A DISHEARTENING CORRESPONDENCE

By Edwin Cooney

In mid August, while I was innocently vacationing in Northern California, the message you see below made its way into my mailbox:

“...THE POPE’S CONFESSIONAL GUIDELINES... So I went to confession on Saturday evening before Mass and started with the usual…

 

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 4 weeks since my last confession.

Last night, I beat the crap out of an Obama supporter."

 

The Priest responds, "My son, I'm here to forgive your sins, not to discuss your community service.”

(Note: The piece, at least the version sent me, doesn’t describe what the Pope’s “confessional guidelines” are or what they do. However, you’re going to have to do some pretty serious arm twisting to convince me that the Holy Father would even consider sanctioning violence against people who’ve supported and voted for President Obama!) 

So, who do you suppose sent this to me?

It could have been some radical liberal socialist angry with Obama for not nationalizing the banks as well as the auto industry back in 2009 when he had the chance.  It’s conceivable that such a “radical lib” is still morose over Obama’s decision not to advocate for “single payer” health care substituting the hodgepodge of public and private nonsense in “Obama care.”  That same “radical lib” might also be angry over drones in the Middle East, slow progress on climate change, or perhaps because the president was too slow instituting the new method of saluting military personnel with his coffee cup!  (Come to think of it, none of that really sounds right.)

Let’s see now!  Who could have sent it to me?  No! Don’t try and convince me that some conservative sent this piece of disrespect for the twice-elected President of the United States of America!  After all, former President Ronald Reagan, who had the respect of that former liberal Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, would never allow such a sentiment to pass a patriot’s lips or drip from a conservative’s pen.

There are, of course, two relevant questions here:

First, how can any true American patriot see this bit of ironic humor as being in good taste let alone the least bit funny? Second, why am I allowing what some might dismiss as a piece of humor to get under my skin?

What disturbs me is threefold:  fear that the advocacy of violence to the supporter of any public servant represents another tear in the fabric of the trust Americans ought to hold for its elected leadership.   Second, it seems in recent years that opposition to sitting chief executives is way too personal.  Third, I fear that the real root of this humor is racial.

As for my first point, every president has been the recipient of outrageous and often undeserved rancor.  Jimmy Carter rightly asserted in 1980 that criticism, unfair or not, “...goes with the territory.”  However, the attacks and the characterization of the last three presidents have been increasingly personal.  To conservatives, Clinton was little more than a gangster.  Liberals never forgave Bush #43 for the 2000 election.

Although, the opposition to President Obama is intensely doctrinaire (which is not only understandable but respectably traditional), way too much of it is both personal and racial.  Everything, from his heritage, to his birthright, to his religion, and yes, his race, draws a degree of enmity that’s not only unfair to him, but unhealthy to our future well being.  Even more, it’s downright unpatriotic.

The advocates of every political doctrine have occasionally crossed the boundary of fairness and good taste when referring to the personalities and policies of the opposition.  After all, no social, political or religious group has a monopoly on attributes good or bad, wise or foolish.

As for the likelihood that a conservative sent this piece to me, that is too horrifying to imagine.  Conservatism is dedicated to the freedom of all Americans including Obama supporters, isn’t it?  Conservatism at its best energizes creativity, investment, and stability at home and abroad.  However, conservatism as currently practiced is especially vulnerable to abuse, especially toward the most vulnerable among us, because it proclaims that the most successful Americans have been rewarded by the “Almighty.”  Hence, 21^st Century conservatives generally (although not always) side with the mighty against the less mighty.

To conserve is to manage and preserve the resources that are the birthright of us all.  That goes for everything from living wages to the benefit of the doubt when weighing matters of private and public morality.  At its worst, it invites dogmatic and indignant self-righteousness toward those who don’t share its values and encourages its proponents to regard themselves as morally superior to everyone else.

Okay, it’s confession time.  Of course, the above piece was sent me by a dedicated conservative, a gentleman proud of what he believes in rather than being merely respectful of the elements that make up his belief system.  Therein lays the Achilles heel of his political faith.

As traditionally followed by John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Calvin Coolidge and perhaps even by Ronald Reagan, conservatism was about the management and preservation of precious economic, social, and moral resources.  (Conservatism has never been about preservation of natural resources such as rivers and forests, because, like their liberal cousins, they too like the use of valuable resources free of charge.)

