On March 12, 2014, I argued that President Obama needed to apologize to the American people for something. It didn’t matter what, I said, so long as it was something “the people” were offended about. The state of the economy would do, or our “lost greatness” or the presence of so many people who were not born here. None of these outcomes can be traced to Obama’s presidency, but an apology is nevertheless necessary because of the effect it would have.
In that March post [1], I developed a situation John Gray talks about in several of his Mar
s/Venus books. She thinks you have committed an offense of some kind. You would like to explain that you have not, but she is miffed and won’t hear anything you say until you apologize. So apologize. Then you get to say the thing that needs to be said.
When I referred, above, to “the effect it would have,” this is what I was talking about. Donald Trump was elected by a coalition of fat cats, racists, abused and ignored low income voters and Hillary-haters. Of that list, the one the Democrats can do something about is the abused and ignored low income voters. We (Democrats, progressives, socialists, feminists) desperately need to talk to them—more, soon, about just why that is so—and they desperately need to talk to us because all their hopes are going to be dashed.
Why? Not because Trump might be re-elected or some other Trump-like person. Trump is just a weed. He is not the most serious problem to be addressed. The most serious problem is that we have a weed-producing soil. The polity we now have is very friendly to charlatans running for office. They have a lot to gain by doing that, so there is no reason to imagine that they will stop. Amending the soil so that it is not so hospitable to weeds is by far the better strategy and it has the advantage of being something we can—in principle—do.
This urgent need, “amending the soil,” is what I am calling a “hearts and minds” problem. [2] Democrats have focused narrowly on winning elections—which is fine as far as it goes—but we win elections by having broadly appealing candidates, sophisticated fund-raising routines, and elaborate get-out-the-vote strategies. None of those address the hearts and minds problem. We just wind up winning the presidency and occasionally the Congress and about a third of the states and hardening the lines of the debate. The process of winning an election is sometimes called “counting noses” but below, see a more substantial view of the problem.
All this reminds me of a saying I first heard from my mother: “A man convinced against his will/Is of the same opinion still.”
So if the Democrats’ problem is a hearts and minds problem, how do we reach the hearts and minds of the abused and ignored low income voters? They are, as I see it, the only part of the Trump constituency to which the Democrats have access. Besides that, they were part of the the original Democratic coalition.
I think we could make a start by not disdaining the issues that hold them where they are. The arguments they make are dreadful beyond repair, but they don’t care about the arguments anyway. They care about the issues—just a few issues. And these are moral issues. We keep arguing economic self-interest because that is what worked for us in the past. And it will work in the future, too, if all we want to do is win elections. If we want to amend the soil—to make constitutional (note the small c-) changes in the polity, we are going to have to attempt something deeper.
That is the end of my attempt to propose a new solution in principle and to justify the logic. Ordinarily, that doesn’t persuade anyone. Let’s look at some examples; maybe that will work. I’m thinking of “welfare cheats” and “a woman’s—a pregnant woman’s—right to choose” (to abort her fetus).
Welfare Cheats
Let’s start with “welfare cheats.” They drive conservative voters crazy. In support of their umbrage, they cite “facts” that they have heard somewhere. They talk about how many such cheaters there are and about how great a burden those parasites impose on state and national budgets, and how the great majority of people on welfare are black.
All the “facts” are wrong and I am a fact-oriented kind of person, so what I move naturally to do is to show that they are mistaken. There are very few cheaters in the welfare system according to all the actual studies I have read over several decades. The cost is remarkably low as a percentage of all government social programs, even as a percentage of social programs. By far the largest percentage of users and abusers of the welfare system are white. We could debate about the margins around some of those claims, but for today, let’s just say that they are all correct.
That is where I want to go. That is where I am most comfortable. But let’s stop and remember the wife to whom an apology has not been given. She isn’t listening. The facts don’t matter if you don’t hear them. Even the logic is not compelling if you refuse to acknowledge the terms. Nothing is going to work in this scenario until she puts the hearing aids back in, so let do that first. And facts are not going to do that.
What will do that? I think complaining about welfare cheats would do it. We (liberals, Democrats) treat the issue as if it were not a moral affront; as if we think cheating the system is perfectly acceptable. [3] Why don’t we begin by saying, “You are right. This is a problem that needs to be addressed. Let’s work on it together.”
