It’s also snow Moments and snowmen!

There’s lots more at my talented wife’s blog and Flickr account.

I don’t know about you, but I suddenly feel really WASP-y looking at these pics – like Thomas Kinkade or Martha Stewart suddenly dropped by to decorate our yard and family for the holidays. It’s a little too perfect…

Somebody stop me! I can’t stop writing!

One quick word about this Warren/Obama flap:

I completely get the gay/liberal community’s outrage at Warren giving the invocation. It’s a very prestigious and visible spot on an historical occasion. I think they’re justified, and I would never presume to tell them they’re out of line by saying this is a mistake, especially on the heels of the Prop 8 debacle. I hope that this further motivates them to put pressure on Obama to carry through on his campaign promises to the GLBT community.

That said, having come from an Evangelical background, I can’t feel the outrage as much. Warren is much more stylistically progressive than many of the characters that have inhabited the pulpits at churches I’ve attended, and I fully get his sincerity when he says he “loves the gays”. I’m sure he does, even as he baffles and outrages that community with his overheated analogies. In my experience, Evangelicals as individuals tend to come through and shine when the chips are down and someone needs to be taken care of, even though as a group politically they act like spiritual bulls in a china shop and are on the losing side of the struggle for hearts and minds on this issue.

And that said, I also am amazed at the sense of liberals feeling betrayed by Obama. The guy has been nothing if not consistent in this transition in his pledge to bring the “civil” back into civil debate. He didn’t punish Lieberman, he’s reached out to McCain, he’s made pragmatic choices to ensure maximum good governance, stocking his cabinet with Dems and Reps, and now – surprise! – he’s reaching out to both sides again by bookending his inauguration ceremony with Warren, representing millions of progressive-leaning Evangelicals, and Lowery, a civil rights leader in full support of gay marriage. As a liberal, its seems to me that if you’re going to be outraged about Warren, then you should be stoked to the same degree about Lowery – a preacher unapologetically supporting gay equality as a civil rights leader with moral cred and who is taking the message to blacks, a community with notorious antipathy to being gay.

Obama’s making a simple statement: we’ve all got to stretch a little to push forward together in the places where we agree. As Frank Schaeffer, son of the famous Evangelical Francis Schaeffer, says in HuffPost:

I’m pro-Obama, pro-gay rights. I’m a former once burned, twice shy, ex-evangelical, son of a founder of the Religious Right, now a writer excoriated by the right as a traitor. And Let me tell you why Obama is — again — wiser than his critics in picking Warren to pray at the inauguration…

Unlike his lefty critics lamenting Obama’s ideological impurity, the President-elect is actually positioning himself to help gay rights. That is because he is going to actually govern, not stand on the sidelines complaining. As such he needs to do all he can to soothe the idiots, when it comes to the tough social/political issues that are the residue of 30 years of culture wars.

In inviting Warren, President-elect Obama is sending a signal that as President he is going to stick with resolve to doing the tough things when it comes to using some political capital on behalf of the gay community. He knows symbols are important and is softening the blow for the vast number of evangelicals to whom Warren is a hero.

The whole post is worth a read, and I completely agree. And, I hope this gives this the GLBT community more impetus to continue to engage and put pressure on PE Obama to deliver on his promises.

Bob, welcome back. To you and Stephen and Maria, I appreciate the questions and the mental pause they gave me to consider beyond just my raw heartbreak, sadness and frustration.

Bob, you asked:

…at what point after the 9/11 attacks was a line crossed by Pres. Bush that constitutes the ‘moral failure’ of which you speak? Is it at the point of lifting the Geneva Convention rules, or is it at some other place?

I’m going to be blunt in saying that I don’t think Bush had the personal moral foundation to even take office, much less make decisions of this gravity. My read on him before the election (including his mocking of Karla Faye Tucker’s execution among other things) and one that’s been vindicated a thousand times over since, is that he is a deeply unintrospective, unwise and unserious man. His moral landscape is a childish cartoon of black and white villans and heroes, and his willful refusal to deepen his own capacity for healthy adult ambiguity and wisdom predetermined, I think, both his vastly (almost criminally) incompetent leadership as well as the stain he inflicted on America in a new embrace of torture as official policy. He was, sitting in the most powerful office in the world with all of its pitfalls and pressures, a guaranteed moral time bomb.

