Christian Militias--Enough Already

It’s Maundy Thursday. This celebrates the night Christ ate his last Seder and proclaimed himself to be the new Passover Lamb. He also instituted the Christian sacrament of the Mass (or communion) in which Christians celebrate his sacrifice by ceremonially eating his body (bread) and drinking his blood (wine).
Another Christian tradition that comes from the night of the “Last Supper” is the ceremonial washing of feet. Even the Pope is expected to kneel and wash the feet of those around him, like a servant, as Christ washed his followers’ feet.
So it’s a significant day on the Christian calendar—celebrating sacrificial blood, death, humility and obedience. It celebrates the day God tried to make it clear to men that he was coming after them, since they no longer knew how to reach out to him.
He failed. In the midst of the Seder, while he was trying to explain that his kingdom was essentially a peaceful kingdom, his followers interrupted and asked, “Is this the day that you restore the kingdom to Israel?” They meant the violent overthrow of Roman government.
They have imitators today. Last weekend the FBI arrested nine “Christian Militia” types in southern Michigan, Indiana and Ohio for plotting to violently overthrow the American government. Their scheme started with the plan to kill one, or a few, police officers.
Then, when hundreds of cops bunched up for a funeral procession, they would set off more bombs to kill those hundreds. This, the Christian Militia—calling themselves “Hutaree”—believed would set off a vast bloodbath in which they would help Christ overthrow the anti-Christ and violently establish his kingdom on earth.
This is only a two thousand year old misunderstanding. Militiamen quote Christ who told his followers to carry swords and money now that he was leaving, forgetting that when the apostles, all too eagerly, showed him they had their swords, he said, “Enough, enough already.” They had missed his point entirely, like the militiamen did.
One of his over eager followers took a miserably aimed whack at the high priest’s servant, merely cutting off his ear. Christ stopped, already under arrest, and healed the poor man. Christians go on eagerly showing him that they have swords and are ready to wield them.
Entirely too many Christians have showed the attitude throughout the centuries—“Do we restore the kingdom now?!? Whoopee, where’s my sword, my AK-47 and my M-16? Where’s the rack and iron maiden? Wheeeeee!”
No, Christians do not restore the kingdom. HE does. He says clearly he doesn’t do it with bombs and automatic rifles (or swords and lances). He does it with his WORD. The same Word that John 1:1 says created the entire cosmos.
Christian writ and doctrine clearly states that when anti-Christ finally is destroyed, it will be done with the “sword of his MOUTH”—his “word”. We’ll just be along for the ride, sans swords, guns, bombs or any other implement of violence.
But, how do we go out and evangelize after an event like this weekend? Accept Christ as your savior—and pick up your assault rifle on the way out? Nothing more negatively affects Christian evangelism that foolish people like the Hutaree Militia.
The very rafters of Hell must echo with diabolical laughter as these misguided “Christian soldiers” try to wage physical rather than spiritual warfare—and succeed only in gutting the true message of Christianity, reducing it to a malicious joke and telling the world that our God is so feeble he couldn’t possibly manage without our AK-47s..
Shakespeare—who may just possibly have edited the King James Bible—probably said it all in the words he wrote for Puck in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “What fools these mortals be”.

