On Buffalo

It's going to get worse.

It's bad enough already. Today, a young man walked into a grocery store in Buffalo -- in one of the city's blackest neighborhoods -- and started killing people. He live-streamed the massacre. Police say it was "straight up racially motivated."

Assuming this bears out, we can add Buffalo to the list of racist massacres in recent years. Charleston. Pittsburgh. El Paso. Christchurch. Etc, etc, etc. The blood of black and brown people keeps being spilled by white people who somehow delude themselves into thinking they're acting in defense of something. They do this because they believe lies -- that white people are being "replaced" by immigrants and minorities, that white people's lives have more value (or that black and brown ones have less, take your pick), that these poor people who were grocery shopping were the tools of their oppression.

God help us. God damn this evil.

It's hard not to sense that we're closer to the beginning of whatever this racist evil is than to the end. It’s going to get worse. And that’s terrifying.

And here’s the thing: I don’t trust myself to write with any sort of wisdom when I’m filled with rage and sorrow and fear. I don’t trust myself to act, because the 21st century — not to mention all the other centuries — is filled with some fairly obvious examples of people and nations lashing out in rage and sorrow and fear in ways that created so much more harm, and so much more evil.

But it’s impossible to call a timeout. History keeps moving.

For the last few years, I’ve been asking myself if we’ll know when democracy ends. I don’t think so. We’ll still have some of the forms of democracy, elections, even if the substance looks less and less like what we’ve known until one day it just won’t be what we’ve known.

Now, another question. It’s one I hate to ask or say in print, because I’m afraid of being shrill, afraid that by putting the words down in digital ink and then putting them out there for the world to see, I’ll inadvertently help summon the awful thing. But I’m going to ask it anyway, because I don’t think it can be avoided.

Will we know if a civil war has arrived?

I don’t know. I don’t want it to happen, and I suspect most people reading this don’t want it to happen either. And yet. It may be that we’ll have the forms of civil peace, even if the substance looks less and less like what we’ve known until one day it just won’t be what we’ve known.

I think about what my friend Damon Linker wrote after Jan. 6:

I think it's an error to assume that any civil war that might arise would need to resemble the one that tore the country apart from 1861 to 1865… Another model of civil violence is The Troubles that rocked Northern Ireland for 30 years beginning in the late 1960s, with factions aligned with the (Catholic) Irish Republican Army, which sought unification with Ireland, squaring off against those allied with the (Protestant) Unionists (backed by English troops), who wanted the territory to remain part of the United Kingdom. There were some conflagrations in this conflict that resembled traditional military battles. But most of the time the republican side waged its side of the war through acts of terrorism at home and abroad, while their opponents used brute force to crack down on the roiling insurrection.

“Acts of terrorism at home and abroad.”

What does that sound like, if not Buffalo? Or Pittsburgh? Or Charleston? Or El Paso? Or Christchurch?

What if — and God, I pray this is not true, but I am terrified that it is — our civil war has already started? The young man who shot up a Buffalo grocery store seems to think it’s true, at the very least.

It feels like a sin, honestly, to type that. Because maybe it hasn’t, or maybe it has and will peter out on its own, but maybe either way just talking about it adds to the momentum of it. Maybe the best way to deny the power of the gunman’s beliefs is to not let him draw us into war? Or perhaps that’s just a form of sticking our heads into the sand. I don’t know. God, I do not know.

What I do know (and forgive me for repeating myself) is that I do not want this. You don’t either. Civil war of this sort — if it happens, if it’s happening — will be enacted by a very few people. Most of us, I truly believe, just want to live peacefully with our neighbors, and let them do likewise. It only takes a few dark-hearted men to upend that script however.

If it happens — if it’s happening — we and our children and their children will feel it for generations. There will be more deaths, and more suffering. And as we know all too well, civil wars don’t necessarily, truly end. Their legacies drift through the ages, hardening the survivors against each other in an endless cycle of blame and recrimination.

What we do now will reverberate.

God help us.

The fight is the thing

A couple of interesting pieces in the last day or so, one from David French and Liz Bruenig. They're both writers I admire - though, perhaps, I don't always fully agree with them - because they're more interested in staying true to their principles than in relentlessly defending their respective tribes. Which means that it often seems that they don't really have tribes - at least not on Politics Twitter.

Anyway, let's start with French. He's talking about a recent First Things essay that criticizes evangelist Tim Keller's "winsome" approach to public discourse as outdated and suggests a more, uh, muscular approach is needed because secular culture has become so hostile to Christianity.

Here's French:

Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—does not represent a set of tactics to be abandoned when times are tough but rather a set of eternal moral principles to be applied even in the face of extreme adversity.

And here's Bruenig, talking about how parenting is increasingly just another culture war prop. 

America is a much harder place to be a child than it has any excuse to be, and a much harder place to have and raise a child than it has any possible reason to be: It’s hard to find a politician who’ll disagree with either proposition, and harder yet to find one with any intention of doing anything about it. When it comes to the crucial business of caring for children and families, our country is an international embarrassment.

Politics is downstream of culture, and this is perhaps the greatest defeat of all: Having and raising children itself now seems poised to become a culture-war issue, daily losing its discursive resemblance to an ordinary life event and gaining all the markers of a personal consumption choice that makes a statement about who you are and which side you’re on. The GOP seems all too happy to nudge the process along with caricatures of childless libs and the specter of armies of “groomers,” broadly labeling scores of left-wing educators, activists, and parents as pedophiles. The fact that Republicans are up two-to-one versus Democrats among households with kids in Marist’s latest pre-midterm survey suggests that they’re enjoying some success in this push to become the Party of Parents, and on it goes.

What a terrible thing to witness, and how distant from anything like a victory. Nothing beautiful survives the culture war.

These are different pieces from different writers on different topics. But they share a theme. For many participants, across the political spectrum, the fight has become the thing. Politics becomes not a way to pursue one's principles in the public sphere, but an excuse for battle -- and one that eventually subordinates the ostensible principles to the urgency of the fight. And as Bruenig suggests, making the fight the thing often does little to create the better world we supposedly want. It just leaves us angry. 

Some personal news...

Some personal news: Today is my last opinion column for TheWeek.com. The website is pivoting away from opinion toward the newsier style of its UK sister site.

I’m sticking around (at least for now) to write some of that stuff — I’m a freelancer with bills to pay — but it will obviously be a very different endeavor. I will miss the old version of TheWeek.com, and I will miss writing for it. This has been one of my favorite gigs ever, an incredible privilege to work and write alongside some really smart people. My imposter syndrome has raged endlessly. 

Not sure if I’ll try to stick somehow in the opinion-slinging business. I’ve been blessed to do that in one form or another for 14 years. (Longer, if you include my first “Cup O’Joel” blog at Lawrence.com nearly — Good God! — 20 years ago.) I love doing it. But I’m also aware the world might not need a middle-aged white guy to keep grinding out takes. 

Punditry often involves the appearance of certainty. Sometimes that’s warranted. Sometimes not. And sometimes it means putting an elbow to other people’s real concerns and feelings about the issues of the day. I’ve tried to be humane and humble as a writer, to see the world beyond my own limited perspective while still advocating for what I think is right and criticizing what I think is wrong. I know I have often failed. But I still believe the aspiration is worthy. And I’m beyond grateful to have had the opportunity.

Thanks to all my editors: Ben Frumin, Nico Lauricella, Bonnie Kristian, Jessica Hullinger, Bryan Maygers, Jeva Lange and Jason Fields. 

Thanks also to Damon Linker, who a few years ago suggested that I get in touch with Ben Frumin to try out for the site. It changed my life, and let me do my dream job for a few years.  

Thanks to my wife and son, who often adjusted our family life around my odd work schedule. (I’ll finally have Sundays off!) I love you both tremendously. 

And thanks, of course, to all of you who’ve read me, responded to me and shared my work. 

I have been so blessed. 

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me feel so defensive.

Even now, having completed Samuel Moyn's "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," I can't decide if the problem is me or Moyn. Moyn's central idea here is that the United States has made its wars more palatable for public consumption -- particularly with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but also by focusing ever more on the international laws of war -- and in so doing has made it easier for the country to find endless wars with little or no public restraint. "American concern with war has become focused on ensuring it is humane -- not whether it drags on and on, or even should be fought in the first place," he writes.

I agree with part of Moyn's assertion. We're a country that goes to war pretty easily. Sometimes there's a debate, as when the United States invaded Iraq. Mostly, there's not: America fights or facilitates violence in places like Syria and Yemen with barely a peep of interest from the public and only the scantest attention from major media organs. And I also believe that America's increasing use of drone strikes has helped make our wars more invisible to that public, letting us spread death to alleged terrorists around the world in a fashion which invites blowback, but which is easy to ignore because U.S. soldiers are safely immune from the immediate threat of reciprocal violence. How can somebody in the Middle East take revenge against a pilot based in Las Vegas?

And yet, I really struggle with Moyn's notion that the people who try to keep war within certain bounds after it has been declared -- lawyers mostly, those who have developed the laws of war and then applied them vigorously -- have somehow enabled war. Moyn argues that as the focus on fighting wars "legally" ascended, the power of antiwar forces in American life receded. "Compared with the antiwar forces of the past, humanitarians were a far preferable foe, occypying more common terrain," he writes. Observers were right to ask if the military's "self-humanizations since My Lai entrench violence more than they regulated it." Is the choice really between arguing against war and arguing against using torture at war? It seems like I ought to be able to do both, right? Can't I be a pacifist, yet also argue against targeting civilians while the war is underway? Am I really assenting to war by criticizing its conduct? Maybe there's room for "both-and," but it's difficult to argue against Moyn's contention that it hasn't worked out that way. In his telling, the lawyers who represent Gitmo defendants might be honorable, but they're also patsies. I find that hard to swallow.

Another source of frustration: Moyn seems to wish that opponents of U.S. wars would focus more on legal arguments that those wars have often violated the United Nations' ban on wars of aggression. I find that idea naive (particularly since Moyn points out repeatedly how the laws of war have often been bent and broken with little repercussion) as is the idea that war can be stamped out. As I've written elsewhere, I've long lived at the edges of pacifism -- but I also believe there will always be wars and rumors of war. Am I betraying my own stated principles to believe in "don't kill civilians, don't torture detainees" the best second-best I might get? Am I a hypocrite? Or is Moyn being impossibly utopian? That's what I suspect is true, but again: Maybe I'm just being defensive.

If I find "Humane" to be frustrating, I also find it useful -- unexpectedly as a quick primer on Leo Tolstoy and his pacifist activism, but also the rise and development of international humanitarian law. He also provides a useful thread of how major powers have tended to observe the laws of war loosely, and usually not at all when fighting non-white peoples. American forces, for example, have often found easy justification for brutality against Native Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese an "War on Terror" combatants. The rules are supposedly for civilized people only.

Still, it was perhaps unwise of me to read Moyn while tensions are on the rise -- the weeks I spent with this book coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm angry and scared about matters of war and peace right now, anyway. Today, I watched a video of a Russian tank running over a Ukrainian civilians' car with the driver still inside. If war has become humane, it is difficult to see the evidence this week.

