Is Insta-responding Corrupting the American Character?

I watched President Obama and his town hall meeting tonight, with Anderson Cooper, and their discussion and debate with the audience about gun violence and Obama’s modest proposals on gun control. What struck me was perhaps something odd, but the more I thought about it, perhaps something important about modern political discourse: Obama’s speech was slow and deliberate and thoughtful, while Cooper’s speech was quick and pointed and glib.

I thought about Obama’s slow speaking as a way of talking in a seminar, when you have two or three hours to understand a point, whereas Cooper’s speech was on a timer, a fuse lit with seconds to go, zeroing in on a quick point, entertaining yet superficial. As a somewhat slow talker myself, I could listen to Obama, and I gave him the patience to make his point, and I agreed with much of what he said. I wondered if Cooper—representing the media and in a way how we communicate in our media culture—was more modern than Obama, but also at the root of why we in this country are less of a ‘we’ as years go by, why we talk past each other in political discourse, why we characterize opponents in stereotypes (or other facile categorizations) and caricatures. Has ‘media insta-responding,’ to coin a term, corrupted our ability to think carefully, to weigh, to consider, and even to empathize? When we know of a world that only ‘insta-responds,’ do we start basing our decisions on prejudices, stereotypes, and easily understood theories without tests in gritty practice?

Insta-responding is part of our world in a way that it never was for me growing up. We insta-respond on Facebook by pressing a ‘Like’ button, and that somehow demonstrates our political solidarity, or aesthetic preference, or temporary pleasure, or all of the above. We insta-respond through talk radio, with one voice reaching millions and pontificating on this or that current event, quickly, glibly, for entertainment as well as to score political points. And sometimes these are exactly the same: to score a quick political point is to entertain, even if your point is superficial, or based on a straw-man version of your opponent.

Insta-responding is the internet. The troll is a creature of responding fast, in every newspaper discussion page online, in any kind of entertainment forum online. When you are responding fast, and are kind of an ass, then of course you want the ability to be anonymous. So online responding has led to ‘discussion pages’ that are not about discussing anything, but more like pages of one-sentence hit pieces to vent, to smear, to feel good about yourself when you have little else to feel good about. Responding on these ‘discussion pages’ has never changed my mind about anything, has never illuminated me to a new perspective. It’s mostly invective.

Of course, where we see a constant river of insta-responding is on television, and its news, where anchors respond to events as they unfold, before they know who did what to whom, where reporters give preliminary (and often false) conclusions, but who cares? The point is to respond, to capture eyeballs, to entertain, to show the gut-wrenching images, and later, much, much later, to make sense of it all. If anyone tunes in for that more considered perspective or the matter-of-fact corrections the next day, that is. The TV crowd may already be on to the next disaster, or outrage, or political fiasco. And so the wheel keeps a-spinning!

One of the reasons TV has been the first and most important purveyor of insta-responding is because time is money on television. If you can’t speak (and respond quickly), then you can never be an Anderson Cooper. Every second of ‘no talking,’ of ‘no reacting,’ is a second when the viewer can turn away, change the channel. Advertisers hate that, and so do television executives. When we put a price on time, on seconds, and when we put that time on an apparatus called television, any reasonable person would have expected ‘discussions’ to be glib and quick and definitely entertaining, and with images that would also be arresting. A split-second of an image communicates more viscerally than anyone describing that same image. When we as a country have most of our political discourse filtered through television, what do you, as that reasonable person, think would happen to that discourse? ‘Discourse’ would become ‘talk,’ and ‘thinking’ would become ‘insta-responding.’

What kind of political candidate would be favored in this insta-responding world? Someone who would promise to bomb all the bad guys as ‘foreign policy.’ Someone who would say, “Trust me. Just don’t ask me too many hard questions and expect concrete answers.” Someone who would play to your prejudices and anxieties. Someone with all the answers, as long as these ‘answers’ are easy, digestible, colorful, and even outrageous. Someone arrogant who makes fun of complexity and thinking and any crap that keeps him from adulation, or as I would put it, a slavish insta-responding to him.

Imagine another world. Imagine a world where people would turn off their televisions, and debate outside, over cups of coffee, and not through any filters like talk radio hosts, but face-to-face. What would happen to empathy? Imagine if we had hours upon hours discussing such serious issues as gun control, gun violence, the Constitution, the United States becoming multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious as never before, and that these discussions would be done in town squares, or better, through lunches, and weekly meetings that would last until most of us got hungry. Then some of us would go out for a bite to eat. What would happen to how we see each other?