Obama--A Salubrious Cynicism Indeed

A couple of days ago I wrote that Obama probably does not have “the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to [the] sort of hubris” that makes him forget power in Washington is not so much held as derived from others. I added that I sensed “a salubrious cynicism in him.”
He wrought brilliantly to resurrect health care reform from the dead and get it through the House. Even those who don’t like him or the bill have to hand him that! Getting the bill passed required a masterpiece of political statesmanship.
George Bush demonstrated it when he got his tax cuts through; Reagan displayed it when he pushed Reaganomics through a Democratic Senate; Clinton flaunted it time after time with both Democratic and Republican Congresses. LBJ and Nixon both had the knack.
Now, for the first time in his presidency, Obama shows us that he, too, can run something—specifically, he can push a program hugely unpopular with large segments of the American population and the opposing party right into law. Give him credit.
Then, as soon as Congress folds its tents and sneaks out of town for its own version of Spring Break, Obama displays a wonderful version of Chicago ward boss politics. (Run against the King of England; get them to vote early, vote often.)
He slipped fifteen major appointments—that require Senate approval—through as “Recess appointments”. The rules say that if you use a recess appointment, the guy (or gal) can serve a year or more without being confirmed by anybody.
Whooosh, they’re in. I know I should be properly peeved as my fellow Republicans all profess to be, but I can’t help but grin a bit. Apparently wandering around Chicago as a community organizer, watching how politics is played in that grand old town, taught Obama something.
The Republicans used to procedural grounds to hold up these appoints for nearly eight months; that does smack of pure politics. (Then again, if they really didn’t like some of the people—and they did not—what other choice did they have against an overwhelming Democratic majority?) So everybody was playing politics—and Obama end played them.
Republicans went through the motions—John McCain pleaded with Obama not to use Recess Appointments—and Obama paid as much attention to them as he did during the 2008 campaign. Obama has been a bit rough on McCain lately, true enough.
During the bi-partisan summit on health care reform, he tartly reminded a pontificating McCain that “the election is over”. He just gave him another reminder last weekend. “The election is over; I make the Recess Appointments; you don’t.”
Obama looked like a patsy last year. He allowed the international community and BOTH parties in Congress to walk all over him. Last weekend he showed, finally, that he can be a political “son-of-a-bitch”.
Democrats—who are sweating fall re-election—can maybe start to smile just a bit and repeat the rest of the old adage, “but he’s OUR son-of-a-bitch.”
As a Republican I’m not necessarily pleased. As a detached observer of the American political scene, I’m grinning a bit.

Obama and the Usages of Power IV

Obama has won the Battle of Health Care Reform. His perceived ability to have exercised effective political power will create an aura—an illusion, if you will--of a politically savvy and powerful president. The hardest thing for him to do now will be to remember—as he did NOT in 2008/9—that much of this aura is a normal Washington illusion.
He must now act in a way to conserve that illusion. Conserving AND using the illusion of power is a bit like having one’s cake and eating it, too, I admit. It is part of the necessary and health destroying tight rope act of exercising power in Washington.
The Illusion of Power, as long as he can maintain it, will be the most important weapon in his political arsenal for as long as he holds office. The instant he allows it to fall apart, he will cease to be effective and the nation will be fundamentally leaderless—as it was under Bush in 2008 or under Hoover in 1932.
Let’s look a bit more at political illusion as it applies to the presidency. Sometimes it’s easier to see in matters of foreign policy so I’ll mostly talk about that. Domestic maneuverings are usually done more quietly and don’t make major headlines.
Look at the difference between Eisenhower and Kennedy during the late fifties and early sixties. Ike could afford to let our national defense deteriorate to a degree that might have been criminal under any other president. Pilots lacked fuel to practice flying, GIs were still carrying World War II weapons and the navy was floating boats from the 1930s and 40s.
How could he get away with it. Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. The Russians knew him. They remembered that with a nod of his head he could unemotionally sentence half-a-million German civilians to death in a single day’s raid.
He embodied the horror and destruction of total war. They occupied the ruins our bombers had left of the neighborhoods of Berlin. He scared them. He didn’t need to spend billions on new toys. Just the myth of Eisenhower was sufficient. Smoke and mirrors.
From 1958 on the Russians had wanted to build a wall across Berlin like the Iron Curtain across the rest of Germany. They didn’t dare. Kennedy took office with his green berets, all the new ships and planes for the armed services—and they built the wall during his first year.
Khrushchev summoned Kennedy to Vienna in June, 1961, took his measure, saw no illusion of power, and built his wall a month later. He tried to put missiles in Cuba. Finally Kennedy stood up—and nearly extinguished all life on this planet. Creating no illusions can be dangerously costly.
LBJ was the “Master of the Senate” in the 1950s. He lost all real power when he became Veep in 1961; but he had left enough of an imprint on Congress and such an illusion of being dangerous that he passed more social legislation in two years than almost any four or five previous presidents had in their entire combined terms.
One last illusion that we are living with today. THE INVINCIBLE AMERICAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER. It was, in 1945. We could launch a thousand carrier planes in a single strike. We owned the skies over Japan and occupied China.
If an American carrier shows up today in foreign waters, it inspires great trepidation in those who live adjacent to those waters. (An Arab leader pointing out at the Persian Gulf and screaming, “Do you think those carriers are there on vacation?’)
One lucky missile hit—and that illusion will be forever gone. We won’t just lose a ship, its 5,000 men and its eighty or ninety planes—we will lose three-quarters of a century of myth that has served and protected us well. Be careful where you send them. Stay at red alert—the way we didn’t in December, 1941.
One missile—and the illusion goes the way of the B-29 bomber.
Illusion of Power. It is the indispensible ingredient for successful politics and diplomacy. It is so easily and quickly broken and lost. Obama—in Afghanistan and Washington—must now walk a very, very careful (without seeming to be cautious) tight rope.
Let’s all wish him Good Luck.