They will still be angry—with us as well as with the welfare cheats—and they will propose punitive and ineffective responses. Those responses won’t work, but two good things could happen. The first is that we—the former Trump supporters and the current Democrats—are working together on something. That’s a good thing. The second is that any particular “welfare cheat” is going to be a stereotype buster and it is harder to call for the punishment of someone whose circumstances you know.
Will that fix the problem? Yes. It will. You said No because you forgot what the problem was. We are working on developing a hearts and minds strategy that will change the constitution of the American polity. We are not “fixing the welfare system.” I wanted to remind you of that now, before we start into abortion, the next topic.
Abortion
What drives conservative voters crazy, it seems to me, is not the need some women have to have their fetuses aborted. Consider this from a 2016 Pew survey.
Though abortion is a divisive issue, more than half of U.S. adults take a non-absolutist position, saying that in most – but not all – cases abortion should be legal (34%) or illegal (24%). Fewer take the position that in all cases abortion should be either legal (23%) or illegal (15%).
You get a majority for what Pew calls “the non-absolutist position” by adding the views of people who think that abortion should be legal in most cases to those who think it should not be legal in most cases. So 34% + 24% = 57%, a majority. That’s a majority of people who say that abortion is perfectly acceptable if there is a good reason.
But Democrats don’t want to argue that. They (we) want to argue that it is the woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion for any reasons at all. We don’t say it that way, but conservative voters hear it that way. Once I have said that the choice belongs to the pregnant woman, I am bound to consider valid any reasons at all.
That’s not a hearts and minds view. The actual politics of providing or refusing abortions is complicated by the federal system, which requires the Supreme Court to tell the states what they may do and what they may not do. The Court cannot say that abortion is acceptable if there is a good reason and otherwise it is not. But Democrats could say that. That’s the position President Clinton was widely understood to support when he said that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare.” That is not a criterion the law can live up to, but it could be the rhetorical home of the Democratic party.
We would have to be serious about “rare.” We would have to find some way to say that casual and thoughtless abortions are wrong. It is at that point that the hearing aids go back in and the object of our sincerest affections—the formerly Democratic Trump voters—begins to listen again.
The hearts and minds strategy isn’t for sissies. And if may not work, either. But the kind of voting constituency we have right now—divided, self-referential, vindictive—is a soil that will grow only weeds. If it isn’t Trump, it will be the next weed.
I want to propose the amendment of our soil as the 28th Amendment. What do you think?
[1] Citing your old columns is what my brother John calls “calling up the reserves.” Perfect.
[2] According to a site called the Phrase Finder, Chuck Colson was not the origin of the adapted saying, “Once you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” One possible origin “is a Vietnam-era congressional debate in which a liberal Democrat pleaded for programs designed to ‘win the hearts and minds of the downtrodden.’ Hawkish Rep. Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.) responded, ‘I say get ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.’ It’s doubtful that this rejoinder began with Rivers, however. It certainly didn’t begin with Charles Colson.”
[3] We call it “blaming the victim” but these con artists who work the system and waste the money are not just victims—although they are that too. They are the indicators of a social problem that everyone would like to see fixed.
President Bartlet has been on edge since his daughter Zooey was kidnapped and held for ransom. She was found and rescued, but the event left Bartlet shaken and his marriage in tatters. Going to Oklahoma to “serve people” was what he wanted to do more than anything and he found it so rewarding that he wanted to keep on doing it.
duties of a servant rather than to compete with each other to be the top dog. As always, you get real clarity when you specify the opposite of what you are trying to say. When you say, “Not this, but rather that,” you have made the meaning of “this” much clearer. So it is with “serve others” and “rule over others.” Look at the alternatives in this passage from Matthew 20:
When he agreed to go back to being President of the United States, he agreed to take on the authority that being of service required of him. Flying back to Washington in Air Force 1 doesn’t look humble, but on this occasion, that is exactly what it was.
Of these roles, which is best characterized as “serving others?” Neither, if you follow my argument this far. The person who is a natural leader, but who lays those preferences aside to take up the role of healer, is serving others. And so is the person who is a natural healer and takes on the role of healing the casualties that are the natural part of the small group process. It costs the leader more to serve as a healer. If you count his willingness to pay that cost as meritorious, then he has more merit. But he has not served more or better than the person to whom it comes naturally. The confusion I am trying to oppose is graphically represented in this cartoon.
