Category: Society

The Ink Blot President

The record suggests that the President has been reasonably consistent in the positions he staked out during his election campaign and his presidency.  But we all seem to have trouble seeing it.  Why?

As Frank Rich pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, he is seen as “either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela.”  (See, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!”)

To be sure, all public figures are vulnerable to this Rorschach effect, unless they become caricatures of themselves.  Moreover, Obama is less an ideologue than a pragmatist, a “shape-shifter.”  But this extreme degree of variability calls for explanation.

The underlying psychological principle here is that we see by categories.  The mind takes the raw sense data it gets and does its best to fit into preexisting slots, a capacity that was a huge advantage in our evolutionary struggle to respond rapidly to events.  If we had to consciously consider everything we experienced and decide how to respond, no doubt, we would not have made it as a species.

But Obama confounds our established categories.  For one thing, he is black.  That, in itself, links to a host of categories for all of us, along with a host of divergent assumptions.  Then, he is our first black president, and we don’t have much experience with that category in our minds, much less reconciling the categories of blackness with those for presidential.

Moreover, his arrival on the political stage was meteoric.  We really didn’t have much of a chance to get to know him and figure our where in our minds he belonged.  In 2004, he gave an inspiring talk to the Democratic National Convention.  Four years later, he became its candidate for President.  As a junior senator from Illinois, he did not have much opportunity to become known to us all.

So our minds are still struggling to put together what we know about him.  The task would be hard enough in the best of circumstances but, in this tumultuous environment, charged with conflicting hopes and fears, distracted by the noise of accusations and counter accusations in the media, it may take a long time to establish the new categories we need to make sense of him.

Clearly we won’t all agree on what they are, but they are sure to be less contradictory and bewildering than they seem now.

Or Our Rivals

“Mr. Karzai recently told lunch guests at the presidential palace that he believes the Americans are in Afghanistan because they want to dominate his country and the region, and that they pose an obstacle to striking a peace deal with the Taliban.” It’s an intriguing comment for an ally to make. (See, “Afghan Leader Is Seen To Flout Influence of U.S.”)

On one level, it may well reflect that we are not reliable allies for him personally. In so far as we oppose his efforts to preserve his and his family’s influence at all costs, we might not be the ally he wants. Similarly, if we oppose other forms of corruption in the country or we want to intervene to ensure more fair elections, we might be seen as wanting to “dominate” by replacing feudal and tribal ways of doing business with alien western ways. In that sense, he may believe, we may not “understand” how his profoundly indigenous and traditional culture works.

Last week I commented on Newsweek’s account of the massive waste and corruption in the largely unsuccessful effort to train an Afghan police force. That too seemed based on a cultural disparity. Without a tradition of public service transcending tribal and family loyalties, or a system of public education, it may be unrealistic to expect a police force we would recognize.

But what about our judgment in yoking our war effort to this ally? Rebuked over his effort to dismiss the commission investigating election fraud, he retaliated by inviting Iran’s president to give a talk in the presidential palace in Kabul, a talk in which the U.S. was bitterly attacked. No doubt, tribal cultures do understand loyalty and betrayal as much as we do.

Friday’s Times carries an account of a recent rambling speech in which he accused us and other allied forces in Afghanistan of “perpetrating the fraud that denied him an outright victory in last summer’s presidential elections.” Peter Galbraith, former deputy UN representative to Afghanistan, called Mr. Karzai’s speech “absurd,” adding that it “underscores how totally unreliable this guy is as an ally.” (See, “Afghan President Rebukes West and U.N.”)

Saturday, The Times reported that Karzai called Hillary Clinton to express “surprise” at the reaction his comments aroused, blaming the press. The White House had called the comments “troubling,” but the Times reported that it caused “consternation” in Washington. (See, “In Call, Karzai Tries To Clarify a Diatribe.”)

Diplomats are concerned that his statements may undermine support in the west for this unpopular war. But that is the least of it. Is the war viable under these circumstances?

Karzai’s comments may be “absurd,” as Galbraith says, but, on the other hand, how did we get into this absurd situation? The Bush and Obama administrations cannot have been ignorant of Karzai’s character, temperament and interests. Did they underestimate his volatility? Did they feel we had no choice? Is this another gigantic miscalculation on our part, like the WMD in Iraq?

It’s possible that Karzai is “crazy like a fox,” playing to his local supporters and neighbors. But he seems easily wounded, petulant, impulsive. And even in the official language of diplomacy, Clinton sounds like she’s talking to a child, trying to strike the right balance between sympathy and firmness.

Climatologist and Meteorologists at Odds

Common sense suggests that climatologists and meteorologists would be sufficiently aligned to agree on global warming.  After all, they both work with weather.  But not so.  According to a study released on Monday, “Only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was ‘caused mostly by human activities.’”

