Body Parts

GWOT, Pakistan, and Wretchard's Three Conjectures

I hadn't known about Wretchard's three conjectures, published in 2003; I started reading his blog only a few years ago (thanks to Shrinkwrapped for the reference). In view of the precarious situation in Pakistan, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda entrenched in the frontier tribal areas, radical Islam adherents in the military and government, and Musharraf's tenuous position, Wretchard's conjectures take on a pertinent urgency that was only prophesy immediately after 9/11.

Update. February 1, 2008. Donald Sensing lays out the same idea, with fresh alarm from the recent atrocity in Baghdad in which Al Qaeda sent mentally disabled women loaded with explosives into a crowded market.

September 7, 1983

[Peace and Reconciliation]

I recall clearly the occasion when I made my peace with California. While we [my wife, daughter, and I] were [living] at the Josephine Street house [in Berkeley], sometime in the summer of 1971, I was sitting one evening on the front porch, which looked to the West, toward San Francisco (although the view across the Bay could be glimpsed only from an upper storey window in the house).

I could feel a feeling of well-being rise within me, as I enjoyed the peace of the end of the day. I listened to unseen doves cooing their liquid call. Rather suddenly, my hatred of California shed off me, like cold water evaporating. I never again really regretted that I was in California, and I look forward to returning to Riverside.

As I articulated to myself, the reasons for this transformation were two.

The first was a realization that my dislike of California was less of a reaction to California than the perpetuation of a pattern. With the exception of my year in Pittsburgh, since I obtained self-consciousness, I had always wanted to be somewhere else, and assumed that the next place I would live, or the next school, or next job, would bring me happiness. In Plymouth, I had to get out. Durham and UNH I soon outgrew; Ithaca and Cornell were an awful experience; now (skipping over the wonderful year in Pittsburgh), I was unhappy in California.

Surely, I realized, most of this unhappiness came from a source within me, from a dysfunctional source. At one time, the unhappiness may have properly sprung from a realization of the inadequacy of where I lived and from my situation, but how--objectively--could that be true any longer?

Riverside gave me a good job, physical comfort, security, an opportunity to following my own interests, and a pleasant place to raise a family. Whatever else was wanted, I had to supply on my own.

I realized it was time [to] accept where I was and make my fulfillment there [here].

A second reason for my realization must have been due to my daughter. A_ was born in California, and I realized--though this too I had resisted--that California would seem as natural and "right" to her, as New England was to me, simply because of growing up in the place. An infant learns about the world as a series of "givens", and California would be as "given" to my daughter as New England was to me.

What better evidence did I need that the trouble with my reaction to California was in me, not in California?

I think I was also struck by a "moral" discontinuity. How could I hate a place, when I would be unable to point to the reasons for that hatred to my daughter, when she would undoubtedly, at least as an infant, like California? I did not want to be separated from my daughter by hating a place that she might love. What would I teach her but hate? I did not want to teach her this; I wanted to teach her to see and feel positive qualities, and to be positively motivated, not negatively.

If I was to raise a child to have a positive, healthy outlook, I needed to have one myself. The rest was easy. Once I had these realizations, I swam deeply into life in California.

Was this an instance of self-transcendence due to self-realization? Probably not. The body and soul, in the natural interests of health, accommodated to California, and my mind followed.

I wrote a poem about this evening of healing. A haiku? I'm not sure I remember, but a brief poem, anyway.

----------

Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

December 24, 1983

I cannot recall many details of the day that A_ [my daughter] was born [in 1970]. I can't recall how many trips we [S_, my wife, and I] made to the hospital; if we made more than the trip immediately prior. But it does seem to me that S_ was finally admitted about noon or early afternoon, about 2 cm. dilated. We were placed in a private labor room, from which we could see other women pass to the delivery room.

S_ was excited, but time and the labor were slow for her. We used LaMaze [Lamaze] technique--I coached her breathing as contractions came and went. As the contractions intensified, S_'s ability to tolerate the pain decreased and several times she requested from the nurses a shot to relieve the pain, which she was denied, of course, since any medication would have affected the baby.

