Fred Clark (and Caitlin Wall): Translating Huckabee (Updated)

First posted January 22. I enjoyed Fred Clark's comments so much I stole his whole post. February 7 someone else takes note of the governor's rhetorical gifts. Having been spoon-fed this kind of language from childhood, I haven't paid much attention, but with the man's growing profile this not-so-subtle talent is worth noting.
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He said it so well I'm stealing the whole thing. I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes, so if you want to read those and check out the comment thread you'll have to go there. I first heard reference to "dog-whistle politics" about three years ago and have had my ears perked up ever since. Obviously Fred's ears have been trained longer than that. This is rich!

Doing my best impression of Barbara Billingsley in Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak evangelical ..."
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Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was very skilled at peppering President George W. Bush's public statements with so-called "dog whistle" language targeting evangelical Christian voters. These passing phrases and allusions wouldn't alter or confuse Bush's message to other listeners, but they would have an additional resonance for the evangelicals listening. The actual meaning of those phrases didn't much matter, what was important was that he came across as conversant in the local idiom, the insider's jargon.
To cite a famous example, when Bush said that he believed in the "wonder-working pow'r" of the American people, the message was simply that if Bush used that phrase he must know that song, so he must've sung that song, so he must've been to church, so he must be one of us. No one was supposed to, and few did, think too hard about the bizarre meaning of that statement -- which seemed to equate the American people with "the precious blood of the lamb," suggesting that we could, by rallying around our president, "be free from the burden of sin." That (heretical, arrogant, insane) implication wasn't the point of the allusion. The point was just to reassure evangelicals that he spoke their language, and was therefore on their side, without scaring off everyone else.
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Unlike Bush, Mike Huckabee really is a native speaker of the evangelical idiom. He isn't just parroting phrases spelled out phonetically for him by some Wheaton-alum speechwriter, he's talking the way he naturally talks. The effect for evangelical voters is thus the same -- they are reassured he is "one of us." But the effect for everyone else is quite different, because unlike Bush's dog whistles, everyone else can hear Huckabee's allusions too and non-native speakers have a hard time making sense of what he's saying.
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To take a trivial example, Huckabee has on several occasions mentioned that he reads a chapter from Proverbs* every day and that he carries his New Testament with him for this purpose. The book of Proverbs, of course, is not in the New Testament, but evangelicals are all familiar with the Pocket Testament League's tiny volumes, the size of a deck of cards, that include not just the 27 books of the New Testament but also the Psalms and Proverbs.** These editions were designed for convenience and not with the intent of dismissing the other 37 books of the Hebrew Scriptures as unimportant, although it's worth noting that most American evangelicals wouldn't notice if the prophets suddenly disappeared from their Bibles. (Evangelical reading tends to focus on Paul's Epistles, Proverbs and pselected Psalms, which is also why Huckabee earns points for his frequent citations from Proverbs but Barack Obama gets none for quoting the book of Amos, as he did yesterday.)
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More potentially confusing is Huckabee's reference to "a living God." He used this phrase in the comment we looked at earlier, in which the former Arkansas governor explicitly endorses theocracy. Here again is that comment, as reported by MSNBC:
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"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said.

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Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has some fun with this juxtaposition of "living God" and talk of the Constitution. Since the idea of a "living Constitution" is often railed against by social conservatives who see it as a synonym for "anything goes," Grumer wonders if this means Huckabee believes in an anything-goes God as well:
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Wait, “the living god”? Wouldn’t that be some kinda wishy-washy progressive modernist God? I figured Huck for a strict constructionist God, an eye-for-an-eye guy who meant every word of Leviticus when he spake it. “Living God” implies some kind of dynamic, changing God, probably soft on crime, the kind of warm, fuzzy God from whom Words emanate with penumbrae.

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In the ensuing discussion, Grumer writes, "I'm just amused by the fact that the adjective 'living' seems to imply diametrically opposite things when you apply it to 'God' or 'Constitution.'"
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That's astute. The same could be said of the evangelical idiom "the living Word of God" as a reference to the Bible. "Living" there certainly doesn't mean all the wanton things they take it to mean in the phrase "living Constitution." But I don't want to get bogged down in the legal and legalist lit-crit, what I'm interested in here is what this phrase "living God" means.
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When a Southern Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee speaks of "the living God," what he means is that God is active, busy, involved in the world, even that God intervenes in the lives of people and the affairs of nations. That's not in itself an unusual claim for us Christian types to make. I would probably disagree with Huckabee as to the extent and content and intent of that divine involvement, as well as over our capacity for understanding it (there's that effing ineffability again), but I wouldn't object to the use of the phrase "living God." What it means, essentially, is that he is not a Deist.
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I should caution, however, that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to translate Huckabee's evangelical-speak because I'm not entirely confident that he isn't using a different kind of dog whistle -- one to which my evangelical ears are not attuned.
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Bush's dog-whistle code-words were designed to appeal to evangelical Christian voters without scaring away everyone else. Huckabee isn't doing that -- he employs evangelical idioms without any apparent regard for how it sounds to those unfamiliar with it. But Huckabee may also be employing his own set of vague allusions to appeal to a particular subset of evangelical types without scaring away the rest of the people in the pews. Over at Daily Kos, dogemperor makes the case that Huckabee admires Bill Gothard. Huckabee has even proudly noted that he has been through Gothard's "Basic Seminar."
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Gothard is not well-known outside of his particular fiefdom, but Huckabee's expressed admiration for him -- and Gothard's attendance at a Houston fundraiser for the candidate -- is deeply disturbing. You know how, say, Christopher Hitchens gets a case of the howling fantods any time he hears anyone from the religious right speak? That's how most evangelicals respond to Bill Gothard. At the fundamentalist Baptist, and very Republican, church I grew up in Gothard's seminars were often criticized as a "cult."
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It may simply be that, as a politician, Huckabee is willing to accept support from anyone who is willing to offer it. I haven't heard any reports that Huckabee's daughter has been ordered to remain single until age 30, after which she would be allowed to marry only with her father's permission (yes, that really is something the Gothardites I've encountered believe), or any other indications that the former governor is truly a Gothard devotee. So his praise of Gothard and the Basic Seminar might just be a politician's flattery -- just as his praise for the World's Worst Books after receiving Tim LaHaye's endorsement might not mean he's a full-blown prophecy maniac. But both of these instances give me pause. Huckabee talks like a run-of-the-mill evangelical, but if he's really a fan of both LaHaye and Gothard, then he may be something very different and far more troublesome.
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* Many evangelicals seem to think that the division of Proverbs into 31 chapters was divinely inspired as a sign that we should read a chapter of this book every day. That entails skipping the final chapter five months out of the year -- nothing against Lemuel, but hey, he's no Solomon, you know? Contemporary evangelical piety might be a very different thing if the book of Ecclesiastes had also been divided into 31 chapters.
** I've kept one of these pocket-sized volumes in the glove compartment of my car ever since the day I found myself unexpectedly at a hospital bedside needing, but not having with me, the 23rd Psalm, and Psalm 139, and Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. It turns out it's also a good thing to keep in one's glove compartment because troopers tend to look closely at everything you're pulling out of there when they ask to see your registration and proof of insurance.

