There is something in the American psyche, particularly that of Northerners, that considers the past as something dead. We are educated to look upward, outward, always toward the new frontier. The past is the past and we can’t change it, so why bother with it?

But as William Faulkner, a Southerner, of course, noted:

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

The rest of the world gets that. In Europe people live in houses that are older than the United States. In Asia there are layers of civilizations reaching back millennia that people accept as part of their own. In the Middle East there are family obligations that span centuries.

And we have great difficulty just getting the last 100 years straight.

There are people who will whine, but where do we stop? Do we have to worry about a wrong done two, three or four generations ago? Those people aren’t even alive anymore, why do we have to address their afflictions? Don’t we have enough to deal with here and now? Can’t we just get over it?

No. We can’t. Yes, we do have plenty to deal with now, but also yes, we must address our historical wrongs.

Here in the United States we have traveled shameful paths that we continue to wrestle with as a nation because the descendants of the peoples injured are with us and refuse to go away.

We may not be so smug as to say we won, they lost, let’s move on.

Because History will not be denied.

1810: Ohio charter school operator gets prison for overstating enrollment…

1103: Howard Dean”s “strategy” vs. Barack”s message – no contest

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mano!

On Gaza — The Horror…

On Gaza — Countering The Myths…

On Gaza — The Media Reaction…

On Gaza — The US And UK Government Reactions…

If you’d like a chance to actually meet Mano and experience his conversation skills first hand, join us Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House on the northwest corner of Mayfield and Green roads for the monthly Socrates Cafe.

And finally, a bit of Jon Stewart.

Eyal Press says:

This may be a bit premature. But the right has indeed lost the ideological battle. The problem is that many Israelis on the center and moderate left are conflicted and confused. More and more when I’ve gone to Israel in recent years, I’ve spoken to people who unequivocally oppose expending lives and resources to defend illegal settlements, but who also fear withdrawing from the West Bank will only lead to violence and chaos.

Press is a Jewish guest blogger on Ta-Nehisi Coates Atlantic blog. His quote from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, extracted from an interview for Yedioth Ahronoth, set me back in my chair.

Ehud Olmert: We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere]–without this, there will be no peace.

Yedioth Ahronoth: Including Jerusalem?”

Ehud Olmert: Including Jerusalem…

Reading this exchange reinforces my own feelings of ignorance and how poorly informed we Americans are.

And how language informs us.

Jesse Sheidlower, Editor At Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, says:

Let me give you an example, in terms of looking at things historically. At the beginning of this conversation you pronounced the word “ask” as “aks.” This is something that people often object to. People say it’s the wrong pronunciation, and it’s stupid.

But if you look at the history of the English language, you can’t tell if the correct pronunciation is “aks” or “ask.” The “aks” pronunciation goes back 1,000 years. It’s in Beowulf. It’s in Chaucer.

What happened was both were in use. But at some point, the dialect in which the “ask” pronunciation was used became dominant. But both continued and have been in use since then. When you look at America, the “aks” pronunciation is widespread in Southern American English. African-Americans used this because they were in the South–it’s not especially African-American, but its Southern.

I should carry this around with me to hand out to every person who tells me that aks is lazy English.

Talking about American Girl…

Part I

Part II

I don’t know anywheres near enough Constitutional law to have an opinion on the appointment of Roland Burris by the Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to take President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s seat and the Senate’s refusal to seat Senator-Designate Burris.

But Nate Silver asks the question: Why Are There No Black Senators? and Ta-Nehisi Coates makes this observation:

African-Americans are still the most segregated minority in the country. I can’t overstate how much that sort of thing warps a prospective candidate’s world. It influences who he meets, what he sees, what he’s invited to, who he has drinks with etc. It’s not because white people are saying, Nigger don’t come over here. It’s because these folks don’t know each other.

President-elect Obama has changed the nature of our national conversation on Race, but he hasn’t ended it.

Richard Harwood writes:

Hyundai’s tagline is, “We’re all in this together and we’ll get through it together.” Your first reaction to this ad might be, “Right, show me the money!” Too many times companies try to snooker people with their slick commercials, and then add the fast-talking voice over at the end who reels off all the product”s restrictions and possible side effects.

But Hyundai puts their money where their mouth is. If you experience involuntary job loss, a physical disability, job transfer or other life-changing event within the first year of your purchase, Hyundai will take back your car. You can read the details at Hyundaiusa.com, and even I could understand them.

Point Hyundai. Detroit?

OK, so it’s a puff piece and in the Fashion & Style section of the paper, but New York Times writer Ruth La Furla misses what I think is an important sociological point when she writes about sales of sex toys increasing.

It’s this: sex toys are generally purchased by women; men generally purchase other goods from the sex industry.

So I’m not surprised at all when when she writes:

Sellers maintain that sex trinkets have not been affected by the recession that has hurt other segments of the multitentacled sex entertainment industry.

Those other segments — strip clubs, pornography, peep shows and prostitution — all generally cater to men.

As is the case of all sociological realities, causes are complex, but as I read the story I thought: a man out of work has no money to spend on recreational sex and may become depressed to the point of losing interest in sex with his partner or spouse. The dynamic for women, at least as far as what this article implies, is different.

Why is that?

