A Thanksgiving Prayer

Steve Inskeep: “What does it mean to be American?”

Junot Diaz: “It is a question that as individuals and as a country we wrestle with every day. It’s the wrestling with that question that defines us, not any of the answers.”

NPR’s Morning Edition on November 24, 2008


It is Thanksgiving week and a time when all of us should think about those things that matter to us as a nation and for which we should be thankful. While it is difficult to contemplate the concept of our riches amid the steady stream of woeful news articles about global recession, failing banks, shrinking retirement accounts, and falling stock markets, it is, nonetheless, true that we, as a nation, are rich indeed. In fact, it may well be that these very market forces should cause each of us to examine the complexity of our nation and rejoice, once again, in simply being one, single ingredient in that most wonderful of stews - the American melting pot.

There are two things that unite everyone in this country - the diversity of our ultimate place of origin and the rights we share as American citizens and residents.

The idea that our very diversity is a source of unification might not be apparent to some, but it is the common heritage that the everyone in this country shares. Because of North America's geographic distance from the original home of mankind, all of our forebearers came from somewhere else - even those of the Native Americans who enjoy the unique role of being descended from those who settled here first. The land was a vacancy waiting to be filled, and we are still in the process of adding newcomers and filling it. The United States is a continuing grand experiment in mixing races, religions, cultures and viewpoints that has lasted since its inception as a nation. Just when some dominant group decides that their culture uniquely represents America and all others are foreign and inferior, reality sets in and the grand spirit of immigration overwhelms that group's notion that they should control and define who we are once and for all.

It has been ever thus since our founding. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur said in 1782 in his Letters from an American Farmer:

"…whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes... What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared."

At the time it was written, the focus of de Crevecouer's view upon our European heritage was not misplaced, even as it failed to recognize the existing strains of Native Americans and African Americans in our culture. And the truth is that little has changed since his writing except for the incredible array of additional ingredients now in the stew. Whether he would like it or not, de Crevecouer would recognize the strains of change due to increasing diversity in today's society even if the present day majority does not. Change the spices to add those from Africa, the middle East, the Caribbean, Asia, South America, Africa, India and so many other parts of the world in addition to those from Europe, and de Crevecouer's comments would remain valid today.

This ever increasing diversity has been our genius. Instead of being afraid of it, we should embrace it as the essence of the American spirit and accept it as the defining element of our nation. I am not trying to argue that the process of diversification is ever easy or that each new group suffers the same exact process of assimilation upon arrival. I could not argue either point of view, since both are incorrect. I am arguing, however, that the process of diversification - no matter how it may play out for any particular group - is the defining and unifying experience of our nation and one that we should embrace in the spirit of continual reinvention of the American stew.

The energy which comes from that constant reinvention of culture is what makes America unique. The rough and tumble of our politics and the constant spark of ingenuity that governs our science, our business and our culture comes from this, our diversity - from the constant rearranging and mixing of styles, cultures, viewpoints, and attitudes. I strongly suspect that without this incredible cornucopia of diversity, the United States would have been just another enclave of statehood where a dominant voice would have ruled to the exclusion of all else, and that its history would have been quite different, far less interesting and far less successful.

The other thing we all have in common is our form of government and, more importantly, the human rights that spring from that source of government. While we haven't always been the best at granting or securing those rights for all, our history has been one of a gradual realization that everyone is entitled to those rights. Out of the common shame of slavery and World War II relocation camps has come the understanding that to deny uniquely American rights to some is as unamerican as it is possible to be. While I would like to think that those lessons have been learned for all time and that we will not repeat those mistakes in future, I am fairly certain that the strains of the melting pot will cause us to err again in a similar manner and that we will eventually learn from whatever particular error we do commit. That also seems to be part of the American stew - while it blends, it does so slowly and cautiously.

This constant struggle is of the essence of Americanism: because we care about our rights and their application to all peoples, the struggle will continue unabated into the future. This will happen because we are simultaneously human beings who remain afraid of the unknown and Americans who share a common sense of right and wrong as expressed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. I have confidence that eventually the second strain of our character will see us to the right conclusions as the melting pot - the American stew - continues to boil and reinvent itself.

