Advocacy and Analysis

 Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.

The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.

Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.

Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida?  Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving. 

Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact  and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity. 

I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead  Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem  for Black advancement.

Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor.  Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the  usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.

For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?

Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in  that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters  forced to choose between an  insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.  

Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could  be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.

The Hostage Question

Hostages are poignant and casualties are horrific.

Hamas is each day releasing 50 hostages in exchange for 150 people held in Israeli jails. The whole world watches the daily event of the hostages taken in ambulances to Israeli hospitals, footage of reunions, and snippets of what their captivity had been like, even though it means stalling the invasion of Israel to destroy Hamas because of its massacre of southern Israel on  Oct. 7th. President Biden says the release of the hostages has been front and center ever since the hostages were taken and that  rescuing the hostages results, Netenyahu states, because of Israeli military pressure rather than pondering the regrettable casualties that are the result of pursuing the war. Why are the hostages so important even though there are only hundreds of hostages while many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, die as the result of Israeli artillery. Isn’t that disproportionate?

The reason hostages are seen as more precious than civilians is existential. Hostages are particular while civilian casualties are statistical. A hostage is a person absconded and in grave danger of dying and so suspended between life and death and that leads to, well, suspense, which means concern for whether that particular person will die, a person full of feeling and personal lives, those recounted by un-hostaged relatives, and therefore precious because of their anguish. On the other hand, civilians are at any moment either dead or alive, mourned if gone but that over and done with, or else still alive and subject to the chance of a bomb falling on them or on the building which collapses on top of them. Some people have bad luck while others don’t even though the odds are worse in some places rather than others. Palestinians remind the world of the number of casualties even as Israelis have to remember what happened on Oct. 7th so as to explain why reprisal was justified. The media find the story of hostages a better story to cover because of individual biographies while all the media can show of casualties are bodies in shrouds, but the media is telling the story of the hostages because of its inherent poignancy: a person captured or released who was available to be killed.

There are precedents other than war of the poignancy of people under a sword of Damocles suspended under a thread, and so in recognition of immediate death, but still alive. Think of the Chilean miners a decade ago who were trapped underground world wide television closely following for days their eventual rescue while not covering the auto deaths on the highways at the same time  except as a record of a particularly grisly one without covering the people who had lost live ones. Car accidents are just statistical and to be alleviated by seat belts and driverless cars rather than saving the guy who gets behind the driver’s seat to some unknown fate. Also think of Billy Wilder’s most cynical movie,”Ace in the Hole”, from 1951, where newspaperman Kirk Douglas creates dispatches of a trapped miner that leads to a carnival atmosphere and Douglas extends the time until he would be freed so as to do it more safely until  the point that the miner dies, which is now a lose rather  than an inspiration for hope, which is what everyone admires as a token of humanity, however manipulated by Douglas for his own advantage.  

A way to overcome both hostages and casualties is to point to the grievances of one party and neglect those on the other side to the point that Palestiniians will claim that Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis to itself while Israelis will say that Gaza residents did not overthrow the Hamas regime and so those Palestinians afre being liberated by Israeli attacks on Gaza. A bit of hyperbole that is rhetorical and self-serving. But underneath the faux humanitarianism are the historical grounds for each side. Israelis were on the land for three or four thousand years and Palestinians claim that the land is part of the essential Muslim territory. There are quibbles about which side engaged in bad faith, the Israelis expelling the Palestinians during their War for Independence, the Israelis claiming that the Palestinians mostly left when they expected to return to their homes when Arab armies had taken over the area when they won the war. Both sides justify their own history, though I do find telling that the Palestinians never accepted any one of the many partitions offered to them. The Palestinian view “from the river to the sea” can be considered either principled or foolhardy or both.