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Caitlin Wall at FP's Passport blog posts How to speak Huckabee... Insightful variations on the same theme.

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As I watched Mike Huckabee's speech from Arkansas Tuesday night, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was speaking in some sort of code.

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Not all of Huckabee's images are biblical. Here he sends a message in Sportstalk:

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Now, it's tough for this old Razorback to say things like 'Roll, tide roll,' but I'm doing it tonight. And it's tough for this old Razorback to look over there to the state just to the east of us and anticipate being able to say that we're too, Volunteers. I think before the night is over, I'll even be singing 'Rocky Top.' This old razorback may even catch some bulldog fever before the night is over. And we're going to forget all about the Cotton Bowl and even be grateful for our friends to the north before tonight night is over, I'm fully believing."
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Huckabee is tapping the rich lexicon of southern college football to highlight his decisive win in Arkansas and herald his strong showings in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri. He ultimately took home all of the above, save the Show Me state.
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Translation: I am from Arkansas, but I also won Alabama and probably took Tennesee, Georgia, and maybe even Missouri.

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It's no accident that Southerners do well in politics, especially if they have a good foundation in religion. It is their birthright to say one thing and mean several without saying so...and get away with it.

I have come across observations that Barack Obama speaks in poetry while Hillary Clinton speaks in prose. How can I say this without sounding racist? Obama's oratorical gifts derive in part from his insights into black preaching that is the best of Southern poetry. He therefore shares a gift like Huckabee's that Mrs. Clinton does not have. She may have gone to Vacation Bible School, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Cognitive Dissonance

Thanks to Google I have a personal metric by which to track public awareness of Barak Obama. A post I composed in December 2006, updated several times since then, usually appears on the first screen of results for any search for Barack Obama's religion. I have been able to watch the numbers rise and fall daily for over a year. And because the rest of my two-thousand-plus posts are so obscure, that post receives upwards of seventy percent of all hits, sometimes spiking as much as ninety-plus percent of the last rolling 100. My two hit counters run pretty much the same.

Observation: Interest in Obama's religion spiked after, not before the last two high-profile voting events. The Iowa caucus and yesterday's "Super Tuesday" both showed large spikes. This indicates more people paying attention AFTER the results than before voting.

If that's human nature, it's a sad commentary. When the voting is over it's a bit late to be doing homework.

Super Tuesday Snips

Everybody's an expert at speculating. You know what they say about opinions. These snips caught my eye this morning.

The Lovers And The Fighters by Digby

...the campaign will boil down to whether or not independents believe that the way to fix a broken system is through inspiration or confrontation --- in particular whether they believe that the radical Republicans can be tamed by inclusion and compromise or if it will take a metaphorical billy club.

McCain will make the case that he is a man apart, beholden to no one, the only person who can make both parties straighten up and fly right. He'll run as the fighter for America. Obama is making the case that he's a man apart, a leader of millions, who will make both parties work together for the common good. He'll run as the healer of America. It will depend a great deal on a non-partisan voter's personal temperament and worldview as to which one he or she will believe.

All You Need Is Hate by Stanley Fish, NY Times

...Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

The Conservative No McCain Zone: Big Arguments for a Bad Idea by Vanderleun

...the culture war is over. And the conservatives have lost. Reaction? Consume your own.

Here's the news on "The Big 3 Issues:"

Abortion: Alas, this is a done deal. There will not come a time in the foreseeable future when abortion on demand will not be available in the United States. The best that can be hoped for at this point is a widespread understanding among the populace that abortion, though perfectly legal, is morally wrong except in certain, widely understood, circumstances. (And, no, I'm not going to spell those circumstances out -- that's up to you. Work it out with yourself, your family and your friends.)

The law and public morality are not coterminous, nor should they be. When they are the result is dhimmitude. Not really the state one is seeking, correct?

Homosexuality and gay marriage: This too is a done deal. To paraphrase Gay Rights activists from years ago, "They're here. They're queer. Get used to it."

Reversing Illegal Immigration: Done deal #3. I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. But, alas, that too joins the previous two issues in the category, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 500 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Cindy McCain’s Painkiller Problem by Radley Balko

McCain’s condescending, dismissive attitude toward medical marijuana patients only exacerbates the hypocrisy. Cindy McCain’s powerful husband and high profile probably had something to do with the fact that she didn’t get the Richard Paey treatment. But as with Rush Limbaugh, prosecutors likely laid off of her also because she played the drug war game—she admitted she was an “addict,” repented, and sought treatment. Paey had the audacity to insist that he oughtn’t go to jail for treating his own pain, and that he wasn’t an “addict,” but a chronic pain patient who was dependent on the medication in order to lead a normal life.

Contra my friend Jeremy Lott, the problem with the hypocritical practice of letting politicians’ family members get off for drug crimes that land normal people in prison is that it doesn’t seem to do much in the way of making them more sympathetic. It just hardens them into more militant drug warriors. We have to throw Richard Paey in prison so we don’t get any more Cindy McCains. See the logic?

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters by Andrew Sullivan

Cover story. Long and big.
And nope, I didn't read it, but I think it's important.
I'm tired, tired of all the words.
I'm ready to change presidents and see what happens next. I can't imagine, Democrat or Republican, how it can get much worse.

FOX News Ratings Woes

This is more delicious than a box of cherry cordials.

...Fox News years ago made an obvious decision to appeal almost exclusively to Republican viewers. The good news then for Fox News was that it succeeded. The bad news now for Fox News is that it succeeded.

Frozen Grand Central Station

Improv Everywhere

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

Back in 2006 we had around 200 people shop in slow motion at a Manhattan Home Depot. For part two of that mission everyone froze in place. As it turned out the slow motion was subtle, but the freezing in place was absolutely striking. I wanted to recreate the frozen idea, but this time in a larger, more open space. Home Depot had many aisles and multiple floors so you could never see more than a handful of frozen people at a time. At Grand Central’s enormous Main Concourse, we would be able to see everyone simultaneously.
We met in nearby Bryant Park and synchronized our watches. We would freeze at exactly 2:30 PM. A nice mix of people of all ages and races showed up, so we would look like any random sample of New Yorkers before we froze.

Willy Loman Lives

Radio blogging here...
This ten-minute feature by Scott Simon hit me hard this morning. Willie Loman and I are the same age. We have a lot more in common that most people might guess. But in many ways his story is that of everyone...sooner or later.

There's a transcript there, but don't read it. Allow yourself to listen so you can hear the deliveries of Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy in their own voices. It's just ten minutes.

Youth Radio's Paul Katzman on the Draft

This morning's Weekend Edition Saturday included a feature from Atlanta's Youth Radio by Paul Katzman, senior at Atlanta's Grady High School I don't know if this was broadcast nationally or was a local fill spot from WABE, Atlanta's NPR affiliate.