I first began to be interested in this passage when I noticed that the New Jerusalem Bible (my favorite) has a translation of “knew” that was new to me. Like everyone other Protestant my age, I grew up with the King James Version, which has: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man…” [2] The Revised Standard Version has a modern version of the same sentiment: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.” This is something the servant knows to be true and it attaches to the character of the master and is evidenced by the master’s repeated actions that support it.
It would be asking a lot to ask that the servant put his master’s interests ahead of his own and I am not asking that. I am saying only that if “avoiding punishment” is the servant’s own top priority, then information about what kinds of activity the master will punish is very important. Instead of that, the servant relies on “I had heard.” That doesn’t sound like risk aversion to me.
The servant is the recipient of his master’s money and the name of the game is investment and profit. I can see that Matthew would have a good deal of interest in that. Matthew would have been troubled by people who “wanted a little piece of Rabbi Jesus’s kingdom” but who wanted to pretend that no obligations went with that “little piece.”
You could, of course, wish that you had not been given the gift and all the obligations it carries with it. I think about Frodo, who, when he discovered what “Bilbo’s ring” really was and the burden it was going to be to him, said, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
is green, as all Notre Dame fans know, the official color of Ireland is blue. I didn’t know that. The official symbol of Ireland is the harp and I was just playing around when I added the (s) to “symbol of Ireland” because Guinness has great popularity in Ireland and all they had to do is to reverse the direction of the harp. Note the direction of the harp in these two images.
The harp has been a traditional Irish instrument for a very long time, but I think it has a special status because the English domination of Ireland included a determination to obliterate Irish culture and playing the Irish harp was declared to be a capital crime. When I saw the intensity of Ireland’s love of its harp and of traditional Irish music generally, I realized I was seeing more than just a tradition-loving people. I was seeing an indomitable people.
not prepared to have–not, everybody assured me, “like the Celtic Tiger years of the 90’s–and a stable socialist democracy that is not dependent on England. It is dependent, however, on the European Union (EU), which funded the Celtic Tiger 90s, and Irish news pays a great deal of attention to the EU. I heard speculation of what the EU flag would look like –the ring of stars on a field of blue–when the U. K. withdraws. There may have been just a little glee mixed in with the speculation.
When I travel, I am often taken by signs that catch my interest. I had never heard, for instance of the earliest written Irish script, called Ogham (and pronounced ōm). It is just a series of lines representing letters of an alphabet. But that makes this sign in Dingle–Chinese take-out, no less–a four-language sign. Even in Ireland, where two languages per sign are common, this was worth a good laugh. [1]
There is nothing at all subtle about this statue of Molly Malone in Dublin. It was hard to get a picture of just her–people wanted to have their pictures taken with her as background and who could blame them. On the other hand, if you know the traditional Irish song “The Rose of Tralee,” this picture might catch your fancy. This (see footnote 2) is a rose IN Tralee. We stopped there for dinner on our way back to Adare and I couldn’t resist it.
I saw more redheads in Ireland than I have ever seen at one place. There was an attempt in Portland to break the Guinness (!) Book of Records for the most redheads in one place and one time and I contributed my redhead to that cause, but I didn’t actually see the gathering itself. It will not surprise you that there are a lot of redheads in Ireland, but this one, in Ennis, is named Éowyn and I sincerely hope there is a Faramir somewhere in her future.
me all that much because I am, after all, from Oregon and we do green as well as they do. [3] But nothing in Oregon suggests the division of all that green into very small plots of land marked by rock walls or, as here, by hedges, and you see that all over the parts of Ireland (south and west) we saw.
sources. “Culture” is just things everyone knows and the elements of it don’t come with labels attached. I got a quick lesson in Ireland about how very much of “my culture” is Irish.
Here’s an example from Genesis 38, the story of Tamar, who is one of my favorite biblical characters. The story of Tamar and Judah, her father in law, is not the easiest story to grasp because it requires an understanding of levirate marriage. [2] Our students were perfectly ready to approve of God’s commands that we should not steal, lie, or kill. God’s commands that the younger brother should mate with the widow of an elder brother was not as easy to approve. It is, however, the basis of the story of Tamar and Judah.
Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how difficult and unappetizing this is. We are asking them to grasp a truly foreign concept—levirate marriage—and understand it as part of God’s covenant with Israel. It is, in other words, binding. And having grasped this concept, to care about it; to see why it would have mattered so much to the writer. On the other hand, there is nothing at all foreign about a woman seducing someone else’s husband, as Tamar did—and her father in law, no less. But to stay with the writer and his values, you have to set aside your own condemnation of Tamar’s behavior and see her as going to great lengths to achieve the goal God had in mind. [4]
of church organization that followed from the Hellenized Jews who first followed Jesus, rather than the kind of church organization that followed from the Hebrews who first followed Jesus. From the split that Luke describes, two entirely different approaches developed and if you are inclined to doubt that, I recommend that you read the book of James, then the book of Galatians. I am reminded here that in our little church in Englewood, Ohio, we used to sing a hymn called “The Church in the Wildwood.” Possibly this woman in on her way to that church.
If you start with how it must feel to have someone tell you that you should not dress the way you want and have your hair the way you want, much less that you should defer to the authority of “a man” just because he is a man—you arrive at a completely modern and understandable and unscholarly anger. But you can choose not to start there. (You probably cannot choose to ignore your feelings altogether, particularly when you begin to apply it to our own times.) But you can choose not to start there. You can choose to start with the situation the writer faced.
more more clearly and to evaluate it more thoughtfully. In a way, I am not the ideal person to do this. I am, I need to say, a fan of TWW—the kind of person who was referred to in the chatrooms as a “wing nut.” I participated in the chatrooms. I taught a university course about the West Wing. I own the DVDs of all seven seasons and I do, in fact, refer back to the issues that are raised more urgently and ominously in the Trump administration. [1]
I’d say there is no blood in that one at all. But it does launch some criticisms. “Fantasia” is not entirely clear, but the relationship with “fantasy” not at all obscured. And the fantasy is founded on “shibboleths” [3]—inside code words that establish membership. These same shibboleths sustain “Beltway liberalism.” By the way, “Beltway” is the adjective of death. Nothing good is modified by the adjective “Beltway.”
our house, so after every run, I would add that extra half mile. I called them “victory laps” after all the victory laps I had seen superb runners like Steve Prefontaine take at Hayward Field in Eugene. [2] And that’s all there was to it at first.
This is Britain Lake, by the way. The faculty circle loop is just to the right.
and right downstairs by the pool is the hot tub. I do have one new trick about physical relief. My body has felt bad in a lot of different ways over the years and I am familiar with those ways. I am capable, now, of getting up in the morning and actually experience the “not hurting” of a joint or a muscle. That is something I never experienced at all at the time I was running the 1776 project.
And I think I will start with winter. Winter will begin five days after my birthday. That doesn’t seem too long to wait. And my brother John, who has greatly enriched my appreciation of seasons, begins his survey [7] with winter on the grounds that it is the simplest. Productivity has shut down and “life” is resting—unless it is trying to find a way to live through the winter—and the whole cycle is getting ready to begin again.
good at it or who had gotten good at it. But good people or no, the ceremony itself is aimed at making people feel welcome because it is a library. They conveyed the attitude that a library is a special place. That’s where the illusion of the curtsying came from. Welcome to this special place. We do knowledge here. We are so glad you have come to spend some time sharing this pursuit with us.
We’ll look first at the situation as Levitin describes it; then at the alternatives as they seemed to him at first. Then, finally, how he escaped that trap and how those familiar and bad options turned themselves inside out and gave him some new choices.
indicated above, the decision situation derives directly from things you aren’t aware of at the time. “The situation” is concocted of stories you have heard, movies you have seen, arguments you have had, your own attitude toward yourself, your self-confidence or the lack of it. So the set of options—should I shoot or not if it comes down to that—seems very present. It seems clear. And it should seem clear. These are all things you are experiencing.
I like this story because Levitin escaped from the trap that his gun laid for him. Suddenly another question became available to him Am I prepared to kill another human being just to protect all this stuff? Of course not. In that form, he rejected it instantly.
ry to understand why an Easter card has meant so much to me over the years. It first meant something to me because it was sent to me by my niece, Lisa Hess, in the confident expectation that she and I found the same kinds of things to be funny. Boy was she right about that!
. Welcome back.” For me, this is where the funny starts.
artist didn’t have a candidate in mind. For myself, I think maybe “the natural order.” The relationship of God’s followers to the natural order has been contentious to say the least. Those drawing from Genesis get to choose between God’s command that we “dominate” and “subdue” nature or that we “care for it” as a steward cares for his master’s property. Quite a difference.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 