Obama and the Usages of Power III

We’re talking about how much Obama showed us he has learned about the usage of power last week—when he got at least part of his health care reform through Congress after a year of abject failures. In earlier blogs I talked about how Obama’s biggest problem last year was believing his own press.
It’s hard to stay balanced when everyone from Vienna to Honolulu is cheering madly for you, calling you the culmination of the entire civil rights movement and proclaiming that the new millennium begins now with you.
Perhaps today he senses that power—whether it arrives from office, public adulation or military force—is essentially an illusion. And that nothing is easier to lose than the illusion of power—because it never had any reality in the first place.
On the other hand, nothing is more powerful, more frightening than illusory power because, unlike actual power, it has no limits in other people’s mind. It assumes a life of its own and seems more dangerous than a hundred hydrogen bombs.
Used properly and sparingly, it can accomplish more, prevent more problems and win more bloodless victories than all the armies of World War II. But you must have a monumentally acute sense of just how far you dare push it, how unreal, how unstable it truly is.
Let’s give a couple of practical examples. One has come and gone—poofed away in the wind. THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC BOMBER. The B-17, B-24, B-29, B-47, B-52. The world literally trembled at the mere thought of having such horror unleashed on it.
Everyone “knew” that the American bomber had won World War II. Photographs of German and Japanese cities in flames or covered with the puffs of exploding bombs, all falling in a deadly row, were seared into world consciousness.
Except that they—and unfortunately we—knew wrong. Bombers were frightening; they killed an awful lot of civilians—but they had a very limited impact on German and Japanese war making potential. All those photo-news shots of falling bombs were militarily an illusion.
(Caveat—we did cut German oil production to the point that German troops jumped off in the Battle of the Bulge (December, 1944—five months before it was all over) with only five days of fuel. They were expected to capture allied fuel dumps to resupply. People like Patton prevented that.)
But as long as the world THOUGHT that the American bomber was invincible—it was. Every so often in the 1950s and 60s, Russia’s fractious ally, the Chinese Communists (who had fought us to a draw in Korea) got feisty and threatened to take on the US again.
They kept calling us the “paper tiger”. Russia’s Khrushchev would publicly remind the Chinese that the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had “nuclear teeth”, and ask the Chinese to shut up. But China knew something.
In Korea her troops had taken the brunt of World War II style mass bombing raids by B-29s and B-50s. They had endured terrible casualties. Enough, however, had survived to force the war to a stalemate. But the myth went on.
What was worse, we believed the myth. In Vietnam we destroyed it forever, like a shattered glass vase. We bombed and bombed and bombed. Our generals assured the White House that, just as they had defeated Germany and Japan, they would destroy the Viet Cong.
They killed lots and lots of human beings, true. But they only thing they destroyed with their own myth of invincibility. That was possibly the biggest loss we endured in Vietnam. Never again would a Russian leader publicly credit American bombers with mythological powers.
It can be expensive to shatter one’s own myth. We did it—by not recognizing that, at bottom, an illusion is an illusion is an illusion. It can protect you while it endures; when it falls apart, it can leave you terribly naked.
A bit more next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power II