As the afternoon stretched out (and as S_ didn't stretch out!), I passed the quiet intervals by reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather, a gynecological novel for a gynecological occasion. I can't recall my emotions. I think I was detached from S_'s efforts and pain, and I didn't have much fear about the proceeding.*

In late afternoon, the obstetrician on duty decided to move S_ to the delivery room. I requested the privilege of accompanying her, explaining that we had done the LaMaze training together. But I was denied.

I believe that I remained in the delivery room [labor room?]--although I may have gone to some sort of waiting room. S_ was in delivery for four hours. A nurse told me at some point, that her contractions had stopped, and that she was given a shot (of what?) to induce and strengthen them. She was also given an intravenous dosage of (glucose?).

Eventually, A_ was born. It was late in the evening, but before midnight, so my daughter was born on my birthday anniversary!

I was told later, by S_ (or by a nurse?) that A_ had to be delivered by forceps, and after she was born, the delivering ob. had difficulty getting her to breath. He spanked her bottom, but she wouldn't cry and take in a gasp her first breath. Finally, by slapping her feet with an instrument, she was stimulated to breath. But it required nearly a minute. I wondered if she might have suffered any brain damage from oxygen starvation, though I don't think this thought ever occurred to me again after that day.

S_ was wheeled out of delivery on a delivery cart. She was lying prone and looked exhausted. A_ was lying across her chest. The nurse pushing the cart told me I had a daughter. She said, as S_ quietly lay and rested, "Isn't she beautiful!"

Actually, I didn't think so. A_ was still covered with blood, and her eyes were filmed with the antibiotic put on them to prevent infection. My daughter appeared to me to be a small, hairy, red, little baby of no distinctive beauty.

As I stood by the cart, outside the delivery room, I was suddenly overcome by all the anxiety and fears I had apparently repressed in the preceding hours.

Blood rapidly drained from my head and I began to faint. As I started to sink beside the cart, the nurse told me to sit down and put my head down. This I did, and after 30 seconds or so, blood returned and the faint passed.

After a minute or two more, the nurse indicated that S_ and the baby should be moved to their room. The cart with mother and child was wheeled down the (gray green?) hallway.

I took S_'s labor kit and left the hospital. I remember the drive home, late at night; I was hungry, tired, and strangely detached from the events. I was excited and I was not excited. I was satisfied, but not relieved.

I recall lying awake, briefly on the bed in our bedroom in the apartment. I don't recall what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all.

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[* The recollection of detachment strikes me now as curious. I hypothesize that my state of detachment much have been the result of Kaiser Permanente's policies regarding participation of husbands in the births of their children.  We were compelled to be observers, rather than participants, which would have produced the sense of being detached from my wife and her ordeal.]

Will We Really Elect A President From the Old Industrial North?

Since 1945, only one president has been elected whose political career was made in the old industrial northeast and midwest.

• Harry S. Truman--Missouri
• Dwight D. Eisenhower--Kansas--but did not have an electoral political career before the presidency
• JFK--Massachusetts
• Lyndon B. Johnson--Texas
• Richard Nixon--California
• Gerald Ford--Michigan--but not elected to presidency
• Jimmy Carter--Georgia
• Ronald Reagan--California
• George H. W Bush--Texas
• William Jefferson Clinton--Arkansas
• George W. Bush--Texas

Since 1945, only one sitting U.S. Senator has been elected president--JFK. We have preferred to elect governors.

Since 1945, there has been a well-recognized structural shift in American politics, following the shift of the American people to the South and the Southwest, to the suburbs, to the Republican party, toward center-conservative positions away from center-progressive positions.

Of the current front-running presidential candidates, only McCain built his political career in these regions. And McCain is a sitting Senator, of course.

For Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani to win nomination and win the presidency would represent a great reversal of the last two political generations. What do they offer that would precipitate that reversal?

