(For this holiday, I am reposting an amalgam of two posts from two years ago.)

Today, being independence day in the US, will see a huge outpouring of patriotic fervor, with parades and bands and flag waving. I thought it might be appropriate to read one of Mark Twain’s lesser known works. I came across it during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was surprised by the fact that I had never even heard of it before, even though I have read quite a lot of Twain’s work and about Twain himself.

Sometimes great writers reveal truths that are hidden. At other times they reveal truths that are squarely in front of our eyes but which we do not see because we have not asked the right question. Mark Twain’s story The War Prayer fits into the latter category, where he explores the dark underside of the seemingly innocuous act of praying for something.

The idea of the intercessory prayer, where one asks for a favor or blessing for oneself or for a designated group of people, is such a familiar staple of religious life that its wholesomeness is unquestioned. But Twain points out what should have been obvious if we had only thought it through.
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The Daily Show provides a wrap up of the events of Tuesday night, comparing the speech of Barack Obama with the non-concession, self-absorbed speech of Clinton and the disaster that was McCain’s presentation (that was supposed to upstage Obama’s night) that was panned even by the Fox News punditocracy.

The Daily Show is one of the very few that actually digs up at the archives of what people said in the past and contrasts it with the present, and shows how the talking heads usually have nothing useful to say. Note how in the clip the media pundits assumed in 2006 and 2007 that the nomination was simply Hillary Clinton’s for the taking and that it was futile for anyone to even challenge her. It was only around March 2008, after she stumbled in Iowa and lost a string of eleven straight primaries to Obama that the media narrative switched and people decided she was unlikely to win.

Contrast the predictions of the TV pundits that of blogger Markos Moulitsas who said way back in December 2006 that if Obama ran, he would win, and carefully explained why.

I want to emphasize that it is not that Moulitsas was right in his prediction and the media pundits wrong that makes me compare them. Long-term predictions in politics are tricky and one can easily be wrong because there are so many contingent factors at play, any one of which can cause fortunes to fluctuate wildly. (I am almost always wrong in my own election predictions.) The reason the media pundits are so useless is because there is no depth to their analysis, no sense that they have taken into account the complexity of the process. They focus on one or two factors (gender, race, demographics) or some trivial issues of style and then draw sweeping conclusions and make flat declarative predictions. And then they move on to the next topic, never acknowledging that they were not only wrong, they did not even know what they were talking about. This kind of hit-and-run punditry is a waste of time.

Moulitsas, by contrast, takes into account the various factors involved and tries to weigh them appropriately. He may have been lucky in his prediction but his approach was correct.

In some ways, this difference in approach to punditry was replicated in the way the Clinton and Obama campaigns were run. Clinton based hers on sweeping but shallow generalizations, while Obama’s looked at the nitty-gritty details carefully. Clinton adopted the standard Democratic Party strategy of focusing on those large states where the Democrats are strong and trying to run up the vote count there and spending little time on the smaller states that are often Republican. But Obama’s people studied the rules and realized that by carefully targeting congressional districts across the country in all the states, and keeping the margins close in the traditional Democratic strongholds, they could win the delegate battle.

There is an important consequence of the Obama strategy. As a result of it, many voters sympathetic to Democrats but living in Republican states suddenly found themselves being wooed after being ignored for so long, which has boosted the chances of Democrats around the country. Obama’s strategy paralleled that of the Democratic National Party chair Howard Dean who after taking that position announced a 50-state strategy where the Democrats would not concede any state to the Republicans. Traditional Democratic insiders ridiculed the fact that he put party organizers in every state as a waste of time and money, but it laid the groundwork on which the Obama candidacy could build.

It is significant that Obama has announced that he wants Dean to continue as chair of the party. It signals that they are going to jointly pursue a strategy of campaigning everywhere, for all positions, forcing McCain and the Republican Party to defend themselves in states which Republicans have taken for granted in the past. As a result, the 2008 election may have a record-breaking turnout.

And Stephen Colbert adds his thoughts on the events of Tuesday night.

POST SCRIPT: Baxter again

Probably wondering why I keep taking pictures of him. . .

The Democratic Party primary process has finally come to an end with Barack Obama having secured the party nomination by virtue of having acquired the majority of delegates.

In many ways it has been a remarkable process. A system that had seemed for so long to belong to just white men found two candidates not fitting that mold fighting it out to the finish. While I knew that the barriers of race and gender would eventually be overcome, I had thought that it would be first breached by a woman before a minority, simply because the numbers were in favor of women.

