The World Turned Upside Down

On year’s longest night,

moon tilted on its side, the

world turned upside down.

Last Thursday, the night cleared briefly, the first time this month, and there it was -- a half-moon tipped over, bottom lit, top dark, lighted from far below the equator by a sun at its farthest away. I suppose “The world turned upside down” comes to mind because I have been reading Kenneth Roberts’ Rabble in Arms. Roberts’ tale is of our 1776 retreat from Quebec, the stubborn defeats along Lake Champlain that delayed Burgoyne and denied the British until we rallied in ’77 to defeat him at Saratoga, the turning point of the war. That 18thC English pop song was played by the British as they stacked arms and surrendered at Saratoga (and again six years later at Yorktown.) My Mom gave me Rabble in Arms when I was twelve, beginning my life-long love of American History. I just sent my 12-year old grandson a long out-of-print copy for Christmas, hoping to set him on the same path.

Roberts extols the tactical genius and battle-field leadership of Benedict Arnold while vividly describing the travails of the Continental Army and the inconstancy of the militia that were to supplement it. A few militia units excelled, but most proved unreliable, undisciplined, incompetent. The difference lay in leadership. Perhaps that is why Mason penned “… a well regulated militia…” later to be the conundrum of Madison’s Second Amendment. Mason wrote “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty;….” Even when Washington came to see the need for a professional army, the first force formed in 1792 avoided the word; it was constituted as “The Legion of the United States.” Its first General was Anthony Wayne; one of its key commanders Arnold’s old nemesis, General Wilkinson, who later also turned traitor to the US.

So there was no standing army in 1789 when Madison wrote the 2nd and said that (therefore) citizens’ right to bear arms should not be abridged. What a far cry from today; now we have a huge standing army, and military suppliers adapt an individual’s weapon of mass destruction and sell it to most any of us – three and a half million assault weapons so far in civilian hands, more than the army has. Is this not madness?

… Madness … General Wayne was known as Mad Anthony Wayne, a tribute to his fiery, battlefield leadership. The Army says Sgt. Bales is not mad – despite wearing a cape costume while assaulting Afghan women and children asleep in their homes, and going out a second time without remorse to do it again that same night. Sounds pretty mad to me. And the Army Psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan? Mad? No, says the military court, but not a terrorist either. ???

And Virginia Tech’s Seung-Hui Cho, who bought semi-automatic handguns from licensed dealers? Who passed background checks with flying colors? And Newtown’s Adam Lanza, said by his mother to have Asperger’s Syndrom? But that is not madness. Is it mental illness? My Asperger grandson, raised by patient, loving, caring parents and specially trained teachers, is now a fully functioning adult, married to a woman he met in college (yes, college), thriving in his auto repair career, loving father of Natalie, my first great-grand child.

What is mentally unfit? Who is to judge?

My grandson’s fine, responsible Dad, my first-born, says guns are inanimate objects, that guns don’t kill people, etc., etc. Well, bats don’t hit homeruns, but take them away and there are no home runs to marvel at …. And then comes Wayne LaPierre who wants more -- more guns, more ammo, more high capacity magazines, more automatic hand guns, more old white guys volunteering to guard public places with concealed weapons … because a highly regulated militia is essential to our freedom.

Oh God….

Just northwest ruminations on a dark December day … the world turned upside down.

Inauguration Celebration ... or Corruption?

The Obama "finance team", reports the NYT, is selling four inaugural packages to corporations and other institutions -- read unions and think tanks.  Price? For $1 million, you get the "Washington" package; or for $500k, the "Adams" package. The "Jefferson" goes for $250k and the "Madison" for $100k. 

For a million, your corporation or union or think tank gets tickets to a "benefactors reception", a children's concert, a candlelight celebration, parade bleacher seats and four tix to the Presidential Ball. 

I assume GW, JA, TJ and JM are spinning in their graves. 

For "finance team" read access peddlers. For "benefactor" read influence seeker.  For "reception" read schmooze time.  For the whole magilla, read corruption.

What a waste!  A waste of money and a wasted opportunity to send a message about this White House and its serious second term.  In these times, when we want banks lending to businesses and businesses innovating, stimulating demand and investing; when we want to close special tax loopholes; when we want people to believe we are serious about shifting the course of our economy ... and to sanctimoniously say "no lobbyists allowed," and then unabashedly sell access to corporations and unions.  What hypocrisy!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the administration and re-election committee announced a bare-minimum inaugural -- because the President had much to do starting Monday, January 21st, and money could be better spent?  Just a speech, a small parade back to the White House, one nice Sunday evening concert or dance, and back to work?  How refreshing would that be?

