Martin Marty anticipates Niebuhrian outlook in Obama presidency

by monte on Nov 06, 2008 at 6:52 pm

Regular readers of this blog will recall the claim I made last summer that Reinhold Niebuhr has been a formative influence on Barack Obama’s worldview (see http://contexts.org/monte/2008/08/15/obamas-theologian-and-the-party-of-irony/). That op-ed article has been expanded into a much longer review essay in the current issue of Contexts.

I was pleased to discover yesterday that I was not alone in predicting a Niebuhrian credo in an Obama presidency. In the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, the dean of American religious historians makes a similar case for the president-elect’s new administration.

Martin E. Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history in the Divinity School for 35 years. Marty is the nation’s foremost Protestant scholar and an advocate of “public religion” (an interesting sidebar is that he is the father of Minnesota State Senator John Marty).

Realistic Hope and Hopeful Realism

The election of Barack Obama says—about America and to the world—that it is open to “realistic hope” and “hopeful realism.” Those two two-word phrases paraphrase themes from the mid-century theological great, Reinhold Niebuhr. I mention him because President-Elect Obama is influenced by him and quotes him (as did President Jimmy Carter, the other theologically literate president of our time). Niebuhr is a formidable and sometimes formidably difficult thinker, and some cynics suggest that when politicians quote him, they are just posing Columnist David Brooks checked up and found that Senator Obama could discourse intelligently and expansively about Niebuhr. It is clear to those who know Niebuhr and who read and observe Obama, that he has internalized some Niebuhrian motifs.

I am singling out the combinations of “hope” and “realism” because the nation and the world needs a dose of hope, and hope has been a main theme of Obama the author, who used the word in a book title, and who accurately sensed the need and a hunger for hope. This is as true of a demoralized nation as it is of much of “the world” as it looks on forlornly to a forlorn America. Those of us who have been visited with e-mails from around the world since Tuesday report to each other how consistently correspondents testify to and exemplify a quickening of hope once again.

If “hope” is so manifest also now, after the election, why burden it with the word “realistic?” Or, if you start out with the “realism” that candidate Obama always displayed and will do more so as he begins to come to terms with the presidency in a time whose problems do not need enumerating, though they do get listed by virtually all commentators? Answer: realism can be so realistic that it can breed cynicism, or, as one wag put it recently, we observe that “the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out.”

“Realistic hope” is a caution against utopianism, naive idealism, the claiming of bragging rights, or politically “not knowing to come in out of the rain.” As author, community organizer, law school professor, state and U.S. senator, and presidential primary candidate, Senator Obama tirelessly invoked and promoted hope–and always coupled his invocation and promotion with cautions. We hear it all the time: righting wrongs and charting new courses in a dangerous world and with a destroyed economy allows no chance to relax and sit back.

Niebuhr liked to quote Psalm 2:4, where the Psalmist witnesses to a God who sits in the heavens and laughs, and holds the pretentious and conniving powerful “in derision.” Yet he kept reminding us that the same God held people responsible and did not dishonor human aspiration.

So: the election of the first African-American president, a choice that went beyond the wildest hopes of most of adult America is only a part of the “hope” package the nation will be opening in the months ahead. And the election of THIS African-American to the presidency means a turning to a leader who may be young, but wasn’t “born yesterday.” His reading of Niebuhr and his experience and observation of life as it is lived in complex times will show up in his “realistic” activity. Or am I too hopefully naive even to hope that this will be the case? Realistically: no.

 

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Can Obama lose? There are signs (or lack thereof)

by monte on Oct 10, 2008 at 1:01 pm

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Thursday, October 9, 2008.

His strategists decided that lawn signs don’t matter. His supporters aren’t happy.

Obama volunteers across the nation are wondering why they cannot get lawn signs for distribution. Signs are an important political ritual in their communities, and they need them to generate a visible cascade of support for their candidate. While their stories vary, what they share is growing frustration with their state and national headquarters.

The sign problem is not due to a shortage of funds, bureaucratic bottlenecks or incompetence. It is deliberate; Obama’s senior staff decided long ago that lawn signs were inconsequential and a waste of resources.

From chief strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe down to state and local campaign officials, the party line has been consistent: Lawn signs don’t vote. Well, neither does a TV ad.

