REPRINT: Why There Aren't More Black Republicans, 2 of 3

This blog post is reprinted from one I wrote on sodahead.com under the name CarbonMike (link to original here).

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In Part One of this post, I started to address the issue of why there aren't more black Republicans, despite the fact that black people (especially poor and working-class black people) are a natural constituency for a party which has staked out family-values, socially conservative, church-on-Sunday territory in the American political landscape. For students of American history, Republicans are also the titular party of Abraham Lincoln -- not a minor thing to an ethnic group that used to be traded as chattel slaves, you might think.

What makes the picture even more puzzling is that the black demographic in question has witnessed firsthand the failures of liberal social policy of the last four decades or so (and if we liberals want to be seen as serious and intellectually honest, we have to admit that there have been failures and that they've happened partly on our watch). Version 1.0 of institutions like public housing and direct financial assistance to poor people fulfilled some of their intended functions, but failed at others, and while the intent may have been noble, the implementation in many cases had socially destructive effects. And as a resident of New York State, I don't even want to get started on the so-called Rockefeller drug laws -- conceived by a senator with a (D) after his name --
which after a couple of decades on the books we're finally, belatedly starting to dismantle. Poor and working-class people of color have been disproportionately
affected by all of the above.

So what's the problem? Why can't Republicans "enlarge the tent" and attract more people from the demographics that should already be with them?

Reason One that I cited was: Republicans are wrong on race, specifically (though not exclusively) with respect to black people.

Reason Two involves something a bit harder to nail down concretely: the concept of fairness: Poor, working class, and even many upwardly-mobile people of color tend not to trust Republicans because they believe that they don't apply their own political philosophy (and therefore cannot be trusted to govern) fairly and consistently.

This has almost nothing to do with political corruption, which afflicts both parties (correcting for the rise and fall of their fortunes) more or less equally. So conservatives please note: this is not a "Republicans are corrupt" argument, which would be unfair and even a bit silly.

Unfairness is also not the same as being "tough" on people (I'm looking at you, Ronald Reagan). The populations I've mentioned don't have a big problem with toughness, at least in part because they're accustomed to the fact that life is tough; that there are many chances to screw up; and that the consequences for same are often harsh. This is especially true of recent immigrants from the developing world.

I think the POC who make up the working poor, immigrants and their children, and the upwardly mobile working class can live with toughness. What they can't live with is the idea that the core values of conservatives/Republicans, specifically in the areas of criminal justice and economic and social policy, are too fluid to be trusted; that they are provisional values contingent on things like race or social class.

For example: In the middle of the healthcare reform debate, you had any number of conservatives -- on television, in print media, and especially in online forums like this one -- shouting (literally) at the top of their lungs that healthcare reform (especially if it included a public option) was a terrible idea because (say it with me) Government Can't Do Anything Right.

Now while that debate was in progress, we had an incident in Massachusetts involving a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, in which a government agent entered his house on a valid suspicion -- but, having ascertained that it was in fact his house and the suspicion was therefore invalid, arrested him anyway because he didn't like his tone of voice.

Many of the exact same conservatives whose voices were still hoarse from screaming that government could do no right, immediately started screaming that government could do no wrong -- as long as it was wearing a police badge and a sidearm. There were hysterical condemnations of President Obama -- even though he praised the initial police response and the phone call that led to it! -- for uttering the obvious truth that it's stupid to arrest a man for disturbing the peace in his own house.

This is not limited to the Gates affair. Look at discussion of any police-on-civilian incident involving the allegation of excessive force, and you'll find that political conservatives, in the overwhelming majority of cases, come down on decisively -- even vehemently -- on the side of the police. Putting aside for a moment the merits of any particular case, siding with municipal government agents by default is a morally inconsistent position to take if your default position is that government can't do anything right.

Political conservatives are also usually (sometimes vehemently) pro-death-penalty. Without getting into a rhetorical war about the pros and cons of the death penalty (please let's not, guys), you can see where I'm going with this: if you don't trust government to run health clinics and give out free cheese to people, why would you trust it to administer a system of capital punishment?

Going back to President Obama: here you have a president who's embarked on a number of very ambitious policies. There are perfectly good conservative reasons to object to any number of them, and doing so in a thoughtful and reasoned way (listen up, conservatives) absolutely does not make you a racist, or a hatemonger, or crazy, or any other objectionable thing.