Isn't it to be celebrated that we have re-elected a black man President, that it wasn't just a self-conscious affirmative action fluke the first time?  Of course; certainly it is.  But this shameful display?  No.  What we need now is the Grinch That Stole the Celebration. 

On second thought, maybe that's what we've got, but apparantly he's working in partnership with the Corruption Fairy.

Who Lost the Election? We Did!

I am sitting here prior to the results even starting to be reported, but already I know who lost. We did.

Representative government lost – when candidate after candidate eschews compromise, represents contributors first and constituents second or when they so clearly represent only those who vote for them and not the whole of their district.

Democracy lost – when a select, few voices are allowed to so outshout the many.

National identity lost – when eleven states representing but 29% of us US citizens receive virtually all the appearances, ads and field work for Presidential candidates; when 79% of us went virtually ignored.

Education lost – when attention being paid was rewarded not with intelligent explanations of the issues, but with pandering, simplistic half-truths, empty slogans and personal attacks.

Trust lost – when the press, TV and radio are filled with stories about voter fraud, voter suppression, last-minute provisional ballot and ID constraints and other dirty tricks, and confidence in the fairness of our election process eroded.

International respect lost – America as exemplar of democracy sullied in the eyes of the world as we squabble, belittle our leaders, waste unbelievable treasure, and mud wrestle our way into the next phase of never-ending political campaigning and partisan gridlock.

Who lost? We did.

January 21st, 2013: What Would You Do…

…not say, do? And not Obama or Romney, but You!

Your inaugural address yesterday has been widely praised for its healing words and for your call to Congress to lay aside ideology, to come together pragmatically, to get to work on our nation’s needs and opportunities -- straight talk that thrilled the huge crowd on the mall and South Lawn and  television audiences around the world.

Now, this morning in the Oval office with your chief of staff, the thin winter light shining coldly in, it begins to sink in: now you have to act. What are the first things you will do to turn those words into action?

You face a House still in Republican control, with John Boehner having barely survived a coup led by Eric Cantor and his Tea Party allies and only then through support of Democrats. Cantor is again House Majority Leader; Nancy Pelosi had little trouble retaining her Minority Leader position. In the Senate, Harry Reid is still Majority Leader, the Democrats retaining its slim majority status with help from independents who caucus with them. Mitch McConnell turned back a revolt among some Senators to retain his Minority Leader post. And everywhere, lots of post-mortems, second guessing, finger pointing going on.

So, what will you now do to get Congress in gear? Grand words from the inaugural address and those platitudes and vague promises from the campaign are all fine and good … but now it’s time to act.

If you are a Republican President, what will you do?
If you are a Democrat President, what will you do?

PS, Fletch talking:
I raised this question at the Olympic Club a couple of weeks ago and have been reflecting on it since. It seems to me an insurmountable opportunity – one of the conundrums that make the Presidency America’s worst job (as the Onion wrote four years ago "US Gives Black Man  Worst Job in America.”) I can’t imagine a sane person wanting to tackle it.

Please post an answer in the comments space below (instead of sending me an e-mail which others cannot share) and tell us where you would start and what your first actions would be to get Congress moving.

PS re the Ummayad Caliphate: What If They Had Won?

My friend Bill Riddle, a military history buff, commented re my thoughts on the Cordoban values of seeking and sharing learning and embracing diversity of ideas and beliefs.  Bill wondered what might have happened in Europe, to Europe, had the "Moors" won the Battle of Tours/Poitiers.  That battle was for control of half or more of what today is France; it took place near the north central towns of Tours and Poitiers in 732. That was before Abd al-Rahman became Emir of Cordoba, in 755, but had the Ummayads controlled the Pyranees and Acuitaine, the southern half of today's France, when they installed Abd al-Rahman, our world might look quite different.

Western historians, particularly Gibbon and various churchy 19thC types, portray Martel's victory at the Battle of Tours, or Poitiers #1,* as having saved Christianity and Western Europe from the dreaded Moors, a decisive turning point in the struggle against Islam, driving the infidels back below the Pyranees.

Well, the victorious Franks struggled on in the grip of their church and in the ignorance of the Dark Ages for another 600 years or so.  But what if the Cordobans had won?

