Animals Can Be Patriots, Too

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Patriotism as a normalizing force, presupposing and engendering its own truth, succeeds by continually extending its reach. Innumerable acts of remembrance, rituals, ceremonies, exercises, dates, events, historic figures, gestures, songs, tributes, render it a nearly irresistible phenomenon. In the United States it seeks to colonize democracy itself.


The United States government, a principal player in the patriot game, cannot do enough for those who kill and die for their country. Witness the “Vow to Hire Heroes Act” and the “Civil Service Recognition Act” recently passed into law, the subjects of my last two posts. Soldiers and civilians who run the ultimate risks find themselves joined by a new breed of patriot. For perhaps the past decade or so, commemorative ambition has also focused considerable attention on four-legged 'members' of the military.

Interest in military working dogs soared in the aftermath of the Navy SEAL raid that ended with the assassination of Osama bin Laden last May. This is due to the critical role that Cairo, the single canine in the eighty-member team, played in the mission. While Cairo’s specific tasks may be unknown (information about the raid is, of course, classified), it’s likely that he would have been responsible for monitoring anyone who tried to escape (or enter) bin Laden’s compound. Military working dogs have the capacity to capture human targets through terror or sheer force (the bite of one of these dogs can exert anywhere from 400 to 700 pounds of pressure). Dogs may be domesticated, but these dogs can shed their domestication on command. 

Historically, the United States has treated war dogs abominably. Thanks to Clinton-era legislation, however, military working dogs can now be adopted upon retirement. The number of applications skyrocketed following news of canine participation in the Pakistan raid. Most dogs do not enjoy the celebrity of Cairo and the jobs they perform are even more dangerous. Close to 3,000 dogs “serve” in the military worldwide and some 650 serve in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The number one cause of human casualties (and thus canine fatalities as well) has been IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Dogs have proven themselves indispensable when it comes to detection, far surpassing any technological or human means deployed for the same purpose. One reason: IEDs often have no metal components. Dogs thus become an irreplaceable asset or resource. They have but one purpose: save human lives, including at their own expense. Ron Aiello, president of the United States War Dogs Association, with undue and surprising modesty, describes each dog as a "kind of hero in a way".

The tasks assigned dogs are deadly. Bomb detection is not foolproof.  Moreover, the American military’s use of dogs is no secret, which means that opposition forces learn to target them. The Taliban is the latest example, following the NLF in Vietnam. This may be a regrettable side-effect, but the military would never reconsider the use of dogs as a result.  In excess of 50 military working dogs have been killed in action over the last six years, but if dogs save hundreds of human lives (or more) each, the cost is deemed well worth it. And speaking of cost, the American military will do its best to redeem every dollar invested. Thus, dogs disabled by their service do not necessarily receive immediate discharge. With the investment in each dog running to close to $50,000, the military is determined to extract every cent it can from its canine members. Ultimately, the condition of the dogs is at best a secondary concern: the primary concern is that they continue to execute successfully the tasks assigned them. “This is a human health issue as well,” Dr. Walter F. Burghardt, chief of Behavioral Medicine and Military Working Dog Studies at the Lackland Air Force Base Military Working Dog Hospital, insists. Dogs traumatized by combat are subjected either to “desensitization counterconditioning” or to a regimen of drugs to calm them. Through one, dogs will be exposed to the very terrors that incapacitate them and rewarded as they learn to overcome their fears and perform their official duties. Through the other, they might be prescribed Xanax. Here what works for humans who suffer panic attacks can also work for dogs. The dogs, of course, should be panicked. The resistance they offer to further service is not respected; rather, it is to be overcome. The military thereby shows its disregard for life itself. Successful rehabilitation does not mean the dogs are cured. They are permanently scarred. As one medical expert in the field, a Tufts veterinarian, observed: “It is more management. Dogs never forget”.

Dog advocates have focused not on the use of dogs in war, but on the treatment of military working dogs following the completion of their service. Military Working Dog Adoptions, founded by Debbie Kandoll, seeks to facilitate placing retired dogs in loving homes. The military, which classifies dogs as equipment, will not pay for transport back to the United States, insisting that once a dog is adopted, it is no longer military property and thus the responsibility of the new owner. If anything, were the military to pay for transport, it would amount to “fraud, waste, and abuse,” according to one Air Force Major General. Kandoll and others recommend Congressional legislation to change the status of dogs. Many advocates would also like to make dogs eligible for decoration, a practice supposedly reserved for humans (there is one report of a dog receiving the Silver Star for a suicide mission). They would also like to see the military devote meaningful medical resources to the dogs’ care once they have been repatriated. All of this seems likely to happen. The irony of such well-meaning efforts made on behalf of dogs is that they obscure the more pressing ethical issue, namely, the very use of dogs (and other animals) by the military in the first place.  In this context, consider perhaps the dominant concern of those closest to the dogs, their handlers, who very much want military working dogs to receive the recognition they are due. According to Aiello, “It’s a question I get over and over again from the handlers. They ask, ‘Why can’t my dog receive some type of recognition for what they’ve done for me and other troops’”? The implicit complaint is that this is no way for the country to treat those who serve it with their lives, that is, this is no way to treat heroes, patriots. More importantly, the absurdity of the call for recognition seems to escape notice, for it is tantamount to recognizing ourselves for the ingenious use to which we put other species on behalf of our human, all too human projects, however violent or murderous. Thus, as dogs are treated more and more like humans, the legitimation of their use can be increasingly taken for granted. And as legitimation succeeds on this register, it reinforces similar assumptions operative regarding humans—that citizens (or at least some subset of them) amount to little more than standing reserve, on call when the country summons them. With the waste of so much human and animal life, it must be revalued according to a patriotic logic in which death—being killed—becomes inherently meaningful. Patriotism simply won’t allow dying for nothing. Not even and especially if you’re a dog.

I'm reading: Animals Can Be Patriots, Too

Making Sense of Rick Santorum

Kathy Ferguson
  University of Hawaii


I want to understand Rick Santorum. Republican candidates routinely compete for the most extreme position from which to oppose women’s reproductive freedom, but Santorum is distinct.  He is not simply calling for a ruthless public policy limiting women’s access to abortion: he is performing the savage grief of the bereaved parent, enacting the wild, aggressive distress that brings many conservative Christian women to the ranks of the anti-choice movement.  His passionate participation in a realm of sorrow usually reserved for women, and usually unrecognized in civic life, brings public, male recognition to their suffering.  To respond, feminists need to intervene in this alliance, not by minimizing the pain associated with child loss but by recognizing it differently.

Santorum marshals a fiery combination of rage and grief to call for reproductive unfreedom for women. This is a potent emotional brew that often works, politically, by lionizing the perceived suffering of some (in this case, unborn children) while demonizing the pain of others (here, women whose desire to control their fertility is recast as selfish, thoughtless, and murderous). 

Santorum demands control over women's bodies, his story goes, in order to protect babies, and that calculation often works, politically, as well. Enough women want to protect babies at any cost that they will cooperate in their own loss of freedom, and enough men want to control women's sexuality, and perhaps protect the unborn as well, that they enthusiastically go along. Leaders of conservative evangelical groups, nearly all of them men, have rallied around Santorum because they think Romney is not sufficiently hard-line on denying women medical care if it relates to their control of their reproduction.  For evangelical women voters, Romney loses out to Santorum not so much because of policy differences but because of the raging emotional economies through which relatively small differences on reproductive policies are being cast.

It is on the terrain of emotional labor, of competing efforts to marshal pity for some victims and contempt for others, that the abortion debates are being fought.  Senator Barbara Boxer, defending the legality of late term abortion, described the women lobbying to retain the provision with these words:  ‘They’re crying, they’re crying because we’re trying to take away an option.” Then-Senator Santorum proudly, defiantly, repainted these women as the aggressors against helpless , victimized babies:  “I got up afterwards and I said, I repeated the story about these women crying, and I said, ‘We would be deafened by the cries of the children who are not here to cry because of these procedures.’” 
Mackenzie Weinger,  “Rick Santorum Stresses Evangelical Pitch.”

It is the hypothetical cries of the unborn that move Santorum’s women. Numerous scholars interviewing evangelical women have found that, while right wing Christian men may be motivated by rage at the violation of proper family values, their female equivalents, in contrast, are likely to be motivated more from grief at a loss related to birth or children. The life stories of anti-choice activist women, far more than their pro-choice opponents, are littered with reproductive losses: devastating miscarriages, infertility, death or serious illness of a child, or some other trauma related to childbearing unite as many as one third of anti-choice women. They share intense narratives of inconsolable suffering and desperately sought solace: “I lost a baby.” “I grieved for years.” “In a way it becomes as though [all] abortions were my children.” 