It is no wonder then that political scientists will abandon historical rights and consider only realpolitik: what is useful rather than what is right. Japan had interests in getting scrap metal from the US and access to Indonesian oil so as to pursue its war against China. The US had been leery of Japan becoming a great Pacific power and so had conquered the Philippines in the Spanish American War so as to keep it from Japan. But realpolitik can go just so far. Hitlrr did not need a war for Germany to be prosperous and glorious. His daring risked too much. George Bush did not need to recapture Kuwait even if Iraq's control of it raised oil prices. The US adjusts to OPEC without going to war with it, Sunni nations useful for longer geo-political ends.The Palestinians and the Israelis are implacable foes for religious reasons and the US sides with the Israelis for domestic political reasons based on the idea that Israelis are westerners and Arabs are only slowly becoming that. Cultural affinities triumph over geo-political interests.

There is another way to explain the plight of hostages and casualties that takes advantage of their two properties: hostages as poignant and casualties as horrific. Biden uses both of them to accomplish his own goal, which is to get things to settle down rather than in war solve the problem once and for all, despite what Netenyahu and his most ardent supporters may want. Biden said a few days after the hostage taking that freeing the hostages was the first priority and would encourage humanitarian pauses so as to allow that. That Biden view may well have been heartfelt even though any pause would allow Hamas to regroup. The best Netanyahu could do was to use the poignancy of the hostages to say that only military pressure would allow Hamas to release hostages. And Biden, apparently with his active intervention, arranged for a trade between time and hostages, putting aside the Palestinians left out of jail. Then Biden talked about extending the days for exchange and possibly extending the situation into a full truce, which is counter to the Netanyahu position that Hamas has to be destroyed or else it will rise again and massacre Israelis. But Biden is concerned that the Palestinian casualties are so considerable that it will stain Israel permanently, there always people to blame the Jews for doing what other nations do regularly, as was the case when  the US engaged in unacceptable behavior in Vietnam, killing civilians that were called “combatants'' because they were running away from American helicopters. So, by their own terms, Hamas would have won the war they expected: able to fight another day, thanks to American intervention. Biden would hope the Israeli people would kick out Netenyahu and elect a government that wpoui;ld supp[ort a two-state solution. Biden is sincere in what he says about Hamas and Israelis but is also cagey in the way he tries to leverage American power to his own ends, which means looking in the long run for a gradual accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians, over the course of generations, so deep is the chasm between them.

The New Speaker

Herblock, the political cartoonist of the Forties through the Seventies  who severely criticized  Richard Nixon, said that even Nixon would get a clean shave after Nixon  became President and so Nixon would be judged on the basis of what he did after he was elevated to that office. I approached Jim Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, in the same light, giving him the benefit of the doubt when, in his inaugural speech, Johnson was filled with high sounding religious invocations. Johnson said that in the Declaration of Independence God had created men as equal rather, I suppose, than that rights are a human creation, but Christians are often unfamiliar with or find it incomprehensible that Jefferson was a Deist who thought the rules of nature are the only things that apply. Johnson also said that public officials have been anointed by God, which I took to mean that when elected officials had a supernatural mandate, they should meet the highest moral standards in their legislative crafting, eschewing petty matters,so as to be Godly. So Johnson’s opposition to same sex marriage and abortion could be read as taking seriously the most important and fundamental matters and so to be respected even if I disagree with him.

My willingness to be respectful to Johnson lasted all of twenty four hours. It ended when he said that his only response to the mass murder in Lewiston, Maine was that it should be addressed with prayer concerning the evil amidst people. No legislation required. Johnson certainly doesn’t think only prayers should be addressed to the evils of abortion. He wants laws concerning it enacted. But no laws on gun control or even just quicker interventions to take away guns from mentally ill and dangerous people. So Johnson is just the same old MAGA Conservative, with Trump credentials, rather than one of the high minded religious sorts. His religion is not independent of the shibboleths of the Right about gun control, which believes that people have a right to bear arms so as to protect the people from a national army. But if that was the case, they would not stop at allowing people to have assault rifles rather than the rifles carried in the Revolutionary War. They should allow citizens to arm themselves with tanks and howitzers so as to attack the Pentagon, should that be needed. But I doubt many gun owners would accept that, and so what are the limits of gun control? As far as I have heard, Johnson doesn’t say.