If Obama or Clinton is successful, it could only be as a result of the great political shift against the political world that has generated the Republican Party success. It could possibly be the beginning of a new political era--of progressive left political programs. And this is the reason Republicans must mobilize themselves to prevent their election. Conservative purity should not be the criterion for the Republican nominee; the criterion should be electability--the right stuff to stop Obama or Clinton.

September 5, 1983

[Screwed Up Resistance]

So: resist Southern California I did, that first year in Riverside. Were Riverside's hills bare of deciduous forests? Yes--so I thought they were ugly and mean. Were the hills brown soil, rather than gray with exposed granite? Yes, so I thought brown was ugly. Did the hillsides have trails wandering up and down them?--Yes, so I wrote a poem comparing the trails to lacing on motorcycle boots.

So: resist I did. Was Riverside, and all of Southern California, irrigated, and did impulse "rainbird" sprinklers turn the desert into a carpet of green? Of course--so I thought irrigation sprinklers were "mechanical" and ugly, and consequently the very lifeblood of Southern California was dead.

I tirelessly devoted emotional effort to this conscious resistance; I argued constantly with myself, silently and privately in my head, that Southern California could not be beautiful, that somehow the experience of New Hampshire with which I grew up exhausted all that could be known about scenic beauty.

Lest I waiver momentarily in my determination to see Riverside and Southern California as the epitome of ugliness, I kept momentos of New Hampshire: S_ and I subscribed to the Plymouth Record and Yankee magazine, and I hung a photograph of the Presidential Range in New Hampshire on my office wall. I carried in my pocket billfold a plastic-covered snapshot of the same Presidentials, a snapshot I had taken in 1956 or 1957 from the Christmas Cottage in Jefferson and carried in my wallet ever since. On the back of the color snapshot I had written, words to the effect, "Mt Washington from the Christmas Cottage, where I belong." I carried this photo until my second or third year in California.

I mounted a screwed-up logical campaign against Southern California, which consisted of the following strategies:

1. I conveniently forgot everything unfortunate and gray about New England--including the reasons why I had worked so ferociously to get out; I ignored and pushed away everything lovely, colorful, and vital about Riverside and Southern California.

2. I continually compared the worst features of Southern California with the best features of New England.

3. I carefully maintained my ignorance about Southern California, while simultaneously learning more about New England.

4. I carefully avoided making friends in the community of Riverside, where I would have met persons happy with their lives here; and cultivated friendships among new academics at UCR, who, like me, were transplanted from the East and would not argue against my anti-Southern California campaign.

Thereby did I manage--in my first year in Riverside--to become a mean-spirited, resentful, ungrateful, and nay-saying opponent of the life I had chosen and the region I had chosen to live in.

This campaign of vicious hatred of Southern California and self-torture reached a peak--and at the same time suddenly ended--in Berkeley in the summer of 1971, not in Riverside, ironically.

----------

Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

War Sometimes IS the Answer

I was driving to a lesson today. I was passed by a young woman driving a car with the bumper sticker, "War Is Not the Answer". Huh? I thought. It depends upon the question. Sometimes, alas, sadly, war is the answer.

What's At Stake in 2008: A Partisan Political Revolution Under Hillary's Banner

What is at stake in the 2008 election?  It's not "change". I probably shouldn't use the word, "revolution", because it raises the wrong references; so let me use the term, "political paradigm shift". Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a centrist-conservative paradigm of government has dominated the national government. And after a long struggle against the forces of Euro-Socialism, conservatism has largely come to dominate Europe, rolling back the stagnant and intellectual bankrupt paradigm of socialism. In the 1990s in the US, the Clinton's effort to reverse this centrist-conservatism in favor of left-progressivism, failed. The electorate rejected the Clintons' first big program, national health care, and later the Republican capture of the House pushed President Bill into centrism, of which the Republican welfare reform was the center piece.

Hillary hopes to undo all this. Hillary hopes to bring forward an older left-progressive program to the national government.

