The Grace of Simple Things

“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear without my contriving.” — Rainier Rilke, Book of Hours, 1, 12 (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

There are times in our lives when the moment is so deep, so simple, as to be transparent and effortless. Within that moment we sense that the rush of events has subsided and we, quietly grateful, find ourselves turning in a gentle current to gaze first here and then there, and to feel ourselves lifted and set upon our feet on a new morning at the edge of a far wilderness.

Those are moments that one treasures, storing them up for the times when the days turn to rust and the air sears as we sit in the stink of traffic waiting for the light to change. There are never enough of these moments, and in time they fade, although the mere desire for them can conjure up a train of images—some unrelated to the first experience—which gradually take on an iconic weight and bearing. 

I’ve enjoyed enough of these that I can string them like pearls in my consciousness, holding them up to the light and seeing how they’ve changed over the years. There is curiosity in recalling which ones marked stages in my life. They are like ancient buried ships whose mounded boundaries we circumscribe unaware until we gain the heights and look back and down and gradually discern the outlines.

For me, these moments most usually come when I’m alone in the vicinity of strangers or near a lake or river or mountain or beach. I am booked up with a scripture (the Gospels, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada or the Bhagavad Gita), some poetry (Rilke, Blake, Eliot, or Stafford) and some philosophy (Epictetus, Seneca, Marcel or Augustine)—and a fine cup of strong, rich coffee. Setting off for these possible transcendences there is anticipation, but at the very least the satisfaction of a good experience. We cannot plan for these moments but we can be ready for them. 

I had one such experience while on holiday recently, visiting family in Banff, Alberta. Early on a Saturday morning, a time of special holiness for me, I moved through the quiet streets alone in the cool dawn. In search of a quiet shop with coffee, I found one—Evelyn’s Coffee Bar—on Banff Avenue. I was past the door when I noticed it, stopped and backed up. The sign said Saturday, 8 am to 9 pm, but it was 7:45 and the door was open, so I went in, the first customer of the day. 

The only other person was behind the bar, a polite and cheerful young man from the East End of London by the sound of it. With mug in hand I sat in the window that fronted the street and gazed in wonder at the mountain that rose thousands of feet in the near distance. There was morning light all around—I could see it filling in the space between the peaks—but the town was in that blue shade that only exists in the shadow of a mountain that is blocking the sun. Streams of light shot from its shoulders and I knew that in minutes I’d be in the full glare of the sun as it crested the peak. 

I was reading Rilke’s Book of Hours, in a translation I’ve come to revere, in a passage that carried all my longings to create:

“If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.”

By now one or two more early customers had come in. The English barista had been joined behind the bar by a young woman who spoke with a Scandinavian accent. 

“Wot time are we to open?” he asked, as they worked. I could not hear her murmured reply, but he responded, “Cos I wasn’t sure if it was 7:30 or 8:00 so I opened at 7:30 just to be safe.”

“Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.”

And then the light burst over the peak and in one astonishing moment the street in front of me, the window, my books and cup—everything was shot through with white, pure light, warm to the touch but with hard-edged shadows. 

“I want to know my own will

and to move with it.

And I want, in the hushed moments

when the nameless draws near,

to be among the wise ones—

or alone.”

We move through this world in a sullen daze more often than not. We mind our own business, shuffling through the streets, not meeting the eyes of those around us, drifting like motes in the sun. But occasionally, if we dare to look up, if we glimpse—even in imagination or memory—the trembling, fiery annunciation of the morning, we might just be graced into joy.

“I want to unfold.

Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false.

I want to stay clear in your sight.”

Courage Without Calculation

“But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.” — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.

Courage is the virtue found between the extremes of recklessness and cowardice. Virtue, in Aristotle’s view, could be achieved through reflection, discipline, and practice. Since it did not come naturally to us, it would have to be applied, and that could only come through deliberate conditioning of ourselves. Virtue through habit would become our second nature.

How does one practice courage in this society? Not many of us are called upon to rescue our lambs from a lion nor are we required to go up against a Goliath. Some might argue that it takes a type of courage to navigate rush hour in an American metropolis, but we know that is a limited type of courage, if courage it is. Mostly, it requires steady nerves and a willingness to regard fellow drivers as both weary travelers (to be given the benefit of the doubt) and latent killers, as oblivious as clams to others in their proximity while they chatter on their cell phones. 