Johnson is now second in line after the President, and he does not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election and so would disrupt the orderly succession of power that has existed up to then since the time of the Constitution. Representative Matt Gaetz says that the other side should recognize the Republicans are the party of Trump. I am willing to recognize that such is the case, however sad that might be to acknowledge. The “moderate” Republican members of the House are said to have caved into the extreme of the party because they are indecisive and cowardly and confused and exhausted but I think they think of party over nation and so cannot go to Jeffries and get elected a Republican Speaker who will do limited things like money for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan and the southern border and a continuing resolution until the next year and nothing much else until the 2024 election, however unprecedented it would be to have coalition government in the House, even if constitutional, but because the Republicans could not organize themselves except under the leadership of an  extremist. Who said Trump wasn’t in charge? The GOP doesn’t need tweaking; it needs an overhaul if it is to be regarded as a legitimate party.

Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.

Two Blockbusters

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” ain’t much.

I had been looking forward to seeing two blockbuster movies of the summer, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, partly so that movies would bring large audiences back to the theaters where they belonged with wide screens and amplified sound and darkened auditoriums, which has always been the right way for a hundred years to see movies, now that covid was over. And the audiences came, the gross net of the two movies now close to two billion dollars. That's not chopped liver. But I was disappointed with both of them and it made me wonder why people liked them so much.

“Oppenheimer'' was at a disadvantage for me because I like stories that start at the beginning and move along until you get to the end, flashbacks only happening when it is necessary to bring up the past as a present juncture, as when Darcey tells about how Mr. Wickham had engaged with Darcey’s sister when he finally explained to Elizabeth why he so distrusted the cad. It struck me that “Oppenheimer'' was jumping around in time, especially in the beginning and so the film was choppy, without a narrative flow, and I thought difficult to understand unless you were already familiar with the details of the history as I was because the security  clearance hearing took place when I was in high school and had already learned the lore concerning the development of the A bomb. I was disabused when my daughter was able to follow the story even without having already learned its history. I thought that Roland Joffe’s “Little Boy and Fat Man”, the movie of 1989 that just concentrates on the essential and contained story of the Los Alamos project, was much superior to “Oppenheimer'', and Paul Newman had stolen the show as General Groves. Newman should have won an Oscar for one of his post-pretty boy roles.

The movie “Oppenheimer” was also sloppily edited. A critic said that two nude scenes were exploitative rather than liberating, as if those were the only two possibilities. The scenes showed intimacy and jealousy, which are certainly traits of sex. But the story was not elaborated as to whether Oppenheimer was a highly sexual creature rather than  that he had a young love he could not get over. Similarly, a moment when Kitty Oppenheimer lapses into child neglect to the point that her husband puts his child with another family for a while is not expanded to show that his wife was generally a poorly functioning person. Either expand it or drop it. 

The final judgment of Oppenheimer made by the movie, though it may not be the one the director Christopher Nolan wanted, was when the movie has President Truman say that Oppenheimer was a cry baby because, after all, the blood was on Truman”s own hands because he had dropped the bomb rather than on Oppenheimer’s, who just made it. Truman’s character always looms large in most comparisons and so Oppenheimer is presented as a wavering reed  rather than to be taken as a man plumbing a deep moral dilemma. The movie provides no comeback to the Truman remark.