As the election nears, the decision to blow off lawn signs is provoking discontent among Obama supporters. Recently these simmering grievances boiled over in the Washington Post and on national blogs like Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.

Bill Hillsman is the maverick media adviser who helped design the upset victories of Sen. Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1998. In a recent interview with the Minnesota Independent, Hillsman addressed the unrest among the rank and file.

“The problem with the campaign was that people thought they were walking on water, and they weren’t really willing to listen to any advice coming in from the outside. It’s been a very top-down, command-and-control type of campaign, which is different from what a lot of people expected it to be. They expected it to be very much a grass-roots, broad-based dialogue type of campaign, and it’s turned out not to be that way.”

Since day one, the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign has been retail politics: volunteer recruitment, door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and voter registration. These grass-roots tactics led to stunning successes during the primary season.

Even so, this game plan worked best in caucus states. Large primary states like California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio exposed the shortcomings of the strategy. Clinton’s wholesale politics proved superior in those elections.

Virginia has been particularly hard-hit by a shortage of lawn signs. Yet when the campaign headquarters finally received several thousand signs, the Washington Post reported, it decided to give Obama signs only to volunteers who had knocked on at least 40 doors.

The organizing experiences of a blogger from Missouri refute this logic:

“This isn’t the primary where you are calling on motivated people; this is a general election where you are calling on average voters and you are lucky to get people to go vote and you are really lucky if they want a sign to show their neighbors how they are going to vote.”

The Obama campaign will turn out record-breaking numbers of young and new voters. It will also get the Democratic base to the polls. Nevertheless, this alone will not win the presidency. Independents will decide this election and, as Hillsman highlights, you win their hearts and minds with wholesale politics.

“In order to get independent voters, you can’t get them by field work or volunteer organization or grass-roots organizing, because they don’t exist on any lists. You can’t really mail to them. So the best way to get them is through mass communications, and the Obama campaign has proved to be not that adept in mass communications.”

Presidential campaigns are ultimately about influencing public opinion. There is a mass psychology operating during the last 30 days of a presidential election. During the endgame, wholesale politics trumps retail politics.

If you doubt that axiom, witness McCain’s decision last weekend to go all negative, all the time. McCain’s chief strategist is Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt. A master of the politics of fear, Schmidt is turning Halloween into a monthlong event. Brace yourself: For the next 30 days, the campaign will saturate the media with ghouls and goblins—costumed, of course, as Jeremiah Wright the “anti-American racist” and William Ayers the “terrorist.”

Will Axelrod’s and Plouffe’s decision to double down on door-knocking succeed? I hope Hillsman is wrong, but given his political moxie, I will not be betting the farm on an Obama victory.

© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Tom Hayden at Metro State Oct. 7-8; watch presidential debate and debrief with Hayden

by monte on Sep 29, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Metropolitan State is pleased to welcome Tom Hayden for two days of events across the Twin Cities.

“Tom Hayden changed America,” the national correspondent of the Atlantic, Nicholas Lemann, has written. He was the “single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement,” according to the New York Times. Tom Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, most famous for his involvement in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Hayden’s continued influence in American culture spans fifty years. He was a famed sixties radical, then a long term state senator, an acclaimed author and teacher at many universities.  Today he is passionate opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the polluting quest for oil, and sweatshop conditions across the planet.  He not only writes about these subjects, but works toward their realization as a close adviser to many politicians, peace and human rights groups.

Movement Building and the Role of Student Activism:  A Student Conversation
Noon - 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Metropolitan State University Minneapolis Campus,
Helland Student Center Lounge

Debating Democracy: What’s at Stake in the 2008 Elections?
Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008
7-8:00 p.m. Discussion led by Tom Hayden
8:00-9:30p.m. Watch the Debate on the Big Screen!
Metropolitan State University, Library and Learning Center, Ecolab Rm 302

Peace Movements:  Past Lessons, Future Prospects
7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Metropolitan State University Founders Auditorium

ALL EVENTS ARE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Light Refreshments provided.

Sponsored by Metropolitan State Students for Social Change, the Student Senate, and The American Democracy Project, for more information about this event, please call 651-793-1285.

