Letter to John J. Wall, Law Student and American

I don’t know if this horrible screed crossed your path. It’s a letter, written allegedly by a law student “and an American.” If it did, it should have gone into your spam box. It’s from a site known as The Minuteman, which links you to Renew America, which links you to such things as Phyllis Schlafly telling us why Obama’s stimulus package is all wrong, how the courts killed Terri Schiavo, how the fall of Adam marked Western Civilization, no mention being made of the Enlightenment, etc. It comes in at least one variation.

I don’t troll the John Birch sites or read Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, so I would never have seen it if it were not for a born-again member of my family who loves to bait me as much as I love being baited. I thank him for it.

Here's the letter, titled Divorce Proposal, and signed "John J. Law, Law Student and an American" followed by my point-by-point response.

Divorce Proposal

We have stuck together since the late 1950's, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has run its course. Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right, so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile; slate it up to irreconcilable differences, and go on our own ways.

Here is a model dissolution agreement:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement.

After that it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes. We don't like re distributive taxes so you can keep them. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.

Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military. You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Donnell (you are however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move them).

We'll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart, and Wall Street. You can have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies, and illegal aliens. We'll keep the hot Alaskan Hockey Moms, greedy CEO's, and Rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.

You can make nice with Iran, Palestine , and France, and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us. You can have the peaceniks and war protestors. When our allies or way of life are under assault, we'll provide them job security.

We'll keep our Judeo-Christian Values. You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, and Shirley McClain. You can have the U.N. But we will no longer be paying the bill. We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks, and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru Station Wagon you can find.

You can give everyone healthcare, if you can find any practicing Doctors (that is practicing, Howard Dean) who will follow you to your turf.

We'll continue to believe healthcare is a luxury and not a right.

We'll keep The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the National Anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute Imagine, I'd Like to Teach The World To Sing, Kum Ba Ya, or We Are the World.

We'll practice trickle down economics, and you can give trickle up poverty its best shot.

Since it often so offends you we'll keep our History, our Name, and our Flag.

Would you agree to this? If so please pass it along to other likeminded patriots, and if you do not agree just hit delete and hang on.

In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you ANWAR on who will need whose help in 15 years.

Sincerely,

John J. Wall
Law Student and an American

P.S. Please take Barbra Streisand.

Dear John:

Thanks for your letter suggesting you conservatives and we lefties divorce and divide up the country. Let me take up your points (reproduced here in italics) one at a time:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement.

OK. We’ll take the East and West Coasts, the university towns, like Madison and Austin, Chicago, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico – actually, come to think of it, no, you can’t have any part of my beautiful country. Let’s move on to the next point.

After that it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes. We don't like re distributive taxes so you can keep them. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.

Now you’re talking. You can have the portion of the country where people like yourself pay a third of your income while the fat cats pay less than 10%. Without your complicity, this wouldn’t work. Have at it. As for the ACLU, yes, we’ll take them. They are the folks pushing for an open trial for Omar Khadr, who was captured at 15 or 16, brought to Guantanamo and tortured, and has been there these past seven years slowly going mad, without ever being able to have access to a lawyer or his family. Yes, by all means give us the ACLU.

Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military. You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Donnell (you are however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move them).

You don’t hate war? Really? You can’t have the cops. We need them and the military to protect us from others who also don't hate war. But I won’t call them if you carry off the NRA. Let’s leave off the ad hominems.

We'll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart, and Wall Street. You can have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies, and illegal aliens. We'll keep the hot Alaskan Hockey Moms, greedy CEO's, and Rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.

