A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us.
He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path.
So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue's gallery showing how other national leaders - the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them - have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).
There was good news Monday for potheads, and even a little good news for states' rights, which once upon a time were thought to be important.
Barack Obama's Justice Department said it would encourage U.S. attorneys to look the other way when they see hollow-eyed potheads emerging from the legal pot shops dispensing the noxious weed to "medical smokers."
In theory the decision won't necessarily increase the use of pot, either for medicinal or recreational purpose, and the president might be throwing a toke to his followers on the left already high on wingnut politics. He might even pass this off as part of his health care reform, a Senate version of which arrived Monday at 1,502 pages. This could be reckoned as pot in lieu of public option.
Congressmen (and women), with due apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. Privilege makes them soft where life teaches the prudent to be hard, cynical where their constituents must be trustful.
The congressional entitlement to privilege, wrought not by talent or inheritance but by legislation, explains the typical congressman's blindness to tint and deafness to tone, revealed in the angry "town hall" confrontations over health care legislation. Instead of reassuring frightened constituents, Democratic congressmen (and women) denounce the voters who sent them to Washington as Nazis, Brown Shirts and the "un-American." Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate Democrats, calls the critics "evil-mongers." Congress is dead to anything outside the bubble it has created for itself.
Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, for scandalous example, are under investigation by ethics committees for taking sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp., the sort of sweetheart deals mere citizens could never get. To hear the senators tell it, the deals were merely rewards for their charm and enchanting ways. The fact that Mr. Conrad is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and Mr. Dodd is chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee had nothing to do with anything.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his friends - first among them President Obama - think the most celebrated arrest since Sacco and Vanzetti was all about race. Friends of Sgt. James Crowley think the incident off Harvard Square was all about law and order and a lack of respect for the cops. It's a shame they ruined a teaching moment by getting the fundamental fact wrong.
Everyone with a pulse and a working lung knows the "facts" by now, even if some of the facts are mere factoids, as Norman Mailer famously described assertions that "seem to be facts, are taken as facts, but in fact are not facts." A (white) neighbor called the police when she saw two men she thought might be breaking into the professor's house, a police sergeant arrived and got into an argument with the professor when he tried to find out what was going on and the argument grew to a public entertainment for a growing crowd of neighbors watching from the street. The professor was black, the cop was white, and alas, that's all it takes to get something started in America, circa 2009.
But what seems to be about race isn't always about color. Mr. Gates accused the cops of asking impertinent questions simply because he's black (or "African-American," in the current fashion). President Obama agreed. In the endless retelling of the tale, the white neighbor who called the cops told the police dispatcher that "two black guys" were trying to break into the Gates abode. A review of the police 911 tape revealed Monday that the caller actually told the dispatcher that "two gentlemen" were trying to get into the door; she subsequently referred to one of them as a "gentleman" and to both of them as "individuals." Nothing about color.
Nobody teaches harder lessons than Experience, the lady who grades on the steepest curve. But sometimes even her most difficult student looks like he's beginning to get it.
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