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Fight conformity! Defy orthodoxy! Join the party of free thinkers

by monte on Sep 18, 2008 at 10:25 pm

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Friday, September 5, 2008.

If John Stuart Mill were alive, he might well be at the Republican National Convention this week, providing the British with pithy commentary about American politics. What the author of On Liberty would have found most impressive about his visit is the vibrant marketplace of ideas that is playing out in our arenas, parks and streets.

Liberty is the watchword of the week. It is not just Republicans and Democrats who are exercising their freedoms of speech, association and assembly. The Libertarian, Green and Independence parties are passionately promoting their agendas. Supporters of Ron Paul and Ralph Nader are also busy hawking their heroes.

Perhaps most noteworthy, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens have gathered throughout the Twin Cities to peacefully protest the RNC. Oh, and if you hadn’t noticed, there are a few hundred anarchists rioting in the streets.

When it comes to our constitutional liberties, these political parties and activists have very different ideologies and agendas. Nevertheless, there is one liberty that no political group really wants its members taking too seriously — intellectual liberty.

The sociologist Joel Charon argues that liberty of thought is a precondition for those “action” liberties like speech, association and assembly:

To act without thinking is to act without freedom. To act with thinking that is controlled by others is to act without freedom. Without freedom to think, freedom to act is an empty freedom.

Intellectual liberty is not free. On the contrary, freedom of thought is like a sown seed, requiring a citizen to nurture it.

Why is free thinking such a rare commodity? Conservatives and libertarians will assert that the enemy of intellectual liberty is government coercion. Liberals and leftists counter by arguing the real threat to free thought is corporate media manipulation.

I concede that each of these claims has an element of truth. I contend, however, that the most significant obstacle to independent thought is neither governments nor corporations.

No, the danger is closer to home. The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing disconcertingly suggests that our friends can also be the foes of our free thought:

The hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one’s group, a group of one’s peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.

A wide variety of experimental studies, ranging from simple sensory perception to judgments about politics and morality, demonstrate that the peer pressure of group membership dramatically alters a person’s private opinions.

When individuals know their conformity or deviance will become public knowledge, they are more likely to conform. In other words, people are prone to suppress contrary perceptions and opinions when they must take a public stance in the presence of fellow group members.

After reviewing this extensive literature, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein concludes that “many people, of all political stripes, go along with political orthodoxies despite their private reservations.”

Why do we silence ourselves? Sunstein suggests several reasons.

·          We do not want to risk the wrath of friends and allies.

·          We fear that our dissent will weaken the reputation of the group.

·          We blindly trust that our group members are right.

Sunstein asserts that groups unified by bonds of affection and solidarity can make serious errors in judgment. What does he see as a solution?

The clear implication is that if a group is embarking on an unfortunate course of action, a single dissenter might be able to turn it around, by energizing ambivalent group members who would otherwise follow the crowd.

As an example he points to “Twelve Angry Men,” a movie about 11 jurors who are hell bent on convicting an innocent man. A single dissenting juror, played by Henry Fonda, persuades his fellow members of their erroneous conclusion.

In closing, I invite you to join an ancient party. This party requires no registration, no dues and no meetings. It does not even ask you to relinquish your other party affiliations. In fact, it encourages dual allegiances.

I’m talking about the party of free thinkers. “Such people, such individuals,” writes Lessing, “will be a most productive yeast and ferment, and lucky the society who has plenty of them.”

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Reading Novels: Easy Pleasures or Pains of Conscience?

by monte on Sep 11, 2008 at 3:19 am

The twenty-first century is off to one hell of a start: wars and rumors of war, famines and plagues, terrorism and genocide, hurricanes and earthquakes. For “citizens” of the empire, these horrific events are usually little more than annoying background music, as ignorable as Muzak. However, for the “barbarians” huddled outside the empire’s “Green Zone,” the sounds of death are a ubiquitous funeral dirge.

The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that augment his feeling of rightful ownership. These pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Why Read? Mark Edmundson                          

While most Americans are loath to admit it, we are denizens of a global empire. It is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile our standard of living with the disconcerting reality that an empire for the few requires the subjugation of the many. Consequently, we continue to “consume the kinds of pleasures” our empire offers as a way of warding off the “debilitating pains of conscience.”