As evidenced by the piece that began this commentary, modern conservatism has its roots in Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 decision to free minorities and assist the poor.  With that decision, LBJ freed his own party, as well as his personal past, from its traditional advocacy of state supported ignorance and prejudice.

Sadly, the party of Abraham Lincoln has thoroughly lapped up and digested that old Democratic Party waste.  Modern conservatism fosters messages like this designed not only to disguise the application of meanness and bigotry with humor, but even designed to abuse pronouncements of the Holy Father!

Can you believe it?  Unfortunately, it’s all too real!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

A LETTER TO SPEAKER NEWT

By Edwin Cooney

Dear Speaker Newt,

I recently read with interest and amazement your insistence that there were five strategic failures in what you called the president’s “pretty good” speech of Wednesday, September 10^th, 2014 outlining his new and more aggressive policy toward ISIL.

Although your concerns regarding the status of Qatar and Yemen, and the possible length and depth of our involvement have some substance, your tone and justification of them smacks more of partisan politics than patriotic concern.  If I possessed your historical knowledge and respectable celebrity status, I’d have sought a personal meeting with the president before going public with my concerns.  What’s even more amazing, given your considerable knowledge of history, governmental experience, and intellect, is the way you have contorted the history of our successful struggle with Communism to quarrel with President Obama on a matter of considerable international importance.

Unlike Communism, which was preached but never practiced as a worker’s paradise on earth, ISIL isn’t doctrinaire; it’s just plain gangsterism.  Even worse, you legitimize this international thuggary by suggesting that if they are successful, they will have the capacity to establish a government or “Islamic Caliphate.”  You know too much history not to realize that there’s a huge difference between fighting and governing.  

Hence, your first complaint that the president has failed to “define a global strategy to defeat doctrinaire radical Islam” is misleading.  There’s nothing doctrinaire or even genuinely Islamic about ISIL.  After all, Muslims are among ISIL’s tragic victims. 

Your second complaint that President Obama has failed to set “a positive goal” or strategy for combating radical Islam indicates significantly less faith on your part than you had a decade ago as to who we are and what we stand for and its importance throughout the world community.  As far as I’m aware, you never doubted the righteousness of our cause when President Bush (2001-2009) insisted we had a moral obligation to obliterate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003.

Your third complaint, that the president offered no plan to compel “our so-called allies” (as you sarcastically labeled them) to adapt sufficiently draconian measures to combat radical Islam within their borders ignores an historic reality with which you’re more than aware. Speaker Newt, you know better than a lot of Americans that our NATO allies fostered Communist parties within their borders throughout the entire cold war.  Hence, despite the NKVD and the KGB, Communism could not and did not prevail.  That American and western European citizens would join ISIL is exceedingly disturbing, but it won’t even come close to being fatal to our national survival.

Your fourth complaint that the president failed to adequately prepare us for a long hard struggle is clearly your most valid point.  No president, not even Mr. Reagan during Iran Contra, has leveled with the American people concerning the consequences of his actions especially when it comes to foreign affairs.  (Actually, Mr. Speaker, Jimmy Carter may be an exception to that observation!)  Perhaps John McCain was right during the 2008 campaign when he suggested that it would be more realistic to keep boots on the ground in Iraq as we have in South Korea since 1953.

As for your fifth and final complaint, that President Obama failed to ask Congress for adequate resources to win this kind of war, that is the sort of suggestion you, as a history professor, might receive from a student in History 101.  After all, sir, Congress has yet to even declare war on ISIL.  Therefore, as has been the case so many times since World War II, we are fighting on foreign soil absent a declaration of war just as President Reagan did in Granada, briefly in Libya, and poorly in Lebanon.  As for Congress having a “constitutional obligation,” there’s nothing in the constitution that forces Congress to declare war.  Congress may have a prerogative, but it clearly has no obligation to do anything.

Your reaction to the president’s speech is clearly more partisan than it is either constructive or instructive.  You complain on the one hand that the president and his team clearly haven’t thought through the war and then you suggest that having begun this war, justifiable as it is, Congress ought to be investigating the Commander-In-Chief and his administration during “war time,” a time of national emergency under any definition.