A major failing of the movie to me was that it was not set in the proper historical context. Louis Strauss and J. Edgar Hoover were agents but not the impetus for the vendetta against Oppenheimer. This was the McCarthy era and the idea of Communism was enough to get people at bay. Remember the House Un American Activities Committee and the espionage trials and finally the Army McCarthy Hearings which brought the era to its end, Eisenhower sure that McCarthy would be overwhelmed by the military even if he had reused on the campaign  trail in 1952 to defend his mentor George Marshall for accusations that Marshall  was a disgrace to the uniform. Oppenheimer was just someone else who was abused for communist ties and had never betrayed his trust, though my high school history teacher thought it was naive to have thought that. I still want a movie that goes over McCarthy, whose paranoia and hate are reborn as Trump but without the ideology, even though the story was very well told by Richard Rovere’s book and by the Edward A Murrow telecast at the time.

I was even more disappointed with “Barbie” which I thought would analyze in a humorous way the plight of women so that I could defend the male point of view. But the movie was such a mishmosh of ideas that there is no way to take a purchase on it. I guess I was hoping for “Major Barbara” which I found very unsettling when I first read it as seeing munition makers as progressive. Or where, in “Pygmalion”, a poor flower girl can become the appearance of a princess, able to confront men as equals, through hard work and being exposed to men who treat her as a lady. Consequences are the result of causes. But causes are absent in “Barbie”. Instead, Barbie Land has an all woman Supreme Court. Does that mean society is equal because four of the current Supreme Court are women? What is the basis for inequality? All men do when Ken takes over Barbie Land is turn his home into a man cave rather than a girlie place. There is a speech whereby “mean” Barbie lists the degradations to which girls are subject. Women are supposed to look adoringly at men who sing while strumming their ukuleles. But men also fawn on women, complementing them on how pretty or accomplished they are, just to please them. Flattery is the stock in trade of courtship. What is the substance of male domination? It could be job discrimination or reproductive rights or the male threat of physical abuse. The movie never says. I wish the screenwriters for “Barbie'' had taken the time to straighten out its ideas rather than just look at the visuals so as to create a franchise set of pictures about Mattel. But they got what they wanted, which was sufficiently superficial so  that everybody could have a good time.

A female friend said that Barbie, the doll, was historically important because it showed women could be anything they wanted to be, which was not possible previously. I hardly think dolls are all that important even if they are invoked as such, as was the case when Kenneth Clarke said that black girls shunned black dolls (which was not true) and so showed a stigma about being black. It is similar to when people said that boys would be less violent if they didn’t have toy guns. Boys just took up twigs and called them guns. Gender is deeper than just toys. Now Barbies, which are just toys, are taken to make girls free to be what they want, as if that weren’t happening since Seneca Falls. And the availability of the pill at the same time when Barbie made its way seems to me to be a more powerful change in the relation of women to men.

A male friend of mine who reads literature carefully was taken by the “Barbie” point of view that women had engaged in self-discovery when, until recently, they had not. I couldn’t disagree more, which is the real nub of the issue. Men, I think, are traditionally supposed to be only one thing throughout the eons of history. They are solid, which means reliable, reasonable, stoical and moral and to be otherwise is to be a cad or over emotional, or a wuss, like Hamlet, or a reprobate. No exceptions to the approved type, whether in Homer or “Genesis”, and whether that type is admired or seen as limited. Macbeth and Othello are different but both are doomed for violating the male stereotype. Women, on the other hand, can be anything they want to be. Delilah is a lover and also a betrayer. Chaucer’s wife of Bath adopts her nature to the circumstances as she gets older. Elizabeth  Bennet is both ambitious as well as outspoken.

