Defining "American"

            In a letter to the editor of The Ventura County Star for February 15, 2017, Ray Sobrino Jr. of Newbury Park, CA, ended with the admonishment to "remember we are all Americans in the end." I won't argue with the letter or even the sentiment of this clause, but I will reword it to, "we are all Americans if you pull back and take a long-distance view of ourselves" — because close up we see important differences.

            One set of differences is political, and nowadays that's pretty obvious with continuing support for Donald Trump from most of the 46.1% of voters who votedfor him and continuing opposition from many of the 48.2% who voted for Hillary Clinton — and at least some of the nearly 6% of the electorate who voted for someone else and the large number of people who just didn't vote. 

            More important, there are deep and long-stand differences you can analyze in many ways, but my current favorite is Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2014) and the idea that there is no single American nation but either none or up to eleven, depending on how you define "nation."

            Most of us on the territory of the United States are citizens of the American Republic, and we mostly agree on loyalty to the Republic. What holds us together is our agreeing to argue over what the Republic should be, who should be members, and what sort of society we should try to build.

            "We are all Americans" — and then we fight over what that should mean.

Don't Talk Sex or Religion! (Coalition Conversations in the Age of Trump)

To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. […]

To those not having the law I became like one not having the law […],

so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak,

to win the weak. I have become all things to all people

so that by all possible means I might save some.

(St. Paul to the Corinthians [9.20-22])

"I had no need of that hypothesis." — Attributed to

Pierre-Simon Laplace, responding to Napoleon I's

question, "But where is God […]?" in Laplace's

discourse on an issue in astronomy

         A While back — 8 October 2014, to be exact (reposted 19  March 2015) — I blogged a short, relatively moderate rant against Leftist allies who declined to play nice with those with whom they had converging political interests but deep-rooted philosophical disagreements. In that piece I quoted from memory a line from Ursula K. Le Guin's great 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, "You don't have to be kemmerings to haul a sledge" — i.e., you don't have to be bonded lovers to cooperate on a project.

         Indeed! And now in the Age of Trump it is even more the case that we need coalition politics of the responsible Right, Left, and Center to oppose an incipient mass movement of Trump supporters that can move into all the nationalistic authoritarianism threatened by the slogan "America First."

         So I have some unsolicited free advice — worth every cent you pay for it and more — for my potential allies of the atheistic persuasion.

         First, notice that the lines of St. Paul to the Church at Corinth may sound cynical and hypocritical, and from my point of view, they kind-of are. Still, toned down a bit, they are the standard device of rhetorical decorum: fitting one's words to the audience, subject, and general context. And for those of us of the fact-respecting, "reality-based community," there is the relatively simple fact that Paul was an extraordinarily successful propagandist — check the etymology of the word — and Jesus-Movement organizer.

         And to this add such facts as the survey data that religiosity in the US may be decreasing but still remains high and that churches, synagogs, mosques, and such are by definition already organized communities-of-interest that can be used for group action, e.g., sponsoring immigrants or providing highly traditional sanctuary … up to more radical action.

         There's also the fuzzier philosophical "fact" that asking people to give up God sets up a logical chain leading to conclusions such as that the idea of humans' holding any importance in the universe is a product of an infantile "illusion of central position" and that our loves, losses, achievements, wars, and strivings are radically trivial and described more or less accurately as "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as a despairing Macbeth still so poetically puts it.

         Less poetically but more vividly, the mad but philosophically rigorous Marquis de Sade has a pamphlet perused during a pause in the orgy-ing in his Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) entitled "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans," wherein he notes that homicide does not destroy life: kill someone, bury the corpse, wait … wait a bit longer, dig it up and weigh what nowadays is called the biomass. If it is not significantly less than the weight of the murder victim, no life has been destroyed. If you argue that human life is more valuable than that of (I'll modernize here) maggots or putrefactive bacteria — on what grounds? Nature alone gives no greater value to human life than any other, and if we humans think otherwise, it is only our conceit.

         So quick conversions to a rigorously materialist view of things are unlikely, not to mention that your average atheist seems open to challenge to being way, way too comfortable in a non-rigorous materialism.

         What agnostics without a lot of time on their hands for theological disputes, or an atheist can do in political organizing is respond to ultimate questions about God with recycling Laplace and saying, "I don't need that hypothesis" — and then shut up about God-stuff and get to immediate political goals.

         Better, of course, effective atheists could imitate St. Paul and work with the literate in the target religious traditions (and that "literate" bit excludes many people who claim the faith) and couch their arguments in religious terms.

         E.g., the opening of the 24^th Psalm says, "The earth is the LORD'S, and all it contains; / The world, and all who live in it. // For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods." That gives a labor theory of property, and lays the groundwork for theories of social justice developed at some length and high intensity by the Hebrew Prophets and their Jewish, Christian, and Muslim successors.

         Get the point?

         Disagreeing on fundamentals means that eventually religious and secular activists will come to serious practical disagreements. But as anyone who's ever been politically active for more than a few months knows, secular political sorts can get into doctrinal controversies without a hint of God-thought and form circular firing squads with almost the alacrity of religious fanatics gathering the wood to burn heretics.

         If devout Catholics can work with you murderers and damn-ers of the unbaptized unborn, you can work with infantile believers in the Great Spaghetti God with 6^th-c. BCE beliefs about sexuality and the sexes.

         Lovers in bonded-relationships, Earthly kemmerings, should acknowledge, talk over, and work through their differences. Two people hauling a goddamn sledge should just shut up when it comes to important differences until they get the sledge where it needs to go.

         "I don't need that hypothesis" can close the argument on God until nobody needs to worry that large hunks of the Americas and Europe are threatened by Fascists.

Immigrants: Excluded or Melted Down

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.

Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

— Leviticus 19.34 (New International Version)

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me […]" —
"And we'll send 'em right back, we'll send 'em right back,

we'll send 'em right back to you!"

— Quoting from memory, Mad Magazine, 1960s or so,

 and "The Critical Mom" website

            My father's father came to the US a couple steps ahead of the Czar's secret police. He, my grandfather had killed a Cossack. The family story is that my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom. That's our story, and I'm sticking with it, but if my grandfather had waited a couple days to kill the rapist, or had killed the Cossack as a servant of the Czar in an unfortunately premature burst of revolutionary zeal — that would be okay with me.

            The Cossacks are among the groups who suffered under Stalin, and that suffering should be respected, but at the beginning of the 20^th century many Cossacks served the Russian Empire, and for all of my dedication to nonviolence I won't speak badly of killing a Czarist rapist.

            From a US immigration point of view, however, my grandfather was a wanted criminal, and I assume he'd have been stopped at Ellis Island and returned to Russia if he'd given his right name and explained the reasons for his emigration.

            We can be sure my grandfather did not give his full story at Immigration and that far, which is pretty darn far, was an "illegal."

            Alternatively, in terms of interpretation, not facts, he was a refugee from an openly autocratic regime — "Autocrat" was part of the Czar's title — an openly if not always effectively autocratic regime that use pogroms and rape to keep down restive populations, e.g., the Jews.

* * *

            In its edition for 4 February 2017, The Ventura County Star ran an excellent column by Jerry Schwartz, titled and arguing that the "US has [a] long history of barring immigrants," and the 247 words above in black constitute my initial reaction. I ended up e-mailing a different response, since I kind of wanted the headnotes for this one, and because what I wanted to say took more than 250 words.

            There's more to US problems on this issue than Right-wing (usually) exclusion of us undesirables; there are also less deadly but still significant Lefty attitudes toward us "wretched refuse." Now refuse as a noun, the Oxford Learner's Dictionary tells advanced students means "waste material that has been thrown away," and is that sense is almost neutral: many were indeed cast off, "thrown away." However, the Oxford folk inform those advanced students of English that "refuse (noun)" has as synonyms in N. American English "garbage" and "trash" and among the Brits "rubbish."

            So the more progressive sorts sincerely and usually compassionately wanted to de-trashify our late-19^th and early 20^th-century ancestors — and later, too — by getting us to lose them there hyphens ("Irish-American," "Italian-American," "Jewish-American") and assimilate. Note the word: not "integrate" but assimilate, with the image of assimilation the great melting pot, which you should picture.

            It's a nicer image than trash collection — nowadays maybe recycling — but we foreign metals were to be thrown into a pot, subjected to heat sufficient that the metals liquefy, with individuals if not in the physics/chemistry sense definitely in the sociological sense atomized, and these radically individual individuals combined into a complex alloy: American. Except the alloy would be basically Anglo-Saxon WASP, at least in Yankee theory.

            And to a great extent this happened: if not in the first or maybe even second generation, most of the "Unmeltable Ethnics" melted at least a bit, assimilating into one or another of what Colin Woodard counts as "[…] The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. To some extent, the immigrant cultures and individuals changed the surrounding culture, but for the most part we were assimilated to them.

            And this assimilation isn't so bad a thing insofar as a good deal is necessary for a nonBalkanized country, and a fair number of immigrant cultures have aspects we can just as well do without — sexism, for example, some tribalism, disrespect for education — but, then, so do some of our regional cultures (sexism, racism, clannishness, xenophobia, macho violence, privilege, puritanical snobbery, elitism, anti-intellectualism (that stuff).

            Still, the ideal probably should be integration, not assimilation, and the image a well-made quilt, or, to get less artsy-craftsy, chop suey: that great American-Chinese hodge-podge of leftovers to simmer and sell to people who don't know high-class Chinese cuisine.

            Also, assimilation "to a great extent" has not meant total assimilation, and things can get complicated in an area such as "El Norte" in Woodard's dividing up the map: an area covering large parts of south-western US and the north of Mexico. And things can get complicated where different regional cultures, meet and overlap, places where there have been some important recent waves of migration: places where I have lived pretty much my entire life.

            I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana; grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago — where politics were largely ethnic politics — attended college in central Illinois, where the Midwest meets "Greater Appalachia"; spent a year at Cornell University in radically rural Ithaca, NY, living with guys from "The City" of New York; taught for 35 years in S.W. Ohio, in the non-Kentucky area J. D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, but at very much up-scale, largely Roman Catholic Miami University at Oxford, OH (with occasional trips to and gigs at our campuses in Hamilton and Middletown). And I now live in southernmost Ventura County, where Woodard's El Norte meets "The Left Coast," but in a town where more than half the people are not Hispanic but ¡Por Dios Mexicanos y Americanos!, and often here a long time before the gringos showed up.

So: The United States has a very mixed record meeting immigrants and in treating like immigrants or worse people here first — including Native Americans, whom I haven't discussed here, not to mention Africans who didn't immigrate but were kidnapped and enslaved. And this record didn't improve all that much in the 20^th century when our behavior — usually that's "our" in quotation marks, for our predecessors — when "our" behavior was frequently, well, despicable: when we let fear and bigotry over-rule our feelings of compassion and knowledge of basic ethics.

            We can do better. This time around, let us be of good courage, show some decency, and do better.

On US Seal Team 6's killing civilians in the raid on Yemen, 28 January 2017:

         * It was alleged on the National Public Radio Show 1A International, Friday, 3 Feb. 2017, that one or more of the women killed in the fire-fight picked up a weapon and fired back, hence becoming a combatant. The reporter who mentioned that had been embedded with US troops in raids. If the unit he was with had been attacked and he picked up the weapon of a dead combatant, he would become a combatant and could not only be shot in a fire-fight but would be likely to be executed afterward if he were taken prisoner or, if lucky, held as an unauthorized enemy combatant. 

         * The very large context is that holding civilians off-limits for killing is a norm that comes and goes, The point of much medieval raiding was to murder the serfs of an opposing lord, thereby cutting off a source of the enemy lord's income. And it was perfectly proper for much of history to treat as the victor wished the survivors of a town that had resisted, was besieged, and then successfully stormed — to say nothing of the point of a siege of reducing a population to starvation and despair. More recently, the area bombing of World War II was obviously going to kill off a large number of civilians, as was the carpet bombing by the US in Vietnam (etc.). Drones and relatively "smart" munitions are a kind of progress for targeted homicide, except insofar as their greater accuracy is a temptation to use them where just blowing the hell out of someplace with "dumb" munitions would be too obvious a PR loss (not to mention moral issues).

          * One difference between civilian deaths with drone strikes (etc.) under President Obama and with President Donald Trump is that Mr. Trump is on record approving of killing the families of (alleged) terrorists. When a raid occurs where family members are killed, a not-necessarily-correct but legitimate inference is that those who accused Mr. Trump of running a misleading campaign for US President owe him at least one apology: this is a campaign promise he's kept. And those of us who place conscious evil above the banal kind should condemn less the conscious killing of women and children to a casual acceptance of "collateral damage." 
                     (In Dante's Inferno, the "Trimmers" who were neither good nor evil but just for themselves and "blew with the wind" don't make it into Hell proper "For the wicked would have some glory over them" — since the wicked at least chose. The principle applies to those who euphemize killing non-combatants and obfuscate that choosing to drop high explosives in an area with civilians is a decision to kill/risk killing civilians. Also, if you celebrate your side's intentionally killing young men on their side and revel in body-counts, don't get too vocal about unintended killing of old people, women, and children: that's sentimentality, not ethics — or Machiavellian propaganda.)

"Nothing is off the table"

On or about Groundhog's Day, 2017, US President Donald Trump said that in responding to Iran, "Nothing is off the table." As I've pointed out with a similar comment by President Obama, the advantage of such comments are precisely in their ambiguity and imprecision; the disadvantage is in the immorality of precisely such ambiguity and imprecision.

Richard D. Erlich

1007 Arrowhead Drive, Apt. 2A

Oxford, Ohio 45056-2641

513-523-5265 (529-5258)

(ErlichRD@MUOhio.edu)

[Undated but it has to be 2006]

FOR RELEASE: Guest column 538 words

"All options are on the table"

         A much-ignored passage in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four shows Winston Smith and Julia--the protagonists--being asked what they would be willing to do to aid the destruction of a vicious totalitarian state.

         The supposed revolutionary O'Brien asks, "You are prepared to give your lives?"; they answer, "Yes." He raises the stakes, "You are prepared to commit murder? … To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?" "Yes."

         O'Brien goes on to ask if they'd be willing to commit an increasingly vile series of crimes summed up with "to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?"

         They answer "Yes," and O'Brien proceeds to a horrible example. "If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?" They answer "Yes"; given the horror of totalitarian rule, any means that would serve the resistance, they think, would be justified, up to and including throwing sulphuric acid, presumably highly concentrated sulphuric acid, in the face of a child (II.8).

         I'd occasionally cite this passage back in the days of The Movement—the Civil Rights, Anti-War, Black Power, Feminist movements—when people would talk about achieving some worthy goal, "By any means necessary."

         Does "any means" include throwing acid in the face of a child? Acts of terrorism that "may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people"?

         I hoped to discourage talk about "any means necessary" and get people discussing what means, given our worthy goals, might be effective and moral.

         "The end will justify the means," after all, is a statement of faith, "End" implies "outcome, consequences" as well as "goal," and one can never be certain of final outcomes as actions reverberate down the decades.

         People in power who object, correctly, to "by any means necessary" from anti-governmental activists should apply the rule to themselves when they say, "All options are on the table."

         If "All options are on the table" in dealing with Iran's producing atomic weapons, does that mean we're considering thermonuclear warfare against Iran?

         We have the missiles, so the reduction of Teheran to sterile glass is an option. Or perhaps one atomic bomb--or just firebombing Iranian cities with concussion bombs and incendiaries?

         If one responds that such actions are inconceivable, I'd ask that one to talk to the still-surviving survivors of World War II bombings of Rotterdam, London, Stalingrad, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The destruction of cities is conceivable: it was conceived, attempted, and, sometimes, pretty thoroughly accomplished.

         "A Bumper Stick Is Not a Philosophy, Charlie Brown," and we shouldn't demand much of dumb-ass clichés. I will, though, ask Americans to challenge powerful people when they use clichéd threats that are not only dumb-ass but amoral.

         Literally amoral: The great moral obligation is to work through questions of ends and means. It is never ethical to avoid the question by falling back on vague threats like "By any means necessary" or "All options are on the table."

         If you reject as evil the means/option of throwing acid in the face of even one child--however fine your goal--speak out against talk that includes options of killing thousands.

Richard D. Erlich is a retired English professor, currently living in Oxford, OH.