Pacing the twilight zones...
March 5, 2024
Footbridge to an Afterlife (2017)
The gravity of empathy, and morality
I voted for Joe Biden but I don’t understand him.
Enlisting the marvel of the internet, I poked around this weekend, to find music, lectures, sporting highlights, etc. At intervals the YouTube feed would be interrupted with short ads inviting me to explore ways I can improve my diet, my wallet, my memory, or my love life, etc.
In this queue of solicitations there were also Joe Biden ads, the President of these not-so-united states, talking to me as a “we,” asking me to consider how vital it is to pitch in for his re-election. I was surprised at how swiftly I became angry upon hearing his voice, how quickly I clicked at “skip” or muted the audio.
I don’t hate Joe Biden and even though he doesn’t deserve my vote in November, he will likely get it.
Heather Cox Richardson knows our history better than I do. When she predicts we will lose our democracy for a generation if Donald Trump wins in November, she has my attention. I hope she’s wrong, but we’ve all seen the disastrous preview and roughly half of us seem ready, if not eager, for the sequel. A mortal life comes with a platter of painful choices, and for me and millions of other Americans this will be one of them.
My problem with Biden is a moral blind spot that, to me at least, was first visible in the way he helped feed Anita Hill to the wolves during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991. He was a senator then, and chairman of the Judiciary Committee that forwarded Thomas’s nomination (which Biden opposed) to the full Senate. To my lights, Biden’s handling of Hill’s testimony and brutal cross-examination (if we can even call it that) by the all-male committee was every bit as sickening as Thomas’s flagrant ethical lapses have proven to be. In that chapter, Biden appeared to be much more concerned about Senatorial courtesy and comity than about being fair to Hill as she recounted her sexual harassment by Thomas. To those who watched this unfold, it was nauseating, and not just for women.
Far more gut-wrenching has been Biden’s appalling indifference to the humanitarian disaster unleashed upon Palestinians in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israelis last October. Actually “appalling indifference” is charitable, perhaps to a fault. The evidence is the U.S. has been complicit in war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza by supplying the weapons of war (including 2,000 lb. bombs dropped in urban areas known to harbor refugees) used in contravention to U.S. and international laws to protect non-combatant civilians and aide workers.
The misery inflicted upon innocent Palestinians in Gaza is visible in all directions but largely buffered by our internal politics and, lamentably, our mainstream media. Both political parties are conditioned to support Israel and it has taken five months for a high-ranking U.S. official (Vice President Kamala Harris) to finally call for a truce in reaction to the siege and the emerging famine. According to the World Bank between 80 and 96 percent of Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure has been destroyed.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the way U.S. media has handled the witness of journalism to these events. For the most part, our news umpires have been treating Biden and the Israeli cabinet spokespersons as voices of the home team, and treating critics (including Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib) as subversives. And if you were too honest or blunt with the facts (as was the case with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan) you can lose your show and your air-time.
I don’t understand Biden’s blind spot to this tragedy. I can’t fathom how someone with his life experience with grief (the death of his first wife and the loss of both a daughter and a son) and the riptides of our politics could make such a tragic mess of this imbroglio at such a crucial time in our history. When I hear Biden’s voice, I hear betrayal and feel sorrow.
I’m shaken by this. If we are going to have a world that is more humane and democratic than it is now (indeed, the trend appears to be in the wrong direction) we cannot buffer our values and our emotions by the global distance to conflicts like the one in Israel/Gaza. It’s our money, our weapons, and often our soldiers who are involved, and for that there is no discernible moral distance. We are there, even when we flip the channel, so to speak, to create the illusion of a visceral and moral buffer. But in the physics of humanity, moral gravity doesn’t have an “off” switch. That’s just not how this works.
If I can leave this subject on a more positive note, it would be to offer this link to an interview that MSNBC’s Ali Velshi hosted Sunday with Palestinian commentator Dean Obeidallah and Jewish Current’s Peter Beinart. It is the sort of discussion we should have been having in prominent U.S. media space months ago. Beinart’s reporting and voice has been especially brave and I recommend his work and a mission he describes in these terms: “I don’t think the US possesses any inherent right to run the world. If America wants moral authority, it must earn it. And I believe that the best way to secure the safety of the Jewish people, my people, is through equality and justice for Palestinians. I hope these principles foster a different kind of conversation.”
Winter at Soda Lake (2019)
Who Wants this Damn Bridge Anyway?
In the realm of U.S. politics, today is Super Tuesday, and, um, I don’t really give a rip.
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What’s worthy news, though, is when the batshit-crazy political story of the week comes from a place other than Texas, Florida, or Alabama. Sunday the Seattle Times had such a story….
—tjc