Of all these wells of sadness, the devaluing of “imperfect” children is often the most devastating for their mothers: Santorum’s lost son and disabled daughter, I speculate, come to stand for the lost and endangered children and potential children these women grieve.  Santorum may be a man, but in the emotional economy of reproductive rights he is with the women, his masculine privilege enhancing the public import of their usually private grief. And the Republican women, at least those voting in Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesotta are with him. Nancy Pence of Concerned Women of America, concurs:
“After playing the field for weeks, women in Iowa finally settled down with their man. In fact, CNN entrance polls showed that the majority of women were supporting Santorum at twenty-seven percent (despite the sweater vest)….Santorum's appeal to women and evangelicals centers on a desire for authenticity. Rick's been consistent in behavior and record. His stance on the sanctity of life and traditional marriage gained the voters' attention. His personal story of a strong marriage and eight children, including baby Gabriel, who died, and beautiful Bella, who is severely handicapped and the apple of her father's eye, is beyond reproach.” 
“Beyond reproach” is Pence’s ham-handed summary of how the personal has become political for many evangelical women: Santorum’s grief at the loss of a child, and his fierce dedication to the damaged child remaining, let these women see their own deep grief reflected and honored. 
  Santorum recalled how devastated he was when his son died, and the news of his daughter’s condition seemed too much to handle:
“I was the rock, I was the guy holding everything together as the chaos was around. And I did so. I loved her. But I had lost a child. And as I think you can see, it still hurts. I had put everything into that little boy Gabriel and it crushed me. And I felt maybe, maybe if I love my daughter but just hold back a little just so I don’t get hurt so bad. And then she got sick,” he said.

Then Santorum told the hushed crowd that his daughter got better — and taught him about his relationship with God.
“The gift that Bella gave me was the gift of looking at this disabled child, who in the world’s view will never be able to do anything for me, other than love me,” Santorum said. “She is just a font of love, as far as I’m concerned, and she made me understand that’s how the father looks at me – disabled – unable to do anything for him except love him. And he loves me unconditionally.” 

Thus, Santorum’s strongest assault on reproductive rights comes through the backdoor: his personal grief over the death of his premature infant son, and the tragedy of his daughter’s genetic disability, allies him with bereaved evangelical women and their spokespersons far more effectively than do abstract arguments about policies and their implementation.

Effectively opposing Rick Santorum requires sustained attention to the concerns of his evangelical base. Opposing Santorum’s extreme anti-choice position through mockery is counterproductive. For instance, Lee Drutman from The Sunlight Foundation ridicules Santorum for being obsessed with anything “gynecological” for his successful criminalization of late-term abortions, and adamant advocacy for the rights of the unborn over any health or life consideration of the mother.  Andrea Stone, writing for the Huffington Post, repeats the line that Santorum is “obsessed with all things gynecological.” Derision of “things gynecological” subtly jeers at women’s bodies as much as at anti-choice activism.  It is not a victory for feminism if Santorum is defeated because he cares about reproduction, since feminists care very much about reproduction as well.

Opposing Santorum by focusing on his personal ethical dilemmas is similarly unhelpful. For instance, some critics have accused the Santorums of hypocrisy, in that the pitocin-induced labor that produced their doomed 20 week old infant was not unlike the medical procedures against which Santorum rages.  Other critics are repulsed by the Santorums’ decision to take the infant’s corpse home for the older children to kiss and fondle.  Still others find him inconsistent on anti-choice legislation in his Senate career, when, like all Senators, he sometimes had to vote on omnibus spending bills packaging a number of issues into a single vote. But these responses miss the main political point: Rick Santorum’s public grief, his savage heartbreak over the loss of a child, his exalted loyalty to the remaining disabled child, is exactly the source of his legitimacy over other men who merely oppose abortion. He willingly, exquisitely performs publicly the grief and outrage that the anti-choice women feel. 

Defenders of the Santorums are more perceptive in seeing what is at stake: potential hypocrisy or disquieting death rituals are not the point; the point, rather, is a fierce public legitimation of reproductive grief.  That is what pulls evangelical women toward Santorum, and it may be right wing men’s realization of the likely electoral support of evangelical women that has brought the country’s male fundamentalist leadership into Santorum’s camp. 