Might the Cordoban awakening have spread into Europe by 900 had those terrible "Moors" established some of their translation factories north, in Tours and Avignon and Bordeaux?  Might the Renaissance have come and lifted the curtains of the Dark Ages some 400 years sooner?  Might Jews, Christians and Muslims learned to live together in mutual respect, as peoples of the Book?   Or would the repressive forces of fundamentalist, purist Christianity and Islam have still risen up, driven by fear, suspician and paranoia to overwhelm the humanist, tolerant culture of the Cordobans? 

Perhaps their victory was a pitiful set-back for Europeans.  Idle speculation to re-imagine what might have been ....

* Not to be confused with Edward's 14thC defeat of John of France, the 2nd Battle of Poitiers.

Let's restore "The Ornament of the World"

Our near-month in Spain confounded me with how little I knew of Catholic Spain’s history, and with how totally ignorant I was of the “Moorish” period in Iberia. Seven hundred and eighty years -- that's how long the so-called “Moors” resided in what today we call Spain and Portugal, their al-Andalus (hence today's Andalucia.) Consider: we’ve been a republic for less than 250 years; the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620 -- not four hundred years ago; Spain founded St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, almost 450 years ago. The so-called "Moors" were there in Europe for 780 years!

The breezy impression one gets there, for the most part, is ‘they came in 711, we kicked them out in 1492, they built the Alhambra, the Alcazars in Toledo and Seville, the great mosque in Cordoba, all of which we turned into our palaces and churches.’

Well, not all true and even more curious. The Alcazars were built in Arabic style by admiring Christian kings who took Seville and Toledo from the Muslims – and they had the walls inscribed with the Quran quote “There is no conqueror but Allah.” Ferdinand III, the Catholic re-conqueror of Toledo, had his tomb inscribed in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Mozarabic, the mother-tongue vernacular of al-Andalus. I came away in mystery, what was this all about…?

Since returning two weeks ago, I have been studying to fill my history gap, to learn more about who these "Moors" really were and what they truly left behind in Europe. (A great source: The Ornament of the World, by Maria Menocal, from which I poached my title.)

What I find, what they left behind -- their legacy to us -- was The Renaissance.

Let me to try to encapsulate 700 years in a few paragraphs. As you know, Islam was a tidal wave out of Medina and Mecca that swept across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic in less than 60 years.

From the start, Islam was riven by sectarian in-fighting, as it still is today among Shiites, Sunnis, Sufis, Allewites and all the rest. Barely a hundred years after the death of Mohammed, the Damascus-based caliphate of the Umayyads was overthrown, slaughtered in 750 by another Muslim clan.

The one surviving prince of the Umayyads fled west, made it to Morroco and crossed the straits of Gibraltar into Al-Andalus in 755. Abd al-Rahman's mother was a harem girl, a Berber from the mountains of Morroco; his grand-father, the assassinated Umayyad Caliph. Abd al-Rahman, whose name is a name of God, the Compassionate One, was half-Berber, half-Arab.

It was Berber troops under the generalship of Syrian Arabs who had invaded Iberia forty years earlier, overwhelming the Christian Visigoths, and establishing their Capitol in Cordoba. So both the Berbers and their Syrian Arab leaders welcomed Abd al-Rahman as Prince, as Emir.

This remarkable twenty-something then set out to re-create in al-Andalus the Umayyad society that was being erased in Damascus. It took root as a distance outpost of the new Caliphate, but soon became a culture of its own. For nearly 500 years, until 1236, Abd al-Rahman's successors devoted themselves to learning, to the arts of poetry and song, to irrigation and agriculture, to the graces of cooling architecture, gardens and running water that desert folk so fully appreciate.

This Cordoban culture flourished on two ideals:

1. That knowledge was to be pursued and shared.
2. That diversity was to be embraced.

And so it was that in Cordoba there were established translation factories, where ancient manuscripts were collected from Damascus, Bahgdad, Alexandria and Greece; where then, working in teams, Arab, Jewish and Christian scholars translated the documents into Arabic, Latin, Hebrew and the Mozarabic vernacular. Next, cadres of educated women made hundreds of copies of the translations for distribution throughout the land. Cordobans learned paper making from China, by way of Baghdad, and built Europe's first paper mills.

And so the works of Aristotle, of Heroditus, of Euclid, Plato and all the others, the mainly Greek philosophers, dramatists, and historians, and the mainly Arabic mathematicians, alchemists and astronomers came alive again in Europe. Latin translations were taken to Italy and France in the 1300's to lift the curtain on the dark ages of Northern Europe. Arabic poetry and song became available north of the Pyranees; Hebrew poetry had a rebirth, and Jewish Mysticism grew out of al-Andalus.

