A personal message from Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Till recently, it seemed possible and desirable for me to address the Presidential campaign without regard to individuals or parties, but solely in regard to issues — especially the life-and-death issues of war and global scorching — and what I called the “issue behind the issues,” the concentration of political, economic, and cultural power in fewer and fewer hands.

But recent events have convinced me that individual character is now an important part of the meaning of this election.

Senator John McCain’s decision to name Governor Sarah Palin his vice-president and possible successor as President, and the emerging information about her, have convinced me these issues need to be raised.

So, purely as an individual, I will share some of my views about the election itself.

McCain, from every report, wanted to nominate Senator Joe Lieberman for vice-president. Lieberman is no hero to me, mostly because of his support for the Iraq war. But he is reasonably well qualified to be President, which is the only serious qualification to be vice-president. Aside from the war, many of his policies are a mild form of what needs stronger expression — like his protection of sexual and reproductive rights and his concern about global climate crisis. He has stuck to his principles, even when some became unpopular.

But under pressure from the right wing of his party, McCain broke — abandoned what was evidently his own value system — and instead nominated a dishonest, vindictive, and unqualified person for Vice-President, knowing almost nothing of her actual background.

It’s not the first time that McCain has broken under this kind of pressure. He broke under pressure on what seemed to be at the heart of his values because it is the hinge of his life — - his opposition to torture because he had been tortured and knew both its vileness and its ineffectiveness in getting the truth.

(His own memoirs report that at one point he broke under the pressure of Vietnamese torture and signed statements he knew to be untrue:)

“Despairing of any relief from pain and further torture, I tried to take my life. After several unsuccessful attempts, I managed to stand. Up-ending the waste bucket, I stepped on it, bracing myself against the wall with my good arm.

“I looped my shirt through the shutters. As I looped it around my neck, a guard saw the shirt through the window, pulled me off the bucket and beat me.

“Later, I made a second, feebler attempt at suicide. On the fourth day, I gave up. I signed a confession that “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pilot”.

“The guards ordered me to record my confession on tape. I refused, and was beaten until I consented.”

After winning a practically unanimous vote by the Senate to ban torture, McCain broke under the pressure of the Bushies and ended up capitulating, even supporting enactment of a law permitting the CIA’s use of torture.

I have absolutely no criticism at all of McCain for his breaking under the pressure of torture, only sorrow and compassion for him and anger at his torturers . Almost everyone does break under torture, saying anything at all to end the pain, and that is one of the reasons torture is so vile. During the period in which he drew on this experience to get the Senate to outlaw torture, I urged Rabbis for Human Rights to have him speak at its first convention, even though I disagreed with many of his other policies. (I changed my mind about his speaking after he stopped opposing torture.)

Aside from his self-reversal on outlawing all US torture, McCain — under the pressure of big-business fat cats whose support he needed to win the Presidential nomination — abandoned his principled opposition to the Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

And now, the Palin nomination.I don’t want as President a person who can so easily crack when the right wing attacks his own values.

As for Governor Palin herself: Let me refer you to an Associated Press fact-check article on her, and quote just one of the items in that story:

“PALIN: “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending . . . and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”

“THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

“In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a ‘bridge to nowhere.’”

She harassed the public librarian of her small town for refusing to ban books Palin didn’t like from the library; she evidently fired the State Trooper chief of Alaska for refusing to fire a trooper she wanted to revenge herself on for family reasons; she poured contempt on the profession of community organizer; she shows every sign of a vindictive and authoritarian personality. In regard to policy: she has called the Iraq war a service to God; she has opposed the right of women to choose abortion even when they have been raped or incested; she has demanded that sex education be limited to “abstinence only” (despite the evidence in the country at large and in her own family that it doesn’t work to prevent teen pregnancy); she has called for obeisance to Big Oil’s demand to drill everywhere, including the Alaska Nature Reserve; she denies the role of human action in bringing on the global climate crisis.

Except for Iraq, these are positions McCain does not share. (Even on abortion, her views are even more hostile to women’s right to make choices than are his hostility to choice.) Yet McCain chose her when the right wing threatened him if he were to follow his own value system and chose Senator Lieberman. His pattern of succumbing under pressure from the extreme right, even and especially in the crucial task of naming the next possible President, make him in my judgment unsuitable to be President himself.

Senator Obama is no saint. I have publicly criticized what I thought were either his misjudgments or his ethical compromises about Middle East peacemaking, and about the FISA bill on governmental violations of the Bill of Rights. But he has shown no trace of vindictiveness, he WAS a community organizer and has consistently urged grass-roots involvement and organizing, and he has policies far more attuned to preserving religious freedom and other Constitutional rights, and to healing the earth and American society. He picked as Vice-President someone clearly qualified to be President.

I think these differences in character need to be taken into account in choosing how to vote in this election.

Even so, I might not have decided to take the unusual step of writing you as an individual, outside all institutional connections, if the last week had not shown that something dark and dangerous in the American public is responding to Governor Palin’s “pit bull with lipstick” persona.

I am not surprised; one response to the sense that everything we knew and trusted — all the old certainties about sex, race, safety, prosperity, “the American dream” — all of it is is in earthquake, crashing — - is the desire for someone tough, nasty, to take control of the mess.

Can we transcend that impulse? Might we descend yet to even worse, out of panic? Are we, or can we become, a better country than the last eight years would indicate? Can we respond to the earthquake not with brute force but by dancing in it, hard as that is — dancing our way to deeper and broader community?

This election poses a great test to us, at the most basic level. If we choose an unnecessary war in response to real problems, choosing leaders who are ruthless and vindictive is simply in the same pattern. If we choose instead to weave new forms of caring community, then our leaders will have to be different in character as well as policy.

So it is imperative for us to choose our future, and work to achieve the one we choose.

Now.

And in any case, no matter who wins the election, these months make still clearer how crucial will be grass-roots commitment and action into the next Administration. The November 23 action-gathering in NYC, “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America,” is all the more important so remember to sign up!

Blessings of Shalom, salaam — the peace that rises from community and compassion –
Arthur

Please send your comments or questions to Rabbi Waskow at awaskow@aol.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Israel Supporter, Jewish, Rabbi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. >