In this moment of his campaign, Santorum is the rightful heir of Sarah Palin, whose folksy appeal to right wing women is largely based on the compassion calculus embodied by the quiet Downs Syndrome baby in her arms and the strapping son in military uniform by her side. If, in the long run, it is not Rick Santorum, then there will be another standard bearer for this violent compassion. If not this election, then the next. According to Mackenzie Weinger’s account of then-Senator Santorum’s confrontation with Senator Boxer, when Santorum invoked the tears of the unborn, “The crowd responded with the biggest cheers of the night.” Conservative evangelical women’s well of birth-grief will not soon wear itself out or retreat from public life.

If I am correct that ridicule and charges of hypocrisy are inadequate grounds for critique, then how should feminists proceed? I have two suggestions. First, we should recognize and honor the profound sadness, as well as the potential understanding, occasioned in birth loss.  
  Pro-choice women also struggle with reproductive loss, and it does us no service to overlook or minimize the grief we share with our anti-choice opponents. When I miscarried in the first trimester of my second pregnancy, I was bereft.  Well-meaning people who encouraged me to cheer up, since I could always have more children, totally missed the point. That baby would never be. I desperately mourned the loss of that baby.  Pseudo-precise definitions of when, exactly, the potential life became an actual life were irrelevant. Further, the loss of a life growing inside my own was confusing: who, exactly, ceased to be? Was it my fault?  It does not compromise our pro-choice politics to mourn a baby who could have been but is not.  In fact, it could enhance our politics by taking seriously the disquieting presence of death in life, and help us to take in death as a part of life, not its opposite.

   Second, the best way to act on concern for the not-yet-born is to work for equality between men and women. The great and utter tragedy of the abortion debates is that if, as a culture, we truly wanted to protect babies, then we would empower women over all aspects of their lives. Global development projects find, over and over, that the best way to raise children's standard of living is to channel resources to their mothers. If women are educated and have access to opportunity, including the opportunity to control their own fertility, then children are far more likely to flourish. But Rick Santorum’s candidacy shows us that actual existing children and their mothers are far less important, politically, than the heady brew of parental grief and public solace Santorum enacts.

Worth noting that in 2010 19 percent of children in Santorum's Home State of Pennsylvania live in Poverty 

*My thanks to Sharain Naylor and Carolyn DiPalma for helping me think about Rick Santorum and role of child loss in politics.

I'm reading: Making Sense of Rick Santorum

What Happens in Europe Doesn’t Stay in Europe

John Buell
  is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and   
  a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most    
  recent book is, Politics, Religion, and Culture 
  in an Anxious Age.


Reading the corporate media, one gets the impression that the travails of the Eurozone constitute a morality play with a comforting theme. Germany has been a model of fiscal rectitude amidst a sea of profligate governments that are dragging it—and the whole European Union and the common currency-- down.

However comforting this theme may be, it is wrong on several levels. For starters, the countries in Europe that are still doing relatively well—including Germany, Sweden, Denmark—have far more developed welfare states than those of such “profligate” nations as Spain and Portugal. In addition, on a more basic level, the fiscal crisis faced by southern European nations owes more to the German model, the worldwide faith in financial “liberalization,” and the single currency.

European integration proceeded out of the most unquestionable of motives. After half a century of war and the decimation of the continent, European leaders and publics sought an end to violence. What better means of reducing violence than tying nations together economically. Europeans, starting with France and West Germany, fashioned common trade agreements on iron and steel and soon went on from there to create both wider free trade zones as well as a set of common policies to govern health, safety, and civil liberties. These early trade agreements, however, did not include or require a common currency.

From the start, many European social democrats worried that more inclusive European integration would bring together nations with vastly different economic productivity levels. Preserving floating currencies would, however, give nations that experienced shocks or the loss of jobs through balance of trade problems the escape hatch of currency devaluation. But just as importantly, the Maastricht agreement, one of the pillars of European Union, required richer nations to contribute to a stabilization fund to assist poorer nations in developing their infrastructure. Such a fund was viewed as an instrument of economic justice not only for the poorer states but also for a Western European working class that feared the loss of jobs to a low wage periphery.

