Rantle

by Eric Anschutz April, 2007

The recent uproar about CBS and MSNBC “shock jock” Don Imus has served to raise consciousness about coarseness in our public dialogue. Imus has been insulting people for the 30 years that he has been on radio; in fact, his “schtick” has always been the use of sneering and demeaning language to get guffaws from his amused (or bemused) audience. His insults, and those of other right wing radio and TV personalities are generally aimed at public figures (Hillary Clinton is maligned as a “bitch,” and her “thick legs” are a frequent target, as are unsubstantiated and irrelevant hints at her rumored lesbianism). He has maligned Gwen Ifill, one of America’s most endearing and distinguished reporters, who happens to be African American, as a “cleaning lady” allowed by the NY Times to cover the White House. It was only when Imus slandered a group of basketball-playing college girls, most of whom are African Americans, that the walls around that arrogant and mean-spirited man finally came crashing down.

Imus has for many years commanded the appearance of notables on his morning show. Tim Russert, Frank Rich, John McCain, John Kerry, Rudolph Giulianni and the like come to discuss current affairs. Authors, hoping thereby to sell books, appear almost daily to win kind words from Imus about their writings. The Imus program had become a kind of salon for the “in” crowd, all willing to yuk it up with the “I-man” to gain air time and a claim to membership among the beltway elite.

What troubles me is that Imus will almost certainly find a new venue; there is a public demand for that kind of raunchy and nasty and spiteful venom. Following Imus’ firing by CBS and MSNBC, hate mail came pouring in, not against Imus, but against the Rutgers college girls, and in support of Imus. And the vitriol continues unabated, even without Imus. We will continue to hear daily from Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Drudge, Laura Ingraham, and endless others.

The heroes of this whole tawdry affair are the Rutgers students; their grace, their dignity, and their willingness to forgive the crudeness and cruelty of their attacker, puts the chattering classes to shame. One of them, Kia Vaughn, said, after learning of Imus’ remark: “I’m a woman, and I am someone’s child. I achieve a lot, and unless they’ve given the name “ho” a new definition, then that is not what I am.” There have been endless commentaries on the Imus affair; none comes close to the beauty and elegance of Ms. Vaughn’s statement.

No discussion of public vulgarities can be complete without reference to rappers – whose denigration of women, especially black women, is nothing less than disgusting. And then there is Jessie Jackson, famous for his description of New York as “Hymietown,” and Al Sharpton who stands by his Tawana Brawley fantasy to this day. More recently we have Mel Gibson with his anti-Semitic rants, and Michael Richards’ tirade against African-Americans. Every day we hear relentlessly anti-Bush diatribes, albeit couched in parody, from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert. And, setting the tone for all of us, critics of the war are derided daily by the President and the Vice President as unpatriotic, unsupportive of our troops, and motivated only by base political motives.

We can hope that the ongoing discussion, spawned by the Imus affair, will lead to a gentler and kinder public discourse. But, somehow, I doubt it.

by Eric Anschutz, March, 2007

I read someplace that when a man and a woman conceive a child, there are 8.4 million possible mixes of maternal and paternal genes. Thus, the odds of any one of us achieving life are remote. Because those 8.4 million to one odds apply to a given set of parents, the odds get far greater when we take into account the small likelihood that our parents would meet and marry. When all of this is added together, we see that the odds against any one life coming into existence border on infinity.

Life is precious. We all know that. But we don’t often pause to consider just how miraculous, how amazing it is that any one of us was conceived and born. Each of us is unique. We know that, too. But to understand just how unique, just how individual, we need to consider the odds: infinity to one! How dare we complain about our lot in life when the very fact that we are alive at all, against such impossible odds, is of such cosmic relevance? How dare we see ourselves or our lives as ordinary or pedestrian when our very existence results from the confluence of such infinitely unlikely events?

By virtue of the odds against our conception, those of us who live are among the chosen ones. Who or what rolled the dice that brought us to life, thereby denying life to infinite numbers of others who might have been conceived in our place? Did I, or you, take the place of another Einstein or Beethoven or Edison or Shakespeare? Do we not therefore owe it to ourselves, our parents and to the human community to make the most of our allotted years?

I don’t mean to imply that life should be a burden. On the contrary. We are fortunate beyond belief to be alive, but that doesn’t mean that we are obliged to spend our lives “paying” for the privilege of life. As I see it, recognizing and appreciating our good luck is enough. Beyond that, what we “owe” to life is to live it fully, do unto others as we would have them do unto us, do some good deeds, accomplish some useful things, enjoy every day, smile and relax and enthuse about birds, and bees, and flowers, and clouds, and sunshine, and snow and sparkling waters, and (perhaps above all) love and respect one another.

War, it seems to me, is the ultimate insult to the magnificence of life. When electing our leaders, one of the tests we need to apply is the willingness and determination and intelligence that each candidate would bring to the search for non-violent means of resolving conflict.

by Eric Anschutz, April, 2007

Americans of every political stripe share a concern about the state of our world. Relationships between our country and much of the Islamic Mid-East range from tense to hostile to incendiary. There is growing concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility that some may come into the hands of terrorists, especially those driven by irrational religious extremism.

To compound some of these anxieties, the role of nation-states is diminishing, while the role of sects and sub-national players expands daily. These sub-national groups, Al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the like, wield power, far greater than their numbers would suggest, because of their readiness to kill any and all who stand in their way, and because of their willingness to perform suicidal missions. These insurgents and terrorist groups are difficult to root out and defeat militarily because they live in population centers, because they do their murderous deeds in everyday locations such as shopping areas and busy intersections, and because they are often difficult to identify; most have “day jobs” driving taxicabs and teaching school, or even serving as local police.

We cannot hope to guard every market place, every mosque, every hospital and every school all the time. Nor could a “trained” Iraqi army and police force do so. Baghdad has become a place where every car and truck is a possible explosives-laden missile, every grandmother is a possible terrorist with nail-studded dynamite under the tent of her burqa, and every wedding party, every school building and sporting event is a possible target.

We are told that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will follow us to our own streets. Maybe, but I doubt that. Terrorists on the streets of Baghdad are Arabs with few if any skills in the English language, and little if any knowledge of our culture. Those who might follow us to America would find it difficult to blend into our communities without being detected. It is said that al Qaeda cells already exist in America; if so, that threat has so far been fully contained. Our police and FBI are demonstrably much better at this kind of thing than Iraqi police, and better than American soldiers in Iraq, who must do their work in a alien culture with no local language skills.

It is of course possible, perhaps even probable that we will one day suffer another major terrorist attack against the American homeland. But I think that the assertion that “they will follow us home” if we pull our troops out of Iraq is specious and misleading. Our troops will leave Iraq one day, if not this year or next, then some day in the future. And so far, with every passing month that we stay in Iraq, the numbers of terrorists has increased. Their ranks are replenished constantly, even as we kill and capture them by the hundreds and thousands. The war in Iraq, and the large American presence in the Middle East, has rallied Moslem extremists against us in ever-increasing numbers.

My thought, just thinking… is to leave as soon as logistically possible, within months, not years. If the Shia and Sunni extremists are determined to continue their civil war, let them do so without our troops standing in the middle. We are now spending some $10 billion every month in Iraq; once we withdraw our troops, we could allocate a fraction of that amount to enhance our homeland security, and a further fraction to create economic and diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East, making deals with all those willing to make them in exchange for peace, and save the lives and limbs of countless American soldiers in the process. To stabilize the wider Middle East, and to bring lasting peace to the region, we must negotiate with Iran, with Syria and with Lebanon, and find ways to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem.