Those who have a vested interest in Muslim anger (updated)

With a good nights sleep and a brand new day I find that I have a little perspective on what caused my melancholy yesterday.

As readers here might have learned by now, I tend to read pretty broadly across the political spectrum in an attempt to inform myself. That means that I peruse everything from right wing sites to their counterparts on the left fringes and a lot in between.

One of the main things that was bothering me yesterday is how both sides of the extremes seem to have a vested interest in using the demonstrations happening in the Middle East to convince us that the entire Muslim world is angry at us.

On the right it comes as no surprise that there are those who want us to see all Muslims as the great threat of our time.  But in the political heat of a presidential election, even their slightly less rabid counterparts are intent on exploiting the recent protests to suggest that President Obama's more moderate approach has been a failure and that its time to "show some muscle" in this great battle with the angry hoard.

But we also see that the world view of some on the extreme left is dependent on the idea of an angry Muslim world. These are the folks that are wedded to the idea of US complicity in all that's wrong with the world. Muslim anger at the US becomes exhibit A to make their case.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not denying that many Muslims are indeed angry at the US. Nor am I denying that our history in that part of the world justifies their anger.

What got to me yesterday was that I saw that anger being used as a political tool on both sides to make sweeping claims in an attempt to justify their pre-concieved positions. The reality on the ground in many of these countries is far more complex than that, as was exemplified by the photo spread of Libyan protesters I posted recently.

This morning I read some saner heads. For example, this diary at Daily Kos by Clay Claiborne (many thanks to commenter Bill for introducing me to his writing!) where he points out that 10 Libyans died trying to defend the US embassy. He also shared this wonderful video.



Also of interest to me was an article posted yesterday by Juan Cole in which he discusses some of the major differences between the situations in Libya and Egypt.

As I said in the photo diary I referred to above, I want to actually HEAR what people of the Muslim world are saying. I'm not suggesting that I'll agree with all of them. But I do think that its important for all of their voices to be heard. What really pisses me off is people using them to try to score political points.

UPDATE: I'd like to add this wonderful article by Jose Ramos-Horta - former President of East Timor and Nobel Peace Prize winner - to the "saner heads" category.

But the tragedy of Benghazi and riots in Yemen do not signal the end of the Arab Spring. Nor is it an indication of any “failed policies,” any more than it is justification for the shameful practice of political candidates in the US attempting to make points from a US Ambassador’s death.

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

I must admit that I'm a little melancholy today. I'm tired...tired of all the attempts to use people's lives for political point-scoring, tired of the violence and hate, tired of hearing we're all on our own in the world. But most of all, I'm tired of people who would use and exploit the worst in all of us as human beings.

For the last few days I've had an old song on my mind. I finally took the time to go find it on youtube and wound up taking a journey through some songs that reminded me that it has often been our artists who have reached into our hearts and inspired our better angels.  So now I'm going to invite you to take that journey with me in hopes it will inspire you as well.

For you old-timers, remember when this was the ethos in the air?



Its been done to death, but I never tire of this one.



Of course Stevie is the master of this kind of music.



We should always remember that being the "shelter in the rain" is not just an act of selflessness. Its in our own self-interest as well. I love how Daniel Barrigan put it.

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for the meeting of your eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to loose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

And here's Garth Brooks singing about that.

Putting yourself in the President's shoes

I just finished spending a good bit of time reading Michael Lewis' story in Vanity Fair titled Obama's Way and listening to Terry Gross interview Lewis about the article on NPR. It's a lengthy article and the interview is just shy of 40 minutes. But I want to tell you that both were more than worth the time I've spent reading and listening to them.

As background for the article, Lewis spent time observing and interacting with President Obama over the course of six months. This is something that had never been done with an American president before. His reason for wanting to do so - as he explains on NPR - was to allow the reader to put themselves in the President's shoes. That's something I try to do in my head all the time. I'm sure Lewis only captured bits and pieces of what its like to see the world through the President's eyes. But its one of the most thorough pictures I've seen so far.

Some people have criticized Lewis because, as part of the deal, he gave the White House the ability to review and approve of direct quotes included in the story. He addresses that criticism right off the bat in the interview on NPR. First of all, he points out that this is common practice when writing biographical stories about famous people. Secondly, he says that after submitting the quotes that would be included, the White House changed almost nothing. And finally, he points out that the meat of the article is actually more about his observations after spending time with the President. That is not something he gave the White House the opportunity to review.

