Jerusalem: First Impressions.

The Old City is tiny. The physical realities of the place force proximity that would otherwise be uncomfortable: the Muslim Quarter right up against the Christian Quarter, against the Jewish Quarter. (The Armenian Quarter hasn't really been visible to us yet). One is struck by the huge range of diversity in the people and religions - little children in the street in the basic garb of Jews or Muslims mark themselves as they run among us, dodging the heaping carts of too many boxes that functions as the cargo transport system in the tightly wound alleys and streets.

This is a place where every square meter matters: where a Jewish House in a Muslim area is marked by many bright Israel flags, where guards of both public and private allegiance stand guard while seeming civilians also walk around with their machine guns. But there is no fear, or if there is fear, it is invisible. Possibly this is because Jerusalem's residents are used to terror or fear, but I think the security state of checkpoints and a layered defence also functions. At the airport, I went by 5 places of armed guards before leaving, compared to one place in Atlanta with unarmed guards. It's the price of doing business and seems to be acceptable.

Jerusalem is also a dirty city (or at least the old part is), where you get the feeling that things are decided by the locals who live in and around the place, and less by the international powers that focus so much of their attention on this tiny, walled city.\

PS: Other posts will be here.

Press Bias Against Palin

Sarah Palin is the victim of press bias. Active, malignant, press bias. I'm not going to quote anyone here: sole examples are equivalent to anecdotes, and tracking percentages is mostly useless. So you're going to have to go off of whatever expertise I've managed to attain in 4 years of watching network/cable newscasts, blogs, Twitter, and the many aggregators I use.

Was some speculation about the shooting reasonable? Yes; the targeting map was certainly fair game for the news media. But THE MOMENT is came out that the shooter was actually crazy, the media changed their tone. Suddenly, the overall message about "civility" and such became the story.

Yes, the media needs to be more civil, but that's like saying the people of Iraq needed to be free, which is the argument the Bush Admin and GOP used to justify Iraq when the WMD's weren't found. It's flatly intellectually dishonest to suggest that crosshairs from ANYONE had something to do with this - we have nothing to suggest that, and taking advantage of the current situation to raise implicit connections between Palin and these deaths is bias, pure and simple. (Though it's not a "blood libel," a term Jewish groups have pushed against her for using)

We can and should have a conversation about civility and inciting violence in our politics, but having it now, in this time, isn't going to be a fair fight. The left is obviously counting on that, and some have sought to capitalize on this moment by talking about gun control or other such things. That's not justified, and its horribly unfair to the families.

But, on the other hand, the same voice inside me that is defending Palin right now thinks this as well:

Stewart on the Attack

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona Shootings Reaction
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Start the first clip at 2:30.

Dear Mr. President

Not that he'll ever read this, but open letters are hardly ever written for the person in the "To:" line.

Sir,

It's 2011 and your re-election campaign starts now. Deplorably, the system as it stands is slowly accelerating in this direction. We've already had a G.O.P. debate and there will be many more, but you have to think long-term. You got healthcare, and you got the tax deal passed. But you need to out-do the GOP and stake your own claim on the title of "conservative," since they aren't acting conservative.

You need to insist on cuts in defense, which every informed person knows to have a ridiculously bloated budget. You need to embrace long-term deficit reduction, and confront the GOP with the choice that confronts all responsible parties in government: given that we are paying out more than we take in, what will be cut, or where will extra revenue be raised? You need to make these choices obvious and apparent, so that a public with a short attention span can see that the President is working while the opposition is talking.

And you need to escape the bubble. Somehow.

-Will

Winter Study Day 1

Fun things accomplished today:

• Lunch with the classmates
• Nap in Library after Haxball
• True Grit with the housemates and friends
• Lost tickle battle
• Victory over "someone" about a fairly minor Williams policy.
• Damnyouautocorrect.com

Earning the Grade

Writing papers is always a struggle for me. My best, and most natural writing is what you see on this blog - completely unedited save for spelling as I type, I can place an idea down and leave it alone. Essays aren't quite so friendly. For them, you need to have an idea or hypothesis, do the reading/research, and only then can you formulate the "real" idea about which your paper is based. You then must structure a paper that expresses that idea, and then you have to dig in and write the thing.

Ew.

The thing that happens to me with essays - repeatedly - is that I spend much more time on the research/thinking portion than I should, relative to the writing portion. The interesting part of essay writing to me isn't expressing my thoughts (which is irrational, since much of one's grade is based on the quality of expression), but formulating and balancing them. However, what that can mean is that I end up 24 hours before an essay is due with a piece of writing that doesn't match my own standards - not because the grammar is wrong, but instead because I don't like the final ideal product.

So I refine the ideas, forgetting or ignoring the inevitable re-writing that is required, and I get into a timecrunch. That happened twice this semester in a single class, and each time I had to take my own medicine and turn in the papers late, despite a grade hit, because I wanted to get the ideas right. Neither turned out super, in the end (at some point, you start to loathe your graphs and data), but I was much happier with the intellectual content I had produced and the mental twisting they had required.