Gideon Lichfield writes:

Deterrence has to be equal to the enemy”s fear of defeat; when the only defeat is annihilation, there is no deterrence unless Israel is prepared to reduce all of Gaza to rubble.

I’m not certain that Lichfield is right. But yesterday I had lunch with she who Writes Like She Talks and we talked about how a person gets to the point of hopelessness.

There is a classic psychology experiment where you place a rat in a cage where parts of the floor are electrified; if the rat steps on the wrong part of the floor it gets a shock. The rat quickly learns where not to walk.

But if you randomize which parts of the floor are dangerous so that the rat cannot ever be safe, it curls up in a corner, unable to move.

Here’s an extension of that experiment that I don’t think has ever been done scientifically, but which has been repeated hundreds-of-thousands (millions?) of times: poke a stick at an animal and it will run away. Corner the same animal and continue to poke it with a stick and it will turn on you and try to bite your face off.

It’s fight or flee. When neither option is possible you get the rat comatose in the corner.

Jill Miller Zimon asks the question: Is blaming “the 60 years of occupation” a euphemism for “one-state solution?”

The Middle East is a geopolitical mess in no small part because of artificial borders following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW I. At the end of WW II, Great Britain, devastated by the war, realized that it could ill-afford maintaining its colonial possessions in South Asia and the Middle East. It need out.

And so Great Britain did what no nation would ever allow an outside power to do on its own soil: it set in motion political realities that led to the creation of states divided along religious lines where before single, albeit colonial, states existed.

In South Asia, Muslims and Hindus split to first form Pakistan and India and later Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; and in the Middle East the creation of Israel and Palestine which may now be evolving into Israel and two, yet unnamed, entities in Gaza and The West Bank.

We don’t get a do-over. We can’t turn the clock back to the United Nations’ partition vote of 1947.

I keep reaching for the unconsidered and unconsiderable solutions for the people in Israel, Gaza and The West Bank, so let me ask this:

What reasons can be given against a one-state solution that you would not be willing to see applied universally (what’s good for the goose…)?

0810: Shrinking Scene reports shrinking Sun News being eaten alive by dying PD

That is one of my all time favorite questions. And I love the blank stares or sputters of indignation that I typically get when I ask it. I’m glad that James Fallow asks the question too.

The one relevant thing I do know concerns a repeated source of tragedy in foreign-policy decision making. That is the reluctance to ask, before irrevocable decisions, “And what happens then?” For instance: so we depose Saddam Hussein. What happens then? This question is all the harder to ask when the step in question feels so good. Crushing Saddam. Or, punishing Hamas.

The standard answer is we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, which means we don’t have a clue.

Noah Millman draws some interesting conclusions:

Since 1993, Israel has been staging a fighting retreat from the bulk of the territories won in 1967. Rabin understood that the effort he led to crush the first Intifadeh had failed, strategically; that there was no plausible military path to retaining the territories; and that the territories had become a strategic liability for Israel.

He didn”t trust Arafat for an instant, but he still embraced Oslo, as the fig-leaf for a retreat to more defensible lines. The retreat stalled out with Rabin”s assassination and Netanyahu”s election, but Netanyahu could not actually escape the logic that Rabin followed.

Indeed, he tried to force a conclusive division of the territories by daring Arafat to declare a state unilaterally (something Arafat and his successors have pointedly declined to do), and so he grudgingly signed the Wye accords.

With Barak in office came a new effort to force a conclusive division of the territories, this time by diplomatic means. After the failure at Taba came the Second Intifadeh, to which Sharon responded with Operation Defensive Shield, which was his cover for a decisive retreat from Gaza.

The current violence is intended to provide cover for the reelection of a center-left coalition that will stage a unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank.

That”s what the war is about, strategically: providing Israel”s government with domestic and international cover for the next phase of unilateral retreat from its post-1967 positions to more defensible ones.

I put the point where the situation went south earlier, to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but I’ll take Millman’s 1993 mark as well, because I think he’s right about Rabin. Just as only Nixon could go to China, so too only Rabin could return (with the exception of Jerusalem) to the 1967 borders, and they murdered him for daring to have that vision.

1458: Is blaming “the 60 years of occupation” a euphimism for “one-state solution”?

George Orwell wrote:

What kind of State rules over us must depend partly on the prevailing intellectual atmosphere: meaning, in this context, partly on the attitude of writers and artists themselves, and on their willingness or otherwise to keep the spirit of liberalism alive. If we find ourselves in ten years’ time cringing before somebody like Zhdanov, it will probably be because that is what we have deserved.

Orwell could have written this yesterday. Seriously. If you are a blogger, or a writer, read the entre essay from 1948 and carefully consider how it sounds in 2009.

Who wrote:

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

Sherman Alexie says:

Everything in the book is what every kid in that school is dealing with on a daily basis, whether it”s masturbation or racism or sexism or the complications of being human. To pretend that kids aren”t dealing with this on an hour-by-hour basis is a form of denial.

The world is an incredibly complicated place, and our literature must match that, especially literature for our kids. he book is incredibly positive about the world we live in, and people from vastly different politics and groups end up being friends.

If they read the book, it”s a celebration of the values of what they [parents who oppose the book] hold dear.

And yes, he throws in a Rick Roll…