This young man observes that today's young people seem complacent to stories in the news that would have sparked outrage from the same age group a few years ago.

What has happened to student activism? Thirty years ago if it came out that the president condoned the treatment of some detainees that some considered torture, the youth of the day would not have sat idly by and accepted it.
Students used to riot over such injustices.
But today public outcries on political matters have been relegated to the arena of publishing punditry, forwarded emails and the blogosphere. What will it take for the youth of America to care about our immoral war? There's on e simple answer: a military draft.

He goes on the describe how unless and until more people see the results of war in a personal way, the loss of family members and others they know, nothing much will happen to bring about a change.

This young man is able to see a truth that too many people we call leaders either cannot see or don't want to admit.
Listen to his words and pay attention to what he says. Remember that he is still in high school and is referring to his own peer group.

I don't think he has been brainwashed or put up to this by anyone. He strikes me as a serious and patriotic youngster speaking his mind. And I agree with him. I was a draftee in 1965 and the experience changed my life. I have written about my experiences at some tiresome length on this blog as regular readers know.

I don't know how I can promote Paul Katzman's ideas and opinions as a budding journalist but if one man's blogpost will help, then here it is.

Meantime, I have been watching and waiting for the return of a military draft for some time. Sooner or later it will return.

Bill Noxid on the "Diebold Effect"

Hey, I'm a cautious guy, not given to conspiracy theories. Even when someone advances a first-person narrative so compelling that it becomes hard to swallow what is regarded as common knowledge, I am still able to go with the "generally accepted" version, if for no other reason than I'm not in any position to do much to change it.

But Bill Noxid's suspicions about voting machines is a nagging piece of work that won't go away. Think Freakanomicks, one chapter long. Comparing the New Hampshire primary results by paper ballot and machine ballot he discovered a discrepancy that is hard to accept.

What this clearly shows however, is where the 14% points some polls indicated Obama was leading by went. As you can see, the ballots that were counted by hand give Obama a 7.5% win while the Accuvote “count” gives Clinton a 5.5% win. The combined “shift” is 13%. Here is where the percentage points disappear that were expected right up to the casting of ballots. Not tears, not lazy young people, right here in this “shift”.

There’s no way to legitimately explain why this discrepancy would exist. These are people in the same state, voting for the same set of candidates, from the same party, and on the same day. Nothing happened to one group that didn’t happen to the other. One group doesn’t have information that the other group doesn’t have. One group couldn’t have been “moved” by the “tears” while the other was not. One group could not have had sudden “black-voting phobia” while the other did not, so these “news” people need to start looking for a plausible explanation. The only difference between these two groups is that one had their votes counted by hand, and the other by Accuvote. One group voted definitively for Obama, and the other definitively for Clinton… And as usual, after combining the two the ultimate margin of victory is too thin to be challenged and finding the truth is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If we were to apply the hand count as the standard, then the 5.5% win given to Clinton by Accuvote would actually be a 7.5% Obama win. Thus Obama would have won by nearly 15% and the pre-primary polls, the genuine voter turnout, and the pundits themselves would have all been right for a change. The real question then is which is harder for the American people to believe? The fact that every poll, every pundit, every voter interviewed, and every sensibility turned out to be so drastically wrong, or that Accuvote “flipped” the vote as it has done so many times before

Curious readers can read the details at the link.

This is one of those I-report-you-decide items.

Poverty Snapshot

Inspired by wealth, poverty and the state we find ourselves in . . . I looked back at some posts I put up in 2006.
As the politicians yammer on about helping poor people, take a look and have your consciousness raised.

I'm sick of hearing well-off people with bad habits they can afford complaining about poor people with bad habits they cannot afford. Having money means being able to escape the consequences of being irresponsible. Being judgmental about povety makes a successful person look a bit trashy to me.

Winograd Commision

Israel's Winograd Commission, like most committee assignments, is yet another Monday-morning-quarterback report on Israel's thrashing and trashing of Lebanon in 2006. Here's another link. And another. (Remember how at the time the notion was tossed aboout that the Israel-Lebanon conflict might be the start of World War Three?)
As the dust settles, the Israeli Prime Minister feels exonerated for his tawdry part in the affair. After all, how was he to know that shooting people, dropping bombs and setting fires might hurt anyone?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Tony Karon sees the whole exercise as a proxy war directed from Washington. His take on what happened makes sense to me.

Whatever I say is of no importance, but the real reason for this post is to capture for future reference a perfectly delightful snip by Helena Cobban, whose comments on the commission are worth noting. Here is the quote...

In US military and political circles, people like to talk about the importance of doing "lessons learned" exercises. In Britain, more realistically, they tend to call them "lessons identified"-- since learning is yet another stage, that requires some active intelligence going in.

Love it! Another stage that requires some active intelligence!
I've always regarded the phrase military intelligence as an oxymoron.

Gaza Snapshot

Apparently the wall between Gaza and Egypt is still down...

(And some Americans think we have a border problem here. No clue.)

The next morning, having stayed in a semi-abandoned house with a stream of Palestinians coming in and out, we grabbed a cup of tea in town and then made over to Rafah, catching a ride at the back of a pick up truck with a bunch of boys from Gaza. The winter wind in our hair we wobbled out of sleep and into conversation. When I asked them what they came to buy in Al Arish, they answered, almost unanimously, that they had come "to enjoy". Again, it didn't add up. On the morning news we had just heard of four Palestinians being killed in Israeli air strikes. Gazans had been living with no electricity for days due to Israeli-imposed blockade. Their shops and refrigerators had long gone empty; cigarettes and soda were a luxury no longer available. Their babies were struggling to survive in hospital. So what of death, despair, and darkness?

As I spoke to a left-leaning starry-eyed youth who told me of his love for football, his disdain for Hamas, and his respect for Che Guevara, it started to make sense. For a day, (now five), the Palestinians had left the occupation behind and claimed what ought to be ordinary, everyday, life: to trade with their Arab neighbours across the border, to step in to Al Arish, for a night out with family and friends.

Lines of Palestinians going back with their goods dominated the scene in Rafah. They stood holding their boxes, their bags and even their bulls (by the horns); they sat on donkey carts and in their cars. The overpowering smell of fuel, carried across in cans, leaking and leaving a trail that could have so easily go up into flames, stood in as an indicator of the tenuousness of the situation at hand. People were trudging their suitcases, herding their cows, as the huge Egyptian military vans stood by.

We made our way through the maze to one of the smaller openings in the border through which Gazans were coming and going. The passage was not as free flowing as we had heard it had been the day before. Riot police were switching modes, at times letting people pass, and at others barricading the border and pushing Palestinians back. We watched a herdsman on a mission trying to control his bulls and get them across the chaos. The bulls were all on heat and jumping on each other and having sex amidst the madness. People were hitting them to calm them down as they charged about.

After watching the mayhem at the first opening, we found our way to the main Philadelphia gate. As we neared the border crossing, an Egyptian guard drunk on power, parading the field, electric baton in hand, insisted that as foreigners we couldn't all go in. At this point, I left my professor and university friends behind and tried again. Armed with my press card and shielded by my shades, I stepped forth. Wesam would use his Palestinian ID card to get into Gaza, and his Egyptian student residence permit to get out. We had covered our basis. Or so we hoped. We approached one of the military police and inquired permission for safe passage. "Israeli or Egyptian press", he seemed to ask. "Indian," we answered. Baffled maybe, he let us through.

We entered the human chain formed by the black uniformed Egyptian riot police, amidst boys and bulls, cement and cigarettes, all making their way to Gaza. We came into the clearing and I felt a sense of disbelief. There I was in Palestine. We jumped up to join a bunch of press reporters and photographers on top of a huge lorry and watch the scene below.

And from that height I stared at the terrific gaping holes in the massive Israeli manufactured obstruction. One part of the wall was just missing; another was split in half; a third swerved to the ground and boys sat along it watching the people pass by. While the wall was testimony to the violence of our time, its collapse stood in as a sculpture of the tenacity of Palestinian lives.

And then the standoff between the riot police and the stone-throwing mob began. As the huge stones came falling down the guards began to exert their authority and the crowd moved back, created a opening between the Palestinians and the police where two minutes earlier there was none. The Associated Press reporter was on her phone, making news while it happened—dramatising the fact that perhaps the Egyptian riot police had encroached, having taken two or five steps forward, onto Gaza territory.

About an hour later, we decided to head back, before which we walked around and took pictures of the bullet ridden apartment blocks. As we tried to make our way from a section at the side, the guards wouldn't let us through. And then we heard bullets being fired into the sky. I tensed up as we walked along the barbed wired wall and found a spot to jump across. We were in no man's land with Egyptian tanks on either side and at the mercy of their arbitrariness of Egyptian orders. Fortunately, this time around, they let us through.

Coming back from Rafah to al-Arish we sat at the back of a mini van, exhausted by the intensity of our adventure. Wesam noticed some Palestinian graffiti: "Al Kassam militants passed through here", written in a barely visible fluorescent orange felt tip on the back of the grey seat. When I asked the boy next to me why he was going to Al Arish now when there was talk of the border being closed, he didn't seem phased at all, and answered, "If Egypt closes the wall, Hamas will bring it down."

Avishai on Obama

Bernard Avishai has come to my attention at just the right moment. This morning's essay should be a must-read for anyone feeling shaky about Obama.

The essay is written by a Jew, for other Jews to read. It has been quietly mentioned that Obama has a "Jewish problem" because he hasn't performed the usual oblations in that direction, that this breach of conventional political etiquette will cost him dearly in the long run. Maybe even the nomination since the Clinton machine has been so well-oiled along those lines. Wasn't it President Clinton who got extra points by placing a Jew on the Supreme Court...and a woman at that? The shadow of Ruth Bader-Ginsberg is a long one indeed.

But this essay, though focused (and titled about) Obama's gingerly handling of Kosher politics, is better seen as a case study in the man's surgical political finesse.

If you're Jewish, read the essay through the glasses of your faith and the open mind for which Jewish reflective thought is famous. But if you're not Jewish, like me, read with another thought drumming in the background: How has and does this man, Barack Obama, a half-black Senator from one of the most emphatically black political foundations in America, one that goes so far as advertising the anti-white, anti-Jewish Farrakhan as a noble figure...How does this unlikely product of that background expect to win any important measure of Jewish support in November?

Clearly he has won at least one Jewish heart. Fortuntely, this man is articulate enough to explain how that came about. And looking into the details, one discovers how Barack Obama is able to look way into the future whenever he takes the first step in any direction.

This is not skimming stuff. The reader should go slow and digest what is being said, drilling into many links along the way. It is in the links, not the text, that the clues are to be found. The text is for Jews. The well-read Jew already knows what's in the links. The links are there for those of us who haven't been reading through Jewish glasses.

THIS IS, PERHAPS, a very roundabout way of saying that Barack Obama got me with hello. Pretty much everything he’s said and done since he started his campaign makes me proud to have voted for him (by absentee ballot, from Jerusalem). But I would be less than honest if I did not explain why voting for him makes me feel like a Jew in America, and in Israel for that matter, in a way I haven’t felt for a very long time. I think of Obama’s candidacy a little like the way I think of my first vote for Pierre Trudeau in 1967, or the emergence of the European Union in my lifetime. It is a kind of show-me-don’t-tell-me proof that the essential premises of liberalism, which Jews have championed since 1848—by which they have defined themselves since Heine—are, well, true.

I know there is something terribly uncool about this. If I were not myself something of a racist, presumably, I would focus on the subtle differentiators of Obama’s policies, like Paul Krugman and the mandates. I would shrug off Obama’s attacks on anti-Semitism and at least take seriously that his church once honored Farrakhan, as Richard Cohen warns us. I would be skeptical about callowness, as Leon Wieseltier warns himself, plumping for the new McCain; I would, like Wieseltier, not be taken in by Obama’s suave, since Wieseltier (“I am myself not unsuave”) troubles to instruct us on “how much it accomplishes and how little.” I am old enough to know better, or certainly old enough to know how suave it is to show off that I know better.

Indeed, if I weren’t uncool I would just focus on Obama’s political virtues, his detailed progressivism, his efforts to run without polarizing electors, his hundreds of thousands of donations, his courses on the constitution, his intellect, his story, his cadences. I would, like Andrew Sullivan, want to see his as the face of America, as we try to redeem America’s place in a dangerously small world. Since I live half my life in Israel, I would emphasize his evolving approach to Middle East peacemaking, his hint that we all know what the deal is, that it is time to get it, his reliance on foreign policy people who seem both realist and fair, his even-handedness, his cosmopolitanism, his willingness to talk with all parties, his insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed cannot be ignored any longer.

I clipped those paragraphs partly because they summarize the main threads of Avishai's essay, but also because of the links. Remember the links? That's where the treasure is buried. That's where we learn the subtleties of Obama's political genius. Look particularly at this one from The Jewish Standard.

Ask about Barack Obama’s natural constituencies and you might hear that he’s the first black with a viable shot at the White House, or about his Kenyan father and his childhood in Indonesia, or the youthfulness of his followers, or the millions of Oprah junkies swooning over his candidacy.

What you might not hear is that the Illinois senator, who made history last Thursday by winning the Democratic caucus in Iowa, has made Jewish leaders an early stop at every stage in his political career.

There follows not one or two, but a string of casses in point. Don't take my word for it. Read for yourself.

Hamas Note

Hamas, the officially labeled terrorist group (polite journals like the Christian Science Monitor now use the term "militant") controlling Gaza, is learning how to manipulate events to their political advantage. Last week's breach in the wall between Gaza and Egypt is their wedge.