And this time (unlike in past classes), I got a grade that reflected the work I did, despite the grade hit. Sometimes sucking it up and turning a paper in late is a good idea. Whew.

Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party

Obama wrote this blog post in 2005. I will provide excerpts and commentary.

There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate.  And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position.    I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.  

Obama is saying here that. Elections matter, and they matter more than specific policy wins. This post was in the context of John Roberts's confirmation hearings. Obama was writing to convince bloggers not to go after Democrats supporting Roberts, because he felt demanding purity was unwise.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party.  They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda.  In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda.  The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people.  From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon

Obama knows that this path is available - and he is specifically rejecting it. The Healthcare and Tax Cut deals are a part of his political DNA, one reason I supported him, and what he's saying with the bolded sentence is that the Public isn't going to catch on to the great policy goals. Because we won't get it, he shouldn't try it. Cynical.

It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings.   A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession.  Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee).  While they hope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

This is Obama being aware that he's outside the mainstream in some ways, and aware that leading from the left is hard.

Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line?  How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation's fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist's threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?   

I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups.  The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton.  But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward.  When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems.  We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority.  We won't be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate.  Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard.  They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice.  The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won't go away after President Bush is gone.  Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won't change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice.  We won't have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties.  We certainly won't have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system.  And we won't have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job.  After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart.  It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for.  It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion.  But that's our job.  And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.  Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.  A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more "centrist."  In fact, I think the whole "centrist" versus "liberal" labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark.  Too often, the "centrist" label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don't think Democrats have been bold enough.  But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don't work very well.  And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will.  This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required.  It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.

Finally, I am not arguing that we "unilaterally disarm" in the face of Republican attacks, or bite our tongue when this Administration screws up.  Whenever they are wrong, inept, or dishonest, we should say so clearly and repeatedly; and whenever they gear up their attack machine, we should respond quickly and forcefully.  I am suggesting that the tone we take matters, and that truth, as best we know it, be the hallmark of our response. 

This is our President. Time has made him more realist, as I noted in the previous post, but this is what he wants to believe, and why I'm glad he has the job. He gets it.

Honesty and Education in Campaigns

There was an unfortunate pattern during the 2008 campaign of Obama "dumbing down"- specific rhetoric on policy was ignored by the media, and his honest statements about occasional home discord or leaving socks around weren't effective at showing him to be a real person, so he stopped making them. For as much as we prefer people who are kind and honest, the results show that being ruthless is the true path to power - just look at the characters in "All the Devils Are Here," which I read yesterday. That's why the charge of Obama mania was so accurate - in simplifying a message for the masses, Obama (and Palin) both took an individually correct path that, in sum, hurt the entire election process.

I believe that candidates and their campaigns should treat each race as a learning/education opportunity for the public, so that people are empowered to understand issues as they learn who will represent them best.

The Bell of Hope

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/927951639/

TO THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD

AND A RECOGNITION OF 

THE ENDURING LINKS BETWEEN 

THE CITY OF LONDON

AND

THE CITY OF NEW YORK

FORGED IN ADVERSITY - 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

I visited Ground Zero for the first time today. Despite several trips to and through New York since a longer 5th grade sightseeing venture, I never got further south than the Lower East Side or the Port Authority.

That changed today, when I had several free hours between my arrival from Williams and the flight to Atlanta (where I am writing this post while appreciating the irony that my flight has free wifi while the airport it departed from has no internet available at all.) But I digress: using my MetroCard, I took an A and then E train to the Wordl Trade Center Station, without map or expectation, and to my surprise, emerged across the street from Ground Zero (so named on the night of the events, the same day I turned 13. But that is a different story).

I was a little shocked to come out of the station next to this aerial gap; while a tower is being constructed, one still gets the feeling that something larger used to fill this space; the scar is still present, if obscured by the fence and website advertising the memorial effort. But then I turned around, and to my surprise, saw a littel graveyard with people wandering around, and behind that, a little church.

It was, I now know, St. Paul's Chapel, and I faintly recalled the news stories about how volunteers and rescue workers found aid, shelter, and comfort within its untouched walls as they labored to shift through to toxic rubble (ahem, Zadroga Bill). So strange to see such old graves, such as a French her from the Revolutionary War, standing next to the place where the battles we fight today in Afghanistan began. I marveled and observed the old graves with curiosity, but short of a brief moment when I came out of the station, the area had no strong emotional effect on me.

And then I saw the Bell, right outside the Chapel's doors, and as I read the words inscribed (reprinted above), my eyes welled up and I felt something within me respond to the hope of the bell, and the tradition of ringing after each terrorist attack, be it in London, Madrid, or elsewhere, as a reminder of reconciliation even when bloodlusts are strongest.

