MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Sleeper

Can you call it a war if . . .

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Can There Be Politics in Tragedy? Or in Gaza?

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I’m immersed in long-range writing and leave tomorrow for six months in Berlin, but the Gaza war provokes me to share a brilliant essay by Darry Li, a doctoral student in anthropology and Middle East Studies at Harvard and a student at Yale Law School who has worked in Gaza for Human Rights Watch, B’tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The essay appeared last February in Middle East Report, but it’s making the rounds again because its clarity and comprehensiveness outweigh its blind spots. Below I post half of it with my comments, but click the link and read it all.

Li writes that Israel’s promises to avoid a “humanitarian crisis” reflect its long descent from treating Gaza as a Bantustan to abandoning yet controlling it as a holding pen. He gets polemical at times, and some of his analysis is wrong. But he’s right that Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 is, not “a one-time abandonment of control” but “an ongoing process of controlled abandonment, by which Israel is severing the ties forged with Gaza over 40 years… without allowing any viable alternatives to emerge.” This strategy seeks “neither justice nor even stability, but rather survival — as we are reminded by every guarantee that an undefined ‘humanitarian crisis’ will be avoided.”

A chilling charge. Li doesn’t mention Israel’s donation of greenhouses and housing it left behind in 2005, but he notes coldly that “Since its beginnings over a century ago, the Zionist project of creating a state for the Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean has faced an intractable challenge: how to deal with indigenous non-Jews — who today comprise half of the population living under Israeli rule — when practical realities dictate that [Palestinians] cannot be removed and ideology demands that they must not be granted political equality.”

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A noble name

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Until I read  Jim Sleeper‘s TPM Cafe column, Swear Him in as ‘Barack Hussein Obama,’ it never occurred to me that the president-elect would be sworn in by anything other than his full name.

The protests during the primaries and the general elections have been when bigots have wielded the name as an invective or epithet.

Obama has never appeared to have any hang-ups about his name. I’ve heard speeches where he invoked the name, or joked about it. For instance, during the 63rd annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York, the traditional dinner where presidential candidates meet to crack wise about the campaign and about each other. Mr. Obama was particularly self-deprecating:

Many of you — many of you know that I got my name, Barack, from my father. What you may not know is Barack is actually Swahili for “That One.”
And I got my middle name from somebody who obviously didn’t think I’d ever run for president.

Here’s Sleeper:

Even as we all lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as “Barack Hussein Obama.”

During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama’s detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he’s won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one — not in Baghdad, but in Washington.

Sure, the mind reels. Hussein is a title of honor applied to metaphorical descendants of the prophet Mohammed. An American president bearing that name proudly would enact what philosophers call a transvaluation of values — a wicked case of cognitive dissonance for millions of people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

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Based on nothing but intuition, I think Mr. Obama will proudly carry his middle name, Hussein, into the history books.

On the road to Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008

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Editor’s note:

I am so nervous about the presidential election on Tuesday that I’m almost paralyzed. Certainly here I have been content to let others post instead of writing myself. I hope to summon some of my own words before Tuesday’s voting actually begins (I know boat loads of people have already voted).

My friend Jim Sleeper, who deserves a wider audience, has been one of the best and wisest writers on this election. I am going to post links here to a few of his last few pieces, which he has kindly grouped under: Thinking About Race and This Election

My Almost-Hidden Stake in an Obama Win By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Cafe, October 27, 2008, 2:21PM

Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called “Bradley Effect.” Maybe, maybe not, but that we’re even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary just posted at “Things No One Talks About,” in Dissent magazine.

What I don’t talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we’d heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn’t, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.

So let’s glance back 15 or 20 years, to when contests involving even only white candidates were shadowed by Willie Horton, Sister Souljah, Tawana Brawley, and O.J. Simpson. Only a few black scholars, such as William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, and white writers, such as yours truly, suggested that the significance of race was declining – and that it should.

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Things No One Talks About, by Jim Sleeper, Dissent,

October 27, 2008

AS PUNDITS dithered late last week over “the Bradley effect” and other racial clouds on Obama’s horizon, the candidate was making a difficult, possibly final, visit to the white mother of his white mother. Few commented on the implications of the fact that while racial identity runs deep in America, maternal bonding runs deeper. But maybe our Hollywood-besotted political culture requires the drama and sentiment in Obama’s farewell visit to “Toot” (the Hawaiian name for “grandma” is “Tutu“) to drive those implications home.

Sarah Palin claims that Obama doesn’t know or represent the real America. That both Obama’s color and his childhood exposure to Muslims are assets to America’s image abroad doesn’t matter much to Americans who are still offended or frightened by racial and religious difference. Image is one thing; intimate fears another. In a small former steel town in Pennsylvania this weekend a 71-year old woman, a Democrat who considers McCain a grouchy old man and Sarah Palin a joke, paused when a New York Times reporter asked her about Obama. “He scares me,” she said finally. “The coloreds are excited, but my friends and I plan to write in Hillary’s name.”

No one mentions that Obama’s biracial provenance and childhood brush with Islam launched him on struggles that have prepared him unusually well to address one of his country’s most daunting challenges: youthful alienation in inner cities where, at least until 9/11, the Nation of Islam held a certain appeal.