Regrettably, too many novels published today are sources of such easy pleasures; we read them for escape. By contrast, these three prize-winning novels confront rather than comfort, each provoking our moral sensibilities with disturbing images of human motivation and behavior. Before reading these reviews, take a look at Milan Kundera on the“spirit of the novel.”

Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel. . . . The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.

The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

A winner of the 2006 British Costa Award, this tale has elements of both a murder mystery and an historical novel. Written by a Scot who has never set foot in Canada, the novel takes place in 1867 in the wilderness region of Hudson’s Bay. The novel opens in the tiny settlement of Dover River, a community of Scottish settlers who are dependent on fur trapping.

The plot is set in motion with the murder and scalping of an old trapper and the disappearance of his 17-year-old friend and lover, Francis Ross. Another suspect is a mixed blood trapper named William Parker. The authorities arrest him but he soon escapes.

Francis’s mother, sets off with Parker to track her son who, they soon discover, is tracking someone himself. Parker and Mrs. Ross gradually develop a gnarled bond, breed of physical necessity and emotional need. Mrs. Ross narrates most of the novel, providing a rich interior monologue of her conflicts.

A number of subplots, sometimes confusingly overlapping, involve conflicts between trading companies, between members of a puritanical Norwegian settlement, and between settlers and the native people caught up in this embryonic European empire.

Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

In 2007, this Norwegian novel won both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Britain’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. This is the story of Trond Sander, a 67-year old grieving widower who retires to a desolate cabin in eastern Norway.

His only neighbor turns out to be the brother of Jon, his childhood friend. This evokes memories of his fifteenth summer, particularly of a single afternoon when he and Jon set out an adventure of stealing horses. It was also the last season he spent with a cherished father. The novel alternates between his current solitary musings and his reminiscences of his father’s mysterious wartime activities during that memorable summer.

The novel’s landscape evokes the timeless grandeur and power of pine forests. Petterson also masterfully moves back and forth between the consciousnesses of an adventuresome young boy and a contemplative old man. It is, most of all, a tale of loss and recollection, of reflection and renewal.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this is not a novel for those who fear bad dreams. I generally only read fiction for 30-60 minutes before falling asleep at night. While I slowly progressed through this novel, I began having nightmares every couple of nights.

The apocalypse has occurred, whether it is natural or man-made we never discover: “Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” It is a burnt-over landscape, devoid of animals, planets, and the sun. A nameless man and his son are trudging along the remnants of a freeway, heading for the coast. We learn that the boy’s mother could finally take no more—she committed suicide.

Snows falls gray and even daylight is little more than a shadowy haze. It is freezing cold and they are starving; every day is a desperate search for food and shelter. Even in these dark times, the father has constructed a narrative. He and his son are the “good guys” Among the few remaining survivors are the “bad guys”—roving bands of cannibals. 

Even at the end of the world, McCarthy offers us a secular meditation on love, 1 Corinthians 13 after the death of God. In an unsentimental and stark language, McCarthy’s father and son reveal what it means to be human in a universe practically devoid of humanity.

So now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13

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Yesterday Jennifer met Amy Goodman and the riot police

by monte on Sep 03, 2008 at 11:12 am

This is an eyewitness report from the streets of the Republican National Convention in downtown St. Paul. Jennifer Pennington is exemplary of a new generation of brilliant young activists who are changing the direction of this nation. She was an organizer of the highly successful Liberty Parade that took place in Loring Park on August 31. Jennifer was named the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Student for 2008. She is a social science honors graduate and was the commencement speaker last spring at Metropolitan State University.

Wow.  I’ve had quite a day.  I had taken the day off to recover from the Liberty Parade and return stuff like the walkie talkies we had rented.  I decided to bring some treats to the ACLU office because I knew they were having a very busy week.  I went to the office with cupcakes and blueberry muffins.  They told me they were holding a press conference at 2:30pm with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, and they asked if I’d come back from that.  Would I come back?  Amy is only one of my personal heroes. 