...Hamas not only has broken out of its physical isolation, but is emerging with a stronger negotiating position on several fronts. "At this moment, Hamas is the only address for discussing the Egyptian-Gazan border regime. Hamas is also the only address for Israel right now to solve the practical problems of the open border. If this isn't a victory, I don't know what is," says Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University.
[...]

"The Israelis miscalculated. They thought besieging and isolating Hamas would help Abbas, but the outcome has been the reverse," he says. "We're in a new phase, and Hamas has been strengthened. Now the Egyptian government is offering to bring Hamas and Fatah together under its sponsorship, because that's where Egypt's national interest now lies."

[Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamic movements and regional politics in Cairo] says it's unlikely that Hamas, aware of the friendlier Egyptian attitude, will force more border confrontations. "The Israelis were giving all of their attention to Abbas until now, but everyone forgot that a third of his people were being ignored in Gaza. Now the support of the Arab public is with those people, Egypt hasn't cut its channels with Hamas, and Hamas understands that Egypt is willing to negotiate."

Hello, Washington...

Yo, State Department....

Anybody listening????

Mr. President, how about you? Is this worth even a single line in tonight's SOTU speech?

Hmm?

Obama's South Carolina Victory Speech

Seventeen Minutes...."Yes. We. Can."

February update, a week later...
The video:

Yeah! What she said!

It would be really nice if the media, both liberal and otherwise, would calm the hell down. They've been out of their minds since Iowa with the identity politics, pushing both the gender and the racial angles beyond all measure. But the fact is that this is much more complicated than they are letting on with lots of demographic information that they are ignoring. Obama, for instance, once again did extremely well among young people of all races, which it seems to me is much more salient than the media have yet to acknowledge. If he keeps this up, we will see an entire generation making its home in the Democratic Party and that is a tremendous advantage.

Digby said that. And more.

In so many words, so did Deborah White. Her stats are heavy duty. And her comments on the "vision thing" are super.

This year's election is gonna give me great satisfaction, no matter whose name is on the ballot. The rottweiler will give me smug satisfaction, but the cocker spaniel really takes my heart.

The Wiener Circle, Chicago

Those of us who make a living serving the public have fantasies about this kind of service. I've heard about a few places that promote business with reverse psychology by insulting customers, but this place sets that bar really high.

Oh, and profane, too. I can see how this level of "fun" can get out of hand. At the least it's a way to make you lose whatever innocence you may have left.

Be advised: BAD LANGUAGE HERE.
Prudes need not continue.
Find something else to read.



(So is that what Ira Glass looks like?)

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Via Leila Abu-Saba's blog I learned of Bernard Avishai who posted for the occasion a personal remembrance of the late Ilona Karmel Zucker, holocaust survivor and faculty member at MIT.

Yesterday's mail brought me a complimentary copy of Krista Tippet's book, Speaking of Faith from a publicity company that contacted my small-potatoes blog because I have mentioned her a few times in passing. I'm looking forward to reading Krista Tippet's book (trying all the while not to hear her mellifluous voice in the background...trying to pay attention to the content more than the form).

As I read Avishai's recollections of his old friend Ilona Karmel I thought of Tippett's program Speaking of Faith. Going on several years now, this program is building an archive of interviews which will be a treasure for future historians wanting to listen as movers and shakers of faith of our time explain and elaborate their ideas. In the same manner, Avishai describes how Ilona Karmel became the center of a small group of seekers who set out to read and study scripture, meeting together bi-weekly over a six-year period. This is a delicious piece of prose that I highly recommend.

The smallest mystery, perhaps, was what Ila loved so much about the Bible. Nevertheless I hesitate to speculate about this alone. I like to think there could be a group conversation about this love, with each of her interlocutors contributing a part, which would probably wind up as much a debate revealing our own individual hearts as a body of thinking about hers. But that is precisely the point about the Bible, is it not?, its cragginess and grittiness, its many voices, its stories and projections, its mixture of sublime vision and everyday observation, a chronicle inhabited by unmistakably true human beings, which lends itself to the kind of conversation we were having and was itself that kind of conversation. The books were a first chronicle of other people’s efforts, so obviously failed, to think themselves into greater certainty than they had any right to. Ila loved how earthy and flawed the characters of Genesis were, how God was Himself like that (she hated political corrections of that particular hegemonism). She loved God’s rebuke to Jonah, and aloofness from Job. She loved watching God mature along with His creation, and then have the good sense to pretty much get lost. She loved reading accounts of the Lurianic Kabala, where God collapses and limits himself as an act of compassion. She loved Moses’ charisma, the kings’ tragedies, the prophets poetic daring. She loved Jesus' teaching skill. She resisted any kind of orthodoxy, but quoted often from the codes and chants that became orthodox, from the Shulchan Aruch, or from Dante. The orthodox also had writers, and they deserved a kind of honor on that account. Most of all, I think, she loved the Psalms. Esa eniei, el heharim, meayim yavoh ezri. “My eyes look to the hills, from where comes my help?” She loved Jesus’s example, especially in Gethsemane: “If this cup can be passed let it be passed, but if not Thy will be done.” Hope from nothing. Later, when the Bible group moved naturally to Shakespeare, the echo of this love was for Lear on the heath, and she spoke about the great storm, where one strips oneself to the skin, and saves one soul by throwing the trappings of power to the wind.

There was a time, long ago, when I was in a handful of readers who met regularly to discuss what was then called "the Great Books." I'm sure similar groups meet today but I the demands of work and rearing a family have crowded out whatever discretionary time I might have had for such activities. If blogging doesn't take too much time, I may in retirement allow myself to join or start another such group. I hope so. In the meantime, this gem from the Internets will more than compensate for the loss.

Footnote/followup/update/whatever...

It's now January 27 and this morning I read the opening pages and first of six chapters in Krista Tippet's little book. The book, unlike her programs, reveals a person behind the words. As a journalist she knows and respects the role of an interviewer as someone who holds the spotlight on her subject, asking only as many questions, making only as many comments as necessary to reveal to a listener what her guest has to share. She never reprimands, argues with or embarrasses anyone, being no more important to the program than the paper on which a book is printed, a facilitator, not a gadfly.

I was expecting the same cautious, reluctant writer to be at work in her book but I was way wrong. She exposes for all to see the roots of her faith, from the beloved memories of her Baptist maternal grandfather, whose categorical understanding of right and wrong was so unbending that even her parents saught ways to dilute it, to her matriculation at Brown University and subsequent professional life as a budding journalist assigned to Europe...significantly, it turns out, in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She speaks almost reverently of her "wondrous Western passport" which allowed her to compare and contrast in real time the impact that political separation had on two populations of Germans and their non-German visitors. Already I understand how bathing in the same streams as Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, literally, she was marked as their child forever. This book will be a pleasure to read.

Gush Shalom

Just passing the word...

Wikipedia...

