The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The Interpreter

28 January 2009

Volume 11, Issue 4

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Our new President sure has caused quite a stir in his first week in office. The consensus across the spectrum is there seems to be no quantifiable anything on really what are the core principles of Barack Obama. There is a lot of spin on the applications so far, some of it I received as comments to last week’s offering, but whether this is spin to appease his far left supporters, or whether they are Obama’s core beliefs, or whether Obama possesses any core beliefs at all, are truly undefined and it might take a while to really know the truth. Then and only then, truth may be only relative and that is no truth at all.

We are surely not going to change any of that here at Wonder Springs, but we will add some thoughts about communities, especially human communities, that hopefully bring some context to the future, which truly is without similar parallels in this country and the world.

“The Interpreter” http://www.jackgladstone.com/Pages/buffalo_cafe_lyrics.htm#interpreter is a song by Blackfoot Indian, Jack Gladstone. One of the lines from the song goes:

“In a barroom brawl, he’ll knock you out, then buy you a drink when you come to.”

The link under the song title leads to the rest of the song’s lyrics as well as a little history relating to the song. Jack was raised in Seattle, played football at the University of Washington, in the ancient history when they went to the Rose Bowl, and currently lives in Western Montana.

The job of the interpreter is to provide a means of communication between languages and cultures. Those cultures may share a variety of things in common, they may not. The interpreter seeks to find words and customs to bridge those differences. The barroom incident seems to relate more to customs than language.

The context of the American Frontier is a wise model to what is happening in the United States today. On the Native American side you had basically a communal culture where the concepts of what we today call private property, if they existed, were not all that pronounced, and were subservient to the needs of the community structure of tens and fifties. In the larger community structure of thousands, the ties were much less developed simply because of the demands of environmental survival.

The culture of the White Man was much more hierarchical in nature. The Great White Father ruled from the land where the sun rose, was in charge, owned all the property, and you would submit, because Indian ways were uncultured in comparative arrogance, actually savage in the generalized interpretation. Communities, in the Native American sense, did not and do not exist beyond the concept and influence of the Rez.

The nature of formal discussions were, from the American side, pretty much about property rights relating to land. From the Indian side, God owned the land, because the Great Spirit made it, and humans treated it with respect and reverence, because that is how they continued to survive.

In that respect, Christian missionaries had much more initial success with the Indians than did the Army and frontier settlers. Christian missionaries called the Great Spirit, God, and His Son, Jesus. While the names may have been different, much of the Christian gospel was not all that different than the oral creation myths and stories of the people.

In the Northwest, missionaries were of two strains, either the Black Robes of Roman Catholic priest and monks, or the Presbyterians of the cult of revivalist John Finney. Both groups of missionaries carried a strong sense of Christian piety, required in order to be saved and to maintain your salvation. Missing from both of these efforts was the Reformation concept of specific unmerited grace leading to personal justification before God. Hence we see in Native American communities today, a return or commingling of native religions and Christianity, which is not that much different than the general American culture of “spiritual but not religious.”

What this leads to really is two divergent cultures, based essentially on the role and definition of property as it relates to the individual and to the larger community. Again when you look at the far left and far right of American culture today, the vocabulary may be socialism and by extension communism, and capitalism and individual property rights, but they are really the common grace tension between the community and the individual.

In North America for much of the nineteenth century wars were fought over these concepts. The historic context of the American south, the Civil War was a struggle between states rights and federal sovereignty, more than the issue of slavery. Again the underlying issue is and was the conflict in definitions of individual property, individual liberty, and community values. Except in the magnitude of the chaos, the Civil War was not all that different than the Indian wars.

If you watched the television series on John Adams, each episode was introduced with a rolling series of pictures of various flags of the revolutionary era. One of those was a flag with a serpent stating, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Notice in the colonial sense it does not say, “Don’t tread on Us.” This is contrasted in the picture series with a similar rattlesnake symbol, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, this one cut in pieces, symbolizing the disunion of the colonies.