That said, you asked about “the line”. Defining the line that has traditionally constrained America in protecting our security has been the heart of the issue all along – determining the right place to be in the murky clouds of interrogation methods, international agreements, urgency, what is legal, and above all, what is morally right. I’ve blogged about this dilemma for myself before:

The movie [Clear And Present Danger] is just OK, but it made me wonder about something that’s popped up for me a few times about Christianity and people who deal with violence on a regular basis as part of their work — CIA interrogators, special ops military personnel, spies, prison guards, undercover cops, etc. etc. This society we enjoy is preserved in a number of ways by people willing to engage in violence for the sake of protecting us. They provide a certain kind of safeguard for normal and nice people to enjoy their neighborly lives. I wonder how people in those professions manage to retain their connection with their Christianity. Is it possible to follow closely in the footsteps of Christ, be told in church that “if you’ve done it to one of the least of these, you’ve done it to me” and still work over a suspect until they talk or assasinate a target?

I don’t know the answer to that question, and it’s a huge issue to wrestle with on the scale of deciding the fate and security of a whole nation, especially in great uncertainty when the nation was wounded so visibly and deeply, as we were on 9/11. I found some great reading on this while thinking about my response:

First, a good example of what Ta-Nehisi calls “weak-sauce” – a jot and tittle argument by the National Review that the torture, humiliation and deaths were “legal” outside the Geneva Convention, and therefore somehow less abhorrent or justified, because the combatants were not state-sponsored. They completely sidestep any real evaluation of the human/spiritual/moral dimension involved, even though their editor makes a lot of loud-n-proud noise about being a conservative Catholic. (Note: The Review has been stubbornly and steadfastly almost 100% wrong over the last eight years as Bush cheerleaders — still! — so I feel completely comfortable writing them off just on that basis, much less the merits.)

Second, a much more thoughtful and compelling series of posts from the Atlantic’s (what a great magazine!) Ross Douthat, a conservative, trying to grapple with Bush’s legacy on this. The posts in order are here, here, here and here. He basically comes down to admitting that while presidents have had to give the order approving horrific acts, such as Truman ordering the atomic strikes on Japan, the Bush administration lacked similar justification, especially for how broad and aggressive the orders were to implement torture.

So, what do I think the line was, and where it was crossed? From a moral perspective, I think there were a few lines, crossed in several ways.

First, our national trust was breached when Bush made the decision to use 9/11 as a “fear lever” for any and every politicized overreach his administration could dream up – cloaking the GOP in an untouchable cloak of patriotism that silenced/dismissed dissent around foreign invasion, energy policy, and a host of other issues. Our nation was wounded, badly, on 9/11. We were full of rage and near panic. The Bush administration was exactly like those charlatan preachers that prey on the fears of seniors to bilk them of their money. We were afraid, we trusted, we were taken for a ride. That’s immoral behavior.

Second, the official decision to pursue traditional torture techniques like waterboarding was beyond the pale, and speaks, in my mind, to morally diseased motivation. This is especially true, given what we now know: torture just doesn’t work. This has been extensively verified, most notably by real, effective interrogators dealing with actual al Qaeda members in actual, “ticking time bomb” combat conditions. A simple review and enhancing the existing methods and safeguards would have been more than sufficient, but instead Cheney went back to Vietnam-era black ops programs as a starting point for our official policy. Why would you do that unless you had a predisposition to, at some level, wanting to be agressive, punitive, retaliatory – beyond the point of civil, reasonable policy or morality? Bush’s immorality is his unquestioning embrace of this mindset.