Imagine that many of us valued being alone, and bolstered our minds through reading, and reading literary fiction from other worlds, and imagine that we would take the time to read these long novels from other worlds, and so consider other viewpoints, other societies, characters radically different from us, yet complex characters surviving, failing, trying, loving. What would happen to who we would consider an Other?

Imagine, finally, that we would seek respect from others not because of the size of our biceps or how we could punch like Holly Holm, and not because we are in an SUV and angry and so we better goddamn get respect on the highway, and certainly not because we had a gun in our hand, nor money in the bank, nor a cutie in our arms. We might still need a gun to protect ourselves, and we most certainly would need a cutie in our arms for a variety of reasons, but we would not go to the gun because we demand insta-respect from innocents, and the cutie would be in our arms because we read, and are calm and reliable, and that cutie is like us, a reader, and maybe even a Trekkie or at least a sci-fi geek. We’re imagining, okay?

It’s not too late, America, to escape the Cave of Insta-Responding. Read. Think. Go talk to someone different from you and take him or her out to lunch. And respond to what you hear, but don’t just blab: write about it.

Economic uncertainty as a political weapon

You have to hand it to the House Republicans: they have outplayed President Obama in almost every respect on the deficit-ceiling debate, but primarily in their use of economic uncertainty as a political weapon.  Republicans have set the terms of the debate, while Obama did not respond, analyze, anticipate, and attack months ago.

The president did not try to frame the debate, or lead the country to set the terms of the debate.  He did not anticipate how sophisticated, yet simple, the Republican plan against him was, and he did not counteract it before it blossomed into the near-fiasco we are facing now.

Consumer confidence and business confidence are key to uplifting an economy burdened by recession and shock.  This was the state of the U.S. economy at the end of 2008, when George W. Bush left an economic mess for Obama to clean up.  This confidence is invisible, but if it is eroded over time, people and businesses don’t invest, don’t create jobs, and don’t take risks, even if they have the money.  They hoard their cash.

After we weakly climbed out of recession with the emergency measures adopted by Obama immediately after he took office (some of these measures had been initiated by the Bush administration), I knew we were at the point where the economy would either gain momentum, or lose steam and fall back to some version of the disaster at the end of the Bush administration.

If we gained momentum, we would create more jobs, and the temporary measures which added to the deficit would be a historical footnote since the economy would grow fast enough to reduce the deficit in relation to the size of our economy.  But if we didn’t, then we would be saddled with the ‘temporary deficit,’ and a lack of jobs, and a weak economy, and Obama would surely not be re-elected.  Since I voted for Obama, I was rooting for the economy to improve, and expand, over the past two-three years.

During these past two-three years, however, I noticed something interesting.  I’ve read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day for decades.  I want different perspectives; I want to consider different voices.  But whereas the editorial page of the Journal has always been conservative, at least fiscally, if not socially, the front page and news pages have been a mix.  But in my opinion, not anymore.

With every slight uptick in the economy over the past two-three years, whether it was on jobs, or corporate profits, the front-page Journal articles were relentlessly negative.  Sometimes on the same story, it seemed as if I were living in two realities: what the Journal reported —the economy is awful under Obama, we are going nowhere, these corporate profits are illusory— and what the Times reported— we may be turning the corner, banks have recapitalized, companies are flush with cash.  Was the Journal being too pessimistic, or the Times too optimistic?

You could pick your facts to support either side, and that’s my point.  But why would anyone want to ‘talk down’ the economy?  I even imagined that perhaps the new Journal owner, Rupert Murdoch, had placed the kind of editors who would undermine confidence in the American economy under Obama.  But perhaps I was being too paranoid, I thought.  But I also knew such a relentlessly negative spin on anything that might improve the economy would also have an effect on whether individuals and companies spend money, even modestly, to grow us out of the deficit we incurred after we cleaned up the mess Bush left behind.  Most people in business read the Journal.

Obama didn’t help himself by focusing on healthcare reform, instead of jobs, eighteen months ago.  He didn’t help himself by not recognizing that House Republicans, after last November’s election, did not trust him absolutely, assumed he was a traditional, even radical liberal, and would not work with him.  They want him out.  Period.

