In an old saying, Opinions are like sphincters. Everybody's got one.
This formulation is inelegant but not inconsequential. It cautions us not to be heedlessly fond of our own point of view.
More caution would be useful in the United States Congress, where the arrogance of doctrinaire Republicans has produced a perfect storm of governmental incompetence. Louisiana's freshman Rep. Jeff Landry could be their poster boy. He has announced that even if the president is fellow Republican Mitt Romney, the White House has leave to tinker only with the smaller stuff. The big decisions, Landry said, belong to him and his allies. "We're supposed to drive the train."
The Republican holy war against diversity of viewpoint doubly compromises a Congress that had already defaulted on proper obligations. Members of one party slight their duty to serve voters of every party. Ideologues cling to their polar positions and leave the center sparsely populated.
But the center is where the main work of democracy must be done. There, paths forward are found by people who understand that politics are a tool, not a weapon. There, political craftsmen -- a dying breed, alas -- are willing to do the glamourless, sleeves-up work of tending to the nation's business. They hold this duty above mere partisan advantage.
Congress' default is conspicuous in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where Speaker John Boehner's idea of leadership is to sneer at the president of the United States, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor wears his personal ambition like an ugly necktie. While they posture, rookies entertain delusions of giving orders to the White House. As a rule, the American public has little appetite for extremists. Perhaps, over time, the voters will send to Congress a larger supply of members who understand the difference between being elected and being anointed.
A loss of political craft also has been conspicuous in the serial disgrace of the Republican presidential primaries. The candidates settled largely for invective, and for insinuations that opinions other than their own were not only different but inferior.
We may not be surprised these days when politicians ask us to believe they are made of better stuff. We should be concerned, however, when the politicians themselves begin to believe it. The result, as seen in the Republican primaries, is self-serving noise with nothing coherent to say about appropriate options in public policy. The candidates were not able to parse democracy's language of balanced ends and means, because they had no taste or talent for it.
Nor is much relief in sight. In settling on Mitt Romney as their nominee, the Republicans are about to choose a bandleader with a tin ear. He was politically clumsy as governor of Massachusetts. As a presidential candidate, he looks stiff and uneasy because he is. Romney is genuinely uncomfortable with the public conversations of presidential politics. He doesn't know how to speak to the electorate.
The atrophy of thought and ability in today's Republican party is sad to see.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Violence in Sports
I once worked with a fellow who was competitive in his marrow. Every transaction included a win/lose quotient. Nor was it enough for him to win. Someone else had to lose. Someone had to be designated a "loser," and my colleague had to be the agent who applied the tag.
I always thought he missed an important distinction, in the following way.
We like to say that some virtues are conspicuous in the American character. Among these is a determination to persevere against certain circumstances or adversaries. We speak of can-do and never-say-die attitudes.
Of course perseverance would not be considered a virtue if I persevered, say, against a neighbor's objection to my vandalizing his flower beds. Persistence admired is persistence toward a goal that is itself admired. Both the persistence and the goal are perceived to have their own value. If I invent a better mousetrap against all advice that it can't be done, I have produced more than a mousetrap. I have produced an example of attitude and skill.
Attitude and skill are valued in competitive endeavors. Business is one of these. We assume (sometimes naively) that competition in business produces better products and services for customers, and better value for investors. Success in the competitive world of business is admired when it is presumed to reflect exemplary attitude and skill.
Sports also are competitive endeavors. In sports contests at their proper best, athletes are supposed to test their skill against the rules and circumstances of the game, and against the skill of their opponents. They are supposed to test nerve and attitude as well, against fatigue and pressure and surprise adversity; sometimes against bad odds of prevailing against a superior foe. We praise athletes who display "mental toughness" -- an unyielding determination to prevail. This is why the cheers are louder when underdogs win.
My former colleague considered himself a sportsman. But for him, in sports as in other endeavors, competition wasn't about excelling. It was merely about defeating others.
The same is broadly true, alas, across sports of all kinds nowadays. An ethic of winning through excellence had been adulterated by an ethic of defeating others through expedient means.
The means run from small to large. Basketball coaches may be noted for their skill at baiting referees. Or whole programs may be corrupt. Recruiting scandals are a fixture in big-time college sports. Academic cheating scandals are, too.
In some sports -- football, basketball, hockey and others -- violence is implicit in physical contact. It is supposed to be bounded by rules, and by standards of principled behavior. But when the goal is simply to bring an opponent down, boundaries fall and rules bend.
Especially in big-money professional sports, violence may be among the overtly chosen means of winning. Professional basketball includes intentional hard fouls that are meant to intimidate. Hockey teams employ players whose specialty is fighting. Football players cultivate reputations for especially aggressive, punishing play.
All of which brings us to the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League. The Saints have been penalized by the league for running a bounty system in which players received cash rewards for injuring or incapacitating opponents.
