Three thoughts about the death of Fidel Castro

1. If anything should encourage modesty in U.S. foreign relations, the ability of Fidel Castro to survive nearly six decades as the ruler of Cuba should be it. We tried killing him, we supported a (brief) insurgency, we tried starving him. Nothing worked, except old age. This is a tiny island nation 90 miles from our shores. If we couldn't force our will there, we should be realistic about our ability to assert our will in, say, the Middle East.

2. Likewise, if anything should encourage modesty about U.S. intentions in the world, it's this: Fidel Castro was a rotten dictator who replaced ... a rotten dictator. Fulgencio Batista took power through a coup, remember, and presided over rampant corruption and exploitation of his country's economy by outside powers and corporations. America wasn't angry that the country was ruled by a strongman. America was angry that he wasn't our strongman.

3. That said, two wrongs don't make a right. Fidel really was a strongman. Lots of people fled the country or died trying to flee the country. He imprisoned gay people and journalists and dissenters of all sorts. The fact that he provided good medical care isn't really a counterbalance to that. American policy toward Cuba over the last century or more has been cynical, short-sighted, and often foolish. But that doesn't make Fidel Castro a hero. It just makes Cuba's story a bit of a tragedy.

Let's hope Castro's passing will help end that tragedy.

Filmstruck Queue: "Le Samourai"

Three thoughts about "Le Samourai" just as soon as I create a fantastic alibi:

1. I'd never heard of this movie until today, when I saw it as a Filmstruck offering. When I saw the ingredients — a sharp-dressed French assassin living by the samurai code — I was helpless. Play! And it's rare that I say this: This movie was everything I could've hoped it would be. Smart. Funny. Stylish. Sexy. With a fantastically tragic ending that, yeah, you kind of see coming, but they sell the hell out of it. I hadn't heard of this movie 12 hours ago. I think it's one of my favorite movies ever, now.

2. Just non-stop with the beautiful people. I mean...

Guys, I'm straight, but even I know Alain Delon circa 1967 is about as pretty as it gets.

I mean....

I'm blinded by all the beauty.

I know I know. Movies have beautiful people. What can I say? Even the extras were knockouts in this flick.

3. There's a scene when our protagonist takes his stolen car to a mechanic to make "legit" on the streets. I thought to myself: "Seems like Brian Cranston's character in 'Drive.'"

Wikipedia informs me that Walter Hill's 1978 thriller "The Driver" was "heavily influenced" by "Le Samourai." And, of course, "The Driver" was a huge influence on Ryan Gosling's "Drive."

Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun, kids.

Bonus note: Other movies that owe a debt include John Woo's "The Killer" and (of course) Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" featuring Forest Whitaker as the Japanese-influenced hitman. Again: Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun.

#NeverTrump Republicans fall in line

Matthew Continetti, June 17

This is not a good man. This is not a stable man. It is in the self-interest of no rational person to have him near the situation room.

Matthew Continetti, November 19

While hardly anyone — including the campaign of President-elect Trump — expected this outcome to the 2016 election, the Republicans I’ve spoken to over the last week are unified, enthusiastic, and eager to pursue Trump’s agenda. Giddiness is the attitude toward the prospect of GOP control of the White House, the Congress, and the courts.

Church

I continue to attend church, even though the old Mark Twain observation that "you can't pray a lie" remains true, at least for me, and I don't have faith to match the hymns or sermons. But community is a nice thing.

Here's my favorite part: The sharing of joys and concerns.

I don't know if your church does it. Certainly, it's not been practiced in all the churches I've ever attended. But at Peace Mennonite, a young child takes a microphone around the sanctuary, and members of the congregation share important news from the week.

My cousin discovered she has cancer.

The mother of a little boy in my son's class died suddenly.

And joys:

I found a place to live.

The disease in remission.

He's coming home. 

It's the difference between church and, I guess, Facebook for me. News gets shared on social media all the time. And that can be very helpful.  But in real time, face-to-face, I get a more palpable sense of community — of the act of "bearing one another's burdens" that community can be about.

I'm not a good bearer of the burdens of others. Not even my wife, all the time, and she's borne mine so wonderfully. So. Even though I feel a bit strange in the church, unable to sing most of the hymns, I persist. I am learning.

The worst argument for the Electoral College

The weakest argument for the Electoral College goes something like this:

The top ten states population is about 165 million total. 119 million people counted so far as of today voted in the 2016 presidential election. This is why the electoral college was created. So that the other 40 states matter! Otherwise the candidates just go to where the biggest populations are.