On Ukraine and pacifism

 My tendencies toward pacifism -- I'm not sure I have the right to call myself a total pacifist -- stem from a few influences. My dad was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, one of the few young men in his community who was accorded that status by the local draft board. And when I was an adolescent, my family moved into a Mennonite community, and I eventually attended the local Mennonite Brethren college, and the Menno tradition of Christian pacifism left its mark on me even after I left the church.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week has made me realize that there was a third factor in all of this: For my entire life, the United States -- the country where I live, and thus the context for my dovishness -- has pretty much always been on offense. We go to other countries and make them feel the "shock and awe" of our tanks and bombs and missiles, but we have never been in the position of so many Ukrainians right now, making life-or-death choices to defy a murderous onslaught. Even after 9/11, the United States packed up its kit bag and made war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We've never really been on defense. Weirdly, living in a militaristic country that fights all its wars "over there" made it easy to be a pacifist.

That's not Ukraine's situation. And it's difficult not to be humbled -- assuming these stories are real -- by the Snake Island folks or the guy who died blowing up a Russian bridge to stop the invasion's advance. These were people who lost their lives in a probably futile attempt to protect their families and communities from having to live under the violent thumb of tyranny. That's not very pacifist. I think I'm OK with that. 

Common Book: The haze of war

"After a war, there were always recriminations about its consequences. But when it started, the haze of militarism, pride, and virtue obscured the possibility of moral choice—or even awareness that, in the end, you could lose." - Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

Ralph Gage, RIP

On my last day at the Lawrence Journal-World, I burned all my bridges.

The whys and wherefores don’t really matter; indeed, they’ve basically turned to dust. What matters is that I had seen the end coming, had arranged to move onto a lucrative new job elsewhere in media, and then — once everything had been put into motion — got my feelings hurt. I reacted badly. I went around the newsroom, shook hands, made it plain that I was full of rage, gathered up my belongings and rather ostentatiously marched out the front door. It was impetuous, and probably stupid. I was 34, married a bit more than a year, had a few nice awards under my belt and considered myself somewhat ambitious. I was still young enough to think I had a future. 

What I didn’t count on was a series of cascading failures: The economy, the media industry, my health. I really didn’t have a clear-eyed view of my own foibles, for that matter, and how they could bring me down.

When my health went, in 2011, I was already at the end of my rope: I’d lost my job in Philadelphia the year before — it still hurts to write that — and was broke, with a wife and young son to support and no idea how to do it. A sudden brush with death brought me to my lowest point. It felt like nothing could ever be good again.

That’s when Ralph Gage reached out to me.

Ralph was a longtime veteran of the Journal-World. He was a journalist and then managing editor, general manager and eventually chief operating officer of the company. He was known in the newsroom for having a gruff personality. He could be scary, frankly. When I burned my bridges at the paper, I figured he was one of the people I had burned. But while I was in the hospital, he reached out to me on Facebook — checking to see if I was OK, if he could offer any support, rooting me on as I recovered.

It was humbling. I never expected to hear a good word from him again — and, to repeat, I probably didn’t deserve to. He didn’t owe me any kind of grace. He gave it freely.

And he gave it again when I returned to Lawrence from Philly, eight years after I’d left. He wrote to several people who had the ability to give work to freelancers, vouching for me and asking them to send some assignments my way. I didn’t ask for it. He didn’t have to do it. And that support was meaningful.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had the good fortune to make a bit of peace with a number of people that I thought I’d broken with. It’s such a relief to let go of grudges, to free yourself of the burden of anger. I’m great at carrying that anger, to my eternal detriment. I don’t think Ralph intended to serve as an object lesson in the power of grace — I don’t think I ever let him know how much his kindnesses meant to me. I’m not sure I would’ve known how to have that kind of talk with him. Now I won’t get a chance: He passed away this weekend.

So I’ve tried to learn from his actions toward me — to be more careful about recognizing the human beings whom I deal with, to remember that they’re more than the sum of their interactions with me, have more facets and needs and wants than I’m capable of perceiving. To consider their pain instead of using it as an excuse to return anger for anger. I am not good at this stuff yet. I might never be. All I know is I didn’t expect to learn those lessons from Ralph. Life is funny. 

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