Oh for the days of good old identity poltics-when you could silence your opponent by simply asserting your identity claim. “Well you are a MAN,” a woman would say,” So you would say that.” Or “You are from the MAJORITY so why would I expect you to understand?’

Being a minority or a woman, a gay or a crime survivor once gave you the upper hand to claim privileged access to knowing. These days, we have all know and use the same trick. The competition for victimhood or ’specialness’ is too crowded for any one voice to easily silence others. Even the white middle class majority can claim victimhood, vicitmized by their affluence no less.

When it comes to foreign policy however, identity politics is still alive and well. We do not passively accept terrorist attacks on the homeland. Why? Because we are America, that’s why. President Bush’s message to the world was “America will not stand idly by and let the axis of evil spread its poison.”

Then, as the torture scandals broke, Senator McCain led the charge “We do not torture. Why? We are America, after all.” That is the cry that President Obama has taken up. No more waterboarding, no more Gitmo. And it is ubiquitous-We do not let kids grow up without a decent education-Why? We are America, say the Democrats. We need business and not government to lead the economic recovery. Why? Because we are America, say the Republicans.

You get the idea. Stop the argument by concluding-

“Why? I’ll tell you why.
We are America.
That’s why?”

Try to top that!

American behavior, it seems, springs from some mystical core that says who we are deeper down, even if these so called core identifiers are sometimes crazily contradictory.

Now we come to Iran and the disputed election. President Obama has been more careful about what not to say. He realises that our history in that region makes any claims to moral leadership dubious in the extreme. However, one reads in today’s Washington Post (June 23, p.11) comments from opponents who accuse him of timidity. How is this for good old identity politics?

“It’s almost as if the president lacks confidence in the greatness of his own nation. He seems unwilling to aggressively project American global power,as if it were something to be ashamed of.”

So says Nile Gardiner of the Margaret Thatcher Center. You have to love the Thatcher-like boldness. But to suggest that the way we treat Iran must primarily say something about us, rather than anything about the people of Iran. Well, that is quite a stretch.

The stem for this useful story-0-type begins with “We are the best nation on earth…” and therefore, we can do anything. Or try “We are the oldest and wisest democracy on the face of the earth and so we can…..” If you claim the highest ground, everything becomes a shout down to the ignorant masses below you.

But why is it always about us?

When we were teens, we thought the world was only and always about us. Then we had our hearts broken, or we failed an exam, or we totally goofed off and no one came to the rescue. We learned that we could no longer use the excuse, “Dad, I am only a pimply, confused teen- that is why I smashed your car. Really. It’s about me, not your car.”

The new global world we have created is fraught both with dangers and opportunities. But it means nations have to grow up, to leave behind their adolescent delusions. What we say to Iran is not some exercise in healthy American ego maintenance. It’s about Iran. It’s about granting to them a say in their future the way we demand a say in our own. No more. No less. Why? let me tell you why. Because we are America-That’s why!!!!”

What did you say? I didn’t hear you.

See, it works.

I remember my sister coming home from exams and telling all the family that she had failed dismally. When the results came out, she passed, of course, and we were all so relieved. She was exhilirated and I remember asking her, “Why did she tell us she failed?” and she said, “I wanted to be surprised.”

It’s a funny mental game we play with ourselves, and sometimes, it makes sense. We watch the house burn down, and we say,”At least we are still alive.”: We cheer ourselves up by imagining the very worst and then, console ourselves when it ain’t so bad.  But when the media and the government are doing it, however, we had better beware.

The unemployment figures came out a few weeks back. We hit double digits, but “not as bad as expected,” we were reassured.  How bad is 10% ? The worst in 20 years!!!Then, this week, more figures and the headline is “The latest figures are not as bad as first thought.” That was the first line.

It works. We feel better already. But then, when you think about it, you see the con. Titianic sinks but only 1523 lives lost, not 2200. Or, 9-11 kills 3000 but could have taken 50,000. Swine flu pandemic only kills 12.  HItler only wants the Sudetenland, not Poland and the rest. Whew!!! What a let off! We are going to be OK!!!

