For Timothy Burke As Civic Friend

This post is in response to a wonderful comment that Timothy Burke left in the thread on a prior post, Crooked Timber in The Dumpster too. I am posting it here to draw further comments on what may emerge over time as a shared understanding. We are hashing through what we can learn from our several reactions, and reactions to the reactions, to the incendiary post, How to Write Like a Liberal Sack of Garbage. Having felt the mutual pain of misunderstanding, Timothy is trying with relentless good will, and I am also, to learn from each other, and come away with a sense of colleagueship, if nothing else. The notes below could not have been written without his prodding and are a "straight" statement of my own beliefs, sans satire, insofar as I can still write, at moments, like a liberal and moderate man "capable of reason" (as Swift said of humankind.)

--

Timothy, Bravo! I am deeply moved and exhilarated by your clarion call to reason, mutuality, and the public square. And, yes, even a humane capitalism, in the spirit, say, of Mill. Crooked Timber, the name, comes I am sure from Kant via Isaiah Berlin, one of my moral and intellectual heroes. (I was at Oxford as a philosophy student when he was there and treasure a moment when he came by Holywell Manor, where I lived, to talk to us after dinner. What an enormously gracious and empathetic man. How he reads himself into those with whom he disagrees, the generosity of spirit and the curiosity are to me models, not just of philosophy, or intellectual history, or lit crit, but of citizenship. As you say, the Habermassian public square.)

I do not feel any hatred for more centrist liberals, not enmity. The attitude is that of the Tutor towards Dick Minim. Love and fidelity. Yet also protective.

I acknowledge that I have not yet found a good way to engage the far right. I am immersed in their world but most often silent, going along to get along. But there are some emerging opportunities. As those who read this site know I have a cordial and friendly relationship, one I have consciously courted, with Lenore Ealy, a socially conservative policy intellectual who currently specializes in philanthropy. She is very much a part of the policy circles that include Heritage, AEI, Hudson, Heartland, George Mason, and on and on. (She would modestly call herself peripheral, but she has convened a listserve of some major figures.) We engage each other on purpose. We trade names and connections. We stage moments of debate, and we encourage our friends to join us, not just to take potshots but to develop collegial working relationships with our apparent "adversaries," in the process of which we find common interests, for example, in promoting grassroots giving and civic engagement. So, I do think, you and I are back to back in the same foxhole, willing to fight to the last bullet, or the last witticism, for the ideals of, say, Isaiah Berlin, may his influence spread!

So whence comes the animus that you notice, correctly? Why the fury over the prose, or more generally the decorum, of received liberalism. Let me give three or four answers.

1. In the upper levels of our society liberals and conservatives seem to in some ways fuse into a single elite. Not quite. There is real mutual distrust between the liberal or traditional funders and, say, the Koch family, Coors, Mellon-Scaithe who use giving to promote a (what appears to me to be) ruthlessly libertarian, damn the public square, kind of public policy. Still, it is frustrating that those of us who feel that, say, The Patriot Act, subverts democracy to find that it had and has broad bipartisan support. As the right moves right, their counterparts in the middle, move right too, until it seems that there are no viable alternative choices.

2. What does the Habermassian public square, or democracy, require of us, when we are called out as Terrorists? Or when we see the putting in place of a new McCarthyism, one blood libel, one innuendo, one Freedom Pen, one Patriot Act, one Attorney General, one judge at a time? What is the most effective defense, when we are not the judge, but the accused? Can we write in the moderate even handed style when we are defending our own personal bona fides before a Kangaroo Court?

3. I do not think liberalism is a given, or an eternal verity. I think of it as garden or a plant that requires watering, pruning, cultivation. (Metaphors from Pindar via Martha Nussbaum.) Unless we care for it, the garden will be overrun with weeds. Some pruning, some weeding, gets the hands dirty, and requires edge tools.

4. As a matter of personal discovery, my own little aha, I do believe and think if I were still in academics I could prove that the tradition of Berlin and Mill or of Wimsatt, or E.B. White, is also the tradition of Augustan, and classical satire. That is something that might be worthy almost of an anthology, so many proof texts, right on down through, actually, Hume and Locke. (Read Hume's famous passage for example on not deducing an ought from an is, and see it within the tradition of Augustan wit and satire, it will pop into focus as such. The tropes, as of feigned bewilderment, would do Pope proud.)