European integration also took place on another track, one more dominated by financial elites than by working class or even manufacturing interests. Financial interests promoted the idea of a currency union as a means of taking currency risk out of trade within the EU as and thereby facilitating broader trade and development. Corporations would not need to worry about rapid fluctuations in the relative value of particular currencies. Another agenda was in play as well. Some banking elites hoped that a common currency would function much as the nineteenth century gold standard, making it impossible for debtors to inflate their way out of debt. 

The initial appeal of the common currency was not limited to the banking community. Some of the weaker European states expected that teaming up with economic power Germany would allow them to benefit from the latter’s stellar credit rating. Others hoped that they would become little Germanys.  

Germans were willing to go along, but with one proviso. Any agreement must include a central bank that would operate along historic German principles so that the new common currency would continue to carry an excellent credit rating. The European Central Bank (ECB) would have to be independent and would be guided by one mandate—price stability.  As Center for Economic Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrodt puts it, “The right-wing nature of the monetary union had been institutionalized from the beginning. The rules limiting public debt to 60 percent of GDP and annual budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP – while violated in practice, are unnecessarily restrictive in times of recession and high unemployment. The European Central Bank’s mandate to care only about inflation, and not at all about employment, is another ugly indicator.”

In the prevalent morality play, German’s fiscal rectitude plays a starring role, yet the German economic model is at the core of the periphery’s economic crisis.  Economists at an early November conference on the “Crisis in the Eurozone” at the University of Texas pointed out that Germany in the last decade has forged a new social compact and model of development. The basic postulate is that price stability fosters economic growth. Price stability in turn had two pegs, government austerity and a social compact between management and labor under which wages were kept flat even as productivity rose dramatically.  Labor’s one benefit was a commitment to maintain relatively high levels of employment even during down times. German corporations in effect accepted some redundancies in order to buy labor peace.

The strategy worked, at least for a time, but only because of one other major factor, financial speculation. Under the new Eurozone rules, each nation retained the right to regulate its own banks even as capital could flow more freely than goods and services. Banks and governments in effect forged a common bond in the aggressive quest to pursue new sources of profit.  Since prices were stable in Germany and interest rates low, its banks could take cheaply raised capital and invest it elsewhere. Elsewhere included toxic US mortgage backed securities as well as housing in Spain and commercial real estate in Ireland, among other targets.  The rating agencies, including most prominently Standard and Poor's, which recently downgraded the debt of several peripheral EU nations, blessed the credit worthiness of these toxic instruments, thereby adding fuel to the fire.

The press often suggests that European banks were affected by the Wall Street 2008 collapse, but from the very start they were key players in the run up to that collapse. And since European banks were even more highly leveraged than their US counterparts, their role was very large.

The evolution of this system in effect created real estate bubbles even as it was gradually decimating the productive capacity of the periphery economies. In a recent Foreign Affairs commentary, Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs commented: “German lending to the eurozone has been pro-cyclical. Indirectly (through buying bonds) and directly (by spreading its exchange rate through the euro), the country has basically given the periphery the money to buy its goods. During the economic boom of 2003-2008, Germany extended credit on a massive scale to the eurozone's Mediterranean countries. Frankfurt did quite well for itself. … in 2008, Germany was one of the two biggest net creditors within the eurozone (after France). Its positive positions were exact mirrors of Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Spain's negative ones. Of course, as the financial crisis began to escalate in 2009, Germany abruptly closed its wallet. Now Europe's periphery needs long-term loans more than ever, but Germany's enthusiasm for extending credit seems to have collapsed.” 

Once the bubble burst, governments had to take on immense responsibilities to the unemployed as well as to their banks. Spain and Ireland had been models of fiscal rectitude before the crisis. That crisis and the factors that led up to it were the cause rather than the consequence of exploding budgets.

 Some conference participants pointed out the literally self-contradictory nature of the current mainstream agenda. Every European nation is now being asked to cut wages and welfare benefits in order to become more competitive and run balance of trade surpluses. But every nation in a free trade area cannot run a surplus. Someone must buy the goods.  Or perhaps Europe can become like Lake Wobegon, where everyone’s children are above average.  Even S and P, though without acknowledging its role in this crisis, has belatedly recognized,  that: “[T]he financial problems facing the eurozone are as much a consequence of rising external imbalances and divergences in competitiveness between the eurozone’s core and the so-called “periphery. As such, we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues.”  