So why these two blockbusters for two inferior movies? A good answer is offered by Pauline Kael, the longtime New Yorker film critic, in commenting on “The Sound of Music”, a much inferior of the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, thin on plot and a but ludicrous in plotting in that, as Kael observed, what if one of the children did not want to be a chorister? And yet “The Sound of Music” was, at the time, the tenth greatest movie gross of all time. Kael’s answer for the big attendance was merchandising rather than art. The title and tone had been pre sold by its history and advertising and so was what people were prompted to view. But I have a less cynical but more dourfull explanation, which is that people like poor efforts which do not work their plots out even though they also like some that do, like “Casablanca'' and “The Best Years of their Lives”. “Oppenheimer” treats the hero as anguished when he is driven because it is easier to think that way rather than to think of him as like Werner von Braun, who cared more about rockets than about politics. “Barbie” is fuzzy on ideas because Feminist ideas are fuzzy, cliches a substitute for reasoning. Being both artful and familiar to a movie’s level of meaning is very hard. I hope Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon" will turn the trick of showing the protagonist as both cruel and progressive and so memorable, providing a valuable insight into what great leaders can be.

Faulty Indictment Arguments

Don’t expect some bombshell facts to be revealed in the indictment of Trump for the events concerning January 6th. Sometimes something new arises in a cause celebre where so many facts and strands of possible history are assembled, as when years later the real espionage was revealed that cleared Dryfuss of his name. Looking into the details of a political cause celebre usually ends in nothing, as when Jim Garrison tried to figure out who killed JFK and what happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas. We never did find out why Nixon had gone along with the Watergate cover up. Maybe it was his bad demons overcoming his statesman-like alternative instincts, as bloody as he required it to be in dealing with Vietnam. What can be said about the indictments of Trump is that they reveal just the facts covered by the House Jan. 6th Committee with added on details that a political junkie might relish.  Of more interest and moment is how arcane and contrary to ordinary psychology are the legal proceedings themselves and those will not be addressed, except here, much less reformed.

Distinguished commentators on the law, ex judicial officials themselves, say that the reason for offering up those people who worked at Mar a Lago is to show he had a guilty intent in that he was covering up his having government documents and so must have known it was wrong to take those papers. Jurors might be inclined to think that Trump must have known he had no right to those papers, quite aside from his admission that the one he flaunted around was still unclassified in that as an exPresident he could no longer do so. But we don’t know what he was showing around. Maybe it was just  boasting and there would have to be witnesses to testify that they had read the plans to invade Iran. Maybe just Joe McCarthy shuffling papers about the non existent names of those State Department Reds. 

Anyway, that is false psychology. A person can truly believe that they are in the right and therefore feel free to hide their doings so as to protect what they think is their right as happens when Huck schemes with Tom Sawyer to free Jim. The legal claim that evasion is evidence of guilt is just an assertion that is useful just so as to incriminate someone. Lawyers offer a reason so as to treat it as a proof. That does not mean there is no way to assess whether Trump was allowed to have secret papers in his possession. He could make the case that he could indeed declassify papers simply with a mental act to do so, but no lawyer is willing to say so in a court of law. Or he could explain why he needed these documents and offer proof that the Defense Department were warmongers against Iran but as an aside rather than as an explanation in a report or address that he was a whistleblower doing his duty as an ex-President, but he hasn't done that. The lack of an excuse is not an excuse and so his retaining the secrets is either vain or slovenly orf to sell for money or for any other number of reasons to which one can speculate, none of them legitimate or to be tested as legitimate.

The same false psychology and the more palatable reasons for thinking Trump criminally liable are also operative in the central case having to do with the insurrection that was regarded as justified because the election had been stolen from him. Prosecutors may offer witnesses that show experts and key politicians told Trump that he had legitimately lost the election and conclude that Trump lied about the election results. But that would just mean that Trump should have known that he rightly lost. It does not prove he believed he had lost, whether for vanity or an inherent conspiratorial nature. Most people would follow the experts, but it will be Trump on trial and so it is necessary to prove in a particular case rather than as a general practice people in such circumstances are liars. Moreover, even if prosecutors can show that Trump admitted the election was not rigged, that would not settle the matter because Trump is a notorious liar and so might be lying at some occasion for lying that the election was legit, Trump has the liar’s defense, which is that you can’t trust anything he says. Checkmate. But not quite. If he believed the election was rigged, then he might not assert that as a fact but offer the reasons for thinking so in  a statement or an interview, which he never has. You might think him incapable of the rational thought required to prepare or read such a report, but that may well be the ultimate defense, which is Trump’s mental incapacity to think through thoughts, something clear since he announced in 2015, and then the national electorate is to be chastised for ever having voted for so damaged a person, but that means Trump can and should be defeated by an electorate rather than a judiciary that would put him in an asylum rather than a jail but left off because he is harmless so long as he does not run for public office, Michael Cohen to have been blamed for his own troubles because he did not shy away from the guy as soon as getting wind of him.