One of her chief advisors, Sidney Blumenthal, is quoted in The New Yorker as describing "the 2008 election as a chance to secure progressive government for years to come. 'It's not a question of transcending partisanship,' he said. 'It's a question of fulfilling it. If we can win and govern well while handling multiple crises at the same time and the Congress, then we can move the country out of this Republican era and into a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time.' " (George Packer, "The Choice," The New Yorker, January 28, 2008, p. 30.)

Obama is unlikely to be the Democratic Party nominee; Hillary remains, I believe, the likely nominee. The big industrial states will come in on her side, because the Democratic establishment has so much at stake in her candidacy. I find it difficult to believe that California, dominated by San Francisco Bay area leftist/feminist/homosexual coalition of unions, academia, government, and elite, will break for Obama. Democractic white women have waited a long time for a woman president; they aren't going to abandon Hillary now. And California would bring a lot of delegates to Hillary.

So the big concern must be Hillary's ideas, ideology, and proposed policies. These constitute in total, a new progressive political paradigm. She will bring around her a progressive, secular literary-academic advisory elite; they will reinforce the socialist tendencies in her program. She wants the US to look like, say, France twenty years ago--a social welfare state with universal mandates, a larger national government, eviseration of our free, voluntary society, a much high percentage of GNP produced by government activity, a host of new New Deal type programs for middle as well as working classes, an abandonment of a growth economics, greater regulation of private business and capital, greatly higher taxes with more redistribution of wealth (with "rich" defined closer to $150,000 for a couple than to a $million).  In foreign policy, it will be reliance upon the corrupt UN, weakening of the US armed forces, and complete abandonment of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike; she will let down our guard and invite another horrific Islamist terror strike on the nation. Hmmmm... all this does sound like a revolution, of sorts, doesn't it?

That's what's at stake. Republicans better get their butts in gear and turn out and vote to oppose her, because Congress is likely to pick up more Democratic seats in both chambers. If she would be president with a majority in both chambers, then she would be a position to fulfill her dream--and our nightmare.

August 27, 1983

[A New World]

To continue this recitation of changes:

3. Opportunity: California provides opportunity to do and be most anything. The act merely of moving to Southern California breaks enough ties and interrupts enough habits to permit new opportunity to be seen and seized. And Southern California offers the diverse opportunities offered by any large and growing metropolis any time in history: a lot of mobility of persons and institutions, great movement of money, continued circulation of news, of rumors, of gossip. To these traditional virtues of a city, Southern California adds its relaxed and tolerant life-style, a life-style encouraged, if not entirely sustained, by a pleasant climate that permits comfortable and cheap living, and a diversified topography that permits anyone to escape the constraints of one kind of community or setting and select one more to taste. In a word, opportunity in a setting of wealth and freedom.

The structural freedom and wealth of Southern California is so great that it enables the sprawling metropolis to contain within it something that would seem paradoxically contradictory to this freedom and opportunity: a vital and vigorous middle class culture centered around family values. Perhaps not so paradoxical, since this stalwart middle class provides an engine of striving that drives the economy of the region, and a sturdy foil of morality that permits diversity to be defined by difference.

This was a setting of opportunity greatly unlike any I had ever lived in. Plymouth--Ithaca--Pittsburgh were all different, but similar in the [their] tight limitations.  Opportunity came primarily through escape and leaving. Even Pittsburgh, which I loved, was a city in decline in a region that was stagnant.

The true opportunity, different in scale and quality, provided by this region, threw into different perspective whatever opportunities had been offered by other areas I had lived in.

In particular, it became quite clear to me that one of the outstanding characteristics of New England was a state of mind that: (1) makes a virtue of necessity. This characteristic occurs not so much because the region is moralistic, but because it wishes to disguise necessity. For instance: poverty. New England is one of the poorest areas of the nation. But this poverty is treated as a superior moral virtue by those who suffer it. So much so, that a few years ago a group in Providence, Rhode Island started a "voluntary poverty" movement, asserting ideologically that poverty was better, permitted better human relationships, and so on. These were not persons who gave up wealth they owned, and assumed the monastic vows of poverty; they were persons who had no wealth to begin with.