But what reached me ever more was a sudden realization that in reading the words on the bell, I wasn't thinking about "cities," but instead people. Cities are people - collections of people, just as colleges, towns, countries, fan clubs of sports teams, and every other organization is a ccollection of people that say "I am."

I am a Decaturite, and a Georgian. I am an Eph and a Bulldog. I am also an American, and while that allegiance resonated as I watched the bell, what struck me more was the kitchy phrase "citizen of the world." For I recognized in that bell the connections I have with the City of New York and the people that compose it - those who lost parents or friends in the attack, and those who lived through the dire days of dust and death. I saw in that bell a window to the ties that bind all of us, even in the deepest tragedy when some reject those ties and give their lives to violence, and for the first time in months, I cried a bit. But not for fear, and not in mourning. Instead:

Hope.

StoryTime

I wrote this roughly a year and a half ago, on StoryTime:

But mostly, I hear about times when some of the people I looked up to most had the deepest troubles - the facade is pulled away, and we see each other as we see ourselves - as flawed creatures simply trying to do the best with what we have in life. Storytime is a place of common comfort - where a crowd can support the speaker, and the speaker support the crowd. My life at Williams is better for those gatherings at 9 in Henze lounge, and I look forward to the last of the semester and the other stories in years to come.

Last Sunday, it was my turn. I had known since my first Storytime that I wanted to speak, but such things weren't for me to decide (though I'll admit I said I had that interest a few times). To me, each week is its own gift: hearing some unique part of someone's past. For me, the story was also private, but had something to do with the irony of my leadership at Williams, and my natural introversion.

Those patterns continue today. I still say well-intentioned things sometimes ("nah, I'm dropping Maddy off first") which come off as "I won't drop you off," when I mean to say "I'm dropping you off next."

Complicated, yes, but also true. I wish I'd said more about Gargoyle as well - the little purple book I own has so much of the history of student leadership at Williams, something I constantly seek to foster; I also hoped to be clearer that whatever my reasons for starting to do "leadership" stuff, the ultimate reasons for my actions are that I genuinely enjoy helping people.

But it was my story, and while I have to get back to finals, I'm very gratified by the response I got.

Another Technology Post

While writing a paper about hypocrisy in politics, I came across a blog post review of Political hypocrisy: the mask of power, from Hobbes to Orwell and beyond By David Runciman. I then searched for the book (which is checked out) on my library's website, then accessed it via the electronic portal. I can now read the entire book online, at no cost to me, about 1 minute after finding out it exists.

Without getting up from my carrel. Whoa.

Storytime

A reprint from 18 months ago, as I prepare to speak tomorrow....

The founders of Storytime [09s] are soon to graduate, and though heaps of accolades have already been given to them, especially in the form of the Grosvenor Memorial Cup. However, I think readers near and far should know about the scope of Storytime's achievement.

I and others here sometimes speak of the legendary "Williams Woman" or "Williams Man." This person is a true polymath - he or she excels physically through WOC or a varsity athletic team, artistically expresses him or herself through music, theater, or visual art, and carries a high GPA on the side, while maintaining close friendships and near universal respect. WEPO, JAing, or other campus honors are also the norm for this person. This ideal Eph is created, I think, through an amalgamation of various respected students on campus who have excelled in some of these areas, though not all. This legend is the yardstick that I sometimes compare myself too, enabled by a few real seniors who do seem to excel in all areas.

This myth of "effortless perfection" has been the subject of studies, Gargoyle conversations, and presentations across campus, some before my own time. I'm curious to see if it was around in the days of some of the alum on this blog.

Nevertheless, the myth is alive and well today, with one exception. Storytime is one moment when hierarchy disintegrates: there is only a speaker and an audience, with a facilitator who makes any needed announcements, such as the name of the cookies going around (Tonight: Chex Mix w/ chocolate, peanut butter, and something else)

Like any good tale, such stories usually involve some combination of hardship, trial, and conflict, often along with redemption in the form of loving friends or mentors. But they are always profound - Storytime has become a place to share the history that has shaped a person's character. I often hear of invitations to Storytime by speakers to their friends, who have often heard nothing or a small piece of the deep and powerful narrative of the speaker's experience until that night, along with a group of utter strangers entrusted with the same secrets. It is a place of vulnerability, bound by an unwritten covenant of shared support. I am almost always left discovering something about myself in hearing about others; sometimes realizing a blessing that had gone unnoticed earlier in life, or a hidden value in common experience that I had not yet seen.

But mostly, I hear about times when some of the people I looked up to most had the deepest troubles - the facade is pulled away, and we see each other as we see ourselves - as flawed creatures simply trying to do the best with what we have in life. Storytime is a place of common comfort - where a crowd can support the speaker, and the speaker support the crowd. My life at Williams is better for those gatherings at 9 in Henze lounge, and I look forward to the last of the semester and the other stories in years to come.