But politics is not just mathematics and statistics. It does have an element of contingency and it turned out that this year the particular candidate who happened to be a minority appealed more to Democratic Party members than the candidate who happened to be a woman.
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A year ago ago, I wrote a series of three posts (part 1, part 2, and part 3) about a fascinating BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares that charted the parallel rise of two groups: the neoconservatives in the US (whose ideology was formulated by University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss) and the radical Islamists (led by an Arab intellectual Sayyed Qutb).
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(For the two previous posts in this series, see here and here.)

The manufactured outrage over Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright’s comments shows the extent to which capitalist Christianity has taken over in America. In this version, Christianity is presented as some kind of self-help program, a lifestyle choice, that is designed to make you feel good about yourself. In this approach, you just have to say some slogan about accepting Jesus as your personal lord and savior, and bingo! you have automatically become a Good Person, guaranteed a place in heaven. This version of Christianity does not deal exclusively with heaven, though. It is also believed that god wants you to be rich and prosperous, so one has it nice both here and in the hereafter. Being poor or sick or otherwise troubled is seen as a sign that you are somehow unworthy or have failed god in some way.
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One of the things that would amuse me if it did not have such serious consequences is that white people in America are always shocked, just shocked, when they get even a glimpse of the anger and resentment that exists among many black people about they way they have been treated and still continue to be treated in this country.

The reason for this perpetual state of surprise is that many white people tend to unquestioningly accept a powerful myth: that America is the one country in the world possessed of an Essential Goodness, bestowed by god. They believe that not only do Americans as individuals possess this quality (that they mysteriously acquire simply by being born within its geographical boundaries), but that the nation as a whole, this political entity, collectively possesses this same quality. The possession of this Essential Goodness is believed to make America morally superior to every other country.

Of course we committed genocide against the Native Americans, we institutionalized and perpetuated a long and brutal slavery, along with lynchings and murders, we have killed millions and millions of people in many small countries under the pretence of defending and spreading democracy, but it is held that all that is in the past and anyway were done by a few misguided individuals a long time ago and is not a reflection on the people as a whole. Despite all that history, the myth persists that we are and always have been, Essentially Good, and that anyone who challenges that myth in any way is spreading a vicious and hateful lie that is borderline treasonous. People who adhere to that myth cannot seem to wrap their minds around the idea that other ethnic groups, with a history of being oppressed, might not find it so compelling.

This powerful myth serves as the basis of a sense of self-identity that is thought to be uplifting but is actually dangerous because it can lead to arrogance, blindness, hubris, and an unwillingness to learn from the harsh lessons of history. A paper in Psychological Review showed that individuals, groups, and even nations that think highly of themselves without any real basis for doing so, resort to violence when they do not receive the inflated respect they feel they are entitled to. High self-esteem that is unsupported by actual achievements or abilities turns out to be harmful. (Roy F. Baumeister, Laura Smart, Joseph M. Boden, Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem, Psychological Review, 1996, vol. 103, No. 1, 5-33.)

America’s politicians pander to this powerful and corrosive myth since it conveniently enables them to always get the benefit of the doubt of the public when they do something obviously wrong. Since America is Essentially Good, people think that there must be a benevolent reason for any action taken by its government and are eager to seize on any excuse to believe in its good intent. The public acceptance of the weak, almost non-existent, and obviously fraudulent case made for the invasion of Iraq is a case in point.

The brutal fact that history reveals, and which so many of us seem unwilling to accept, is that no people are special, no people are possessed of an Essential Goodness. Not the Germans who were passive in the face of the murder of Jews during World War II, not the Americans who were passive during the murder an estimated half million Vietnamese, not the Ethiopians who were passive during the destruction of Eritrea, not the Hutus who were passive during the murder of the Tutsis, with the list being continued almost indefinitely.

The hardest lesson for us to accept is that we are just like other people.

The commonly heard opening phrase “Only in America can . . .” is a symptom of this belief in American exceptionalism. That preamble is usually followed by a boast that can almost always easily shown to be false, but the truth is immaterial to the speaker of such sentiments. He is appealing to the myth about our Essential Goodness and thus cannot be challenged. Even Barack Obama appealed to this myth in his otherwise exemplary speech on race. He did this to distinguish himself from his former pastor Jeremiah Wright because Wright had committed the one unforgivable sin in American political discourse, a sin even worse than blasphemy, even worse than denying the Holy Spirit, which the Bible tells us is the only unforgivable sin. By listing all the crimes that he felt America had committed and then saying “Not God bless America, God damn America”, Wright had denied the Essential Goodness of America, denied that god had a special place in his heart for America and would always take its side.