Third, the attempts at legal cover, obfuscation and even hubris around this new dark legacy of torture reveals premeditation – a need to justify something morally incorrect by either hiding it or daring the public to enact a consequence. From day one of this new policy, the White House employed its lawyers to cover its tracks in case of possible future attempts of war crimes, and pursued an Orwellian policy of redefinition of torture as something else not so hard to stomach. Piled on that, it harshly punished soldiers like Lynndie England as being “bad apples” for simply carrying out its own policy and attempted to silence and ruin the reputations of honorable soldiers like Captain Ian Fishback for whistleblowing. And as a final insult, Bush refuses to own any of it at practically the same time Cheney clearly states that he advocated waterboarding.

Put all this in context of it happening in a direct relationship with another human being. Obviously, there’s not a direct equivalence for nation states with personal human relationships, but these are human beings leading us and their decisions/motivations mean something morally. When you lose, or don’t have, the capacity as leader to make these decisions with some fear and trembling and some sense of taking responsibility, when you go to more lengths to protect yourself from legal action than you did to prevent someone from dying while being tortured, when you use the power of your office to persecute whistleblowers and proclaim your hubris because the protections it gives you – it is immoral and you are responsible.

I include Rick Warren in this list of let-downs because as a Christian leader in a very influential public position, he had the same duty to speak out as Nathan did to David about his crime against Bathsheba’s husband. I’ve heard numerous times in church from preachers like him that you have more of a duty to do this to leaders that loudly proclaim your same Christian faith, as Bush has often done. That he did not, and equivocated about it by saying “it never came up”, is a moral and spiritual failure. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary stances by our public leaders in all areas, and he, among many others, failed that test of moral leadership.

Stephen, in one sense, I take your response as true for the nation as a whole (especially about the financial crisis). As Ross Douthat says in his thought-provoking post:

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved – because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do…

But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us – not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn’t get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds – to return to where I began this rambling post – the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

But, to be clear, I never felt this way. Even immediately after 9/11, I felt scared by the where the collective rage and need for a pound of flesh was going to take us as a nation, especially given our leadership at the time. We, as a nation, wrote Bush a blank check and he bankrupted us. But I, and many others, were outspoken about our concerns all through this even through a lot of push-back from our conservative friends and family, and I feel no need to step back from taking our leadership to task. In this one case, I was right, and those who felt the same were right and are justified in our outrage now.

I would counter that to force responsibility on these leaders when they will not accept it for themselves is engagement. We as a national community, need to find a way to complete the narrative of the last eight years in a way that establishes the rule of law and decency for the future – whether its Nuremburg-lite, a special prosecutor, a deep truth and reconciliation process that gives us all an honest look at ourselves, or even a refusal to let Bush’s version of his tenure become the official historical record. These men did not represent the best of who we are, and more than that, they dragged us lower. This shame is theirs to own, fully and, if possible, legally.

I’m weary and depressed tonight. The physical part of it comes from looking down the long barrel of another all nighter following a full day’s worth of dev. But my main sadness is mental, and spiritual.

The Levin/McCain report just out this last week officially determined that Bush and his administration willfully set out to implement a policy of torture, replete with interrogation tactics (hypothermia, stress positions, humiliation, simulated drowning) borrowed from regimes like the Viet Cong. It’s also been clear for some time that Bush’s office tasked John Yoo and David Addington with creating a legal framework to give them cover on war crimes prosecution. Hell, Cheney brazenly admitted it to ABC News – saying directly and unequivocally “yes, I approved waterboarding and other tactics”.

Astoundingly, the media still refuses to call these methods torture, instead preferring to parrot the phrases “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, phrases coined by the Nazis to rhetorically obfuscate their crimes. The media also seems perfectly fine to hound Obama on non-existent ties to the buffoon of an Illinois governor, while giving Karl Rove space to say, with a straight face, that Obama needs to be more transparent. And Rick Warren, champion of “Biblical principles”, still cannot bring himself to condemn Bush’s moral failure.

Millions are losing their homes from predatory lending. Our hard-earned tax dollars are being flushed away into the coffers of the same crooks and incompetents that got us into this mess.

These aren’t abstractions. These are families and lives shattered by war, injury, financial failure, fear. These are wounds to the soul and psyche that will take a generation to heal.

