Scott McClellan and President Bush

When Scott McClellan was press secretary for President Bush, his daily briefings to reporters were frustrating and annoying. McClellan would respond to questions in a monotonous voice, often repeating the same answer over and over again when the journalists tried to rephrase questions in an effort to get at the truth.

Now, long after he should have spoken up about what was really going on, comes a book by McClellan entitled: "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." McClellan was a long-time Bush loyalist who worked for Bush in Texas. As Press Secretary he stood by Bush and adhered to the Bush line. For this reason, despite whatever criticisms there may be about McClellan’s character, motivation, and tardiness in coming forth, we should pay attention to what he has to say.

McClellan says that at a time when the nation was on the brink of the war in Iraq, the Bush White House made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed." He says that that President Bush relied on an aggressive "political propaganda campaign" instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war, and that the decision to invade Iraq pushed Bush's presidency "terribly off course.” McClellan calls the Iraqi war a "serious strategic blunder," adding that "the Iraq war was not necessary."

McClellan says that Bush was focused on “accomplish[ing] what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office,” and adopted a “permanent campaign approach,” which included “never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned.”

The book by McClellan claims that the President based his misjudgments on the bad advice of men like Dick Chaney and Karl Rove. I have long realized that this president has been a weak pawn in the hands of powerful personalities like Chaney and Rove.

McClellan repeats an accusation that we have heard before about George W. Bush—that he is “uninquisitive.” That is another way of saying that he is unintelligent. Others, including security advisor Richard A. Clarke, and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, have described Bush as “uninquisitive,” “unquestioning,” “uncurious,” and “anti-intellectual.” That would be okay in an ordinary person. In the President of the United States, it is scary.

This president, who sent our soldiers to die needlessly in Iraq, has opposed pay raises for the military, a $40-a-month increase in benefits for military widows, and expanded educational benefits for veterans. Bush has sought to impose on veterans new fees ranging up to $750 for care at veterans’ health-care facilities. In addition, Bush sought to significantly reduce federal support for state-operated veterans’ homes and to impose new limitations on who can be admitted. He has set himself up as a money-saver despite the fact that he never vetoed a single pork-engorged, earmark-stuffed spending bill while the Republicans were in control of Congress.

Recent polls have shown that President Bush has approval ratings averaging about 28 percent. I’m not surprised, but I wonder what kind of people still approve of this dreadful chief executive. There are surely many die-hard conservatives who care more about social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage than about Iraq. But how do you explain John McCain? Surely he ought to know better! McCain went on supporting Bush’s escapade in Iraq long after it became clear to a majority of the American people that we had been badly mislead.

It reminds one of Vietnam. When there were no more lies to tell and no more justifications to offer for the sacrifices and the blood of our youth, Johnson, Nixon, and their apologists made the argument that we could not pull out of Vietnam because our prestige was at stake. They argued that if we left, there would be a blood-bath. Those arguments were false then and they are false now.

McCain has made it a basic part of his campaign to say that pulling out of Iraq now would lead to catastrophe and that Barack Obama wants to surrender in Iraq. No doubt McCain is being advised to pursue this dubious rout by Republican strategists who think that it will be an effective campaign tactic. The answer to it is that we got into the war through lying and deception. Let’s stop the lying and deception and get out now.

The Closing of Antioch College

The decline and fall of Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio has been attributed to many causes. The college was a focal point of a humane belief in social activism. Its students went around the world trying to improve the lives of others. But a rigid adherence to political correctness and left-liberal orthodoxy were certainly contributing factors in its demise. The whole basis of liberal thought is the open mind. It is fundamental to a college environment that there be an atmosphere of free inquiry and open discussion. Antioch appears to have sometimes stifled these goals in the interest of ideology.

When a visiting high school senior was asked if he was going to apply for admission to Antioch, he said: “No way. There is no football and no cool chicks.” I’m sure that some prospective students were turned-off by things like the bizarre rule that a person had to obtain permission for each stage of sexual seduction (e.g. “may I kiss you”). Some parents were probably disturbed by things like the invitation to a cop-killer to speak at commencement. No doubt, the growing identification of the college as a refuge for students with alternate sexual and gender identification led to lower enrollments. But I suspect there may have been other factors leading to the downfall.

Antioch College was a “Liberal Arts” College. It combined different academic disciplines in a method of teaching called the “Connected Curriculum.” To my knowledge, however, it did not have a business school. (Since I wrote this article I have learned that there were some business classes, but I do not know if there was any business major.) In this day and age, the lack of a business school probably accounted more for lowering enrollment than lack of a gridiron powerhouse with delectable cheerleaders.

When I was in college, business courses were considered by liberal arts students to be “gut” courses, something you took if you were not smart enough to master the liberal arts. Today, it is the reverse. The business schools are the hardest to get into. A college education is looked upon as a ticket to success, and a major in classical languages is about as useful as a ticket to Tierra del Fuego.

Paul Neely, publisher of The Chattanooga Times and a trustee of Williams College, recently wrote about today’s higher education, saying: “Students and their families have defined undergraduate education in starkly utilitarian terms. Young people do not go to college to become fuller persons, better citizens, or more lively intellects. In postwar America, college education is justified by the additional lifetime income it will produce.”

Victor E. Ferrall, Jr., former president of Beloit College, said in a recent article in the publication, Inside Higher Education: “The 95 ‘true’ liberal arts colleges, the pure practitioners of liberal education, are in trouble.…. A career-directed education has become the goal of many, if not most, young people eager to get ahead. A purely materialistic motivation for getting an education is now the norm, not the exception. There is economic pressure on liberal arts colleges to add career-directed courses and programs to attract students.”

Why should students study the liberal arts or humanities? Stanley Fish, a college professor, literary critic, and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column on the question of whether the humanities do anything to help humanity. His conclusion was—No, they don’t. He said: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’ the only honest answer is none whatsoever…. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said ….diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”

The humanities enrich your life, enlarge your mind, and make you more human. When you immerse yourself in literature, philosophy, theology, history, music, art, and other liberal arts subjects, you go through a door into a different world. They not only give a kind of pleasure, they give a kind of life; a life of the mind. They will not earn you any money or confer any power, but they can give you joy and make you a whole person.

Antioch College may open again someday, but as America becomes more and more a marketplace in which the only ideas exchanged are the ideas of commerce, demand for education in the liberal arts will diminish and, perhaps, disappear. The tragedy is that Twenty-First Century America may no longer have any use for Antioch College or for the cultivated, educated people produced by liberal arts colleges.

Dirty Politics

Someone forwarded to me an e-mail about Barack Obama entitled: “A man will come from the east.” It starts out in capital letters saying: “LETS ALL PRAY FOR WISDOM AND DISCERNMENT AND PRAY FOR EACH OTHER.” Then it says: “GOD BE WITH US ALL! God help us if this man is elected!! But it is all stated in the Bible and it will happen sooner or later.” It then goes on to say: “I believe the Bible has warned us that ‘A man will come from the East that will be charismatic in nature and have proposed solutions for all our problems and his rhetoric will attract many supporters!’ When will our pathetic Nation quit turning their back on God and understand that this man is A Muslim….First, Last and always…. And we are AT WAR with the Muslim Nation, whether our bleeding-heart, secular, Liberal friends believe it or not. This man fits every description from the Bible of the ‘Anti-Christ’.”

The piece then presents its puny evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that it is the plan of the Muslims to destroy the United States by electing one of their own to the presidency. The e-mail postures itself as a Christian reaction to the candidacy of Barack Obama and ends with the words: “WITHOUT GOD, WE ARE NOTHING!!!” It is a loathsome, despicable piece of right-wing slander.

It was supposedly written by Darlene Millican, wife of the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Sun City Florida. The church, however, denies that she wrote it, saying: “Mrs. Millican has absolutely no idea how this horrible e-mail was started AND named her as the originator of such slander. Darlene has spent her life teaching others to be and do their best for Christ . . .which includes not slandering others!”

The e-mail asks people to forward it to others, and I have no doubt that many thousands of people have forwarded it on just as one person did to me. If you have received it, I suggest that unless you are trying to refute it, you not forward it to anybody. It is pure falsehood. It is pure libel. It is pure excrement.

Why is it that people who claim to be “Christian” are so often right-wing hate-mongers? When I was raised as a Christian we were taught to love others and never to spread slander. The purveyors of this odious e-mail stoop to the bottom level of political discourse in order to malign a man whom they hate because of his color, his background, and his politics.

It is self-evident that Barack Obama is not a Muslim or anything like one. Even if he were a Muslim, that would not be grounds for such hate. We are not, as the e-mail contends, “AT WAR with the Muslim Nation.” We are not at war with any Muslim nation. We are at war with the same kind of extremist fanatics as those who wrote the e-mail.

The e-mail claims that “Barack Heussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.” Are the morons who wrote this nonsense ignorant of the fact that Obama joined that church over 20 years ago and has attended services there regularly? Obama was married in the church and had his children baptized in the church. Does it take very much education to realize that such actions would be profoundly sacrilegious to a genuine Muslim?

I do not believe that this junk was issued by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I doubt that the Republican Party had anything to do with it. I am sure that this was the work of a lunatic fringe of the religious right, a group that stokes the embers of bygone racism and thinks America should be a strictly “Christian Nation.”

The Democratic primaries are still going on, and the main presidential election campaign is yet to be officially started. Nevertheless, this is an example of the kind of dirty politics we can expect in the future—not from the McCain campaign, but from the disaffected zealots of the religious right.

Sportsmanship

It was an uplifting moment--literally. In a softball game between two women’s teams, Central Washington College and Western Oregon University, a tiny batter for Western Oregon hit a three-run homer and started around the bases. She missed first base, and as she turned back to touch it her knee gave-out and she fell to the ground in pain. Because she could not run, and her teammates could not help her, two members of the Central Washington team carried her around the bases, gently lowering her to touch each base. The people in the stands wept. The home run won the game. The opposing players won something greater.

We live in a very harsh world. Each day’s papers bring stories of horrors and atrocities. We read about professional athletes using performance enhancing drugs, abusing animals, or engaging in crude and violent behavior. We are inundated with the win-at-any-cost philosophy of owners, coaches, and players. A losing season often results in the firing of a coach, manager, or general manager. But every once in a while we hear about something fine and heroic, and it renews our faith in ourselves.

Coach Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers is quoted as saying that “Winning isn’t everything. It is the only thing.” Lombardi was, of course, wrong. He was too stupid to understand what sports are all about. He was too uneducated to realize that the whole reason behind sports is participation, not outcome. There are evolutionary reasons why we participate. Winning is just the icing on the cake.

The Nobel-Prize-winning ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, taught that as a result of evolution, there has developed in animals, including the human animal, a means by which aggression can be avoided. He noted that wolves offer their throats to opponents as a way of deflecting an attack. Most animals, including fish, have evolved rituals in order to turn away from conflict. According to Lorenz, humans have also evolved such rituals, which we call sports. Humans use athletics as a means of channeling those aggressive instincts which might otherwise lead to violence.

It is self-evident that we are not fully evolved. Our leaders still try to resolve disputes through a form of insanity called war. The instinctive blood-lust that lurks in our hearts is not always fully satisfied by a touchdown pass. Sports fans can become rowdy and sometimes downright nasty in the stands. Soccer fans in Europe and South America look upon the game as war by other means and will erupt in combat before, during, and after the matches.

One indication of our evolutionary backwardness is the sound of fans booing their own teams and players. Often, the only reason for the booing is that the players have not played up to the standard demanded by the fans. The players are probably doing the best that they can, but the ignorant boo-birds are dissatisfied. I can understand booing the umpires and referees. That is what they are there for. I can understand booing players who use performance-enhancing drugs, make outrageous statements to the press, or take bribes. But booing your own team simply because they are not winning shows not only a lack of class but also the mentality of an imbecile.

There is, however, something inside most of us that is deeply moved by heroic sportsmanship. Julie Reed says that only women would do what the players of Central Washington College did. That may be. I have never seen anything like it in men’s sports. The most notable acts of sportsmanship by men seems to be found in the more genteel sports like tennis and golf.

I think we yearn for a better world in which heroic acts of sportsmanship and selflessness are commonplace. Somehow, within the process of cultural evolution, we are evolving behaviors which go contrary to our instincts for competition and destruction. Whereas evolution might dictate that we let the sick and starving people in Africa die so that the fittest might survive, our human nature tells to feed those people and heal their children.

Perhaps we will get better as a species. Perhaps we will replace conflict with cooperation. Perhaps we will someday abolish war. Perhaps the young women on a softball team in Washington can show us how to touch the bases.