Kerry Bio

Brought home a new book from the bookstore: John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton. Pretty interesting. Here’s a quote to get the ball rolling:

“John would clearly say, ‘If I could make my dream come true, it would be running for president of the United States,’” recalled William Stanberry, Kerry’s debate team partner for three years [at Yale]. “It was not a casual interest. It was a serious, stated interest. His lifetime ambition was to be in political office.”

Why? What drove Kerry? “I don’t think there was any one specific issue, such as ‘I am going to spend my life working for racial integration or word peace.’” Stanberry said. “I don’t think he had pet issues as much as he simply said, ‘The life of a politician is the life I want. I want to speak out on issues. This is what I want to do for a job.’” (p. 50)

Better documentation would be nice, but the authors are journalists, not scholars, so all I know is that this comment from Stanberry came from an interview at an unknown time and place by one of the three authors. Still, it’s interesting. Kerry has no doubt been an ambitious guy.

In their introduction, the authors say “[Kerry] is trailed by a reputation for political opportunism” (p. xxv), and “critics see him as an unabashed political operator. Unlike many who are driven to succeed in public life by a core belief system, the arc of Kerry’s political career is defined by a restless search for the issues, individuals, and causes to fulfill a nearly lifelong ambition” (p. xxvi). As one who is also a bit of a searcher, I can understand the apparently volatile youth of John Kerry.

In his early college days, he was “gung-ho: had to show the flag,” according to his father (p. 54). In his senior year at Yale, he “sort of made a spontaneous speech” about Vietnam to his Skull and Bones pals, which at least one of them remembers as unusual because “You had this group of the elite of the elite selected out of the Yale senior class who probably were most adept at gazing at their own navels and probably thought the world rotated around them” (according to Alan Cross), but “Kerry forced the group to focus on Vietnam” (p. 51). When Kerry gave the class oration in 1966, he said of Vietnam that “if victory escapes us, it would not be the fault of those who lead, but of the doubters who stabbed them in the back” (p. 54). His words are almost shocking when compared to his participation in the antiwar movement after returning from Vietnam himself. But Vietnam appears to have been a pretty traumatic experience for John Kerry. After his friend Dick Pershing was killed, he wrote home to his parents: “What can I say? I am empty, bitter, angry and desperately lost with nothing but war, violence and more war around me. I just don’t believe it was meant to be this cruel and senseless” (p. 65). Without belittling the import of the experience and the pain of Pershing’s death, I think Kerry’s comment betrays a little naivete. His apparent surprise at the cruelty and senselessness of war seems strange to me. Could war be anything else? However, Kerry recently recalled that he “wanted to be there and be able to be part of it, make my contribution, have a sense of what it was all about. Like all young men who have a sense of adventure, who are testing themselves” (p. 57). That one so enthusiastic greeted the horrors of war with such shock perhaps explains his gradual shift from flag-waving freshman to antiwar activist.

In 1972, Kerry decided to run for office. Because he had lived in so many places as a child, he had no real geographical home, and had a hard time choosing a congressional district:

He tried on congressional districts like suits off the rack. In less than two months in early 1972, the antiwar leader had accumulated mailing addresses in three different districts in Massachusetts. To this day he bears the brand of opportunist because of his brazen district-shopping. Kerry acknowledges this period as part of his “baggage” in his home state.

Honestly, I can’t say I blame him. Recall the comment from William Stanberry, that Kerry sought politics as a career. If you want to go to a university, you apply to several of them. If you want a job, you apply for several positions. We tend to see politics differently, though, because Americans still harbor the myth of congressional office as a place of temporary citizen participation, even though it has always been a place of career-forging. Was it wrong for Kerry to behave as he did? I don’t think so. If I really wanted a seat in Congress, I would probably try to hedge my bets, too.

People close to me have often heard me say that I want to do something important with my life, that I want to make a positive contribution to the world. Now, as I read a little on John Kerry’s earlier life, I have to admit I see something similar in him, and I sympathize with the labels the public have given him. He has not been driven by an overarching ideology, but by an internal drive to do something important with his life. People like that often fail to fit the common molds. They seem contradictory and confusing. I know, because I have been one, in my own small world. I doubt, however, that I will ever be elected President of the United States. (Being a little on the thick side and having male pattern baldness are just not acceptable for presidential candidates in our sex- and media-driven age. Nor does it help that I’m an atheist.) But John Kerry seems to have a pretty good chance.

The 400 Books

Just forced myself to do a little picking up around the humble abode. Vacuumed, even. Put away clean laundry that’s been sitting in my favorite black leather chair for two months, even. In the process, I decided to count my books. Seemed like fun. Turns out I’ve got approximately 400 books in this place. Probably a fire hazard. Adequate shelving would be nice (the piles on the floor are not good for feng shui, no sir), but the budget won’t accommodate right now (because the budget is too busy accommodating more books!). Cataloging would be fun, too, but I’m too lazy.

The nice thing about a cleaned up apartment is that it renews my vigor for study and writing. Have you noticed that I’ve been slacking off with the blog? Probably not, because as my posts have gotten less involved, less philosophical, and less challenging, hits have fallen off, too. Unfortunately, though, I don’t have time to inaugurate a new era for theomorph just this moment, because I have to show up at work in about half an hour. Perhaps I shall return with yet another book.

Una Pelicula de M. Night Shyamalan

Before seeing The Village, I read ten or fifteen reviews online. This is part of a game I play, as I was telling an Important Person earlier this evening. I call it Meta-Critic™. Here’s how it works: First, read lots of reviews before seeing the movie. Then try and figure out why no two critics ever seem to have watched the same movie. Now, use all those conflicting reviews to piece together a hypothesis of what the movie is really like. Finally, see the movie and reassess the hypothesis. Meta-Critic™. You heard it here first.

So I played Meta-Critic™ with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village today. Most of the reviews were negative, which isn’t extraordinary in itself. No, the really interesting thing was that while few critics seemed to like the movie, none of them seemed to dislike it for the same reason. This led me to hypothesize that perhaps there was something deeply unsatisfying about the film, but that none of the critics could quite put their fingers on it.

Well, it turns out my hypothesis was pretty close. The problem is not that The Village is unsatisfying, but that it’s darned near impossible to say anything meaningful about the film without giving away the ending. Suddenly, it all became clear. I imagined critics across the nation facing blank computer screens and wondering what to write. They certainly couldn’t give away the secret ending. What would they do? Latch on to whatever little detail annoyed them most and use it to lambast the whole movie, of course. Hence the divergent negative reviews.

Is there anything original in The Village? No, not really. Will it give you something to think about? Probably, but it depends on who you are and what you think about already. Should M. Night Shyamalan put his talents to use on a film without a twist ending for once? Probably, and the sooner the better, before he turns into a one-trick pony. But most importantly, is Bryce Dallas Howard just about the cutest thing ever? YES.

Campaign Cynicism

Each evening this week, I have tuned to coverage of the Democratic National Convention on PBS. (Due to a family event, I was only able to watch the first hour of coverage on Wednesday night.) I have enjoyed some of the speakers (Al Gore, Ron Reagan, Ted Kennedy, Wesley Clark, and Barack Obama), and rather loathed others of them (mostly Al Sharpton, who cannot pronounce the word “ask,” cannot seem to speak without yelling, and who has a highly racialized vision of history). However, because I have been trained to look for logical analysis of documented facts, most political speeches still grate on me.

Logical analysis of documented facts does not make a rousing political speech. It is more fun and exciting to say without substantiation, and based only on the shared assumptions of your fellow party members, that the United States cannot withstand four more years of George W. Bush. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But in a political speech, truth doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the speaker and the audience agree with each other, not whether they agree with facts. If the audience believes something, even something untrue, the speaker who echoes that will succeed.

As for whether the nation can withstand four more years of the President, I believe that kind of talk oversimplifies the truth. The United States government is an immense and complex system whose actions cannot fall entirely on the shoulders of one person. The framers of our Constitution intended this. But as the power and prestige of the executive have increased, so has the mythology surrounding the office of President. This carries into presidential campaigns, and cynical people like me are nonplused by all the rhetoric.