 The European crisis, as several conference economists pointed out, could be contained relatively easily. Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has developed one of the most detailed and widely discussed proposals.  The ECB—acting on its own authority-- could buy bonds of distressed governments and refinance the loans at lower and sustainable rates of interest. With the exception of Greece, these nations could all pull debts and deficits down to manageable levels if reasonable interest costs were restored. A sensible recovery program would also include recapitalization along with central regulation of national banks. And finally, slow growth and the ECB’s relentless pursuit of price stability have been immense problems. Both ecological and economic concerns could be addressed through a European wide infrastructure fund.  

The recent ECB decision to loan money to European banks accepting their risky sovereign debt as collateral is a small step in the right direction. It may buy time and prevent credit freezes.  Nonetheless, it is inadequate. Loans are limited to three years maturities. As such there may be little effect on the long end of the yield curve. More fundamentally, nothing has been done to encourage growth and spending by the wealthier nations.

Unfortunately, as James Galbraith has pointed out, even more than the US case, Europe is dominated by a Calvinist mindset that equates wealth with virtue and debt with moral sloth. Germans complain about the irresponsibility of Southern Europeans, forgetting both that their banks encouraged it and that without such lending, German industry would have enjoyed smaller markets. A German working class, after years of being squeezed itself, can too easily accept such scapegoating.

These self-reinforcing trends could be reversed, but only through action on several fronts.  In the healthier European states, a renewed social democracy might extend more fiscal benefits, support for wage growth, and more aggressive pursuit of shorter hours as a reward for increasing labor productivity. Such steps would benefit not only manufacturing workers but also the growing service sector as well. Demonstrations across Europe might show debtors are real people rather than crude moralistic stereotypes.  A European infrastructure fund could lend more to the periphery, thereby improving long- term development prospects for the entire community.

Taking lessons from Occupy Wall Street, movements and leaders in Europe could do more to show the ways in which private investment banks have harmed both debtor nations and German taxpayers. Finally, one can even dare hope that industrial leaders in Germany might come to realize and publicly argue that austerity hardly helps them either. Stranger things have happened. Contemporary capitalism has more stresses, strains, and inconsistencies than either its defenders or even some of its Left critics recognize.

 Whatever happens, we in the US have a vital albeit hard- to- measure stake in these events. An EU collapse will hurt our banks, many of which have huge credit default swaps (in effect insurance policies against sovereign debt defaults), Too many of our elite and many citizens will also continue to draw and even reinforce the wrong conclusions.

I'm reading: What Happens in Europe Doesn’t Stay in Europe

Newt Gingrich as Intellectual

Tim Hanafin

Johns Hopkins University

Newt Gingrich has recovered sufficiently from a few missteps early in his campaign to return as a real voice in the Republican machine. Apparently, we have to take Newt seriously again, if not as a bona fide candidate then at least as the Republicans’ touted resident intellectual. It provides a degree of solace of sorts to realize that even that machine needs a character like Newt to give it legitimacy.

The ego of this intellectual is cartoonishly large. His self-regard defies parody: he once said in earnest, “people like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” He’s a bully, and he takes himself seriously enough to relieve the burden on others to do so. If he’d stayed out of this year’s race, he’d merely be the national know-it-all, hectoring his many detractors and enemies from the sidelines. As it is, he’s chosen to run, and he clearly thinks the presidency is his by right. On December 4, Newt pronounced, “I will be the nominee” (video). On December 22, he told the entire GLBTQ and allied population that if they’re going to be like that they should go ahead and vote for the other guy because he doesn’t need them.

The way he’s running his campaign, you get the sense Newt feels he’s doing us a favour; he seems to wonder why he can’t just do something nice for us all without getting the third degree. For example, last spring Newt was observed reversing his position on Medicare reform inside the space of three days, which piqued some interest. However, he lost patience with answering questions about it almost immediately, pronouncing on the following Thursday, “any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.” In their insolence, the media generally refused Newt’s command to throw his words down the memory hole, and Newt was lambasted widely for that phrase. In response, Newt’s press secretary, Rick Tyler, issued a florid press release, presented here in the form of a dramatic reading by John Lithgow on The Colbert Report:

Newt styles himself as a philosopher and a mandarin of policy and political vision. It’s clear he cultivated this cred, such as it is, to use it as a cudgel against his opponents. To attack his intellectual pretentions on their own terms would be to miss the point. Take, for example, his contribution to the ‘debate’ about the so-called ground zero mosque in New York. Newt scores points by erroneously presenting Islam and Christianity as natural, perennial enemies and by implying the centre’s name, ‘Cordoba house’ was not a reference to a shining example of a uniquely cooperative culture and society, but a deliberate symbolic insult, a reference to a conquest that Muslims in general, Newt implies, would like to repeat sometime soon. He concludes that American ‘elites’ are too ignorant of history to realize ‘Islamists’ are jeering at them behind their backs. Since Spain actually stands, until 1492, as a place where a rough territorial pluralism of sorts between Judaism, Christianity and Islam survived for a long time, it’s a whiggish revision of the history of Islam in Spain. It could have been written by a Grand Inquisitor who forgot to rail against the Jews and the Protestants as well as the Muslims. It’s silly, but it’s not meant to be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the matter. He cut this history from whole cloth to paint a historical veneer over the manufactured outrage against the creation of a Cordoba House in Manhattan today.  

Newt's intellectual vanity is only the base of an even-grander self-image as the historical hero of the uniqueness of American civilization. In a 1997 report on Gingrich, the Congressional Select Committee on Ethics found handwritten notes he had distributed to his political advisors concerning a course he once taught called “Renewing American Civilization.” In these notes, Gingrich described himself as an “advocate [and] definer of civilization,” a “teacher of the rules of civilization,” an “arouser of those who form civilization,” the “organizer of the pro-civilization activists,” and the “leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.” All of which Newt calls ‘Newt Action.’ He even drew a picture of himself undertaking ‘Newt Action’:

Credit to www.bessettepitney.net/2011/11/gingrichs-self-image.html

This hand-drawn diagram was submitted as supplementary evidence in a congressional report on Newt’s professional ethics, and was attributed to him personally. Of course, if you look closely you’ll see that after drawing himself as a tiny little stick-figure Sun King, and after realising, perhaps, that others might not share or appreciate his views vis-à-vis his own indispensability, Newt wrote, humbly, “a pattern rather than a single point.” This means, I guess, that he was willing to acknowledge he might not be the sole cause of world-historical change. Nevertheless, whether pattern or point, it’s all pure Newt action.

Maybe this is not that unusual for the type of person who fancies him- or herself presidential material. I don’t think you could do that job without a huge ego. But Newt transfigures it into a gargantuan ego. It seems winning the presidency would be, to Newt, the ultimate (or perhaps the only possible) vindication of his intellect. It’s the destiny of a man with a brain like his. Or, to say the same thing, it’s America’s destiny be ruled by Newt in a Newt way.

And maybe Newt believes it’s his intellectual destiny to ascend to the presidential throne. But it is doubtful whether many others believe that, not even the 30% of those polled recently who consistently favour him. Newt’s appeal extends only as far as being aggressively obnoxious has become a virtue in U.S. political culture, which is to say, not quite far enough yet. Nonetheless, his claim to be an intellectual may still carry subliminal clout in the political culture. There is a large portion of the U.S. population that feels intellectually condescended-to by ‘elites,’ the media, the media-elites, liberals, liberal-elites, the academy, the liberal media, so on and so on. This is a feeling that the Republican party fosters and exploits as their bread-and-butter. If people like Newt, it’s because Newt puts ‘elites’ in their place. He may be a snob, but he’s their snob. Indeed, he may take advantage of a tendency within the liberal intelligentsia to correct false histories as if everybody should already have known this.

So Paul Krugman was wrong to say Newt was a stupid man’s idea of a smart man. If the stereotypical ‘smart man’ ridicules trumped-up know-it-alls for not being half as smart as they think they are, then to a large portion of Americans, Newt and Krugman sound exactly alike. In the end, Newt doesn’t need to have real intellectual credibility any more than George W. Bush needed to really be from Texas. Newt, like Bush, fulfills a resentful political-cultural wishes for revenge. Perhaps, in his case, the hidden attraction is to take revenge on a culture which does not care enough to educate its populace.

I'm reading: Newt Gingrich as Intellectual

Celebrating Death, again

Steven Johnston
Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

For America’s elected representatives, the 2011 holiday season called for gift-giving, both material and symbolic. The recipient, if you will, was patriotism. First came the “Vow to Hire Heroes Act.” Now we have the Civil Service Recognition Act. The Democratic and Republican parties may be split on which version of neoliberal capitalism ought to govern America’s social, economic, and political life, but they can always agree on the fundamentals of patriotism, including the need to feed this insatiable affective cultural machine. Patriotism is always on guard for new sources of sustenance to maintain its glossy sheen. Nothing rivals dying for your country, unless, of course, it’s killing for your country—though when it comes to killing, the celebration tends toward the discrete.