We’ll both be keeping capitalism. You can have the greedy corporations; we’ll take the rest. You can have Wal-Mart, but you’re going to have to start paying health and retirement benefits Wal-Mart fails to pay its employees. We’re tired of your tapping into our tax money to do that. “Beloved homeless”? The folks your man Reagan tossed onto the streets way back when? We don’t always love them, but we’ll take them. When Christ comes to visit, I trust you understand he’ll be spending more time with us than with you. You want Sarah Palin? Good Lord, she’s yours! Greedy CEOs come with the greedy corporations which you’ve already spoken for. Rednecks? No, we’ll have to argue over them on a case by case basis. If it were up to me you could certainly have all the Bibles. Who do you know other than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot who has done more harm than the folk who wave Bibles? Unfortunately, there are some on our side who actually read the Bible, and they insist just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean you have a right to own it.

You can make nice with Iran, Palestine, and France, and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us. You can have the peaceniks and war protestors. When our allies or way of life are under assault, we'll provide them job security.

Make nice with France? Now there’s a concept. Do you have the faintest idea what you are giving away? Crepes? Edith Piaf? The concept of human rights? Fois gras? Thank you, thank you, thank you. Read Reading Lolita in Teheran again before you give away Iran. You might have second thoughts. Palestine you don’t want to “make nice” with? Shall we go on for another fifty, sixty years like this, raising kids in refugee camps? Really? When our allies are under assault? We barely have allies anymore, thanks to your President Bush. I’ve been talking lately with people who keep track of Iraqi refugees. Did you know there are as many as five million displaced people in that country, including virtually the entire middle class? That the once well-educated populace is becoming one of the least well-educated – all thanks to your inclination to “invade and hammer” places that threaten us. Maybe if Iraq had actually threatened us, we’d have an argument here, but they never did. Unfortunately the educational level of the United States has sunk so low that we now have a critical mass of people who are willing to believe simply because the Iraqis shared a religious identity with the criminals from Saudi Arabia who hit the Twin Towers and the thugs working in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and not Iraq) who hid their leader, it’s OK to “invade and hammer” them.

We'll keep our Judeo-Christian Values. You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, and Shirley McClain. You can have the U.N. But we will no longer be paying the bill. We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks, and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru Station Wagon you can find.

Your Judeo-Christian Values. “Blessed are they who invade and hammer…"?

You like your SUVs and oversized luxury cars? So do we, but are you really that clueless? Do you really not know what we’ve done to Planet Earth in recent years? Do you really not know how dire the problem is? Why is that? Do you not read?

You can give everyone healthcare, if you can find any practicing Doctors (that is practicing, Howard Dean) who will follow you to your turf.
We'll continue to believe healthcare is a luxury and not a right.

Judeo-Christian values again. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me." Was it was Mohammad who said that? It really ought to be easier for me, who doesn’t live by the Bible, to throw the little people to the wolves. Why are our positions reversed on this? Next time you pray to Jesus, would you ask him to help me make the cut – which kids get medical attention, which kids get left out in the rain?

We'll keep The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the National Anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute Imagine, I'd Like to Teach The World To Sing, Kum Ba Ya, or We Are the World.

OK, you can have the Battle Hymn if you want it. We’ll share the National Anthem. Thanks for Imagine and those others. I don’t want them, but I know some who will appreciate them. None of them are “substitutes” for the National Anthem, though. We’ll really have to share that.

We'll practice trickle down economics, and you can give trickle up poverty its best shot.

It will give me no end of joy and fascination to watch you work your wonders with trickle down economics in this day and age. Lots of luck. We’ll be rooting for you.

Since it often so offends you we'll keep our History, our Name, and our Flag.

Good Lord, your history? Excuse me, History. You think History belongs to you? Are you on drugs? And the Flag (also capital F, I see.) No, you can’t have that. It’s our flag. Flag. We’ll even pay to have it cleaned, if you like. Somebody on your side smeared excrement all over it by torturing prisoners in our name. When it comes back clean, it will have to remain on our side, thanks all the same.

Would you agree to this? If so please pass it along to other likeminded patriots, and if you do not agree just hit delete and hang on.

In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you ANWAR on who will need whose help in 15 years.

Sincerely,

John J. Wall
Law Student and an American

P.S. Please take Barbra Streisand.