Yeah. Otherwise, we'd have candidates spending all their time in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — the fourth, sixth, and seventh-most populated states, respectively. 

Oh. Wait. 

The truth is already this: Kansas never sees a presidential candidate during the general election campaign. New York and California do, a little bit, but only because those are great places to raise funds. Otherwise, they're so solidly Democratic that it's not worth the time or money to bother with them.

What's more likely is this: Abolishing the Electoral College opens up the map. A Democratic vote in Kansas becomes meaningful — it won't be wiped out by the state's winner-take-all method of distributing electoral votes. A Republican vote in New York, similarly, would also be more valuable, for the exact same reason.

Candidates would have to go where the votes are; in a popular vote system, the votes are everywhere. Yes, there are more votes in the cities, so candidates would naturally gravitate there, but smart candidates would think in Moneyball terms, trying to find votes where their opponent might not. So maybe you start seeing smart campaigns target Latinos in Western Kansas and other groups in rural areas, people whose votes didn't really matter under the Electoral College, but might be vital under a popular vote system. 

It's too late to fix this year. But it's not too late for next. 

Just to sum up...

I'm fairly aware there's not a large constituency for my position, which is roughly:

• Donald Trump ran a racist campaign.

• People of color and minorities (and women!) are right to be alarmed and angered by his victory. They are justified in wondering why we're supposed to care about the feelings of the "white working class" while their concerns about living under racist regime are so easily disposed of.

• That the system that produced this victory placed inordinate value on the feelings of white people — and can reasonably be called "white supremacy." 

• That it is nonetheless a bad idea, as a matter of democratic tactics, to write off ALL the Trump voters as irredeemables who cannot be persuaded to join our side. (I.E. It's an approach designed to help lose in 2020, as well.) 

• That there are ways of attempting that persuasion without giving up a public and vocal commitment to justice, racial, sexual, and otherwise. 

• That it's bad for society for both halves of the country to view the other half as the implacable enemy.

Manichaeism is emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't do much to solve problems.

What would Jesus do?

Folks, forgive me. This is a draft, at best, written after midnight when thoughts kept coming and I couldn't shut up my brain.

I used to be pretty decent at community-building. It was back in the early aughts, when I was a newspaper reporter given the privilege of being my publication’s first blogger — and I used the platform to celebrate everything that was wonderful about my community.

It was easy — necessary — for me to take that approach. As an “objective” journalist, my professional mission was to avoid at all costs seeming as though I had an opinion on the issues of the day. That’s not really an approach made for blogging, so becoming a cheerleader seemed like the right move. No, that’s not necessarily “objective,” but when you work for a Kansas newspaper, only a few people will object to seeing the stuff of their daily lives lauded by a journalist. Not coincidentally, I built up a nice group of fans and friends who also loved our town.

When I left the paper, I went into opinion journalism, and was freed from the old constraints. There were new ones, though. As part of my duties, I co-wrote a weekly column — which survives to this day — arguing issues with a conservative writer, who eventually became one of my best friends. The format was popular, but imposed new constraints. I had just 300-some-odd words to make a case. And the me-versus-Ben format for the most part discouraged the seeking of common ground or bipartisan solutions: Both of us became busy trying to win an argument.

Winning an argument, I’ve always hoped, involves some degree of being right. And being right has become very, very important to me. To the exclusion, perhaps, of other important values.

Here’s where I mention that my return to Kansas has brought my return to regular worship at the Mennonite church. I’m not a good Mennonite; I don’t really know that I believe in God, and certainly I don’t believe in any kind of orthodox idea of God. But I love a church community, and in my life I’ve particularly come to love Mennonite church communities. Which means, in recent days, I’ve wondered what the Mennonite response to the election of Donald Trump should be.

Granted, this is the viewpoint of a particular kind of Mennonite. My congregation, like the college town I live in, is full of white liberals who see themselves on the side of the underdog. The town can get more than a little bit self-congratulatory in its liberalism; Mennonite earnestness and modesty quiets down that tendency in the church … for the most part. But there’s not much question about how most folks in the congregation voted; if anybody did cast a ballot for Trump, they are in hiding.

The reason for the question — how should Mennonites respond — came from an unease about how many of my friends have reacted to Trump’s election: With declarations of something like total war. “If you voted for Trump, you’re not my friend,” I see folks writing. The passion is understandable — particularly if you’re a minority or person of color who has been made to feel, by Trump’s rhetoric, that your life is about to get much, much more difficult.

It also seems to me to be incorrect.