Bar People

Last night I spent a couple hours at a bar with my brother and a cousin. This is the place where my brother meets his friends every Wednesday night, but most of them were not there. So we stayed for a couple hours and I watched all the weird people who are expressing their personality by putting pieces of metal through parts of their body and injecting ink into their skin, but who would surely call me an intolerant bigot for daring to make assessments of said personalities based on the metal and ink. What happened to good old fashioned virtue, having character, and expressing your personality through your words and deeds?

While we were there, my brother tried to convince me that controversy for the sake of controversy is constructive (e.g., maybe Michael Moore is just a polemical jerk, but he’s “bringing people to the conversation”). This is what he considers edifying “bar talk.” I happen to disagree. Being controversial just to get your adrenaline flowing, or to practice your argumentation techniques, is pathetic. It’s a waste. It’s decadent. “Bringing people to the conversation” is a worthless endeavor if those people have nothing insightful to say, if they have no unique perspectives, if they cannot find their own facts, and if they are simply going to huddle in parties and spout competing dogmas. But my brother, I fear, would approve of anything that merely looks like reasoned discourse, regardless of what it actually is. Get people arguing over Michael Moore, he says, even if they don’t know what they’re talking about, because at least they’re “participating.” Well, if acting like imitative monkey drones is “participating,” I suppose he’s right.

This is why some people say I’m an arrogant elitist. Because I think tattoos and body piercing are stupid, and because I don’t want to sit around in bars compounding ignorance laced with alcohol and cigarette smoke. (Nor do I think girls in halter tops and lowrider pants are at all attractive. Could there be a clothing fashion less flattering?) But this is who I am, and I am expressing it through my words and my deeds, instead of getting it tattooed on my back. This way, I have the option of changing my mind someday (and I won’t have to pay for an expensive procedure to remove the tattoo).

More “Colonial House” Religion

Watching Colonial House on PBS. Third episode. Most of the “colonists” have discovered they don’t like going to Sabbath services. This is because of their 21st century opinions, and not because they are playing 17th century folk authentically. Apparently they don’t mind a physical reenactment of colonial life, but the mental aspect is just too much for them.

You might be surprised to hear that I am disappointed in these revolting atheists. I think it’s stupid and petty of them to refuse to play along with Puritan religion. They are, after all, participating in a “living history” experiment, and part of living history is thinking history, too. Religion, particularly Christianity, has been an integral part of American history. It’s not just intellectually dishonest to deny that, but it can be instructive to think within it, just as it can be instructive to take away modern technology and see what physical life was like in 1628.

I may believe the content of religion is bunk, but the practice of religion is very real, and ought not be ignored. Ditto for the practitioners of religion, some of whom, here in the 21st century, are very, very dear to me. Wherever there is religion, there will be differences, and wherever there are differences, there will be pain, and wherever there is pain, compassion is required.

Militant Islam

In my previous post, I mentioned Osama bin Ladin’s “letter to the American people,” because the authors of The 9/11 Commission Report cited this document in their explanation of the roots of Islamic terrorism. In his book The Crisis of Islam Bernard Lewis also discusses bin Ladin’s letter. Here is a paragraph from the introduction of that book:

To most Americans, bin Ladin’s declaration is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the U.S. presence in Arabia. They should also be aware that for many, perhaps most muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam, and even of its doctrine of jihad. The Qur’an speaks of peace as well as of war. The hundreds of thousands of traditions and sayings attributed, with varying reliability, to the Prophet and interpreted in sometimes very diverse ways, offer a wide range of guidance, of which the militant and violent interpretation of religion is one among many.

This dovetails nicely with proclamations by President Bush and others that Islam is a “religion of peace.” However, as an atheist, I am not comforted by this perspective. Perhaps “the militant and violent interpretation” is only “one among many,” but the fact that it can be one at all is worrisome. (Christianity has a similar problem.) So long as militance and violence can be culled from the Muslim scriptures, these groups will be out there, somewhere, sometime, either acting or planning to act. What is the solution? Well, I’m an atheist. You know what I think. Are there other solutions? Leave a comment, tell me what you think.

9/11 Commission Report, Part 2

I have now finished reading the first two chapters of The 9/11 Commission Report. The first chapter describes in detail the events of the morning of September 11, 2001; the second chapter provides a brief history of Bin Laden and al Qaeda. The first chapter was much harder to read than the second, because it brought back the anger and sadness I felt on the morning of September 11.

Early in the second chapter, the report’s authors highlight two common questions Americans have been asking themselves for almost three years: “Why do ‘they’ hate us?” and “What can we do to stop these attacks?” (p. 51) Answers to the first question have generally fallen into two categories. Conservatives claim we are hated for our democratic values, while Liberals claim we are hated for our foreign policies. However, the report makes clear that neither of these simplistic answers is complete.

Bin Ladin’s grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper. To the second question, what America could do, al Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture: “It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” If the United States did not comply, it would be at war with the Islamic nation, a nation that al Qaeda’s leaders said “desires death more than you desire life” (pp. 51-52).

(Those remarks come from Bin Laden’s “letter to the American people,” available here.)

Clearly, American foreign policy is not the sole instigator of Islamic anti-Americanism. If the goal of al Qaeda is not simply the end of American influence in the Middle East, but the beginning of Islamic influence in the United States, we are not dealing with people who are legitimately torqued off by our policies. We are dealing with an aggressive, militant religious sect that intends to destroy our way of life. These people have no qualms about using and abusing our infrastructure, either. One of the people who pops up in the second chapter of the report is Ali Mohamed, who was instrumental in planning the African Embassy attacks in 1998. Here is how the report describes him: “a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and became an instructor at Fort Bragg” (p. 68). Personally, I find that chilling.

Religion on “Colonial House”

When Colonial House first aired on PBS, I missed it. But my local affiliate is airing it again, so I’m on board this time. It’s an interesting show, not so much for its history, but for the way its participants are engaging with history, particularly concerning religion.

You can’t go back to colonial America without religion, so here in the second episode, the “colonists” are going to church. Some of them are atheists and some of them are Christians (of both liberal and conservative flavors), which is fascinating. But, as in 1628 Puritan New England, all are bound by law to attend Sabbath services. The atheist man appears to be okay with this, but his wife is not too thrilled. Most interesting, however, is the teary confession of one of the conservative Christian girls that she finds it really hard to be living with people who believe differently (or, in this case, not at all). I can see how, for the daughter of a Baptist minister, close, continuous contact with atheists might be difficult. However, I think more Christians ought to put themselves in that kind of situation. It might give them a better perspective on how we atheists feel in a world where most people are Christians. Nope, not too much fun. But living with our differences is what makes us compassionate human beings.

Next episode promises more religious strife. I’m looking forward to it. Welcome to American history, were we all oppress each other and discover equality in the process.

9/11 Commission Report

Just picked up my copy of the 9/11 Commission Report. Paranoid liberal bookstore coworker was unimpressed: “It’s censored bullsh*t!” she told me. What, you were hoping for nationwide publication and sale of classified documents? Come off it.

I have only read the first few pages, in which the actions of the hijackers on the morning of September 11, 2001 are recounted in clinical detail where possible (airports in Newark and Boston did not have closed-circuit cameras monitoring security checkpoints, so there are fewer nitty-gritties from those locations). Already I’ve come to my first heave of emotion with the following passage:

The 19 men were aboard four transcontinental flights. They were planning to hijack these planes and turn them into large guided missiles, loaded with up to 11,400 gallons of jet fuel. By 8:00 A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, they had defeated all the security layers that America’s civil aviation security system then had in place to prevent a hijacking. [emphasis added]

How am I to feel? Proud that the United States was such an open, forgiving land? Embarrassed that we let these terrorists into our parlor so easily? Unfortunately, I feel both. This, I think, is the paradox that has wracked our nation for nearly three years now. How can peaceful, open people defend themselves against an enemy who has no qualms exploiting as weakness what we value as civility? I cannot answer that question now.