This "voluntary poverty" amounted to no more than refusing to look a fact in the face.

And this aversion from the fact is precisely the sort of attitude not characteristic of Southern California.

Southern California's willingness, indeed eagerness, to "look a fact in the face," is not due to some superior morality in the region. It is due to the presence of widespread opportunity to change the fact. Indeed, there is an empiricism, a quest for the hard fact (here in tinsel town) precisely because true change is change of the factual situation. So one needs to "know the facts" in order to take advantage of opportunity and transform a situation.

2. What's good for you is bad for me. This maxim derives from an economy and culture that is so limited in true opportunity that when any one actually does obtain something good in life, it removes that possibility for everyone else. When there is room for only one corner drugstore, that opportunity taken, no one else has it.

This condition leads to resentment of other's achievement.

In contrast, achievement in the L.A. region is in a "supply-side" situation, to use the capitalism analogy. One person's achievement and seizing of opportunity creates more opportunities for achievement for everyone else. This leads to the attitude, "If they can do it, so can I," and to admiration and encouragement of the achievement of other persons.

In turn, this attitude leads to generosity, or at least to a generous view of change and the achievement of others. And certainly the people of Southern California are generous in this way. New England, by opposites, has evolved to a crabbed and ungenerous, even resentful, morality.

Southern California's respect and generous attitude toward achievement and opportunity has been reinforced by the poverty of its natural resources and its marginal geographical location (at least until WWII). Without any natural resources--no minerals, not even water--whatever "opportunity" has been built here by imagination out of nothing. Opportunity has not been created by exploitation of natural resources, as in most of the U.S., or by exploitation of human resources, as in the slave South.

(The exception to this, sadly, is the exploitation of migrant labor in agriculture, which stands as an exception to how Californians have "done it," as well as a regional shame.)

Southern Californians have invented industries that didn't previously exist in order to keep their region alive--movies and airplanes are the two great examples.

This points to one of the great differences between Northern and Southern California in that Northern California was built on the exploitation of two great natural resources--gold and lumber.

Southern California's peculiar economic and cultural situation led therefore to utilization and respect for--ironically--imaginativeness.

"Ironically" because Southern California is so empirical. But opportunity and self-generative achievement are the conditions that unite apparently antithetical qualities, empiricism and imagination.

(Is this musing really derived from Carey McWilliams Island Upon the Land?)

As it turns out, these qualities of achievement and opportunity-making reinforce a middle-class bourgeois morality and culture, thus the growth and wealth of the region reinforced a bourgeois culture, whereas in many urban societies, the long-term growth of the city seemed to undo and unravel this stalwart culture.

In turn this middle-class culture provides the institutional basis for an achieving society, by fostering discipline, thrift, etc., in raising of children.

Thus a fortunate cycle has been created in Southern California that has enlarged opportunity, fostered a respectful and generous morality, and reinforced the institutions that foster individuals of the type needed to create opportunity.

In the end, therefore, Southern California opportunity was symptomatic of a state of society, economy, and culture unlike any I had ever lived in before. And one whose qualitative difference I found absolutely congenial.

As a consequence, I did things and grew in ways I could not have expected before I came out here.

----------

Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

What Is Obama's Stance Toward Israel?

Time to take a look, for the early warning signs are up.

Here is Obama's position statement on Israel.

Here is a recent statement that Israel must remain a Jewish state and that the so-called "Palestinians" do not have a right to return in Israel.

Listen to what he says; but see who his friends and associates are and watch what he does.

Revised. January 28, 2008.

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I have provided a running chronicle of information, as it arrives, about Obama's stance on Israel, below in the updates.

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See also my running updates on my post on Obama's foreign policy advisors--bad news for Israel.

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Updated. February 25, 2008. Obama's foreign policy advisors are anti-Israel.

