Return of the Native

“Elizabeth Warren Disappointed After DNA Test Shows Zero Trace Of Presidential Material”
 —Headline in The Onion, October 15

Have I mentioned that I have reason to believe I am 0.390625 percent Irish?

Feel free to be skeptical. I have not had my DNA tested, so my assertion is unhindered by the existence of chromosome evidence. It is based entirely on non-rigorous personal research into my family history by way of clan anecdotes, an old family Bible, and the conclusive authority of the internet. I have convinced myself that I may be the sixth-great-grandchild of Margaret Lewis, born in County Donegal in 1726. As I recounted on this blog three years ago, I have used this ancestral quest as a pretext for adventures both here in Ireland and in the U.S. state of Virginia. Margaret was a daughter of John Lewis, a second-generation Donegal resident (apparently transplanted from either England or Scotland, for reasons not clear) who fled Ireland after killing his new, young landlord in a dispute. John Lewis wound up in Virginia where, according to his gravestone, he “settled Augusta Co., located the town of Staunton, and furnished five sons to fight the battles of the AMERICAN REVOLUTION.”

So, once apprised of this information, my friends and neighbors here in Eire immediately accepted me as one of their own, right? Well, I have to say that they are indeed all very welcoming and have all made me feel that this country is my home, but no one seriously considers me “Irish.” Not even naturalization confers that identity in any meaningful (as opposed to legal) sense. Yes, newsreaders on RTÉ diligently do make a point of identifying every third-world-born resident and/or citizen in Ireland as “Irish” if they make the news. I have yet to hear them, though, use that term with any naturalized American or Brit. I am pretty darn sure that if I somehow got featured on the main evening news—unless I have won a Nobel Prize or something similar—I fully expect I will be described as “an American residing in Ireland.”

That will not bother me. I certainly do not self-identify as Irish—even though I happen to be the husband and father of Irish women. I do not expect the purchase of a house or the filing of a few papers to change who I am. On the other hand, if people from Ireland—or anywhere else—emigrate to my country and become naturalized, I do consider them fully American and do happily refer to them as such. That is the way I was raised to think, and that is how my country self-identifies: as a nation of immigrants. I truly believe that despite the fact that immigration has become a contentious political issue. From where I sit, the debate is a massive case of cognitive dissonance. One side thinks they are arguing about whether immigrants are good or bad. The other side thinks it’s about whether immigrants should come in legally or not.

Anyway, I understand that most other countries, such as Ireland, see themselves differently than the U.S. Irish-ness is an ethnicity as well as a legal status. What you realize here and in most countries is that the ethnicity is what matters to people. The passport you use is nearly seen as incidental. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear someone described in the news as “an Irish woman holding a UK passport.”

These musings on ethnicity and identity have been spurred, as you might have guessed, by the kerfuffle caused by Senator Elizabeth Warren when she drew attention to the results of her DNA test indicating that, “[w]hile the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” In other words, Senator Warren is about the same percentage (or possibly less) Native American as I am Irish.

Senator Warren comes from Oklahoma and, having grown up around a lot of people from that state and other parts of the Midwest, I always noticed how an awful lot of them proudly point to Native American or “Indian” heritage. It is nearly a badge of honor to say, “I am part Cherokee” or “my great-grandmother was Shawnee.” I always saw this pride as a positive thing and a sign of the good old American melting pot. I suppose, though, one could also view it as cultural appropriation. I certainly never felt compelled to ask question anyone’s claims of Native American pedigree or ask them for proof.

The senator’s announcement pretty much backfired, as fellow Democrats criticized her timing (right before the midterms when she is not even running), the usually non-political Cherokee Nation pointedly issued a statement that a “DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship,” and Republicans had a great time pointing out that the percentage of her Native American DNA could well be lower than the average U.S. citizen. CNN and The Daily Beast embarrassed themselves by rushing to proclaim that Warren had been vindicated in her self-identification as Native American. (She apparently once had four recipes published in a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek & Seminole.)

So why did she do it? She did it because President Trump baited her, and she took the bait. Observers have taken this to mean that she is definitely running for president in 2020. Lots of families have lore that is historically imprecise or apocryphal, so she should not embarrassed about that. (On the nearly-pure Swedish side of my family we used to hear about “a Spanish grandmother,” whom I have been trying to track down for years.) There is no reason to believe that she profited from designated minority status at Harvard, as her critics charge, although it appears Harvard may have used her Native American self-identification to boost its own diversity statistics. It makes no sense for her to behave defensively about a non-issue.

The real issue is what the whole episode says about her character and judgment. Of course, when it comes character and judgment, the current standard seems to be pretty malleable. I mean, look at who is in the White House at the moment. So what may really matter is what the whole #fauxcahontas episode says about the senator’s suitability for the current environment of political hardball and voters’ exhaustion with the old rules of politics.

