Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Dispatches: Electoral red herrings

This week’s Dispatches is available on the site. Its focus: With broad agreement on the decal provision of Kyleigh’s Law (it’s bad), the candidates for the senate seat in the 14th District should move on to other issues.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Nationalizing politics

All politics is local (isn’t that what Tip O’Neill used to say?), but all coverage appears be national — and it is skewing the storyline.

Blanche Lincoln’s escape Tuesday, a narrow win for a conservative, probusiness Democrat in a conservative state, is being spun as a huge loss for organized labor (it wasn’t) and a major rebuff of the Democrats’ flaccid left wing. Democrats, the lesson appears to be (or so the conventional wisdom folks are telling us) that Democrats must move to the right or lose.

Except that two weeks ago, when Joe Sestak knocked off Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter on the same day that Bill Halter forced Lincoln into yesterday’s runoff, the storyline was about muscle-flexing on the left.

I wish they would get their stories straight.

The problem with national coverage of U.S. Sente and House races is that most of the races do not hinge on national issues. These are local races that often turn on local and state-level issues.

When Bill Bradley nearly lost his re-election bid to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey in 1990, it was because the former Knick was seen as out of touch with the Garden State. He refused to take a position on the biggest issue in New Jersey that year — the Florio tax increases — and he allowed a then-relatively unknown Christie Whitman to capitalize and make the race close. (She then parlayed that campaign into two terms in the governor’s mansion)

Chris Christie won the NJ governor’s race in 2009 not because of some kind of national backlash against President Obama, but very simply because he was not Jon Corzine, a governor with approval ratings in the 30s.

Candidates who nationalize these elections often fail to make headway with voters, which is what appears to have happened in Arkansas, where Halter got tremendous help from “outside groups” and Lincoln made it an issue.

But this doesn’t work on national television, so the narratives get rolled out: It is about Obama’s coattails, the Tea Party, an anti-incumbent mood. True, generic polls show voters ready to throw the bums out, but voters do not vote generically and most tend to believe that the bums represent other districts.

We may as yet see a shift in numbers in both houses of Congress toward the Republicans, with a possible shift in majority; that’s normal during off-year races, especially ones during economically volatile times.

But the winners will have won not because of Obama or the Tea Party. Rather, the peculiarities of the local landscape are likely to have the final say.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Extremism posing as reason

I was catching up on some podcasts today, including this interesting interview on Radio Times with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born critic of Islam now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

Ali makes some interesting points but shows a remarkably blind eye to other cultures, her anger at Islam being so great. Her basic argument is that Islam contains within it the seeds of its own fanaticism — an argument that applies not just to Islam but to all religions.

Her argument offers a subtle conflation of culture and religion, attributing cultures practices from nations in which Islam is practiced to Islam itself and not acknowledging — except when questioned — that the practices are not necessarily Islamic in nature (I am thinking of female genital mutilation, which she admits is not contained in the Koran).

In general, her arguments are rather half-baked for someone so prominent, built on a mix of inuendo and rumor and lacking statistical backing. She talks about honor killings as if they are common, alludes to a few, and uses them to show that the progress being made by Muslim women in the United States is a mirage.

The inconsistencies are maddening, the biggest one being her contention that Christian groups should seek to convert Muslims — especially Muslim women — because Christianity is far more supportive of women’s rights. Forget that Ali is an avowed atheist. Her view of Christianity not only exhibits a dangerously ahistorical view of religion, but a naivete about the kind of Christian fundamentalism that has left doctors and nurses dead in the United States. The recent incidents of Christian terrorism in the United States have been well documented, as has Jewish extremism and violence in the Middle East and Muslim fanaticism.

The Christian Right is far from sympathetic to the plight of women and it is no more accepting of reason or even of other religions than fundamentalist Muslims.

All of this leads Ali to traffic in the false assumption that only Muslims can be terrorists, that only Muslims can be extremists and that only Islam poses a threat to the values of the Enlightenment.

The enemy, however, is not Islam but a kind of certainty that shuts the mind to differences and disagreement and that transforms these disagreements into existential threats that require response. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists and the other major and minor world faiths are not going to agree on everything or even many things. But that does not become a problem until someone attempts to erase the disagreement by force.

Targeting Islam, as she does, without making these distinctions is foolish, dangerous and makes her little better than the people she condemns.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

So much like stone

I saw this photo on Friday and it took my breath away, this sea bird coated in thick crude, looking almost stonelike and polished. This is what our addiction does to our planet.

Here is the brief text from The Boston Globe explaining the photo and seven others included in the package:

A short entry – AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana’s East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident.

I have been working on a poem on the spill, our oil culture and the damage that we do. I’ll post it when it’s done.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.