For these words, he has been vilified by those who were looking for a reason, any reason, to fan racist flames and discredit Obama as a candidate. I think that a commenter at Talking Points Memo said it best

What drives me crazy is how this could have been avoided so easily if Wright was the slightest bit media-savvy. Had he merely controlled his tongue and limited himself to advocating an attack on Iran to encourage massive worldwide Muslim attacks leading to a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of end-times and bringing about Armageddon and the summary slaughter of every Jew, Muslim, Catholic, and non-believer on the planet while rapturing him and his flock up to heaven, then followed it up by denouncing Catholics as cult members and blaming Hurricane Katrina on gay people, this story wouldn’t be metastasizing like this. One five minute milquetoast repudiation by Obama and it would all be behind him.

But what does Wright do instead? He spews this vile “God damn America” bile. What a psycho.

In the next post, I will look at the prophetic tradition in which Wright’s sermon is embedded.

Next: Capitalist Christianity versus prophetic Christianity

POST SCRIPT: Hilarious story

I wrote before that the intelligent design creationists were going to release a documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed where they continue their whining about how these mean scientists are saying nasty things about their nice theory.

Biologist and blogger P.Z. Myers, who has been a fierce critic of intelligent design creationism and was interviewed for the film, has an absolutely hilarious story about what happened to him when he went to see a prescreening of the film. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just read his post.

Also, don’t forget today’s screening of The God Delusion Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox in Strosacker Auditorium at 7:00 pm.

UPDATE: After the screening, Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers share a good laugh at what happened.

As readers of this blog know, I have not been an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama, voting for him in the Ohio primary as the default choice since the alternative of Hillary Clinton is much worse in comparison, and John McCain is truly awful.

But I was really impressed by the speech he gave last Tuesday on race, triggered by the ridiculous flap over some words spoken by the former pastor of his church. If you haven’t seen the speech, you can join the three million people who have viewed it on YouTube or read the full transcript.

The speech was quite extraordinary both for the things he did not say and do as well as for the things he said and did. It was a long speech, lasting about forty minutes, but it was not a stem-winder with resounding phrases. There were no jokes, no innuendo, no digs at political opponents. While there was applause from the audience on a few occasions, there were no built-in, cued-up, applause lines, like one sees in campaign speeches or the awful State of the Union addresses. In fact, Obama seemed to prefer no applause at all and seemed to want to just get on with it. There were no rhetorical flourishes, no crescendos, no dramatic modulations, not even very many memorable phrases.

In his understated and low-key speech, Obama used just one rhetorical device, the pause, and he used it extremely well in a way that reminded me of Harold Pinter’s memorable 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech which I have discussed earlier.

Obama quietly delivered a powerful message about the state of race relations in the US and how the way it is currently conducted poisons everything and everyone it touches and of the need to change that situation.

For once we had a major political figure talk like an adult about the serious issue of race. Even more impressive, he seemed to be assuming that the audience also consisted of adults. What made the event so extraordinary, and at the same time reflects so poorly on the state of our political discourse, was that such events are so rare.

He spoke about one issue that I have repeatedly emphasized, how race and other issues are almost always deliberately discussed in inflammatory ways, so that they become distractions from vital issues, and he issued a challenge to the media and to us to change that. He did not take a Pollyannaish view of race or try to disavow the people or history that are integral to dealing with it. Instead he correctly said that we need to know and understand that history if we are ever to overcome it.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

But what was most important in the speech was the indictment of the media about how they cover race and politics and the challenge that he issued to them and us to talk like adults about race, a topic that is at once so ephemeral (after all, the concept of race has no biological standing) and yet so important.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
. . .
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

We have to look to comedian Jon Stewart who, between the jokes, gives one of the most adult media reactions to the speech.

The reactions to Obama’s speech are interesting. Those who would never have voted for him anyway have been nitpicking it to death but in the process come off looking petty. But he put in a tricky position those who pride themselves on being at least somewhat enlightened. If they continue to harp on Wright’s words, they will be acknowledging that they really don’t want the kind of discussion Obama is calling for but simply want to continue to use race as a divisive tool. Even Fox News’s Chris Wallace was so embarrassed by his colleagues on his own network over their relentless focus on precisely the kind discussion that Obama deplored that he publicly took them to task for it. It seemed like even he had had enough.

We can only hope that this speech will change the way that race is discussed in America.

In the next post, I will say more about the context in which Obama’s speech came to be delivered.

POST SCRIPT: The God Delusion Debate

Case’s Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA), in partnership with the Case InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, will present a screening of The God Delusion Debate beginning at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25 in Strosacker Auditorium. The program features biologist Richard Dawkins, who needs no introduction, debating points from his book The God Delusion with John Lennox, a mathematician, philosopher of science, and a Christian.

You can see just the opening to the debate here. In the interests of time, this 20-minute introduction explaining the debate set up and having the debaters give brief biographies of themselves will not be shown at the event.

At 8:30, immediately, following the screening, there will be refreshments and then a panel discussion.

For more information about the program and CFA, see here.

Yesterday, March 19, 2008 saw the fifth anniversary of the tragic invasion of Iraq by the US, a deliberate act of aggression against a country that had posed no threat whatsoever to it, an action that is going to have serious negative consequences for US power an influence in the world, both militarily and economically. Historians looking back might see that as a watershed event, a peak in the power hubris of a country. Apart from the appalling death and destruction that has been wreaked on the people of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and injured and vast numbers of internal and external refugees, the invasion of Iraq has also brought to the surface the decline of US economic power.
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Presidential elections involve two distinct phases. In the first phase, the Villagers drive out of the race anyone who might even remotely threaten the power and privileges of the pro-business/pro-war single party oligarchy that runs the country. Once that is achieved, then the Villagers create major controversies over personal and social issues, so that the electorate gets really fired up and angry and think that important issues are at stake, and not notice that the game is already over. (See here and here for who the Villagers are and the role they play.)

We are now comfortably in that second phase of the process. There is little to choose from between Obama and Clinton in terms of policy differences and so we have this ridiculous amount of attention being paid to statements made by their supporters and other trivialities. When the Democratic nominee is finally determined, we will then see the same kind of intense attention on trivial issues between the two party nominees.

As I said in a 2006 post on election year politics:

As a result, the overture to familiar strains of election year sloganeering are being heard, following a similar pattern. In the months leading to November, one can expect to hear a lot about the following: gay marriage, abortion, immigrants, flag burning, English-only rhetoric, UN bashing, estate tax repeal, and assisted suicide.

All these issues (except for immigration and the estate tax) share the characteristic that they are largely symbolic and directly affect only a tiny minority of people. They have little relevance to the actual lives of most people, but they do aim straight at the emotional core of the base and provide many opportunities to push people’s buttons and make them angry. And expect to hear lots of talk about god and religion, perhaps involving those old faithfuls such as displaying the ten commandments in public places or the pledge of allegiance or prayer in schools and similar church-state separation issues.

However, I would not be surprised if a completely unexpected, but equally trivial, new issue emerges suddenly, since the ones I have listed are, like, so-o-o-o 2004, and the extremist base loves fresh raw meat.

That has happened. Look at the kinds of media coverage that the race now gets. The big issues that the country faces are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of a US attack on Iran; the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in Iraq and the massive number of displaced people and refugees; the large and continuing budget and trade deficits; the rapid decline in the value of the dollar against other major currencies; the threat of an imminent recession; the crisis facing many homeowners due to the subprime debacle; the shakiness of the US banking system because of that same issue; and the spiraling cost of health care and the lack of coverage for over forty million people, a large fraction of whom are children.

These are all signs that the US has gotten itself into a tailspin. Paul Craig Roberts spells out the magnitude of the problems that have been created. All these issues affect each and every one of us, either directly or indirectly, and have major long-term consequences. Whoever becomes president in November will inherit a financial and military mess that will require very tough and unpopular decisions.

And yet, how much coverage do we have of the candidates’ views on these topics and what their priorities and plans are for dealing with them? Take for example the unprecedented actions by the Federal Reserve to bail out the big investment banks that made lots of money but now are in serious trouble. What are the candidates’ views on this situation? What would they do as president? Do they approve of this kind of government intervention in the financial sector?