But if you're labeling him a totalitarian -- if you're calling him a Stalinist, to use a very common epithet on the right these days -- you have zero credibility if you were silent (as most American conservatives were) while the previous president was doing all the things to people that Stalin actually used to do: torture, extrajudicial kidnapping on home soil, trials based on secret evidence, and so on. Again, the point here isn't whether those acts were justified or not; that's a different discussion. The question is, how can you have been in favor of torture, warrantless surveillance, and the suspension of habeas corpus -- yet believe that doctors for poor people are a dagger aimed at the heart of the republic?

To me, true conservatism is about modesty -- that is to say, true conservatives believe that we should be modest in our attempts to effect the change we want through government power, because of the corrupting nature of all power (Google "Lord Acton"). Conservatism says that we should distrust our own well-meaning impulse to use government to prevent all unpleasant outcomes. The conservative mode of thought embraces a kind of detached skepticism and a tough-minded acceptance of human nature as its core values, and those are healthy and important values for any free society to have.

But conservative skepticism should be fairly applied to all the enterprises of government, not just the ones which might benefit the undeserving, and not just the ones which happen to benefit low-income people of color. Appearances matter. Republican political inconsistency, played out in the public media every day, is not lost on poor black people, recent immigrants, the aspirants to higher classes. People who already have wealth and power don't care if the system isn't fair, no matter what color they are, because (1) they've obviously already overcome the existing barriers, and (2) their wealth constitutes a form of ongoing protection. Poor and working-class white people don't worry as much about the fairness of conservative governance (even though they probably should, at least occasionally) because conservative politicians are very vocal about their identification with, and preference for, that ethno-social-economic group.

People of color on the bottom and middle tiers of this economy, by contrast, need to believe that they've got a shot at the brass ring. They don't mind having to work hard to attain it; they just need to know that they (and more importantly their children) won't get slapped down because they reach for it. Appearances matter. In the American political landscape, who appears to speak for them, and who against?


Concluded in Part 3, thanks for sticking around so far...

REPRINT: Why There Aren't More Black Republicans, 1 of 3

This blog post is reprinted from one I wrote on sodahead.com under the name CarbonMike (link to original here).

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I'm a pro-gun, pro-markets, pro-growth liberal who comes wrapped in a black skin. I also believe America is best served by having a serious and vibrant conservative movement as well as a serious and equally vibrant liberal tradition. But lately I've noticed that conservatives -- not all of them, but too many of their leading figures -- have been indulging in an awful lot of foolishness at the expense of serious, informed, rational dissent. At the same time, their political fortunes seem to be in decline (the changing demographic map is not in their favor, not to mention the disaster of the last eight years) and a question I hear often from mainstream conservative strategists is, how can we expand the party -- or more to the point, why can't we seem to?

Well, why can't they? Why aren't there more black Republicans/conservatives?

Some of my fellow African-American politics junkies probably remember the GOP's periodic "racial listening tours" (a term which is exactly two-thirds correct), an unintentionally funny exercise in which Republicans roam the highways and byways of our great nation asking why they can't seem to capture the black vote. Sometimes an obligatory black person is trotted out as if to demonstrate good faith, illustrating complete ignorance of the fact that it demonstrates just the opposite. I'm looking at you, Michael Steele.

The question itself is a testament to the almost pathological tone-deafness of many conservatives when it comes to black politics. Who would ever dare to field a candidate in Florida who was wrong on Cuba, or a candidate in New York who was wrong on Israel, or one in any Southern state who was wrong on guns? Not only would that person's defeat be a foregone conclusion, but once the electoral carnage had ceased, the operative question would be not "why did that person lose?" but "what ever made you think they could win?"

Yet the leaders and thinkers of the Republican party seem mystified that black people don't flock to the genius of its economic ideas and socially conservative ways. Why Are They Not Conservatives? Because conservatives are usually wrong on race.

Not just wrong in a speakers-making-occasional-gaffes sort of way. The GOP has gone out of its way ever since the Dixiecrat Flip to be consistently, aggressively wrong on race, every chance it gets. Its leaders can't seem to help themselves: Trent Lott and his CCC/Southern Partisan affiliation, not to mention his rhetorical appreciation of Strom Thurmond's brilliant segregationist ideas. Ronald Reagan slyly referring to "states' rights" in Mississippi. Lee Atwater's racially infused campaign propaganda (talk about victimology!) George Bush Jr. going out of his way to speak at segregationist Bob Jones university (which, by the way, was granted tax-exempt status by the Reagan administration). The countless Republican politicians and lesser operatives who feel compelled to make racial slurs about President Obama and his family.