National Crucible

“Trump Asks Why Kavanaugh Accuser Didn’t Just Immediately Request Hush Money”
 —Headline in The Onion, September 21

Sixty-five years ago Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible premiered on Broadway. Recounting the story of the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, it tells the following story. Several young women alarm the community with their strange behavior. Under persistent questioning, they eventually accuse several townspeople of consorting with the devil. In the resulting hysteria, citizens are arrested, put on trial and, despite their protestations of innocence, convicted and hanged. The play was a thinly veiled allegory of the campaign to root out Communist influence in American society in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus, among his other literary contributions, Miller popularized the term “witch hunt” in the political sense.

Six decades later there is again hysteria across the land. As in the 1950s, the hunt is on to find people secretly working with Russians and against America’s interest. The difference now is that, instead of the political right hunting Russians under every bed, it is now the political left raising the alarm over Russian bots lurking in our social media accounts and controlling the commander in chief in some kind of Manchurian Candidate-style plot. We keep waiting for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to give us the definitive word on what exactly went on between the Trump campaign and the Russians, but so far we have only the hysterical speculations of politicians and commentators. People have been indicted, but so far only for infractions unrelated to the election or for so-called process crimes, that is, transgressions arising from not cooperating fully with the investigation itself.

Some people think that the #MeToo movement is a wave of hysteria. Personally, I think that any concerted campaign that roots out people abusing their authority or preying on the vulnerable is a good thing. If the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby are convicted in a fair trial, by all means punish them to the full extent of the law. On the other hand, there are instances of calling out alleged perpetrators that have an air of the French Revolution or the Chinese Cultural Revolution about them. For example, the allegations made against actor Aziz Ansari by a 23-year-old anonymous woman sounded like nothing more than a bad date. The accusation by Jimmy Bennett against fellow actor Asia Argento (who played his mother in a movie) sounds like an audacious attempt to cash in on the fact that he was 17 when they had sex. Of course, I don’t know the real truth of any of these situations. It’s not as though I was in the room when any of these things happened. Should I even try to have an opinion?

That brings us to the current circus which is the confirmation hearings of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. What are we to make of it? On one hand, it is not actually necessary for me to have an opinion on it because it is the Senate that will be voting, not me. On the other hand, being a serious citizen requires me to have some sort of opinion. It comes down to whom one believes about things that happened decades ago and whether one believes those alleged events should be disqualifying. But since there is no objective way for any of us to know what the truth is in this situation, the question is really, who should get the benefit of the doubt? It does not help that the last-minute allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are such that they can not be objectively proved or disproved. You hear some people say that, in cases of alleged assault or rape, the woman should always be believed. That policy would certainly simplify things, but unfortunately one of the people currently saying this is Hillary Clinton, who vilified the multiple women who made accusations against her husband. And what about the accusations made by Tawana Brawley and Crystal Gail Mangum (of the Duke lacrosse case), which were eventually proven false? No matter how prevalent male criminal behavior may be, it makes absolutely no sense to consider a person more credible purely because of her gender.

My fear in all of this is that the progress made by the #MeToo movement will be undone by by one party’s blatant wielding of it as a political weapon. Donald Trump’s behavior towards women was well documented by the time he became a serious candidate for president. He had earned no benefit of the doubt, but I certainly took notice when multiple women made public accusations against him, all on the same day and each one located in a state about to hold a primary vote. Nor has it escaped my attention that the allegations against Kavanaugh, who had heretofore appeared to be nothing but squeaky clean after six separate FBI background checks, began to be doled out by activist Democratic lawyers, one after another at a point in the process when there would be little time to adequately vet them. Trump may well have won the presidency because enough voters decided that women’s accusations against him were politically and/or monetarily motivated and so could be discounted. The danger for Democrats—and for everyone—is that the allegations against Kavanaugh will look like such a blatant and callous partisan smear that it will undermine the credibility of the #MeToo movement in general.

When I think back on The Crucible, I am struck by the coincidental parallel of it chronicling the downfall of a basically good man because of overwrought testimony from various women who were egged on to condemn him. Of course, that does not mean the same is happening to Judge Kavanaugh. Besides, The Crucible was written by a man. But I am also reminded of another seminal literary work, one which was written by a woman. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson is accused by Mayella Ewell of rape. Though we are given plenty of reason to doubt her story, it turns out to be an instance where the jury chooses to believe the woman. Tom Robinson is convicted and ultimately dies in a vain attempt to escape.

In that case, as in the cases of Trump and Kavanaugh, people end up choosing to believe what they need to believe.

R.I.P. Senate’s Maverick

“I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s.”
 —John McCain

As with John B. Anderson, the onetime congressman and presidential candidate who died in December, I feel compelled to eulogize Arizona Senator John McCain. In a way, though, I already have. It was in a blog post on my movie web site a decade ago, just after he was defeated by Barack Obama by a landslide in the Electoral College.