Yesterday I talked about what Obama has learned about the nature and usage of power. I also talked about my own experience in learning that all political power is in some sense derivative—derived from someone or something outside of one’s own self and office.
Learn that, live and succeed. Forget it and someone will cut you off from behind before you ever know you’ve been hit. I don’t think Obama has the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to that sort of hubris. I sense a salubrious cynicism in him. No one in Washington ever achieves much without it. I think he may have that.
I question whether he will demonstrate the appetite for health breaking kind of work it requires to continue to exercise real control in Washington. He is, after all, a man for whom family is very important. The pursuit of political power will permit you to have no other gods before it; it is more jealous than the proverbial “bitch goddess of success”.
But he did what needed to be done to get his health care plan through Congress last week. That shows tremendous growth in aptitude over last year. Now we shall see if he knows some other things about power that I learned while watching, doing and meditating in Washington decades ago.
Briefly, my own tale. I allowed overweening ambition to propel me into a job in the Office of the White House before I was ready or capable. I had reached my then limit by rising to a job in the Office of the US Surgeon General that allowed me pretty effective access and, to a slight degree, control over the vast (international in scope) US Public Health Service.
People answered my phone calls; they had a car waiting for me at the airport, I had friends and allies. Where I needed to be feared, I was feared. The intensity of working more immediately for the President (my boss’s boss’s boss was Lyndon Johnson) was something I wasn’t ready to handle.
They chewed me up and spat me out. When they laid off or reassigned over half the staff or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1968, I was one of those called in and told to go away. (The Democrats did not need the stigma of being too pro-Civil Rights in that year’s election.) Perhaps foolishly—I was offered a higher pay grade in another agency—I resigned and left Washington.
My success—and my failure—had cost me a marriage, a career and a mental breakdown. Playing with political power is a bit like holding a 400 amp electrical cable in each hand and trying to attach them while they are live. It can fry you.
From my standpoint of having experienced both success and failure in wielding the Washington game—and years of meditation—I pass along the following thoughts on the nature of power. Obama will learn these things if he succeeds.
One) Power is a matter of propinquity. You have to BE there. After five o’clock, when the bottles of scotch come out, the feet are up on the desk and you talk (and LEARN) about what’s going on. You have to get off your chair and walk around, all day, late into the evening.
Talk even to failures—some will know someone who can help you. (My best sources of power came from people who had failed themselves, but still could place a helpful phone call.) Forget family, forget other activities. Be there, be there, be there.
Two) Power is persistence far more than it is the exertion of brute force!!! (Any insurance agent can tell you this.) It is the gentle pressure of the star fish rather than the bite of the shark. The latter will scare others into retaliating against you. Eventually that will get you.
Be friendly, be understanding of the other fellow’s problems, keep yourself in his memory banks, hang onto ALL phone numbers you are given—and call them now and then. Somebody, somewhere, is going to need something that can benefit you—and you want them to remember your name. Favorably.
Three) Power is mostly ILLUSION. This is the biggie. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power

It’s still too early to say whether or not Obama will grow to be a successful president—but he took a significant step in that direction last week. He put his nose to the political grindstone and made some of his health care initiative finally happen.
Whether he can articulate it or not, he’s learned some important lessons about the nature, usages and limitations of Power. A year ago he made the mistakes most people make when they think about power—that if you have a title like “president” all you have to do is stand there and “be” powerful.
Nope. Do that and Congress, Wall Street and the folks who decide where the next Olympics will be held will walk all over you. Throughout Obama’s first year in office, they walked at will. He discovered that the presidential seal and fifty cents will get you a phone call every time.
This is not really Obama’s fault. He has had no experience wielding power. A Senator, a community activist and a recent Harvard Law School graduate have no power to wield. There was no way he could have learned before last year.
First of all, to be effectively powerful—to make things happen—requires a voracious appetite for an appalling amount of desperately hard work and a stomach for unimaginable stress. I believe it can be safely said that most men who have served as CEO of, say, General Motors (or Exxon, Nescafe, General Electric—it doesn’t really matter) have done so without ever seriously affecting how or what was done at General Motors.
In other words, they’ve never ran General Motors. The same thing can be said of most presidents. They have served their four or eight year terms without ever having run the United States government—or having gotten a real idea of what’s going on in Washington.
Obama’s misfortune—and possible future good luck—is that he landed in Washington during one of those rare occasions when it was necessary for a president to 1)know what was going on, 2)make things happen, and 3)exert real and effective power.
Roosevelt did. Lincoln did. George W. Bush did. It is instructive to look at photos of these men taken on the day they assumed office and taken during their last year in the office. The job aged the life right out of some of them. It killed Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It left people like Bush and Buchanan covered with opprobrium.
Most presidents, more than we like to think, have glided through their terms without having to go much beyond Cal Coolidge’s famed question (when he woke up from a nap), “Is the country still there?” It usually was and it survived them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the nature of power ever since I was a twenty-five year old kid in Washington with the equivalent civilian rank of first lieutenant or captain in the army. I would periodically step back and observe myself and be fascinated by a couple of things I saw around me.
I could call a multi-billion dollar federal agency like the CDC in Atlanta and make it hop, skip and jump. The man next to me, with the equivalent rank of a colonel or general couldn’t make it budge. Why? What was the difference?
For one thing, I possessed something that is true of almost anyone in Washington who can exercise any real power—I had DERIVATIVE power. I spoke in the name of someone who had power, in this case the Surgeon General of the United States. The other man did not.
I quickly realized that much of the Surgeon General’s power was also derivative—as was the power of his boss, the Secretary of HEW. ALL of us were working on derived power—not anything that was actually real. (Forget that, even for an instant, and you suffer a nasty political death.) So all power is actually merely derived. It isn’t really yours. Push beyond the limits of that derivation, and you fail.
I learned a few more things about power during that time—I’ll continue next time.

