moreover, this is hardly “the first time” the US and Iran have negotiated over nuclear issues, not least since Iran’s nuclear program began with full-on American support decades ago, under the Shah. But I’ll stop with the cavils for now…)

The new agreement is still informal.  It comes after “intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials that date almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term,” the NYT reports, but it’s unclear if Ayatollah Khamenei has yet signed off on it, or even when negotiations might begin.  “After the US elections” is all that’s being said.  And of course if Romney wins, forget it.

If this works out, it’s excellent news.  Long overdue.  There’s no way this whole standoff is going to be resolved without direct talks.  So it was hardly a surprise to see the Israeli reaction, via ambassador Michael Oren:  “We do not think Iran should be rewarded with direct talks.”  Instead, he said, sanctions and “all other possible pressures on Iran” should be increased.

“Rewarded?”  More sanctions?  “Other pressures?”  Does he imagine that Iran will simply collapse and disappear?  That it can be bombed into submission?  That no direct talks are ever necessary?  Where exactly does he see any form of resolution in all this?

The answer is:  he doesn’t.  Conflict resolution is not the aim so far as he’s concerned.  That’s his government’s stand toward Palestine:  no negotiation, no resolution, and yes, per Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, bomb ’em into submission.  No give and take, no flexibility, no live and let live.  Just build more walls.

If US-Iran negotiations do indeed take place, the logical outcome would be that Iran ends up with nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons.  From Iran’s point of view, that’s a huge concession:  Israel has nuclear weapons, after all, and the US has been one of the world’s largest exporters of nuclear-arms technology.  It doesn’t take much to see why Iran objects to being lectured on nuclear issues by two nuclear powers, or that the very idea of “allowing” Iran to develop nuclear energy — “allow” is a word that crops up often in the NYT article — stinks of paternalistic hypocrisy.

But Iran’s leaders — its real leaders, that is, not front-man clowns like Ahmadinejad — may turn out to be a lot more realistic than Israel’s ones.

One thing is for sure: This news is going to figure large in Monday’s foreign-policy debate between Obama and Romney.  And Obama couldn’t do better than quote R. Nicholas Burns, whom the NYT cites as the man who “led negotiations with Iran as under-secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration.”  Burns sounds as though he’s had quite enough of diplo-speak:  “While we should preserve the use of force as a last resort,” he says, “negotiating first with Iran makes sense.  What are we going to do instead?  Drive straight into a brick wall called war in 2013, and not try to talk to them?”

—————–

Update, Monday October 22: The NYT reports that  everyone’s back-tracking.  Looks like someone was pushing a little too hard.  Or to use an unfortunate metaphor, jumping the gun.

In case you can’t quite understand how on earth this presidential race could be so close — how any self-respecting woman could vote Romney/Ryan, or anyone over 65, or anyone earning less than a quarter million a year (not to mention anyone with a mind and a conscience) — Randy Newman has a gentle hint:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/cvLeQbwuKys]

Could that pernicious video have ended up working against itself?  Could this be the tipping point for both Islamophobia and its mirror image, militant “Islamist” extremism?  Is this where both are revealed for the ugly con game they really are?

Perhaps the one good thing about the video is that it is so upfront in its ugliness.  It’s no longer just you and I saying it;  it’s also the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, whose anger was palpable:  “To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Now we know who made the video:  a convicted con man, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, indicted on multiple charges of bank fraud and check-kiting.  And he may indeed end up back in jail, since by posting his work to the Internet he violated the terms of his probation.  That’s little consolation, of course, for the multiple deaths he’s caused — at least a dozen so far.  And none at all for those who don’t understand that the principle of freedom of speech, no matter how hard it is to accept, applies to all. Under a different administration, the same principle by which they demand that he be jailed could then be turned around and applied to them.

But we know more.  We know that the protests against the video have been used and manipulated by Al Qaeda and Salafi types, who manipulated the sincere outrage and insult of protestors to further their own political agenda and try to destabilize newly elected governments.  In the process, they also furthered the agenda of their Islamophobic blood brothers, providing graphic images of Muslims doing everything Islamophobes expect — rioting, burning, killing.  But for the first time, all countries involved seem to have clearly recognized this and given voice to it, perhaps none more perfectly than Hillary Clinton: “”The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”

We know that Twitter is alive with condemnations of the violence from Libyans, Tunisians, Egyptians, and more.  Mainstream Muslims, both religious and secular, will no longer tolerate being intimidated into silence by those who claim to speak in their name for a violent, extremist travesty of Islam.  They are speaking out in unprecedented volume and numbers.

And we know this:  the new governments of Libya and Yemen instantly condemned the violence and apologized for the death of Ambassador Stevens.  In the words of the president of the Libyan National Congress, it was “an apology to the United States and the Arab people, if not the whole world, for what happened.  We together with the United States government are on the same side, standing in a united front in the face of these murderous outlaws.”  Residents of Tripoli and Benghazi staged demonstrations to condemn the attack on the Benghazi consulate and to express their sorrow at the death of Stevens, who was widely admired for his support of the revolution that ousted Qaddafi.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt finally realized that this was not a matter of defending Islam against outside enemies, but of defending it against its own worst enemies on the inside.

All this, it seems to me, is new.  As is the reaction of the US administration, led by Obama and Clinton — calm, measured, determined, and in the spirit of Ambassador Stevens himself,  the opposite of the heavy-handed American imperialism of the past.  Imagine if this had happened under Bush, or under Romney, and shudder at how they would have reacted.

Could it be, finally, that more and more people are getting it?  That both the Islamists and the Islamophobes are losing?  That sanity, however high the cost in lives, might actually prevail?

This was just sent me with a note saying “I don’t know your political stance” — (clearly not a reader of the Accidental Theologist!) — “but this version of Les Miserables is not to be missed.”

Darn right.  It’s so good it could almost make me like musicals…

[youtube=http://youtu.be/0WHw32bv9BQ]

No exultation.  No victorious “mission accomplished.”  No jingoistic “Rah rah, USA USA.”   What a relief that Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States.

While students cheered wildly in front of the White House as though their team had just won a major football game, Obama’s announcement last night was characteristically calm and realistic:

Bin Laden’s death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must –- and we will — remain vigilant at home and abroad.

Obama is clearly aware that the killing of Bin Laden is more a symbolic victory than anything.  “Emblematic” is the word being used.  Al Qaeda is a loose alliance, with no reliance on a single leader.   But the fact that this happened on Obama’s watch and on his orders is a huge shot in the arm for the voices of calm and reason in the United States.  And a brilliantly timed one.  Bin Laden’s death may finally give Obama the respect and authority he merits in Congress, especially since it has to be clear as of last night that he is all but assured of a second presidential term.

We need it.  The US is still reeling from the racist absurdities of the “birther” luantics (how many hours until they start demanding Bin Laden’s “long-form death certificate”?).  It’s still in deep recession.  It’s still enmeshed in Iraq, newly mired in Libya, and floundering in Afghanistan. And, as Steve Coll makes clear on The New Yorker blog, bamboozled in Pakistan, where Bin Laden was hiding out just a thousand feet from a major Pakistani military base, “effectively housed under Pakistani state control.”

So I know this is naive.  I know it’s not going to happen soon.  But really, all I can think right now is this:

Mr President, can we please get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya?

Can we please go home now?

There’s been a ton of punditry about what the Tunisia and Egypt revolutions mean for America, and you can bet there’ll be several tons more.  But I suspect its biggest effect is yet to register, and that is psychological.  Because these two revolutions – achieved through determinedly non-violent action – constitute a radical, positive challenge to the politically manipulated atmosphere of fear and paranoia about Islam.   In fact, as New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it, 2/11 may be the perfect antidote to 9/11.

Too optimistic?  I think not.  There’s a very good chance that we’re due for a major paradigm shift here in the United States — one that seemed unimaginable just a few weeks ago (and one even a congressman like Peter King, head of the HUAC-like committee due to start ‘examining’ the supposed radicalization of American Muslims (“are you now or have you ever been an American Muslim?”), might have to take into account).

What’s happening all over the Middle East challenges the crude stereotypes of “Arabs = riots.”  Of “Islam = terrorism.”  And above all, of Islam as somehow fundamentally anti-democratic.

These stereotypes run deep.  Think of the scenes shown in the American media from the first week of the Egypt uprising.   A close-up of 200 people prostrated in prayer, excluding the tens of thousands who stood behind them, not praying.   A protestor holding a poster of Mubarak with horns and a Star of David drawn on his forehead – the only one of its kind, it turned out, in the whole square.  Or a few days later,  the replay after replay of Molotov cocktails – “flames lead” being the mantra of TV news – reinforcing the image of rioting Muslims out of control, “the Arab street.”  It was exactly the image Mubarak was aiming for.