Wrong, as well, in a hypocritical and cynical way. Conservatives -- and even many liberals -- take great pains to brand public figures of color who speak intemperately on the subject of race as being beyond the frontiers of civilized debate. Yet you can easily name any number of white conservatives who have made ethnically insulting, racially inflammatory, or downright racist statements -- loudly and in public -- and have not only avoided censure, but have continued to be accepted in mainstream political discourse. To my white brothers reading this: please don't pretend not to know what I'm talking about. I personally (along with most black people I know) have no special use for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but if neither one of those names can be mentioned without the accompanying phrase "racial demagogue" then someone needs to explain why Pat Buchanan is a talking-head show regular and Rush Limbaugh seems to have veto power over any public statement made by any Republican anywhere.

The irony here is that many black voters don't have any illusion that the Democratic party somehow automatically has their best interests at heart. Talk to young black urban professionals in my demographic -- who vote overwhelmingly Democratic -- and you'll have no problem getting them to admit that certain major elements of liberal social policy over the last few decades have failed, and failed badly. Those of use who love urban life and traditions understand, for example, that Jane Jacobs' The Death And Life of Great American Cities was -- intentionally or otherwise -- as much an indictment of liberal/Democratic public housing policies as it was a broadside against Robert Moses.

Conservatives really don't understand this, or at least behave as if they don't. You go talk to working-class black people of my parents' generation about, say, Clinton's welfare reform policies and most of them will say they didn't go far enough. Talk to black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods and you'll find that they're absolutely livid about crime -- on criminal justice issues, many of them are slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. Yet you can't get either group to touch the Republican party with a ten-foot pole.

Shouldn't conservatives be interested in attracting more of what seems to be a natural constituency for them? Sure they should be. Maybe they are. But the electoral numbers say that that's not enough. Black voters often resent being taken for granted by Democrats, but we prefer it to being treated with outright contempt by Republicans.

Safety Dance Part 2

Sometimes it's hard being a liberal. Hard, that is, when you have to watch other liberals miss all the really important parts of the argument or, worse yet, fail to frame the argument effectively in the first place.

If I hear one more fellow liberal talk about "how America is perceived in the world" as a primary reason not to torture people I think I'm going to jump through the television.

Joan Walsh from salon.com made this argument a while ago on Hardball, and she stuck in my mind because she sounded so lame doing it.

When people on the left argue this point, they often employ the following arguments:

(1) torture diminishes our moral standing and/or makes people hate us;
(2) torture never works.

The first argument is a trap, while the second breaks a good point -- that torture does not work reliably -- by pushing it too far.

Let's take the first: talk to a security-minded (read: scared) conservative, or even a liberal security hawk, and he or she will say -- correctly -- that moral standing is not even of secondary importance in a war, and that all sorts of atrocious things happen in wars. The firebombing of Dresden may even come up.

Now you could counter, correctly, that in a counterinsurgency war a lot of factors are more important than body count, and that public opinion is one of them, but now you're back to playing defense. Essentially, adopting this argument puts you in the position of arguing in favor of opinions rather than outcomes -- never a winning strategy in a national security debate. Not to mention that a smart conservative could gum up the works by pointing out that most of the governments running around torturing Muslims are also run by Muslims.

The second argument -- that torture never works -- goes too far because it's reasonable to assume that some non-zero percentage of the time, some guilty person will be detained and will go on to make a genuine confession or render useful information under duress. Insisting that can never happen makes us sound like we're repeating a slogan rather than cold-bloodedly analyzing reality.

When liberals talk about torture, they need to remember that they're framing an argument against an opponent who is playing to fear. So our arguments need to be about professionalism and problem-solving first, rather than moral standing.

My ideal talking point would be something like

-The name of the game is counterterrorism/counterinsurgency, and CT/CI is a zero-sum game at best. Every time you have to have an agent pick up a phone or jump in a car or do a Google search to run down some bullshit lead from a detainee who lied to get the pain to stop, you have an asset you're not fielding against the enemy, who now enjoys an additional degree of freedom against you. That's a losing strategy, and I'd actually like us to win this one if it's alright with you. So let's have the interrogating done by professionals rather than closet sadists, so we can win this one and move on.