Rather than the recondite aspects of the indictment, look at what is obvious on the face of it as its central features however many years it takes for a person to become aware of what is obvious and therefore undeniable and conclusive. It isn't that the meeting at the Willard Hotel of conspiratorial figures doesn’t show that the attack on the Capital was planned rather than just a protest that got out of hand, but that even better evidence of Trump’s malign intent is available on tape out of his own mouth for all to see. Jack Smith has avoided these issues so as not to be open to the accusation that what Trump did was an expression of free speech, but I will dig into that because it is the heart of the matter. Trump in his speech to the crowd on Jan. 6th was inciting riot if you pay attention to the rhetoric of his words even if he did not say explicitly that the followers should riot. He said that they should be strong. Maybe that is a reference to be clear in their determinations, to be resolved that their beliefs were proper, but it is also to say that they are determined to prevail in preventing the certification of the electoral vote, and what else were they doing milling about except to do just that when he was told to. Being just short of incendiary words does not make the words incendiary. 

Further, when Trump finally asked the rioters to go home, to cease rioting after having Trump for hours watching on tv that they had been rioting, Trump says to them that he loves them. “Loves them” for what? For merely being partisan? No, an easy inference is that he was endorsing what they had done, which was to threaten the elected Senators and Congresspeople. That is the clear meaning of the language and that is his crime, to egg on and afterwards praise an insurrection. Not just unstatesmanlike but also criminal. That is the gist of the case even if Alan Dershkowitz thinks Trump was just letting off blather. Moments count. They reveal the real motive. Words tell you what people say in their Jack Smith pile up the illegal activities Trump and his associates engaged in. What Trump said is something about which he did not lie and places him as what he was: a destroyer of the Constitution. hearts and that is enough. 

Prosecute Trump. I want him shamed though he likely won’t live long enough to go through the appeals process so that he will ever have jail time. Nixon tried to rehabilitate himself during the eternity between resignation and his death. Trump will not try rehabilitation because he will be a martyr to his cause, himself. We will just be rid of him if even his supporters decide he is too sullied to be dealt with. So I am already bored and passed beyond the indictment or future indictments to the 2024 election because the Constitution cannot protect thbed people if thbe people have gone sedriously astray.

Abraham

Morality, a harsh taskmaster, is the key to religion.

I have had an understanding of Abraham, the father of modern religion, that seems both clear and obvious and hardly worth noting except that Christians, in  particular, might find my view strange and querulous, and for reasons I will explain. My basic premise is that Abraham fashioned God to be invisible and omnipresent because he had identified God with morality, which is also invisible and omnipresent, and so distinctly different from pagan religion, where there were spirits in trees and rocks and mountains and in idols and where the gods might or might not be moral, more akin to human beings than to the supernal, to the otherness of God, just a more or less powerful god.God always had to be moral even if people could not always see that He was such because being moral was an essential characteristic rather than just a quality of some god character, like Odesseus sly and Achilles brave, when people and gods did not have to be that but God did.