That is, Saints' players took payoffs for behavior that would be felonious in other settings. The idea was to stack the deck: to deplete the opposing ranks so that the Saints' better players would be pitted against the other team's lesser players. The scheme was about recording the higher score, but it was not about doing a better job with the skills and tactics of football.
Nearly half the players on the Saints' roster took the money. Something more than cheating is at issue here -- something more than violating the rules of the NFL business conglomerate. The Saints' scandal offends a basic sense of right and wrong. Nor did a willingness to betray principle suddenly infect these young men when New Orleans hired them. They brought it with them, in a concept of competitive sport that could embrace a plan to limit genuine competition.
The Saints' case is an extreme, yes. But it's an extreme of a regrettably familiar notion that winning and achievement are necessarily the same thing.
I always thought he missed an important distinction, in the following way.
We like to say that some virtues are conspicuous in the American character. Among these is a determination to persevere against certain circumstances or adversaries. We speak of can-do and never-say-die attitudes.
Of course perseverance would not be considered a virtue if I persevered, say, against a neighbor's objection to my vandalizing his flower beds. Persistence admired is persistence toward a goal that is itself admired. Both the persistence and the goal are perceived to have their own value. If I invent a better mousetrap against all advice that it can't be done, I have produced more than a mousetrap. I have produced an example of attitude and skill.
Attitude and skill are valued in competitive endeavors. Business is one of these. We assume (sometimes naively) that competition in business produces better products and services for customers, and better value for investors. Success in the competitive world of business is admired when it is presumed to reflect exemplary attitude and skill.
Sports also are competitive endeavors. In sports contests at their proper best, athletes are supposed to test their skill against the rules and circumstances of the game, and against the skill of their opponents. They are supposed to test nerve and attitude as well, against fatigue and pressure and surprise adversity; sometimes against bad odds of prevailing against a superior foe. We praise athletes who display "mental toughness" -- an unyielding determination to prevail. This is why the cheers are louder when underdogs win.
My former colleague considered himself a sportsman. But for him, in sports as in other endeavors, competition wasn't about excelling. It was merely about defeating others.
The same is broadly true, alas, across sports of all kinds nowadays. An ethic of winning through excellence had been adulterated by an ethic of defeating others through expedient means.
The means run from small to large. Basketball coaches may be noted for their skill at baiting referees. Or whole programs may be corrupt. Recruiting scandals are a fixture in big-time college sports. Academic cheating scandals are, too.
In some sports -- football, basketball, hockey and others -- violence is implicit in physical contact. It is supposed to be bounded by rules, and by standards of principled behavior. But when the goal is simply to bring an opponent down, boundaries fall and rules bend.
Especially in big-money professional sports, violence may be among the overtly chosen means of winning. Professional basketball includes intentional hard fouls that are meant to intimidate. Hockey teams employ players whose specialty is fighting. Football players cultivate reputations for especially aggressive, punishing play.
All of which brings us to the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League. The Saints have been penalized by the league for running a bounty system in which players received cash rewards for injuring or incapacitating opponents.
That is, Saints' players took payoffs for behavior that would be felonious in other settings. The idea was to stack the deck: to deplete the opposing ranks so that the Saints' better players would be pitted against the other team's lesser players. The scheme was about recording the higher score, but it was not about doing a better job with the skills and tactics of football.
Nearly half the players on the Saints' roster took the money. Something more than cheating is at issue here -- something more than violating the rules of the NFL business conglomerate. The Saints' scandal offends a basic sense of right and wrong. Nor did a willingness to betray principle suddenly infect these young men when New Orleans hired them. They brought it with them, in a concept of competitive sport that could embrace a plan to limit genuine competition.
The Saints' case is an extreme, yes. But it's an extreme of a regrettably familiar notion that winning and achievement are necessarily the same thing.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Obama and the Court
News Item:
President Barack Obama said "good morning" to a Marine guard in the White House today.
The President's comment was sharply criticized by Republican presidential candidates past and present; Tea Party legislators and their extended families; House Speaker John Boehner and his tanning coach; also by Clint Eastwood, Wayne Newton, Kid Rock, Larry the Cable Guy and Willy the Dolphin.
Well, OK. Things are not really as bad as all that. But sometimes folks do get close to begrudging the president his own words. The latest dustup involves the Supreme Court's review of the new national health care law. President Obama said in a news conference he was confident of the law's constitutionality. He said that for the court to find otherwise would, in his opinion, require it to reach into inappropriate judicial activism.
This excited Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who said the comments "crossed a dangerous line." He advised the president to "back off."
I will borrow a phrase and call this pious baloney. (See the collected sayings of Newt Gingrich.)
Tussles between the judiciary and other branches of government are not new. An early sally came from the Supreme Court itself in 1803. Before then, the power of the court to overturn acts of Congress had been considered debatable, as it is nowhere specifically granted in the Constitution. In its landmark Marbury versus Madison ruling, the court formalized the power by seizing it.