As an old friend pointed out to me this summer, perhaps Obama was too young when he became president.  Too inexperienced.  Too much in belief of himself, instead of recognizing what effect he had on others, particularly on a white middle-class seeing the livelihoods slip away for their children, while this country becomes more Latino, more Asian, more Muslim, while American corporations react to globalization by shipping jobs overseas, for more profits which their investors (often ourselves) demand.

If Obama had recognized the unique ways in which he would never be trusted by House Republicans, and perhaps a great swath of the American electorate, he would have ‘triangulated,’ à la Bill Clinton, before or certainly after last year’s election.  That just means Obama would have acted as a fiscal conservative to counteract the (reasonable and unreasonable) prejudices of these Republicans and that part of the American electorate that would never trust him.  In that way, Obama would have positioned himself for reelection, in the middle of the road, which is how you win elections in this country.

When Obama ordered our Navy Seals to kill Bin Laden, that was a perfect moment of ‘triangulation’: the quasi-Muslim American president, who may or may not have been born in Hawaii, killed one of America’s greatest enemies.  You could sense when that happened that Obama’s harshest critics even tipped their hats to him, and perhaps for a moment reconsidered their zealous opposition to everything Obama.  That moment put Obama in a new light.  The problem is that Obama did not have, or aggressively pursue, enough of these ‘triangulation moments.’

If he had done that, if Obama had recognized that a significant portion of the American electorate and these adamant, inflexible House Republicans were already painting him as a stick-figure liberal who will only explode the deficit any chance he gets, Obama would have acted differently, and set the terms of the debate.  He would have gotten out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and pointed out the huge waste of hundreds of billions of dollars on defense spending, while our allies spend so little and ride our coattails.  He would have attacked government waste seriously, and closed unnecessary departments (but not the ones helping the disadvantaged or the needy).  He would have repeatedly pointed out how certain American companies pay so little in taxes, because they have sweetheart tax breaks from Congress.  He would have recognized that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an important role in the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis at the end of the Bush administration, and how Republicans and Democrats both benefited from their political and economic ties to these companies.  Everybody in Congress was greedy when it came to Fannie and Freddie.

But Obama didn’t do any of the above, relentlessly, day after day, ahead of the curve, so that he wouldn’t be boxed in later.  He allowed House Republicans to set the terms of the debate, and responded only to what they wanted, and simply kept giving in to their demands.  And they have just kept saying no.

What I think is rarely pointed out is this: by passing this temporary, short-term increase in the debt ceiling, with deep spending cuts and another vote in early 2012 on the debt ceiling, House Republicans are using economic uncertainty as a political weapon.  The more uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the fewer jobs will be created.  The more economic uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the more the stock market will languish, or even decline.  And of course, the more the government is contracting before the election, the fewer jobs and services will exist in 2012.  The fewer jobs in the American economy, and the worse off Americans feel about their economic prospects, the better the 2012 elections will be for the Republicans.

They have outplayed Obama, and now here we stand on the brink of default.  We will all pay a huge price for these selfish political games.  When we ‘talk down’ the economy, when we lose our AAA credit rating, and when the dollar’s role as a reserve currency erodes, we all lose.  What happened to ‘us’?  Why are we not a ‘we’ anymore?  Who could be that transformative, adaptive figure who can still lead us to change for the better, while still making us believe we belong together as a country?

Obama's Focus

I like the photo released from the Situation Room, with President Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates, Joe Biden and others riveted by the live screen as our Navy commandos enter Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and put a bullet in the terrorist’s head.  President Obama looked apprehensive, serious, and tough.  But above all, focused.  He took a gamble to get Bin Laden with commandos, rather than deciding to bomb the hell out of the compound.  The man from Chicago would either win big or lose big.

But the gamble was a good one.  The risk was commensurate with the reward: it was high risk to have our military men in harm’s way, to risk a fiasco where they get killed, but it was also high reward to identify Osama Bin Laden, to kill him, and to prove to the world that the deed was truly done.  What mattered was not only that our commandos were terrific, and that they completed their work without U.S. casualties.  What mattered most of all was this focus from President Obama and why we were there.  What 9/11 was originally about, and why we should ever risk putting our military in harm’s way.

