The Torture Debate

1. People who torture, or who order others to torture, are criminals under US and international law.

2. People who admit to having ordered torture are confessed criminals.

3. Confessed criminals should be prosecuted for their crimes.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THERE TO DEBATE?

November 22

The anniversary of the murder of Jack Kennedy usually sets me thinking about that long-ago day. But this year I was yanked back to it in particularly brutal fashion. Yesterday, I had a meeting at a law office in the 3300 block of Elm Street in Dallas, in the now hip, formerly industrial neighborhood of Deep Ellum. At the end of the meeting, two of the participants, both baby boomers, walked me to my car. "What's the best way," I asked, "to get onto Interstate 35?"

"Oh," one of them replied, "just follow Elm Street all the way through downtown, like you were in the Kennedy motorcade."

November 22, 1963, was a bright, beautiful fall day in suburban Philadelphia, where I was an eighth-grader. Shortly after we began our Latin class, the principal came on the PA system to announce that our president hat been shot in Texas--a few minutes later he came on to say that President Kennedy was dead. The teacher tried to continue with the lesson, but without much luck. I sat in my seat sobbing. The following Wednesday my family stood in a long line at Arlington National Cemetery, waiting for hours for the privilege of filing past his fresh grave.

I loved John Kennedy in a way that I have never loved any public figure since. He was for me, and millions of my generation, much more that a politician. He was young and beautiful and full of possibility. He was the promise of what we could grow up to be in a post-war America that was the greatest country that had ever been. The announcement over the junior high school public address system yanked the veil of innocence from my eyes; it never returned. For me, part of the attraction of the Obama campaign was the suggestion, the hint, that, if we could manage to elect this man, perhaps we could return to the world as it was on November 21, 1963, before we saw what was behind the facade.

Iowa

A couple of years ago, I read Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson. I knew nothing of her work at the time--my recollection is that I selected the book at random from the "new arrivals" shelf at my local library. I loved it so much so that I emailed passionate recommendations to my family and friends, not something that I am in the practice of doing. This was strange because the book is explicitly a Christian one--the novel is in the form of a long letter written by a dying Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. Since I am not a Christian, I was hard put to explain my attraction to the book. In the end I put it down to my interpretation of the book as being largely about the history of white northerners' attitudes toward race--that and the fact that, as an alumnus of a congregationalist-founded college and Presbyterian Sunday School, I am familiar with and interested in the culture and theology of American Calvinism . My admiration for the book was widely shared; it won the Pulitzer Prize and our President-to-be listed it as as one his favorite books.

I've just finished reading Robinson's new novel, Home. It is also set in Gilead. And it has strong theological themes. And I love it, despite the fact that the racial/political/historical threads are much less prominent than in the earlier book.

Home is a presentation of the incidents of Gilead from another vantage point. Jack Boughton, the ne'er-do-well namesake of Gilead's narrator John Ames, has returned to town after a twenty-year absence. His father, a retired Presbyterian minister, welcomes him but cannot resist the impulse to judge him. If this brief summary brings the words "prodigal son" leaping into your consciousness, you are probably part of the audience for this book.

The novel is not particularly strong on plot, but there is a mildly surprising incident at the end. The writing is beautiful in a plain, Midwestern way that is artful without seeming self-consciously artsy. The characters are carefully drawn. The themes of family, alienation, moral responsibility, and mortality are universal, but the setting is distinctly American.

You don't need to have read Gilead to read Home, but you ought to read both because they are such good books. Home was published in the midst of the recent campaign, so I don't imagine that Barack Obama has had a chance to read it yet. I know he's busy these days, but I hope that someone will send him a copy for Christmas.

Obama and the Death Penalty

On June 25 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the imposition of a death sentence for the crime of rape of a child is cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. The opinion (pdf), written by Justice Kennedy on behalf of himself and 4 of his colleagues, is well-reasoned. As an opponent of the death penalty, I believe that the Court's decision is correct.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama immediately announced that he opposed the decision, saying, "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable that that does not violate our Constitution." He has thus put himself in the position of attacking the ultra-conservative Supreme Court from the right on the issue of capital punishment.

Those of us who believe that capital punishment is a moral and legal nightmare are, unfortunately, used to watching liberal politicians pander to the public's pro-death penalty sentiments, especially if we live in Texas. All of the Democratic candidates for Texas governor in my memory have supported executions, including the sainted Ann Richards. Bill Clinton notoriously took a break from campaigning for president in 1992 so that he could go home to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged death row inmate. Nevertheless, given the facts that public support for the death penalty seems to be declining and Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, might be expected to have a more sophisticated view of the subject than most politicians, I had hoped for better from this candidate.

1972-2008

Although Barack Obama likes to say that his campaign represents a break from the boomers' obsessive re-fighting of the battles of the Sixties, the McCain-Obama race represents the most clear-cut contrast of Vietnam era symbols since the last Vietnam era Presidential race, Nixon-McGovern in 1972.

The most obvious similarity between the two campaigns is that, like McGovern, Obama, a longtime opponent of the Iraq War, is running as a peace candidate, while McCain, like Nixon, is a war supporter who wants to fight to "victory" in Iraq. But there are other ways in which McCain and Obama remind us of the Age of Aquarius.

