There are all kinds of reasons why I continue to have faith that President Obama knows what he’s doing and is playing his hand skillfully in these treacherous times. James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine has had a running dialogue on his blog on this subject, and he was kind enough to include some of my thoughts in a post yesterday (I’m “reader LB in California,” the last contributor in the sequence). For a less wonky and more amusing presentation of the same essential idea, here’s a clip from a few months ago of Obama describing the art of compromise to a group of college students and speculating on what the Huffington Post might have had to say about President Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Funny stuff!

I was in Washington DC on vacation the week the news media was all a-twitter about some congressman’s crotch shots. I haven’t the slightest interest in wasting time on such things. Some of us consumers of information and entertainment actually have a taste for quality content, and would prefer to find coverage of the decision-making process on bringing troops home from Afghanistan, or the real reasons Republicans feel so threatened about putting Elizabeth Warren in charge of consumer financial protections, or a substantive examination of the various issues comprising health care reform on the front pages of major newspapers. You know, real news.

Maybe acknowledging that much of what the Tea Party movement is belly-aching about was identified and explored by the counter-culture back in the 1960s would kick-start a spirited public dialogue and crowd the trash out to the margins. “Power to the People.” “Small is Beautiful.” “Question Authority.” These are not new ideas. Dressing up in costume and throwing tantrums can be lots of fun, but at best all it can do is influence people in power. The real game is what the adults are doing.

Republicans are the ones who kept bashing Vietnam-era anti-war protesters over the head with the slogan “America: Love It or Leave It,” so what’s with the “Love Your Country, Fear Your Government” stuff that the Johnny Reb-come-latelies are fulminating about? Most of us youthful Baby Boomer lefties got the memo: you’re supposed to grow up and take your place as a responsible, functioning member of society; build long-term relationships; rack up consumer debt in pursuit of your personal vision of the good life (ideally including a mortgage); etc., etc. The American system is far from perfect, but it actually does a pretty good job of offering maximum individual freedom to a highly diverse population. As a woman, I don’t take that for granted.

At DC’s National Portrait Gallery, I wandered through an exhibit that noted the push-pull between the Declaration of Independence’s manifesto on individual liberty and the framework of laws set out in the Constitution. American culture was built from the start on a dance between these polarities. Individual stories play out in infinite patterns, but we’re all bound by the same laws. If we don’t agree with how the system operates, we’re empowered to try to change it. This whole democratic experiment in the idea of self government is a work in progress, and it’s a relatively new development in the global arena.

It’s no small thing that Congressional Republicans have recently started coming around to supporting the anti-war position. I wish they had had their crisis of conscience about fiscal matters back when George W. Bush decided that going to war in Iraq was a good idea and there was no need to worry about the costs, but better late than never. The U.S. has been playing the role of world cop ever since World War II, and we can’t afford it any longer. Europeans have enjoyed significantly better social services over the last half century than Americans because they’ve been able to rely on us to foot the bill for a massive military and provide defense around the globe. Those days are over. The Obama administration has begun making this case in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent remarks in Brussels that a new generation of American leaders, for whom the Cold War was not a formative experience, is unlikely to continue giving the Europeans a free ride. The times they are a-changin’. Finally.

The Vietnam era culture wars exposed some critical fault lines in how American democracy functions. Since then, a great deal of progress has been made, especially in the realms of personal freedom and equal rights. But we still have a long way to go to make good on the promise of “government of the people, by the people and for the people” that Abraham Lincoln invoked in the Gettysburg Address. The good news is that a majority of Americans genuinely seems to want the system we’re told we have. How we might pool our efforts to make substantive progress towards our shared goals will take a lot of work and discussion. You’d think that process would be more newsworthy than the adolescent antics of yet another ego-challenged politician.

I went with my son to Richmond, Virginia last week, among other things to visit the Museum and White House of the Confederacy. Walking around an older neighborhood afterwards, I found myself repeatedly drawn to brick buildings that had clearly been partially rebuilt after the Civil War. The skeletal frames of buildings standing amidst the destruction of Richmond are among the iconic images of the war’s end. Some of these bricks have known fire. The seams where the newer portions were added on are obvious. It was a powerful reminder that 150 years really isn’t all that long a time.

With saints and sages on each side,
How could a fool through lack of knowledge,
Vote wrong? If learning is no guide
Why ought one to have been in college?
O Son of Day, O Son of Night!
What are your preferences made of?
I know not which of you is right,
Nor which to be the more afraid of.

The world is old and the world is bad,
And creaks and grinds upon its axis;
And man’s an ape and the gods are mad!—
There’s nothing sure, not even our taxes.
No mortal man can Truth restore,
Or say where she is to be sought for.
I know what uniform I wore—
O, that I knew which side I fought for!

–Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
from “The Hesitating Veteran”

Exactly 150 years ago, shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, kicking off the long, bloody Civil War. Today, our society is rent by conflict every bit as great as that which culminated in the War Between the States. We cannot afford to re-litigate the issues that were fought over back then. If nothing else, we owe it to the dead to build upon their sacrifices rather than regress and wallow in old battles. I have no illusions that getting out of the mess we’re currently in will be easy. But I have faith that it can be done, and in a classy and constructive fashion to boot. The power of the idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be underestimated.

Watching from afar the revolutionary wave that is sweeping the Arab world, I am struck by how the essence of each situation distills down to the question of whether or not members of the armed forces will revolt and switch sides when ordered to start shooting at the civilian population, and whether or not members of a revolutionary uprising can unite behind a designated leader and message. May the flowers of 1,000 new democracies bloom, even though not all of them will be benevolently inclined towards the good old United States. This is another of those historical moments that we have to go through in order to reach a better place. As the Age of Imperialism draws to a close, more of our resources will be brought to bear on the very real work of forming a more perfect Union. Finally.

“We will make converts day by day; we will grow strong by the violence and injustice of our adversaries. And, unless truth be a mockery and justice a hollow lie, we will be in the majority after a while, and then the revolution which we will accomplish will be none the less radical from being the result of pacific measures. The battle of freedom is to be fought out on principle.”

– Abraham Lincoln, from a speech given in 1856

8/1/02, Ponferrada, Spain — I arrived here in Ponferrada this morning and am seeing the sights and resting for the rest of the day. They have the most spectacular castle that I’ve seen so far in Spain here, but of course right now it’s closed for siesta time.

Yesterday I climbed to the top of the mountain, then spent the night at the monastery there. This was only about 40 km of forward progress, but the mountain was 1500 meters high so it was a lot of work. There is an old iron cross on top of a pile of rocks on the mountain that I didn’t know about until some other pilgrims told me about it. All you have to do is visit this place and you are officially sinless. Of course, I have never committed any sins in my lifetime, or for that matter ever even had any impure thoughts. But now that I have visited the iron cross, which looks like it was built for Kaiser Wilhelm and flown to Spain by the Red Baron, I will get an official document from the top-level hierarchy of the Roman clergy for Spain stating that I am without any doubt officially and irrevocably without sin. Before this, people just took my word for it that I am totally without sin and have never ever had any impure thoughts. Now I will have documentary proof!

I now have only 207 km left on my holy crusade and I think this will take four or five days. There are still some hills to climb, but I think that yesterday’s was the hardest.

This morning I finally got some cold weather for a welcome change. I only coasted 20 km downhill to town after being awakened at an ungodly hour by the mad monk, but I almost froze my sacred holy butt off on the way down from the top of the mountain.

The newspaper also says that it is raining to the west of here, which will be a nice change from all the heat we’ve been having. Near León, the pilgrims were dropping off like flies.

Siesta time is over now and I just took a break from letter writing to see the castle. That is a very impressive pile of rocks! Anyone who has ever even carried a couple of heavy stones just from one side of his back yard to the other would be totally in awe.

If only the South could have motivated their slaves as well as the people that built that castle, the damn yankees never would have won the Civil War. If this had happened, then there probably never would have been WW1, WW2, the Korean War, Viet Nam or Sept.11, there would be peace and prosperity throughout the world, the Dow Jones average would be over 100,000 and the Dodgers would have won the series for the last 20 years.

But enough for the history lesson. It’s almost dinner time, and I want to get some sleep and an early start tomorrow as it looks like it’s going to be hot again.

Talk to ya later

St. William the Sinless

Castillo de los Templarios. Ponferrada, León, España.
Fotografia por Alejandro Bolado (bolado@yahoo.com)

7/29/02, León, Spain – I arrived here in León yesterday, and now have to pedal only a little over 300 km more to achieve sainthood. Unfortunately, there are a lot of big hills, over 1500 meters high, between here and Santiago. Hopefully, I will get there in a week or so. I’m going to take the day off here to rest and see the sights, then get back on my holy crusade in the morning.

The weather has been VERY hot for the last week. I haven’t seen a thermometer, but the temperature must have been over 100 degrees Farenheit in the afternoons. I’ve been getting up early and pedaling as fast and far as possible before noon. Around here, only an occasional mad dog or Englishman will go out of the shade after 12:00.

Spain still is not as pretty as the rural parts of France I’ve seen, except for the old cathedrals, which are something you have to see to appreciate. I’m taking a lot of pictures, but somehow photos just don’t capture the atmosphere. It really irritates me and injures my sense of national pride when I think that if the damn Yankees hadn’t freed the slaves, the Baptists in America would have had even more magnificent cathedrals than these foreign Catholics.

I still have over six weeks before I have to go back to being intimidated by the Mexican kindergartners and pimply faced, purple haired, underachieving potential Rhodes scholars. This is something I am really not looking forward to.

After visiting the sewage museum, writing subversive poetry on the subway wall in Paris and going on a holy crusade for Jesus, I feel like I have seen and done it all, or at least almost all. I still haven’t had the opportunity to burn a protestant at the stake, denounce a witch or slay a moor, but it is still a long way to Santiago. Maybe I will get to do this too.

The Virginia state legislature is gestating a proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution so individual states would have the right to opt out of federal laws they don’t wish to abide by, subject to a 2/3 vote of the state legislature. Eric Cantor, a cocky idiot who will be House Majority Leader in the new Congress, is urging everyone to keep an open mind about this. Phew! Once the floodgates in the mind open up to the lure of delusional revisionism, there’s simply no going back.

It’s actually fitting, given that the sesquicentennial (great word!) of the Civil War is fast approaching, that this subject be given a public airing. Back in the day, the idea of secession was romanticized from a leftist/environmentalist standpoint in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, which posited an ecological utopia formed when Northern California, Oregon and Washington split off from the United States to create a separate nation. It was a fun fantasy, but one that I outgrew a long time ago.

Don’t these people have enough to do? We really don’t want to re-litigate the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was passionate about holding the Union together, and slavery was a secondary concern. I know there are many people who prefer not to examine that too closely, but it’s the truth. Our radical experiment in the ideal of liberty and justice for all has made great progress in the past 150 years. We need people in positions of power doing the ongoing heavy lifting required to engage constructively with the major issues of the day. We don’t need lightweights who prefer to sulk when they don’t get their own way and waste a bunch of time indulging in escapist fantasies.