Walking with Iran, Celebrating the Tiger Gods

President Barack Obama has begun to turn the ship of state from its collision course with the Islamic world. Only a wise student of history with self-confident moral courage could do what the President is attempting to do. He has ended an era of confrontation and posturing and begun the process of educating America about its new leadership role in a post-modern world.

What many Americans and Iranians share in common is ignorance about socio-cultural factors that drive us. Metaphysical nuances aside, everyone is born in a world he or she did not create. The culture we have is the culture we learned as infants. For breakfast today, you probably did not sit in a lotus position eating rice and coriander sauce with your fingers. If you've been following my Sri Lankan Journal (blogs below), you may recall that's the way they greet the morning. If a child is born in Idaho, she is statistically unlikely to be raised a Hindu. Move the birth site to Mumbai, and the numbers reverse themselves. All the evil-doers in the American slave era were conveniently born in the Old South, while my Civil War era Yankee ancestors stood for God, country, and freedom. Moving to Georgia, I got a much different picture of the War of Northern Aggression. It was a hopeless but noble stuggle for independence against a powerful, tyrannical central government that wanted to control and tax the good people of Dixie until our way of life was gone with the wind...

We need to grow up and realize that there are no tiger gods where there are no tigers. Christianity is not the one true faith; neither is Islam. The American way of life, which was good enough for Superman, may not work for people from other lands. The point is, people must be able to choose how they want to organize their societies, and we cannot go around the globe trying to make everyone into suburbanized white Protestants. There are some common causes about which humanity seems unified: Children should be safe and educated; women and men should experience some degree of equality (although the jury is stuill out on what that means); humans should not own, kill or mistreat other humans; public policy must not be motivated by hatred toward any group; and the best way to solve problem is through dialogue and reconciliation, not force of arms.

When did we we adopt this John Wayne foreign policy that characterized the Bush Administration? Was it all about 9-11? Hardly. The advice we Baby Boomers got from the moguls of popular culture was, “Don’t get mad, get even.” Two decades of theatergoers cheered the five-part Death Wish movies (1974-94), when an avenging Charles Bronson killed a series of bad men for the best of reasons. Perhaps we inherited this trait from the movie stars our parents had adored, heroes who met the bad guys in the street at high noon and gunned them down.

John Wayne, whose action-movie career spanned generations, was one of my boyhood favorites, too. Although he had an appealing personality both in film and real life, the Duke’s onscreen characters displayed a consistently violent behavioral repertoire, offering neither empathy for human frailties nor reconciliation with one’s enemies.

A goodly number of young radicals in our generation adopted the modus operandi of the crusading hero by deciding that bringing down the system would transform the world. Beyond ordinary drop-out, get-high hippies, we produced the Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weather Underground Organization, and the Youth International Party (Yippies). These and other groups advocated everything from forming anti-establishment communal refuges to a total revolution and seizing the reins of government. There was a lot of shouting at the meetings, mostly directed against the Vietnam War in general and the Johnson administration in particular. Since a fair number of the anti-war disturbances occurred on University campuses, there was also a significant amount of railing against the educational establishment. Some of the furor escalated because the Establishment—our parents of the WWII generation—responded with slap-down disciplinary measures when their Boomer children protested against the icons of the elder generation, i.e., down with the schools, the military, the government, and conventional morality.

In the 1970 protest comedy Getting Straight, Elliot Gould plays a Vietnam veteran who returns to college for his master’s degree and gets swept up into the culture of chaos developing on American campuses. Near the end of the film, Gould’s character meets with campus administrators during a student riot. They observe a young man rampaging through the halls, breaking things. Gould accuses the faculty “adults” of transforming this student from a peaceful kid, who previously only wanted to get laid, into a raving lunatic who now wants to kill.

It is an overstatement, of course, and inappropriately dismisses the responsibility of the rioters for their behavior, but Gould’s veteran has a point. When people feel they have no recourse to achieve worthwhile goals by peaceful ends, they will often resort to violence, sometimes violence which is haphazard and heartbreaking. That is why the sex-driven young man in Getting Straight became a violent protestor. That is also why the 9-11 terrorists flew their planes into buildings full of people whom they did not know, praying "God is Great!" before they died.

It is long past due that an American leader should understand the complex forces which motivate godly people to do ungodly deeds. It is not simply about good and evil; that was the chief error in the thinking of the previous administration. In American history, good people owned slaves, who were good people themselves; good people fire-bombed the cities of Germany and dropped two nukes on Japan; good people protested the Vietnam War, while other good people marched off to fight it, obeying their country's call. All people are basically good, but in the long and bloody history of the world circumstances have often impelled us to do ungodly things for the highest reasons.

Someone has to blow the whistle and say, "Enough!" It's time for humanity to grow up. I am encouraged that America has finally elected someone who understands the nuances of the real world. It's long overdue that a grown-up should lead us, even a young one. Hold your breath; the ship is turning, slowly but steadily, away from the rocks of ethnocentrism to a new consciosuness of the connectional nature of human life in the post-modern world. I pray he succeds, for the good of all humanity.