But there is a more obvious type of courage which we have seen recently, and as an example of virtue in the classical sense it is without parallel. In the Aurora, Colorado killings several young men reacted instantly to the sight and sound of gunfire by shielding others with their bodies. At least one was ex-military, a young National Guardsman who had served in Iraq and was thinking of signing up for another tour. He saved the life of his girlfriend by throwing her to the floor and covering her with his body. When the shooting stopped and she tried to get up she discovered he had taken a bullet for her. 

Action like that is heroic but not unexpected from a soldier. If anything, it is a testimony to the power of military training that some people react to gunfire by protecting others before saving themselves. That certainly does not diminish his actions in our eyes, in fact, it only reinforces belief that virtue can be trained into a person.

But what is even more remarkable is that several other people—civilians all—did the same thing in those first chaotic minutes. They stood up for girlfriends, children, and others, reacting instinctively without hesitation. This suggests that courage and selflessness were so deeply engrained in them that they did not have to agonize over the decision. It was second nature to them. 


As more details emerge over the next few months other stories of heroism and courage will no doubt come to light. Without knowing these people it’s probably not fair to make generalizations about their actions in hopes of predicting a trend. A lot of things could have played into those instantaneous reactions, but it’s heartening to know that the person next to you in a crowded public space might be a hero-in-waiting.

We often define heroes as people who have done extraordinary acts, like the 9/11 police and firemen who ran into the Twin Towers to rescue people while everyone else was desperately scrambling to get out. Or we think of them as achieving something against great odds, like winning a gold medal at the Olympics. 

But as Carol S. Pearson notes in her book, The Hero Within, these kinds of heroism are rare. “The first is a necessity born out of extreme conditions; the second results from exceptional talent combined with favorable conditions and great effort.” Pearson respects these actions but widens the field to include ordinary people who are called to a heroic journey. They are not generally called upon to handle everything thrown at them: “Rather, it is doing your own part, however humble that might be . . . . It merely requires absolute fidelity to your own authentic path.”

I’ve always believed that we catch a glimpse of our true nature when we’re startled out of the ordinary. Without a chance to duck behind a pretense or put on a game-face we simply react from the inside to the ‘slings and arrows’ of the outside world. It’s easy to see the call of duty as the bolt that shot the Aurora people into action. Immanuel Kant, whose deontological ethics have had a profound effect on philosophy since the Enlightenment, believed that the right action in any ethical dilemma is that which springs from the will, not from calculating the benefits or losses. If they’d stopped to do a cost-benefit analysis as the bullets thudded into bodies around them even more people would have died. 

There is courage that knows the odds and goes forward anyway, such as the soldier advancing into enemy fire. There is courage that simply stays the course when it would be so easy and so comforting to drop the whole thing. And there is the courage that becomes part of our moral DNA, ready in an instant to do the right thing no matter what. At various times in our lives we may need all of them.

If we follow Aristotle’s thinking in these lines, we understand that courage of any sort doesn’t come naturally to us. The wires have been strung but the switch hasn’t been thrown. Or as Jesus put it to his drowsy disciples shortly before his arrest: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

The Stoic philosopher Seneca exhorts us to learn how to live before we die. Instead of complaining that life is too short, he says, we need to stop squandering our time. If we could have a tally of the years that remain to us, how carefully we would use them! Could there be a more cheerful retort to moral laziness than this? “Life is long if you know how to use it.” 

Just Say No to Bossa Nova?

"For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like." — Max Beerbohm

The first time I heard the Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together performed with flute and acoustic guitar, I was fascinated. My wife and I had just been seated at our usual place in our favorite Thai restaurant and were glancing over the menu, when something caught my attention. Canned music at restaurants is meant to be an unobtrusive soundtrack for conversation, and so this would have been had I not realized with a shock of cognitive dissonance that this was music of the Rolling Stones. You just don't expect the Stones to show up as Muzak. Not only that, it was the Stones done as bossa nova! The soloist had the kind of breathy voice one hears at high school variety shows where the girls all try to sound like Celine Dion. 