Since a popular jumping-off point for this debate is the "ticking bomb" argument that Alan Dershowitz and others are so fond of, the following argument is also handy:

-Ticking bomb is fine if you're lucky enough to get the right guy, lucky enough to get him at the right time, and lucky enough that he breaks and tells you the truth in time; but all the other times you torture the wrong guy (or the guilty detainee lies to you) you're just running down the clock on your own side. Do you want a counterterrorism strategy based on luck, or based on science and empirical evidence?

Liberals need to flip and reframe this thing -- we should be referring to the "ticking bomb argument" as "the luck argument". Next time you're arguing the point with a torture apologist and he mentions the ticking bomb, you say "ahh, the luck argument! That's fine; you want to keep America safe with luck. I want to keep America safe using science and evidence and ruthless professionalism. But good luck with the luck thing."

This condenses very nicely down to "luck is not a security policy."

The reason I'm woofing on about how to argue a point which really shouldn't even need arguing is because this struggle -- war on extremism, overseas contingency operation, G-SAVE, whatever -- really is going to be a long game, and it's inevitable that we'll take some hits. Our enemies can't defeat us directly, but they can cause us to engage in self-defeating behavior. If the next terrorist attack sends us into some nightmare revenge spiral of secret detentions and internment camps and torture and who knows what else, the Al-Qaedas of the world will have accomplished their objective, which is to destroy American civilization. They made some headway under the Bush administration, so those of us who love our country with our eyes open have to win the argument decisively. The torture apologists need to be not just defeated, but utterly discredited, and the precedent needs to be neutralized, in order protect our most precious common posession: the structure and function of American civil society.

Safety Dance Part 1

It's been a bad patch for the GOP, but there's still some good news to be had. Republicans have finally found something they trust government to do correctly and well: torture and secret imprisonment.

Pretty amazing, when you think about it. Talk to any ten Republicans about, say, universal healthcare. At least nine of them will give a little involuntary shudder and say that your health is waaay too important to entrust to the government, which obviously Can't Do Anything Right.

Mention more aggressive emissions or fuel efficiency standards, and chances are the response will echo what Mike Huckabee said to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart when he raised the issue: "do you really want to drive a car designed by the government?"

Pick any service or activity: food aid for poor people. Civil infrastructure. Education. Wildlife preservation. Regulation of financial markets or power companies or the factories that feed the country. Regulation of anything at all. The provision of any service to anyone whose name does not end in Inc. You're sure to hear the same refrain: the government is guaranteed to screw it up. The old conservative paragon himself, Ronald Reagan, was often heard to say that the scariest words in the English language are

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Imagine the horror of the modern conservative, living in a society with such an extensive (if poorly maintained) physical and social infrastructure, complete with safety nets for the poor and the aged. A nightmare from which he struggles to awaken! Worse, actually, now that Barack Obama is president. You only have to witness his treatment of the wretched hedge fund managers of the earth to know that the man is a Socialist/Communist/Stalinist/Godknowswhatist. Doesn't he know that government Can't Do Anything Right? From Jon Voight to John Boehner, the political right is scared to death of what such a man could do.

Thankfully, there's a phrase coined by the previous administration which is the antidote to the fear:

"I'm from the government, and I can arrest people arbitrarily, detain them indefinitely, and torture them with impunity".

When conservatives hear that phrase, it doesn't strike them as the scariest in the English language. Apparently it doesn't even rate in the top ten.

When conservatives hear that phrase, it makes them feel...safe.

When Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama's presidential campaign, it
seemed to lend weight to at least a few of the favorable comparisons
between Barack Obama and JFK: both (so the narrative goes) intelligent,
charismatic, and hardworking political operators. The sentiment was
expressed in some quarters that Sen. Obama seemed a natural heir to
the Kennedy legacy. People even credited Barack Obama with having
something of Bobby Kennedy's political style. Seeing either one of
them work a crowd (no matter what you thought about their politics),
you might think: "this guy has a way with people".

Then again, if you were Geraldine Ferraro, you might not think
anything of the sort. What you might think is that Barack Obama would
never merit such a comparison, much less such an endorsement, if he
weren't lucky enough to be black.

It's not that Ms. Ferraro is racist; far from it. Some of her friend's
best friends are black. Ms. Ferraro just understands, perhaps better
than most, that a white man with as much intelligence and political
skill as Mr. Obama could never, ever hope to secure the Democratic
nomination; only with absolutely no charisma would the white guy ever
get the nod. And even then, he'd have to be somewhat ethnic. Maybe
Greek. Then he'd have a shot. Ms. Ferraro, of course, would be happy
to share that ticket, if such a crazy thing had a chance in hell of
happening.

