The Heretic

Heretic moves!

Please note that Heretic has moved to http://thesilenceseeker.wordpress.com. See you there!

I can never stick to a position…

I am a constant doubter when it comes to most political issues. With the labor struggle in Wisconsin, I still stand firm in my belief that there is an enormous need for reform among how public employees are managed. Basically, they should be subject to the same system of incentives as private employees. But the more I think about what Walker is trying to do, the more I doubt my original stance.

Isn’t unionizing basically just freedom of assembly made manifest in the workforce?

It is one thing if we return to the old days of union thugs harassing non-union workers, but if people are just getting together to talk about the quality of the workplace it seems like that’s their right. More to the point it seems like there is middle ground to be struck….

Workers should be able to unionize. The state should be able to hire non-union workers and fire employees at will.

It has come to my attention that I had unknowingly set up Heretic such that comments were not allowed on my posts. This seems contrary to the spirit of the blog and, really, blogging in general.

Anyhow, I think I fixed it so that commenting is allowed. If it isn’t, just tell me…which you won’t be able to do….Hopefully, I fixed it.

McCarthyism? Let’s hope not…

I watched an interview this morning with Keith Ellison, muslim Congressman from Minneapolis, and Pete King, Congressman from New York and chair of the House’s Committee on Homeland Security. The issue is that Rep. King is starting congressional hearings on March 10 on the radicalization of American Muslims. He points to a string of recent thwarted terror attempts whose perpetrators were all American citizens. Rep. Ellison’s response is that terrorism is a much broader issue (i.e., Jared Loghlin) and it is conterproductive to single out one embattled minority. The extremist mullahs abroad who are trying to recruit young, muslim Americans make the argument that the West despises Islam. We would do well to avoid proving them right.

That being said, I think it is possible to salvage these hearings and turn them into something productive. If they devolve into a witch hunt, they will drive even more Muslim youth into the arms of the extremists. HOWEVER, if this were to turn into a substantive and honest look into how to stop the spread of extremism among the American ummah, this could actually be an incredibly positive development.

What would “substantive and honest” hearings look like? They would fairly acknowledge equal, but seemingly clashing truths. On the one hand, terrorism from Islamic extremists poses a grave threat and needs to be prosecuted aggressively. On the other hand, we should not shortshrift particular American citizens on their civil liberties, simply because they are Muslims. They would acknowledge the fact that finding ways to assure Muslim Americans that, although America has not always been America to them over the course of the past decade, it can be in the future.

Terrorism is not about achieving a military victory. It is about provoking a response in your target that causes it to stumble towards its own demise. Embracing the Muslim population at home prevents domestic disturbance which allows us to focus our energies on combatting threats abroad. Muslim Americans, on the whole, are a patriotic bunch. They are also a huge asset in figuring out how to bridge the divide between East and West, so that we can one day move past this barbaric war of attrition.   

Need for change

A few years ago, back when I was a bleeding heart, I would’ve been cheering the unions on in their battle against the governors who are trying to reform the public sector. Those days are over. There are plenty of good, hard-working public employees; I work with many of them. Overall, though, it is so difficult to terminate public employees that the incentive to work hard and work well is nowhere to be found. When an employee in the private sector does a poor job, they are terminated. When an empoyee in the public sector does a poor job, they get paid time off. If a company can’t afford to pay pensions as they stand, people come to the table. This isn’t about conservative-driven class warfare; low income citizens deserve quality, efficient, cost-effective service from their government.

Baltimore’s tax base is dominated by public employees. When you tax someone you employ, you are operating at a loss. Then, you have to compensate by shutting down fire houses and rec centers. That doesn’t help the poor. Something needs to change.

Ghadaffi is nuts. He is a textbook case of what happens when you stop drinking your own Kool-aid and resort to rubbing the powder on your gums. That being said, his is not a new psychosis. He is the same kind of crazy as any other dictator who has spent decades trying to convince his people they are not “ready” for democracy and that they “need” him. It is impossible, I suppose, to have absolute power for four decades and not become rather self-obsessed.

So, Ghadaffi’s routine is not new. What is new is the context in which we find it. Dictators love secrecy because it allows them to create whatever narratives they want. Propaganda is nothing more than a story with monopolistic status. The countervailing narratives with nitty gritty details of your own people lying in a ditch, having been executed, get swept under the rug. You own the stories of the past. You interpret the present. You dictate the future.

…And then there was YouTube.

Now, at the same time that the Ghad-meister is drolling of incoherent accounts of his family history, people all around the world are watching his hired thugs brutalize the Libyan people. He has lost credibility among every sector of Libyan society and the world at large. Even shutting down the internet within the country is insufficient as the rest of the world can see exactly what is going on and within the country the media crack down is so conspicuous it is self-incriminating. His plan of regaining control through reiterating his egotistically quixotic message would fail even if he were capable of forming a coherent thought. There are just too many other messages (articles, images, videos, tweets) with which to compete.

So the question is: What if we lived in a world with no secrets?

It’s not that far-fetched given that apparently a guy with a flash drive is apparently all you need to get confidential information from the military of a superpower. (Go ahead and convict Assange for sexual assault, but if you do it, do it because you want him to be convicted for sexual assault).

The most obvious answer is that it would be the death of dictatorships. But what if its bigger than that? Isn’t all governance about constructing narratives? George W. Bush and the Axis of Evil. Barack Obama and we are the people we have been waiting for. Partisanship itself is built on narratives, interpretations and half-truths. But a half-truth is half false, and we live in an age when counterpoints come before the point is even made.

All governing, it seems to me, is about telling a story about the world and how we fit in it. Telling a story is about taking a set of facts, a set of observations and insights, and making conscious decisions about how to organize them. We do not live in an age of stories. Stories are dead. Now, there is only the deluge.

The point I am making is that the forces dogging Ghadaffi are dogging Obama. (There are innocent deaths in Afghanistan, too. They are not deliberate and I am not making the argument that they are morally equivalent. I’m saying they look just as bad on YouTube). They dogged Bush. They’ll dog 45. Everyone sounds just as incoherent as Ghadaffi when you splice in white noise.

How, I wonder, does one govern a deluge?   

Orwell’s Rules of Writing

For those who are interested, here are the fundamental rules that Orwell highlights:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2) Never use a long word where a short one will do

3) If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out

4) Never use the passive when you can use the active.

5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English alternative.

6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

What’s in a name?

You’ll notice that the name of this here blog is no longer Homo Publicus. I have changed it to “The Heretic” and I thought I should explain why. I read an essay by George Orwell, last night, called “Politics and the English Language.” In it, he describes everything he thinks is wrong with Modern (as of 1945) English. The gist of it all is that he thinks people get so caught up in pretense that they cram their writing with passive and contrived language. As part of this, he says that people feel compelled to use Latin and Greek phrases, solely because they imagine them to be more impressive—a sort of inferiority complex around the English language.

Needless to say, the essay had an effect on me. Homo Publicus was always a rather contrived name. I guessed that it was proper Latin and went with it, because I thought it sounded impressive. While I am most focused on using Orwell’s views to improve the content of my writing itself, it made me want to put the blog through a rebranding. (I had already been considering it, in the hopes that a simpler name would be easier to publicize). In plain English, I wanted a direct name that embodied what I hope to do.

So, why “The Heretic?” The exhaustive, 10-second search I did on dictionary.com informs me that, among others involving the Catholic Church (go figure), one of the official definitions of ”heretic” is: 

Anyone who does not conform to any established attitude, doctrine or principle

While it could very well be that I am simply an average leftist who is deluding himself with visions of eccentricity, my aspiration is to have this blog be a means of exploring the Truth (note the capital T) that lies beyond the confines of modern political ideologies. My hope is that I remain suspended, fighting against the current of uncertainty and doubt, but never landing on the “left” or “right” river bank.

Furthermore, this blog is built upon the contention that the World is not simply changing, but has in fact changed already, and that all of our self-images and schema are antiquated and useless. I think the prevalent internal conception of America is too White, too traditional, and too nostalgaic. I don’t think we are debating whether or not to become a pluralistic society; I think we are a pluralistic society trying to figure out how to feel about it. I want to write gadfly-ish posts that poke popular assumptions as they swiftly turn to dust.

The World defies the boxes we build to contain it. I don’t think we can ever truly “understand” geo-politics (as evidenced by the fact that it usually takes political scientists about 30 years of retrospection to fully grasp any development). We can only listen. I want to be a heretic because, when I see a new truth revealed by developments in American or International politics, I want to taste it in its distilled form, before it is doused and drowned in the sauce of stubborn, narrow-minded, partisan delusion.

So, I changed the name of the blog. Lo, the Earth trembles. 

The triumph of non-violence

Advocates of non-violence are receiving powerful evidence of the legitimacy of their views. Cynics often dismiss pacifism as naiivety, saying that it is a nice idea but has no bearing in a violent world. As we watch the glorious upheaval going on everywhere from Gabon to Libya (and there are even reports of renewed protests in Iran), let us note the fact that not only are these uprisings more morally right than the violent schemes of al-Qaeda and similar groups, they are also proving to be more effective.

Violence begins where open communication ceases. Democracy is governance by open communication. It is a doctrine that contends that human beings can resolve their disputes through peaceful, legal avenues. Violence is antithetical to democracy. Any society that frees itself through violence must renounce violence before it can truly be a liberal democracy.

Some will point out that America became “free” through a violent uprising against a King. This is false. That is how America became independent. It was a non-violent struggle led by a King* that made us free.

*This is, obviously, meant as a poetic means of proving a point. It is not meant to attribute American freedom solely to MLK, and is certainly not meant to dismiss the importance of the Women’s movement, the Gay Rights movement, or any of the other liberation movements that have transformed America.