OK.

Sincerely,


Alan J. McCornick
Retired and also an American

Beautiful People

With all the hullabaloo about gay marriage these days, all the focus on civil rights, all this Christophobia on the part of gay people who want to remove the right of god-fearing folk to discriminate, it’s easy to lose sight of an absolutely astonishing phenomenon taking place before our eyes – the slow but certain fact that homosexuality is becoming normal. No-big-dealization. What’s-the-wussitude. I’ll find the word some day. For now, being ORDINARY will do.

I remember once listening to Tales of the City author, Armistead Maupin, tell of the time he was with a gay baseball team that had gone somewhere to play the cops team and how they felt when they won. On the bus trip back, Maupin said, “There I was, a 36-year-old man sitting in the back of the bus and making out like a teenager.”

I’m not sure I’ve got the exact age and I may have the situation mixed up, but his point was clear. This was something he should have been able to do as a teenager, but couldn’t, and he was making up for lost time.

A lot of us resonate with that story. We look back at our youth and feel a sadness at the hole there where we were left out. We were deprived of the chance to experience the normal awkwardness of first love, and satisfying explanations for what the hormones were doing to us.

In the 1950s when I was in high school, while most of my friends were swooning over love songs and movie stars, sex for me was like the cheese in a mousetrap – one careless nibble and I was a goner. Don’t want to press it, but mousiness is not an unrealistic metaphor.

Gay kids today don’t all have it easy. Dustin Lance Black’s speech at the Oscars brought home the fact that they still have to fight the relentless bombardment of messages that they are “less than,” as he put it. But from my perspective, dealing with the tragic abuse by church, government and family that homophobia comes down to, is a whole lot easier by far when you’ve got the right posters and photos you can hang on your bedroom wall.

Much has been made of the fact that black kids all over America now have a model in Barack Obama their parents never had. It’s working. Have you ever seen so many African-Americans waving the stars and stripes before? They know they belong. Models are tremendously important.

Less conspicuous is what a gay black couple can do for gay black kids. I recently came across a picture of Keith Boykin and Nathan Hale Williams, who have apparently found each other. What a couple of beautiful people, I thought to myself. Well, yes. They are beautiful people. Black people. Gay people.

Two lawyers, no less. Keith Boykin went to law school at Harvard with Barack Obama. He also was the most prominent gay person in the Clinton Administration. Today he is an articulate supporter of Obama, and he edits his own political journal, The Daily Voice. Nathan Hale Williams is a model turned producer who also went to law school.

Like Armistead Maupin, suddenly I found myself the other day trying to catch up, not making out in the back of a bus, but googling around for gossip like a love-struck teenager in love with love, swimming with the beautiful people and the fantasy of Hollywood fame and riches and unending delights.

OK. Not really. But allow me a little rhetorical excess here.

My point is there are places to go for young people today to exercise their fantasies. Their dreams don’t have to end in mousetrap images any more. The church still continues to fail them, but they’ve got Dustin Lance Black to remind them God loves them. The government is much of the time a cipher to them, but it is increasingly less hostile. And now there is Keith and Nathan.

For that matter, Armistead Maupin married his partner Christopher in Canada in 2007. It’s never too late. Lt. Sulu (George Takei, now in his 70s) of the original Star Trek married Brad Altman in June of last year. The wedding – a quick aside here for Star Trek fans - had Chekov (Walter Koenig) as best man and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) as matron of honor.

And for folks who think they were born to Darth Vadar, even the real Darth Vadar (Dick Cheney), it turns out, has a daughter in a lesbian marriage.

The beautiful people models are everywhere. Marc Jacobs of France and Lorenzo Martone of Brazil, for example.

And T. R. Knight and Mark Cornelsen.

And Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka.

Stop it, already. I get the picture.

But you don’t, if you’re old and you remember “I thought people like that killed themselves.”