And what are we to think of the Hillary Clinton who in 2000 beat Rick
Lazio in the contest for Pat Moynihan's empty seat in the U.S. Senate?
By some accounts it was a close race and a hard-won victory (she got
55% of the vote) against an adversary who had spent more time as an
elected official than she. (This is also true of Senator Obama, talking
points about "experience" notwithstanding.) It was said in some quarters
that she came off quite well in the debates against Mr. Lazio. There were even
rumors that she had campaigned quite aggressively and skillfully in the
suburban and rural areas of New York State.

If you were Geraldine Ferraro, however, all this talk about hard work and
political skill would be just so much noise to you. In fact, as
politically incorrect as it might be, you couldn't help but conclude
that the Clinton victory never would have happened if she weren't
lucky enough not to have a penis.

Or not. Here is where Gerry starts to deviate from her own logic. You see,
Ms. Ferraro would probably tell you that Sen. Rodham
Sen. Clinton Sen. Rodham Clinton, far from
being a tough political streetfighter with deep pockets and name
recognition, is actually the victim here. She's worked very hard for
everything she's achieved independently since some guy she happened to have married
(what was his name? Will? Phil?) got some high-profile job or other in
Washington. The sexist media, on the other hand, has downplayed not
only the resounding success of her healthcare plan but also her many 3A.M.
foreign policy achievements -- in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, not
to mention Northern Ireland -- choosing instead to sing the praises of some black
guy who was never part of a scandal-plagued, polarizing White House.

It's clear: America's media establishment hates white guys and women.

The bias is obvious and unmistakable: on the rare occasion in this
country when a white male manages to break through the glass ceiling
and become President, he often finds himself crippled by a storm of
anti-white-guy media coverage. In recent memory there was one white
President whose rationale for starting a war was endlessly questioned,
analyzed, second-guessed, and subjected to withering scrutiny to the
point where, if memory serves, he got so pissed off he choked on a
pretzel.* Shame on you, Judith Miller! (You're lucky you don't have a
penis.)

On sexism the media's record is just as shameful. Rather than focus on
the battle-hardened Senator Clinton's "experience"
while she was married to whatshisface, this country's media outlets
are fawning over a "black" man (no more black, according to some, than
the elusive and seldom-seen Mr. Clinton) who, with the invisible aid
of a vast right-wing reverse-racist sexist conspiracy, gave her a
thorough asswhipping in eleven straight primary contests and is ahead
in the delegate count. Shame on you, democratic process!

After careful study, the elegance and simplicity of Ferraro Logic
reveals itself thus: being an ethnic minority in a country with a
painful legacy of slavery and segregation is a breeze, there's
essentially no downside. Being a white man or a woman, on the other
hand, is really difficult; lacking both melanin and a penis, Senator
Clinton is really in a bad way. Sympathy is definitely in order;
perhaps some tears too, as I hear the senator has used up her yearly
quota. Some wit might be thoughtless enough to suggest that, while
there's nothing for the melanin problem, she could simply confiscate
her husband's penis, thereby forcing him to do his thinking with his brain. (I
couldn't possibly comment.)

In any case, this is less about the Clinton dynasty ("nasty" being the
operative syllable) than it is about our friend Geraldine. I applaud
Ms. Ferraro for her independence and her courage. So many of us are
silenced, in our daily lives, by the fear of looking like a complete
fool; to see someone who is undeterred by it is an inspiration.






* The chronology of the events in question does not jibe with reality.
The pretzel incident actually occurred before the start of the Iraq War.
Sense7 regrets the error, and fuck you if you can't take a joke.

Sudan's Government and its Critics

By now most readers are aware of the latest outrage from Sudan's government (which seems to have an infinite supply of them): the arrest and imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher, on charges of "inciting racial hatred" and "insulting Islam". She apparently allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, and that, to a government actively supporting genocide within its own borders, rates as a Serious Crime.

There have even been protests in the streets of Khartoum calling for a harsher sentence than the one that was handed down for this supposed insult to Islam's prophet Muhammad (some wag somewhere has probably already accused Ms. Gibbons of insulting bears, but I digress). I'm curious as to how organic and "grassroots" such street protests really are, the memory of the engineered frenzy over the Danish cartoons being fresh in my mind -- but that's another matter.