Updated. February 25, 2008. Nader says Obama was pro-Palestinian when in Illinois legislature.

Updated. February 26, 2008. Obama's talk in Cleveland to Jewish leaders raises questions, because of the words and labels he chooses. Words matter!

Updated. February 27, 2008. A strong defense of Obama's support of Israel and criticism of Obama's critics on Israel is published in the Jerusalem Post.

Updated. March 21, 2008. Obama was critical of Israel and strongly supportive of the Palestinians when he was in the Illinois Senate.

Update. March 25, 2008. Obama's military advisor (McPeak) is anti-Israel. (Thanks to Atlas Shrugs.) Here is Powerline's view of McPeak.

Update. March 28, 2008. Regular Obama contributor supports one-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the so-called "Palestinians" that would effectively end the Jewish state. (Thanks to Atlas Shrugs).

Update. April 9, 2008. In his article, "Is Obama committed to Israel's survival?" (American Thinker, April 9, 2008), Bruce Walker argues that Obama's participation in and indirect allegiance to the "Black rage school of politics", in which irrational anti-semitism is a prominent feature, leave open the question whether he would, as President, do what has to be done to ensure Israel's survival should an existential threat to that nation suddenly emerge.

Update. April  10, 2008. Obama adds new advisors. One, a former US Ambassador to Israel, looks friendly to Israel on the face of it, but check behind the smile and his views often favor the so-called "Palestinians" and are harmful to Israel. At American Thinker.

Update. April 10, 2008. The Los Angeles Times reports that Obama's close relations with Rashid Khalidi, and other verbal slips, have encouraged the so-called "Palestinians" to believe he will favor them if he is President.

(As a side note, the LA Times utilized closely, without acknowledgment, a blog article on Obama by Debbie Schlussel, along with an interview, also not acknowledged, with Schlussel. More dishonesty from Southern California's largest circulation newspaper. [We cancelled our Times' subscription of 34 years last December.])

Update. April 10, 2008. In an interview to JTA, Obama says that a [so-called] Palestinian state must be "contiguous". What does he know of boundaries of Israel and the geography of the region? The only way that Gaza and the West Bank could be contiguous would be for Israel to be cut in half. Is that what he is prepared to advocate?

Update. April 11, 2008. Obama, like the rest of us, must be known by the company we keep. Astute Bloggers reports on Obama's association with so-called "Palestinians" and their anti-Israeli supporters.

Update. April 30, 2008. Obama's former pastor, Rev. Wright, has views on Israel that are not friendly, whereas his views on so-called "Palestinians" are friendly. He takes his information from an organization, Americans for Middle-East Understanding, that is distinctly biased against Israel. This milieu of bias against Israel was part of the Trinity Church which Obama attended for two decades.

Update. May 7, 2008. The pro-Arab views of Obama's advisors should worry Jews.

Update, June 5, 2008. Obama talks tough and supportive of Israel to AIPAC, but does he really mean it? I'm not convinced.

Update. June 5, 2008. Jerusalem Post article compares McCain's and Obama's policy views on the Middle East, including their views on Israel.

Update. June 6, 2008. In just one day, Obama backs away from his strong words favoring an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Update. June 6, 2008. Barack Obama is a close friend--frequently having family dinners--with Khalidi--formerly member of the PLO whose pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views appears to have influenced Obama's vision of Israel and even Obama's phrases in his foreign policy talking points. See the Fox News report, below (five minutes long). (Thanks to Atlas Shrugs.)

Update. June 11, 2008. Obama's anti-military posture and desire to reduce drastically America's research and spending on military technology and upgrading America's fighting forces would directly threaten Israel by reducing the advanced arms available to Israel to purchase from us, at a time when the oil-rich Middle Eastern Muslim states are spending their money on advanced Russian armaments. From Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

Update. June 13, 2008. Rick Richman in American Thinker analyzes Obama's speech to AIPAC, showing that it is not nearly as favorable to Israel's interests as it sounded when he delivered it. Another case of "pretty words, ugly sentiments"?