That’s what the good folk of California are missing when they think there is a “reasonable” argument to Prop. 8 and “people have a right to vote their conscience.”

Whether they have a right to vote away gay people’s civil rights is currently loudly contested. But behind the desire for marriage, which is – make no mistake about it, very real – is all the stuff that leads up to it. Including the right to be fourteen years old and leaf through magazines and dream that someday you too can be one of the beautiful people.

Somebody once said that the greatest of all freedoms in a democracy is the freedom to be stupid. Not a noble goal, obviously, but an important one when you consider it simply means you need not be afraid to stick your neck out. You can recover from your mistakes and experimentation and risk are positive things.

Wanting to be one of the beautiful people isn’t noble either. It’s ordinary.

Ordinary is not the final goal.

But it is where the starting line should be.

Pursuit of Equality: A Review

One of Gavin Newsom's first acts as mayor of San Francisco, just 35 days into office, was to challenge California's marriage and family code limiting marriage to heterosexual couples by granting licenses to same-sex couples and marrying them in City Hall. Starting with Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79, on February 12, 2004, at 11:06 a.m., the Newsom administration eventually married over 4000 gay and lesbian couples before they were forced to go back to withholding the right on March 11, 2004, at 2:33pm. (That’s what you can do with films like this – savor the details.) Newsom understood this was civil disobedience. He had his eyes on the long term.

Most gay people and local Bay Area residents know the rough outline. A few – not many – know the names of Dennis Herrera, the city attorney, and possibly even Mabel Tang, the city Assessor, who performed the first marriage. But almost nobody knows what they look like and how they felt about what they were doing.

Pursuit of Equality, a film documentary that came out in 2005 but apparently is only now building steam, shows what documentary filmmaking can do – it can put faces to names, reveal the spirit behind the law, and make the story about real people. The film is filled with rich detail – the Bible-waving folk who insist God’s law (their crystal clear understanding of it) should run the country, and not the California Constitution; the duel between those singing “I’ve decided to follow Jesus” and those singing The Star-Spangled Banner, 83-year-old Del and 79-year-old Phyllis being informed by the bureaucracy about family planning issues, tears running down the cheeks of a 24-year-old straight son whose mother and her partner are turned away on March 11, 2004 – and how he chose to look on the bright side and observe how the hardship brought his family closer together.

This event is a legend in the making. It begins with Nancy Pelosi sending Gavin Newsom a ticket to George W. Bush’s inauguration and Gavin’s reaction to Bush’s decision to politicize gay marriage. Newsom came home determined to fight it. The film has a marvelous shot of Teddy Kennedy, too, sitting in the joint session showing obvious disgust at Bush. Those who doubt Newsom’s personal investment in the decision need to see the film before drawing too many conclusions.

Once back from Washington, Newsom lost no time. His aids told him all he had to do was change “bride” and “groom” to “applicant 1” and “applicant 2” on the licences and he was off and running.

Besides putting a face on those involved, the film helps you keep track of the complicated twists and turns that month when it all began – the crowds overwhelming City Hall, the “cease and desist” order which was ignored, the Trial Court decision supporting Newsom and declaring the ban on marriage equality unconstitutional, the Appeals Court’s overturning of that decision and the voiding of the marriages, which is where the film ends. Not shown is what was to come when finally (OK, temporarily finally), on May 15, 2008, the Supreme Court determined the Trial Court decision should stand. The Supremes, as they are lovingly called in these parts, voided the Appeals Court’s decision, and the couples came back to do it all once more. That number has now reached 18,000, and this time, the marriages were not voided. I’m getting ahead of the story here, but just to bring things up to date, most people know what happened next. The State threw together a referendum known as Prop. 8 which passed by 52%, overturning the Supreme Court Decision.

This too turns out to be far from the end of the story, since the Supreme Court is meeting in just over a week on March 5 to decide whether the state had a right to amend the constitution to remove rights of its citizens to marry they themselves had declared a constitutional right. Are you running with me, Jesus?