So what? In satire we have the wet work needed to be both faithful to our own tradition, and also to defend it against those who would subvert it. Am I good at it? No, I am insurance exec and former academic, not a creative writer. But the tradition, the double helix, of reason and poetry, including satire, is there to be embraced, as one might run to an armory still well stocked the weapons needed to defend a free society from disingenuous foes.

Here is my gut level feeling about Horowitz and his memes. The GOP embraced a Southern strategy via Rove, out of Atwater, out of George Wallace. What Horowitz is doing, with the Patriot Act, the rehabilitation of McCarthy, and secret tribunals as backdrop, is to call certain of my friends, by innuendo, the equivalent of "Niggrah." Now he says, traitor or terrorist, not niggrah or commie, but the rhetorical strategy is that of a slur, or an unanswered blood libel. To let it slide is not acceptable. Or it will come at us again and again until it becomes like a Brand, the equation of liberalism with terror and treason. Then could come marginal cases where such people deemed (or slurred as) traitors are tracked in databases, deprived here and there of certain liberties, and if that works, more of the same with increasing intensity. The limits, the perimeter is being probed. If we do not resist, the ideals of Isaiah Berlin end in our era, on our watch, in all but name, or in all but isolated pockets, such as the universities, on which Horowitz has also trained his attention, as has Lynne Cheney via ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni)

"So, what are you saying, boy, are you saying you are not a niggrah? Sure look black to me, boy. Show me your hand. Black as the ace of spades. You saying you're white? No, you are a Niggrah. Aren't you, boy?" That is what I hear in Horotwitz and I am appalled that we are unable to answer. (I have been asked here in the South by colleagues in business, "Are you a liberal?" When I say, "Yes," they shake their heads as if I had owned up to being a Pariah, their worst fears confirmed.) By "we," those unable to answer Horowitz, honestly, Timothy, I had in mind specifically some of the people and organizations specifically named in his Discover the Network. (I had just come from a conference, The Momentum Conference, convened by Threshold, Changemakers and Tides who are instanced in the database.)

Look at the posts on Peter Karoff here, including the one recently about "What We Want," see how he is operating almost in a state or rosy minded denial? (I say that with genuine admiration and affection. He is my mentor and friend and has probably done more for me than anyone in my career, but he is in a box, and he knows it, and suffers from the sense that he is living among Sleepwalkers, his fellow liberals, who are reliving Weimar. He has written a piece about it but published sub rosa only on my other site, unless I have missed it elsewhere.) Horowitz has called Peter's friends out, with an eye to demonizing them, wrong footing them, and possibly setting them up. And what is their response? To ignore him. As some ignored Hitler's rise through similar memes. I think Peter and his friends are just plain dumbfounded. They are so polite, as you are Timothy, so sincere, so well educated and so well bred, and so earnest that they are speechless at Horowitz's malevolence. They are ostracizing - as if it mattered - the Yahoos who are now risen to power. They are no longer masters of the big house, for they are the new niggrahs. And accused to Terror they just stand there and take it. As a guy living in the South, they seem to me to be almost asking for it. We don't like no terrorists down here. We have pickups driving around with Terrorist Hunting Licenses on the back window, and we don't stand with politeness. (We being the rednecks empowered by the Horowitz discourse that winks at and seemingly condones vigilante violence but with deniability, Abu Ghraib all over again, with Gonzalez as the Sheriff in this Southern town, where a liberal or a gay or an Planned Parenthood doctor may well turn up... well, missing. Here in Dallas a democratic organizer was told from the pulpit that you can't be both a liberal and a Christian. His home was later egged, with an note suggesting as much. These people, spurred by the likes of Horowitz, and emboldened by White House access, are not debaters. Their tradition is barn burning.)

