SOOTHING BALM OF GILEAD: A PRESIDENT’S WORDS TO A SHOCKED NATION

By: Paul S. Marchand


One of a President’s toughest jobs is applying soothing balm of Gilead at a time when the body politic has experienced a shock.  Though it is set forth nowhere in the Constitution, the President must be prepared to be not merely the commander-in-chief, but the comforter-in-chief as well.

 
Not all Presidents are able to do so equally well.  No President has ever equaled the adroitness, the empathy, and the awesome compassion with which Abraham Lincoln addressed words of comfort to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, in the immortal letter he sent to her upon being it being represented to him she had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.

Indeed, so felicitously chosen were President Lincoln’s words that they merit verbatim repetition:

    “To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.
  
        Dear Madam,
  
    I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
  
    Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
  
    A. Lincoln”

Tonight, another President from Illinois, Barack Obama, found himself facing a more complex task than simply offering comfort to a grieving mother.  His mission tonight was to reassure a shocked nation, while at the same time appealing to what President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, so famously referred to as the “better angels of our nature.”

Speaking to an audience of approximately 13,000 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, President Obama managed to strike that delicate balance, at once reassuring the nation, calling us to be guided by those better angels of our nature, and --perhaps most importantly-- offering remembrances of those who fell on that awful morning a few short days ago.

In so doing, the President had to avoid the temptation of partisanship or intemperate rhetoric.  Tonight was not the time to justify his administration, nor was it the time to assign blame.  The President avoided doing either, and he also avoided engaging in the kind of self-referential, self-justifying statements that have emanated from other political figures or pundits in the last few days.  By rejecting such an approach, the President avoided becoming part of a recriminatory exchange that has, thus far, served no purpose beyond further inflaming an already heated dialogue.

It will no doubt be easy in some quarters to dismiss what the President said tonight, or perhaps to take issue with the venue in which it was said, or because --for some-- reflexive opposition to anything Barack Obama says or does has become ineluctable force of habit.  Contrariwise, President Obama’s speech will probably be overpraised in some other quarters; it is always thus in polarized times.

Yet, leaving aside those for whom anything from this President is wrong, “socialist,” or worse, a careful listening to, and analysis of, his speech tonight reveals nothing that we would not expect, nay, demand, from any President in this hour.  While some may be irritated or frustrated by the President’s seemingly effortless ability to deliver an almost pitch perfect address, the fact remains that, for millions of Americans who have grown tired of the endless exchange of anathemas from True Believers of all stripes, the President’s words tonight were indeed soothing balm of Gilead.

For, in the end, the President of the United States is not, cannot be, and must not be, the President of a particular faction or ideology; the President must be the President of all, not merely of political or ideological junkies who batten on the kind of hyper partisanship that seems to have been so much in command of late.  The President must also be the President of that vast middle which seeks to live life in a community where the tribal affiliations of partisanship, ideology, or faction are less important than simply being American together.

To the extent President Obama has been able to remind us of our common Americanness, his speech tonight may be accounted a success.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

By: Paul S. Marchand

Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.
    -René Viviani, Prime Minister of the French Republic, August, 1914

The next great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.
    -Attributed to Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, sometime Imperial Chancellor of Germany, c. 1898.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
    -Hillel the Elder

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
    -Confucius, Analects, XV.24


Following Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, it was perhaps inevitable that both sides of the political divide should begin to lob rhetorical broadsides at one another, in what has become a flame war about flame wars.

Comment boards, message threads, the blogosphere, and the MSM, all lit up with instant analysis, most of it directed at assigning blame.

On Sunday, in a previous blog entry, I suggested that, in the wake of the shootings, we should all take a deep breath and ask: what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  While I was not alone in suggesting such a thing, it has become clear that those of us who have called for calm and reflection seem to represent a minority, at least within the larger conversation.
 
Perhaps we should not be surprised; it is always easier to throw a bomb or issue a “fatwa” against one’s political adversaries than it is to remain calm and keep one’s head when others are losing theirs.  Yet, when bullets have flown, a United States District Judge is dead and a Congresswoman is fighting for her life, du calme, du calme, et encore du calme is often the wisest, if not necessarily the most emotionally satisfying, course of action.

Unfortunately, the tone of much of the conversation seems to have become almost as unhinged as the mind of the shooter who authored Saturday’s dreadful events.  One cannot help but recall how nearly a century ago, on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, another unbalanced young man, a 19-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo.  The assassination of the Archduke and his wife was, of course, that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” that precipitated the Great War.

Today, the anathemas which both sides have been flinging at one another since Saturday have started to bear an ominous resemblance to the rhetoric directed by Vienna at Serbia in the days and weeks following the events in Sarajevo.  As both sides scramble to try to claim some kind of moral high ground and to put the other in the wrong, both sides also have engaged in what is, given the circumstances, an unseemly effort to wrap themselves in a gaudy mantle of self-defined victimhood.