We have especially good reason to be thankful in this year of economic chaos. Amid that chaos has occurred a remarkable event that most of us didn't anticipate for years to come - the election of a President who doesn't look the same as his 43 predecessors and who is quintessentially American in his views and approaches. In sharp contrast to the present sitting President, he demonstrates intelligence and articulate rhetoric. He represents both immediate and long lasting change, for our American universe can never remain as it was prior to his arrival on the scene.

As we watch the melting pot boil on this Thanksgiving day, enjoy a helping of our American stew. Don't bemoan the new ingredients, but think ahead to future Thanksgiving days and wonder with anticipation what the stew will then taste like. To our standard helpings of turkey and dressing, imagine the wonderful new foods that will come to define this day - and enjoy the prospect.

Palinopsia

palinopsia pal·i·nop·si·a (pāl'ə-nŏp'sē-ə)n. Abnormally recurring visual imagery.

The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary


What is the hold that Sarah Palin seems to have on the American media establishment? There doesn't appear to be any real substance to her, yet the media persists in a series of interviews based upon her perceived star power. They cannot be conducting these interviews with an aim to convince all of us of her intellectual acumen, since the depth of her knowledge makes the depth of the nearest kiddie wading pool seem like that of the Marianas Trench by comparison. What is the fascination?

The possible answers would appear to be one or more of the following (hereinafter, the "Palinopsia Possibilities"):

1. The media is suffering from Palinopsia, and what we are seeing is nothing more than recurrent after images generated by the overly strong spotlight in which she was bathed for the several weeks of her involvement in the presidential election campaign. This is the kindest of several possibilities.

2. The media, always fascinated by behavior that is less than stellar and that borders on blowzy, is once again engaging in its favorite pastime of gossip mongering for lack of any real idea of responsible journalism. This is the most likely of several possibilities.

3. She really, truly is the future star of the Republican party, and her every move between now and the next presidential election cycle deserves to be chronicled in all of its magnificent detail for an admiring world. This is the least likely of several possibilities, but the answer that the media will give, if pressed for one.

4. The national electorate is actually dumb enough to eventually conclude that she is a viable candidate for anything outside of Wasilla, Alaska. After all, Alaska voters have already made that mistake on a statewide scale, and the media owes it to those of us in the lower 48 to prove her viability for national office. This is the most dreaded of several possibilities.

5. The public's fascination with the continued free fall of the world economy needs to be diverted by bread and circuses, and a lurid vision of Ms. Palin in the middle of the Coliseum floor surrounded by stalking lions may be the very thing to allow the powers-that-be to retain their hold despite their incompetence. This possibility has the media as the hapless tool of the aristocracy. Another dreaded possibility.

6. She is the political equivalent of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears et al, and the very essence of her awfulness is of a source of media enthrallment. This is my personal favorite - it is simple, it fits the nature of the media, and reminds one of a cat playing with a mouse.

If I didn't know better, I would have to conclude that the media has been ensorceled by La Palin and that they are well and truly bound by their state of enchantment to repeat her every word and ponder her every possibility. I rather suspect, however, that they are really a pack of wild dogs circling their intended prey while waiting for the first sign of weakness before attacking. If this is correct, the final attack is well overdue given the fodder for a feast that she has already given us. Only by visualizing the media as toying with that proverbial mouse can we explain their reluctance to proceed to a kill.

Personally, I am hoping for an early cure to our Palinopsia. The image burned on my retina is not a pleasing one that I care to ponder for an indefinite period of time. I confess to wondering what her ultimate downfall might be and to relishing the various hypothetical means by which it might occur. But this, too, is a version of the cat playing with the mouse, since her take down is inevitable. As the potential victim, she is doing her best to invite the inevitable meal with her as the main course by her blatant attempts to pander to every possible voter within view. How else can one explain her statement that she admires President-elect Obama even though she still wonders about his attachment to an avowed terrorist?

There is a great headline this morning at mlive.com that says: "Palin has reached her sell-by date." This is so true - so much so that one wonders how the likes of Matt Lauer, Larry King, Wolf Blitzer and the remainder of the current clique of "heavyweight" media pundits cannot seem to grasp it. The reason simply has to be somewhere among the Palinopsia Possibilities. If only I could be certain which one it might be!