I rushed to Burnsville to return the Walkie Talkies, and I got back to the ACLU office.  I met Nicole Salazar and Shareef, the two producers that were arrested and charged with felonies.  Amy had also been arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.  We got them set up in the press conference.  Chuck Samuelson, the Executive Director of the ACLU of MN introduced everyone.  Geneva from the National Lawyers Guild was also there.

One reporter from Fox News was a total asshole to Amy.  He kept questioning her like she did something wrong.  She responded beautifully quoting Thomas Jefferson when he said if he had to choose between government and a free press, he’d choose a free press.  You can listen to what happened to Amy, Nicole, and Shareef at www.democracynow.org

Btw, in yesterday’s March on the RNC, there were 17 people arrested.  The 200+ other arrests happened AFTER the March on the RNC had finished and occurred between 4pm-midnight.  Over 100 people were charged with a felony.  This means a lot of different things, but it also means they can be held for a longer period of time.  If you want to help, you should donate to the ACLU of MN (www.aclu-mn.org).  I’d like to note that the mainstream press makes it sound like these arrests all happened during the March on the RNC.  That was not the case.

 Afterwards, we were all talking in the hallway.  Amy mentioned that they needed to call a cab, and I offered to give them a ride.  There were five of them, and only four fit in my car.  So one guy agreed to wait behind and I’d come back for him.  Btw, they had all tried to come and cover Liberty Parade but couldn’t make it.  I was pretty thrilled that they had heard of us! 

So I drove Amy, Nicole, Shareef, and one of the camera men to where their office was in St. Paul.  Downtown St. Paul was weird.  Streets were blockaded everywhere and it was hard to get through.  There were a lot of detours.  I finally got them to their destination which was near Mears Park.  The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign was holding a rally there with a march scheduled for later.  I was supposed to meet my old ACLU co-workers there to hand out fliers on their rights.  There were riot police hiding behind every corner, and the Democracy Now! crew took note of it. 

I dropped off three of them, and then I brought Amy as close to Excel as I could get her.  We talked in the car.  She was very tired. Her arrest the day before had really drained her.  They had taken her sweater, and today was pretty chilly.  The secret service had also ripped the press credentials from her neck.  These were for Monday so she still had press credentials for the rest of the days.  Her sweaters and credentials weren’t returned.

After I dropped her off, I went back and picked up the 5th member.  I brought him into downtown, dropped him off, and then I found a parking spot near Mears Park.  The place was packed.  I handed out fliers and met up with two of my old co-workers from the ACLU to be a legal observer.  One guy was arrested, but we couldn’t see what had happened.  A huge crowd surrounded about 5 police officers on horseback.  I couldn’t see the guy they had arrested.  But then one participant who was standing on a van had a seizure and fell off the van.  That created quite a bit of chaos.  A human chain formed around him.  None of the police (who are EMTs) offered to help.  Someone called an ambulance and some medics came in. 

Then the march started.  We walked alongside observing and taking video.  The march started in Mears Park and went by the Union Mission and up to the Capitol.  There were thick lines of riot police at every corner.  It was disturbing to see so many riot police for a legal, permitted march. 

Ripple Effect was at the Capitol and scheduled to end at 7pm.  Apparently Rage Against the Machine had turned up unannounced.  I was by their suburbans.  The police told them they couldn’t play because they weren’t scheduled to play and weren’t on the permit?  Suddenly the crowd from Ripple Effect rushed towards the suburbans.  The suburbans started moving through the march which was now merging with people from Ripple Effect.  It doubled in size, making the crowd 5,000 strong easily. 

From the Capitol, the march started moving to Excel Energy Center.  People were taking pictures and videos constantly.  Riot police lined the way.  We passed the place where the Daily Show was playing.  We stopped to get a better look of the crowd at a place where there were tons of riot police.  I would have taken more pictures of the riot police (and the National Guard), but I was pretty intimidated by them.

We then continued on to Excel.  At Excel, the march stopped and organizers with bullhorns at the front asked everyone to make a pledge to peacefully storm Excel.  They took off but were blocked by high wire barricades.  There were riot police behind all the barricades.  After 20 minutes, the crowd began to disperse.  We decided to walk back to our cars.  But we couldn’t.