To do so, commentators, bloggers, message-board posters, and trolls of every stripe, have availed themselves of often conflicting claims, reports, and allegations concerning the shooter, his views, his associations, and his mental state.

The arguments of both sides are flawed in direct proportion both to their stridency and to the extent to which they have been enhanced by persons who have publicly staked out controversial or highly partisan positions.  As much as it may be unhelpful for Keith Olbermann to overstate a liberal position on Saturday’s events, it is equally unhelpful for Sarah Palin to do so from a conservative perspective.

Nonetheless, there is something disturbing about the argument/narrative which is emerging in some quarters that because the shooter --at least as far as we currently know-- seems to have operated alone, that we need not take a moment to ask ourselves whether, in some way, shape, or form, the overheated and angry tone of our recent political discourse may not, in fact, have helped push the shooter over the line that separates disturbing behavior from homicidal violence.

For, in truth, the tone of our dialogue has become angry and embittered.  We seem not only to have forgotten the affirmative formulation of the Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you,” but also the negative (and perhaps easier to follow) formulations of Hillel (“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”) and Confucius (“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”)

Yet there is a reason why we should refrain from embarking on the kind of extended flame war that seems to be emerging from Saturday’s events.  The greatest challenge for a democratic society is perhaps the one expressed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, that of being human alongside others -- particularly others with whom we may entertain the most serious and comprehensive differences of opinion.  The greatest danger that faces any democracy, but particularly one as diverse as ours, is that, in our own certitude that we are right and those with differing views are wrong, we come to regard one another as members of warring and irreconcilable political tribes, and not as Americans, linked by a common stakeholdership in a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal.

For when any society begins to Balkanize itself along tribal lines, whether those lines be ethnic, religious, racial, political, it sooner or later finds itself on a short route to chaos.  There is a kind of infantile paralysis that takes hold when the Truly Believing adherent of any particular ideology falls into the absolutist trap of believing that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, or that anyone whose views are not absolutely accordant with one’s own is not merely wrong, but in fact an enemy to be eliminated by any means necessary.

What makes matters worse is when such True Believers seek to arrogate to themselves a concurrent status of both Holders of the Moral High Ground and victims of The Other Side.  Such resentful and self-indulgent victimhood, when indulged in a regular basis, is poison to the body politic, especially when, as seems to be the case here, the facts are still altogether unclear.

At the beginning of this week, I asked what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  The answer four days later is that we still don’t know much more about the shooter than we did on Sunday.  In terms of what we think, there has been an awful lot of self-indulgent, even narcissistic, overthinking on both sides of the aisle, much of it intended to buttress pre-existing confirmation biases.  Finally, there is no certainty at this point as to what we can prove.  There will be an investigation, followed --in all likelihood-- by a trial, or at the very least, by some kind of evidentiary hearing with respect to the shooter’s mental state.

In the meantime, instead of allowing ourselves to elevate Saturday’s events to the status of that damned foolish thing in the Balkans, perhaps we should all, as Fox News’s Roger Ailes --of all people-- has suggested, tone it down.  At a time when six are dead and 14 wounded, a decent respect for them ought to counsel us towards sober and thoughtful reflection about the kind of country we want to be and how we want to interact with our neighbors, as well as militating against continuing an unseemly flame war over the etiology of Saturday’s horrifying and tragic events.
 
At all events, Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he practices law and recently completed two terms on the city council.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice.

AFTER THE TUCSON SHOOTINGS: TIME TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH

By: Paul S. Marchand

When the news hit out yesterday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, which left six dead, including United States Chief District Judge John Roll, and 14 injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition at this hour after being shot through the head, my first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.

Oh my God.

My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.

The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame.  Certainly, the last 24 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another.

At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.

In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think?  What can we prove?

At the moment, what we know is that six are dead and 14 have been wounded.  We know that a suspected shooter is in custody.  We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of rather disjointed commentaries on the Web.

What we think is a more problematic issue.  From yesterday’s events, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias.  About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy broad support across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots.

Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.  By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land.  Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”

What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase.  The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues.  Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.

Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.

No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated.  Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy.  When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.

Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Tucson yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations.  As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point.  There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.

In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether yesterday’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous.  At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.

In short, we know very little, we think --perhaps-- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.

Nonetheless, whether yesterday’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the other 13 who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll and the other five victims whose lives were so tragically cut short.  Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?

For now, however, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments.  A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law.  He recently completed two terms on the Cathedral City city Council.  The views expressed herein are exclusively his own.

NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case.  Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.