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How to Gauge Racism in This Election, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 28, 2008

As the polls tighten, Slate’s veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can’t bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.

Let me give this sage of journalism something he deserves — a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits’ jitters are worth frothing about right now. Ask yourself these simple questions:

What if it had been the Obamas, not the Palins, parading five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

Would the polls be so tight if it had been Barack Obama who’d finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class and if John McCain had been president of the Harvard Law Review?

Where would the polls be if McCain had married only once and had stayed married, while Obama had been the divorcee?

What if it was Obama who had been a member of the Keating Five (the U.S. Senators accused of corruption in a scandal that helped ignite the Savings and Loan meltdown of the late 1980s and early 1990s)?

How tight would the polls be if it had been Obama whose military service had included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

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Treat, or Trick? Elections Officials, Beware!, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 31, 2008

In honor of Halloween, here’s one more frisson about election tricks that are perverse enough to block the treat of a victory.

One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty “checking” voter registration cards from the recent primary election.

The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again.

Beatty’s minions – the young Rev. Al Sharpton among them — were actually fabricating “evidence” of voter fraud in Beatty’s recent defeat in his bid to succeed Shirley Chisholm, who was retiring from Congress.

They were forging thousands of signatures on voter-registration cards to create enough fraud to invalidate the 54-46% victory of his opponent, State Senator Major R. Owens, in the historic Bedford Stuyvesant district, one of the first created under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Beatty would submit the Saturday morning forgeries to a county court as evidence that Owens had rigged the election!

I hadn’t simply stumbled upon this scam. A political operative close to the Brooklyn Democratic machine had tipped me off. Had I not rushed down to the board that Saturday knowing what to look for, Beatty would likely have won his suit, and Owens, a redoubtable reformer, a graduate of the famed black Morehouse College, a librarian by training and a long-time progressive activist, would have been smeared.

So a lot was at stake in my Village Voice story that week on Beatty’s outrageous gambit: “Look at it this way,” said my tipster; “The man is either going to Congress or he’s going to jail.” (The pdf of these old stories is very slow, but worth the wait if you’re interested. Read the second story, “Vander Batty’s Desperate Gamble.”)

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The color of thought

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I’ve just about had it with my friend Jim Sleeper.

This is what he does to infuriate me:

He writes these deep, complicated pieces, which are really essays, not blog posts, that are layered with links to other thoughtful pieces that very nearly grind you to the ground as you contemplate what they mean, that by the time you catch your breadth to even think of what to say about them, the moment to comment has almost passed. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press) Barack Obama’s campaign wants to stem concerns about his viability in a general election race.

And, as you’re doing this, knocking on your consciousness, demanding to be considered, would be another Sleeper piece, equally as thoughtful, complex and reasoned as the one you’re wrestling with.

All I can say is, thank God for this interminable presidential primary election season.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, what of the substance of Jim’s piece?

I (partly) disagree with Jim (but is this his argument, or is he limning another’s) and agree with one of the responses to his TPM Cafe piece offering Sen. Barack Obama a “Way Out of the Race Trap” in this campaign.

Sleeper referred to Ed Kilgore’s piece at TPM Cafe highlighting a debate at The New Republic over whether Obama is fated to be another McGovern. Kilgore gently demolished that trope. Sleeper wondered why none of these guys mentioned Obama’s race when the importance of race had just shown itself in the recent Pennsylvania primary.

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Thinking and reassessing

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Jim Sleeper got me. We’d had our debates all those years ago but I was always fond of him. So, when we had our disagreements, it was a disagreement. I figured he believed what he believed and that was that.

But when we had lunch recently, after having been out of touch for several years, he intimated to me that he’d changed his mind about some of his old positions. He was not explicit and I did not challenge him. That would have been rude.

Mr. Sleeper has a piece at TPM Cafe now that absolutely blows me away. This is the thing. He was always a thinker, seriously assessing problems that afflict our society, especially when it comes to race, and the mind-bending ways that we go about not solving them.

Constraining us all to define our citizenship and even our personhood more and more by race and ethnicity in classrooms, workrooms, courtrooms, newsrooms, and boardrooms, today’s liberalism no longer curbs discrimination; it invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it. Its tortured racial etiquette begets racial epithets, as surely as hypocrisy begets hostility. And it dishonors’ liberals’ own heroic past efforts to focus America’s race lens in the 1950s and ’60s, when conservative pieties about color blindness concealed monstrous injustices.

— Introduction to Liberal Racism, Jim Sleeper, 1997

In his TPM Cafe piece, he was taking a measure of Shelby Steele, a man I have no respect for but for whom, Mr. Sleeper, once upon a time, had high regards. Steele came out with a book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, right before the presidential primaries and caucuses began.

His dismantling of Steele is so deeply thought out, so complex, yet methodical that it would not do justice to try and quote any passage without taking it out of context. It is a great read.

Some of Mr. Sleeper’s books, The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream, are available at Amazon.com. He wrote so well (and still does) about these issues that we really ought to go back and re-read what he said and reassess some of his observations about our society, our culture.

A good place to start, at least until you receive your books from Amazon, is Mr. Sleeper’s website at jimsleeper.com.