Neither do I, or most of my “liberal” friends. It is only in the last
30 years that “Liberalism” has come to mean this, and it is only
because “conservatives” have framed the term in this fashion.
To Enlightenment thinkers, “liberal” was an a priori positive term,
denoting principles like free enterprise, learned curiosity,
libertarian virtue, and progress. We see vestiges of this meaning in
“liberal education” or “market liberalization,” or (my favorite) the
description by foreign media of American gun control attitudes as
“liberal.”
Whether you cling to the Catholic Church is between you and God. But
for Pete’s sake just let go of “conservatism.” It has come to mean
exactly nothing other than “I identify with other people who call
themselves ‘conservative.’” In the last decade it has acquired the
awesome corollary definition of “seeking to alter reality through
applied semantics.” That you cling to the label bespeaks the awesome
power of such meta-voodoo.
Importantly, liberals never had similar angst at all, even in the very
dark period in the wake of the 2004 elections. They spent plenty of
time talking about how to regain political power, or the relative
merits of individual programs, or the ideological purity of certain
attitudes, but they seldom spent time arguing who was most worthy of
the label itself, or what it meant.
Speaking for myself: since early teenager-hood I have though of myself
as a “liberal,” despite having your inclinations re: government
activism, collectivism and interest groups. I came to think of myself
this way precisely because identified liberals saw that crocodiles
like government activism and collectivism were in need of wrestling.
Liberals may wrestle them badly, they may even love wrestling them,
but if you just let them those crocs lie there on your patio, sooner
or later they’re gonna eat your poodles.
The a-ha moment for me was when I was old enough to think rationally
about supply-side economics (around age 14). By loudly and proudly
espousing such transparent nonsense, American conservatives were
pretty much saying: “the best way to deal with crocodiles is to call
them lizards.” Then the croc would eat another poodle and some liberal
would say “look, we really need to wrestle those crocodiles.” To which
the conservatives would reply with a non-sequitur like “what are you,
pro-crocodile? Just ignore those lizards on the patio.”
Courtesy of James Fallows, I learned that the Mandarin transcription of “Obama” is 奥巴马. I’ve written previously about the danger of “translating” foreign words from Chinese based on their characters, which are chosen primarily for their calligraphic appearance, not their semantic meaning. But it’s fun to do anyway.
Also, as soon as I saw this t-shirt I realized “I can read those characters!” Of course, those characters say “Obama,” helpfully translated above, but still: a fun party trick.
奥 is a common character for foreign transcription, usually for the long o or ah sounds. You find it in the Chinese words for Austria (奥地利), Australia (澳洲), and Olympics (奥林匹克). It means “mysterious.”
巴 is (I think) a noun particle (and thus essentially meaningless); dict.cn also translates it as “hope” which is very fitting indeed. I recognized it as the sound-part of the second character in 酒吧, which is the Chinese word for “bar” (as in “the place where you get drunk”).
马 means “horse,” which is the core of a common Chinese tongue-twister. Again, this is a common character for transliterations of foreign words; last year for example, Jenny and I ran in the 厦门国际马拉松.
So, the literal, direct, character-for-character translation of the Chinese transliteration of “Obama” is “Mysterious hopeful horse.”
…
This post comes in the midst of a little nostalgia Jenny and I are feeling for Xiamen. For example, scarcely a week goes by when we don’t lament our inability to get noodles from Bu Er Zhai.
One of my coworkers is leaving this week for a tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prompted some conversation around the office about life as a foreigner or outsider. In relaying this to Jenny I realized what I really missed about living in China: I am no longer special. In Portland, I’m just another white guy on a bicycle, a demographic pretty well represented here anyway. In Xiamen, it was impossible not to attract a lot of attention everywhere we went. So, to our neighbors we were special, because we were 老外. And to our friends and family “back home,” we were the exciting couple living an adventurous life in China.
I’ve been watching this video of the convocation at a mccain/palin rally with a certain degree of ... fascination. like so many things happening in politics right now, it’s a train wreck of logic and common sense. let’s unpack it a little:
REV. CONRAD: I would also add, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November.
So right away the hon. Rev. Conrad takes a tone with God, the supreme being, our creator, that resembles the kind of lecturing you hear from some of your less inspired high school football coaches. Step it up, Jehovah! Your reputation is on the line!
Because there are millions of people around this world,
Billions, actually!
praying to their god, whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah,
OK here’s where it gets ... weird. First, The right hon. Rev. Conrad seems to think there’s a god named “Hindu.” There isn’t. I checked. “Hindu” is an adjective. It describes the native religion of India, and its adherents.
Second, the Buddha is not a god, and Buddhists would be the first to point this out. The honorific “Buddha” comes from an ancient Pali word meaning “enlightened.” The Buddha Siddhartha Gautama was an ethical philosopher in India in the sixth century B.C. His followers revere him as a great person who attained spiritual perfection, but Buddhism, like Hinduism has room for many gods, one God (note capitalization), or no gods at all. None of which, it bears repeating, is or would be “Buddha.”
Moreover, neither Hinduism or Buddhism make any claim to exclusivity. They have no equivalent to the First Commandment (or the Second, if you’re looking at Deuteronomy). So it’s unlikely that very many Hindus or Buddhists are praying that Barack Obama wins just to show up that smartypants Jehovah.
And “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic. The Quran takes some pains to spell out that the God it discusses is the same God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. So the people that the right hon. Rev. Conrad imagines praying to “Allah,” presumably for the humiliation of the Christian God, are also praying to the Christian God.
In just nine words, Rev. Conrad has demonstrated he doesn’t know bupkiss about what I would presume is his primary area of expertise: God.
that his opponent [i.e. Obama] wins, for a variety of reasons.
None of which we need to discuss, apparently.
And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation,
Again with the hectoring. Here he sounds like the father of a teenage daughter on Prom night.
because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you. If that happens.
It’s a four-way deity-on-deity smackdown! Because religion is like a pro wrestling match played out by proxy through presidential elections.
So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and election day.
Because God the Almighty, omnipotent and omnipresent, sole creator of the entire Universe, needs a little poke from the right hon. Rev. Conrad every now and then, or his reputation is gonna go to shit.
Some of my lefty friends object to Rev. Conrad’s convocation on grounds that it invokes hate speech. To which I reply: whatever. Sometime in the 1980s “liberals” ceded the topic of religion to “conservatives,” presumably because lefties spend less time in church. Our implicit assumption is that, because the other guys spend so much time talking about God, they must know a lot about Him. To which I would offer: maybe they just don’t know what they’re saying. With twenty minutes on Wikipedia, I can demonstrate more insight into God than Rev. Conrad, and that’s his f-ing job.
Just now a coworker and I were discussing Nebraska’s surprising status as a potential swing state in the presidential election. I was trying to describe the cultural dynamic of a state that is “Western” on one half and “Midwestern” on the other (with a little bit of “St. Louis” in the Second District, I guess). Then I realized I had inadvertently coined a new state motto:
Axoplasm is also 