As a postscript, I tried very, very hard to arrive at a suitable palindrome in order to name this piece "Palinopsia and Palindromes," but without any suitable success. The only palindrome I could find or imagine was "Harass selfless Sarah," but if there is anything at all selfless about Sarah Palin it must be of the nature of the universe's long sought antimatter - a theoretical place holder impossible of validation given the present state of our scientific knowledge.

Seeing is Believing

There is a report this morning that President-elect Obama is working on a plan to close Guantanamo immediately upon taking office. It is essential that he follow through on this matter immediately upon taking office, without qualification, hesitation or backtracking, if America is to reclaim a place of moral authority in the world.

However, there are some aspects that are troubling, such as a report that for some Guantanamo detainees a new form of special court may be required. I truly hope that this sort of thinking will not prevail, both because our existing court system ought to be able to handle anything thrown at it and because we don't have the time to debate the nature and rules of a new court system if we are going to demonstrate effectively to the world a renewed commitment to human rights. It would seem to me that the legal authorities assisting President-elect Obama in this matter would do well to involve sitting federal judges in their planning to determine how existing federal courts might be used to prosecute the more intelligence sensitive matters. I would much rather see special court rules adopted by existing federal courts than a further debate in Congress over an issue that was clearly answered by our citizenry on November 4th.

As in all delicate matters, we need to revisit our priorities and goals, and use them as a measuring stick in order to determine how to proceed. Not only has our moral voice been severely muted in matters of international diplomacy by keeping prisoners indefinitely in Guantanamo without any serious attempt to give them a fair trial, many in the world have come to think of us as human rights abusers. America's greatest authority on the world has not come from its extensive military might, but, rather, from its position as a moral authority. All of the military might imaginable is insufficient to allow us to maintain our position as a superpower, witness the fact that we are currently stressed beyond capacity in the occupation of two foreign countries. Our true authority has always stemmed from the essential morality of our positions. Even if we have not always been consistent in our approaches to the world and even if certain members of the international community have disagreed with our basic values or quibbled from time to time over our methods of their application, prior to the Bush administration's hegemony there was little suspicion among other nations that we lacked a basic moral precept.

Thanks to the Bush/Cheney administration, that last statement is no longer true. In eight short years, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney squandered decades of hard work to earn the trust of the international community. Based upon the international reaction to Obama's election, there appears to be a residual hope in the international community that America is not really as Bush and Cheney have painted it. This is a legacy of all the hard work in the decades preceding Bush from which we may still benefit.

We must bear in mind at all times that the election of Barrack Obama to the presidency has not cured international skepticism about our moral precepts, but only has given hope to the international community that we will return to our senses. As January 20 gets closer, the world is likely to hold its breath to see if the election's promise bears fruit. In other words, the hope will turn into belief only if the actions suit the words and the implementation of a new policy is swift and unqualified in its breadth. Conversely, if our actions do not suit our words, the hope generated by Mr. Obama's election may quickly dissipate or turn to bitterness. We cannot afford to hedge our actions in any manner that even remotely smacks of the thinking of the Bush administration on this subject. If the hope of the international community is not swiftly turned into belief by the new President, his goal of returning America to a position of international leadership will become much harder to achieve.

The world is a complicated place, and the President will always receive advice, solicited and unsolicited, from all corners of the spectrum prior to taking any action, however major or minor. I hope and trust he will remember to keep his priorities firmly in front of him when making decisions of this magnitude, and use them as measuring sticks to cut through the cacophony of conflicting opinions and position. No matter what decisions he makes, there will be significant disagreement from portions of the electorate and senior politicians, so he will succeed best if he makes decisions consistently in accordance with his personal values and priorities. He would be better served by criticism that he is consistently incorrect in his positions than by criticism that he has no clear path to success on subjects due to inconsistent decision making.

In short, a President is better off being complained of for sticking to his or her positions than for having no discernible positions at all.

Lessons From the Long, Dark Night of Our Soul

Yesterday marked a series of signal events in our history, the foremost of which was the election of a young, African-American man as the 44th President of the United States. His election generated immediate hope and energy in a country starved for both at a time when we will need all of the hope and energy we can muster to deal with several daunting tasks, any one of which, if taken alone, would be considered a formidable challenge for a new President in ordinary times.