I wrote this earlier about the topic (with some small revisions):

“To cut ourselves off from people who have made what we think was a grievous error in their vote is to give up on persuading them, to give up on understanding why they voted, to give up on understanding them in any but the most cartoonish stereotypes.

“As a matter of ideology, cutting off your pro-Trump friends is to give up on democracy. As a matter of tactics, cutting off your pro-Trump friends is to give up on ever again winning in a democratic process.

“And as a long-term issues, confining ourselves to echo chambers is part of our national problem.”

That still seems right to me. Democracy requires persuasion, not isolation. It requires engagement, and it’s tiring and it takes a lot of work and it requires us to spend a lot of time hearing opinions we don’t like from (in many cases) people we don’t like.

OK. But what about the Mennonites?

Mennonites have a rich history of shunning politics. In fact, they have a rich history of fleeing uncomfortable political situations. They’re pacifists — which they believe comes directly from the example of Jesus. The Mennonites I know today are the literal and spiritual heirs to people who fled Germany for Russia, then Russia for the United States, to avoid compulsory military service. In World War II, many declared themselves conscientious objectors and suffered scorn from their fellow Americans as a result. There’s a lot that’s noble about that history.

So I asked myself this:

Would the most "Mennonite" response to this election would be Is it to bury ourselves in communities of like-mindedness, walled off from a world we don't like? Or is it to work for peace and justice where we find its absence?

And then I realized: Historically the answer is “yes.”

And then I realized: That’s OK.

Which is to say this: Mennonites preserved their faith community by raising up those walls, hard, and by largely confining themselves to communities of like-minded believers. In my hometown of Hillsboro, churches continued to worship in a German dialect through the late 1950s. (My boss in high school, the owner of a local grocery store, could still converse and — more memorably — sing in that dialect.) When my family moved to the town in the mid-1980s, we were gobsmacked by its insularity. We made jokes about it, but we also, for a very long time, felt very alone.

That’s been both a strength and a weakness for Mennonites, clearly. They preserved their identity, but they made relatively few converts. Mennonites are still, today, often a gathering of white people with German surnames. There are charms to this. There are also problems.

What’s all this have to do with politics? Are we called to isolating ourselves to preserve our moral goodness, or to engage a world we see as fallen?

I think the answer is yes.

Which is to say: We are right to build communities of people who believe more or less as we do. That’s how churches exist. And if one looks to the Bible, it would seem that there are limits to the engagement that might be required of us. “Whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy and stay at his house until you move on.As you enter the house, greet its occupants. If the home is worthy, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not welcome you or heed your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town.” That’s not a call to keep engaging past the point of all understanding.

But those words came from Jesus.

The Jesus who called Zaccheus down from the tree.

The Jesus who forgave the woman at the well.

The Jesus who fed the hungry because they followed him and wanted to hear more from him.

The Jesus who cured the child of a Roman centurion.

Mennonites have another tradition. One that works at the creation of peace and justice where those features are absent. They are drawn to places of conflict, and work for resolution. This means bringing together antagonists. It means finding a way to end the conflict that is mutually acceptable. It’s hard work, driven more by hope than success. It is noble and worthy.

So. Where does that leave me?

If you’re not Christian — or not Mennonite, perhaps — you probably left this piece awhile back. I don’t blame you.

But here is where I am arriving:

I want to keep writing about politics. I want my values represented in the debate, and expressing them is the best way I know how.

But I need to focus a bit less on being right. I need to work harder to abandon arguments that appeal to people who think like I do. I need to work on persuasion, instead.

Ah, but persuasion is just another tool of being right. So what I need to do more actively is listen. To consider and process the opinions of people who think differently than I do. To care about them. *To show my work* at doing that processing, so people know that I’m hearing and listening to them, instead of just trying to win the argument with them. I need to be open to the possibility that my mind will be changed once in awhile while still holding firm to some essential values.

There’s tension in all this. A balance that might be difficult to achieve. To try to be right, and yet to realize that “rightness” perhaps carries you only so far. To try to be right and recognize you’re occasionally wrong. To try to be right, yet modest enough to truly hear people who also try to be right - and come to different conclusions.

I know some folks will point out I’m showing my privilege. As a straight white guy, I have less to lose in a Trump Administration than many people of color. That’s entirely correct. And I can’t let the mission of engagement override the moral requirement of aiding, defending, and being on the side of the oppressed. But I must try to do both.

I must be more about the building of community than the winning of arguments. There are plenty of people who do the latter; not enough of the former.