Bergen Ethical Culture Society

by Ed Gross

During my term as president of our Society, I tried to keep references to specific politicians and the parties out of my newsletter columns. Now, however, I’m writing as an individual and not as an official, so I feel free to address a highly political issue directly. I hope you won’t mind.

In Paul Krugman’s NY Times column of September 16^th, he put an idea floating around in my brain into words. Namely, that “lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.” As proof, it’s easy to point to the Republican Presidential debate during which Governor Perry was asked if he ever lost sleep over executing so many death row prisoners. Unbelievably, his “no” received wild cheers from the audience. As a death penalty opponent, this turned my stomach. There’s simply no chance that every single one of those 234 convicts was actually guilty of a crime. But set that aside. Even true believers in the necessity of such a drastic measure in all cases should be appalled. After all, we’re talking about killing a human being. Cruel, even vicious human beings are people with mothers and fathers, wives or husbands, children and friends. What kind of person rejoices at an execution that causes them terrible hardship and grief? Relief, even quiet satisfaction, I can understand, but rejoicing? Really? During that same debate, in response to a question about what should happen to someone without insurance who becomes seriously ill, an audience member shouted an equally disturbing “let him die!” As an Ethical Culturist who believes firmly in the preciousness of human life, I’m extremely worried about what those audience reactions say about the future of our country and the current condition of the Republican Party.

In the recent past, I’ve worried about Republican politicians for a variety of excellent reasons: too bellicose and militaristic, too prone to sacrifice rights for security, too much in the sway of big corporations, too willing to disregard science, too prone to politicize justice, too eager to disenfranchise Democratic voters and too likely to undo the separation of church and state, to name more than a few. But my main concerns about Republican voters were just three: too greedy, too fearful and not well-enough informed. The concern that Republican voters lack compassion is a new one for me. There have been clues all along, of course, including a shocking one delivered right to my face early in the Bush administration.

My good friend and fellow ex-Ethical Culture president, Ron Schwartz, and I were trying to get signatures on a petition to stop the war in Iraq before it started. We were standing outside CVS in the historically progressive town of Teaneck and gaining lots of signatures along with just a handful of arguments and some dirty looks. But one woman responded to our request in an extremely memorable way. She said, “We should bomb them back to the stone age.” It literally took my breath away. To be fair, I don’t know her party affiliation, but a total lack of compassion in a random middle class woman who would wish complete destruction on an entire country is very hard to assimilate. Based only on that outburst, she would certainly feel very much at home in today’s Republican Party.

In American politics, it’s accepted as a truism that the pendulum swings back and forth between the Dems and the GOP. After Bush, we swung to Obama and thank goodness. The question we all need to ponder now is: Can voters who applaud executions and support a party that wants to cut giant holes in our social safety net ever come back around to the simple truth that we’re all in this together? What can we tell them? What can right-minded politicians accomplish that will restore in these mean-spirited citizens a feeling of compassion for their fellow human beings?

Currently, we’re in the midst of a terrible financial crisis affecting the vast majority of Americans. Is it too much to hope that the struggles so many of us face will enable Republican voters to see compassion not as a weakness but as a strength essential to our country’s past growth and its future survival? Unless someone points a better way forward, we all had better hope so.

by Ed Gross

We’ve all been hearing a lot recently about gaffes committed by Republican presidential

candidates. If I say that gaffe is the wrong word to describe most of them, you’ll say

I’m just a fussy former English major. Okay, you got me. Yet, in this case there’s a

very important distinction I’d like to make. A gaffe, according to the dictionary is “a

social blunder, especially a tactless remark” or, secondarily, “a noticeable mistake.”

Actual gaffes are committed regularly in politics and certainly aren’t limited to one

political party or the other. Joe Biden, for one, is deservedly famous for them. For

example, calling out to Missouri State Senator Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair,

he said, "Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya." Some of Michele Bachmann’s reputation for

gaffes is equally well deserved. This summer, she wished Elvis Presley a happy birthday

on the anniversary of his death. Celebrating Concord, New Hampshire for “the shot heard

round the world” in Concord, Mass. qualifies as a gaffe, and a particularly embarrassing

one at that.

What’s bothering me about the misapplication of the word gaffe is something I call

journalistic squeamishness. It’s the unwillingness of reporters – and, surprisingly,

pundits and columnists, too – to call bad behavior by its rightful name. I noticed

this first during the Bush administration when even the New York Times called

torture “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That’s not just a euphemism to avoid the

socially unacceptable. That’s a distortion. It should be obvious that what was torture

when done to our soldiers in World War II and Vietnam must by definition be torture

when done in our name in Iraq and Guantanamo.

A politician who deliberately presents something as factual that is simply not true is, as

any good parent would tell their child, lying. Calling it a gaffe, implies a lack of intent.

No one, after all, blunders on purpose. Now, as an Ethical Culturist, I can be sympathetic

to lies told to protect feelings or avoid conflict on the one hand while condemning

egregious lies on the other. Here are a few from Representative Bachmann that I’m afraid

have been made more acceptable, or at least excusable, for having been dismissed in the

media as gaffes.

On the Constitution: "We also know the very founders that wrote those documents

worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." (italics mine) Paying

tribute to Calvin Coolidge, she claimed his conservative economic policies led America

into the prosperity of the Roaring '20s. Really? To whose policies would she attribute

the crash and the depression? Speaking of which, she also said the depression was made

much worse by FDR and the Hoot-Smalley tariffs (actually Smoot Hawley, so that part’s

just a gaffe) although they were proposed by two Republicans and signed into law by

President Coolidge before FDR took office!

Okay, so maybe you don’t think Ms. Bachmann a serious candidate anyway. Fine. But

how about Texas Governor Rick Perry? Upon entering the race, he immediately led in the

polls, so he’s necessarily being treated seriously. Recently, he called global warming "a

scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more

being put into question." That’s no gaffe, that’s a lie. As was his statement that Texas

has the legal right to secede from the United States. I don’t know how to characterize his

comment that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might be guilty of "treasonous"

behavior for how he is handling economic policy, but it’s wrong and vicious and

certainly not unintentional.

Being President of the United States is a ridiculously difficult job. I would never pretend

to know who’s qualified based on what candidates say while campaigning. I do, however,

think that by spewing a series of blatant lies a candidate disqualifies him or herself. We

need the news media to have the stomach to make that obvious by calling a lie a lie.

Otherwise, we’ll end up with another “gaffe-prone” president, like another ex-Texas

governor I could name.