Many will want to focus on the present and on the future. The 2005 documentary did not get much publicity – I only just discovered it a week ago. But it is a gem of a story of the inner workings of San Francisco City Hall at a momentous time for gays and lesbians.

Since the story is ongoing, and since the Oscar awards for Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn for their work on Milk is now part of the fight to overturn Prop. 8, the context continues to shift.

But if you want to see the beginning, this is the place to find it.

The Tragedy of Javier Gonzalez

I took issue with an article in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day because they told a story from one perspective and left out another. Not a serious complaint. Not yellow journalism. Not even badly slanted journalism. Just a reminder that there are often several ways to tell a story and that we no longer understand objectivity to be quite as simple as we once did.

The report celebrated a dramatic drop of 34% in homicides in San Francisco’s “troubled” zones of violence. Lost in the celebration was the fact that citywide the figure was down only 6%, and perhaps, if crime has spread outside of the “zones” to the city at large, there was not quite the cause for self-congratulation the article suggested. One might make the argument the journalist was not so much reporting the news as writing PR for the police department.

Then comes this news the other day of two deaths near San Francisco BART Stations. One in Daly City, where some kids apparently shot some other kids because they thought they were rival gang members. They were mistaken, and some innocent kid is dead – and that is not to say he would necessarily be less innocent if he were a member of a rival gang.

If you are not involved – and most middle class people of San Francisco and the world are not involved in this kind of thing – you register no more than a passing moment of sadness over the loss of young life and our inability to build better social structures. You sigh, and move on.

But this time there’s two in one night, and so you can’t turn away quite as readily. And it’s the other killing that is banging around inside my head. An even bigger illustration of how tragedy can be stupid, or at least right up there. And, like the story about the 34% drop in homicides in the Tenderloin and Western Addition neighborhoods of San Francisco, complicated by the possibility we may be looking at the event through a glass darkly.

As the story comes off the news services, it goes like this. Christopher Gonzalez, 18, and his friend Victor Veliz, also 18, decide to mug a third kid, a 23-year-old tourist visiting from the East Coast, who has just withdrawn some money from an ATM machine at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland. Gonzalez, the story goes, tells the kid he’s got a gun, and Veliz puts a knife to his throat. The kid panics and Gonzalez gets stabbed. Gonzalez lives nearby, so he runs home, and Veliz goes with him. The third kid goes out into the street, still holding the knife, hails the cops, gives them the knife and tells them the story. The police describe him as highly agitated, but they release him, suggesting his story rings true. The D.A.’s office decides to prosecute Veliz for both the robbery and the murder, but not "the tourist." That the robbery took place is not in question, since the police find a cell phone in Veliz’ possession when they find him at the Gonzalez home. The phone, it turns out, was on all the time, since the kid was talking to a friend before the robbery took place. Apparently the person on the other end of the phone heard the robbery victim, whose name has never been released, say he was being approached and something was not right.

When you put this all together, you will probably conclude this is a pretty much an open-and-shut case of a robbery-gone-wrong; some punk kid who threatened violence got that violence thrown back at him with deadly, but perhaps just, consequences.

But this is a new information age, an age where privacy has taken a back seat, and we are used to the poor slobs of the world washing their dirty linen with Judge Judy and other daytime television crap mongers. And most of us, whether we do it a lot or not, are conditioned to the great American sport of watching victims of circumstance, folly or a moment’s tragic inattention wail and cry, sometimes out of Schadenfreude, sometimes, I guess, out of love of circus in the great tradition of throwing Christians to the lions.

In following up this story, I hit upon a video clip of Javier Gonzalez being interviewed just after his son died, pretty much in his arms. The same sense of shame at watching someone’s nakedness of soul splayed for commercial gain on daytime TV also makes me want to click off and move on to almost any other activity. But the fact that Javier was telling the story from a different perspective kept me listening.