I would simply add that he's been very up front about all this. And so readers are left to make their own determination about the content.

Lewis uses three events as the mainstays of what he writes about...basketball games with the President, his process for writing the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and most prominently - the decision to intervene in Libya. But sometimes its the casual conversations they had that are most revealing. As an example, at one point Lewis asked President Obama how he dealt with the constant criticism. His response strikes me as something important for all of us to hear.

One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.

I'd suggest this is something that is not limited to our views about President Obama. But I also suspect its more intensified in his case. For those with a vested interest in the bad - that's the character they see. And for those of us who support him - we tend to ignore the imperfections and create a heroic character. But if your'e actually "in his shoes," you know yourself to be a human being who is capable of doing good things with all the limitations mere mortals must endure.

Describing the challenges that face any President, Obama repeats something we've heard Michelle talk about before.

“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”

This says several things to me. First of all, it speaks to the Niebuhrian idea that we have to live in the world as it is and not as we want it to be. You have to take the risk of a 30-40 percent chance of failure. Secondly, it explains why pragmatism must be the cornerstone rather than ideology. As Obama says, you are able to take those kinds of risks if you feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. And finally, that's why the kind of information we get from an article like this is so useful in evaluating a president...beyond simple policy statements, it shows the person's process.

If you want to get a glimpse into the world of President Obama, I highly recommend that you read this article and listen to the interview. The rest of it is too full of fascinating information to summarize adequately. I'll simply say that it confirms to me what a thoughtful, capable man we have in the White House.

We hear you Libyans!

The day after the 2004 election I was despondent - couldn't face anyone or develop a coherent thought for the better part of the day. It was bad enough to see the 2000 election stolen. But to think that a slim majority of Americans actually voted to re-elect Bush/Cheney after they'd shown their hand for 4 years was almost more than I could bear. And yes, I was ashamed of my country.

That day just about the only thing that provided me solace was a web site that developed spontaneously called Sorry Everybody. Remember that? Thousands of Americans took pictures of themselves with signs telling the rest of the world that "we're sorry." We knew that a 2nd Bush administration was going to wreck havoc not just here at home, but around the world. The pictures were from people who had tried to stop that from happening - but failed. It was time to apologize. I looked at hundreds of those pictures that expressed exactly how I was feeling and cried my eyes out! Over the course of the next few days, people from around the world responded with messages of their own - accepting our apologies and letting us know how much they appreciated our efforts. It was a moment of global solidarity unlike anything I had seen before.

I thought of that experience today when I looked at a photo spread at Buzzfeed from Benghazi yesterday. The people depicted were attending a rally to reach out to us in the same way we tried to reach out to the world in 2004.















In my own small way today, I want to say to these people that "we hear you!" We know what its like to have your own citizens do something that you don't condone. We're in this thing together - with you.

The consequences of being sure

Recently some conversations I've had have reminded me of the consequences of surety. Its one thing to know something and another to be sure about it.

Being sure means that you assign yourself the privilege of discarding new information that might challenge what you think you know. When you encounter someone who sees things differently, hanging on to your surety means finding a way to shut them down or dismiss them. We find all kinds of ways to do that. Giving them a label that puts them in a pre-conceived box we've constructed just for that purpose is one of the most common. Never mind that this tends to strip them of their unique humanity. We too often find that preferable to letting go of our surety.

In the end, surety leaves no room for curiosity or questions. It also means that growth is impossible.

But the truth is that giving up your surety is hard. It makes you vulnerable. It means exposing yourself to conflict with others and - even more challenging - conflict within yourself.

That's why so often when I encounter the consequences of surety, I think of some of the most beautiful and profound writing I've ever read on the internet. It comes from Nezua at the Unapologetic Mexican.

We are always new. Every moment is new. No moment need be like anything that came before, even when the resemblance is striking and our imagination lacking. And yet, of course we must learn from who we once were. But to let a lesson that once helped inform every step forward is to walk an old path, and to preclude the sight of new horizons from our view...

Because life is not like a series of books in a course on …anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them…and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders, too...

I am far more comfortable navigating the in-between than I am in any Place. I like no thing as much as the coming and going from one to another. It is on the purpling beaches of dusk and the roseing gauze of dawn that my true eye shines lidless and I see so much more than in broad daylight. In the falling away of my tired husk I remember my shape can only be held temporarily. And to cling too tightly to it is to rot.

Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.

The things some people's children still need to learn

Remember that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? That's what I'm thinking about today as I read the news about what happened in Libya and Romney's response. I remember needing to learn lessons like this when I was a child:

You should apologize when you do something wrong

and

Two wrongs don't make a right

It appears as though some people's children didn't learn those lessons. And now they want to be President of the United States.

It's a good thing the person who has that job right now actually did learn those lessons and knows what it means to act like an adult during times like these.

The long game of an economy built to last

Ezra Klein recently interviewed Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal - a book about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Regular readers here know that I have been talking about Grunwald's contribution to this subject for quite a while now. But this interview helped me understand the link between President Obama's long game and this particular legislation.

First, some background. One of President Obama's themes has been the idea of "an economy built to last." When he says that, what I hear is that he understands that an awful lot was wrong with our economy even before the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008. He usually talks about stagnant middle class wages and increasing costs - especially related to college tuition and health care.

I remember all of that happening - especially building up during the latter half of the Bush administration. You would hear analysts on networks like CNBC and Fox talking about how wonderful things were because the stock market was going up. But anyone actually living on "main street" knew that things were tough and getting tougher. The financial crisis of 2008 didn't happen in a vacuum...it was the culmination of all of that.

So what President Obama is saying is that in order to truly recover from that crisis - we need to reinvest in an economy built to last - not simply go back to the way things were. Hence...the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

One of the points Grunwald is making with this book is that we often overlook the "reinvestment" part. Klein actually articulated it best in the interview with a couple of his questions.

That gets to one of the central political problems the stimulus had, I think. It was called the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Reinvestment side was composed of long-term investments to jump-start tomorrow’s economy. But since it’s thought of entirely as a stimulus bill, those investments, which in another context would be huge accomplishments, are seen as a distraction from the central work of the law...

One problem for the Obama administration, in my view, is that the stimulus included five or six or arguably even 10 or 12 bills that, if passed on their own, would be major achievements that the administration would be bragging about today. A standalone, $29 billion bill to digitize the country’s medical records is a big deal. A $90 billion investment in jump-starting renewables is a big deal. But because it’s all grouped under “stimulus,” Republicans see those projects as distractions, and most liberals are more focused on the idea that it was too small. So there’s really been no political home for the law.

And here's how Grunwald describes it.

I think it was the purest distillation of what Obama meant by change we can believe in. If we’re going to spend $800 billion, let’s spend it on the things we promised we’d spent it on...

People really hadn’t paid that much attention to Obama’s policy agenda. They were interested in his race and Jeremiah Wright and his fight with Hillary, and to some degree, the agenda wasn’t that interesting — it wasn’t all that different from Hillary’s agenda. But it was this coherent agenda. Health care was too expensive, schools suck, we shouldn’t be boiling the planet, the tax code is screwing the middle class, our infrastructure is falling apart — Obama had made an economic case for all that. Health-care costs were destroying the economy, there were opportunities for millions of new jobs in green energy, unless we had an educated workforce we couldn’t compete in the 21st century economy, unless the middle class had money the economy wouldn’t work — and then, in the stimulus, he went ahead and did it. So I think it’s fair to complain he used the stimulus to keep all his campaign promises. But it’s a little unfair to be surprised about it.

So what were some of those reinvestments designed to build an economy that lasts?

The long-term reinvestment part is working. It spent $90 billion for clean energy when we were spending just a few billion a year. It’s doubled renewable energy. It’s started an electric battery industry from scratch. It jump-started the smart grid. It’s bringing our pen-and-paper medical system into the digital age...

By the end of 2008, that industry [wind farms] was dead in the water. The day after the stimulus passed, one of the major wind companies, which was pulling out of America entirely, turned around and announced a $6 billion investment in the United States.

Health IT is another example I love. That’s one of the few where even they would admit there was no pretense of stimulus. The money didn’t go out the door till 2011. But right now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health IT is America’s fastest growing industry.

Yep, all that sounds like something our President would do...play for the long game. And its paying off in slow incremental steps toward the future of a stronger economy built to last while tackling some of our biggest challenges.

It also might be important to mention that President Obama signed that bill 28 days after he was inaugurated and then went on to tackle health care reform - the other pillar in building an economy to last.

I am SO done with Republican complaints about his policies not working and the left's myopia about the stimulus not being big enough.  Yes, there is more work to do. But the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will go down in history as one of the most powerful bills ever promoted by a President. And we have Michael Grunwald to thank for helping us all understand that.