Moreover, “More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement ‘Global warming is a scam.’”  (See, “Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming?”)

Climatologists, with few exceptions, are substantially in agreement among themselves about global warming.  But it turns out that those who report the weather on the news are pretty much like the rest of us, divided and often suspicious of what scientists say.

Part of this divergence can be attributed to the fact that each group uses a different science to reach their conclusions:  The models used by meteorologists are “intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but [have] little accuracy more than seven days out,” according to Dr. Heidi Cullen, who straddled both worlds when she worked at The Weather Channel.   She notes: “meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.”

But probably more important is that they belong to different professional communities and have very different jobs.  Meteorology, at least on TV, is part of news, and news today is part of entertainment.  To qualify as a meteorologist one needs little more than a college degree.  Far more important is an engaging manner that can connect with the public, expressing conventional dismay about the discomforts and tribulations of commuting, cancelled picnics, broken umbrellas, etc.  That has little to do with the job of climatologists, who pore over data, write reports, talk to each other and occasionally testify at congressional hearings.

I don’t mean to imply that the work of meteorologists is easy, but while they may belong to The American Meteorological Society and aspire to its seal of approval, the success of their careers depends more than anything on their link with the public.  Climatologists, on the other hand, have their separate professional associations, generally enjoy higher status in the academic world as scientists, though, on the whole, they earn far less and have less public recognition.  Little wonder that many meteorologists can bond with the public against them.

Taking that into account, it’s no surprise they don’t agree.  On the surface it looks like they have the weather in common, but actually that’s about it.

Additional Thoughts On the New Hatred

My post on “The New Hatred” is essentially correct, I still think — but there is more to be said.  As I pointed out here last week, the dramatic increase in economic inequality in our society over the past 20 years was at first compensated for and then disguised by the availability of cheap credit.  The strapped middle class took out mortgages, home equity loans and maxed out their credit cards – while the financial industry extravagantly rewarded those who devised those products and marketed financial instruments based on them. Then the bubble burst.

People’s fears of losing their jobs, their homes, their savings, pensions, medical benefits, and so forth are the root causes for the hatred.  It is misdirected at government by the tea partiers, a cheap, easy, and ideologically driven target.  But events of the past few weeks make it clear that the most immediate targets for the hatred are minorities, those whose numbers and growing education make them true competitors for our dwindling white majority.

Charles Blow summed it up in Saturday’s New York Times:  “A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law.”

These are the more prominent targets, the ones cursed out on the steps of the Capitol.  But Blow also cited a report recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center:  “‘nativist extremist’ groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment ‘patriot’ groups more than tripled over that period.”  (See, “Whose Country Is It?”)

On the other side, he noted a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that tea partiers, along with most members of the Republican Party, “were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and ‘less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.’ This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite).”

Behind the hatred, then, is fear, a fear rooted in real economic developments that will only get worse for those at the lower end of the economic ladder.  That, in turn, can easily lead to yet more desperation and hatred.

Blow summed it up:  “Welcome to America, The Remix.”

Can We Forget and Move On?

The controversies about our new health care legislation will not fade as quickly as Democrats hope, according to an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times:  “While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years . . . .  The reasons are rooted in human psychology.”

The argument by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist, at the University of Michigan is based on the fact that people essentially seek out confirmation of what they already believe.  They don’t like to change.  (See, “The Fight Is Over, the Myths Remain.”)

That’s true, up to a point.  Our minds are not simply rational;  they don’t automatically replace bad ideas with good ones, or put new ones in the place of old ones.  They tend to stick with the familiar, preferring what’s comfortable and known.

But that’s not the only relevant truth here.  People also forget over time. The retention of old ideas depends on the emotional force they hold for those who believe them.  So if the new reforms retain the heightened charge of fear associated with “socialism” or “death panels,” that person might hold on to his negative judgments for some time.  But if there is less ideological fervor, less anxiety – or possibly, even, some new positive emotions associated with greater security — the person might begin to wonder after a while what all the fuss was about.

Also, much depends on people’s actions, how ideas relate to what people actually do.  New patterns of behavior – like going to the doctor more often or the pharmacy – can make old ideas obsolete.  The actions of filling out insurance claims, developing new habits of health care or balancing household budgets will gradually overwrite past habits of thought.  Moreover, if the behaviors associated with the old ideas are not repeated, they will almost certainly fade away.

As a psychoanalyst, I know that memory is conservative, and it often operates unconsciously, but it is also dynamic.  It ties us to the past, but it’s not fixed.  It can reflect other interests and needs we have as we move on with our lives.