Thus the pumping up of the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat by both the Mubarak regime and conservative western pundits, as though the Egyptian protesters were extraordinarily dumb and naïve.  As though they were not highly aware of  how the 1979 Iran revolution was hijacked and perverted.  As though they couldn’t see the fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia or the Hamas regime in Gaza.   As though the Brotherhood itself were unanimously stuck in the 1950s mindset of ideologue Sayyid Qutb.  As though the only way to be Muslim was to be a radical fundamentalist.

Thus the surprise in the west at the sophistication of the Tahriris, when “the Arab street” turned out to include doctors and lawyers and women and IT executives (you could practically hear the astonishment:  “you mean there’s Muslim Google executives?”).

Thus the continually stated fear, stoked by the regime and by conservative pundits, that the protestors would shift from nonviolence to violence – that the nonviolence was merely a cover for some assumed innate propensity to violence.

Thus the slowness to realize that the old anti-West sloganism had been superseded, and that this wasn’t about resentment of the west;  in fact that it was about the very things President Obama had talked about in his speech right there in Cairo in June 2009 – about democracy and freedom.

In short, what we heard and saw in those first few days was the modern version of Orientalism:   The idea that the ‘Orient’ – that is, the Middle East (it should come as no surprise here that the geography is as weird as the idea itself) — is an inherently violent, primitive, medieval kind of place.  Or as right-wing Israeli politicians have been endlessly repeating for decades, “a bad neighborhood.”   And that the responsibility of ‘enlightened’ westerners and despotic leaders alike was to keep these benighted people under control.

But as the uprising went on into the second week, something began to change. Nobody at the blog of Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, for example, which one would have thought the first to support any kind of uprising, even bothered to comment on it at first.  When they began to, it was with their usual weary stance of pseudo-sophisticated cynicism.   But by the day after Mubarak unleashed his goons in Tahrir Square, when the protestors’ response was to turn out in larger numbers than ever, even The Stranger gave in to excited support.   How not, when millions of people stood up to repression and dictatorship in the full knowledge of what they faced if they failed – arrest, torture, and death?   Would you have such courage?  Such determination?

So here’s what I saw here in the States:   more and more Americans abandoning their unconscious Orientalism in favor of stunned admiration.

And that’s the beginning of something new, the very thing Obama declared twenty months ago in Cairo:  respect.

Finally.

I hate to say this, but whoever came up with the phrase “mosque at Ground Zero” was a political genius.  The phrase is not just an exaggeration;  it’s a lie. But in today’s America, it’s a very effective lie — a horribly brilliant piece of demagogery.

I could show you what’s actually planned, but that’s not the point (okay, the plan’s at the end of this post).  I could point out that the Park 51 Islamic center’s peace- and love-preaching imam is Sufi, part of the mystical branch of Islam (see the medieval Persian poems of Rumi, the best-selling poet in the US), as hated by hardline Saudi- and Taliban-type Islamic bigots as by fundamentalist American Christian and Jewish ones.   I could explain, as William Dalrymple does so eloquently on the Op-Ed page of today’s NYT, that

a 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

I could explain and point out and be as rational as you like, but bigotry demands blind ignorance.   It demands the simplistic view, in which Islam is a destructive monolith.  And just as the patriotism of scoundrels wraps itself in the flag, so the bigotry of Islamophobia wraps itself in the deaths of others — those Americans who died on 9/11 (except, of course, for the American Muslims among them).

The idea of Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” is another ghastly piece of framing, veiling bigotry in the holy.   “Too close to hallowed ground,” say the bigots.  “Move it further away.”   But not to the suddenly hallowed ground of Staten Island, where they’ve organized in opposition to a proposed new mosque. Or that of Murfreeesboro TN, ditto.  Or  Wilson, WI, ditto.  Or Temecula CA, ditto. Three thousand miles from Ground Zero is clearly just too close for delicate bigoted sensibilities.

We need to re-frame this issue, and quick.  NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg started the path toward re-framing (read his full speech here, an object lesson in integrity).  President Obama then set an all-too  tentative foot on the same path, only to immediately back-track — an object lesson, it saddens me to say, in the lack of integrity:

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.

