Tag Archives: President

Sep 17

Plain like Barack

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As befits a Quaker wit­ness, when I felt the nudge to plain­ness ten years ago, I didn’t quite know where it would take me. I trusted the spir­i­tual nudges enough to assume there were lessons to learn. I had wit­nessed a God-centering in oth­ers who shared my spir­i­tual con­di­tions and I knew from read­ing that plain­ness was a typ­i­cal first step of “infant min­is­ters.” But all I had been given was the invi­ta­tion to walk a par­tic­u­lar path.

After the ini­tial excite­ments, I set­tled into a rou­tine and dis­cov­ered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of get­ting dressed in the morn­ings. Gone too was the “who am I?” drama that accom­pa­nied cat­a­log brows­ing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my closet down to a small set of choices, all vari­a­tions on one another. Now when I get dressed I don’t worry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a cer­tain sweater, etc.

Appar­ently, I share this prac­tice with the forty-fourth pres­i­dent. In “Obama’s Way,” a wide-ranging pro­file in Van­ity Fair, Michael Lewis shares the President’s atti­tude about clothes:

[He] was will­ing to talk about the mun­dane details of pres­i­den­tial exis­tence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day prob­lems that absorb most peo­ple for mean­ing­ful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m try­ing to pare down deci­sions. I don’t want to make deci­sions about what I’m eat­ing or wear­ing. Because I have too many other deci­sions to make.” He men­tioned research that shows the sim­ple act of mak­ing deci­sions degrades one’s abil­ity to make fur­ther deci­sions. It’s why shop­ping is so exhaust­ing. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to rou­tinize your­self. You can’t be going through the day dis­tracted by trivia.”

A few dis­tract­ing caveats: we can assume Obama’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thou­sand dol­lars apiece. He prob­a­bly has a closet full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morn­ing. You won’t find Barack wan­der­ing the aisles of the Capi­tol Hill Macy’s or the Lan­g­ley Hill Men’s Ware­house. Michelle’s never run­ning things to the dry clean­ers, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pair­ing socks from the laun­dry bin after com­ing home from school. A Pres­i­dent Romney’s closet would also fea­ture gray and blue (though his under­wear drawer would be more uncon­ven­tional). When pro­to­col calls for the commander-in-chief to devi­ate from suits–to don a tux perhaps–one appears. Presidential plain­ness is far from simple.

The Quaker move­ment started as an invi­ta­tion to com­mon sense. Every­one could join. Early Friends were min­i­mal­ists on fire, fear­less in aban­don­ing any­thing that got in the way of spir­i­tual truth. In a few short years they method­i­cally worked their way to the same con­clu­sions as a twenty-first cen­tury U.S. pres­i­dent: human decision-making resources are finite; our atten­tion is at a pre­mium. If we have a job to do (run a coun­try, wit­ness God’s King­dom), then we should clear our­selves of unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions to focus on the essen­tials. Those core expe­ri­en­tial truths have last­ing value. As Jef­fer­son might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem rad­i­cally pecu­liar to the wider world.

Unfor­tu­nately the kind of plain­ness that Barack and I are talk­ing about is a kind of mind-hack, its power largely strate­gic. I’d love to see a pres­i­dent take up the chal­lenge of some hard­core Quaker val­ues. How about the tes­ti­mony against war? Eliza Gur­ney got pretty far in cor­re­spon­dence with Obama’s hero, hon­est Abe, but even he punted respon­si­bil­ity to divine will. The wit­ness continues.

Oct 07

From the Vault: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror (10/2001)

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Today is the ninth anniver­sary of the war in Afghanistan. In recog­ni­tion, here’s my Non​vi​o​lence​.org essay from 10/7/2010. It’s all sadly still top­i­cal. Nine years in and we’re still mak­ing ter­ror and still cre­at­ing enemies.

