More ambiguity

So here is more room for uncertainty, a quality seemingly hated by those who insist we have clear answers, and tolerated by the rest of us who feel clear only that we do not.

The labor movement, created in the 1920s to organize blue collar workers against the arbitrary excesses of big business, has suffered what seems to be a big rupture in its structure. Two of its biggest members have broken away from the umbrella AFl-CIO over the issue of how they spend their money and energy. Ostensibly, the breakaway unions want more emphasis on signing up new members rather than on using money to influence political campaigns.

In reality the issue is the huge bleeding of members from organized labor over the past generation. In the seeming growing consensus about big business' need to be unfettered, unregulated so as to better pursue the goal of lager profits, labor has been seen as an albatross, a hinderance to efficiency. And with the shift from an industrial economy to a service and tehchnology economy, the ability of large unions to speak for the working people has nearly vanished.

Now CAFTA has joined NAFTA as we join another trading region seeking to eliminate barriers between nations.

It is true that this must mean that more American jobs will go to nations with lower wages. And this will continue to whittle away at American middle class jobs. When will something come along to expose the obscenity, not to mention the drag on morale and profitability, of gargantuan salaries of those at the top of corporate America? Until it does, we should protest against the false piety of business leaders saying these trade agreements are good for everyone. The gap between CEOs and the lower end wage earners is larger in our nation than any other.

I hope the restlessness in the labor movement may begin to address some of these inequities.

Gray Areas

So the man shot dead in the London underground turns out to have been a frightened Brazilian on his way to work. Terrorism works. When we begin shooting our own, even in moments that appear desperate, we have become the sort of society terrorists hope to make us. It may be that it was inevitable and could not have been avoided; the man was wearing an overcoat seemingly too heavy for summer, he panicked when challenged, fled and jumped the turnstile before jumping onto a car where he stumbled and his pursuers fired eight bullets into him while he lay on the ground. Remember when we all marveled that British Bobbies carried only night sticks, no guns? How civilized, we thought.

This is not meant to be a judgment on us; merely the observation that terrorism works. It requires us to adopt ways of functioning that we would once have thought irrational and inappropriate for a free and open society.

The debate among us now is not really about how to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks. We will surrender virtually all our freedoms if we believe we must. And we are beginning to understand all we really can do is lower the odds and make it more difficult for terrorists, because they mingle among us as we do with each other and if they are willing, as they clearly are, to sacrifice themselves, they will succeed in doing us grave harm.

And in frightening us into turning ourselves into a fascist state.

The real debate is what is feeding this terrorism. Is it as Bush and Blair have said, an ideology that will not be satisfied with anything short of bringing down the west and secular culture? If so, logic would have it, we must kill every single person who holds such a view. Both because that is estimated to be in the millions, and because every time we launch an attack we seem to make more fertile ground for recruiting terrorists, that is impossible.

If terrorism is fed by frustration and anger at western, especially American hegemony and the sort of hedonism we export in our movies and clothing, then there is at least some room for discussion about the role we play in the world. Is it possible for us to adopt a less agressive and unilateral posture without knuckling under to the Osama bib Ladens?

We hear both positions, from within our own governement. For me, the first view, since it can lead only to more war and killing, should be tempered by a more serious consideration of the second view.

Would I be willing to risk our country being diminished, or more personally, my being blown up, for a shot at a world in which mutual respect and justice make us more peaceful? I hope so.

John Roberts

So far it appears that President Bush has either chosen a moderate, or someone who has craftily avoided revealing his views, or the Democrats neutered themselves with the agreement they made when facing the "nuclear option." It will wait at least until the hearings, and possibly until Roberts is actually on the bench, before we know.

Maybe it's a good thing, no matter what is going on. Imagine if we had a nominee for the Supreme Court, after all the overblown rhetoric, go through a thorough but uneventful senate review and take his place on the court without fanfare.

Does anyone else sense some exhaustion in the country over endless rancor? The issues have not gone away, but perhaps our thirst for prevailing absolutely on every issue has lost some of its power.

Likely not, but I'll take it while it lasts.

London & US

Two days out the most fascinating thing about the London attacks is the recovery, and that is being led by the people of London. After WWII, a survey was done of the effects of saturation bombing of Germany and Japan. And to the chagrin of war makers the survey showed that not only had the bombing not crippled the industrial ability of those nations to manufacture war materiel, but it had stiffened, not weakened the resolve of the people.

Perhaps we could have known that by simply talking to people in London about the blitz. Forty thousand Londoners were killed by random bombing. Clearly Hitler believed he could bring the nation to its knees, demoralizing the people. And one would have thought he was right, particularly since the bombing was totally unpredictable. A buzz bomb would be heard overhead and everyone would wait until the buzzing ceased as that meant the bomb had spent its fuel and would drop and explode. It made Londoners more defiant.

We Americans have not experienced, at least not yet, enough to have developed such a hard shell. But I suspect we are tougher and more resilient than we were before the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. Why, in the minutes after the Pentagon attack, the passengers on the plane over Pennsylvania changed from passive to active resisters.

All that being said, we still don't seem to understand, or perhaps believe, that our Iraq policy, our whole mid-east policy, our entire foreign policy, is feeding the terrorist recruiting. Over and over President Bush has said the reason for our Iraq occupation is to fight terrorists over there so we will not have to fight them here. London makes clear the futility of such a view.

Though terrorism is a horrible reality of 21st century world politics and we must have a tough strategy for facing into the challenges it poses for every citizen of every nation, and though military and intelligence vigilance is going to require a huge part of our resources, to fail to see how this is linked to seemingly softer issues like poverty means we are dooming ourselves to making no progress in the struggle.

When our president stiffs his closest ally on global warming and addressing African poverty, it may make the plutocrats among us who are getting richer by our hoarding of the world's resources for ourselves happy, but it makes the world more dangerous for everyone.

Swing Vote?

So Sandra Day O'Conner, the so-called swing vote, is retiring, putting the fat in the fire. The president issued a measured, thoughtful statement, saying he was consulting the senate about possible nominees so the nation could have a debate that was civil about her successor. That would fill me with hope had he not made statements like this over and over, during both presidential campaigns, describing himself as one who unites rather than divides. And every time he has been faced with a choice, whether for the UN of the World Bank, he has chosen someone who causes the grinding of teeth of anyone to the left of Pol Pot.

Now we'll see whether the Democrats did buy a pig in a poke in the compromise that looked to me more like capitulation and face-saving. Basically they said they would let through a couple of Bush's most retro judicial appointments in return for the Senate Republicans not killing the filibuster with a parliamentary maneuver. But left open was the possibility that the Republicans would detonate this nuclear weapon anyway if the Democrats filibustered a nominee later.

Any bets?