McCain is, of course, a Vietnam vet, a Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW for 5 years. This aspect of his life is fraught with meaning to Americans who lived through the Vietnam disaster. To those of us who opposed the war, bomber pilots represented the most personally culpable of the American warriors fighting what we knew was an "immoral" war. They were volunteers, officers, "lifers" -- true believers in the American war who rained anonymous death on the Vietnamese peasants below them. (My ex-wife's freshman roommate, whose father was an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, came back to their room crying after a fellow student told her that her father was a "murderer." The girl sobbed that she knew that most of her fellow students didn't agree with this assessment. My ex-wife tried to explain to her gently that, in fact, they did.)

From the standpoint of those Americans who supported the war, McCain's status as a POW plays into one of their major archetypes of the war, that of the American serviceman who, having given his all to win the war, was abandoned by the backstabbing anti-war movement on the home front. This right wing tendency operated for decades under the black POW-MIA flag, and, McCain, subliminally at least, evokes that trope.

Obama was a middle schooler when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, so he doesn't have the kind of personal history in the events of the era that McCain does. However, his life story clearly puts him on the counter-cultural side of the Sixties divide. First of all, of course, he's black, and whether it wants to remember it or not, the defining issue of the Sixties-era right was opposition to black liberation. Second, he's the son of an African, suggesting the Pan-African elements of the Black Nationalist movements of the era, as does the Black Liberation theology of his now infamous pastor, Jeremiah Wright. As an adult, Obama chose to work as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer, both jobs that were essentially invented during the Sixties. No matter how mainstream his politics are, he reminds people of the old issues.

So how does this play out in this year's election? It's hard to tell. McCain's status as a Vietnam vet explains a good deal of the deference given him by boomer reporters who didn't serve and it also makes it more difficult for Obama to attack him personally. Obama's evocation of Sixties symbols explains, I think, much of the reason why he attracted the support of white educated upper-income Democrats, many of whom were part of the anti-war counter-culture and the opposition of working class white primary voters who were on the other side of that divide. But 2008 is not 1972. The end of the Cold War and the disastrous Iraq War have reduced the appeal of the bellicose right. And, of course, millions of Americans who will vote in this election were not yet born when the last American helicopter left the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.

Apostasy

On Monday the New York Times published a really slimy op-ed by Edward Luttwak, a military historian, in which he argues that, under Islamic law, Barack Obama, as the son of a father who left Islam, is himself regarded as an apostate and is, therefore, a pariah in the Muslim world. His ostensible purpose in discussing this matter is to counter the argument made by many Obama supporters (including the TBC) that Obama's status as the son of a Kenyan immigrant would help him repair the Bush-inflicted damage on the United States' reputation in the Islamic world and the Third World generally. Its real purpose is to reinforce, under a legitimate guise, the whispering campaign that Obama is a Muslim.

Luttwak's argument reminded me of the arguments made against a Catholic president back when Kennedy was running: "The papal bull of 1876 says that Catholics must do whatever the pope says, therefore Senator Kennedy as President would transfer the gold in Fort Knox to the Vatican," ignoring the fact that Kennedy was a pragmatic American politician who simply did not take his religion all that seriously. Similarly, Luttwak seems to assume that, because some Muslim religious text urges the punishment of apostates unto the last generation, the world's Muslims, faced with President Obama, will, instead of thanking Allah that the Americans have come their senses and elected a president who is not a trigger-happy fool, launch a fatwa against him because his grandfather, whom he never met, may have practiced Islam. Does that make any sense in the real world?

True Love

Much has been made recently of Barack Obama's patriotism or lack thereof. The flag pin issue is the one most obviously about patriotism, but many of the other "electability" attacks are, at bottom, a suggestion that Obama doesn't really love America. After all, he's got a funny name, his preacher asks God to "damn America," he went to school at a "madrassa" in Indonesia, and he doesn't put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Seems to be a common thread here!

At first glance, it takes a lot of gall for anyone who has ever supported George W. Bush or Bill Clinton to attack anyones patriotism. After all, by the classical measure of patriotism--the willingness to die in battle for ones country--our last 2 presidents, who actively avoided combat while young, are certifiably unpatriotic. However, the folks worrying about Obama's patriotism seem oblivious to this irony.

So is the Obama patriotism issue just a cynical maneuver by opposing political campaigns? While it's certainly true that the political operatives are using this issue, in order to work, the issue has to resonate with real voters. So why is Obama vulnerable to this attack?

At the risk of being accused of "playing the race card," I'd say that the basic source of concerns about Obama's patriotism is white guilt. White people know, whether they acknowledge it or not, that African Americans have a long list of legitimate historical grievances against white America. They find it hard to believe, therefore, that blacks can love America in the same sense that whites do, notwithstanding the fact that blacks have lived in this land for 400 years and died in her service since before the United States was born. In other words, some whites feel like, "if somebody had treated me like we've treated them, I wouldn't love them."

I suspect that the patriotism issue will not go away during the general election campaign. The Obama campaign is addressing it by, essentially, affirming his patriotism, which is probably the only way to go in that context. But individual Obama supporters can and should, I think, confront friends and family members with the source of this concern in America's racial history.