No doubt the restaurant owner was sold on the lilting tones of the flute, the gentle thrum of nylon strings, and the pleasingly insipid performance of the soloist. Each song was like the last, resolutely nondescript, a suitable backdrop for dinner guests and the musical equivalent of Gerber's whipped peas without the tasteful greeniness. 

My fascination turned to horror as I realized there was more to come. This was an entire album of Stones' songs, featuring different bossa nova groups, each one trying to outdo the others in mellowness.

Soon I was straining to hear above the contented lowing of the guests and the clink of plates and glasses. I couldn't turn away; it was like watching someone trip over a cliff in slow motion. And the hits kept coming: Satisfaction, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Ruby Tuesday, Paint it Black, Tumbling Dice. The producers had left no stone unturned in their zeal to cover the classics. I later discovered that this was actually a 2-CD set, available on Amazon, accompanied by gushing reviews that likened it favorably to "mellow goo."

My horror here does not arise from instrumental versions of these classics. Jagger and Richards have turned out many tunes that will stand the test of time on their musical hooks alone. But reflection on the phenomenon of Bossa Nova vs Rolling Stones reveals a callous disregard for what we might call the disposition and provenance of the music. 

Disposition refers to the attitude of some object, provenance to the origins of a thing or a person. We understand the attitude of a work of art when we sense that the content is consonant with the form. In other words, the way it's performed either fulfills its purpose or destroys its meaning. The subject matter demands that it be delivered with the appropriate passion. You just can't sing Satisfaction as if you were complaining ever so delicately about your margarita. That song howled about the maddening itch of advertising, the sharp pang of unrequited lust, and what it feels like to have no place to stand without being hassled. Keith Richard's brazen riffs perfectly matched Jagger's bitter shouts.

On the other hand, the provenance of a work of art reveals where it's coming from. Context carries understanding for those who bother to look. The Stones wrote music that was rooted in the blues, expressed through rock 'n roll, in an era of jagged social disjunctions. That doesn't mean their songs are locked in the past, it just means they come from a particular time and place. 

Does this leave any room for interpretation by other artists? That depends. In Alan Parker's film, The Commitments (1991), about a Dublin-based soul band, the veteran session player, Lips Fagan, bristles when one of the younger players adds his own variation to the classic, Mustang Sally. "You can't do that!" he argues. "You've got to play it the way it was written." Allowing for the fact that you can never play a song the same way twice, this view says that the score is a holy script and you demean the music to play anything but what's in the original. 

But another view says that once a song leaves its composer and makes its way through the world, it stands on its own with new friends in new places. Covers are a staple in music, not just by those starting out, but also by seasoned professionals who honor the muse and the music through their own interpretations. 

I think it's hard to beat Sting at his own game, but one of Washington, D.C.'s own artists, the late Eva Cassidy, came pretty close on her version of Sting's incomparable Fields of Gold. Recorded live at Blues Alley here in D.C., Cassidy's version is not an imitation, it's an interpretation that takes nothing away from the original but can beautifully stand on its own. That's because she understood the music and the lyrics intimately; she made them alive inside her and what came out was both homage and creation.

Joni Mitchell wrote Woodstock even though she missed it. Her producer, knowing how jammed the roads around the festival were, was afraid she'd never make it back to New York for a performance on the Dick Cavett Show. So one of the iconic figures of her generation never made it to the iconic music festival of the twentieth century. Mitchell's version is hauntingly slow, almost ominous, lean and spare, a kind of elegy of lost youth. Crosby, Stills, and Nash turned it into a defiant celebration of idealism, throbbing with Still's guitar licks and CSN's signature harmonies. Their version soars, Mitchell's lingers wistfully. Both are authentic, the Yin and Yang of a true classic. 

  

Sometimes an artist's talents in one area overshadow their ability in another area. I've never found the Beach Boys' lyrics to match the grace and splendor of their music. The musical movements of Good Vibrations are truly astonishing, yet the lyrics are lame.  

