Clarity of Thought

[Author’s remark: this essay was written two years before the economic crisis and the election of 2008.]

Clarity of Thought

One of the most alluring features of our free society is the liberty to create new and altogether original realities. There are boundaries, of course, and a few statutory protections that guard against the hazards of demagoguery, fanaticism, and destructive deviant behavior. But in general our imaginations can roam unfettered. We meander from entertainment to escape, and browse pleasantly woven scenes that have a threadlike connection to our familiar, less textured routines. The internet allows us to experiment with a kaleidoscopic array of virtual identities, and to live glorious digital lives filled with love, honor, and treasure.

But in contrast to ill-advised statements from White House subalterns about their imperious ability to blur reality and lies, not even Olympus will sustain (or politically survive) an assault of sharp analysis and clear thinking. Postpone, yes. Deny, yes. They can even transmogrify one war into another. But even the friendly facts bite back, and Potemkin storefronts, a concept that preceded Second Life by decades, inevitably crumble. Today, the harshest real-world truths of all are is that we do not as a nation have an adequate, never mind cohering, approach to the wars on terror and in Iraq, and we don’t have an effective or sustainable energy policy. Our future is highly leveraged against our collective response to those challenges and not, as the old line networks would have you believe, by the travails of Survivor.

The numbing decline into the make-believe violence of professional wrestling or the schadenfreude of reality TV naturally exaggerate the anxiety that we have reached the tipping point of permanent X-box driven delusion. It is difficult, but worthwhile, to maintain a disciplined distinction between entertainment and information, and to remain optimistic that others eventually will too.

Eventually, and hopefully soon, the United States will take more constructive steps on the winding road towards authentic cultural understanding and peaceful conflict resolution. This is not some utopian dream of dough faced liberalism. Influential non-governmental institutions that promote equal opportunity, basic health care, transparent justice, technical innovation, and environmental protection are relatively new forces in political affairs. And many citizens now slowly accept the premise of economic growth as the bedrock of safety and security, even if the detailed policy implementation remains largely abstract and vague, or, in some cases, unrealistic.

For now we remain firmly caught in the trap that Niebuhr aptly described six decades ago, when he warned against actions that place us above reproach in the global competition of political creed and its concomitant interpretations of moral purity, and, by implication, dominion over what is real. The reckless disregard of that danger, and shameful loss of the slowly accreted benefits of restraint and persuasion, will take a generation or more to recover. By then, the discarded maintenance of even the centrist domestic policy agenda - primarily education, health care, alternative energy production and fiscal restraint - may well have brought us into a dangerously weakened economic position, utterly bereft of whatever high ground may be then available to us. [Author’s remark: I wrote this two years before the economic crisis of 2009.]

The churlish message of the political left, a grand “I told you so”, while perhaps intellectually satisfying or even emotionally validating, does little at this point to forge a new consensus of what to do with the gargantuan mess: debilitating indebtedness at home, lethal insurgency in Mesopotamia, and squandered stature everywhere else. “Yes,” the conservative supporters and believers of preventative war must now admit, “you were correct this time: the leadership of Iraq, as heinous as they were, had no weapons of mass destruction, no operative affiliation with Al Qaeda, and we had no plan once Sadam was in prison and his sons were dead”. Somehow “you win” doesn’t quite say it.

The effectiveness of outwardly projected of military strength, the sine qua non of conservative foreign policy, was dealt a severe blow by Bill Clinton’s brilliant but soft-spoken first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, who had the courage and clarity to solicit opinions, advice, and perspective far outside of the Capitol Beltway. He simply wanted a peek through the Looking Glass, knowing full well it couldn’t possibly be a wide angled, or even high resolution, snapshot. Rather than admire his cool reserve, what supporters naturally interpreted as the quiet confidence of a foreign minister who had little to prove, his critics feared, or themselves ascribed, behaviors they (insincerely, never mind inaccurately) portrayed as weak, compliant, and soft headed. They mercilessly ridiculed his clean assessments of the new realities immediately following fall of the Soviet Union. But it was the Clinton Administration, not fils Bush, that launched targeted rocket attacks against the mastermind of September 11.

The moral sanctimony of the right found some vindication in the Starr Report and the impeachment hearings, and the domestic agenda suffered according to the squandered political capital of a freshly re-exposed philanderer. Indeed, absent Clinton’s personal indiscretions, Al Gore would have likely been elected president in 2000. Completely lost and now forgotten in the censorious welter - not really vast so much as relentless - is that the foreign policy of an admittedly inexperienced player effectively worked. In retrospect, what appeared dithering and indecisive only a decade ago is far superior, in its execution and its guiding principles, then the ideological certainty of unconstrained, and from the international perspective, illegitimate war.

No hologram of completed military missions, no sham trials of former dictators, will provide a meaningful answer to the hard questions we face. Reality for America today is bankruptcy at Hummer, death struggle at Ford, and the ubiquity of imported hybrids. Reality for America are the nearly three thousand coalition soldiers who have died in Iraq. Reality is gasoline once, and soon again, at $3.00 per gallon. And, yes, reality is that not just a few of us escape into TV, computer games, and obsessive email relationships.

The proliferation of amateur video clips, synthetic sport, and the soothing comforts of virtual living can lead to the perception of unhealthy national addiction or, worse, permanent detachment. But not even the president of the United States can create a misty reality impervious to the onslaught of one billion people with convenient internet access, or two billion people with cell phones.

Post script: 24 months later, Barak Obama was elected president.