Update. June 24, 2008. John Bolton, formerly US ambassador to the United Nations, argues that, if Obama wins the presidency, Israel will be compelled to attack Iran's nuclear weapons plants between before Obama's inauguration. The reason? Once Obama is in office, US support for a military strike would probably evaporate. Obama would want to try more talk-talk diplomacy, which would give Iran the final months it needs to complete its nuclear bombs.

Update. July 14, 2008. More clarification from Obama that he didn't really mean that Jerusalem should be undivided and in Israeli control as a part of the capital of sovereign Israel. He does think Jews are suckers.

Update. July 18, 2008. Obama as collected a group of about 300 foreign policy advisers, according to the New York Times. It is difficult to see any overall direction to this collection, but several indications of future policies are evident. First, the foreign policy apparataus from the Bill Clinton presidency is floating to the top of the pool. The Clintonian advisers were not strong supporters of Israel, and were prepared to demand that Israel go the extra mile to give the Palestinians everything they wanted. Second, the advisers as a group are more interested in Africa than the Middle East. It is not clear how they will grapple with the religious issues of Africa, since Islam is at the center of the various totalitarian, authoritarian, genocidal, inter-tribal warfare, and social chaos that engulf much of east Africa. My guess is that, as in Kosovo, they will present themselves as friends of Islam and that tone will cast itself over their views of and dealings with Israel. Third, if Bush can't magically create an Israel-Palestinian settlement, as of course he won't, my guess is that, if Obama is elected, Obama's foreign policy group will seek to ingratiate themselves with Islam by pounding on Israel.

Update. July 23, 2008. Obama's slip, "Israel is a strong friend of Israel's", made in Jordan on his trip, reveals a hidden anti-Israel meaning. Read my analysis, here.

Update. July 24, 2008. In Israel, Obama states that his policy toward Israel and Jerusalem is the same as President Bill Clinton's. Here is a rendition of Clinton's betrayl of Israel and the notion that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel (hint: Clinton refused to move the US embassy to Jerusalem).

Update. July 25, 2008. Here is the Jerusalem Post's account of Obama's interview with its editor. Obama's statements are notable for his firm commitment to ending Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and for his inclination to make Jerusalem the Palestinian capital and to give a Palestinian state the boundaries before the 1967 war. I think the interview positions Obama somewhat to the left of Bill Clinton's view of the conflict between Israel and the so-called "Palestinians"; see Caroline Glick's column for this date on this issue. Israel is unlikely, under Obama, to see the kind of support it received from President Bush up to the 2006 Lebanon War (after which Bush's apparent disappointment in Olmert led to the softening of that earlier support of Israel).

Update. September 1, 2008. Obama accepts the support of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers are anti-semitic, anti-Israel race haters. Watch this video.

Update. September 1, 2008. Obama's VP running mate, Senator Biden, apparently told Israeli officials behind closed doors, that, if Obama becomes President, Israel will have to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Pay attention, Israel and Jews: If Obama becomes President, we walk one more step into 1938.

Update. September 28, 2008. Obama's views on Israel are contrasted with McCain's point-by-point by an expert on Middle East affairs.

Update. October 13, 2008.  Ben Shapiro's excellent 3-part video, "The Jewish Case Against Obama", referenced in Atlas Shrugged.

Update. October 14, 2008. Jesse Jackson, whose family is close to the Obamas, says that, if elected president, Barack Obama will end the US's "Israel first" Middle East foreign policy.

Update. November 4, 2008. Did Obama promise Abbas his support for a divided Jerusalem? A Lebanese newspaper reports he did and requested Abbas keep the promise a secret. (Thanks to Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugged.)

Update. November 14, 2008. Caroline Glick reviews actions and indications of Obama's stance toward Israel since the election. Now that the Jewish vote in Florida has been captured and helped gain a Florida victory, and the presidency won, Obama is moving rapidly, but quietly, to abandon Israel to Iran and the Palestinians.