Too often, in the aftermath of 9/11, fear and paranoia were manipulated to focus on targets having little to do with what happened on that awful Tuesday in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.  I experienced that day as a New Yorker, and it is the day I became in my heart a New Yorker.  But it is also the day I began to see this country twisted by opportunists and demagogues to focus not on Al Qaeda primarily, not on Bin Laden, but on agendas having little to do with what and who wounded us so profoundly.

Why did we start a war in Iraq?  For weapons of mass destruction?  But they weren’t there.  For vague Al Qaeda connections?  But the terrorists who harmed us were principally in Afghanistan, and later we now know, Pakistan.  My opinion is that President Bush started the war in Iraq to finish his daddy’s work, to pay back Saddam Hussein for targeting his daddy, to prosecute a personalized, blustery foreign policy that put our military in harm’s way.  For the wrong reasons.  For the wrong target.

Hussein was a creep and a dictator, but that isn’t a national security reason necessary to commit to a war.  And of course, once you start a war, as Eisenhower warned us, the military-industrial complex, from generals to lobbyists to anyone else who profits from wars, will make sure the ill-begotten war continues for years, with thousands of people dead, with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted.  Attempt to stop a war we should have never started in the first place, and how many right-wingers will smear you as soft on ‘defense’?  How many in the public will believe them?  How stupidly can we keep going round and round without the right purpose?

Here was another wrong target and wrong focus.  How did we allow what happened on 9/11 to be twisted first into fear about security within our borders, then into paranoia about border security, and finally into attacks against undocumented workers?  We allowed idiots like Lou Dobbs to manipulate our fears into a full-throated xenophobia against anyone dark-skinned, anyone ‘not like us,’ anyone whom we could easily blame, anyone weak and close at hand.

We couldn’t get to Bin Laden, but we could kick these Mexicans pouring concrete on our sidewalks and slaving away for pennies, yes we could kick them in the ass and feel good about ourselves.  It might have been false, this feel-good kick, but it was something, and it was what we had.  How many of us stepped up, said no, and yelled at the xenophobes, to tell them they had the wrong target?  How many pointed out that our lack of work ethic, and our lack of focus on educating our kids, and our adoration of a superficial, materialistic culture were primarily to blame for our not competing effectively against nations like China?  Believe me, right now dying Detroit could be revived if civic leaders just rolled out the red carpet for one million, hard-working, undocumented Mexicans.

Obama, in that picture from the Situation Room, was focused.  He was focused on the right target.  He was focused on what should have been the target all along.  Al Qaeda, and all it represents.  Period.  Now that this commando mission has been completed successfully, perhaps we in the United States can start focusing on our problems straight on.  Our real problems.  Not our prejudices.  Not our fantasies.  Not our petty vendettas.  But the problems that matter, to solve them and to make us a better country.  To overcome even the worst of our days.

The Latino Dream With Obama

Tomorrow seems a new beginning with Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, and I am thrilled to be a witness and supporter to this change for our country. We are still in the dark days of our financial disaster and the unnecessary military quagmire of Iraq. Another unforeseen terrorist attack could worsen the defensiveness and cultural xenophobia too easily exploited by politicians. We have taken political steps to be more inclusive, to answer our problems differently, with a focus on those at the bottom and middle rungs of society, and to value competence over cronyism. I am hopeful we will succeed, yet I know we do not control our fate entirely: terrorists could still attack us, and immediately change the political debates in this country; foreign creditors own hundreds of billions of dollars of American debt, and their willingness to do so may waver in the future, with catastrophic consequences for the dollar, inflation, and interest rates.

Despite this guarded hope for the Obama presidency, I have also gotten the sense, by watching the news today and reading the newspapers, that Latinos are at the periphery of this change, bit players aboard the narrative train about what an Obama presidency means for the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Much of this is understandable: Obama is a self-identified African-American, even though his mother was white and his father was black; the majority of the American electorate voted for Obama as the better candidate who also happened to be black; the civil rights struggle embodied by MLK was primarily to redress the modern consequences of American slavery, including racism, segregation, and the political and economic disenfranchisement of blacks. Cesar Chávez marched and fought for the farmworkers along with Robert Kennedy, yet this Chicano and Mexicano narrative is often given short shrift in official accounts of the civil rights era. Were Latinos bit players to begin with? Perhaps in the 1960’s. But the world has changed, for better and for worse for Latinos.

We have become the largest minority in this country, with the highest growth rate of any ethnic group. Yet Latinos are Cubanos, Mexicanos, Dominicanos, Puertorriqueños, Centroamericanos, not a homogeneous voting bloc, not a race, but a hodgepodge group united by an ancestral Spanish from Latin America. We are closer to our homelands than, say, the English or Irish or Italian immigrants who came before us. Yet this proximity opens up the possibility of living in a nether world, between Spanish and English, between going back ‘home’ and making the United States your home, between identifying with the new Latino immigrant and thinking this immigrant is an alien. Is this nether world better than having a clean break in the New World with your ancestral past? That is an open question not easily answered by anyone.

The biggest change for Latinos today is that they, or at least Latino undocumented workers, became the political pariahs in the hate-filled rhetoric after 9/11. The drug violence and political instability in Mexico and America’s voracious drug habit will only mean the potential for more immigrants from the South, legal and illegal, will remain high for years to come. The hope with Obama is that he will give us a more complex, and more humane, understanding of the undocumented worker. The hope is that he will not scapegoat the weak, even during an economic depression or even after a terrorist attack. The hope is that he will include those who are outsiders, and attempt to help them become part of the American Dream, to help them integrate successfully into our culture, and to welcome the positive changes these newcomers bring to America today. For Latinos, we need to work to help ourselves, too.

Barack Obama is indeed not the grandson nor the great-grandson of slaves: he is the son of an immigrant. That perhaps is not part of the narrative train that has been fueled by the media or even by those who support him. But my suspicion, after I heard Obama’s comments on the immigration debate a few months ago, is that he understands what it is to be an outsider, a person who needs to define himself differently from established traditions, someone in between, a compromise, a bridge to where we want to be.

Obama, the Mestizo Mutt

How gratifying to hear our new president-elect, Barack Obama, offhandedly characterize himself as a “mutt” at his first press conference after the presidential election. I sensed a self-deprecation meant to keep himself grounded. Also, it was a revealing look at how he might see himself, between black and white, a representative of the new world of the United States, as a society comprised not just of many races, but also a society where the races are often mixing to create something unique. We were already this new world a long time ago, but it has taken the election of Barack Obama to see ourselves more clearly than ever before.

Mestizo, as some of you may know, means ‘mixed blood,’ and has been the reality in Latin America for centuries. Spanish blood. Aztec blood. Incan blood. Portuguese blood. Mayan blood. African blood. Asian blood. Mexicanos are mestizos, and this history has often been a source of shame, rather than pride, of being conquered and of losing our heritage. Perhaps there is great difference when the union of races begins out of domination, rather than out of an uneasy, unexpected love.

In the United States, as Mexicanos and other Latinos inhabit parts of the country beyond the Southwest, to Kansas and Minnesota and Iowa, there has been a reaction against these newcomers, their brown faces, the Spanish language, and even their religion. Can we be open-minded enough not just to accept them for who they are, but to take them in, to change ourselves as we learn from them? Can these Mexicanos, outsiders in a new land, can they change themselves too? Are they flexible enough, and adaptable enough, to change and become an integral part of America? Are we all practical enough to search for and discover a new middle ground for all of us?

For this is what being mestizo, a mutt, has always meant for me. It has meant the promise and reality of new possibilities. It has been to value practicality and adaptability to the circumstances above all. Being mestizo is the opposite of trying to be pure, or of thinking there was ever any heritage, or history, that was pure. Being mestizo is about being suspicious of categorizations, that ‘whites’ are this way, that ‘blacks’ are that way, or that ‘Latinos’ are always so and so. Categorical thinking has always been at the heart of racism, and really, at the heart of non-thinking, meant to ‘understand’ quickly so as to appease an irrational fear or a doubt. Mestizaje breaks the established category, and creates something new, perhaps over time just another category that has to be broken again to escape yet another rigidity. Remember: ‘white’ America is composed of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, and other immigrants who were once the outsiders in our new world.

So being a mutt mestizo is about the details. I married a Jewish woman. Why? Because she was the one who took my heart away junior year at Harvard. I wasn’t looking for a ‘Mexicana,’ or a ‘woman from Harvard,’ or ‘somebody who could speak Spanish with my parents.’ I saw Laura, and how she was, and how we were together, these wonderful details, and they trumped any category I had in my mind about who I wanted to be with forever. Love is about the details, and so this Mexican mestizo created another mixture with a Jewish woman, and now with our children. The cycle of mixing and remixing continues. We are all mestizo mutts now, and we are a family.