Mr. Speaker, you’ve probably forgotten more history than most of us have ever learned.  You’ve held an office second in line to the presidency and several professorships.  You could, if you so chose, be a knowledgeable and instructive educational force that people across the political spectrum would be compelled to listen to and learn from.  However, you appear to believe that your political views outrank in importance your professional knowledge.  I suppose I’m jealous, but had I been second in line to the presidency as you were between January 1995 and December 1998 and possessed as do you substantial academic credentials, I would hope to use them as a teacher rather than as a partisan preacher.

As you know, just after Great Britain went to war against Germany, Winston Churchill in a speech from the BBC wondered out loud about the likely actions of Russia.  He said they were a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  But, he said, perhaps there is a key and that key is Russian national interest.

Sadly, Mr. Speaker, to this observer that Churchilian observation about Soviet Russia appears also to be an apt observation about you!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

IT ISN’T ABOUT EVIL YOU KNOW; IT’S REALLY WHAT EVIL’S ALL ABOUT!

By Edwin Cooney

Okay, ISIL or ISIS, take your pick, is evil.  The question, however, is whether that’s a good enough reason for us to destroy them.  Might there be a more compelling reason than their evil nature that thoroughly justifies President Obama’s determination to do them in?  I think so!

Sadly, people commit acts of “evil” such as murder, rape, theft, and deception every day.  The forces behind individual acts of evil are anger, resentment, greed, feelings of inferiority and perceived rejection by society.  Just societies seek to counter potential individual acts of evil in several ways.   First, they create an expectation of justice.  Second, they pass laws and create institutions to punish and thus control those guilty of evil deeds.  Additionally, they foster institutions to ease people’s anxiety, poverty and spiritual pain.  Fortunately, modern practitioners of medicine, psychology, and spiritual guidance are increasingly coming to realize that acts of evil don’t mean that most people are evil by nature.

Certainly people and the nations they populate have committed acts of evil since the dawn of creation. Some of the greatest human civilizations have not only prospered, but have flourished while creating and perpetuating “evil” institutions!

There was much that was evil in Greek, Roman, Spanish, French, and British societies.  Even we, the United States of America, the land of the free, home of the brave, the abiding place of noble men and women and authors of freedom and democracy, have done evil things.  After all, would the great North American Indian tribes have been justified if they had regarded as hoards of evil the ever-advancing Spanish, Dutch, French and British colonists who, without provocation, invaded and occupied the tribes’ native land?  Might the tribes of black Africa, whose lands were invaded, again without provocation, have legitimately regarded British and Americans slave traders as disciples of evil? Finally, didn’t President Reagan, after labeling the Soviets as “the evil empire,” negotiate and accommodate representatives of that “evil empire” before its political disintegration in 1991?

Last Wednesday night, President Barack Obama announced a four-point strategy that he asserted must be applied in a successful effort to destroy ISIL.  First, the United States will provide air cover and strategic bombing to destroy ISIL’s military forces and fighting capacity.  Second, we will work to cut off their financial resources.  Third, we will coalesce with a group of nations                     to accomplish the first two objectives.  Finally, we will insist that the government of Iraq and other Middle Eastern governments we support institute social, political and religious equity in that region of the world.

Policies and practices we regard as “evil” such as mass genocide, enslavement, political oppression, racial, ethnic and gender discrimination are hardly original with ISIL. They have been practiced by most “civilized” societies throughout human history as well as by us, meaning of course, the USA.  Hence, the question has to be: “What is it about ISIL that requires its absolute obliteration?”

The answer lies in its stated brazenness, in its flaunted disregard for any other political or spiritual entity except itself.  As the president pointed out, ISIL is not Islamic as many of its victims are Muslims. Nor, the president insists, is it a state.  Insofar as I am aware, its creed or reason for existence is its own perpetuation and dominance over any entity that might conceivably be willing to coexist with it.  In that way, it is comparable to Hitler’s SS, Pol Pot’s death squads and Stalin’s acts of midnight terror.  It appears to lack a willingness to even recognize, let alone acknowledge, the existence of anyone else’s worthiness.  The immediate danger lies in its proximity to the levers of power in two states, Syria and Iraq.  In the final analysis, ISIL is nothing more than a gang armed with sophisticated weapons and stolen money.  As such, it redresses no grievance nor does it seek justice.  ISIL is about ISIL and nothing else.  