Gush Shalom (Hebrew: גוש שלום, "the Peace Bloc") is a left-wing peace activist group which sees itself as the hardcore of Israeli peace movement. Gush Shalom is an extra-parliamentary organization, independent of any party or other political grouping. Some of its activists do belong to political parties, but the Gush is not aligned to any particular party. The Gush was founded by former journalist Uri Avnery in 1993 because he was disappointed by other Israeli peace movements such as Peace Now. Avnery still leads the group.
Gush Shalom objects to what they perceive as the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and claims Israel is committing war crimes on a daily basis. The movement supports soldiers' refusal to serve in these territories, a pragmatic implementation of Palestinian right of return, and an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line. Gush Shalom activists regularly confront Israeli security forces in construction sites in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and along the Separation Barrier.

Gush Shalom said that Israel's offer to Yasser Arafat in the Camp David negotiations of 2000 were not a "generous offer" but "a humiliating demand for surrender."[1]

Avnery was among the first to meet and negotiate with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Gush Shalom received the Right Livelihood Award in 2001.

GAZA RELIEF CONVOY - Jan. 26

The policy of force has failed, prison walls broken End the blockade – completely !

Ceasefire now – for the sake of Sderot and of Gaza!
Saturday 26.1.08: A countrywide relief convoy and Israeli demonstration in solidarity on the Gaza border with a parallel Palestinian demonstration in the Strip.

Click here to read more

Ant Analogue to China

Political science in the world of ants. If they can do it, why can't human beings? I don't think they're interested in stuff.

From Reuben Miller blog, via Sullivan.

This, too. Made of pencils...

Watching Gaza

[This post is being relocated in the archives to appear convenient to the preceding one because the map is so good. Google searches are returning the whole of August, 2005 in response to searches for that map, so maybe this will help. The reader is reminded that the post is two and a half years out of synch with the rest of the Gaza narrative. It seems in retrospect that Sharon's removal of Israeli "settlers" in Gaza was precient. It is becoming clear to me that Palestinians in Gaza are importantly distinct from Palestinians in the West Bank, although Washington and Tel Aviv (and most of the world, for that matter) want to lump them all together as a single political entity. Every year that passes shows deeper separations among these two groups...as well as a third population of Palestinians in South Lebanon.

Leila Abu-Saba is keeping up, too. Her blog has good links about what's happening in Gaza.]

This morning Jewish settlers in the Gaza strip are being given official notice to leave. And the world is watching.
Rafah Pundits points to an excellent overview of the story by Linda Grant they describe as "a good one, lucid, classy even!" Harry's Place (a kind of left-echo of LGF, but not to be confused with the famous Hoot's Place) also points to the same post as "an important guest post up at Normblog."

I very much agreee.

Again, as they say, read the whole thing.

Both the settlers and the far left believed that the disengagement could not take place because each group was gripped by a fallacious belief system, in which contradiction or dissent was impossible. The settlers believe that God gave them the land in perpetuity and would not permit it to be removed. The far left's doctrine was no less impervious to reason. They thought that Zionism was a colonial expansionist movement that would not give up an inch of what it regarded as eretz-Israel, the Promised Land. Not only would it not give up any land, its intention was to acquire more. During the Iraq war I received an email telling me that while the world's press was diverted by the invasion, Palestinians would be loaded on to trucks and 'transferred' to Jordan, in a final 'cleansing' of the West Bank. Now, I am led to believe by the same sources, under the cover of the withdrawal, Israel will perpetrate a massacre in Gaza. There are some, not many, gullible enough to be taken in by this implausible hysteria, always justified on the grounds that there is no evil that the 'Zionists' can't realistically be suspected of. Look at Sabra and Shatila.

She mops up conspiracy theories from both sides. And here is a perfect little nut that nobody can crack:

We should not mistake Sharon's plans for anything other than whatthey are: realpolitik - the scheme of a master tactician intent on political survival.

Take a moment to read what she says.

*********

******

***

*

Jonathan Edelstein has an interesting footnote to what is happening.

It seems there is a remnant of the remnant arguing that they represent an "indigenous group" seeking "self-determination."

This is interesting only in that it illustrates the extreme edge of thinking that has been part of the dynamic all along.

Edelstein's comment is conclusive:

"I doubt that the international community will see Gush Katif as an entity that can be legally separated from the rest Gaza for purposes of self-determination. More to the point, the Israeli government isn't going to take Yitzhaki seriously, and he doesn't have anywhere near the numbers to take on the IDF and the Palestinians."

It's hard to imagine that an area so small can be so important. A better version of this map is available that can be enlarged for closer viewing.

I find it interesting that Gaza City, closest to Israel, is mentioned in the press more than Rafah, near Egypt, which looks on the map to be much bigger.

A Break in the Wall between Egypt and Gaza

Today's headlines about a tax rebate aimed at stimulating the economy are getting more airtime than what happened in Gaza yesterday, but events in Gaza are more important. Too bad...or maybe not, if you're the president and want to divert attention from a flat tire in your recent trip to the Middle East. It makes me wonder why he bothered to go at all.

For those who have not been keeping up, the electoral victory of Hamas in Gaza had an invigorating impact on both Israel and the US, inspiring renewed jabbering about peace in the Middle East, especially regarding a Palestinian homeland. Americans hear stuff like this and say to themselves, Look at our president! See how smart and peace loving he is. See how he's telling the Jews to quit messing around and get something settled with the Palestinians.


What most people fail to understand is that displaced Palestinians are to be found to the North and South of Israel as well as on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and they've been living in those three "camps" for two or three generations. Some, of course, were already there when Israel was established in 1948, but many others were displaced from what is now Israel to make way for the Jews.

The image and activities of the late Yasser Arafat are about all Americans know about Palestinians, and they don't know a lot about them. Oh, they know he was a pain in the ass and they recall him and Menachem Begin shaking hands at Camp David with that famous photo-op with a smiling Jimmy Carter. Some may recall that Al Fatah, now called simply Fatah, was Arafat's outfit and it was shot through with as much corruption and duplicity as any hero-focused group anywhere (think Chavez, Putin, Pappa Doc, Mugabe, whatever).


When the name Hamas is mentioned, most Americans' eyes glaze over. And when the name Abbas comes up, they just shrug and drift off. That's unfortunate, because that's where the story gets interesting.

Hamas is the militant group that has been running Gaza since it's election last year. Because of the autocratic and extreme nature of Hamas...but maily because they are on record as wanting to destroy Israel. At this point Hamas has not reversed that stated goal, so Israel has no option but to stand officially opposed to anything connected with Hamas.

Here are a few comments gathered from several sources.


Tony Karon says Hamas Blows a Hole in Bush’s Plans. This is the first paragraph, but he has links to other places adding depth to the narrative.

The hole blown by Hamas in the Gaza-Egypt border fence has finally punctured the bubble of delusion surrounding the U.S.-Israeli Middle East policy. In a moment reminiscent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, through the breach surged some 350,000 Palestinians — fully one fifth of Gaza’s total population, as my friend and colleague Tim McGirk observed at the scene. And what did they do on the other side? They went shopping for the essentials of daily life, denied them by an Israeli siege imposed with the Wehrmacht logic of collective punishment. And the Egyptian security forces didn’t stop them, despite Washington and Israel urging them to, because U.S.-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak would provoke a mutiny among his citizenry and even his own security forces if they were to be ordered to stop hungry Palestinians from eating because Israel has decided that they should starve until they change their attitude.

Robert Malley is one of Karon's links:

...Gazans, grateful to Hamas for having significantly improved their security, will say they are distressed by the economic hardships and angry at the Islamists' brutal behavior. To the extent the movement has lost popularity the attempt to enfeeble Hamas by squeezing Gaza is working. Yet the success is meaningless. Hamas's losses are not necessarily Fatah's gains; Gazans blame the Islamists for being unable to end the siege but they also blame Israel (for imposing it), the West (for supporting it), and Fatah (for acquiescing in it).



Remember that Gaza and the West Bank are two separate geographical areas but both are being discussed as part of a future homeland for the Palestinians. It is a stretch to speak of a "Palestinian State" because without a connecting link between the two areas any such "state" will really be a divided state. (Think Pakistan, East and West, prior to the creation of Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan.)

...........**************..............

I have decided not to finish this post. My readership is too small to matter and it's taking too much time. Mostly I want to mark this day as having been important for the reasons I posted so far. Maybe at some future date I can return for a follow-up.

Other reading this morning included a new link to Palestinian Pundit blog which I have not yet had a chance to study. That will be a predictable anti-Israel view, I'm sure.

Via Helena Cobban I found Jonathan Edelstein's thoughts on the Gaza bust-out. Edelstein is truly brilliant. He has a way of pushing the most complicated mess through an optimistic lens and see the most promising of peaceful potentialities...

Questioning received wisdom: I think we've been wrong all along in describing the siege of Gaza as an Israeli siege. In fact, ever since Israel left the Philadelphi route, it's been an Israeli-Egyptian siege, and Egypt has maintained its end for its own reasons. Hamas correctly perceived Egypt as the military and political weak link, and chose to break the siege at the Egyptian border. I've actually wondered why it took so long; there have been partial breaches of the wall before, and I remember thinking at the time that Hamas would gain an advantage by widening them. Maybe it wasn't yet ready, but I think it's now very clear that they and Israel were never the only players.

That's all for now.

War and the Economy

Am I missing something?

Headlines everywhere I turn are about a looming US recession, global echoes of fear while America's stock exchanges were closed for the MLK holiday...echoes that scared the Fed so much that a historic three-quarter percent rate cut was announced early in the day, before the markets opened, in what strikes me as an anti-panic gesture. That move makes me think the panic already started...at the top.

Meantime, the war machine keeps pumping. (Pumping money... not oil.) I added a widget to the sidebar linking the cost of the war. And I looked this morning linking the economy with the war. Didn't find much, but there's this...

The United States of America spends 56% of total government military spending on Planet Earth, with a published FY2008 military budget of $623 billion* (in 2008 dollars). China is a distant second at 6% with an estimated 2004 military budget of $65 billion. The entire "Axis of Evil" (with Pakistan thrown in for good measure) spends barely 1% at less than $15 billion.

Seems to me there are only two dots on the page. One is the economy and the other is military spending as a function of that economy. I don't think shopping at the mall is gonna get us out of this one.

Am I trying to connect the wrong dots?

What am I missing?

Restaurant Efficiency Consultant Story

Waiter Rant is the blog home of a professional waiter whose stories about life at work have resulted in a book. He has tons of readers and still works the tables. I learned about him a couple of years ago and followed his blog for a while, but for those of us who have been in the business all our working life, the stories don't have the same punch as they might for those "just passing through" for a few years.

For reasons that escape me now I came across the blog last week and started reading a long comment thread. (I was curious why the writer said ice in the urinals of the men's room was "classy," but that's not related to what follows. ) I found this great story way down the comment thread...

For all of you who frequent restaurants and understand the need for the service to be faster, this short story is a timeless lesson on how consultants can make a difference to an organization.

Last week, we took some friends out to a new restaurant and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange. When another waiter brought our water, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets.

When the waiter came back to serve our soup, I asked, “Why the spoon?”

“Well, he explained, “the restaurant’s owners hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.”

As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he was able to replace it with his spare. “I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen, instead of making an extra trip to get it right now,” he explained.

I was impressed. I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s fly. Looking around, I noticed that all the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So before he walked off, I asked the waiter, “Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?”

“Oh, certainly!” Then he lowered his voice. “Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also found out that we can save time in the restroom. By tying this string to the tip of you know what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39 percent.

I asked, “After you get it out, how do you put it back?”

“Well,” he whispered, “I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon.”

(Turns out this joke is old as the hills, but I hadn't heard it. I never saw it coming and laughed out loud sitting at the keyboard alone.)

A War with Iran Remains a Threat

The NIE story that hit the news last month threw a blanket of false security over Washington. Those of us who have been warning and fretting that the administration was itching to start a war with Iran found ourselves breating a sigh of relief that not only was evidence not there that might justify such an adventure, neither would be the political will in light of that news.

Just when I was starting to get comfortable, Leon Hadar has to go and say this:

If either McCain or Clinton are chosen by their parties as the presidential candidates, Bush-Cheney are then left with a wide window of opporunity (say from June to November) to take U.S. military action against Iran (which will probably be in response to some Iranian "provocation") or to give Israel the "green light" to do that. Is Hillary going to oppose U.S. backing for such an Israeli action. Or is she going to refuse to "support our troops" fighting against the "Hitler in Tehran." I don't think so.

He may be right.
Shit.

Remembering the King family

It was my honor to serve part of the King family in my early days as a cafeteria manager in training. The location has been closed for years, but the old Piccadilly Cafeteria at Cumberland Mall in Atlanta was where I worked as trainee and associate for the better part of twelve years before being assigned my own unit.

Occasionally on Sunday afternoons a party of four or five, sometimes as many as seven or eight, would come for lunch which included M.L. King, Sr., whom everyone called Daddy King, and Mrs. Coretta King. Their visit was always a low-key event. By then -- this would have been in the years between 1976 and 1980 -- the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was over a decade past, public racism was no longer acceptable, Daddy King's wife and Mrs. King's husband had both been killed and all the family seemed to want was a quiet place to enjoy a Sunday meal together.

The first time they came Daddy King sent for the manager on duty and wanted me to know that when they left they would be paying by check and he didn't expect to have any trouble. He made it clear that he wanted to pay the bill and leave quietly just like any other party, with no special attention. Of course a quiet word to the cashier ahead of time was all that was needed.

I resisted the temptation to make conversation, as much as I would have liked to do so, because I had the feeling that the best service I could provide was seating them quietly where they would be least likely to attract attention and allowing them to enjoy their meal without interruption. I know my staff was proud to have them as customers and after a few visits they got used to the idea and didn't make a big deal out of it.

