He Said, She Said

The political race is degenerating. It is increasingly a matter of he said, s/he said. Palin says she said no to the bridge to nowhere. Obama says she said yes. Biden says he is for change. McCain says he is not. The list goes on and on. Back and forth. A tennis match, but hardly as enjoyable. There is so much at stake. Whom do you believe?

I think again. For whom are we voting anyway? Or more to the point—for what? We are voting for the candidates, yes, but really, for the parties who have nominated them, fund them, back them, and cheer for them. These candidates are where they are, in the public eye and on the public stage, because two very large networks, with critical nodes throughout our country, have put them there.

Each candidate is merely the tip of an iceberg. The race is about which conglomeration of people—which cadre of experts and advisors, rising stars and time-tested sages—will have the edge in the ongoing scrum of political debates at all levels of government. We are voting for a team, or a horde, and the candidate who wins is the one who can best sell the dream—a victory vision of who we are, who we want to be, and what this party can help us be.

This is the issue, even more than the issues. We all know that when candidates get into office, they don’t always make good on their campaign promises. The reasons are many. Sometimes acts of nature or terrorism transform the terrain; sometimes the larger political machinery blocks attempts at change; sometimes advisors prevail in a different direction, and sometimes candidates tell the people what they want to hear, knowing everything will be different once they are in office. But we who listen and seek to discern hope that the candidates are making their promises with the intention of trying to carry them out. We trust them at least to try.

Which brings me back to the dream--and the bridge. It is what some Democrats still don’t seem to get. Simply opposing McCain or Palin’s claims won’t work to deflate the Republican fervor. The opposition only serves to strengthen the terms of their arguments. For example, opposing Palin’s claims about the bridge to nowhere simply strengthens the notion that what matters is reducing government, ending earmarks, and winning a reputation as a reformer.

The opposition to her position, in other words, reinforces the very standards of value that Republicans are selling. If you buy into the Democratic rebuttal of Palin, your opposition plays right into the Republican hand, for the Republican party has succeeded—despite the facts of history—to solidify an image of itself as promoting small, fiscally-responsible government. Resistance is futile.

It is a great irony: the Republicans in office, due to their failures and excesses, have stirred in us a deep desire for Republican values of restraint and conservatism. The Republicans in office have set up the Republican candidates perfectly to make the age-old criticisms of Democrats, however off base, as guaranteeing bigger government and higher taxes. The barbs stick.

I am not taking sides here. On the contrary. My point is to understand how arguments by both parties are reinforcing the ways of thinking that have failed to provide us with what we, as citizens, most want.

So what more is possible? We must displace the discussion by offering an alternative vision of the dream. We need to honor the failures and excesses of the current administration as what our movements towards small government and low taxes are themselves creating. We need to ask which party will give us the tools that we need, the new vision we need, to learn from the pain of our current situation how to move differently. We need an experience shift, so that we can find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for more.

One way to begin is to note that the value we accord to small government and low taxes hinges on the idea of individual freedom and what it takes to sustain it. Yet the fact is, as Obama has stated, the kinds of individual freedoms we prize in the United States are given to us and enabled for us by a vast network of relationships. We are free because there are people in our lives who educate us, manufacture for us, protect us, heal us, and raise us. In this light, in order to ensure our freedom, we need a government then that will support individuals in creating the relationships they need to support them in unfolding what they have to give.

Such a government may or may not be big or small, in the war or out, drilling or not. It may or may not offer earmarks. But what that government will do is evaluate all such policies based on whether or not they support individuals in creating the relationships that will enable them to thrive. It will maximize the opportunities for individuals to participate consciously in the rhythms of their bodily becoming, naming and bringing into being a world they love that loves them.

In this light, what matters about Palin’s comments on the bridge is whether she is providing us with a criterion of governing that serves our vision of the democratic good. Simply abolishing earmarks is not enough. A government without them will not necessarily guarantee our freedoms. We need to know what will.

Next week: A harder case

Living It: The Palin Pick

I have to confess, I am obsessed with Sarah Palin. (Who isn’t?)

It is also time to shake up my blog. (Anyone know of a vice-blogger I could hire—maybe one from Alaska? No experience required.)

I have written to the edge of my plan—spending two months each making the case that there is wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and then spirit in turn. All along I have hinted that our desires are entwined—that we cannot address our dissatisfaction or find the wisdom in one realm without involving the others. Now it is time to investigate.

Which happily brings us back to Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick. Hers is a story in which human desires for sex and spirit are enchantingly entwined. We are missing the significance of it.

Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart and gave birth to her first son eight months later; she continued her pregnancy with infant son Trig, knowing he had Downs, and her 17 year old daughter Bristol is 5 months pregnant and planning to marry the father. At every turn Palin’s attitude to sex and its fruits is guided by her Christian faith: abstinence-only sex education, no abortion (except where a mother is in danger), marriage as one man-one woman, with child/ren.

Of course, her personal life is irrelevant to her ability to lead, say Republicans and Democrats alike. What counts is her executive experience, her intelligence, her charisma, her promise. Except that they don’t. For every bend in Palin’s personal story is further proof of what matters most to the social conservatives who rally around her: namely, her belief.

Representatives of the religious right are embracing her joyously with open arms as one of them—as someone who believes. To them she is someone who values life, commitment, family, love, and God. There is no one better for the White House. Period.

How can this be?
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Democrats and some republicans are dismayed, calling McCain’s move a distraction from the major issues (e.g., economy, environment, health care and the war in Iraq); a sign of weakness (caving to the religious right), cynicism (who cares whether the VP has any experience), or desperation (the Hail Mary pass of a losing team).

Yet the fact is, McCain’s breathtaking move scored every point he wanted to make. He wrested media, web, and public attention from Obama; energized his campaign, his party, and its conservative base; refreshed his image as a maverick and change agent; undercut Obama’s case against him, and made his ticket as potentially-historic a reign as Obama-Biden’s.

Even more important, however, is what is implied in the response of social conservatives and the religious right. McCain shifted the race to a terrain where Reagan and Bush won regardless of their (lack of) international experience or positions on the issues—a terrain where what counts is what you believe. McCain made the race about whether we live in a world where life is holy, good triumphs over evil, and the progress we want is assured. It is not an easy position to oppose.
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In a thoughtful essay on the Palin choice and the political mind, George Lakoff makes the distinction between “realities” (issues named above) and “symbolism.” He argues that McCain had no hope of winning based on the former given his ties to Bush and so had to rely on the latter. With the Palin pick, Lakoff argues, McCain’s ticket is now strong in symbolism. Palin not only believes what she believes, she lives it. She is thus a symbol of integrity, of the power of belief in our lives, of what is possible when you, as an individual, believe.

Lakoff praises Obama for being strong on symbolism too—with his descriptions of a democratic America as a place where people care about one another and help one another to succeed. Nevertheless, he urges Democrats not to fall into the trap of arguing over “realities” while ignoring the symbolic dimension of what they offer. Democrats must also provide frameworks and narratives—visions of who Americans are—that enable people to affirm the solutions offered as moral and right, and not just effective. Otherwise, their arguments will fall short of what motivates people. Heart. Love. Desire.
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So too, there is even more at work here than symbolism—which is where sex and spirit come in again. In choosing Palin, the network of belief that McCain is tapping is not solely conservative or Christian. It involves patterns of sensation and response common to Americans across parties: namely, the lived sense of ourselves minds dwelling in and over bodies whose best recourse in facing any problem is to use the power of those minds to exert control over our bodies and those of others.

Palin’s story authorizes the mind over body belief system that underlies McCain’s policies. She lives it in relation to our most basic human desires for sex and spirit. She confirms for us that all we need to do is to exercise the power of our minds over our desiring bodies—or over the bodies of women, terrorists, animals, earth—in order to get the physical intimacy and love, the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that we most want.
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Still critics howl: none of these strategies—abstinence, war, or more petroleum fuels—works! The evidence is clear.

To those who share a mind over body sense of self, however, the fact that these strategies don’t work does not necessarily invalidate the framework, for it might be that they just haven’t worked yet. For those who believe that belief is what matters, the apparent failure is a call for more—more restraint, more war, more drilling. They want that world in which life is good, pleasurable, and meaning-full.

In response, simply arguing for abortion rights, an end to the war, or energy independence does not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues. What we need in addition is a vision of life that allows us to believe in these responses as right--not just because they fix a problem, but because they create the conditions within which we, as humans, can thrive, to the extent they do. What we need is a vision of life that allows us to welcome the failures of the noted strategies as vital information about how to move differently to do what they intend: honor and protect life.
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Moving beyond this impasse requires the kind of experience shift I have been describing, where we dislodge the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies and learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of discomfort. It involves articulating a moral universe rooted in a sensory awareness of ourselves as the movement that is making us.

Next week: What would that look like?