There are a number of advantages to thinking of God this way. It means that God speaks and is a matter of words in that moral rules, which bind the past to the future, something else a  supernal god can do, are set out in words, in pronouncements, and so they are portable, con vegetable in a holy ark, written down in words, and also enunciated through the words imagined by great men like Noah and Moses, for whom words come to them about what should be done. That is different from the God who prefers the offerings of Abel to Cain and with such terrible consequences. An earlier god could make a choice out of pique or favoritism and never have a moral explanation as to why. So morality is not just an acquisition by religion so as to manage the ordinary lives of stable  congregations, which is what Weber thought. It is a revolution in what it is to be religious, their religious yearning for the all powerful. To be accomplished through being moral, an internal state of being rather than mere compliance.as indicated in rituals and prayers and adoration.

It is no wonder, then, that the story of Abraham and Isaac is problematic for Jews because God seems to be planning to kill Isaac. Put aside the platitudes that God was just testing him and  didn’t really mean to carry it out. That would have been cruel and it seems clear that Abraham was willing to go through with it. Abraham had made no objection though Abraham did intervene with God to lessen the judgment on Sodom, compelling God to meet his own moral standards. Couldn’t he have weeded about his own son? Maybe what was being tested was Abrahan’s loyalty to God, as when Job is loyal to God but still wonders about the ways of the world. But the Abraham Isaac situation begs the question about whether God can be immoral rather than inexplicable.

 And put aside the anthropological question that the story is a benchmark for religion moving away from child sacrifice. That would just rob the story of moral significance, just a moment of cultural evolution, in which things move on and nothing has permanent significance. But in morality it is not so easy to change as when it is clear that some people still think homosexuality an abomination. All moral religion thinks there is an old time religion by which people should take their stand and including those humanist religions who think that the respect of personhood is bedrock and so means accepting what were recently taboo as part of the holiness of all humankind.”Who am I to judge?” says Pope Francis.

A Christian, especially if influenced by Kierkegaard, would have a very different reading of the Abraham and Isaac story. It is about faith rather than loyalty. A true believing Christian has faith that however contrary the story presents itself may be, the believer is convinced, has faith, that there is reason for what Abraham was required to do, that shrouded by the mysterious ways of God. There may have been a reason to sacrifice Issac or God to spare him, even if He will not say what it was. The story is less a test of Abraham rather than of the ordinary believer that all is right in God’s world, while the Jewish believer is apt to question God’s wisdom, however less he may be than God.

I think that Kierkegaard and many Christians confuse faith by compounding two very different things. There is faith in the sense of beliefs or a credo, like the Virgin Birth or the Nicene Creed, which means it is a set of propositions about supernatural and also moral themes, such as when a fetus becomes human or whether homosexuality is an abomination, and then there's faith in the sense of the basis for believing in that creed or proposition, Catholics having largely lost the proofs of God’s existence, the reasons Anselm and Aquinas founded or justified their creeds, and relying rather on faith as an emotional confidence in those truths, a deep sense that they must be true because they believed so since childhood and are unwilling to be disabused by their disloyalty, that most primitive of attributes that are already present in the Old Testament. 

Christian believers rely on their faith  and confuse that with what they believe. The problem with that is that faith as a creed can cover a lot of supernatural things that can't be tested, such as the Virgin Birth and can, in their heart of hearts, just regard such beliefs as a formula to assert whatever their misgivings while avoiding reducing the belief into merely a symbolic one, for then one might ask why such a belief was today so reactionary in that women who have human procreation are not to be thought therefore impure. And moral standards are then regarded as also formulas to which a person assents for the sake of loyalty even of disregarding it as a practical activity in that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi regard themselves as good Catholics even though both of them support abortion. Faith as a feeling becomes narrow when it can exclude beliefs that are not compatible.Faith as confidence is far from Kierkegaard because it can exclude whatever it cares to and is left with supernatural matters that are outrageous but non contestable while aligning with an overall sense of confidence or faith that people are always getting better or using Jesus as a benchmark for how humane people should be. But politicians like FDR were embarrassed at discussions of religion. That was to go into deep waters and most American politicians do not want to step into that ocean,largely unequipped to do so, concerned as they are with local district chairmen and matters of social policy, there being few exceptions, like Bill Clinton, who could explain his view on abortion rather than just weigh it as a campaign  point.