We are clearly not going to get any kind of adult talk on this issue from the current president. Last Friday, when the Bear Stearns news was rocking global financial markets, Bush talked to a group of economists at the Economic Club of New York who, along with people around the world, were presumably anxious to hear what the government’s response would be. According to a reporter present, what they heard would have given them the impression of a president who was either in fantasyland, oblivious to what is going on around him or completely out of his depth.

[Y]ou had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.

We’re really past expecting anything much, but in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control.
. . .
Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend.
. . .
[T]his economic crisis has been going on for months, and all the president could come up with sounded as if it had been composed for a Rotary Club and then delivered by a guy who had never read it before.

He then spoke about his Big Plan: sending checks of $600 to everyone! Oh yes, that should definitely turn things around. Oh, and he’s also totally against congressional earmarks now, though he was fine with them while the Republicans controlled Congress. That was pretty much it. One wonders if there are any adults in this administration.

Here is Jon Stewart on the economic mess and Bush’s speech:

Meanwhile, on Friday itself Wall Street investors started a steady drumbeat demanding that the Fed cut interest rates once again at its regular meeting on Tuesday, by another huge amount, perhaps even as high as one percentage point. The Fed duly obliged cutting rates by a quarter point on Sunday, itself a highly unusual action, and then followed with a further cut of ¾ point on Tuesday. The stock markets duly soared upwards again.

Cutting interest rates by large amounts might please Wall Street investors, at least in the short run, but it has consequences for the long term. Doing so while European rates stay high results in the dollar, already at record lows, sinking even further. This will raise the price of oil and other imports, increasing the rate of inflation and aggravating the trade deficit. All this makes foreign investors even more wary of dollar-based investments, which may make it harder to sell them US treasury bonds to finance the deficits.

The investments made by investment banks like Bear Stearns are highly leveraged, meaning that they buy securities with just a small amount as down payment and finance the rest, just like the way we buy houses with a small down payment and finance the rest with a mortgage. The difference is that when buying a house (in normal times) the down payment is usually 10 to 20% and the value of the collateral (the house) is worth more than the loan, so that if the borrower can’t repay the loan, the lender can still recover the money by selling that asset.

In the case of Bear Stearns, it is estimated that the size of its purchases outnumbered its actual assets by a ratio of 28-to 1, meaning that it bought securities for 28 times the value of the actual cash it put into the purchase. The balance was borrowed. Usually these banks sell these highly leveraged securities long before the loan is due to be repaid and thus are able to repay the debt. But in this case, nobody wants to buy their securities. When the bills came due, the banks could not sell and thus had no money, which is why the bank had a liquidity crisis. When the Fed came to the rescue by guaranteeing these securities, it was essentially saying that they would pay up if the value of the securities did not rise again and creditors came for their money.

Hanging over everyone is the uncertainty. How many other big banks are holding on to how much mortgage backed securities? How much did they leverage? How far is the Federal Reserve willing to go in using taxpayer money to prop up these banks?

On Monday the biggest commercial bank in Cleveland, National City Bank, lost 43% of its value in one day, fueled by suspicions that it was holding a large amount of now worthless mortgage-backed securities. Before 1999, commercial banks were restricted by the Glass-Steagall Act from taking the kinds of risks that investment banks take, because the government insured the deposits of those banks and did not want to underwrite excessive risk taking. That act was passed in 1933 in the wake of the Great Depression because banks had been making highly speculative investments and thus caused the crash. But in 1999 Congress and Bill Clinton removed that barrier and now the rot that has infected the investment banks has spread into the commercial banking sector also.

As the days go by, watch for more volatility, fueled by rumors.

POST SCRIPT: The God Delusion Index

Answer this series of questions and calculate the extent of your own God Delusion.

In an article written in 2000, William Greider said something that really stuck in my mind: “An enduring truth, a wise friend once explained to me, is that important social change nearly always begins in hypocrisy.”

This is very true. When we look back at the improvement in our attitudes to race and gender, at some point indulging in crude stereotypes, offensive humor, and derogatory remarks against this or that hitherto discriminated group becomes seen as unacceptable behavior and the people making them are viewed as ignorant and become ostracized, outside the bounds of decent society. As a result, we then go through a long period when people who harbor such offensive views feel forced to hide them or even say things that are opposite to what they truly feel. As Greider says “[T]he powerful are persuaded to say the appropriate words, that is, to sign a commitment to higher values and decent behavior.”
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