In 1965 Paul McCartney recorded Yesterday in a London studio with just an acoustic guitar and a string ensemble. In 1999 it was voted the best song of the 20th century by a BBC2 poll and in 2000 it was voted the No. 1 best pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone. It's been covered in 2,200 versions and remains one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. I've heard numerous versions that are genuine interpretations and others that are tin-plated embarrassments. The difference is palpable. 

Sometimes an artist creates a version of another person's song that is revelatory more of the performer than the song. Bob Dylan's Christmas album of 2009 was a surprise to many, not simply because he's Jewish, but because it didn't fit their view of him. Every Christmas I'm usually done with the songs and hymns long before they're mothballed for the rest of the year. But when I heard Dylan's versions of these familiar favorites I was touched. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas comes off as sappy and sentimental after about two weeks in the seasonal rotation on-air, but Dylan's scratchy, gentle, and poignant version rings true to me, the gathering up of grudging affection from an aging troubadour. 

Needless to say, all this is subject to individual judgments. We speak of "having taste" and usually mean not just that someone has preferences but that they have "good" preferences. Can something so subjective, so vulnerable to individual associations and meanings, ever find a standard that everyone could use? David Hume thought such subjective values could be verified by experts over time. Kant believed that we could arrive at a usable standard through reason, and Schopenhauer thought that the truth of the music was in its ability to reveal us to ourselves. 

If you're a music doctor come to heal others through your ability to reveal truths about music, this is your malpractice insurance—the notion that whatever moves us is our truth. It can't be refuted and doesn't need to be. 

It's humbling to realize that our standards for quality in music are as varied and numerous as there are people. But it's also fascinating to see that we make such judgments effortlessly— at the speed of sound. We know what we like and we don't have to agonize about it. What I hope for myself, however, is a spirit that opens more willingly to the new, cherishes the old, and nurtures creativity.

A Meditation on Violence

“The most intrepid valor may be employed in the cause of the greatest injustice.” — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The horrific shooting in Aurora, Colorado at the Batman premiere, exposes afresh the great divide in this country over the “right” to bear arms. I put quotes around the word to suggest that the matter is not settled.

The gunman entered through the exit down by the front of the theatre near the screen, apparently wearing a flak jacket and holding a weapon. It is a measure of the surreal nature of our current forms of entertainment that some in the audience actually thought he had been hired by the theatre for the premiere. Eyewitness accounts say he fired into the air and then began methodically shooting people, shell casings raining down on the head of one young woman who had flung herself to the floor almost at his feet. 

We can imagine how the slight distraction of the late arriver quickly gave way to panic as bodies fell and people screamed. It is worth meditating on this scene in our imagination because this is the result of choices we have made. 

This event, like other massacres in recent memory, was not a crime of passion. It was deliberate, planned for, premeditated, thus it could not be predicted nor could it easily be stopped. The shooter used a weapon that is designed to exert maximum force in the shortest possible time for the greatest possible damage to living creatures. It is painfully obvious, yet bears repeating, that this is what guns are for. 

Colorado, like other states, allows its citizens to carry concealed weapons, so that the law-abiding can protect themselves and their loved ones from the predations of people like this shooter. And judging by many comments on news stories about the shooting, a lot of people go to the movies packing weapons. In the interest of always being prepared for the wildest of contingencies the pre-movie conversation might go like this: “Okay, let’s see. . . . we’ve got the popcorn, the giant size Butterfingers, the gallon of soda and. . . honey, your Glock or mine?”

Thus, while one man plans to kill at the movies, others prepare to kill there too. One is a psychopath, the others are normal people simply exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms—to kill if they deem it necessary. While the consequences may be the same—people shot dead—we make a distinction between the intentions: in one case malevolent, in the other case heroic. Or so we tell ourselves. 

The issue of gun control is a litmus test that many politicians face at one point or another. Most of them pass it with flying colors because they won’t  go up against the NRA and its millions. And in the meantime assault rifles are available and handguns are cheap. Common sense would suggest that most people are concerned with their families, paying their bills, maybe having a nice afternoon with the kids at the movies. They don’t think about packing weaponry because for most people in this country life goes on fairly uneventfully. Episodes like this one are extremely rare, although news coverage burns them into our reptilian brains to the extent that we may come to believe we are under siege.

I am not belittling the horror of this event nor am I suggesting that people have no cause to be wary. But events like this reveal the disconnect between our ideals and our prejudices. Democracies like ours have at their bedrock the twin values of personal autonomy and toleration. The first creates the need for the second; the second is frequently strained by the stridency with which the first is asserted. When autonomy outguns empathy everybody loses. We feel threatened by the very freedom we demand when others exercise their freedom. So it stands to reason that if we live in fear despite our many freedoms, then something is seriously  wrong. 

Violence begets violence says the Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and others, many of whom died because they did not take up arms against their brothers. Was it worth it? Yes, because the very fact that we can view non-violence as an option means that their witness had an effect through time. 

The strongest protection against shooting each other is to regard the other’s life as our sacred trust. Such a viewpoint demands courage and determination, virtues that must be believed to be seen. That’s the best solution, but it remains a matter of personal conviction. Yet, we have every reason to teach and persuade to that end, to create a society where this becomes the norm.

Since we humans don’t have a great record at doing the right thing for its own sake, the next best approach is to punish those who do wrong and reward those who do right. Oh. . . yes . . . we’re trying that right now.

In the grand scheme of things we’re undergoing some kind of moral evolution over the centuries. But it’s one step forward, two steps back, none of it guaranteed, and our last century stands as the bloodiest in human history. Given that, you’d think we would try to give ourselves a timeout, maybe hide some of the sharper objects while we learn some basic moral lessons. At the very least you could expect that we’d rise up in revulsion and ban assault weapons. How is that an infringement on someone’s rights?

We’re addicted to violence and we need an intervention. We don’t seem to have the will or the desire, as a nation, to pull together. It takes a manufactured war and a constant campaign of fear to get us in line, but even that hasn’t worked. What does work, apparently, is our insatiable desire for vicarious violence. For the few among us who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, the sharp jolt of our mediated mayhem can create for them visions of invincibility. Perhaps they see themselves as avengers of wrongs or heroes of a twisted justice. 

For the rest of us, the steady accumulation of images of violence, like an IV drip, has entered our bloodstream. It renders us passive, uncritical, unwilling to stand apart and critique our own behavior. Violence understood is not violence condoned but neither is it taken for granted or passed over lightly. 

The underlying irony to this whole tragic episode is that Batman fights without guns. He relies on his wits, his strength, and a limitless supply of technological marvels. He knows the lure of power and the lust for blood, and he fights the inclination to justify evil in the name of good. As Adam Smith notes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “Amidst great provocations, apparent tranquillity and good-humor may sometimes conceal the most determined and cruel resolution to revenge.” 

We are no more doomed to a constant cycle of violence than we are promised a sunlit paradise without any shadows. But we can make some choices that can change our lives. That much we can do.

Joy of Work

“By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.” — Thomas Merton, The New Man

One of the joys of teaching is that you have an excuse to learn full-time. Given the fact that humans, even under the worst of circumstances, are compulsive learners, it’s great that some of us actually get paid to do it. Having just finished a week of diving deep into the ethics of genetic engineering, the delights and mysteries of the Tao Te Ching, and the value and meaning of good work—all of this with three different groups of thoughtful adult students—I am realizing the deepening satisfaction of emergent ideas. These are ideas which are a long time coming and which are formed through the confluence of different streams of thought. 

One of the ways I learn is to write my way through a problem, turning with it this way and that, until I find some place to stand if only for a moment. That’s the pleasure in writing this blog—to see what I think and to gain some clarity in the process. These are always snapshots of a process, a momentary glimpse of a mind in pursuit of . . . something. At times my train of thought is no more than a couple of boxcars on a siding; the fun is in seeing if the engine in the far distance, visible only as a plume of drifting smoke, will shunt through the right switches to arrive and connect. 

So all week I’ve had the sense of an idea just under the surface. I am remembering David Crosby’s song: “Just beneath the surface of the mud/There’s more mud here/Surprise!” 

It takes the shape of trying to understand—and articulate in a class on world religions—what Lao Tze is saying in his incomparable 81 passages of wisdom in the Tao Te Ching. He begins with a warning: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” and follows up later with, “Those who speak don’t know and those who know don’t speak,” a joke of sly proportions considering that he’s been going on about this page after page. It is, in the words of one commentator on the Tao, like “trying to unscrew the inscrutable.” 

But later in the week, as a group of us discuss readings on work and leisure in a class on Humanity and Culture, other passages sparkle in their directness: 

“When you are content to be simply yourself

and don’t compare or compete,

everybody will respect you.”

“Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.” 

“Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?”

Taoism holds as a central virtue the notion of wu-wei, sometimes explained as ‘actionless action.’ It’s about working with natural elements in the world instead of forcing one’s way through life. In an aggressive and competitive culture like ours these profoundly simple ideas may sound naive at best and subversive at their heart. But it is often the case that when the needle on the gauge bends against the extreme there arises an alternative. Thus, when we long to do good work and to enjoy it, to speak and to be understood, to receive without fear, we may arrive at the desire for integrity. 

I’ve been struggling to come up with a word that surges up from the depths, parts the waters cleanly, and glints in the sunlight before dropping back. All week the word has been honesty, though I’ve resisted its popular distortion as cruelty disguised as truth—jus’ keeping it real. . .  But it’s a brave word and it stands closer to that shadowy wisp of meaning I’m trying to grasp than any other for now. 

I’m reminded of an enigmatic phrase of A. N. Whitehead, ‘Religion is what we do with our solitariness.’ I’ve been turning that over and over in my head like a rough-edged pebble, trying to smooth it out by constant contact. I don’t know where I found it and I can’t determine the context, but the shape of it looks like honesty—what we truly are when we are truly ourselves, alone before the Divine. In that state we know in our marrow when we are slip sliding away, avoiding the truth, trying to put one over. When it’s just us and God, no one else to impress, what reason do we have to lie? Why not just come clean for once, be courageous enough to laugh at our pretensions to courage, and be still?

Thomas Merton, who had a gift for simplicity of expression, says, “A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.” We winch up the tension, speed up the production line, churn out more and more things. “Our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the quantity of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse. . . .”

Let us have the humility to begin again, to do our work well for the beauty of it, for what we might learn in the doing. Teasing out these strands of thoughts, looking around us and finding a way to bind them gently together, we can at last use them thankfully and well. 

“Behold the world fresh—as it is, on its own terms—through the eyes of a beginner,” urges Epictetus. “There is no such thing as conclusive, once-and-for-all knowledge. . . . Spirited curiosity is an emblem of the flourishing life.”

And so to work . . . .

For What It's Worth

“There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear . . . .” — Stephen Stills, Buffalo Springfield If you were of age in the late 60s you can probably hear that song in your head, the ringing notes of the opening bars suggestive both of hope and apprehension as Stephen Stills’ voice, bluesy with a mocking edge to it, drew us into the images. It became something of an anthem as the mass protests against the Vietnam War spread from city to city across America.  I always associate that song with the 4th of July, perhaps because, inevitably, the 4th is about massive crowds—at least it is where I live, near Washington, D.C.—and because if there’s a protest to be writ large it will happen on the national stage of the Mall in the heart of D.C.  It’s been years since I actually went down to the Mall for the Fourth of July celebrations. When I first moved out here from California in 1981, fresh out of graduate school, to take a teaching position, I did the usual things for a newcomer which included joining 250,000 people, the National Orchestra, fireworks (‘bombs bursting in air’ and ‘the rockets’ red glare’), sometimes the Beach Boys, parades, and speeches by the usual suspects — all of us basted and cooked to perfection in D.C.’s 100+ degree fire pits. If you do that a couple of seasons you develop a lingering suspicion that you’re just one of thousands of extras in an apocalyptic thriller movie. The thin veneer of civilization peels back in your waking nightmare as you imagine the ultimate fireworks of nuclear holocaust opening above the Washington Monument.  So you stay home the following year and find you do not miss the hour-long wait at the subway station, moving a foot at a time toward the abattoir deep underground, all in lock-step with the thousands of sodden, hungry, and beaten citizens on this holiest of civic holidays. I exaggerate, of course, but only slightly: you may enjoy conjecturing on which parts of the narrative cross the line of sensible imagination. But whether I stay or go to Fourth of July public rituals my dilemma remains the same: I do not know how to act patriotically on that day or any other day. I left Canada at the age of five in the company of grandparents who were headed for teaching positions in California. My memories of Canada are pleasant but my knowledge of its politics and culture is slight. Most of my life has been spent in America, with a year and some summers in Britain, and another year in British Columbia. And yet I remain a Canadian citizen and have never voted in this country.  Assimilated to Northern California culture at an impressionable age, I nevertheless found no ground upon which to stand, and thus I remain oddly suspended, neither fully Canadian by geographical and cultural immersion nor American by citizenship and pride. When I traveled in Europe on my Canadian passport in the early 70s, a maple-leaf stitched proudly on my backpack, I received encouraging glances and the offer of conversation. When it was discovered that I was Canadian but lived in America, curiosity turned to something close to envy, although a lecture on the failings of American foreign policy was sure to follow.  I was never sure how to respond. Like many middle-class American kids I had my views on the war, which ran the gamut from naive to ignorant. But of the  moral darkness of the venture I was deeply convinced and have found no reason since to revise that view. What I was naive about were the reasons why boys my age were drafted and why some even volunteered. As the war dragged on it became more clear that disproportionate numbers of poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics were being drafted. That seemed wrong to me, but I don’t think I could have explained why at the time. What genuinely puzzled me was why anyone would volunteer. In the years that followed I spoke to some who had stepped up with pride, served as officers, and returned home feeling betrayed by the American public. They had been told they were fighting for freedom. A lot of Americans saw them as baby-killers.  When we stood for the pledge of allegiance in school I did not recite it nor place my hand over my heart. Dimly, I understood that would be somehow wrong, although my reticence was sometimes taken for defiance. When I saw the flag unfurled, waving in the breeze or heard the national anthem, I did not tear up nor bow my head in gratitude. The Star Spangled Banner seemed simply unfortunate, the lamest excuse for a call to patriotism that I could imagine. Nobody could sing it well and the only version I could stand was Jimi Hendrix’s fuzzed-up and melancholy riff.  Yet, the first time I landed on British soil during a torrential downpour at Gatwick Airport in 1971, I felt like I’d finally come home. Raised by British grandparents, reading Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples under the covers at night, and marching with the hobbits through Middle-earth had conditioned me for a kind of naturalized citizenship. I slipped into it easily and naturally, feeling  less the outsider as the country cousin come to visit. As for national anthems, I found ‘Rule Britannia’ quaintly endearing, “God Save the Queen” serious and moving, but it was “Jerusalem,” sung at football matches and other public gatherings, that brought a tear to my eyes. Whether rendered by the pure voices of English choirboys or thundered through by English rockers Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Blake’s vivid verses and imagery brought me close to pride of country.   That may be the closest I get emotionally to patriotism, an anomaly that I have to chuckle over. Born in Canada, raised in America, with my heart attached to a misty Avalon, I realize that I am everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that patriotism, almost anywhere in the world—and especially, it seems, in America—is joined at the hip with war. Thus, to question American actions in the world is to dishonor the sacrifice of American soldiers. Since wars these days are marketed and sold through sophisticated advertising campaigns, and military objectives are subordinated to political imperatives, patriotism becomes an accessory worn on the sleeve, designed to quickly identify whose side we’re on. Remember when everyone clipped American flags to their cars after 9/11? There was a certain amount of nervousness if you were the first on your block to take your flag off.  I don’t have any reservations about what this country has done for me. I admire American energy and imagination, its willingness to thumb its nose at centuries of aristocracy and privilege of lineage. Most of all, I love the straight forward, clear-eyed pragmatism that so often gets things done. But America, historically speaking, is a teenager— impetuous, brash, arrogant, and ignorant of many things. It is quick to seize on the latest fashion, be it technology, religion or idiom. There are times when you think, “I can’t take this kid anywhere!” It has the attention span of a squirrel, the narcissism of a Chihuahua, and the gratitude of a cat.  That being said, it also has the best mission statement and corporate vision in the world. Alongside the fact that the country was founded on the economic necessities of slavery, the men who built the Constitution out of parts they’d filched from all over created the motherboard of freedom. It works well, really well, when we keep the hardware clean and the software—this wonderful spirit of inventiveness—free of ideological viruses.  So I've found a type of ethical patriotism within which I can live. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy this is one in which "the patriot would take pride when the country does what is right. But her patriotism would be expressed, above all, in a critical approach to her country and compatriots: she would feel entitled, and indeed called, to submit them to critical moral scrutiny, and to do so qua patriot.” It’s been tried before by many people, some of whom died because of it and others who simply and quietly live it out every day. But as Tennyson said in Ulysses, “Some work of noble note, may yet be done/Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

