Hank Kalet

Willie Horton is alive and well and on the interweb

I received what can only be described as a hideous and blatantly racist e-mail today from an organization called Right v. Left, which is launching something called exposeobama.org and plans to run something it is calling a “Horton” ad. You know, “Horton,” as in Willie Horton.

The rhetoric of the e-mail is rather ugly and I’ve gone back and forth over whether I should share any of it. But I think it is necessary so that everyone understands the kind of ugliness that still exists in the hearts of too many Americans.

A taste:

“President Barack Hussein Obama,” those have to be the scariest four words in the English language!

Ask yourself… do you really want the next President of the United States of America to be a man with ties to known Marxists such as Frank Marshall Davis and terrorists such as Bill Ayers and former PLO operative Rashid Khalidi?

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama refuses to wear the flag on his lapel, or that he does not place his hand over his heart in the presence of the American flag.

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama embraces Jeremiah Wright, a man who has preached the most vile racial hatred and anti-American sentiments from the pulpit for twenty years, while at the same time Barack Hussein Obama accuses decent hard-working Americans of bigotry when he says things like, “It’s not surprising that they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them… .”

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama’s wife Michelle said that her husband’s candidacy marked, “the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

But what really makes “President Barack Hussein Obama” the scariest four words in the English language is that fact that HE CAN BECOME THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

The Web site is no better. The organization bills itself as the National Campaign Fund and says it is not affiliated with any candidate, but it boasts the man who crafted the original Willie Horton ad and a former advisor to rightwing Republican candidates as members of the “team.” the organization is seeking to raise $300,000 so it can start running Swiftboat-style ads that distort Obama’s record in an effort to cut the Democratic front-runner off at the knees.

It is a despicable way to campaign, but the GOP has never been shy about resorting to such tactics — especially the rightwing fringe. The list is long and brutal, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s visit to Philadelphia, Miss., in support of state’s rights in 1980 (actually, he’d made the use of coded racial language a central element of his political rhetoric as early as the mid-1960s when he first ran for governor of California); the Willie Horton ad; Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones; Whitewater; the Swiftboats, etc.

Admittedly, this e-mail and ad come from a group at the fringes, one working at the margins of acceptable GOP discourse. But that does not mean that the Republicans won’t be happy to have them working the dark side for them. Groups like the Swiftboaters and Expose Obama allow people like Karl Rove to stay a little above the fray, allowing this nonsense to seep into the public discussion without it appearing to come from the mainstream.

In case Keith Olbermann is reading this blog (not likely, I know), I nominate the folks at Expose Obama and the National Campaign Fund for today’s “Worst Persons in the World.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Theologically speaking

I’ve been obsessed lately with the question of theology, philosophy and what it means to believe in god, organized religion, etc. I grew up Jewish, attended Hebrew school and still consider myself a Jew — know myself to be a Jew.

But I have little use for organized religion, which I find to be nothing more than an excuse to promote the organization and proffer an array of rules designed to control us and rob us all of our free will as sentient human beings.

I describe myself on my Facebook profile as an Agnostic Jewish Existentialist, which means, I guess, that I have my doubts but remain culturally and ethically Jewish while also deeply aware of the tenuous nature of existence and the world around us.

Chris Hedges — quoting the great theologians — refers to it as an acknowledgement of sin, but not sin in the context of having done terrible things. Original sin in this context does not refer to individual deeds but to our collective nature, our inherent potential for doing wrong — a potential we share with all other humans.

But there also is awe — an awe that comes from the knowledge that amid the war and disease that plagues the planet, amid the hideous things of which all of us are capable, there remains the capacity for beauty and quiet and love.

I’ve been trying for years to put this kind of thinking into words, to explain my sense of the world, my sense that there must be a greater power. On some level, I guess, I am a deist, or perhaps a transcendentalist — I believe that this power is both within us and around and about us and it is contained in everything.

James Carroll, writing on Monday in The Boston Globe about the death of his friend Krister Stendahl, a theologian, explained it this way — paraphrasing Stendahl:

St. Paul’s notion of sin was not “sins,” the misdeeds that haunt a miserable penitent before a judging God, but rather the condition of being caught in flawed human structures. The good news for Paul consisted in Christ’s having submitted to those structures as a way of transforming them. Social justice, not individual perfection, was Paul’s concern.