“No comment”?  Thanks, Mr President.

It’s time to stop pussy-footing around. Time to talk not just about the right to build the Park 51 Islamic center, but the need for it to be built.  Yes, right there, close to Ground Zero, as a magnificent stand of Islam — of all of us — against the crude distortions of murderous extremists, of those who love only their own bigotry, and of cynical political operators now determined to make the “mosque at Ground Zero” a central issue in the mid-term elections.

This is not solely a matter of constitutional rights, Obama, and you know it.   You need to speak out — clearly, forcefully, and eloquently — not just for the right to build Park 51, but for the necessity of it as a major step toward healing this ghastly rift in both the national and the international body politic.

Don’t you remember?  Yes, you can.

…
–

I could be cute and say that accidental theology went hip-hop last night, but what happened goes a lot deeper than that.

It was a fundraiser for 826 Seattle, with several musicians and writers paired up together.   The most provocative pairing, at least on the surface of things:  me and the Sportn’ Life crew — D. Black,  Fatal Lucciauno, and Spac3man.  (Go here for video and audio, especially of D. Black’s extraordinary album Ali’Yah — Hebrew for ‘ascent’ — and Spac3man’s new mix tape.)

D. (Damion) Black is Seattle’s most admired hip-hop star, co-owner of its one black-owned recording company, and for anyone who likes religion neatly defined, a nightmare:   a Muslim as a boy,  a Christian convert in his teens, and now, in his 20s, fascinated with the Jewish roots of Christianity and a practicing orthodox Jew.   And a straight-up mensch.  “You’re an agnostic Jew?” he said just before we took the stage.  “That makes you all the more Jewish.”   Which happens to be the most Jewish of all possible answers.

The idea was for us to talk about our respective “crafts,” but instead we ranged wide and deep.  On Obama, for instance:   If many people were in tears and overjoyed the night Obama was elected, Damion said, he wasn’t.  The rent was still overdue, the car still broken, the debts still mounting, and  none of that was going to change simply because a black man had become president.   In Seattle’s Central District as in New York’s Harlem, nobody needed to be reminded that Obama did not walk on water.

This kind of talk wasn’t what the audience was there for, though.  They wanted rap.    “Only if Lesley does it with us,” said Damion.

“No way,” said tone-deaf and rhythm-impaired me.

“Say one of your poems,”  said Fatal.

“I have no poems.”

“You want one of mine?”  said Spac3man, taking out his phone.  He thumbed through a few screens, then handed it over to me.  “Here,” he said, “‘Protect and Serve.'”And this is what I read, straight off the screen, leaning in low and close to the mike:

On the beat like Bean, hop out my hood like J-kwon/
I don’t like one Jake accept Jake One/
Damn! here dey go over da loud speaker/
Follow procegger, while you kneelin on ya knees bruh/
intertwine ya fingas and don’t be quick to speak up/
Cause they’ll beat ya like rocky in a meat freeza/
Please, bruh treat snitches the same/
G ur not I don’t like 5-0 like Game/
Animal, They sense fear so calm down/
Fuck calling them pigs they corrupt like dog pound/
doughberman pinchers, squeezing us in our compound/
Try reach for ID, you might be gunned down/
Rights only go so far dont be dumb, ock/
Court dey hide behind the shield like 300 when the sun blocked/
My advice if you pulled in da slums wit’em/
Be Osama slash Obama, run nigga!/”

(Copyright:  SPAC3MAN of Sportn’ Life Records.  Posted here by permission of the author.)

Weird spelling?  As those doughberman pinchers should tell you, it’s deliberate.   In fact even as I read it, nothing about this poem seemed weird.  If I didn’t get some of the references in the first half, stumbling here and there, no matter;  the subject was all too familiar — a scene told again and again on the news pages, but now from the inside.  And if the mainly white audience was shocked by the last line – that word, in a white woman’s mouth!  the conflation of those two names! — I was not.  By then I was Spac3man, a gracefully gangly walking magnet for the suspicion of those who protect and serve some, but not all.

What it felt like for Spac3man (far left, below) to have his work recited from the outside, as it were — and with a British accent, no less — I don’t know.   But I do know that to allow a newly-met stranger to publicly read a poem not yet recorded or published was an act of extraordinary generosity.  I could have mangled it, and he trusted me not to.

That, I think, is called amazing grace.