I wrote as much to Peter. I suggested that he convene a panel of those in the Horowitz database, and that he invite Horowitz. That he call Horowitz out in his turn, that he advance smartly towards danger and show neither fear nor disdain, just advance until Horowitz feels himself facing a phalanx of his moral and intellectual superiors, shoulder to shoulder. Peter has access to the national media and convenes such events. To prod Peter's conscience, I also included the parable, The Chorus, http://www.thehappytutor.com/archives/2005/03/the_liberal_cho_1.html

He said in reply, "You are nothing if not consistent," meaning that I have been on him about this for years, to bestir himself to defend the democracy we are losing on his watch. Then he invited me to contribute to his new book, in effect, turning the tables and saying, "Okay smartass you stick your neck out. You tell them, and I'll hold your coat. You have rich conservative clients at your firm; you are inoffensive as hell on Company Time, sucking up to one and all, and calling it good manners, or being inclusive. If you want to call out the right, you put your name on the line, Mr. Anonymous Blogger, piss in your own punch bowl and get off my case." At least that is how I read it. He is giving me the rope and suggesting that I should provide a demonstration of a man hanging himself in a noble cause.

Finally, there is this. Do you know the wonderful book by Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property? Among its many fine moments is an observation about language. He says we have the language of the altar (or hearth) and the language of the gate (commerce and war). I think we both write, I in these comments now, you throughout, the language of the hearth, the language of friend with friend, that we would also willingly extend to others as civic friends in the public square, whether we agree with them or not, we would accord them time and attention, and try to meet with them honestly. Yet, that whole discourse is now being subverted not by Terrorists but by our over-response to terror, like (as Derrida said) a man who dies not of a disease but of his own antibodies run amok. How do we address those in the public square who use psy ops, marketing, and propaganda, following Machiavelli and Strauss to create a world of seeming, a world of propaganda, and who sway the multitude with great effect, and who, knowing we resist, are now demonizing us as the new niggrahs, the terrorist symps who are otherwise known as liberals?

We need a language that cuts through to the bone. Reason is weak against their stratagems, because the stratagems are not arguments, but innuendo, demagoguery, and veiled threat. To accept such strategic coded malevolent speech acts as reason and to respond with reason, strikes the adversary, quite rightly, as ludicrous. He doesn't believe his own shit, and here you are carefully agreeing and disagreeing point for point, as he packs another handful of shit to throw in your face. You don't reason pro and con with an egregious insult.

To defend the public square requires two things:

1. That we not abandon it. (That we not stop writing in the spirit and style of Berlin, that we remain faithful to our folkways, even in extremis.)

2. We draw on the full resources of our tradition, including its suppressed or atavistic gene for satire, wit, humor, invective and carnival to make our dishonest and corrupt adversaries feel pain for pain, shot for shot, right down the line. Their faults are not just intellectual, the faults are moral. Sermonizing is dull, as even Swift the Preacher knew; what gets attention is a ritual lynching, vigilante justice, and the satirist does it with greater art, as his Noble Trade, than did George Wallace or now his heirs, like Rove, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Horowitz. If it comes to lynching, let Astraea return and show us how it can be done in the most Horatian and civilized manner, not to subvert what you love, Timothy, but to defend it and preserve it and even to exemplify it, if you love Dryden or Pope or Swift and consider them as I do parts of the broad liberal tradition.

So, if you are willing to accept me as such, I would like to think we are making common cause for the liberal tradition.

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

Can we pull over a few of the late comments from the CT thread? They continue this conversation, I think.

[Tutor]

Looks like Crooked Timber is down. Hope they can bring it back up with the prior posts intact.

[Timothy Burke]

No, I mean from the thread here, "Crooked Timber in the Dumpster Too", where we kept talking past the point here of the post you reproduce above.

[T. V.]

I'd like to request that you not recopy the posts here, Tutor.

[Tutor]

Well we have tie. Let's keep talking in either case.

[Timothy Burke]

Ok, let's not copy the posts over, but let's keep that discussion going there as well.

[Tutor]

Agreed. Feel like one of the three musketeers brandishing a foil in one hand and flintlock in another. Good fun, Timothy, thank you for engaging in such a lively exchange. We are both going to have to deal with the likes Horowitz as mob up operations continue. Liberals whether they feel like winners or like sacks of garbage, have been consigned to a bad end in that guy's view, and those well connected funders who pay him well. Any tips or pointers we can share may help us both.

[Juke Moran]

It's a lot easier dealing with the devil's yard dogs, than with the devil himself, isn't it? Horowitz is about as strategically important as a Rottweiler.
-
One votes for burlesque, another one for satire, still another for earnest honest sincerity - about the only possibility left unsummoned is maybe out-and-out deception. But that's okay, I'm incapable of dishonesty. See? I have a plaque from my superiors attesting to that very thing.
And isn't that a ponder.
Contest the frame without stepping outside of it - like those Escherian perspective anomalies, walking up the stairs and turning left and walking up the stairs and turning left and walking up the stairs and turning left leaves you right back at the landing where you began.
Otherwise you know, there's uhmm...risk. Real danger. Get naked with the bottom line. Confront the orange jumpsuit with your personal God-given number stenciled on its heart.
Try thinking of the top-dog-kingpins as backed into a corner. It's hard to imagine, because they seem to have everything, but they have no options to total control other than abject loss, you know - they can't exist at the lower levels as anything greater than rodentiae. So they're trapped.
Now think of their reactions and actions as proceeding from that corner. Same as the desperate panic of the obviously cornered at the bottom of the economy - only gilded, softened, spruced up and gleaming, with technological/behaviorist refinements and an array of weaponry that's spellbinding.
But it's the same absence of middle ground. There is no middle ground. You really are with them or against them, because in the real world they have no other exit but the narrowing path into the Bardo. They're accelerating into the cul de sac and all their instrumentation's pulsating red.
It doesn't work to go this way, and it won't work for them to go any other way.
There. Now. You see? What you want is to convince people who can't survive in a more benevolent, more righteous and healthier environment, that sacrifice of that magnitude is a good thing. Or that all this will improve, or at least stop hurtling toward the abyss, without any real sacrifice whatsoever.
You think that's too abstract and loggorhetic? Count the SUV's on your local freeway. They're entering this world right out of the maw of that dilemma.
The frame says you can't discuss the menagerie in the living room. Chertoff, Negroponte, Wolfowitz.
Beria.
The frame says you can only say things that make it better for the infantile deities streaming out of the near-future turnaround, spawned by a singular ahistorical moment; real righteousness has its tinge of endured proving, the tempering gantlet of withstood fire, a living-through, annealed, hardened. Evolved. This innocence, this purity that chants outside the windows of a comatose saint, is coming into the world unevolved - it has no experience, it has no tempered strength, it's an infantile unknowing inexperience trying to preserve its lack of knowledge, because of the freedom that provides. It bargains with cynical men and women for protection, and it gets it. The fee is practically unlimited power, given in exchange for shelter and maintenance, and it generates power at unimaginable magnitude. Think that's too airy-fairy? Look at the 300 million souls circling the blinding light at the center of America. No? Still too arcane? Bush is President, Wolfowitz prez of the World Bank, Negroponte in charge of US internal security. How's that? Concrete enough? That light put them there. Not liberal ineffectuality bowing to conservative cynicism, though of course those played their parts. It's that baby-God, trying to protect itself from knowing where it is and how it became what it is.
Pragmatic discussions of the appropriate tools for social change - now - are about as dynamically appropriate as stamp-collecting, or, I'm sorry, philatelic pursuits. Las Vegas numismatism.
Until you guys can talk about what's really here, where we really are, without recoiling in speechless horror and its attendant protective disdain, you're only trying to make yourselves feel better, preserve your own touchie-feelie status quo ante, at the expense of the unnameable promise which is our true responsibility.
Still too arcane?
Too bad.

[Buddy-Karl Morans]

Put the boots to them, huh, cousin Juke?

[Juke Moran]

My apologies to Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Chertoff. I meant of course that Mr. Chertoff is in charge of Homeland Security, while Mr. Negroponte exercises his honed and sharpened abilities in the service of US intelligence, internal and external - wherever it can be found.

[Tutor]

In business and war, now politics, you provoke a crisis in order to manage it. We call that audacity. The gamble paid off, but now that the neocons have seized control, I wonder too if they have any idea what they are doing, except consolidating control, as you put it,

"Try thinking of the top-dog-kingpins as backed into a corner. It's hard to imagine, because they seem to have everything, but they have no options to total control other than abject loss, you know - they can't exist at the lower levels as anything greater than rodentiae. So they're trapped.
Now think of their reactions and actions as proceeding from that corner. Same as the desperate panic of the obviously cornered at the bottom of the economy - only gilded, softened, spruced up and gleaming, with technological/behaviorist refinements and an array of weaponry that's spellbinding. But it's the same absence of middle ground. There is no middle ground. You really are with them or against them, because in the real world they have no other exit but the narrowing path into the Bardo. They're accelerating into the cul de sac and all their instrumentation's pulsating red."

And Jesus cries for blood. The only way out of the con is to run another, bigger. Power is pyramided, like a Ponzi scheme or Enron. Buy in, bring others in beneath you, and rise, until it all blows up. "Falling forward." Hurtling through time, running so fast to keep from falling. That is how I read it too, but it is working, and who and how can we put in an effective bid for something better?

[Gerry]

You have work to do for a couple of days and all hell breaks loose. FWIW Timothy, I don't think you really get it. There is much deep respect for the knowledge and specialized skill of trained academics, and many gathered around the dumpster have formal and informal backgrounds that are truly impressive. Tutor is right, you insist on showing up with a knife for a gun fight.

Several points about action and real change vs. the debate about tactics. The most important near term goals are to revitalize the political ranks from the bottom up. Encouraging sincere conservatives is as important as advancing the war weary Liberal flag. All politics are local. Start from the state and local representatives, then to the House and Senate. These guys are vulerable, and they must be stopped on all fronts. So the measure of success is who gets elected on the left and the right.

I still think that the themes of Wealth Bondage need to be exported into some sort of street theatre that brings this satire to a wider audience. I am no creative writer, and even the Tutor begs off when it comes to the skill to really pull this off. With a creative team of writers and actors this could be done very effectively.

Tutor, I think you need to be the producer for this and gather the talent around. Could become a really hot property. I have some casting ideas, but who would you ask to write?

[Jon Husband]

Matt Groening ?

[Timothy Burke]

Well, but mentioning Groening's name is interesting. Why doesn't "The Simpsons" accomplish the purposes that the Tutor aims for? Or Jon Stewart? Elsewhere a Wealth Bondage commentator pines for Lenny Bruce and judges various other comedians of our times close but not close enough. Why aren't the jesters we have enough to do what you see as needed? Haven't they brought the proper weaponry to the fight? Is this going to turn out to be a Frankensteinian exercise in building the Ultimate Wit who can beat back the demogagogic right perfectly? Who could possibly match the exacting specifications being drawn up here?

[Kip Manley]

A knife to a gunfight?

Oh, we all know what you're talking about, but the problem is one of the things about why we're fighting the people we're fightingone of the things that makes them them and us usis that they use guns at all, and "I am not a gun," to quote the Iron Giant. (Or, to slide from metaphor to ad hominem: it is said we need a Limbaugh of our own, but one of the signal failures of our age is that they have a Limbaugh at all.)

Of course, the Iron Giant had to blow himself up in a nuclear explosion to win the fight he was in, and he can put himself back together, but I can't. I don't want a gun in a gunfight. What I want is tear gas and a goddam kevlar vest. How does that translate?

[Jon Husband]

I was that same commentator re: other comedians .. but I like Kip's point .. I think it addresses the more fundamental issues .. and my basic interpretation is that the society tolerates sociopathy as the basic ideology held by its elected leadership.

Why that is ? ... well, many reasons have been advanced but I suppose its the case that the USA is an adolescent society pumped up on ez-print money steroids and just-as-ez access to guns, with hormonal inflammation fanned by constant religion and television.

[Tutor]

Gruenning and Stewart do what they can, but the leash is only so long. They are corporate intellectual properties. Humor and banter inside Wealth Bondage. The example of Mockus, Mayor, Moralist and Clown, is more inspiring, don't you think? (Timothy, he apparently is himself inspired by Habermas.)

http://www.thehappytutor.com/archives/2004/12/atanus_mockus_m.html

Insofar as we are talking about the role of art, genres are many. How deep does the artist's vision go? Havel is another example. Not a satirist but one who led through art - the good "lies" against the bad ones.

[Timothy Burke]

Swift had a leash. So did Pope. And Addison. And Steele. Which of course you know well: you stress your own leash, your own bondage.

Name me the man--not the archetype, not the role, but the man (or woman) who ran free of the leash.

This is an old political game, and I call futility on it. To say, "Ah, but you or he or she are not yet enough, we must be more: the reason that nothing has yet happened is that all who might be examples of the winning strategy are too compromised, too much on the leash, not yet enough. When we run free of the leash, then watch out! The King will topple from his throne". Just you wait! Godot will get here yet! Or, as the comedians might say, "Yeah, when monkeys fly out of my butt."

[Tutor]

Diogenes? Jesus? Budha? Socrates?

No, there is for most us no 'outside of wealth bondage.' Recognizing as much, we might drop the pretense of disinterested reason, objectivity, moderation, etc. chatereristic of the liberal style and write as contestants on the killing floor, or stage of history. Whether we are actors or audience is not our call. When the finger of a Horowitz points at your face and he calls you out as a Terrorist, you are no longer a commentator, no matter what comes out of your mouth, no longer a disinterested judge, but a participant and a living example, as was, say Boethius. We may not be authors of the play, the master narrative of good and evil that drives history by galvanizing a constituency, but we are all actors within it, with our parts assigned. And we may play the part of judge or king enthroned with a cross of thorns.

At the least we can register in our own style, stance or as you 'habitus' our own historical position - on a sack of garbage in my case on the perimeter of Wealth Bondage, included by way of exception, on the way to the Dump, along with so many of my friends, who call themselves liberals, not because they choose to go, but because that is the role in which they have been cast by those with the power to it, unless we resist.

What was meant as a wake up call, a plea for solidarity in action, seems to have become bickering around the Dumpster, as to who is the bigger sack of garbage. Not my goal. I had hoped to "rally what remains" in the face of a real world threat to democracy.

[klaus]

Some may find it unpalatable
to politic the artist's easel:
they draw upon experience
and produce a portrait of a weasel.

[Tutor]

Can you do couplets, like Alexander Pope?

[klaus]

I could never reach Pope's height.

[Tutor]

No shame in that, no one ever did again.

[Juke Moran]

Tutor-
4th paragraph here
"...and wore a stiffened canvas bodice to support his spine."

[Timothy Burke]

I identify as what you view as a liberal.

Do I seem to think I'm writing with disinterested or historically disembodied reason?

You've grown too fond of your straw man in this respect. I think there's a bit of truth to it--I still regard Garry Wills' disembowelment of Arthur Schlesinger-style liberals in his Nixon Agonistes as one of the greatest pieces of American writing in the last fifty years--but you draw your caricature so broadly and with such confidence in your own superiority that it swallows a vast range of writing and thinking in the public sphere; indeed, your straw man is so supersized that it threatens to envelop yourself.

Wean yourself from the straw man and you may find that the bickering around the dumpster grows a bit less: for the moment it sounds too much like you take too much interest in what the guys up the street are drinking out of their own paper bags.

[Tutor]

Probably fair enough, Timothy. Satire deals often in caricature, like a cartoon or mural meant to be seen from a distance. I lack your current erudition. The trope about drinking is in imitation of Rabelais' refrain, "Let us eat!" We are having, we sometimes pretend, a house party where people come in Wealth Bondage costumes and have a good time.

If you bring a good sherry, we could probably attract a better crowd. The door is open, bring your pals. You are very welcome here. You can come as a strawman, a professor, an authority, a citizen, or just a friend. You have raised the level of conversation, and I want to thank you and hope you will be back. Just bring the sherry.

[klaus]

A lonely, stuffed and ragged man of straw
is a pretty perch for the clever jackdaw.

[Tutor]

Shades of late yeats, or hardy?

[klaus]

I have some Songs by Berryman
tacked up on my fridge.
He wrote some snappy choruses
but fell off at the bridge.

[Tutor]

Drank, sadly, way too much.

[klaus]

Although his poems are found in kitchens
he's under the table 'fore Christopher Hitchens.