Are you feeling better? The danger is we are kidding ourselves. Hiding the bad news in the threat of worse news is a conman’s delight.  Its a narrative technique of creating optimistic catastrophes.  Make us feel better by saving us from feeling worse.

The ability to look reality hard in the face and not blink is the way most leaders lead us out of the morass.  Lincoln doesn’t tell us that 650,000 is a small price to pay for ending slavery. Churchill doesn’t suggest that seeing London destroyed is good medicine.

When your doctor tells you he has good news and better news, and that the good news is you have cancer and the better news is that you don’t have lukemia, you know you are with a spin doctor. The medicine the ecopnomy needs most is some reality therapy. Tell us the truth. Don’t fudge it-That’s what got us into this mess. But then, it could have been a lot worse. An asteroid could have hit us and the martians could have invaded.

What is torture? When if ever is it legal? Does it ever work?

What has got me intrigued in listening to these Senate hearings this week on fundamental moral issues is how they appear to converse  without having to display any hint of understanding first principles.

Not that they have to agree with these principles- no. But at least their competence as leaders demands they know what they are talking about, particularly if they are advocating radical changes as to how we traditionally determine right from wrong. For instance, if water boarding got some captured Japanese Generals executed in the wake of World War Two, what has changed to make it legal for us? Not I presume because we are not Japanese, or that we didn’t lose a war.

Why no mention of the time tested idea of “the end never justifies the means” which is a core ethical teaching, one with a thousand years of commentary to justify why it is such a core principle. If they want to reverse it, fine-but at least do the hard thinking as to why. Engage in solid  moral reasoning and not sound so political and mercenary. Even argue as former VP Cheney does on the basis of pure pragmatics. It worked, so shut up!  But then, outline why in this case pragmatism serves as one’s moral compass, and if so, show how a society might function on pure pragmatics, where what works determines what’s right. Then intention or motive don’t matter-which if we accepted, we would have to rewrite the entire common law but hey, this is America-results rule. I attempted to murder X but failed so, if there was no consequence, there is no guilt, no crime. Does that work? If it works its fine. It it doesn’t, its a crime.

In law school, you used to learn on day one that extreme cases make for bad law, and again, you can disagree, but at least acknowledge you are reversing the hallowed tradition. Show at least you know  the maxim exists and why it is taught, rather than resort to this tiresome ticking time bomb argument which is trotted out by these supposed great minds.  I would ask my 17 year olds in a high school civics class to demolish this trite example of how to hype the hypothetical. Exceptions normally prove the need for the law rather than overthrow it.  In national emergencies, you suspend the law, but you don’t get the Office of Legal Counsel  to make what is illegal legal. You have the courage to say, ‘Guys, this is normally illegal but urgency demands it. OK? “Lincoln did it. It was eventually declared unconstitutional, but Lincoln knew that and the country understood they were in crisis.

The lack of competency in moral reasoning of some of our elected and formerly elected officials, or their seeming intellectual disdain for this deep field of expertise is alarming. One would think to listen to them that  our torture dilemma is totally new, but the Romans and Greeks and the Turks and  the British all had to deal with it. Britain tortured the Irish and provoked an uprising. The Church tortured heretics and is still making up for it. The glorious history of Torture has yet to be written, though a certain Vice President might be inspired to write it.

These paper thin arguments that parade as moral reasoning collapse when exposed to any critical review. They will eventually be exposed as being not right or wrong but just plain dumb, or even worse, to be parroting the  same arguments that Stalin and Hitler used, to save the Proleteriat from the greedy Kulaks, or the Germans from some mythical Jewish conspiracy. We have been here before but you’d never think so to hear these latter day Plato’s postulating in their own caves on Capital Hill.

When elected officials and members of the administration have to make the hard moral choices, often between two evils, or even between two conflicting goods, they are obligated to make a reasonable case, to follow some traceable path that it recognizable as moral reasoning, knowing that they will have to give an account that stands up to the scrutiny of history. Moral discourse unfortunately cannot be easily disguised in political rhetoric, because we know when someone is stacking the odds, or bluffing.  The reason why we know is that we all make moral decisions. We all know how hard it is at times, so our leaders need to honor us as thinking citizens, and appeal to our brains, not our fears. Torture may be right and torture may be wrong, but to torture the well established field of moral reasoning with such a lame conceptual grasp of the basics is to invent a new form of moral hazard. The jury might in the end find OLC to be not right or wrong, but even worse, to be just plain dumb. Whatever about water tortures, these guys seem out of their depth.

I was an avid follower of the 2008 elections because I was writing a book on the campaigns, using them as a case study in narrative critical method. If the contest was really a battle of stories, how could one elucidate the process and predict the result without reference to polls or focus groups? Maybe it was not so hard, but we predicted that as a story, Obama had to win. and even if he lost, he was the bigger story. He was the narrative heavy weight.

In my final chapter, I predicted that the glow of the Inauguration would last about a day. and I was not far wrong. The Republicans have convinced themselves that the best defense is attack and the President, taking the advice of his Chief of Staff, is impelled into action,not to waste this economic crisis.

We have huge stimulus bills to save the banks; we have energy bills to save the planet; we have plans to save the health care system, and we have a new deal in education. Any one of the above could be a lofty and honorable goal, but all four at once! It defies narrative logic.

Imagine writing a drama and having all the action in Act One. If you walk on water in Act One, what do you do for an encore, and more to the point, if your first Act bombs, what can you do to salvage it. You have gambled too big too early, before the cards are even shuffled. The adrenalin rush that new power brings is addictive but sometimes, one needs to go take a cold shower and patiently build energy through anticipation to ensure your most dramatic moves create the most drama. An administration needs to evolve and unfold like a great tale being told. You don’t rush the beginning. You build it up slowly, patiently, giving us time to imagine-what might happen next? “Once upon a time….” The most powerful weapon a President has is his power to command the nation’s attention and he can only sustain that by the way he lays out the story.

The Presidential Plot-my book- predicted that a young, fresh, Prince would steal the kingdom back from the cruel old King. That is how Disney and most traditional folk tales tell the story. But our young Prince needs to be wary of believing his own publicity, and committing that juiciest of sins in ancient drama, hubris. Oh what would tragedy be without good ole hubris. How the Greeks loved it. Just when you think you have conquered all, your own pride trips you up and you overreach. We as audience want to yell at the hero, “Don’t do it.Don’t do it” because we know that we have all done it.

When you have won so overwhelmingly and you have an approval rating off the charts, you could be forgiven for thinking this is all so easy. The world is my oyster, I can rebuild the kingdom and refurnish the palace at the same time, as well as drain the moat and repel the barbarians at the gate, and then, after lunch, I will slay the dragon and shoot a few hoops and cook a three course meal, and then, hold a G-20 summit after supper. And why waste a crisis? Let’s reform everything at once.

A story, as Obama the Candidate knew so well, has a beginning, a middle and an end. The ending he wants and needs most as President is Economic Recovery and he needs that no later than June 2012. Otherwise, he will not get a second term. So he has time, and the priority of the nation now is RECOVERY. Nothing else. That’s the story we are locked in.That is the story in which he as hero must play the unambiguous lead.

The nation has had a heart attack. We need shock treatment to get back on our feet. That is what everyone I know is obsessing about. They are not talking about the finer points of health care or charter schools, or wind and solar power. President Obama feels empowered but impatient-there is so much to be done, but his inexperience has trapped him into an urgency that threatens to dilute his focus. What makes political sense to him and his team does not make much sense to the nation. We only have the attention span to follow one BIG story at a time. FDR wanted us to defeat Hitler. Everything else was secondary to that and today, in a worried and confused nation, we need the ONE BIG story to unify the nation’s efforts.