“During the Vietnam war,” I wrote, “while [George W.] Bush was ensconced in the relative safety of the Texas National Guard (and Obama was a child), McCain was risking his life and undergoing torture in the service of his country.” This was in reaction to people I had heard during the campaign repeating the mantra that there was no difference between McCain and Bush.

I continued, “While Bush was always eager to get along with his political colleagues and run up huge spending deficits, McCain was always quick to annoy and anger his fellow Republicans with (sometimes overly) principled stands. While Bush was willing to tolerate rough treatment of terrorists in U.S. custody McCain, drawing on painful personal experience, opposed anything that fit his definition of torture. While Bush saw no problem cutting taxes and increasing spending, McCain greatly annoyed the president and many of his colleagues by voting against the Bush tax cuts because there were not offsetting spending cuts. While Bush gave lip service to the issue of global warming but did not treat it as a particularly urgent problem, McCain embraced the issue. Indeed, McCain’s positions are such a strange jumble that there is something in them to annoy just about everyone.”

McCain was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and to the Senate in 1987, succeeding Barry Goldwater. McCain was never going to be president, although he did make a good run for the office in both 2000 and 2008. A main obstacle was his eclectic set of political positions and personal principles. They made it too hard to enthuse voters in his own party. Of course, a strange or inconsistent set of principles did not stop Donald Trump from getting elected, so the determinative factor certainly had more to do with McCain’s campaign style. He was literally too nice to be president. Look at Trump’s over-the-top attacks on his opponents, particularly Hillary Clinton, and compare that to the town meeting where McCain praised his opponent and admonished a questioner for suggesting that Obama was “an Arab.” Imagine what Trump would have done with the provocative sermons of Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright. On principle McCain refused to use Wright as a talking point, despite the urging of fellow Republicans at the time, many of whom now turn their noses up at Trump’s unseemliness. Meanwhile, someone planted a story about McCain’s supposed affair with a lobbyist, which got great play in The New York Times until it became overwhelmingly obvious the story was a fabrication.

Apart from his own deficit in cutthroat political technique, McCain’s weaknesses also included little appetite for fund raising during the primaries, an inability to tap into the country’s mood over the financial crisis and, perhaps most definitively, his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

There is probably no better example of McCain being too principled to be president than his campaign finance legislation. This was an area to which he was deeply and personally committed, and the result bore his name. The McCain-Feingold Act limited how much could be spent on campaigns. Thus it was no surprise that, in his run for president, McCain chose to take the limited public funding provided by the law. Obama, on the other hand, who had pledged to do the same, instead forwent public funding because he was able to raise so much more money without the limits and thus vastly outspent McCain. The eventual irony was that, eight years later, the law’s entire raison d’être was called into question when Trump defeated Clinton even though she vastly outspent him—even if you count all known Russian expenditures on social media sites. This, of course, is why we have heard nothing more about campaign finance reform for the past couple of years. The law still bedevils Trump, though, as prosecutors use it to try to make a case against him spending his own money to buy two women’s silence.

As tributes to McCain now pour in, Democrats and the media praise him for his penchant for bi-partisan initiatives, although many in his own party did not appreciate them. His final act of annoyance for them was casting the deciding vote against his party’s so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, thereby keeping the law, technically at least, still on the books. This despite years of promises to repeal Obamacare.

Despite his principles and willingness to reach across the aisle, his career was not without its blemishes. He was one of the Keating Five caught up in a scandal emerging from the 1980s savings & loan crisis, though he ultimately emerged unscathed. After the 2008 election, he candidly admitted to taking no position on the Confederate flag on South Carolina’s statehouse, hoping for more votes in that state’s primary. He clearly regretted his political expediency and was even able to laugh about it, noting, “And I lost anyway.” The fact that he could even admit this was nothing less than refreshing.

That ability to laugh at himself and not take himself too seriously was the most appealing thing about the man. Apparently, behind the scenes he could have a terrible temper, but in public he had a wonderful sense of humor. After the 2008 loss, when asked how he was doing by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, he quipped, “Well, I’ve been sleeping like a baby. I sleep two hours, wake up, and cry. Sleep two hours, wake up, and cry.” I do not think I ever saw him interviewed when he did not make me smile and like him.

He was in a different category than any other politician. As a veteran, he was even in a different category than war heroes such as John F. Kenney and George H.W. Bush. The injuries he received from ejecting from his plane, his capture, prison beatings and repeated torture, as well as more than five years of captivity entitled him to more deference than most people will earn in a lifetime. The fact that he refused an offer of early release unless it did include the rest of his men just made him the kind of human being we all wish we were but probably are not.

John McCain was never going to be president. One cannot help but at least wonder, however, if the country would have been better off if he had been.