Bush is off to a mansion in Dallas, Cheney to a massive personal fortune and ranch in Wyoming, Rove to a leadership spot in the GOP and a commentator on Fox, the media baboons to their six-figure incomes, the incompetents to other circles of power and wealth, Rick Warren to his prestigious pastorship.

We have been let down by our leaders, our truth-finders, our men of God. And for what? Who is left to make an answer for all this besides the bloodied victims and an outrage-numbed and distracted public?

I’m thinking on the 73rd Psalm. Its baffled anguish resonates and feels deeply true.

(taken tonight, our front yard)

Like many other Seattlites tonight, I’m going to write about snow. It happens rarely around here – once, maybe twice, a winter – and it’s always magical. We have about 1/2 inch right now, projected for 2 or 3 by morning. Amira has been talking about snow for at least a month now, maybe more, so I know she’s going to want to get right out in it tomorrow. It’s a good thing, too. Her Nana and Papa won’t be able to make it over here tomorrow like they planned, so the snow will help mitigate things.

Janece and I have a fond connection to the snow, too. I grew up in Utah where it would regularly snow 3 and 4 foot drifts at a time. When I was a teen we lived in a house in North Salt Lake on a steep ridge with a steep incline on the driveway. The plows came through pretty regularly, but we still had to shovel the driveway ourselves and it was a pain. Almost every outing incurred a tailbone-meets-concrete event, and the snow would often melt during the day and turn to ice overnight, which meant literally using a pick to chop it off.

When Janece and I got married, we lived in Eastlake just north of downtown Seattle. There are a lot of leftover cobblestone streets in that area, which we loved, but they were a bitch to navigate during any kind of snowfall. I remember watching many a car float helplessly down the street with the driver frantically pumping the brakes to no avail. One time we saw a car jammed underneath the tailgate of a van when we came out in the morning. They looked like two moose mating.

One winter we couldn’t get to work for 3 days due to a combination of icy inclines and overpasses that we couldn’t navigate, even in our new Saturn. Seattle just isn’t built for handling snow very well. That particular week was so snowy that downtown was practically deserted. We hiked into downtown, stopped into REI for some hot chocolate, and even got passed by a cross-country skier going down Boren. It was lovely.

But my all time favorite memory is laying in front of our Christmas tree as a kid, drowsily gazing at the dog-eared cardboard Nativity, listening to Nat King Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” with the lights of our tree reflecting on the impossibly large, lazy snowflakes crowding the freezing air outside, filled with a pleasant low-key excitement about Christmas being just around the corner. For those that are cynical about the Christmas season because of no connection to it growing up or remembering the season through a miasma of awkward or negative family experiences, I’m definitely sympathetic, but I can’t really share their visceral distaste. I’ve lived the cliche, and I remember it living up to the hype.

This year is the first that Amira has really been able to fully take in the pageantry around Christmas, and it’s been a blast. We got a tree the other night, and I kid you not when I say it’s the most perfect tree we’ve ever had – 9 feet tall, perfectly conical and lush, with a smell to die for. We had enough money this year for some fun new decorations, and Amira “helped” me hang lights on the deck and on the tree outside tonight. I can only hope she remembers all of it the same way I did – feeling safe, loved, excited and content.

Happy Holidays!

Helluva work week. Really kicked my ass. I think my sister might have had a child during the last 7 days. I should probably call…

Anyway, I’ll be posting fuh realz tomorrow. In the meantime, hope you slept well. I know I will/did.

We were in the $.99 store a couple of days ago. Amira was running around being her usual enthusiastic self. (It’s all interjections right now along the lines of “That is the coolest [object] I ever seen before!”) She found a pink butterfly net on a bamboo pole that particularly caught her fancy. We found her gleefully trying to “catch” the butterflies on the wind chimes display before we had to ask her to back down.

I was monitoring her at the end of the toy aisle when a couple of sisters – one a year or two older than Amira and the other probably 9 or 10, both of them blond and kinda WASP-y – came up the aisle, out shopping with their equally tailored Grandma an aisle over. Amira ran up to them to introduce herself. She’s been on an introductions kick lately, asking the checkers at the grocery store and the college kids working the counter at Taco Del Mar and other shoppers their names and sharing her name and latest finds with them. She believes what the TV has told her – everyone is her friend and wants to be helpful and is interested in listening to her about things she finds interesting. We’re not around other little kids much right now, and she’s naturally extra interested in them. So she introduced herself to the sisters and showed them her net.