The Civil Service Recognition Act provides for (to quote the statute) “the presentation of [a] United States flag on behalf of federal civilian employees who die of injuries incurred in connection with their employment.” It is not just military service personnel who risk—and lose—their lives working in the name of the American people (members of the diplomatic corps offer one prominent example). Nor do you need to serve abroad to have your life placed in danger. It can happen on the home front as well, a space increasingly militarized and securitized in the last thirty years.

Who would object to honoring those who 'serve' their country and pay the proverbial ultimate price? Well, the American Legion, for one. Initially, it condemned the bill, citing the following language as objectionable: “A flag shall be furnished and presented…in the same manner as a flag is furnished and presented on behalf of a deceased member of the Armed Services who dies while on active duty.” Fang Wong, the Legion’s national commander, objected to the equation of civilian and military service, privileging the latter: “Civil service workers do not sign a pledge to defend America with their lives, they are not forced to serve in combat zones, and their work routines do not include engaging enemy forces overseas.” Not surprisingly, right-wing bloggers joined in the condemnation, one describing it as “The Flags for Bureaucrats Act,” arguing (I use the term loosely) that it was “just another trapping of power available from the federal government to all those people in the ever expanding federal bureaucracy.” The statute was quickly changed, as supporters of the bill insisted no equation was intended—or possible. The American Legion supported the amended bill without hesitation. Patriotism’s love affair with death again won the day.

Still, and somewhat strangely, the ritual enacted into law hasn’t changed (a flag will still be presented). How to make sense of this? It seems that the American Legion was primarily interested in policing the terms of American political discourse. You simply cannot say publicly (this applies especially to the state) anything that seems to equate civilian and military service. The latter is sacrosanct.

What allegedly distinguishes these forms of service? Though Fang Wong won’t explicitly say it, it’s the act of killing for country that separates the two. Presumably most civilians who die in the performance of official duties do not kill, but this distinction does not always hold true—just ask the CIA. Does the exception prove the rule?

Ironically, the right-wing hysteria may be warranted, a defensive reaction designed to deflect attention from another reality not to be exposed—the mercenary character of the military forces of the United States, which are routinely showered with (more and more) trappings to join and remain in the military. If anything, the military represents the pinnacle of achievement in the American welfare state, though many Americans might be loath to think in such terms. This is the comparison that must be unthinkable, certainly unspeakable. What’s more, the real issue is not that civilian service might rise to the level of military service; the fear is that military service is no more elevated than civilian service. As Andrew Rosenthal points out, many conservatives don’t consider government jobs real jobs; well, how is it that a military career became so highly valued in a country whose founders were deeply suspicious of a standing army? Many conservatives deride professional politicians (Mitt Romney, ludicrously, tried to tarnish Newt Gingrich with this label in a recent GOP debate). While not endorsing such a judgment (I like politics), I would ask how professional military service achieved its exalted status. Shouldn’t it be something that everyone does, briefly, when young? And if a permanent military force is needed, why isn’t it on the list of America’s necessary evils (like government itself)? How is it, for example, that make-work jobs fighting an imperial war in Iraq come to be honored? How was it contributive to America’s collective project?

Finally, the Civil Service Recognition Act, ostensibly reflecting a generous political impulse, excludes and marginalizes as much as it includes and honors. It privileges forms of service informed by death rather than life. Service here functions as a euphemism for sacrifice, itself a euphemism for death. Not surprisingly, then, the thousands of citizens of the Occupy movement will receive no formal recognition for their democratic activism on behalf of justice, fairness, and the 99% (even though they, too, it turns out, risk their lives in its pursuit).

If anything, democratic activism, perhaps especially if undertaken by the wrong people, often fosters state violence and disenfranchisement. Republicans across the country have undertaken a party-sponsored program to systematically eliminate as many likely Democratic voters (openly targeting students) as possible from the electoral process in pursuit of a one-party state. Tragically, those who do in fact kill and die in the name of America’s democratic values thereby see their efforts, in the end, subverted, even destroyed, by those who deploy them with undue ease. For what exactly are they killing and dying?

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