Month: April 2011

A more succinct version of the window view contest.

David Brooks claimed that the Libyan war is "in the spirit of Reinhold Niebuhr." Adam Serwer shakes his head:

If Niebuhr argued anything, it was that a fixation in the purity of one's intentions would ultimately lead to disaster, and that the difference between liberal capitalism and communism was that the former trusted in its own virtue too confidently. Intervening in a civil war in a country we don't understand because we are a "champion of freedom and humanity" strikes me as the kind of thing Niebuhr was trying to warn us about.

Amen.

Ron Brownstein explains what demographic change means for politics:

If the minority share of the vote increases in 2012 by the same rate it has grown in presidential elections since 1992, it will rise to about 28 percent nationally. By itself, that could substantially alter the political playing field from 2010, when the minority vote share sagged to just 22 percent. It means that if Obama can maintain, or even come close to, the four-fifths share of minority votes that he won in 2008, he could win a majority of the national popular vote with even less than the 43 percent of whites he attracted last time.

That was the gist of my column last Sunday. Money quote:

The hope of many was that Obama's presidency would usher in a post-racial politics. The truth is it has done nothing of the kind. But what's fascinating is how for the first time, this is actually backfiring. If you were a political party, what base would you prefer: a multiracial coalition that keeps growing in numbers and clout – or a largely white cohort defined in part by suspicion of multicultural America?

Think of it as the final reckoning of Nixon's Southern strategy.

Nixon rebuilt his party on sand.

(Hat tip: OMG Blog)

Two Indian readers share their perspective on the subject. One writes:

Indians don't usually discuss the sex lives of their leaders, much less their sexuality. If and when they do, its usually breathless gossip or political smears. (The Hindu Right in India, for example, has been obsessed with Gandhi's sex life for decades and has been milking that little bit about his sleeping practices for every last drop of salacity as long as I can remember.) Gandhi makes such a wonderful target because he never covered anything up, discussed his failings in public, was quick to tell everything to everybody without any fear as to the listener's opinion of him – and on top of all that, wrote it all down for posterity. 

Here's what you need to know about Gandhi – he was a crackpot. Seriously.

That's the reason for his success. He makes no sense whatsoever if you actually pay attention to all that he says. One of the more hilarious things is to read his biographies by Western historians who actually attempt to make sense of his life and actions. By the end of the book, Gandhi remains mysterious and the author is clearly having some kind of nervous breakdown. It's precisely what he did to the British.

But as far as his aversion to sex goes, here is what we were taught in middle school. I believe it's from "My Experiments with Truth", Gandhi's remarkably frank autobiography. In it, he says shortly after his wedding to Kasturba, his father lay dying in his room. He'd asked Gandhi to come sit with him for a while and he did, massaging his legs and such. In the middle of the night, the thought of his young bride got to be too much for him and he snuck away for a little midnight action. While he was making love to his wife, however, his father passed away. The two incidents were forever linked in his mind and he grew convinced that "lust" was one of the greatest evils of the world. He became a very disturbed man.

In the light of experiences like that, I don't see anything especially significant in him telling his beloved friend to stick to chastity. This was a man who had no problems whatsoever in quizzing a perfect stranger about his bowel movements and what that said about his health and how he could make it better. 

However, I'm completely willing to believe that he might have been bisexual. There is a very strong tradition of bisexuality in the subcontinent that we insist on brushing under the rug. We don't discuss it; we ignore it; and we continue to indulge in it across class lines. Gandhi may well have been part of the trend.

But his aversion to hetero sex is not an indicator of anything. In fact, the stated idea behind his lying between those two attractive young ladies was a test of his resolve, forcing him (and them) to confront their lustful natures and defeat it. Every night. Night after night. 

Seriously, the man was cracked. Men of genius frequently are. 

Another writes:

While I'm not about to argue that Gandhi was not bisexual, I think your discussion of his sexuality is missing a very important aspect. There is much complexity here. It's not just a sound-byte about the Mahatma being gay.

Gandhi chose celibacy as part of the Indian notion of "Brahmacharya" which has been loosely translated to mean "celibacy' but actually means the pursuit of the "Brahman" (eternal soul) through the living of the virtuous life. This virtuous life included the giving up of sensual pursuit, of which sex was but one aspect. Gandhi has also written how he saw it as the life that unified all his moral pursuits, and included not only his actions, but also his thoughts.

Thus, for example, he is ashamed that his "organ is aroused" because he is unable to control the desires of the body, which, according to Hindu ascetism, (and perhaps ascetism of all religions) keep one from achieving the eternal spiritual truth. His experiments sleeping with naked women, much criticized by his closest associates, were simply tests for both himself and the women – tests that neither would succumb to the desires of the body. These tests, and control in the face of temptation, were a means of making the body more resistant to desire and hence closer to the spiritual truth. It is in this context that one can view the promise that Gandhi and Kallenbach made to each other: that neither would succumb to the desires of the body.

The fact that he was so keen on these tests and saw them as intrinsic to his pursuit of the truth, tell me that he was concerned that his attraction to women was distracting him from spiritual work, and that, hence, he was certainly really attracted to women and knew it. Additionally, it is well-known that his father died while Gandhi was having sex with his wife and that Gandhi never forgave himself for this. In fact, the psychoanalysts Erik Erikson makes this a very key event motivating the rest of Gandhi's life.

That the Indian community speculated that Gandhi had left his wife for another man means essentially nothing in this context. It also speculated that he was sleeping with his brother's grand-daughter, for example, about his experiments sleeping with young women.

We will probably never know for sure what his actual sexual orientation was. But if the man "never covered anything up", why did he destroy his beloved's letters to him?

Another African country, run by a man who just lost an election, refused to accept its results and precipitated mass violence and murder. And who do you think backs Gbagbo over the real winner, Alassane Ouattara? Drum roll for Jean-Marie Le Pen and James Inhofe.

Gbagbo is a Christian; Ouattara is a Muslim. Does that help explain it?

Alexis discusses wind power:

The key thing is, we know that most startups are going to fail. The No. 1 policy we could put into place would be to make sure that companies taking government money — on the assumption that it's a public good they're doing — have to give up some of their data on how well things worked, how well things didn't work. Create a library of failure and success. That would be incredibly useful.

Go back and look at all of those '80s wind companies. Maybe some of them were doing great, and they just collapsed because the leader of the company was a cokehead. We don't know why a lot of places fail.

(Photo by Katie Stine)

Kevin Drum does some soul searching:

If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.

For now, anyway. But I wouldn't have intervened in Libya and he did. I sure hope his judgment really does turn out to have been better than mine.

This sums up my position exactly as well. I have criticized what I regard as a foolish decision because I support this president and passionately want him to succeed. I'm an Obamacon, unlike Kevin, and so my criticisms – like my crushing disappointment with his refusal to take a public lead on entitlement spending – may be somewhat different than others. But whenever he meep meeps me, I don't feel humiliation. Just relief. I remain of the view that we are damn lucky to have him at this fraught moment in history, and that his decisions often look better in the rear-view mirror.

Supporting someone doesn't mean being a toady. It means constantly trying to criticize where you think it's merited. And from time to time, such as on DADT, criticism can lead to change and success.

So far, Michele Bachmann is beating Mitt Romney. It will get worse before it gets better.

Beatboxing the Pixies:

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)