At that time we were living in downtown Atlanta. Our neighborhood, Virginia-Highland, was racially balanced enough that the local elementary school was pretty well integrated. It was situated between two other neighborhoods that were not integrated. At that time the Atlanta Public Schools were busing students to balance the racial composition of the schools, so an elementary school in Bedford-Pine, which was nearly all black, was paired with another school in Morningside which was white. The same buses that took white first-, second- and third-graders from Morningside Elementary to C.W. Hill Elementary in the black neighborhood returned with black fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders to integrate Morningside Elementary.

My wife and I noticed that our youngest daughter was not learning to read in the first grade. By the first of second grade we heard that C.W. Hill had a good reputation and might be a better place for her to attend school. Looking into it, we learned that since we were white and that school was majority black (51%) we were eligible to transfer our child to that school in accordance with the "M to M program" (Minority to Majority). I suppose had we been black she would not have been allowed to go there, but since we were white, it was approved. Sure enough, when she started she was tested and paired with a "team-teacher" and before the second grade was half over she was reading out loud and we were well pleased. (We didn't expect that when she got to Morningside as a fourth-grader we would run into an old-fashioned teacher who didn't believe in learning disabilities and we had to put her in a private school instead...but that is another story.)

While at C.W. Hill our child was invited to a birthday party of a classmate who was a nephew of the late Dr. King, but again we didn't make a big deal of it aside from telling her how very special that was. Children often accept one another at face value much better than their parents. We tried to rear our children to select their friends according to how they live rather than who they are. They are grown now and I think it worked.

This year's contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama underscores the racial divide that remains nearly three decades later. I am amazed at the man's equanimity and grace as he walks a narrow line to win support from both white and black constituencies. I am equally impressed with the passive-aggressive politics by which Hillary Clinton and her organization are able to exploit the race card to her clear advantage.

My remembrance and this post were inspired by an excellent essay I came across in this morning's reading by David Darlington at Josh Clayborn's blog, In the Agora.

Racial mistrust is still very real in this country, even if the days of widespread violence are mostly in the past, and because of that mistrust the Clintons may have stumbled on a way to marginalize and defeat the first African American candidate with a serious, realistic chance at the White House. I do hope that Barack Obama finds a way to keep his cross-racial appeal and win the Democratic nomination though -- not just because it would mean the defeat of the Clinton machine, and not just because of the historical triumph of the first nomination of an African American by a major party, but also because Hillary Clinton is just plain wrong about Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. Politicians who try to impose their will on a republic from the top down without the public being prepared for it get kicked out of office, and rightly so. Men (and women) like MLK Jr are essential to seed the public mind with ideas of change and what a new, improved society can look like. The pols that people like the Clintons love so much can only reap what the visionaries have sown.

As they say, read the whole thing. And take a look at his link to his 2007 essay as well.

On this day of remembrance of Dr. King I have collected a few old posts an put them together at this one spot.

The Speech

Two personal remembrances: King and Gandhi

The Clarkston International Bible Church

Otis Redding at Monterey, 1967

If there is a theme here it is the meaning of what it means to love. What does that mean and how do we keep on doing it, even when it hurts? Along that line, if you are not already exhaused from reading check out Hate and it's children , an exploration of the difference between what I call personal hate and partisan hate. I think this look at the dark underside of love may have meaning today.

The Speech

[First posted January, 2007]

I can now embed a YouTube video in my blog of this historic event. I have no idea how long this privilege will last, but as long as it does I aim to take full advantage of it. At just under twelve minutes, I cannot imagine that anyone has not yet heard this speech. But just in case (and for the benefit of younger people whose education may have neglected this historic event) here it is again. The reader already familiar with this speech owes it to himself and King's memory to budget the next twelve minutes as a personal memorial to his sacrifice.

The Clarkston International Bible Church

[This post was written in September, 2007 and moved to January 21, 2008 in observance of the King holiday.]

As a long-time resident of metro-Atlanta I am compelled to point to today's video and story in the New York Times about a local ministry, Clarkston International Bible Church. Formerly a Southern Baptist church, it is now an independent multi-ethnic congregation in one of the most diverse communities in the area. The Times video is well-done and only five minutes long. (So far they have not enabled You Tube to make the clip available for embedding, but these things take time. After all, it took a long time for the Times to discover how pointless it was to charge for Times Select.)

Clarkston, Georgia is inside the Perimeter very close to the DeKalb Farmers Market, one of the city's most colorful and important cultural attractions. My family and I have moved too far out to shop there now, but when Robert and Harry Blazer started their enterprise in town we were among their most faithful patrons. Starting on a vacant lot at Medlock Drive and Scott Blvd. in Decatur, selling fresh produce off the back of trucks, they put together one of the most impressive retail food outlets in the country. They grew too big for their original location and relocated to the present site which is as big as a warehouse. The brother Harry started a separate business on a similar model, appropriately called Harry's, which grew in the North Atlanta suburbs, but the Original DeKalb Farmers Market remained one of a kind with Robert in charge. The last time I was there I saw him talking with one of the staff in a conversation that lasted the whole time I was shopping. I have no idea what they were discussing, but I was impressed that his sense of priorities is balanced enough that he has all the time in the world to chew the fat with a retail clerk. I think that may have something to do with the success of the business.

But this post is not about the market. This is about the church nearby. Watch the video and get a feel for what happens when old fashioned Southern Baptists decide that welcoming others from all parts of the world is an important part of building the Kingdom. This kind of ministry is not common, incidentally, but also not unique. My wife and I went to St. Jude's Episcopal Church in Marietta for a decade and experienced very much the same kind of cultural mix. Christians from all over the world have more in common than many isolated congregations imagine. By isolating themselves from their Christian brothers and sisters who don't speak or worship the same, they only succeed in limiting their vision of what the Church really is. As the preacher in the video concludes, we can expect Heaven to be a culturally mixed place.

This church and the nearby DeKalb Farmers Market reflect an impressive international diversity. One reason for the success of the market is that from the beginning shoppers from all over the world could find products they wanted. Immigrant shoppers traveled long distances to shop there. Virtually anything available in North America was for sale at reasonable prices, including strange root crops and vegetables not found in most grocery store produce sections. Imported products from Asia and South America appeared along with those from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In time they built an impressive wine selection. But the most impressive part of the market has always been the staff and a true international flavor. Flags from all over the world hang overhead and clerks speaking many languages in addition to English are everywhere. I have no idea how many countries are represented but the impression is that they compose a virtual United Nations in uniform.

No, I have no connection with the church, the market or the Chamber of Commerce. But yes, I can tell you if you have time when you are in Atlanta consider putting the DeKalb Farmers Market on your list of places to visit. Travelers from New York, San Francisco or other places with large immigrant populations may not be impressed. But you can be sure that places like this are a rich, new experience for lots of people here in the South. And churches like the one in Clarkston have a very important ministry and deserve recognition.