I am not a Christian, as I said, but there is something in this passage that strikes me as very real, as true to the world as I understand it — a world that is certain, but that is full of humanity. We express our hope in the future by doing good works — by donating a few cans to the food pantry, by volunteering at a soup kitchen, by protesting injustice and war, by working to repair the world around us.

It also requires that we acknowledge and accept our imperfections. This seems connected to something Chris Hedges told me during an interview a few weeks ago. Faith, he said, “demands a greater intellectual commitment than the totalitarian approach and it accepts that we are not perfect.”

“I say that the prerequisite for me is to face the capacity for evil, to accept that no act that we do is safe from self interest, to see in the other our own imperfections and to understand the humanity of those who oppose us,” he says.

Democracy requires the same leap.

For democracy to function properly, he says, we need to accept our own fallibility.

“I think a democratic culture is based on the idea of human sin,” he says. “You don’t want to allow any single person or group to achieve absolute power because it will inevitably descend into totalitarianism.

“Democracy is a check in that nobody is allowed to achieve unlimited power,” he adds.

In the end, I think what this comes down to is an ability to keep moving forward, to keep fighting to make things better on both a larger and smaller scale even though the deck seems stacked against us, even though the uncertainties of the world are a given.

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, writes of this faith, though as an atheist he does not put it that way. To keep going, to commit to life, to remain connected (Buber’s concept) in the face of so much sorrow is to be committed to something beyond ourselves.

I can’t explain it any other way.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Spies among us

The timing on this story is odd, given the piece the Times did in its Week in Review section on Sunday on the changing motivations for spying. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern region of New York and various press reports, Ben-Ami Kadish of Monroe Township, an 84-year-old former Army engineer, was charged Tuesday with espionage for leaking secret defense documents to the Israeli government in the 1980s and “could face life in prison or possibly the death penalty if convicted on the most serious charge,” according to The New York Times. He was released on $300,000 bail.

His case is linked to that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the naval analyst serving a life sentence for leaking documents to Israel around the same time. An Israeli official who came to Mr. Kadish’s house to photograph documents also received information from Mr. Pollard, prosecutors said. Federal officials said authorities became aware of what they called Mr. Kadish’s spying activities only in recent months but would not say how they learned of his efforts more than 20 years later.

Mr. Kadish admitted to an F.B.I. agent last month that he had shown 50 to 100 classified documents to the Israeli official, according to prosecutors’ court filings on Tuesday.

The case is troubling because it involves nuclear weapons and missile systems, according to the U.S. Attorney.

The complaint specifically mentions three documents that Mr. Kadish is accused of leaking — one “concerning nuclear weaponry” containing “atomic-related information”; one regarding a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet that the United States sold to another country; and one containing information about the Patriot missile system.

Mr. Kadish told the F.B.I. agent that he had not received money from the Israeli official, only small gifts and the occasional dinner, the complaint said.

The Times also said that

Prosecutors declined to provide details on what was in the documents and would not say what harm, if any, had come to American interests as a result. According to court papers, Mr. Kadish’s crimes occurred between 1979 and 1985, when he worked as a mechanical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, N.J., an Army research and development center. He would sign secret documents out of the library and take them to his home in New Jersey — prosecutors would not say in which town — where the Israeli official, a science adviser at the Israeli consulate in New York, would photograph them in the basement, according to court papers.

What links this story to the Week in Review piece, however, is this sentence down near the end — a sentence that raises the specter of dual-loyalties:

According to the article, Mr. Kadish grew up in Palestine, fought for the creation of Israel and served in both the British and American military during World War II.

Reread that sentence and then read this section from the Week in Review:

A new study by a Defense Department contractor shows that divided loyalty, usually on the part of naturalized Americans with roots in a foreign land, has become the dominant motive.

From 1947 to 1990, the study found, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans charged with spying were acting solely or primarily out of patriotic, as opposed to ideological, loyalty to a foreign country. Since 1990, according to the study’s author, Katherine L. Herbig, divided loyalty has been the sole or primary motive in about half of all cases.

“Dual loyalty is a problem we haven’t seen on such a scale since the Revolution,” when many colonists swore allegiance to the British king, said Joel F. Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.

Dual loyalty. It is a question that has dogged immigrant groups since the earliest days of the Republic, with various pieces of legislation and executive orders targeting everyone from new immigrants and oppositions parties in the late 1700s, to second- and third-generation Japanese-Americans during World War II to Jews to Muslims now.