Most importantly, Barrack Obama's election marks the beginning of the end of an era during which the nation's very soul has been challenged by direct attacks upon our most fundamental and cherished beliefs - a period when our government deemed the use of torture to be legitimate in the pursuit of goals for which consensus was lacking and little attempt was made to develop one; when our government sacrificed our personal rights in the belief that all should feel safer in the cocoon of an idealized state that more nearly matches that of the Third Reich than the rough and tumble of traditional American democracy; when our government evidenced a disgust, dislike and disdain for the rest of this wonderfully chaotic world in which we live, simply because "they" didn't think like us and, one strongly suspects, didn't look like us. In short, we are about to complete a period in which the American dream was supplanted by a nightmare of our own making - a Bushmare, if you will. A nightmare wherein we engaged in persistently lower standards of national conduct in the pursuit of presidentially declaimed national goals shared only by the few and the self-appointed and promoted by the rank manipulation of our collective fears.

Having acquired more than a few gray hairs due to the passage of time and from the"enjoyment" of the vicissitudes of life, I have learned a simple, stark truth: not all of our time in this world is pleasant. Following the first of several dark episodes in my life, I was struck by the fact that while I seemed to have weathered it, I hadn't learned anything from it since I promptly repeated the seminal mistake and entered into a second period of darkness not dissimilar from the first - except with respect its intensity. Repeated stupidities are generally far less satisfactory than the first time in which we engage in them. This second period of brain damage made me realize, however, that there is a way to profit from darkness. Since periods of darkness are, by definition, not enjoyable or fun, one has to find other ways to profit from them by knowledge gained and/or lessons learned. These periods can make us wiser and stronger simply because it is, in fact, possible to learn from our mistakes. But to do so, we must take the time to engage in the necessary sober reflection to do so.

So it is in this spirit that I offer the following as possible lessons to be learned from our national Bushmare. We are about to enter a period of unprecedented change, and not just the kind of change promised by politicians everywhere. Are there lessons to be learned from our Bushmare? These are my nominations:

1. No society can succeed by acting contrary to, or from the misapplication of, its shared core values. The discord, animosity and calamity that results from acting contrary to our national cultural identity has no redeeming qualities. At best, such behavior can only be divisive. At worst, such behavior bankrupts society, causing the loss of national pride and, eventually, the destruction of the will to continue.

2. Never give away easily that which was so hard won. Hard won rights take centuries to define and develop, and we cannot be so careless as to disavow them within the space of a single political generation. The resulting slippage can only be erased by the efforts of many subsequent generations - merely to return to a condition we once enjoyed. Therefore, we must be a responsible steward and recognize the value of our predecessors' sacrifices by using them to shape and attain our goals, by furthering the effort they began during our time in charge, and by leaving theirs and our legacy intact so that our children may serve as stewards in their time.

3. Understand that basic human rights are not merely important to the American psyche, but are an integral part of its very warp and woof. Recognize that personal liberties are not merely a convenience, but are, rather, the singular essence which unifies the diversity which is our only common heritage - sons and daughters of immigrants of every conceivable variety and Native Americans alike. Understand further that when we diminish the human rights of non-Americans, we diminish our own honor and integrity while attacking the basic fabric that holds our society together.

4. Realize that we are not a super-power able to run roughshod over the world; that no single nation can, in a world of such variety and vastness, seek to impose its will on others without severely damaging its own internal stability. Recognize the Bush Doctrine for the basic threat to our internal security and peace that it is.

5. Never, never seek cover, security and comfort by allowing our government to preach a form of collective security at the expense of our personal liberties. Never fear the exercise by ourselves or others of our personal liberties, and learn to recognize the joy we share, as a nation, from our sanctification of their exercise.

6. Learn to celebrate, not fear, the panoply of peoples, customs, beliefs, ideas, cultures, religions, nations, and histories, and the respective acts of creativity that led to their existence. In short, listen to life's cacophony and revel in its rhythms and teachings.

We are now faced with an imperative to change in order to preserve the best of our society. The imperative is not driven by a wish to do better, but by the failure of the basic economic model as practiced for the last 20 to 30 years. This will be a period for which the mythical Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" was invented.

Why it might be a curse to live in such times is beyond me. Change is opportunity. We can each make of it what we will, employing our personal resources to the best of our respective abilities. It is times like this in which we can find the stuff of which we are made.

It is also a time in which we can learn and employ the lessons of the long dark night of our national soul, thereby assuring that the national angst of the last 8 years is not wasted but is employed for our mutual profit.