The United States has today begun its war against ter­ror­ism in a very famil­iar way: by use of ter­ror. Igno­rant of thou­sands of years of vio­lence in the Mid­dle East, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush thinks that the hor­ror of Sep­tem­ber 11th can be exor­cised and pre­vented by bombs and mis­siles. Today we can add more names to the long list of vic­tims of the ter­ror­ist air­plane attacks. Because today Afgha­nis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Wash­ing­ton and Penn­syl­va­nia have shocked Amer­i­cans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sud­den vul­ner­a­bil­ity. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nine­teen sui­cide bombers to give up pre­cious life to start such a lit­eral and sym­bolic con­fla­gra­tion. What they did was hor­ri­ble and with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The ter­ror­ists com­mit­ted their atroc­i­ties because of a long list of griev­ances. They were shed­ding blood for blood, and we must under­stand that. Because to under­stand that is to under­stand that Pres­i­dent Bush is unleash­ing his own ter­ror cam­paign: that he is shed­ding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been spon­sor­ing vio­lence in Afghanistan for over a gen­er­a­tion. Even before the Soviet inva­sion of that coun­try, the U.S. was sup­port­ing rad­i­cal Muja­hadeen forces. We thought then that spon­sor­ship of vio­lence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with vio­lence in the region for many years. Our for­eign pol­icy has been a mish-mash of sup­port­ing one despotic regime after another against a shift­ing array of per­ceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Sad­dam Hus­sein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of lib­erty and democ­racy in the region. We have time and again sold out our val­ues and thrown our sup­port behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that mil­i­tary adven­tur­ism in the region could keep ter­ror­ism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced paci­fists in the weeks since Sep­tem­ber 11th, angrily ask­ing how peace can deal with ter­ror­ists. What these crit­ics don’t under­stand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democ­racy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the inter­ests of our oil com­pa­nies) to keep the cycles of vio­lence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peo­ples of the Mid­dle East enslaved in despo­tism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not nec­es­sar­ily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop com­bat ter­ror­ism with ter­ror. In the last few weeks the United States has been mak­ing new alliances with coun­tries whose lead­ers sub­vert democ­racy. We are giv­ing them free rein to con­tinue to sub­ject their peo­ple. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and desta­bi­lizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds ter­ror more.

And most of all: we are mak­ing new vic­tims. Another gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren are see­ing their par­ents die, are see­ing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncar­ing Amer­ica. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democ­racy and hear noth­ing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turn­ing against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our les­son of ter­ror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. His­tory will con­tinue to turn, with blood as it’s Mid­dle East­ern lubri­cant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.

Dec 02

That tired old quagmire playbook

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“We’ll end the war just as soon as…” is the rhetor­i­cal par­ent of empire-crushing quag­mires. The con­di­tional changes as needed, because it needs to stay fresh to stay plau­si­ble. One pres­i­dent will claim that the right enemy leader needs to be killed, another that more troops need to be tem­porar­ily added.

Strate­gic changes can change the tide of a mil­i­tary con­flict but Afghanistan is now an eight-year-old war. We’re not bat­tling some other empire for con­trol of ter­ri­tory. The fight­ers shoot­ing at Amer­i­can sol­diers are Afghani. They will still be there when we leave, when­ever we leave. They are Afghanistan’s future whether we like it or not. The only real ques­tion is whether we’ll leave as friends or as ene­mies. Thirty thou­sand addi­tional U.S. troops will be 30,000 addi­tional U.S. rifles aimed at 30,000 more Afgha­nis who sim­ply don’t want us there. Eigh­teen months will be eigh­teen more months of Afghan seething over the cor­rupt U.S.-backed Karzai government.

I’m no fan of the Tal­iban. But it’s hard to imag­ine being the coun­try being ruled by any­one else when the U.S. troops even­tu­ally do pull out. Ten years of war will have insured another gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cal­ized Aghani youth. And what about Amer­ica? A whole gen­er­a­tion got inter­ested in pol­i­tics because of a bright young pres­i­dent promis­ing change, yet here we have the same tired quag­mire play­book. It’s a shame.

Aug 11

The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

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To Amer­i­can eyes the news of the esca­lat­ing war in the Cau­ca­sus nation of Geor­gia almost reads as farce: a break­away region of a break­away region, tanks rolling to main­tain con­trol of… well, not that much really. We won­der how it could be in either Rus­sia or Georgia’s inter­ests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fight­ing the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s Pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunt­ing the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weari­ness as we real­ize just how famil­iar this all is. Tiny eth­nic enclaves with cen­turies of ani­mosi­ties and well rehearsed sto­ries of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the other set fight­ing by the break­down of an empire that had uneasily united them in repres­sion. Change a few details and we could be talk­ing recent con­flicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil bil­lions and human traf­fick­ing add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fight­ing these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seri­ously: oth­er­wise strong economies col­lapse under the chaos that these ter­ri­to­r­ial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in mar­ginal areas and all sides would be bet­ter off if the politi­cians stopped wor­ry­ing about these con­tested ter­ri­to­ries and just focused on build­ing a econ­omy attrac­tive to inter­na­tional trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mech­a­nisms to end these con­flicts before they erupt into open war­fare? Where is the polit­i­cal will to end this class of war once and for all? Dis­ease and ter­ror­ism are the invari­able fruits of these con­flicts and strike us all across national bound­aries. The “inter­na­tional com­mu­nity” needs to be mean more than impres­sive chore­og­ra­phy and a few thou­sand ath­letes in Bei­jing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the lead­ers that can tran­scend macho pos­tur­ing and weak-willed apol­o­giz­ing and get those Russ­ian tanks out of Georgia.