ISIL has blatantly charted its mission and labeled itself.  Its methods are certainly evil, but its repulsiveness has to do with what it is all about: the perpetuation of gangsterism.

Unfortunately, evil as a human frailty pervades the planet.  It masters the weak and too often tempts the righteous.  Evil is a powerful source but, like all other human traits, it possesses within its DNA a vital weakness.

Happily, when “evil” compels men and women to become that which is intolerable in every society, specifically thugs and gangsters, that’s when “evil” really and truly sows the seeds of its own destruction!

That’s how I view both “evil” and ISIL!  How do you view them?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

 

“A HEAVY VACATION SCHEDULE” -- WOW, WHAT A CONCEPT!

By Edwin Cooney

For the better part of the past four weeks, I’ve been on vacation.  From Wednesday, August 6^th, through Wednesday, August 27^th, I was in Northern California visiting my two lads and some of the most wonderful friends I’ve ever known.

At one point during my California holiday, I informed those of you who get these weekly musings that due to a “heavy vacation schedule” I was suspending the issuance of these columns until my return.  A number of you found the idea of a “heavy vacation schedule” to be quite amusing and perhaps a bit hard to swallow.

Still, I insist that a heavy vacation schedule is exactly what I was up against.  After all, my wife and I were on vacation, but no one else we were visiting was also on holiday (as our British/American hosts Bean and Chris might put it!) Several times we had to alter our pleasure-laden schedule to accommodate our hosts' day-to-day obligations.

A vacation, I’ve discovered, is invariably a state of mind.  I once knew a gentleman who insisted that he was always glad when his vacations were over so he could go back to work to rest up.  Until just recently I’d concluded that observation was merely indicative of his sense of ironic humor, but now I’m not so sure.

A vacation, like most things, is of course what one makes of it.  If one is easily put off by distractions from normal day-to-day activities, a vacation may actually be counterproductive.  On the other hand, vacationing for millions of entrepreneurs worldwide constitutes a very productive living.

Although profit-making vacation spots existed in the nineteenth century, the vacation industry didn’t really take off until the mid-twentieth century.  Howard Johnson (who added motor lodges to his already profitable restaurant business), Marion Isbell who created the Ramada Inn chain, and Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inn fame made good use of President Eisenhower’s super highway expansion and the average person's desire for annual vacations thus making handsome fortunes for themselves and their posterity.

According to the late author David Halberstam who wrote a book on the 1950s, Charles Kemmons Wilson (who was known by his middle name) was a homebuilder from Memphis, Tennessee. He got the idea for the construction of his Holiday Inns during a 1951 summer vacation trip with his wife and two children to Washington, D.C., thus demonstrating that vacations can mean both relaxation and good fortune.

  

For me, the past four weeks have been a time of joy and sadness, adventure and remembrance.  Between August 1979 and March 2013 I lived in Alameda, California.  Here my first wife and I raised our two boys.  Our second son was born in Oakland and knows no Eastern home.  There I gained the friendship of a wonderful group of men and women with whom I worked, played, debated, laughed, cried and occasionally even worshiped.  To visit them once again was to remember being a part of that and wishing that I still could be.  To visit Northern California once again was an opportunity to enjoy my new and lovely wife’s delight in having easy access to restaurants and tourist attractions via public transportation.  To visit Alameda, California once again was an opportunity to wallow in the love and generosity of people named Shadi, Justine, Sam, Bean, Chris, Kat, Don, Peter, Tony, Patricia, Gina, Ed, two Steves, several Chris’s of both genders, Chuck, Dan, Tim, RC, two Brians, two Davids, Mary, Barbara, Richard, Susi, Jim, Sero, Jack, Eric, Bailey Jane (my little granddaughter), Celia, Ryan, Tiffany and yes – even more.  The joy was to be among them once again.  The sadness lay in my longing to be with them always and forever.

Shortly after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson observed that to listen to a record album of Jack Kennedy’s wit was to bring tears and laughter as close together as they could ever be.  So it was during my heavily scheduled recent Northern California vacation.  That we’ll do it all over again next year brings a smile to my lips even as it brings a simultaneous lump to my throat!

I’m especially encouraged to return to California next year in the wake of an observation made by a wonderful gentleman here in Syracuse who said to me only yesterday:

“I just want you to know Ed, that your best essays were those not written while you were experiencing that “heavy California vacation schedule!”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY