The other night I had a dream that I went to a church and Leonard Cohen was the pastor. Instead of a sermon, he sang “Suzanne” and some people starting singing along and I sang along and got some of the words wrong but getting everything right wasn’t the point. He looked about 50, like when “Hallelujah” came out. And he wore a green suit with a white shirt and green tie. It occurs to me that this dream has a lot to do with the posts here on sustainability (”church in the green”), and that this dream is a working out of what I mean about art not being a means to some didactic, narrated end; about worship or fellowship or reflection or whatever not being a group of people listening to one person talk about something (or many things) for 20 minutes; about the kairos of art and the being of community. I suppose it’s a feel more than anything. I’d like to explain it more, but also, I’d like not to. I would, though, like to dream it again.
Thanks to whoever added this blog to StumbleUpon. I appreciate the love. Funny that I should get a spike from SU the same day our friend Nathan Key posted his half of our double interview where we talked a little about viral lit. Here. My half of of our conversation will be up today or tomorrow.
This will be another short one I sort of think about these things as passtime.
So, is Mark Sanford suited for protecting the liberty of South Carolinians? That’s what I’m interested in. His affair shows bad judgement, but the disappearance shows irresponsibility and is a definite breach of the public trust. Also, the sky is blue.
Sanford said in his press conference that this whole escapade shows that God’s laws are meant to protect us from ourselves. Put it another way if you like: Sanford’s moral compass should have told him that cheating on his wife was wrong, that visiting his mistress over Father’s Day was despicable, that lying about his whereabouts was wrong…in short, his morals could have protected him from putting his office and State in jeopardy (not to mention his family, but here I’m focusing on his public commitments).
Is he ill-suited for protecting the liberty of his people, upholding the State Constitution, and executing the duties entrusted to him? I don’t know, but I do know that looking to politicians as moral examples is almost always a losing game. Sky still blue. And protecting liberty starts with the decisions made by voters. Stop voting for father figures or good speakers or people promising you things. Start voting for people who are telling you the truth about everything they can’t deliver.
That’s not exactly true. I care that no one knew where he was. I care that a state was without their chief executive and that officials couldn’t reach him. I care that he put his state in that kind of jeopardy for something other than a matter of life and death. He could have gone away discreetly. I care that he didn’t make better choices. If I lived in South Carolina, I’d probably be outraged. The fact that Sanford is now a non-starter in 2012 means that I won’t ever have to really care in ways that matter.
He shouldn’t have cheated on his wife. As a human being with moral agency, sure, I care about that in a sense. But not in the usual bloviating way of the politicos.
I said a few days ago that we should seek an end to values-voting if by values we mean anything other than the things that inform our commitments to liberty. That doesn’t mean I’m hoping for a polis of amoral libertarians. On the contrary, I think if we make the pursuit of liberty the common goal of our politics we’ll have a richer discussion about the genealogy of ethics in free moral agents and a better understanding of why freedom is our birthright and how we can best protect it. There are reasons for this that I’ll get into later. I spent too long fixing this blog’s CSS tonight.
I didn’t end up going to the Quaker meeting like I thought I might. I did read up on Quakerism, though, and am convinced that these were the first postmodern Christians. Really, everything they’ve been doing for centuries is what emerging church people are trying to do now. The Religious Society of Friends seems to have a spiritual ethos pretty close to mine, but I’m not a strict pacifist. I understand why most (in theory, all?) Quakers are, and I understand that there are many kinds of Quakers and that there’s a large diversity within Quakerism. I also know that I’d take up arms to fight if I felt like my children were being threatened. Compulsion by the state wouldn’t be enough, but feeling a need to protect my family or to protect certain things I value would. Quakers, how welcome is that kind of sentiment in your circles? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
I’m bored with the limited template options on wordpress.com. Any suggestions? I could self-host through wordpress.org, which I’ve done before and liked.
is it just my blog or is the whole system off today? My layout is totally messed up.
Some new material I’m kicking around that will be up here next week:
-The End of Values Voting: please, let freedom and liberty be the values that inform your voting. Yes, questions like “freedom for who? liberty from what? ” mean that we’ll need to employ other values to get to political decisions, but can we stop voting for people because they seem like they share our social values in broader strokes? I also happen to think that Mark Sanford’s press conference was one of the more apolitical political affairs I’ve ever seen.
-Churches in the Green, pt. 3: this will be about art as spiritual fellowship/mystic experience/grounding for common life
-Quaker meeting: I think I’m going to a Quaker meeting this week. If I do, I’ll probably write about it here. That’s not the point of going, though.
Also, I’ll have an interview with our friend Nathan Key here soon. We’re interviewing each other for our respective blogs, something I’m really looking forward to.
Editors on Wikipedia have broken down the Chatham House findings nicely:
According to a scientific analysis by Professor Walter R. Mebane, Jr., from Department of Statistics of University of Michigan, considering data from the first stage of the 2005 presidential election produces results that “give moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud”.[19] This notion is also supported by the NGO UK-based thinktank Chatham House for a number of reasons:[20]
- More than 100% : In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.
- No swing : At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased turnout, and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that his victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent Conservative majority.
- Reformist votes: In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, and all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also took up to 44% of former Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.
- Rural votes: In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces in 2009 flies in the face of these trends.
You may have seen my open note to Barack Obama a few posts ago. This question of Iranian sovereignty has deep implications for free people and for people who understand why freedom is worth wanting.
I suggested that Obama’s wording around “respecting Iranian sovereignty” does more harm than good in the present crisis in this sense: by grounding a refusal to become involved in the struggle on respect for “Iranian sovereignty”, he’s sending the message that the current regime’s understanding of sovereignty is intelligible and morally equivalent to the sovereignty of free nations. Clearly, it is not. Yes, Iran is sovereign in the real politik sense and in the classic sense: the regime is a free actor and is not a client nation in suzerain relationship with a greater hegemony. But is this really what we mean by sovereignty? Is this what a century of sham governments, right and left wing juntas, appeasements, world wars, atomic bombs, cold wars, containment, police actions, terrorist wars, regime changes and blatantly stolen elections has done to the word?
The best of Western political philosophy (and yes, I will show preference here because I think classic liberalism rightly understood is the most viable course for peaceful living in a pluralistic, global community) has always maintained that sovereignty comes from the ground up. People, are sovereign, not regimes. Not even perfectly democratic regimes. Who, by God, is sovereign in Iran? What claim to sovereignty does any government have if that government isn’t constantly checked by the consent of the governed?
Who is sovereign in Iran? Who is Iran? The answer in both cases is the same. The people, not the regime. But when world leaders speak of respecting “Iran’s sovereignty”, what they really mean is respecting the right of the current system to rule, a right not checked by fair and free elections or free expression, the right to assemble, or a free press. That is, quite frankly, outrageous.
Imperfect as the American system is and other Western systems are, Barack Obama was elected precisely because we have these checks. You hated Bill Clinton? Fine. You got George W. Bush. You hated George W. Bush? Fine, you got Barack Obama. You hate them all? Scream it from the rooftop. Convince your friends and neighbors. You hate the mullahs and Ahmadinejad? Tough fucking shit.
Respecting Iranian sovereignty is about respecting Iran’s people (including the people the regime is oppressing), not the right of the regime to rule without popular consent.
I’m not suggesting that any government or corporation or coalition of nations should take the electoral crisis in Iran as an opportunity to impose their own version of democracy on the ground. That would be an unmitigated disaster and an illegitimate use of power by the international community. Still, there are ways to show support, to instill hope, to inspire change and to strengthen the weary, and the best of these will come from people, not from governments. If you don’t believe me, sign up for Twitter. But the formal non-involvement of Western nations ought not be predicated on respect for the current regime’s sham government, but rather on a keen awareness of the way state-sponsored foreign involvement has hurt Iran at every turn for over a century.
There are ways to support the democrats in Iran. So far, millions of ordinary people on social networking platforms around the world have been better at finding them than have our governments. That’s why we, and not the regimes that govern with our anxious permission, are sovereign. We are the people. We are the state. We are the media. We are the open-source, real-time locus of all political power. Tyrants, tread lightly.