To point out how degraded and morally bankrupt this government is would be to belabor the obvious. And in any case much of the best writing about this sort of beahvior on the part of a state -- the sublime, almost surreal ridiculousness with a rich undercurrent of menace and violence -- has been done. You'd have to go back to Soviet-era dissident literature to find it, but it's there.

You can see here some of what Christopher Hitchens is talking about when he refutes the argument that all the 20th century's bloodiest regimes were secular ones: any government will behave like a gang of bloodthirsty religious fanatics if it breathes enough of its own exhaust without having the good grace to asphyxiate. You could tweak some names and transplant this episode to Khrushchev's Russia or Kim Jung Il's North Korea or Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan, and it would be just as believable, just as true to form -- because at their core, Sudan's government and these others are the same damn thing.

But all this is peripheral to the most interesting and illuminating bits of this story, which, it turns out, are in the debate itself.

Those on the left who don't understand what multiculturalism actually is, have offered up their customary threadbare apologia for the Sudanese government. Those on the right who have the same problem are ready to point out how barbaric "they" are, as if people and their political leaders are the same thing. Nothing new there. But even among those who appear to be coming down on the "right" side of this issue -- witness the anger and disgust expressed by many members of the Muslim blogging community -- people seem to have missed the point.

Some have pointed out that Ms. Gibbons didn't name the teddy bear herself, but merely allowed her students to do it (notice how even relating the episode makes one sound faintly absurd). This is correct, but completely beside the point. It implies that a crime really was committed, but they just arrested the wrong person. Perhaps the children should be brought up on charges?

Others, most notably Britain's Foreign Secretary, have said that Ms. Gibbons is only guilty of having made an error, and did not insult the prophet Muhammad on purpose. This, while probably also true, is likewise irrelevant, not to mention somewhat self-negating. Do we now believe that schoolteachers or anyone else should be arrested and imprisoned, flogged, or shot dead if they insult or offend someone's religion on purpose? By way of answering, some vintage Hitchens (in the aftermath of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons):

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Which brings me to the assertion from still other of Ms. Gibbons' defenders that this was a "cultural misunderstanding". The implication here is that if only we Westerners would study harder and mind our words and actions better, we could display the appropriate level of sensitivity and avoid unfortunate incidents like the one that befell Ms. Gibbons. (Note that this apparent defense of Ms. Gibbons, like the two previous ones, is mounted mostly by people on the political left.)

My response is that, as liberals, there is nothing left for us to understand about any rejection of universal humanity in favor of scriptural adherence or doctrinal purity -- beyond the basic realization that this is our enemy. Far from needing to be better understood, whatever is decent and just and humane in Islamic cultures around the world needs to be better defended -- from the people who always claim to be defending Islam. This latest spasm of grotesque and cynical behavior from a grotesque and cynical government may seem like a small matter -- it looks as if Ms. Gibbons will be detained for a short while and then deported -- but it points us toward the largest and most essential questions we've seen so far in this young and already troubled century.

The most important question we're faced with whenever something like this happens is not "what to do?" because there isn't always something we can do. Nor is the question "what is the law?" because lawmakers can be damn fools and often are. Anyone with a conscience knows, for example, that torture and arbitrary imprisonment are wrong no matter what damn foolishness they send up from Congress for the President to sign.

The most important question here is "what is compatible with civilization and what is not?"

I don't believe there's anything inherent in Islamic scripture that makes it any more or less bloodthirsty than, say, Judeo-Christian scripture; those who do are letting their bigotry show, not to mention plain wrong. But if we look at the world as it is, we have to admit to ourselves that something terrible is happening in, and to, the global Islamic community. The Gibbons case in Sudan is one manifestation of this. Hitchens calls it a civil war within Islam, and I think he's right. The question of how that war should be prosecuted is wide open. The question of what side we in the West are on, and who we want to win, should not be.

Back in the Saddle

It's been a long hiatus for your friendly neighborhood troublemaker. Real estate troubles (I Heart New York!) forced a series of retrenchments, holding actions, half-pincer movements, and all other types of shit. Long story short, I'm almost back to a stable business/living situation now (I'm oscillating like an electron between Greenpoint and Bed-Stuy), so it's time to resume my bloggery. (Hmmm -- that last coinage sounds vaguely unwholesome.)

To my loyal readers, I'd like to apologize for the long dry peiod. How have the two of you been?

YZ