This vibrant center of learning and trade attracted people from throughout Europe and the Middle East. It had declared itself the new Caliphate (an unwise presumption, as it turned out, in the eyes of less liberal Muslims in Africa.) By 1,000, Cordoba was the largest city in Europe with a population of over 900,000. Its main library held more than 400,000 books and manuscripts. By comparison, a well stocked monastery north of the Pyranees might have had some 200 to 300 manuscripts. There were more than 70 public libraries in the city, along with multiple mosques, synagogues, and churches.

And that was the second value: not just a tolerance of but an embrace of diversity. It was a society of yes and no, not either yes or no. It was a society that respected the stranger and sought to understand.

My title, "The Ornament of the World", is what Dame Hroswitha, a 10th century Saxon nun, a dramatist and essayist (she'd have been a blogger today) called Cordoba – “The Ornament of the World.” She based that on the description given her by the Caliph's main ambassador to the German court of the Holy Roman Empire. That Ambassador was the bishop of Elvira, the Metropolitan See of al-Andalus -- a Catholic the Caliph’s ambassador, a Jew a later Emir’s foreign minister! Cordoban Emirs' cabinets of ministers regularly included Muslims, Jews and Christians -- anyone of talent.

Despite the Caliphate of Cordoba’s hold on al-Andalus being broken in the 11thC by Berber resentment of their Arab superiors, the culture of learning and diversity continued to thrive in the various Muslim city-states for another 200 years. So integrated was the social order of al-Andalus that Arabic was widely spoken along with Latin-laced Mozarabic, from which has descended Castillian Spanish. In fact, by the 12thC, Catholic Masses in Cordoba and Toledo and Seville were being performed in Mozarabic, much to the disgust of later re-conquering Roman Catholics from the North who represented a very Disapproving Pope.

Concurrently arriving in Al-Andalus from the south, at the invitation of the hard-pressed Emirs of the remaining Muslim city-states, were more of those Berber mountain fighters from Africa, men of little learning hewing to an ideal of purity, of fundamental Islam. And soon enough, they and the Catholic fundamentalists took over.

Between these two disapproving, yes or no, either with us or against us peoples, the Berber Muslims and the Roman Catholics, this magically tolerant Cordoban culture, the Ornament of the World, was torn asunder. By the mid-12th century it was over.

Homogeneity through forced conversions were now being imposed by both new Muslim and new Catholic rulers in their respective city-states. Unorthodoxy was unwelcome. Genius philosophers, physicians, and lawyers like the Jew Maimonides and the Arab Averroes were soon to be exiled, their books banned. By the 15th century, such books -- and such people -- were being burned. It was all over.

The Ornament of the World for nearly 500 years: seeking and sharing learning, embracing diversity, respecting and welcoming the stranger.

Today, fundamentalism grows all about -- both here and abroad. Does not the world need to counter that by again ornamenting ourselves with those core "Moorish" values of the Umayyads of Cordoba? No, not hereditary authoritarianism, nor slavery, nor putting women in harems or accepting polygamy. Set those aside. Is it not time for a re-start, right here in America, to be the new “Moors”; welcoming the stranger; pursuing and sharing learning; embracing diversity of ideas, faiths, and peoples; eschewing “yes or no, you’re either for me or against me”?

P.S. It wasn’t just in al-Andalus. At the same time that Abd al-Rahman was establishing his Umayyad values in Cordoba, the Buddhist scholar Sent-ts’an wrote, in China

          If you want the truth to stand clear before you,

          never be for or against.

         The struggle between “for” and “against” is

         the mind’s worst disease.

Speechifying Charlotte

From Barcelona: Michele Obama also has near-perfect pitch.  Her address was a superb example of public speech -- clearly organized, tuned to her audience (of faltering Obama loyalists), timed to their attention span (unlike Bill Clinton's, though also awesomely effective), and beautifully delivered.  Yes, the cynics will say of both talks that it is vapidly stupid to argue that I love him, therefore you should vote for him.  But both Ann R and Michele O accomplished what they set out to do -- to appear sincere, to be appealing and elicit empathy, and then to suggest that "if I find this distant man warm and human, perhaps you, also, should view him in that light."

Their husbands' speeches did not measure up -- wandering through complicated rabbit-trails of ideas, lacking in feeling, awkwardly delivered in parts.  Guys, take a lesson from the distaff side.