Nothing. Just a short stare, no response except maybe the slightest shrug, and the heel turn that left Amira staring at their backs. She smiled and re-tried her opening gambit about the cool butterfly net, a little more tentatively this time. Nothing. She looked at me quizzically with her “why don’t they want to talk to me?” face.

I looked at my daughters dark curly hair and eyes, her rumpled clothes mismatched with her purple splashing boots she loves so much, her beautiful wide open, unguarded face and got pissed.

I wanted to smack the little beeyotches for not even being polite enough to acknowledge that she was talking to them, much less showing some human decency by being friendly. Or maybe scare the bejeezus out of them with the “dark bearded and physically menacing stranger growling about giving his goddamn kid the time of day” routine.

‘Course, smacking or scaring someone else’s kids can get you arrested. Besides, it was more than likely just kids being kids – disinterested more than dismissive or cruel. I think the youngest one even ended up interacting a bit with Amira before rejoining Grandma.

But given my childhood experience of being either ignored, intentionally ostracized, or actively persecuted by kids my age, when I see Amira getting rebuffed I can get suddenly blindsided by a potent, involuntary emotional cocktail of cold fury, hot embarrassment and nauseating rejection. It only takes a second or two for my reasonable adult brain to kick in and referee, but in those seconds I feel a lifetime of shame and anger for being forced to be an unwilling outsider and a ferocious imperative to keep Amira’s wide open and lovely soul hidden away from the emotional catastrophe that is human beings.

Which is, of course, madness. To become fully human, innocence must turn to wisdom, plastic TV reality must give way to acceptance of complexity, surety must evolve to tolerance for ambiguity, shallow affinities must ripen with understanding into the deliberate choices of love. Not one of those things can happen without being wounded a little, or a lot. To hide Amira away would be to condemn her to being an emotional cripple.

So, I’m trying to stay out of it. I’m going to have to let her get smacked around a little bit by the beeyotches, and coach her how to smack back, or pity them for being the little less-than-human animals that they are when they do that, or rise above it all and be a queen.

And more than that, who said her childhood is gonna be like mine? The only thing I know how to teach her is how to deal with a pack of wolves. What if she’s the bully? Or ASB president? I’ve got no map for that.

Out of the two of us, I’m not always sure she’s the one that needs child protective services.

I know that Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, beyond what we’d normally see in a transition, but Obama’s announcements of his security team yesterday cast Bush’s feeble skills and petty partisan weaselhood into even sharper relief.

After the announcement, I read some pundits drawing equivalence between Obama’s selection of heavy hitters and Bush’s selection of experienced hands when he took office, trying to inflate concern that Obama’s picks might mask the same kind of self-congratulatory ignorance that has characterized Bush’s governing of, well, just about anything he’s ever done. To which I say, are you frickin’ serious? Can they be that naive, comparing leadership by merely comparing staff resumes?

Bush’s brash confidence was plastic and un-self-examined, born of a lifetime of entitlement, and his hubris was magnified to terrible purportions in his administration because he stocked it with similarly hubristic managers. Bush has had to win nothing, to take responsibility for nothing – he’s only been given toys to break his whole life.

Obama’s confidence is a deep self-trust born from a lifetime of skill-building and introspection, achievement and hard work, and he naturally exhibits an air of poise and command. He’s comfortable with himself as the leader of this team not because he feels entitled to power, but because he won every inch of ground that was necessary to take that position, and has become more human in the process. This has allowed him to pick a team that is strong-willed and diverse, one that will encourage debate rather than quash it, as the internal Bush team did in such a dangerous way.

Without Obama even taking office, his sure-footed decisions have revealed how horrifying it is that we’ve been at the mercy of the “Decider” for the last eight long years. Obama’s is the shadow government everyone is looking to right now, and already feels more real, more adult, more reflective of American values than Bush’s administration ever has.