She is a contender for “Most Infuriating American on the Planet”. After George W. Bush’s departure, the world needed a figurehead on which to direct frustrations with the ignorant American.  The beauty of the gift that arrived was that not only was she innocent of any real background in world affairs, gun-loving and prone to delightfully unfortunate colloquialisms in her adorable Alaskan accent, she was also incestuously aligned with pro-life evangelicals, the worst of studied, American scientific know-nothings and small town, hell-raising future Tea Partiers.  More importantly, she had the most photogenic gossip fodder for family since the Kennedys.  The world had found the new American it could love to hate, the very personification of all that was wrong with America.  AND she was hot.

Most of the international reaction to Palin was predictable.  Her (albeit downplayed) evangelical allegiance was bound to draw sneers from left-leaning journalists the world over. On April 9, 2008, French weekly Le Point called Palin “the fanatic of the American heartland”.  Her literalistic approach to religious narrative was enough to push some Europeans over the edge: “Who literally believes that Jonah made his home in a whale’s abdomen? Nobody really, apart from the US president – and the woman who was recently added to the 2008 Republican ticket.” said John Gibbons of the Irish Times in the heat of the 2008 election.

Unlike countless Americans with knickers-a-twist about Bristol Palin’s very obvious pre-marital knocking-up or Palin’s sister’s messy divorce, much of the world barely shrugged at these moral inconsistencies in candidate Palin’s family.  A Huffington Post piece on Buenos Aires residents’ reactions to the Palin nomination contained this reaction from architect Augusto Stigol, “I just wouldn’t consider the personal situation of a candidate. That’s related to his or her private life.”  This sentiment echoed the views of many continental Europeans that are almost disappointed if their leaders are not at least tangentially implicated in a saucy bedroom romp.

But while many were forgiving of and indeed, grateful for the soap opera drama that Palin et family brought to world political gossip, the less pardonable sin the world community pinned on the Alaskan had to do with one of the reasons she was so popular with much of the red-state electorate: her folksy, small-town, conservative, hopelessly-insular-yet-oh-so-patriotic-straight-shooting.  As reassuring as her dialect was to millions of Americans, she was jaw-droppingly alienating to much of the world community.

Take the East Asian commentary that erupted after Palin’s trip to Hong Kong to speak to those gathered for the annual investment forum for the Hong Kong-based investment bank, CLSA.  The Asia Sentinel rants that the standing-room-only crowd was treated to “90 minutes of boredom which had half the audience fiddling endlessly with their Blackberries. Ninety percent of her speech could have been – and probably was – written for a domestic US audience receptive to her ‘mom and pop’ populism.”  The speech was mostly an assault on US politicians she disagreed with, Obama’s health care overhaul and “the very notion of income redistribution” (Asia Sentinel).

The narrowness of Palin’s heartland rhetoric and her overall lack of world knowledge was annoying but hardly surprising. Palin’s 2008 vice-presidential run had unearthed precious gems such as her infamous claim to knowledge of Russia because you can see it from Alaska.  Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron claimed that Palin thought that Africa was a country and she didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA.  Her international travel was practically non-existent as she got her first passport ever in 2006.

Yet paired with global amazement at her lack of international savvy was fearful admiration of Palin’s political potential and raw popularity that, in more recent days, have cemented her undeniable status as Republican kingmaker. Conservative candidates are scrambling for her endorsement ahead of mid-term elections in the US.

As blogger Sarah Britten in South Africa’s Thought Leader put it, Palin is “a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, Creationist, anti-abortion hockey mom who — to make that mouthful even more distasteful to Prius-driving pinko-liberal Obama-supporters — also has sex appeal and the apparent ability to connect with ordinary middle Americans”.

Palin is recognized worldwide as a force to be reckoned with.  And there are those that don’t share the left-leaning tendencies of much of world thought leaders.  “There are few sights more bloodcurdling than the liberal pack in full cry,” writes Janet Daley in an article titled “Sarah Palin gets the spiteful Margaret Thatcher treatment” in Britain’s Telegraph.

The viciousness of the attacks on Sarah Palin is a testimony to the degree of panic … in Leftist circles… She is a renegade, the gender equivalent of an Uncle Tom…. Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.

What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them – even if they do not manage to uphold them.

The life of small-town USA is based on the principles of those Protestant colonial settlers who founded the nation: hard work, self-improvement, personal faith and family devotion. Mrs Palin speaks to and for them in a way that patronising “liberal” elitists find infuriating.

As much as liberal commentators may find comparisons between Palin and Margaret Thatcher laughable, they are not completely unfounded.  Before the bulk of the Thatcher/Palin talk – way back in December 2008 – long-time Thatcher Aide, John O’Sullivan wrote a Wall Street Journal article titled Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin / I know Maggie Thatcher. The two women have a lot in common. O’Sullivan speculates about the future:

She has plenty of time, probably eight years, to analyze America’s problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability… she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter’s speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That’s the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

And that is why this folksy fighter can’t be written off.  She may turn off the urban elite along with huge swaths of the blue states.  But this scrappy pit bull always comes back, usually connects and never forgets her lipstick.  Under the liberal sneer of disdain lies fear and trembling.

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Remember John McCain’s “Obama fame” epiphany during the 2008 presidential elections? His negative ad pegged Obama as out of touch and the “world’s biggest celebrity”, pejoratively splicing in clips of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with crowd shots of Obama rallies as the Democratic contender drew record numbers both at home and internationally.  Reactions abounded. Paris Hilton struck back with this parody ad about the “wrinkly white haired guy”, the “oldest celebrity in the world”.  The media was abuzz as, at least temporarily, the message of Obama’s supposedly counterproductive celebrity seemed to stick with some voters. But ultimately the roadblock proved incapable of doing any real damage and the young Democrat rode his wave of popularity all the way to a very decisive November 4th win.  The raw celebratory energy worldwide was palpable.  Gone was the bumbling, trigger-happy Texan who had infuriated world citizenry with his failure of a foreign policy and the near-sighted disaster of an economic policy that had brought the world to its knees. Impossibly high expectations and desperate hopes for something far better were pinned on the new guy. Conservatives prayed for the bubble to burst while liberals crossed themselves, willing global patience with the new administration.

Skip to the present.  As fickle as the American electorate can be, and despite his substantial drop in domestic popularity, Obama’s international celebrity and popularity have remained high.  While American memory of the blunders of his predecessor may be fading, international scars are still keenly felt and there’s still much hope in the new president.  Cracks are appearing though.  Take recent daggers thrown in the UK over the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Conservative UK commentator, Norman Tebbit, recently called Obama’s approach to the BP disaster a “crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance.”

The source of UK anger against Obama stems from what is seen as an overly aggressive stance against BP.  Tebbit’s rant finds at least partial backing in some of Obama’s BP-related posturing:

“crude” = “I don’t sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar… we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.” (Obama’s June 8 NBC interview)

“bigoted” = The relentless attacks on Obama’s attacks on BP as the disaster spirals completely out of control and Obama plays into British accusations of of “‘buck passing’ and ‘beating up’ the British-based company” (Daily Mail) instead of problem-solving.

“xenophobic” – Obama’s occasional use of the name “British Petroleum” that BP dropped years ago and therefore (it can be argued), playing this up as an issue with Britain when really this is the mistake of a multinational, a large stake of which is American.

“Winding up a hate campaign against the British is not a terribly smart policy. It may win Mr. Obama political support amongst the less well-informed voters right now, but the long-term effects are less sure. BP is also a major US company. Busting it might not be a very smart idea and not just on economic grounds. The message that non-US companies are likely to be treated as political punchbags would be a profoundly political message, too.”  (Tebbit)

Joining the ranks of political malcontents, Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, said that he was concerned about “anti-British rhetoric” and “name-calling” from American leaders.   And it’s not just a few oversensitive conservative politicos that are pissy: the UK’s Sunday Times quoted a survey that stated 64% of Brits and 47% of US residents claim Obama’s handling of the BP crisis hurt the relationship between the two countries and that in both countries, 22% of respondents went as far as calling Obama anti-British.

As exciting as this rift-rhetoric can be, much of the Anglo-American hand-wringing about it took place before a June 12 conversation in which Obama tried to soften the perceived attack on Britain over the disaster by saying that his unhappiness with BP had nothing to do with its British identity. Following the conversation, The Times‘s journalist Giles Whittel wrote: “The notion that American attacks on BP are anti-British is embarrassing. It is a fiction incubated by the thin-skinned, solipsistic and broadly anti- American world view that bubbles up like warm bitter in the best-kept villages of Little England whenever anyone in Washington has the temerity to break with the tradition of referring to the Old Country and its pretensions with anything other than awed admiration.”

Further evidence that Obama wanted to make peace?  He put beer on the table.  The trick worked a year ago when Obama invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and white Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer after causing an uproar by saying the police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct. This time around, Obama and Cameron wagered a beer over who would win the June 12 US/England World Cup game.  When the teams tied, the politicos presented each other with their respective beers and gushed about the special relationship between the two countries.

There’s even a chance that the Anglo-American relationship will improve after the BP fiasco.  The evidence? Obama’s gift-giving is improving.  A beer far outshines his last gift to a British PM.  In exchange for an ornate pen holder from former PM Gordon Brown, Obama presented the British leader with a set of DVDs that don’t even work in British players.

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Talk to enough of the American cultural elite about the upcoming World Cup and you’re bound to hear about those ignorant xenophobes in the fly-over states and their backwards claims that soccer is un-American and a gateway to socialism.  Unlike the demographics of soccer in the rest of the world where it is the game of the masses, the bulk of soccer in the United States is confined to women’s leagues, recent immigrant enclaves or upper middle class suburban communities where births are particularly awkward as one has to accommodate the silver spoon protruding from each babe’s rear.

Despite optimistic attempts at tapping into the star power of international brands like Beckham, Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States is at best considered an emerging league and, more frequently, is the butt of jokes in the American sporting world.  This truth puts America at odds with the rest of the world, not because anyone is defending the quality of the MLS (everyone agrees it sucks), but because soccer is, by far, the most popular sport in the world.

The World Cup is not only the biggest sporting event on the planet, IT IS THE BIGGEST EVENT, end of story.  FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, estimates the viewership of the 2006 World Cup final at 715 million viewers.  Despite this kind of worldwide interest in the sport, the average American is barely aware of the World Cup and is still saying things like, “If they got rid of the goal keepers I might watch it.”  The reasons for this kind of unawareness are complex.  Access is one of them. Twenty years ago, following major European games basically required learning a second language and hunting around for obscure international newspapers.  Even today, coverage of world soccer on American sports websites is thin.  But the problem is not just access.  You also have cultural crusaders in what How Soccer Explains the World‘s Franklin Foer calls the “anti-soccer lobby”.

Says Foer: “There exists an important cleavage between the parts of the country that have adopted soccer as its pastime and the places that haven’t.  And this distinction lays bare an underrated source of American cultural cleavage: globalization.”   The message is clear: parts of the country – the blue parts on the electoral map – tend to be more susceptible to globalization and are therefore more interested in a global phenomenon like soccer. The red states cling to guns and religion and baseball and shun outside influences like soccer. Zeroing in on the anti-soccer lobby, Foer sums up the haters’ sentiment as he quotes USA Today’s Tom Weir: “Hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control.”

Foer quotes prominent American conservative, former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp who, in 1986 said the following on the floor of Congress: “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it”; that “a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist (sport).”  It seems that wild claims on the Congressional floor about creeping socialism never go out of style.

Foer also quotes radio shock jock Jim Rome who raved, “My son is not playing soccer.  I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse before I hand him a soccer ball.”  With this kind of rabid and fundamentally maddening reasoning adding to the national conversation, it is no wonder that many stay away from soccer.

Max Bergmann for the Huffington Post: “What is so bizarre about this is how much the neocons sound like American-hating Europeans. Both dismiss American talent, American enthusiasm for soccer, and American understanding of the game. Just as neocons — and other soccer-hating sports writers of my parents generation — insist that we don’t get soccer and don’t care, European soccer writers are right there with them saying that Americans don’t get it and don’t care.”

David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange / The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, claims that American soccer fans  “tend to lean liberal”  like Holland’s national team because they are “predisposed to liking the country itself”.  He then waxes lyrical about how Holland “represents the best that bourgeois society has to offer: a genuine liberal spirit, the epitome of a certain idea of civilization.”

Soccer Against the Enemy’s Simon Kuper writes, “The game remains too good a way of understanding the world to discard.”  “In the States, being a New Fan is often a mark of being a cosmopolitan.  Soccer’s advance in the country is an idex of how American daily life is globalizing.  The two groups of Americans who are probably keenest on the game – immigrants and their direct descendants on the one hand, and the highly educated on the other – are precisely the most globalized Americans.” (He includes Obama, “the alleged West Ham fan… son of a U.S. born mother and immigrant father,” in this cross-section of America).

In The Ball is Round / A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt quotes British historian Eric Hobsbawm who wrote, “The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport.”  Goldblatt says, “This is not exactly news to anyone, but it remains an extraordinary and under-explored anomaly; an almost unique reversal of the dominant patterns of global influence and power.”

So what should the future hold for America and soccer?  Will we continue to see the cultural cleavage grow as it is pushed up by soccer, or are there other options?  As a Swede I’ve had to nurse my own disappointment at not having Sweden qualify for this summer’s World Cup with the hope that the US will go far instead.  The US advanced to the quarter finals in what many considered the coming of age of the US team at the 2002 World Cup.  Americans that had previously not paid attention to soccer learned that the US could not only compete in the sport, but that it had a chance of dominating.   Although the 2006 World Cup was a disappointment, continued American successes, along with the forces of globalization will hopefully result in a burqa being tossed over our supple cleavage.  America has always enjoyed a new frontier to conquer.  Why not soccer?

“Soccer’s mission in the United States is not, I think, to supplement or challenge American football, baseball or basketball, but to offer a conduit to the rest of the world; a sporting antidote to the excesses of isolationism, a prism for understanding the world that the United States may currently shape but will increasingly be shaped by.”  (Goldblatt )

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It was one of those victories that nobody could make any real sense of.  Twenty-four-year-old Rima Fakih from Dearborn, Mich. won the 2010 Miss USA Pageant on May 16 in Vegas and automatically, the blogosphere erupted with the combined firepower of ideologues on various sides of the US culture wars spouting pronouncements and journalists in the Middle East suddenly interested in an event that ordinarily would have been ignored as trivial, carnal and Western.  Why the fuss?  Fakih comes from an immigrant Shiite family with roots in Lebanon, specifically, the southern village of Srifa, near the port-city of Tyre.

One of the loudest voices was the blogger Debbie Schlussel who immediately dubbed the Michigander, “Miss Hezbollah” and started her article by trying to write off the win as affirmative action by PC judges: “It’s a sad day in America but a very predictable one, given the politically correct, Islamo-pandering climate in which we’re mired.”  It was hard to know what was more delightful about Schlussel’s statements: the predictability of her claim that the win was predictable, or the crazed, jumping-up-and-down desperate, “I-said-it-first” garbage she blurted out next: “The Hezbollah-supporting Shi’ite Muslim, Miss Michigan Rima Fakih –- whose bid for the pageant was financed by an Islamic terrorist and immigration fraud perpetrator –- won the Miss USA contest. I was on top of this story before anyone, telling you about who Fakih is and her extremist and deadly ties.”

What were these extremist, deadly ties?  Well, apparently her last name, Fakih, is shared with Hezbollah members and, according to Schlussel, this makes the Midwesterner a “Lebanese Muslim Hezbollah supporter with relatives who are top terrorists and ‘martyrs’ in the group.”  Schlussel helpfully offers:  “If you don’t have relatives that have died killing some Jews and relatives who’ve murdered hundreds of Americans, you really don’t deserve to be Miss USA.”

Hmmm….  If we want to find out about what Hezbollah thinks of Fakih, why not go to the actual source.  Here’s a statement from a Hezbollah spokesperson, Hassan Fadlallah: “The criteria through which we evaluate women are different from those of the West.” What an endorsement.  She’s got to be working for them.

Beirut Online quotes Swedish political scientist Magnus Ranstorp who calls the suggestion of terrorist ties “ludicrous” says, “She would be flogged if she showed up in any of Hizbullah’s neighborhoods in Beirut.”

“My family comes from a Muslim background, and we’re not defined by religion,” said Fakih in an interview with HLN’s “The Joy Behar Show”. “I would like to say we’re a spiritual liberal family.”  What does she mean?  In an article titled “The Not-So-Radical Roots of Miss USA“, Foreign Policy‘s Hanin Ghaddar says that in Lebanon, claims that Fakih has connections to Hezbollah are seen as slander.  Both her American family and Lebanese relatives celebrate Christian and Muslim holidays, right next to each other.  In the entrance of her relative’s home in Lebanon, a Quran and the Bible are placed next to each other and the family is riddled with marriages between Christians and Muslims.  So far things are sounding very extremist.  It gets better:  “Their house is distinguished from the neighbor’s by a big U.S. flag hung from its balcony, surrounded by ribbons and flowers … Fakih’s 62-year-old aunt, Afifa Fakih — the only woman in the household wearing a veil — explained, ‘We love America … without the USA, Rima wouldn’t have fulfilled her dreams. She made us all proud, and for that, we thank the Americans.’ ”

Although there is certainly discontent about her bikini and pictures that surfaced of her fully-clothed in a Detroit pole dancing competition, many Lebanese are proud of Fakih’s win.   The Lebanese President Michel Sleiman congratulated Fakih on his Facebook page. “This is none of their business,” said Aunt Afifa about the Hezbollah snub, “Who cares about what Hezbollah thinks? She is our daughter, not theirs, and Lebanon is proud of her.” (Foreign Policy)

Before her Miss USA win, Fakih said in an interview with Global Arab Network that she hoped a win “would prove that Arabs don’t always try to separate themselves, but instead are integrated into American culture … There are Arabs that are caring, that are good people, and who love the country they live in. I think it would make the Arab image a more positive one.”

And that is perhaps the best outcome possible for the Miss USA pageant that both liberals and conservatives love to hate: a case has been made for looking at Arab culture outside of the context of religious extremism.  Just as Fakih’s family transcends sectarianism and embraces both Muslim and Christian traditions, wins of this nature speak to a more human side of us.  It proves that whether we are from Dearborn or Beirut, we can all come together in praise of superficial beauty and tacky tiaras.

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Of all the points made against racial profiling, this is the one you want to avoid making if your gig is avoiding looking stupid: Racial profiling is wrong because it is not effective.  On the left side of the shouting match about racial profiling you far too often hear someone rattle off all the white terrorists they have ever heard of in an attempt to make a case that there aren’t any ethnic trends in terrorism.  The guy arguing for racial profiling will then start a list of as many brown bad guys as he can conjure up and “From there the conversation will devolve into a contest to see who can name more terrorists, until at some point the segment runs out of time.” (Ben Eidelson for Salon)  Apart from this being an entertaining spectacle to watch, this is clearly a pathetic exercise and even if you are the victor, your long list of terrorists only qualifies you as a terror geek.  It solves nothing.

So what to do instead?  Eidelson’s got the answer: argue that racial profiling is morally wrong.  Two examples:

Arizona: “Arizona’s new law, for instance, will ostracize innocent Latinos, entrench racial suspicions, and lend the government’s endorsement to hostile stereotypes about who “looks American.” It will serve as a regular and painful reminder to Latino Americans that, in the eyes of many, they don’t belong in their own neighborhood.”

Airport Security: “The question is whether officials should consider ethnicity as one factor in deciding whom to examine more or less closely. We should exclude race and religion from those judgments not because everybody is equally likely to be a threat, but because it would be wrong to institutionalize the alienating suspicion already faced by innocent Muslims and Arab-Americans in their schools, workplaces and communities.”

The inevitable retort to this line of argument will be that we have limited resources and border hoppers and plane bombers in recent history tend to fit a certain profile.  So as uncomfortable as it might make weak sauce commies, brown people are getting the pat-down.  Or, as Fox commentator Steven Crowder helpfully puts it, “You’re not looking for a blond-haired, blue-eyed Swede most of the time.”

As easy as that might make airport security checks for this Swede, this kind of lazy pragmatism makes me sick to the stomach.  Simply because something is simpler or more cost-efficient doesn’t make it right.  This kind of racially-charged rhetoric that blames broad swaths of our population for society’s ills was equally convenient in Nazi Germany when a particularly charismatic leader harnessed German efficiency to his less than fuzzy feelings for Abraham’s children.

Change for the worse may at first happen slowly but bigoted thought has a way of snowballing.  On the heels of the passing of the Arizona law sanctioning police questioning of those who “look” like illegal immigrants, we have another encouraging trend from this anachronism of a state:  a bill that seeks to nix ethnic studies in Arizona schools.  The Los Angeles Times correctly identifies the law as a source of great concern for those who believe, “it’s yet another law targeting Latinos in the state.”

Massive opposition to this kind of downward spiral is needed now.  The Los Angeles and San Francisco and, just today, Austin city governments have passed official boycotts of Arizona for most business.  Opposition to institutionalized prejudice should not just be the remit of government.  Don’t fight creeping racism with weak arguments about what color our troubles come in.  We have far greater problems on our hands if we turn back the tide of civil rights progress by claiming that racial profiling is justified because it is more cost and time-effective a method to soothe our woes.  We have come too far and we are too wealthy a society to justify institutionalized prejudice for such petty reasons.  As Eidelson puts it:  “It may simply cost us more — in time, money or convenience — to achieve the same level of success without racial discrimination. Many Americans are fond of the slogan that “freedom isn’t free.” Why should we expect that fairness will be?”

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Had it up to your ears with the holier-than-thou morality bombs that cultural conservatives lob over their protectionist fortresses in the culture wars?  Turns out the red states have one less leg to stand on:  new research surfaces stats that show a much stronger tendency for divorce in the states with the highest tendency to dictate correct “family values” to everyone else.

In Which Is the Party of Family Values?, Slate states, “The right likes to portray itself as the guardian of American families, but the reality is that stable-two parent families are more common in ‘the liberal bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate,’ than they are in what Sarah Palin would call the ‘real America’ “.

Turns out those crazy Massachusetts liberals have the lowest divorce rate in the country and six of the seven states with the highest divorce rate in the country voted Dubya/his boss in 2004 and oldie/hottie in 2008.  Seems like marital disaster follows the most preachy.  In their undying quest to focus on the family as early as they can reproduce, red state traditionalists have created the perfect storm.

As Jonathan Rauch in National Journal Magazine puts it, “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families”.  To unpack that statement, he looks at the ideas put forward by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone (family law professors at George Washington University and the University of Missouri (Kansas City) respectively) in their book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.

The crux of the thinking is this: Conservative cultural and religious crusaders on the right link sex, marriage and procreation in one troublesome lump.  As soon as you emerge from childhood your mentors start making suggestions regarding (obviously) opposite-sex partners which you are encouraged to court for an appropriately short time before tying the knot, banging like goats and producing spawn that, fed the right steak, potatoes and corn bread, will hopefully repeat the cycle.

This all sounds like a great idea as you pass the turkey at Thanksgiving but it makes for a horrible reality when you look at the results of applying cultural standards from a long-gone era to the complexity of the modern cultural landscape.  Liberal or conservative, kids freak; and, in a conservative culture that stresses abstinence over protection, pregnancies occur, especially when you are on the Right side of Roe v. Wade. Back in the day you could afford to get married in-or-right-after-high-school-young because of butterfly love or because someone had gotten knocked up.  Today that is a terrible idea because it is much less possible to bring home bread for two (much less three or four) people on a high school diploma. But tradition rules in red states, early marriages abound and the combined stresses of youth, poverty and offspring often result in divorce.

On the other side of the culture wars are those pesky leftists with their irresponsible sexual mores, over-the-hill singles and baby-killer doctors.  The right sees them as the bane of family stability and values-based living.  Rather than stress sexual abstinence before marriage, the message from these bleeding heart liberals, is: “Have all the nookie you want but whatever you do, stay sheathed and don’t get pregnant and certainly don’t have a child until after college and a stable income.”  Although it flies in the face of traditional morality, according to Cahn and Carbone, this kind of life advice is statistically more likely to achieve the ideal of a stable, two-parent household.

So what to make of all this?  Cahn and Carbone’s statistics seem to say that moral traditionalism has failed in producing stable families.  Should pre-marital sexual abstinence and other conservative values be discarded? Should blue states now take the moral high ground and should Hollywood be allowed to dictate its own morals more than it already does?  As convenient as that would be, Rauch admits, “Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn”.  In the meantime a nonpartisan and fairer approach might be to abandon attempts to establish a hierarchy of cultures and instead focus on common ground.  Sexual morality is open to a variety of interpretations but surely protection is a good thing to stress across the board.  Life preparation over early marriage is another idea that makes as much sense in Oklahoma as it does in New York.  And before children come into the picture, invest in a college fund.

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I struggled with this post.  It’s different from most in that I’m not writing directly about American politics and I am not trying to write on top of the news.  This post is about context.  Specifically, a context rooted in faith.  My faith.  Intellectual suicide?  I don’t think so.  Let me explain.

One of the things that most fascinated me when I started following American politics from across the Atlantic while I was living in the UK, was how openly politicos talked about faith.  If anyone with political aspirations in Europe did anything more than attend a sterile Easter service at a state church, Europeans would write him or her off as a religious nut.  Not so in the United States.

Despite his moral flexibility and playboy approach to saving the world, Bill Clinton was raised Southern Baptist and regularly sought the counsel of religious leaders like Jesse Jackson (who coincidentally was having an affair while counseling Bill on his Monica-related troubles).  We all know that George W. Bush was a man of faith.  His faith was positively troubling as we witnessed his crusade of a post 9/11 foreign policy that permanently sullied America’s image abroad and did more to draw religion-inspired battle lines than any American move in decades.  As cerebral as Barack Obama is, he was famously aligned with the controversial preacher Jeremiah Wright as a member of his flock when Wright spat out the words “God damn America.”  Multiple presidents have sought to address social problems through government funding of faith-based humanitarian programs.

Apart from the faith of recent and current American leaders, the American political landscape is hugely influenced by the religious right which, although somewhat fragmented currently, is enormously influential in any election.  This group of evangelicals ranges from run-of-the-mill casual believers with nominal conservative values and a penchant for apple pie and Nascar to raving lunatics that bomb abortion clinics, harbor closet (or devastating open) hate for minorities and spend their free time trying to legislate the teaching of Creationism in schools and the flying of racist confederate flags in front of state buildings.

More than once on CultureMutt, I have critiqued the evangelical contingent in America.  I grew up as Seventh-day Adventist and as a current member of this conservative evangelical community I feel particularly responsible for the messages that come out of the evangelical camp.  That’s why I:

Blasted Beck over his ridiculous critique of church social justice programs:  Poetic Justice for Beck’s Social Justice Rant

Found this way to lure young male congregants hilarious:  Pound the Other Cheek: The Advent of Christian Fight Clubs

Thought that this approach to evangelical sexual morality was extremely naive:  Virginity 2.0 – Post Cherry-Pop Purity.

Sincerely hoped that religious crazies and their know-nothing dogma were losing steam:  Fundamentalism Loses its Mojo

As faith and politics are very intertwined and as I am so drawn to talking about both, I thought it only fair to say a few words about where I personally stand when it comes to religion.  Some of my readers have, in one way or another, asked me what I personally believe in.  If you have read CultureMutt over the past several months it won’t come as surprise that I am a cultural and political liberal.  When it comes to religion, I hate evangelical cheese and over-simplification of faith; I look for vomit buckets when I hear of attempts to legislate Christian morality; I am pro-choice; I am no literalist when it comes to my approach to reading religious texts; and I am all for gay rights, including the right to marry.

Having said all that, I do believe in the transcendent, that there is a presence that far eclipses the limited human perspective.  I am a religious tourist and have found meaning in all of the major world religious traditions.  My best friend is a Muslim and through my conversations with him I am drawn to a monotheistic approach to faith.  I am convicted by the Christian narrative of a compassionate deity that redeems humans in the grander cosmic sense as well as in our day-to-day reality.

What I feel most passionately about when it comes to my faith is this focus on bringing redemption in the here and now.  I don’t believe, as some do, that actively practicing faith requires an end to intelligent thought.  Rather, my faith challenges me to use critical thinking in finding a humane response to human problems.  I believe that authentic faith breeds understanding, generosity and compassion.  This is why I am passionate about fighting for social justice and finding systemic solutions for today’s social problems.  Poverty, illness, lack of education, drastic social inequality, racism – in my book these are very real manifestations of evil and I support a faith that combats each.

I don’t think I am entirely “right” in my articulation of reality and faith.  I know I have a lot to learn, that I am doubtless wrong on multiple fronts. I’ll listen to your thoughts because they will enhance my understanding of reality.  I intentionally held off on articulating any personal religious convictions on CultureMutt because this blog is not meant to be a forum for the discussion of the fine points of doctrine.  I simply thought that a little context at this point regarding my personal faith-related convictions would help explain where I am coming from.  Looking forward to your thoughts.

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Just because George W. Bush said something doesn’t mean it was dumb.  Or at least that’s what Jeffrey Scott Shapiro seems to claim.  He’s the founder of Honor Freedom, a non-profit created to “Unite Bush Supporters”;  “Correct the Historical Record” and  “Teach America”.  “You don’t need to be a genius to be president,” says Shapiro.  The Honor Freedom website defends the most contentious Bush-era issues like:

1) The Iraq war (and all its disastrous related issues: hyped/non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction; oil greed motivation; the mere suggestion that this was all daddy’s idea, etc.)

2) Why Saddam and his policies were bad and how that justified “the liberation”.

3) The dollars of US aid pumped back into Iraq to clear up Dubya’s mess.

4) “Information on how you can help correct the historical record or start a chapter of Honor Freedom in your area.”

In “The Bush Restoration Project“, Slate’s Jordan Michael Smith says, “Shapiro talks about George W. Bush the way Buddhists talk about the Dalai Lama. ‘He stands for truth, compassion and freedom,’ he says. ‘Bush instinctively sees the global picture that every living person has the right to be free.’ “  Smith exposes the “nationwide public education program consisting of op-eds, media appearances, and free public seminars, the nonprofit group intends to teach Americans that George W. Bush was actually a great president and an even better man.”

Smith quotes Shapiro as saying Bush critics ” ‘are selfish people who don’t see the value of national liberation … isolationists who don’t care that the U.S. freed a people enslaved by fear.’ ”

Inherent in Shapiro’s approach is a realization that Bush’s reputation is in tatters and is in need of immediate mouth-to-mouth.  With the enthusiasm of a fanboy at an early nerd special premier, Shapiro wants to manipulate the public faster than time and presidential libraries can: “Those wishing to restore the president’s reputation must take a pro-active, aggressive approach that exports knowledge to the people. Merely relying on a passive institute such as a presidential library and waiting for people to learn the truth on their own will not be sufficient in this unique case.” (Shapiro in a commentary piece for The Washington Times)

“On much of the world stage, President Bush has been widely reviled as one of the worst U.S. leaders of modern times, and it is hard to think of an American president who has received a worse press since Richard Nixon,” states the UK’s conservative Telegraph.  The paper concedes that early moves in the Iraq war flopped; that Bush’s public diplomacy was disastrous; that his management of global anti-American sentiment failed and his response to Russia over Georgia was cowardly.  However, the same article argues that most of the critiques launched at Bush have been couched in “a venomous hatred of Bush’s personality and leadership style, rather than an objective assessment of his achievements.”  Praising Dubya, the paper raves, “Ten or twenty years from now, historians will view Bush’s actions on the world stage in a more favourable light. America’s 43rd president did after all directly liberate more people (over 60 million) from tyranny than any leader since Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

Time has absolved past presidents (Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman come to mind) of their sins and perhaps Shapiro and his flock will be successful in their spin.  For now though, what does Bush himself think about all this chatter?  It’s not easy to know.  Unlike Dick Cheney, the former president has laid low since leaving office and it looks like we’ll have to wait for his memoir (slated to be published this year) to gauge his current thoughts on his presidency.  And Bush has no formal ties to Honor Freedom. However, Shapiro did recently stay at the ranch of Bush’s nephew, Pierce, who introduced president and salivating one.  “You’re doing good work,” said the president.  Or at least so says Shapiro.

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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer sure knows how to dial back the pace of progress.  Today, Brewer signed into law a bill that will allow police to demand legal status papers from anyone they think gives off an illegal immigrant vibe.  Challenged by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night to provide one non-ethnic clue that law enforcement would pick up on to round up illegals, Rep Brian Billbray (R-CA) said, “They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of — right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes.” 

So if you live in Arizona, your dressing rituals will have to allow for more than color coordination and avoiding your fat pants: You will also need  to gauge just how illegal you look before you walk out the door.  Like two dudes at the movies with an obligatory “I’m not gay” seat between them, who knows the lengths people will go to not look border-hopperish?

It is hard to decide what is more crazy-making: the fact that backers of the law are so prejudiced that they think you can identify undocumented individuals walking down the street based on clothing or vague hunches, or the fact that these fearmongering xenophobes have the naivety to argue that this isn’t going to turn into legally-sanctioned racial profiling.  Brewer claims that she won’t tolerate anything of the sort as, simultaneously, she stokes the fears of Arizonians in a shameless mid-battle re-election bid.

Even President Obama himself has tried to stop this legislation being voted into law.  He deemed the Arizona moves “misguided” and stated that they “threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”  Obama has ordered his legal team to examine the legality of the decision in Arizona and said that there must be national immigration reform or we would allow for more “irresponsibility by others.”

In classic conservative “us and them” prattle, the bill’s Republican sponsor, state Rep. Russell Pearce of Mesa, said that Obama and other critics of the bill were “against law enforcement, our citizens and the rule of law.”  He claimed that the new legislation would remove the “political handcuffs” on police.  “Illegal is illegal,” said Pearce, “We’ll have less crime. We’ll have lower taxes. We’ll have safer neighborhoods. We’ll have shorter lines in the emergency rooms. We’ll have smaller classrooms.” Why didn’t he just continue? We’ll have less shady brown people.  We’ll have cleaner accents.  We’ll talk to our neighbors again.

This has been a sad day for civil rights.  Let’s push for immigration reform before we are all Arizonians.

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Had enough of the Tea Party tirades against Barack Obama?  For some perspective, take a look at what the rest of the world thinks about the United States since Obama took office:

“People around the world today view the United States more positively than at any time since the second Iraq war,” says international polling firm GlobeScan’s chair Doug Miller, after a study conducted in partnership with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland.  The BBC notes that there can be little confusion as to the cause for this surge in popularity as the uptick in approval ratings coincided (roughly) with Barack Obama becoming president.  The improvement has been drastic and unquestionable: “America’s influence in the world is now seen as more positive than negative,” (Click here for a look at the graph) says the BBC of the results of the survey of 30,000 people in 28 countries.

There are of course going to be the isolationist, deadbeat, know-nothing boobs who shrug at this and claim that world opinion and active diplomacy do not matter.  To a chump of this breed, “us and them” thinking dominates and the outside world is willed away.  Whether they are attention whores waving their home-made signs of xenophobic desperation at anti-immigration rallies or whether they indulge in Rush/Beck/Hannity bulimia – force feeding themselves with ultra-right propaganda and then projectile vomiting, booty grazing style, across their sturdy white picket fences – the viability of their shortsighted thinking is quickly fading.

“They’ll just say that this is further proof that Obama is selling America to his wicked, socialist brethren in the empire of Europe,” said a commenter on the Rachel Maddow Blog.  These antediluvian, paranoid wrecks are as quick to fire off the “s” word as a high school sophomore is to boyfriend drop in every hallway conversation.  Newsflash: Working for better quality of life at home and reaching out diplomatically abroad is not socialism.  It is common sense.

“The idea that a better reputation abroad is meaningless uplift is foolish. It helps the US leverage its power to greater ends. The more popular the US is, the likelier it is to have a positive impact on other countries’ leaders. ” (Andrews Sullivan, The Atlantic)

Sullivan makes the point that the American face-lift began in 2007 , “when Cheneyism was in retreat, when Rice and Gates were beginning to reorient the US away from militarist adventurism, when the surge was beginning to tamp down violence in Iraq, and when the Supreme Court had begun to push back on the presidential power to torture at will. But it’s also worth noting that the gain in respect endures and strengthens as Obama holds office, at a time when every other country’s reputation is declining.”

No courtesy fart was needed after the last administration’s train wreck of a foreign policy.  We needed change.  The massive work of diplomatic reparation was before us.  And in place of cowboyish black and white rhetoric came a more nuanced approach to international collaboration:

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.  The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history. … Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. … As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. … America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more. … To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”   – President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.

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