There were riot police lining the streets for 20 blocks, creating a sort of maze we all had to walk through.  It was ridiculous.  It was seriously a police state.  There is no other way to describe it.  When I passed Mickey’s Diner, there were lines of riot police and two cops stood on top of a car with their guns drawn.  At this point, the crowd was still peaceful.  There were reports of a couple people getting pepper sprayed, but we didn’t see it.  From what we witnessed, the crowd was peaceful. 

One other thing - throughout the march, I witnessed some protesters identifying some people as undercover cops.  This happened several times. 

I’d like to add that in 2003, I marched with 50,000 people in Los Angeles, and the only police presence was the occasional cop on a corner directing us where to go. 

On a side note, apparently the Missile Dick Chicks got picked up in Minneapolis last night.  They were trying to perform, and it was by a RNC event.  The police detained them, physically removed them, did not arrest them, but did drop them off outside of Minneapolis and told them not to come back!!!!

I have many pictures and videos, but I don’t know if I’ll load them all up tonight or not.  Stay posted.

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I will be speaking at the Liberty Parade on Sunday

by monte on Aug 29, 2008 at 11:16 am

Liberty Parade

When: Sunday August 31st

Where: Nicollet Mall and Loring Park

Speakers include: Bob Barr, Coleen Rowley, Farheen Hakim, and Monte Bute

Music from: Dillinger Four, Retribution Gospel Choir, Vampire Hand, Mama Digdowns Brass Band, Happy Apple and a host of others.

To Participate :

Parade Staging at 5th and Nicollet beginning at 11am on August 31st.

Day-of registration will be available. Preregistered groups will need to check in. The staging area might be the most fun of the whole day!

To Observe:

Best observation at Peavey Plaza on 11th and Nicollet, 1pm, August 31st. Bring a folding chair or a blanket.

Follow the parade to a free concert and speaker series in Loring Park from 3pm-7pm.

What is the Liberty Parade?

The Liberty Parade is a large scale parade and CELEBRATION about the idea of Liberty throught the heart of downtown Minneapolis. This nonpartisan event asks participants to crate some sort of mobile visual representation about what Liberty means to them. We have many conservative, liberal and arts groups joining together in the Liberty Parade!

The Liberty Parade Vehicle of choice is the bicycle. The Liberty Parade Materials of choice are card board and duct tape.

The parade terminates in a live concert and speaker series in Loring Park. Music, interesting speeches, strange and exotic groups, BBQ and a beer garden will all be at your disposal from 3pm-7pm

More information: www.libertyparade2008.com

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Obama Lawn Sign Policy Slows Down Bandwagon

by monte on Aug 19, 2008 at 11:09 am

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press on Sunday, August 17, 2008.
 

A few days ago I received a letter from Barack Obama, pleading that I “rush a generous contribution” to him. I placed the return envelope in my checkbook.

The same evening I got a call from his campaign asking me to door-knock on the weekend. I already had plans but I agreed to future weekends.

Then I requested a lawn sign. The volunteer informed me that I could buy one at campaign headquarters.

Buy one? Purchased in bulk, a two-color lawn sign might cost the Obama campaign $1. I checked the Obama ‘08 Web site. They offer the budget-conscious supporter a generic 26-by-16-inch sign for $8. For those Obamites into conspicuous consumption, the site advertises a variety of 22-by-15-inch designer signs for $19.99. If this were an oil company, the Democrats would be accusing it of price gouging. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “So it goes.”

I called the Obama ‘08 Minnesota office for clarification. Media spokesperson Nick Kimball told me it is “generally a policy of the campaign nationally to charge a nominal fee for lawn signs.” “An occasional exception might be made for an outstanding volunteer,” he added. Kimball later called back to report that “if someone balks at paying for a lawn sign and really wants one, we’ll work something out.”

Gee, I guess I didn’t protest enough.

I contacted Obama’s national headquarters and was told that charging for lawn signs compensates for the income lost when Obama rejected contributions from PACs and lobbyists. Here’s what they failed to mention—any revenue lost from those special interests is more than offset by the cash windfall the campaign is accruing from having opted out of public financing.

What’s wrong with this picture? For a campaign that purports to be a movement, this mercenary marketing strategy is not only hypocritical but also counterproductive. Lawn signs should be an investment, not a revenue stream.