What we have discussed thus far is not the Biblical and creation concept of “Unity in Diversity,” but “disunity in diversity.” Without an interpreter of both language and culture, any diverse civilization will disappear and chaos or worse will quickly follow.

Before we try to interpret this in some context, let us look at another couple of illustrations.

It has always been a question to me why Jews in Hitler’s Germany were willing to get on trains that reality truly pointed toward extermination? Five million Jews basically obediently contributed to their own demise, they didn’t run away, they didn’t revolt. There was something that tied all those Jews together, which is unfathomable to most Americans, and it is definitely not part of contemporary American culture. I would submit that it was the Jews sense of community that overcame, or limited their individual fears and discernment of Hitler’s reality.

More succinctly, the community unity was more important than individual liberty. It may look as foolishness from my or your historical vantage point, but Hitler used the strength of the Jewish community to attempt to exterminate the Jews, because they held a community view different than his atheistic Arian supremacy.

Chicago has been the center of urban community organization from the middle of the twentieth century. The program functions in basically political power, Democrat Party political power. This centers in principles of community identification through radical confrontation with the establishment. Saul Alinsky, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants, wrote “Reveille for Radicals” in 1946, and Rules of Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer of Realistic Radicals” in 1971.

These documents were Barack Obama’s reference materials when he served as a community organizer in Chicago and probably the basis for much of his public life hence. Alinsky’s writing were also the basis for Hillary Clinton’s senior honors thesis at Wellesley.

The essence of much of Alinsky’s work is grassroots organization to confront what generally is called the establishment. In Obama’s presidential campaign, you see that grassroots organization ability, contrasted with Hillary the symbol of the Democrat Party establishment. A true community organizer rather than a thesis topic, now overcame what worked for Bill and Hillary in the 1990s.

Furthermore, it must be pointed out that our President chose to become a community organizer. In a sense it is a learned behavior, practiced through his post educational adult life. That life took place in the Afro-American community of Chicago, and while those skills got him to the Presidency, it is also the reason why most Americans attribute to him either their highest dreams or their worst fears. Time will tell whether Obama is true to the liberal Chicago machine or adopts a very pragmatic view of leadership.

The dichotomy is that confrontation with the establishment is a much different skill set than managing and leading the establishment. In that sense he must become not just an interpreter, but rather “The Interpreter” for the nation and also to some extent the world. Radical ideas are not the basis for wise government.

“Words, just words,” are not going to cut it for any interpreter. Words have meaning and as we have seen, they directly touch the community in which they are used, as well as how they interact with other cultures and communities. You can use special interest words and definitions when organizing a radical special interest community. In order to work in uniting diverse communities, words must be used to formulate specific mission statements that not only make sense in the underlying communities, they must reach a sense of applied purpose.

Herein lies the weakness of the radical organizational model, because the radical organizational model assumes that the radical rhetoric is a truth. When formed in community situational ethics and morality, the reality that this goal is based upon any greater absolute reality is essentially stupid luck. Stupid luck does not build community, but facilitates chaos and eventually anarchy.

That means that the words must be crafted towards the oneness of the human community pilgrimage rather than the individual, but at the same time cannot neglect the reality of the individual as a distinct personality. This requires some understanding of transcendence beyond total naturalism (nature is all there is) whether or not you believe in God or a Higher Power.

Then to further complicate the transcendence, it must be naturally obtainable, in definable and generally understood specific steps. The failure of the Bush Administration’s war on terror wasn’t really in the generalized transcendent mission. The failure stemmed from both, not enlisting the general population in the goal, by even some token of sacrifice or calling, but also by not communicating a reality that the war in Iraq in someway related to the terror war.

The difficult mission is the easy part. The impossible application is where it really becomes exciting. This application requires the synergy of both a self-sufficient community structure and also access to continuing energetic resources. In simple terms you have to have enough people to get the job done, and you have to provide enough resources to accomplish the mission.

Again, it has been pointed out by many, that in the War in Iraq the numbers were not there initially and really neither were the resources. So we see in the Iraq War virtually a significant failure of all the community-building requirements we have proposed.