The Health of the Body Politic

“When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.” — Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

To many of us who count ourselves in the liberal —sorry, progressive—tradition, the last week of June 2012 will be regarded as a peak among valleys, an historic moment. That was the week that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 count, upheld the healthcare law put forward by Congress and President Obama. It is legislation, incomplete though it is, which will make life better for millions of people. You might even say it was the right thing to do: that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people ought to care about the welfare of its people. You could say that, but having said it you ought not to be surprised at the outraged reaction of many who will not see this as fairness and equitable treatment for most, but a terrible imposition against the few. 

I try not to let the paralyzing complexity of the process blind me to the straightforward belief that universal health care should be available for all. That the United States is the only rich country in the world without such a plan is shameful. It is shameful in the old-fashioned sense that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, feel the burden of guilt on our shoulders, and be determined to do the right thing. The “right thing”, of course, is the point at which the debate splinters into a thousand yelps of “who is to say what is the right thing for everyone? What’s right for you might not be right for me!”

Well, yes, that might be true if you believe in turning individual preferences, whims, fancies, fads, and choices into general rules for human society. But serious discourse on the moral rights and obligations involved in this issue often stalls over this wild-eyed belief that we are, every one of us, so different that we share nothing in common, not even our needs as human beings. 

In the inevitable tension between the individual and the community, we generally find creative ways to fulfill most of our wants as individuals without disabling the needs of our communities. We’d feel cheated if it were otherwise because we expect the community to honor our individuality. That’s the American way. But why is it so hard to wrap our heads around the fact that we wouldn’t have individual rights if all of us, as a community, hadn’t made it so? As individuals, we only have two options for asserting our rights: either we blow everyone else away or we work together to create a society that protects all of us individuals together. 

Hobbes thought only the Leviathan of absolute monarchy could keep us from each other’s throats. Otherwise, our natural state would result in lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.” Others, including Jefferson, thought that reasonable people could freely make decisions together that would benefit the one and the many. We have the freedom to  voice our opinions, even our unreasonable ones, because of that deeply-held belief. 

Americans are nothing if not pragmatic; we usually take the cheapest, fastest, and most effective route to the solution. But we rarely speak the language of duty, especially about those we dislike or fear. Instead, we speak the language of economy, the lingua franca that unites us all in the glib glossalolatry of capitalism, marketing, and public relations. If you really want to make the point about the need for ethics you must show why it is profitable to do the right thing. Doing the right thing simply because we’re convicted it’s the right thing will often draw blank stares, because as a society we’ve lost the capacity to imagine that two or more people could agree on a moral duty. But if you hint at loss of profits or a public shaming at the hands of the media you’ll be making sense. 

So the argument for universal health care on that ground would take into account that we’re already paying the bills for the poor who are without health insurance. Requiring everyone to have health insurance that they can afford will lower the overall costs to our society; gradually building an emphasis on preventive medicine will lower the costs too. 

In the months leading up to the election we’ll be bombarded with propaganda from both sides. In order to divert the missiles and drones a lot of chaff will be blown into the air by publicists, lobbyists, campaign aides, and the candidates themselves. The Republicans are developing battle plans for a final assault on the Death Star of Obamacare. 

I’m going to lock on to a guidance system that allows two perspectives on the target: one is that people have basic rights as human beings—and adequate health care is one of them. The other is that the greatest benefit to all of us accrues when we all share the burdens.