War and Myth XIII

The American public tends to reserve its most savage reprisals for politicians who tell it the truth. When candidate George Romney (Mitt’s dad) admitted in 1968 that the Pentagon had lied to him (“brainwashed” was the term he used), his run for the presidency was over.
When Carter spoke some hard truths about energy, he was reduced to an object of public derision. When Mondale pointed out some harsh economic truths in 1984, his candidacy sank without a bubble. George H.W. Bush called Reaganomics “Voodoo economics” and lost to Reagan in the 1980 primaries.
In 1990 he admitted his promise of no new taxes was insupportable and signed the increase that laid the foundation for the Clinton surpluses. Disabused and unforgiving Republican constituents abandoned him in droves in 1992. He lost.
A wise maxim for a political candidate in this country might be, “Never, never, never tell people the truth—they will kill you for it.” Instead we insist on living in a world enshrouded with myth.
One of the biggest we’ve insisted on living with over the past half century is the notion that we can have all manner of middle class subsidies—tax free interest on ever bigger houses, pennies to pay for Social Security, Medicare and, in extremis, Medicaid before dying.
Ever smaller tax rates—from 90% in the 1950s down to 36% today--and ever newer toll free high ways, bigger airports, and fancier new high schools with state of the art theatres, swimming pools, art rooms, free bussing and the newest technology.
And nobody needs to pay for it. Ever. Want to get killed at the polls? Tell the citizenry that either the schools have to reduce programs or taxes have to go UP. Or that they may have to start paying tolls on Michigan freeways. You can sneak it in—but don’t tell them.
We’ve gone into our wars the same way. Iraq wasn’t going to cost anything because rebuilding the nation would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. We were fighting in World War II to save democracy—not by any chance to settle some imperial scores.
(The cynical battle front G.I., when asked what HE was actually fighting for, typically answered, “ A piece of mom’s apple pie.” LBJ got briefly honest about why he thought he was in Vietnam and said bluntly, “They want what we got.” What happened to saving Vietnam from communism? LBJ’s public fantasy world fell apart before he even tried to run again in 1968.)
Today we’re being told we can have universal health care (something I believe in), but that it won’t cost us a dime—in fact it will SAVE us money. True, it doesn’t have to cost what this bill will make it cost, but it won’t cost LESS! But, again, try to tell people the truth about health care in this country—and you get wrathful tea parties like last summer’s—attended by people so blinded by their own mythology that they didn’t realize Medicare IS a government program!
(Remember the original Boston Tea Party occurred when the British cut rates on legal tea so far that it was cheaper to buy the legal stuff than the tea American smugglers were sneaking in. So the smugglers banded together and dumped the legal leaf over the side.)
Going to war—or fighting a crisis in the economy or the health care system—blinded by myth, lied to by politicians who tell us what we insist on hearing, isn’t a sound or sane way to make policy. It really isn’t. I suggest to the American voter that he stop yammering about lying politicos and develop within himself a tolerance for truth.
How about evaluating policy by whether or not it is real, whether or not it is honest (I didn’t say “nice” or that it will make the Susie’s of the world like us, I said honest and true)? How about evaluating a war or a policy in the same cold bloodedly rational way we should evaluate our investments—will they benefit us? Will they accomplish the mission? Can we afford them? Will we make enough back to justify the investment in blood, treasure and materiel?
The cataracts of myth merely make US blind; they don’t change the realities of the world we must deal with. Or the real costs. Or the likely consequences.
Applied reality will enable us to shift positions and alter our approaches more quickly as situations become clearer or changes occur. Investors who make big money—and hang on to it—hold to very, very few myths.
Nations that wish to succeed and survive need to be as wise—and as unswervingly honest.
Again, I didn’t say “nice” or “likeable” or “fanciful”.