poltics | Question Polls Don't Ask

Alright Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, you're going to decide who is the next President of our country.

Forget September 11th for a minute, remember October 11, 2002? Come on, October 11th...thirteen months after September 11th. Remember? That's when the resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq was passed. Of course it shouldn't have been passed as our action was misinformed, manipulated, and (even without those aspects) simply unjust. Something wrong was done in our name, your name (and continues). We're clear on that, right?

Seventy-seven senators voted for the action, twenty three against. McCain voted for it, but so did Clinton. It's worth remembering that the 75% who voted for the 'war' were Democrats and Republicans. Still, when it comes to the twenty-three who voted against the 'war,' there was only one Republican. One. It was the Democrats who opposed using our military.

Often polls ask, "Who do you trust more as a commander-in-chief?"

I'd generally prefer to ask, "Who is more likely to keep us out of war?"

Sure, McCain's grandfather was in the Navy. Sure, McCain's father was in the Navy. Sure, McCain got an education from the military at the Naval Academy. Sure, he fought in Vietnam. Sure, he was a POW. Sure, he went to the National War College. Sure, he was the Navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate (around the time I was born) and from there got into politics. When McCain first ran for congress, he used his POW status to deflect criticisms of him being a carpetbagger. That he was a POW was the most common story trotted out at the GOP convention. McCain's whole life has been war and politics. McCain knows military (even if, as he admits, he doesn't know that much about the economy).

The Republican party generally has a strange mix of militaristic hawks and fiscal, social and religious conservatives. To Christians, who may happen to be Republicans, I'd like to remind you that Christians are against war (even the Just War theorists in the Christian tradition were crafting their arguments as an exception to the more general opposition to war). One gets the Pentagon regardless of how you vote, but I think it is worth us asking:

Who is more likely to keep us out of war?

My answer to this question is but one of the reasons I will not be voting for McCain.

[I do not consider voting to be the most important political act
that Christians/Citizens can engage in, but it's not the least either.]

[AYT][Theology][Politics][McCain][GOP][Christian]

quote | Experience, Quest, Adventure

"While scientific experiment is indeed the construction of a sure road (of a methodos, a path) to knowledge, the quest instead is the recognition that the absence of a road (the aporia) is the only experience possible for man. But by the same token, the quest is also the opposite of the adventure, which in the modern age emerges as the final refuge of experience. For the adventure presupposes that there is a road to experience, and that this road goes by the way of the extraordinary and the exotic (in opposition to the familiar and the commonplace). Instead, in the universe of the quest the exotic and the extraordinary are only the sum of the essential aporia of every experience. Thus Don Quixote, who lives the everyday and the familiar (the landscape of La Mancha and its inhabitants) as extraordinary, is the subject of a quest that is a perfect counterpart of the medieval ones."

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History

politics | On Campaigns And Parrhesia

For Aristotle, parrhesia is a virtue. Parrhesia, or frank speech, is used in Aristotle's description of what the paradigmatic virtuous person would look like.

One must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one's feelings, i.e. to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward's part), and must speak and act openly; for one is free of speech because...one is given to telling the truth, except when one speaks in irony to the vulgar.
(Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV)

Newspeak, the fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, might be considered the simulacra of parrhesia. Like parrhesia, there seems to be a frankness to Newspeak as the language sought to remove shades of meaning leaving only dichotomous simplicity (which is easier for the state to manipulate). Our own political speech has its approximations of Newspeak, terms like pro-life, patriotism, freedom. The telos of Newspeak was to reduce even these dichotomies to the "yes" of obedience with which everyone answered to whatever was asked of them. Yet, Newspeak cannot be frank, or open and sincere in expression, since it is never honest about its goal to squelch dissent and disallow a plurality of thought. Unfortunately, much of our political language has more in common with Newspeak than parrhesia. When the Bush administration sold the country on the war in Iraq based upon intelligence known to be (at best) weak, when they told us that a control-freak dictator supported terrorism, when they played on our fears by invoking biological and nuclear weapons, they did so under the cover of a single word, patriotism, to which one could only say "yes."

The ongoing campaigns are not much better. When Barack Obama is questioned for not wearing a lapel pin, when McCain chooses "pro-life" over a wealth of political experience, when it is implied that the Clinton's are racist, when the McCain campaign runs a silly context-bending story about lipstick under the guise of the scare-word: sexism, we are witnessing and being involved in a lack of virtue. Insofar as our talk about, our interest in these stories involves us in this linguistic corruption and duplicity, it must over time have an impact on our character. Let's see if McCain can utilize parrhesia and call Obama a sexist during a debate if he in fact believes that to be true, or will he merely hide behind the Newspeak of his proxies?


Are there bright spots in our situation? Absolutely but not always where you'd expect:


"[The virtuous person] is given to telling the truth,
except when one speaks in irony to the vulgar."
Here's is to better reportage, better campaigns, better conversations and more frank speech. In the meantime, we can be grateful for those who help us to see our vice.


For further reading on parrhesia, see Michel Foucault's Parrhesia and the Crisis of Democratic Institutions.

[AYT][Theology][Politics][McCain]

politics | Palin & Hauerwas

I'll be back to blogging soon. In the meantime, here are two links:

From The Economist (hardly a left-wing source), a story about McCain's choice of Palin that is well worth a read:

Mr McCain’s appointment also raises more general worries about the Republican Party’s fitness for government. Up until the middle of last week Mr McCain was still considering two other candidates whom he has known for decades: Joe Lieberman, a veteran senator, independent Democrat and Iraq war hawk, and Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania (a swing state with 21 Electoral College votes) and the first secretary of homeland security. Mr McCain reluctantly rejected both men because their pro-choice views are anathema to the Christian right.

The Palin appointment is yet more proof of the way that abortion still distorts American politics. This is as true on the left as on the right. But the Republicans seem to have gone furthest in subordinating considerations of competence and merit to pro-life purity. One of the biggest problems with the Bush administration is that it appointed so many incompetents because they were sound on Roe v Wade. Mrs Palin’s elevation suggests that, far from breaking with Mr Bush, Mr McCain is repeating his mistakes.

From the blogosphere, Hauerwas on electoral politics:

Namely..., why is it that no one is angry at the inequality of income in this country? I mean, the inequality of income is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why isn’t that ever an issue of politics? Because you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a plutocracy. Money rules.

[AYT][Theology][Politics][Palin]