Presidents have occasionally clashed with the court since then, notably Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. The court had been mowing down his New Deal legislation. He offered a plan to enlarge the number of justices, which would have let him appoint enough to tip the balance of control. (The plan failed.)
In his news conference remarks, President Obama offered two observations.
-- The legislative branch of government, in passing the law, and the executive in ratifying it, considered it to be in tune with the Constitution.
-- Judges have been known to legislate from the bench, and only another such reach could overturn a law that the president -- who is himself a constitutional lawyer -- considered to be sound.
On the first point, surely we hope and expect that Congress and the President believe in the validity of the laws they enact. On the second, it is simply a fact that several incumbent Supreme Court justices display an immoderate taste for doctrines of their own choosing.
Nonetheless, down toward Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was peeved by the president's comments. Judge Jerry Smith said he thought the president was challenging the authority of the courts to review acts of Congress. He and two colleagues on the bench ordered the Justice Department to produce a memo explaining what the president said.
Attorney General Eric Holder returned a carefully phrased survey of the long settled doctrine of judicial review, which the president had not in any way challenged. The memo made no mention of Mr. Obama's remarks, presumably on the assumption that the president does not need judicial permission to have opinions or to express them.
Under the American system, bumptious judges are like relatives. They must be endured.
Bumptious legislators can be another matter, however. Senator McConnell belongs to a faction in Congress that likes to treat the president of the United States with personal contempt.
This is more than coarse arrogance. Speaking to a magazine about Republican priorities for the 2008-2010 Congress, he said "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Events have since shown us what he meant. The president's enemies -- the word is appropriate -- use the nation's legislature to undermine him and confound the wishes of the voters who sent him to the White House.
If we're to speak of officials who cross inappropriate lines, Senator McConnell's example will suffice for me.
Well, OK. Things are not really as bad as all that. But sometimes folks do get close to begrudging the president his own words. The latest dustup involves the Supreme Court's review of the new national health care law. President Obama said in a news conference he was confident of the law's constitutionality. He said that for the court to find otherwise would, in his opinion, require it to reach into inappropriate judicial activism.
This excited Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who said the comments "crossed a dangerous line." He advised the president to "back off."
I will borrow a phrase and call this pious baloney. (See the collected sayings of Newt Gingrich.)
Tussles between the judiciary and other branches of government are not new. An early sally came from the Supreme Court itself in 1803. Before then, the power of the court to overturn acts of Congress had been considered debatable, as it is nowhere specifically granted in the Constitution. In its landmark Marbury versus Madison ruling, the court formalized the power by seizing it.
Presidents have occasionally clashed with the court since then, notably Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. The court had been mowing down his New Deal legislation. He offered a plan to enlarge the number of justices, which would have let him appoint enough to tip the balance of control. (The plan failed.)
In his news conference remarks, President Obama offered two observations.
-- The legislative branch of government, in passing the law, and the executive in ratifying it, considered it to be in tune with the Constitution.
-- Judges have been known to legislate from the bench, and only another such reach could overturn a law that the president -- who is himself a constitutional lawyer -- considered to be sound.
On the first point, surely we hope and expect that Congress and the President believe in the validity of the laws they enact. On the second, it is simply a fact that several incumbent Supreme Court justices display an immoderate taste for doctrines of their own choosing.
Nonetheless, down toward Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was peeved by the president's comments. Judge Jerry Smith said he thought the president was challenging the authority of the courts to review acts of Congress. He and two colleagues on the bench ordered the Justice Department to produce a memo explaining what the president said.
Attorney General Eric Holder returned a carefully phrased survey of the long settled doctrine of judicial review, which the president had not in any way challenged. The memo made no mention of Mr. Obama's remarks, presumably on the assumption that the president does not need judicial permission to have opinions or to express them.
Under the American system, bumptious judges are like relatives. They must be endured.
Bumptious legislators can be another matter, however. Senator McConnell belongs to a faction in Congress that likes to treat the president of the United States with personal contempt.
This is more than coarse arrogance. Speaking to a magazine about Republican priorities for the 2008-2010 Congress, he said "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Events have since shown us what he meant. The president's enemies -- the word is appropriate -- use the nation's legislature to undermine him and confound the wishes of the voters who sent him to the White House.
If we're to speak of officials who cross inappropriate lines, Senator McConnell's example will suffice for me.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
High Road, Low Road
In one scene of the movie "Game Change," which dramatizes the McCain/Palin presidential campaign of 2008, the John McCain character is campaigning in close quarters with his audience. He has handed his microphone to a woman who declares her support for him by heaping personal invective on then-senator Barack Obama.
The McCain character is startled and troubled. He feels he should demur. In the middle of her rant, he gently takes the microphone away from her and says (I am paraphrasing), No ma'm, he is none of those things. He is a good and honorable man with whom I happen to disagree.
The scene invites us to consider how far we've descended into politics of sneer and insult. Invective has followed Obama into the White House. And now the Republican presidential primaries have tested our collective gag reflex.
There is precedent, alas. The second President Bush was routinely vilified and ridiculed. In fact, the tactic of personal attack has waxed and waned throughout the country's political history. But as citizens we can only deal with the issues of our own times, and we have reached extremes we should want to correct.
To my ear, the tone of discourse began to sour in the 1960s, with objections to the Vietnam War. Opponents went from calling the war a terrible mistake -- which it surely was -- to calling it "immoral." This was a short step from saying that policymakers who favored the war were themselves immoral people.The step was soon taken.
Easy notions are infectious. It is seductively easy to say that people who disagree with us are deficient by virtue of their disagreement. We don't have to grapple with contending ideas. We don't have to do the work of tolerance.
When political opinions thus become dogma, something is lost in the conversation of democracy. Respectful disagreement is an early casualty. Factions want their way, and they want it now, because their way is the one true way. Differing opinions are to be vanquished. Opponents are enemies.
It is natural for me to believe that my opinions are superior to yours. However I should not demand that you believe it, too. Nor should I expect the government to demand it of you in my behalf. The American political system is not supposed to choose a master ideology for the country. It is supposed to mediate among the varied ideologies that should be safe among us.
This principle does not suit dogmatic politics. They foster single-issue extremes: Witness attempts to write religious precepts into civil law on issues of abortion and gay marriage. They license officeholders to slight a duty to serve all the people: Witness efforts by a willful Republican minority in Congress to sabotage the work of a duly elected President Obama. (At the same time, in a particularly sharp irony, doctrinaire voices in the left wing of his own party scold the president for being less liberal than they are. In this they ignore that the American electorate is less liberal than they are.)
Our political system is intended to permit or even force differing opinions to work together. Dogmatic politics are impatient with the very idea, and impatience is by nature disrespectful of its object.
Being thus ill-equipped for the better vocabulary of the system, dogmatic politics lapse into their own.The whole point of discussion is subverted. Invective does what invective always does: It camouflages a bankruptcy of useful language.
The politics of sneer and insult are offensive in being vulgar. They are deplorable in being empty of legitimate public purpose.
The McCain character is startled and troubled. He feels he should demur. In the middle of her rant, he gently takes the microphone away from her and says (I am paraphrasing), No ma'm, he is none of those things. He is a good and honorable man with whom I happen to disagree.
The scene invites us to consider how far we've descended into politics of sneer and insult. Invective has followed Obama into the White House. And now the Republican presidential primaries have tested our collective gag reflex.
There is precedent, alas. The second President Bush was routinely vilified and ridiculed. In fact, the tactic of personal attack has waxed and waned throughout the country's political history. But as citizens we can only deal with the issues of our own times, and we have reached extremes we should want to correct.
To my ear, the tone of discourse began to sour in the 1960s, with objections to the Vietnam War. Opponents went from calling the war a terrible mistake -- which it surely was -- to calling it "immoral." This was a short step from saying that policymakers who favored the war were themselves immoral people.The step was soon taken.
Easy notions are infectious. It is seductively easy to say that people who disagree with us are deficient by virtue of their disagreement. We don't have to grapple with contending ideas. We don't have to do the work of tolerance.
When political opinions thus become dogma, something is lost in the conversation of democracy. Respectful disagreement is an early casualty. Factions want their way, and they want it now, because their way is the one true way. Differing opinions are to be vanquished. Opponents are enemies.
It is natural for me to believe that my opinions are superior to yours. However I should not demand that you believe it, too. Nor should I expect the government to demand it of you in my behalf. The American political system is not supposed to choose a master ideology for the country. It is supposed to mediate among the varied ideologies that should be safe among us.
This principle does not suit dogmatic politics. They foster single-issue extremes: Witness attempts to write religious precepts into civil law on issues of abortion and gay marriage. They license officeholders to slight a duty to serve all the people: Witness efforts by a willful Republican minority in Congress to sabotage the work of a duly elected President Obama. (At the same time, in a particularly sharp irony, doctrinaire voices in the left wing of his own party scold the president for being less liberal than they are. In this they ignore that the American electorate is less liberal than they are.)
Our political system is intended to permit or even force differing opinions to work together. Dogmatic politics are impatient with the very idea, and impatience is by nature disrespectful of its object.
Being thus ill-equipped for the better vocabulary of the system, dogmatic politics lapse into their own.The whole point of discussion is subverted. Invective does what invective always does: It camouflages a bankruptcy of useful language.
The politics of sneer and insult are offensive in being vulgar. They are deplorable in being empty of legitimate public purpose.
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