Cheney’s Chutzpa

Dick Cheney's credibility has more holes in it than a Russian submarine. The former vice-president was a central figure in what is widely acknowledged as the most incompetent administration in modern American history. Yet, the man who once shot his hunting partner in the face has the temerity to launch a fusillade against the Obama administration for supposedly ducking the "war on terror" metaphor.

Cheney's latest broadside follows on the heels of an unsuccessful al-Qaeda plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas, which follows on the heels of the Fort Hood Massacre where a disturbed U.S. Army psychiatrist (who happened to be Muslim) opened fire on his fellow soldiers.

Both incidents, in fact, were carried out by devout Muslims who could best be characterized as unmarried social misfits deeply opposed to America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Major Hasan both illustrate the unconventional nature of the jihadist threat. Neither man was following orders as a part of a formal hierarchical organization. Rather, each was inspired by al-Qaeda's ideology to initiate attacks of their own choosing. Hasan and Abduulmutallab may have received "spiritual guidance" which reinforced their impulses to unleash terrorist violence against "infidels." However, the clerics that recruit, counsel, and radicalize lost souls like these probably do not dirty their hands by planning or coordinating specific acts of terrorism.

Al-Qaeda is arguably the ultimate "virtual community," a collection of loosely affiliated groups and cells comprised of career criminals, paramilitaries, religious zealots, and loner terrorist wannabes.

Osama bin Laden is a charismatic figurehead who is the spiritual locus of al-Qaeda, but he largely irrelevant from an operational or managerial point of view. The Bush administration claimed that bin Laden had been neutralized because he could not plan or conduct operations. This view is self-serving and erroneous. Simply put, nothing would deflate al-Qaeda more than the death or capture of their charismatic spiritual leader, who has supposedly evaded U.S. forces thanks to Allah's protection.

The failure to kill or capture bin Laden at Tora Bora (U.S. resources were being diverted to Iraq at the time) must rank very high on the list of the Bush administration's missed opportunities. Killing bin Laden would not have ended terrorism as a technique, but it could have delivered a knockout blow to al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration instigated one of the greatest strategic blunders in military history when it invaded Iraq. Toppling Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the first step in a wave of democratization that would sweep and transform the Middle East. Instead, the misguided and mismanaged Iraq War became a recruitment tool that radicalized an entire generation of Muslims.

The Islamic extremists that are plotting to blow up airliners and attack Western targets are convinced that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam. Bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration regarding the "war on terror" proved to be self-defeating because it reinforced al-Qaeda's deluded ideology, which paints the Muslim world as the victim of America's imperial aggression. The Obama administration is right in downplaying such rhetoric because the struggle against Islamic extremism is an ideological struggle to convince ordinary Muslims that America is on the side of human dignity and social justice.

America won the Cold War against the Soviet Union because it contained Communism and won the ideological battle for hearts and minds of mankind. At the height of the Cold War, however, there were those on the extreme right who insisted that the only way to defeat Communism was to launch a pre-emptive nuclear war against the "Evil Empire." Recently, right-wing extremists like Dick Cheney took America down a path that included pre-emptive war, torture, and other Constitutional abuses. As a result, America's reputation sank and the country nearly drowned in a financial crisis caused in no small measure by the failed economic policies of the Bush/Cheney administration. Dick Cheney's credibility on national security matters is unsalvageable.

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Barack Obama’s Half a Loaf

Barack Obama is drawing the ire of both the far right and the reflexive left. This is probably a sign the president is governing well.

The historian Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations had life cycles. In Toynbee's view, societies pass through the phases of youthful vitality, vigorous middle age, and senescent rigidity. The intellectual bankruptcy, paranoia, and inflexible crankiness that characterize today's conservative movement would seem to exemplify the social dementia Toynbee believed afflicted societies entering their terminal phases.

Thankfully, the conservative movement has been largely marginalized following the disastrous reign of the epically incompetent Bush administration. Solving America's formidable domestic and foreign policy challenges will require flexibility, creativity, and pragmatism, qualities that are in short supply among conservatives.

The far left, however, can be every bit as obtuse as the far right. For example, President Obama has taken heat from the left for his supposed failure to end America's involvement in Afghanistan and for supposedly getting rolled into supporting a flawed healthcare bill. In fact, Obama made a sound decision on Afghanistan. And the Democratic health reform bill represents a real social achievement in that it establishes the principle that all Americans are entitled to decent healthcare.

Regarding Afghanistan, the president's critics fail to understand that ending America's involvement prematurely would pose intolerable risks. To begin with, quitting Afghanistan with an ascendant Taliban would almost certainly consign the country to civil war, which would destabilize Pakistan (a country with nuclear weapons). Further, Islamic extremists would interpret America's withdrawal as a victory over a weakened superpower, a narrative that would embolden jihadists worldwide.

Exiting Afghanistan on America's terms is imperative. Sending additional U.S. troops is not an ideal option, but it is the least bad of truly terrible options. Likewise, the Democratic healthcare bill is terribly flawed, but it may be the best reform that a broken political system is capable of generating at the moment. Critics on the left (like Howard Dean) who insisted that it would be better to vote against the bill and start over, are oblivious to consequences of their idealistic folly. If Republicans had succeeded in stymieing health reform again it would have been a mortal blow to Obama and the Democratic Party. In all likelihood, the failure of health reform would pave the way for Republican victories in 2010 and 2012. Consequently, it would be years if not decades before anyone attempted to reform the healthcare system again.

Barack Obama is a pragmatist who'd rather come away with half a loaf than no loaf at all. Right-wing activists who contend that Obama is socialist who wants to redistribute wealth are certifiably delusional. In fact, the crony capitalism championed by Bush and Cheney amounted socialism for the wealthy as military contractors like Halliburton, the financial industry, and political contributors fed at the public trough until the entire economic system nearly collapsed.

In reality, President Obama is a centrist and an incrementalist. Indeed, he seems to be employing conservative means towards moderately liberal ends. He may be taking flak from both the rabid-right and the utopian-left, but it is probably a good sign that he's steering a course that displeases the insensate fringes of our political system.

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Pantheism versus Theism

The poet William Blake saw Heaven in a wildflower and he found eternity in an hour. Poets are quite mad, of course. But as Plato recognized, the madness of the gods is to be preferred over the sanity of men.
Poets tend to be heretics too. After all, shattering dogmas so that fresh truths can be perceived is part of a poet’s reason for being.

The poet Czeslaw Miloz once wrote, “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge. And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard.”

Miloz, I believe, captured a great truth about prayer and religion. The traditional conception of God as a personal deity who created the world and intervenes in human affairs is no longer intellectually, theologically, or philosophically persuasive. Nikos Kazantzakis, put it well when said, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man.

The paradox in Miloz’s poem, On Prayer, is that although our prayers almost certainly fall on deaf ears they are nevertheless spiritually empowering. Faced with the dark night of the soul, a time when we are acutely aware of our limitations, we instinctively turn to a power greater than ourselves. This is when we are at our most authentic, even divine-like. The power of prayer lies not in catching the attention of some supreme being, who then intervenes on our behalf, but in the way a truthful and heartfelt inner dialogue, fortifies us to meet life’s most formidable challenges.

The root meaning of the word religion is to link back. Both pantheists and deists share the belief that man has sprung from a transcendental source. For pantheists, this source is Nature, which is a reflection of a slumbering but cosmic intelligence. We humans are a reflection of this unconscious and impersonal intelligence. Nature has emerged into consciousness through us and we are quite literally the eyes and ears of the world. Nature, of course, can be terrifying and awe-inspiring. However, discerning the broad brushstrokes of beauty and harmony against the backdrop of individual suffering can be an aesthetic experience that offers a poetic respite from the harshness of the natural order.

Schopenhauer believed that aesthetic arrest represents a moment when a human being temporarily transcends the limitations of their suffering ego and recognizes (however dimly or faintly) their ultimate identity with the noumenal ground of being.

Seeing Nature as a work of art is no easy task. Great poets demonstrate that an immersion in nature need not be some sort of escapist regression, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat implies in his Op-Ed, Heaven and Nature. Put simply, the kernels of insight and enlightenment that poets like Blake convey have the power to recreate in us the same “Ah ah” experience that stirred the soul of poets in the first place.

In contrast, abstract conceptions of an all-good Almighty -- whose sole remaining function these days is to save His creatures from the evils of His own Creation – seems like an escapist fantasy at best and pernicious nonsense at worst. There is nothing more painful than false belief. And I fear that much of the anger that seems to be consuming the religious right in America at the moment stems from frustration that invariably develops when a person’s worldview is at complete variance with the world he or she inhabits.

Ross Douthat theistic apologia is rhetorically brilliant, but his logic is unpersuasive. His chief argument in favor of theism is that pantheism cannot deliver man from the evils and suffering of this world. But using Hollywood homages to pantheism as proverbial straw men allows Douthat to paint “nature worship” in superficial way.

Wittgenstein was famous for dissolving – not solving – philosophical conundrums. His insight, still not widely appreciated, is that the way we use (and misuse) language generates pseudo-problems. For instance, to say, “It is raining” does not mean there is some entity “It” that is raining. In a similar way, theism generates many false problems by positing literal entities – A savior God, Heaven, and Hell – which are not ontologically real. Pursuing mirages is bound to create angst. Ultimately, it may be that theism creates the malady it purports to cure.

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