Summary: The reaction of both the ‘Murican right and the American left to Ireland’s marriage equality referendum has brought little credit to either side of the American political discourse. While ‘Murican cultural conservatives have been having conniptions over marriage equality coming to the Emerald Isle, American progressives have been waving censorious fingers at the Irish for having put marriage equality up to a vote, because in America, “we don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights.” Yet America and Ireland do not share the same political DNA. In America, making an additional place at the national table for a hitherto despised minority can’t happen by a vote; all of our history of racial insecurity militates too powerfully against it. By contrast, Ireland, which was never hobbled by the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery and all of the racial foolishness and angst which accompanied it, is far better situated than the United States to put marriage equality to a vote, and American progressives’ criticism of the Republic comes across as condescending and culturally imperialistic.
There is an old cliché in politics that you must be doing something right if you are managing to pass off both the right and the left.
It certainly seems that the Irish managed to get things very right by voting, nearly two-to-one, to add a marriage equality clause to the Constitution of the Irish Republic. It's got both sides of the American political divide into knicker-knotting orgies of censorious finger-pointing.
'Murican cultural conservatives quickly got their knickers in knots, swinging into a full-on conniption over the awful thing the Irish had done, over how Ireland had managed, once again, to prove to all God-fearing 'Muricans that Ireland, and the “Old Europe” of which Ireland is part, is nothing but a cesspit of socialism and sodomy, unworthy of being defended by 'Murica against the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Aside from the foolishness of engaging in a love feast for Vladimir Putin, 'Murican conservatives only managed to reinforce the strong negative view of the United States now held by most of the other industrialized nations of the West. By flinging cherry-picked Bible verses at the Irish people, vilifying and damnifying them for daring to embrace the principle of marriage equality, 'Murican cultural conservatives shed more heat than light. Apparently Georges Clemenceau was right to describe the United States as the only society that has managed to go from barbarism to decadence without the customary, intervening interval of civilization.
But if 'Murican cultural conservatives managed to make fools of themselves and reflect badly on their country, the American left has also not exactly covered itself with glory in its comments upon Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. Almost uniformly, American progressives lined up to criticize Ireland for adopting marriage equality by way of a referendum. The standard trope, “you don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights,” has been quoted now so many times as to become nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché.
For American progressives to complain about the methodology by which Ireland adopted marriage equality comes across not only as parochial, but somewhat culturally imperialistic as well. We Americans should remember that Ireland has a rather different political system from our own. Ireland is not a federation made up of numerous several, sovereign states. Ireland is a unitary Republic, whose 26 counties are merely political subdivisions of the larger body politic. Thus, for Americans to complain about marriage equality coming through a referendum bespeaks a certain ignorance, even a certain condescension. Ireland’s constitution is not amended through ratification by a specified fraction of the 26 Counties of the Republic, but through the uncoerced suffrage of the whole population of the Republic.
So, while I can understand the concern of some American legal analysts that Ireland’s marriage equality referendum might give ammunition to the argument that marriage equality should be decided in the United States by popular vote, the separate political histories of our two countries ought to remind us of how completely different the dynamics really are. Ireland, despite substantial amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa, still remains a largely homogeneous society, a society composed of women and men whose ancestors have usually occupied the Emerald Isle for tens, even scores or hundreds of generations. The same cannot be said of the United States, which is well on its way to becoming a minority-majority society.
And, in many ways, it has been American discomfort over our transition from a white-majority to a minority-majority society that has driven many of the fears and insecurities which in their turn have fueled opposition to marriage equality in this country. Moreover, Ireland, though not without her own traumas and anguish, never had to contend with the original sin of our own American Union, the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery. Because slavery was a constitutionally protected, integral part of the American body politic at the time of our foundation, the ability of American society to integrate minorities, to include the different, to make room at the national table for the Other, has always been somewhat compromised. For us, voting to make a place for the Other at the national table has never been nearly as realistic an option as it has been for the Irish.
For Ireland, the greatest hurdle to be overcome was not a whole series of race-based fears and Freudian foibles, but what had been viewed as the well-nigh insurmountable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as Dublin Abp. Diarmuid Martin observed in the wake of the vote, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland needs “a reality check,” it needs, the archbishop added, to get beyond being “the church of the like-minded.” At all events, it does appear, as has been observed among all the chattering classes, that the days of Ireland being a virtual colony of the Vatican are over.
And if, for Ireland, the original sin of the Republic was its excessive identification as a Catholic society, the expungement of that sin has been accomplished with surprising ease, and with a measure of grace Americans would never have imagined. So, to borrow the words of the late constitutional scholar and novelist Walter F. Murphy, it appears that the Irish, having had the church on their backs for so long, are not prepared to let it get on their consciences any longer. And if the Irish have managed to slough the church off the back of the Irish body politic, they certainly are in advance of this country, where our political obsession with Christian religion has precipitated us onto a headlong flight away from the Enlightenment and back toward the Dark Ages
So, because Ireland’s body politic exhibits so many historic, even DNA-based differences from our own, and because Ireland is no longer nearly so poisoned by ostentatious, politicized religion as are we, American progressives need to stop making themselves look as foolish as their cultural conservative counterparts. The entire world does not function according to American norms, a reality we forget at our peril.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
A DAY OF INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Summary: Memorial Day was once a time for harmless escapism. No more. A decade and a half of unending war half a world away forces us to face a number of inconvenient truths that are either politically, militarily, or socially discomforting. Memorial Day emerged from a great struggle for social justice. Endless war has stretched the army to the point where senior generals worry about breaking the Army. Our maritime pivot to Asia is being starved of resources. Our capacity for civil discourse is diminishing. These are some things to contemplate on Memorial Day. These are the challenges the day calls to address.
Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.
That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.
But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.”
Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.
But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.
Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.
And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.
On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”
Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.
That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.
But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.”
Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.
But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.
Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.
And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.
On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”
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