Pre-Protestant Christianity became so encrusted with so many beliefs, articles of faith, that it rivaled paganism with alluring stories and certainties that defied the imagination that had created it. You can know about the gods without ever going around to rationalize them as spirits or forces to be reckoned with, such as wisdom  or bravery. Similarly, pre-Protestantism had invented doctrines that it was difficult to be certain about, such as whether the Holy Ghost was coterminous with God or in some sense was a product of God. You can argue about such matters by arguing philosophically about what was metaphysically necessary or, in a more literary way, playing on what it meant for God to somehow begat Jesus when that is a metaphor for something deep because God cannot literally begat a son, even if pagan gods could. Either way, this reasoning is a stretch and it is reasonable for Bart Ehrman to regard theologians as presumptuous and arbitrary, himself retreating to being a mere historian who chronicled and compared what people in  texts say. Theologians can get out whatever they want to, a harmless pastime in that the laity doesn’t care about that but the base meanings to which they do subscribe.

Protestantism, for its part, went back to basics by dealing with the moral engagement of God to every single person in  his own soul and consciousness, elaborating on  the Abrahamic relationship between God and Abraham, the two sparring with one another about what morality requires, by adding the idea that the human soul has to open up his consciousness, like a witness swearing to tell the truth, so that he or she is pure enough, sincere enough, to engager such a tussle, purified so as to see the morality of things. Very daunting indeed in that it means a faith without the adornment of bells and smells. I am not at all sure this is not so high a standard to place on congregants so that the can apply moral reasoning, but I am not at all sure that it is better to think that following Talmudic law, whether by those of the Orthodox or Reform, and so sufficient to make you morally engageable. Can’t anyone engage with morality? If morality is invisible and everywhere evident, as is the original idea of Abraham, then there is no need for a set of gatekeepers into morality. But that may be my democratic and idealistic way of approaching matters. Christians are more aware than I am of how awful human souls can be and so there are those bereft of moral reasoning while I think that people try to be good, most of them, even if there are monsters among them.

Not that Protestantism does not get encrusted or diminished over its centuries, far from the standards of moral righteousness which is its bedrock. First of all, in America at least it became political, Evangenicals supporting Trump because he was a means to the end, which was accomplished, which was to reverse Roe v. Wade, but at what cost? You have bartered away your soul to someone reckless and a miscreant even if you have preserved millions of souls from murder, Is that a God would think a moral tradeoff? Why should God have to endorse such a deal as a legitimately moral one? Only the devil requires you to make Sophie's choice. They knew he was a bad man even if they did not expect he would try to overturn the Constitution out of p;ique and greed. A Protestant would think that character really counts.

And second of all, Protestants can debase their own gold by trivializing what they claim so that Christianity is reduced to what is allowed for children to understand, when Children catch on to what goes on in life. Protestants are less willing to understand than Catholics do just how lurid can be representations of the crucifixion. That is real suffering however much I think it trivial to suffer a bit before freeing people from their Original Sin. Cheap swap. Abraham would have agonized more about Isaac than God the Father over the fact that Jesus will be restored to the throne next to Him. This is just pagan imagery of slaughter and revenge.

And the Protestant impulse is also diminished by repeating the mantra that “Jesus is your friend” because you can rely on his advice and appeal to your better nature, like a doll cradled in your arms or vice versa. However cuddly the image, Jesus is not your friend. He is much too alien from you, more than the difference between lord and peasant. Jesus is bringing to Earth a new moral dispensation of love over law and you should be properly scared if you are not up to that new standard. Jesus is up to bigger things than comforting you. He is not just agreeing with moral standards but making new ones, just like the judges in Oresteia. The universe shakes, but that is a meager metaphor, and that is why, despite myself, I have to admit that Kierkegaard captures a lot of the enormity and anguish of morality.