The clip, if you watch it, will make you sad. Here’s a father who has not only lost his teenage son, he has watched him bleed to death in his arms. Javier stumbles over facts, but you trust he is running on empty and needing to tell his story as a way of processing what just happened to him. You watch, and you wonder, are you the “bad parent” we hear so much about? The kind of parent that produces these kids we live in constant fear of, the ones who come up from East and West Oakland and mug us in the streets outside of our middle class homes in Berkeley? Are you the bad guy here? Why am I feeling so sad about your plight?

Could it be that what you are suggesting is true? That your son is an innocent victim? That it was Victor doing the mugging and Chris merely coming to his rescue when he saw he was in trouble? Not very likely. There is too much information to suggest this is grasping at straws to save yourself from having to recognize your “really great kid” is a mugger. One who threatens strangers with guns. But the little invisible fellow that sits on my shoulder and whispers in my left ear a reminder of how often the powerless fail to get their story heard, wants me at least to listen.

Javier is not a pretty sight. He lashes out at the BART police, an easy target these days since one of their number killed another kid on New Year’s Eve, causing major unrest in racially charged Oakland because the kid was black and the officer was white and the kid was shot in the back.

But I hear your pain, Javier. You're not that different from my other friends with 18-year-olds they can barely persuade, much less control. I know you never intended for your kid to rob strangers (if indeed your kid did). And I am reminded that I have just spent a couple years going to neighborhood meetings where we all yearned publicly for solutions to the problem of muggings, wishing somehow the police could magically solve the problem. Like folk searching for keys under the lamp where the light is better instead of where we dropped them, we focus on the police and their sometimes obvious shortcomings. Occasionally, though, we remind ourselves the problem is really lack of parental control and moral guidance somehow.

Should I have turned off this exploitation of Javier Gonzalez like I turn off Jerry Springer? Should I have allowed him to grieve privately instead of in front of news reporters conspicuously feeding him justifications for putting up with their questions?

Were things not a whole lot easier back in the days when we almost never got to hear the Javier Gonzalezes of the world tell their probably (but not certainly) erroneous side of the story?

Obama’s Vietnam?

Don’t know if you happened to tune in to Charlie Rose last night. He had on Craig Mullaney, Dexter Filkins, Milt Bearden and ABC news correspondent Martha Raddatz talking about the war in Afghanistan.

As I watched I got this sense that I might be having my attention turned to the elephant in the room at long last. The news media at present are focused on Obama’s alleged mistakes, on the Republican insistence that we can and should still live and work the Republican way, and at the devastated economy and the possibility of a decade or more of depression years.

What worries me is that I doubt Obama can fix it. The more I watch the controversy over whether throwing good money after bad money is the solution to the mess the country is in, to use the oversimplified frame so many – and not just Republicans – want to use, the more I despair. The man seems so strong, so intelligent, so capable. The answer to prayers – never mind the powerful symbol he is of an America that apparently can right itself.

But California is about to come off the rails. We are going bankrupt. The State Legislature can’t raise taxes to pay the bills – the Republicans again – and that means we are likely to have to shut down government and works projects that will cost us millions more to start up again once we do get this show on the road. And as goes California in struggling with the economy, so goes the rest of the United States. The Republicans won’t, the Democrats can’t, and we are now beginning to listen to the philosophers who suggest the problem lies with the system. The only way to fix systemic problems with politics is for things to fail. No politician will buck the system to act in the national interest unless it does; essential to the way the system works is that it is based on self, not national, interest.

So the media’s focus on the economic disaster and our apparent inability to fix it is understandable. But in doing so, they may be missing an even larger problem, what some are now referring to as Obama’s Vietnam.

Here’s what I think I hear all or most of the experts agreeing on:

1) We are stymied by our inclination to see the world in terms of national boundaries. We see Afghanistan and Pakistan, but if we messed up in Iraq by not understanding Kurdistan as a nation, we are messing up tenfold in not seeing Pashtunistan as a nation. Not the kind of nation that will sit in the United Nations and act internationally, but the kind that makes a mockery of lines drawn by white-man's-burden-carrying Britain.

2) We keep thinking Pakistan can and should act to control Pashtuns, while Pakistan understands the border lines are a charade and they simply lack the power to act but can’t admit it internationally without losing face.

3) Afghanis and Pakistanis are at the mercy of the Taliban because there is no viable alternative, no traditional democratic habits to fall back on, no secular national identity strong enough to counter them.

4) Afghanistan is a wild mountainous region bigger by far than Iraq. In Iraq, insurgents are largely concentrated (and thus susceptible to bombing and containing). In Afghanistan they are scattered and impossible to manipulate militarily. Apparently the hearts and minds approach is equally elusive; the only effective way to get soldiers to line up on one side or the other seems to be to pay them. But the fact that there is no long-term vision any of them will work for means we can’t buy them; we can only rent them for a time, and once the money stops, so will the loyalty to any American purpose.

5) The British couldn’t have their way in Afghanistan, and neither could the Russians. America still thinks it can. But America has long suffered from a Superman complex. It led them into Vietnam, blind to the reality they were making the same mistake as the French. And into Iraq, blind to the reality the military solution which didn’t work in Vietnam was even less likely to work in Iraq. And now Afghanistan, even though we don’t have the money or the willingness to bleed anymore.

6) The Karzai government is an American illusion which stems from a belief that Afghanistan can be controlled by our puppet working from the capital of a nation state. Which it isn’t. Even if he were not totally useless and corrupt. Which he is.

I’m wondering if our biggest problem isn’t an imperialist belief that this is America’s problem because God gave us the testosterone to make it our problem.

Think how differently things would look if we could persuade the rest of the world that it was their problem, as well.

We have had a cold war with Iran for thirty years because we don't have the humility or wisdom to process the reason productively why they still seethe with resentment at us; Iran’s modern history begins with the fact that we overthrew their government in 1953 and imposed the dictator Shah. We can’t accept responsibility for the Islamic Revolution which followed and the way it (justifiably) terrifies the Israelis and helps to explain their hard line against the Palestinians. And appreciate what fools that makes us in making what should be a friend in the region an enemy. Iran’s interest in fighting the insurgents and the Taliban in Iraq, and in keeping peace in neighboring Kurdistan and Afghanistan, is possibly even stronger than the U.S. interest in those same goals, yet we have them working not with us but against us.

We can’t understand that insisting that Georgia and the Ukraine join the United Nations keeps the Russians enraged at our imperialist ambitions (in opposition to their colonial ambitions, of course), thereby keeping Russia our enemy. Same issue as with Iran. What nation has a stronger interest in keeping everybody calm so it can develop its own economy, so that nuclear weapons do not spread? Why are we working against them and not with them? Russia, some say, has the best intelligence service in the world, superior to ours. Why is it not working for us and not against us?

If there is a solution in Afghanistan, it surely ought to be obvious to us by now that we can’t find it on our own. Pakistan is dead in the water. Iran and Russia are treading water with zero confidence that Americans are people they can work with. Bush and his “bring it on” bravado made it worse, but it didn’t start with him. We simply do a lousy job at pretending we can run an Empire.

Big problem, say all the folks on Charlie Rose. No workable solution, imply all the folks on Charlie Rose.

OK, so the economy is a disaster and it’s touch and go at the moment whether we can fix it. But Obama hasn’t begun to face his real problem, much bigger than the failure of the U.S. economy, the bottomless pit that is Afghanistan. LBJ and his noble war on poverty, his astonishing civil rights successes – all that good stuff he did, and he had to fall on is sword over Vietnam. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… What will it take to change the system?

We didn’t learn from LBJ’s example. Will we learn from the failure and discrediting of the new Messiah, maybe?

Where will we go if we can’t figure this all out?