Lawn signs are a biennial ritual for partisans and party activists. Even so, the faithful have minimal influence on their immediate neighbors. However, when a nominal party member or, better yet, an independent puts up a candidate’s sign, the neighborhood takes notice.

Here’s how it works. A couple of households unexpectedly put up an Obama lawn sign. Emboldened by their neighbors, others follow suit. Obama ‘08 should be seeking this bandwagon effect: Folks are more likely to put up a sign when they see an increasing proliferation of signs. This effect carries over on Election Day.

So I have learned that even heartfelt allegiances are conditional.

I will write no check nor will I knock on any door until the person answering that door can get a free lawn sign. I urge Obama supporters of conscience to do the same.

I recently spent countless hours writing an op-ed article favorable to Barack Obama. It was a labor of love and a proud contribution to his candidacy. I now realize I was a fool not to have billed my hours to Obama ‘08.

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Obama’s Theologian and the Party of Irony

by monte on Aug 15, 2008 at 9:48 pm

This post first appeared on July 14 as an op-ed article on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. 

Race and gender may have been the most visible currents in the 2008 presidential primaries, but what really unsettled the political waters was a riptide of religion. Beginning in March, a maelstrom encircled Barack Obama’s relationship with his pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

It started when ABC News discovered some of Wright’s old sermons. Cable news channels were soon repeatedly running video clips of the pastor’s most racially inflammatory and anti-American remarks. Given this negative coverage and a subsequent dip in the polls, Obama had little choice but to condemn Wright’s “incendiary language” but he refused to disown the man.

Just as this political firestorm was about to burn out, the recently retired pastor embarked on a five-day publicity tour, concluding on April 28 with an appearance before the National Press Club. In a performance described by a Newsweek columnist as a “public murder-suicide attempt,” Wright seemed as intent on damaging Obama as he was in defending himself.

Obama reacted with uncharacteristic anger. Within a month, Barack and Michelle Obama had resigned from Trinity. In their resignation letter they wrote, “Our faith remains strong and we will find another church home for our family.” On Father’s Day, Obama gave the sermon at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God.

Wright may have been Barack’s pastor for nearly two decades, but it is now obvious that he’s never been Obama’s theologian.

David Brooks of The New York Times interviewed Obama last year. The columnist asked the candidate if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” he said. Brooks asked what Obama took away from Niebuhr:

I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from from naïve ideaism to bitter realism. 

“My first impression was . . . that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History,” wrote Brooks. “My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle.”

Who was Reinhold Niebuhr? From the 1930s through the 1960s, he was arguably the nation’s most influential theologian and political theorist. For three decades after his death in 1971, Niebuhr’s influence steadily declined in both ecclesiastical and civic circles. Nearly all of his books had gone out of print.

This was quite a tumble in status for a public intellectual who in 1948 graced the cover of Time magazine’s 25th anniversary edition as America’s “No. 1 Theologian.” His crossover popularity was so great that a Harvard critic once joked about “atheists for Niebuhr” clubs.

It’s ironic that it took the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent debate over terrorism to resurrect Niebuhr—Paul Elie argues that he has become “a man for all reasons.” New acolytes include a Noah’s Ark of ideological warriors: neoconservatives, liberal hawks, military revisionists, anti-war leftists, theoconservatives and religious liberals.

Each of these factions claims him as their own. Regrettably, most of these latter-day disciples are seeking sound bites rather than subtlety. “Niebuhr was always finding troubling questions,” wrote one scholar, “where even his friends found easy answers.”

No single work of Niebuhr’s does justice to the range and depth of his unique fusion of religious faith and power politics. Nevertheless, if you are among those many readers of the past two generations who have never made the acquaintance of Pastor Niebuhr, The Irony of American History is the place to start.

As an interpretation of our national heritage, Irony stands alongside the masterpieces of Beard, Du Bois, Miller, Hofstadter and Williams. Even so, portions of a book written early in the Cold War are unavoidably seasonal.

What is perennial about Niebuhr is a style of thought—and his ironic mind is most evident in the first and last chapters. In the alpha and the omega, he sketches an existential drama that is born of the human condition. Niebuhr appropriates the ideas of tragedy, pathos and irony to portray three enduring theories of human nature and destiny. With Abraham Lincoln as his exemplar, the preacher casts his lot with irony:

The evil in human history is regarded as the consequence of man’s wrong use of his unique capacities. The wrong use is always due to some failure to recognize the limits of his capacities of power, wisdom and virtue. Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future, divide society today as of old.”

The literary critic R.W.B. Lewis has argued that these polarized perspectives don’t account for those thinkers who “seemed skeptically sympathetic toward both parties and managed to be confined by neither.”

To accommodate those intellectual innovators who periodically challenge our taken-for-granted beliefs, Lewis suggested creating a third party. Like Lincoln, Niebuhr and Martin Luther King before him, Barack Obama is today’s standard-bearer for Lewis’s “party of Irony.”

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A Writer’s Cautionary Tale

by monte on May 23, 2008 at 10:40 pm

The careful writer is an endangered species.

The evidence is all about us: at America’s best newspapers the economic bottom line now trumps journalistic values; bloggers pollute the Internet with unedited, stream-of-consciousness musings; e-mailers and text messengers practice a staccato disregard for spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

No one is immune.

Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct.19

Kersten rebuked

In her Oct. 15 broadside against bans on sports teams with Indian names, Katherine Kersten manages to both violate principles of sound argument and indirectly denigrate the deceased. As a columnist, she has every right to savage policies with which she disagrees. But in her typical ad hominid style of argument, Kersten gratuitously attacks a nationally respected young sociologist who is only tangentially connected to the story. She does so by mocking the titles of his books and articles, scholarly works that have nothing to do with her topic at hand.

We are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even unintended ones. It was thus a supreme act of cosmic justice that her column appeared on the same day that the Star Tribune had a front-page obituary of Vernon Bellecourt, the man who initiated the nationwide campaign against Indian mascots.

Given her rigid mindset, she could probably never get her head around the idea that a Christian God had struck her such an ironic blow. OK, perhaps it was Karma? I look forward to a future Kersten column in which she laments the invasion of both South Asians immigrants and their alien religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

MONTE BUTE, WOODBURY

At 7:30 a.m. on the day that my “Kersten rebuked” letter appeared, I received an e-mail from my university provost: “ad hominid?” Once the visceral flush of shame had passed, I rushed to check the editorial page. Sure enough, I had committed a malapropism.

Given the universal impulse to save face, I first gave thought to claiming intentionality–of course, Kersten’s simple-minded arguments really are ad hominid! Upon further reflection, I decided to be forthright. I contacted the Star Tribune editor so that he might as least correct the on-line version. I also asked why he had not caught and corrected my gaffe with “ad hominem.”

Actually, Monte, I did stop at it and was in the process of changing it when I thought, wait. Monte’s a smart guy. Maybe he knows something I don’t. So I did a quick search and found a couple of dozen uses of it. In hindsight, I should have checked further. But it’s one of those things: If it’s a writer I know and trust, I’m inclined to believe him, even if he’s using a term I’m not personally familiar with. I may not know every word that exists, but I sure as hell don’t know every word that DOESN’T exist.

Alas, you gave me more credit than I was due. Nevertheless, the error was mine, and mine alone. Given the probability that few read the letter, and even fewer recognized my mistake, why don’t I just let this embarrassing lapse lie? Even a parish priest needs confession. As a teacher, I profess that self-editing is the key to writing well. I counsel students that every composition, even an e-mail, deserves careful proofreading and at least a couple of drafts. I must fess up: I was in too much of a rush.

And particularly when using newly-minted prophylactics–spelling and grammar checkers, for instance–realize that these tools are neither infallible, nor do they absolve us of editorial culpability. A highlighted suggestion should not provoke an automatic click on the “change” box. Regrettably, I did not practice what I preach; when prompted, I mindlessly changed a word that I had originally spelled right. Too late, I learned that my computer’s abridged dictionary did not contain that word–and an absent word is a spell checker’s misspelled word.

How can we save this endangered species of careful writers? For my part, I will henceforth distribute this scarlet letter on the first day of every class. Perhaps then, this faux pas will be an edifying moment not just for me but for my students as well. Author, heal thyself.

 

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