Now many have wisely reported that the American homeland has not seen a terrorist attack since 9-11. The analysis of why the September 11^th attack was successful was a “failure of imagination.” The American intelligence community did not believe that such an attack was possible; hence they never looked seriously for that potential, even though the intelligence in hindsight displays data the shows that terrorist work proceeded systematically towards that end.

Part of the reason, if not the most significant, we were not again attacked, was the Bush Administration reality of taking the war to the Islamic lands of the terrorist jihadists. This again was never publicly communicated or interpreted to the American people or the world at large.

The reality of the Obama election was that detailed Chicago community building strategies worked. However, the United States is not in anyway a liberal Democrat or conservative Republican political machine, even though the politicians from both parties work in lockstep to maintain their power. The people of the United States are generally slightly right of center politically.

That means essentially that Obama must govern near the political center if he is to succeed. He wants to succeed or he would not have gone to all the effort, not only in the campaign, but probably moving to Chicago after he graduated from Harvard Law School. There surely are almost a universe of places a man of his abilities could have gone and made a whole lot of money without virtually any risk. He chose the difficult path, took the risks and played very tight with his own personal beliefs, whatever they may be.

Thus far his presidency has placated the liberal left with words, not just words, but so far limited actions, but it has been only a week. Those words especially the international funding of abortions and sections of the Whitehouse website that seem to embrace a lesbian, gay, transgender persons with special civil rights, is not going to set well with the vast majority of Americans, that includes conservatives of both political parties, independents, Afro-Americans, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Moslems, the list is long and quite inclusive in opposition to those views.

We have seen the President in the mold of a Chicago radical community creator. So far he hasn’t begun to build the bipartisan support to which he said he could pull off upon his election. To see if he might be able to make that happen, we look to his life prior to Chicago.

There are a number of articles on the Internet about his father. Barack has also written a book, which gives some insight about Barack senior. Essentially he was a well-educated economist who returned to Kenya to build that nation after its independence from the British. His views didn’t follow that well with African socialism, he was dismissed and basically died of drunkenness and poverty, while his actual death was in a car crash in 1982

Barack’s mother was again well-educated, an anthropologist, who worked in that field before dying of ovarian cancer in 1995. Anthropology is the study of human cultures and their development. Barack’s mother was basically a scientific interpreter of which we know even less personally than we do about Barack. Being raised much of his life by his white grandparents in Hawaii during his developmental years, it would seem that he would become somewhat comfortable in the island’s multicultural community.

Having little experience with the more typical Afro-American community, it would follow that sometime Barack would be willing to invest some time and resources in getting an understanding of the black community, which he would always be associated whether he wanted to or not. Becoming a community organizer in Chicago seems as an excellent choice out of few satisfactory offerings.

After a few years of that type of work what better contrast than a Law Degree from Harvard. Smart, ambitious, and having gained a lifetime experience in the true diversity of the United States, a return to that Chicago community seems to flow completely logically. From there through diligent hard work and keeping his true feelings to himself, we now have the 44^th President of the United States.

Is he a socialist? Since socialism basically destroyed his father, I doubt it, but time will tell. The same holds true with the economics, but he is probably more in the grasp of the present than he would like to be. There is a growing body of evidence that FDR’s New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression. Unregulated laissez-faire capitalism brought about our current meltdowns and the bailouts. Voices from the left say more government, more spending, more taxes. Voices from the right say less government, less spending, less taxes.

I suppose what this country really needs is an Interpreter. Someone who is committed to the job, not his ideology. That is something I have not seen in a President in my adult history. On the frontier the interpreter was a half-breed, that nobody associated with, other than when he had a job to do. How he did his job rested the future of the frontier community. Welcome Barack, to a new economic frontier for the United States of America and the world.

“In a barroom brawl, he’ll knock you out, then buy you a drink when you come to.”

© 2009 Wonder Springs, under Creative Commons License 3.0, see website for details.