Update. November 23, 2008. Obama's views on the Middle East are influenced by Brent Scowcroft, a "realist", who favors deal-making over ideological or moral commitments. Scowcroft sees the Israel-(so-called)Palestinian conflict as central to the problems of the Middle East. Resolution of it would solve a host of other problems in the region, in his view. Look for Obama to pressure Israel to concede a lot to the Palestinians in the hope a deal might be made between them.

Update. June 21, 2010. Gateway Pundit reviews Obama's mentor at Columbia, anti-semitic, anti-Zionist professor, Edward Sa'id, in order to publish a new photo of Sa'id in action. In this photo from 2000, the professor is in southern Lebanon, hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers.

August 26, 1983

[All That Is Gray Is Not]

It is interesting to me, now, to reflect upon the ways in which California changed me, or otherwise influenced me. These changes were both painful and--sometimes--wonderful. In general, these changes came from the vast explosion of unexpected experience brought upon me that California brought.

These changes may be, albeit inadequately, pointed to by several epigrams:

1. Life is always larger than words,

2. experience always surpasses judgment.

Or, somewhat differently,

3. Life is larger than morality.

These lessons came as a surprise to me. I think the first time I articulated them came in 1975 or 1976, when I wrote a poem about the Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Of course, it is entirely possible that I would have come to the realizations simply as part of the process of gaining maturity, no matter where I was.

But I think that if I had stayed in the East, my experience would have followed a sufficiently familiar enough pattern that I would have come more slowly to the recognition of the point of these epigrams.

The reason that I may well have come to these epigrammatic lessons regardless of the locale of my life, is that their opposite lesson strikes me as particularly adolescent.

The opposite lesson is the expectation that morality is larger than life, or that words can express--indeed, structure--life and experience.

I think of this expectation as adolescent, because it is derived from the adolescent experience of having many words--obtained from years of education--and not enough experience to fill them. I would imagine that the lives of most persons involve a growing, in which experience out-runs the verbal conceptualizations of adolescence, so that the experience of adolescence is succeeded by the experience of maturity. So I think that they would come to my epigrammatic lessons of maturity.

Whatever--California brought me to these lessons, not any other locale. And the re-shaping of experience, the veritable flooding of experience California provided, began the day I arrived in Riverside, the moment S_ and I peaked Cajun Pass and gazed upon the smog-blanketed Los Angeles basin.

And that was the day I resisted the lessons.

What features of California brought this experience to me:

1. dreams: all the dreams and fantasies I had, prior to coming to California, were set in New England. California was an unimaginable setting. Everyone, and me too, has dreams--we have no choice. And California imposed a new topography and setting upon my dreams--whether of success, love, children, horses, or whatever. Without my entirely consciously realizing it, not only the topography, but also the wish behind the dreams also changed.

My dreams shifted from wishes for static fulfillment at some future time to wishes for continuation of growth, openness, and opportunity.

California gave new dreams for old.

2. asethetics [aesthetics]: all my asethetic experience, and hence expectation about beauty generally, had been fashioned by growing up in New England and the east. The qualities of this asethetic may be summarized in the expectation that beauty, when found:

a. Would be "small" in scale

b. Would be "dense" in detail

c. Would be visually keyed to "green" colors

d. Would be "manageable"

California--which I found incredibly ugly when I arrived, because it violated these trivial asethetic canons--was just the opposite. California

a. is so immense in scale, compared to New England, or Europe, as to be a qualitatively difference topography;

b. is "empty" in detail,

c. is visually keyed to earth colors--"brown" and "reds",

d. cannot be "managed."

The asethetic experience of California can be summarized in another lesson: beauty must be taken on its own terms. California must be taken on its own terms.

I am truly appreciative to California for opening me to new modes of asethetic experience. I learned not to prejudge, to be open, to asethetic experience.

Or differently:

"All that is gray is not smog; it may just be an 'opaque marine layer'."

"Go with the flow." (referring to freeway traffic)

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)