Consider the questions surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidential run, the overt and covert arguments surrounding his loyalty to the pope.

And then there is the Pollard case. In 1999, several American Jewish organizations were lobbying for his release on humanitarian grounds —

Here is part of a response to the effort that ran in The New York Times:

The real crux of the Pollard defense is not that his crime was minor because of the number and type of stolen documents, but that it was minor because of the country for which he stole them: Israel. And this is what makes the Jewish groups’ argument so problematic. The United States and Israel have been allies since Israel gained independence, and that longstanding alliance may have lulled some into the belief that the two countries’ interests are the same. But they are not; no two countries’ are.

When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in 1950, some on the left argued that they were legitimately sharing information with America’s wartime ally. Others charged anti-Semitism. But Jewish groups led by the American Jewish Committee, citing patriotism, steadfastly refused to call for clemency. (The committee has not called for Mr. Pollard’s release, though it has urged the President to formally review the case.)

Indeed, the American Jewish community’s traditional response to the ugly charge of dual loyalty has been: there is none, we owe our sole national allegiance to the United States. In arguing that spying for Israel is a lesser offense than spying for other countries, Jewish groups appear now to have strayed from that position. To apologize for an American official’s decision to put another country’s interests ahead of his own can be seen as essentially defending dual loyalty.

Peter Beinart, author of the piece, hits on something very real, but also raises the spector of something very dangerous. Pollard — and allegedly Kadish — certainly was guilty of placing the interests of another country above his own nation’s, as do his defenders.

The problem is that the charge of dual loyalty tends to become amorphous, as it did with the Nissei during World War II and American Muslims now. The limited occurrences of spying or terrorism on the part of a Japanese-American or an Arab-American become justification for profiling — or imprisoning — entire groups. This danger is absent from the Week in Review piece, but it is very real. It goes to the heart of what it means to be an American, what patriotism means and what hold our ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds have on our sense of selves and our sense of others’ loyalties.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Bird brain blues and a poem

The squirrels and I have declared a truce. It’s the birds that have my blood boiling these days.

There is a family of North American robins attempting to build a nest atop the bay window of our office in the front of the house. There is a ledge atop the window on whcih the robins have been depositing strands of dead grass and leaves, mud and other debris.

I first started seeing the debris there about two weeks ago. I brushed it off and went about my business. A few days later, there was more nesting material and I again brushed it away. I’d gone through this drill a couple of times, the grass and other material building up on the ground below a bench until the weekend, when I used the leaf blower to clear the area.

That was Saturday. By Sunday, much of the material was back — as were the robins.

It has become my morning ritual this week to chase the birds away and brush the nesting material from the window ledge, often doing it two or three times before heading off to work.

This morning, however, I must have cleared the window a half dozen times, watching as the birds circled around. One bird, with a couple of long pieces of straw in its beak, flew from the maple tree along the street to our roof to another tree in the yard and back. I would swear it was watching me, waiting for me to either go in the house or get in the car and drive off — a belief my wife shared.

In any case, I fully expect to get home tonight — well, I expect Annie to get home (I’m here late) — to find a full-bore nest in place.

Evil robins.

(Here is a very rough draft of a poem I’ve written on the entire escapade, at Hank Kalet’s Poetic Blues.)

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Quick thoughts on the election

It is amazing to me how quickly we alter our expectations once we know the results, how fungeable our analysis can be depending on what kind of narrative we’re hoping to write.

If the numbers hold, then Hillary Clinton wins Pennsylvania by 10 percentage points — the minimum she needed to seem viable. It is either a big win for her or an expected win; Obama was supposed to lose, or he stumbled badly, etc.

Part of me wonders how much of this race has been dicated by the calendar. For the most part, every state has gone to the candidate who was expected to win that state, with Obama’s big February win streak tied mostly to the states that held those February primaries.

How might we have viewed the election if Ohio and South Carolina swapped places, for instance, or if some of his big states came after Pennsylvania? I suspect the roles would be reversed (and it is likely Obama would have been called on to get out).

I also wonder just how much McCain benefits from the prolonged race. Pennsylvania adds itself to the long list of states that set turnout records (Democrats have turned out about twice as many voters as the GOP) and I suspect that the energy surrounding this primary will infuse the Democratic campaign in the fall. Plus, McCain has yet to face the harsh light of the campaign this year, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Basically, the dynamics remain in flux.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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