Obama needs to get back to his ONE BIG story-economic recovery. That’s what his bully pulpit should be bullying us about, how he will lead the nation back. Only when that is securely underway should he introduce Act Two-REFORM, which is an even BIGGER story. Give us enough time and give that story enough space and we will get that too. Reform surely deserves its own full season of debate but don’t schedule it before February 2009.

When the patient is almost dead, you restart the heart. You don’t decide to throw in a face lift, a kidney transplant and a brain makeover. Why use up all the narrative fuel you need to keep your government dramatically compelling by spending it all at once and losing the impact that any one of these reforms could create on its own. The nation is not paying attention because the President’s solution sounds as messy and confusing as the problem.

Obama and his team are standing on their own best stories. He knew how to manage it in the campaign, but the object was clear. He wanted to win. Now, there are too many storylines, and people are not paying attention to anything but the economy. President Obama has had barely 8 weeks in the Oval Office but I fear he is being sucked into too much too soon, and into over promising what he cannot possibly be sure he can deliver. Why risk your credibility so soon?

So here is a memo to the narrative genius behind the President, David Axelrod. You took four years to prepare the Obama candidacy and get it focused and your Candidate was an amazing example of ONE disciplined storyline. He got it. Now that you have won power, the same lesson applies. What is the one BIG story you want the nation to absorb and act out of? We can only handle one BIG story at a time. Recovery AND reform is too much, and it is inherently contradictory. What you do to revive a patient is not what you do to get him back to fitness.

President Obama doesn’t have to keep making giant gestures. Just getting elected was enough inspiration to last us 6 months, and then a concerted effort at recovery. That makes sense. That’s a story that works. That will take at least 12-18 months. Recovery first, then reform. But if the overcrowded storyline of four BIG stories all at once doesn’t work, then nothing else will work and the President will have blown all his dramatic capital in one stunning opening act. It’s a tragedian’s dream. Like Rush Limbaugh, the Greeks wish failure on all their heroes because it is what makes a compelling story. But it should not be Obama’s story. We did not elect him for tragedy. Right now, the Obama team are perilously close to becoming narratively unintelligible. They won, but now they’re losing us and we can’t follow this presidential plot.

36 murders get reported in one night’s news this week. 36 life stories have ended. But what other stories get attached to them? We heard news of 15 killings at a school in Germany, followed by another 14 dead  in the Southern USA. Then  add the daily casualty count from Iraq and Afghanistan as listed on the nightly NewsHour-4  soldiers killed-and then comes reports of mass protests on the streets of Belfast and Derry over the deaths of  three people, two British soldiers and one PSNI policeman. Thirty six deaths from around the world in one bulletin. But the differences in the stories they tell are dramatic.

If the appropriate reaction was to be gauged by sheer weight of numbers, then  there should be thousands on the streets of Berlin and Washington protesting the senseless deaths of innocent students and family members because someone with a grudge got a gun.  Grudges are easy to obtain, but they become lethal when those who nurture them get an armory as easy as walking into a MacDonalds for a burger.

Yet Berlin is quiet and Washington is silent. The mass protests happen only  where the death toll is the least, Northern Ireland, because these deaths  threaten to resurrect that old story of bloody conflict, a story that Northern Ireland has decided most determinedly belongs to the past. Those who want to re-ignite the secular hatreds are yesterday’s men.  The public rise up as one to condemn the criminal acts and console the families who have to relive the story that no longer makes any sense, if it ever did.

‘Senseless killing’ is a term broadly applied, and it describes all these headlines of murder and mayhem, but the isolated acts of lone madmen in Germany or the USA do not tap into any larger narrative. They are in the service of one small, isolated story of enmity and insanity. The deaths will transmit a chain of family stories that will echo down the generations, telling of loss and despair, but ultimately they belong to the human story, that sometimes, people lose it and when any society makes guns as accessible as toys, tragedy is almost inevitable. We don’t let kids play with guns. Why do we let psychopaths?

But in Northern Ireland, the murders threaten to add a new chapter to a viral story of unparalleled viciousness, blood feuds, tribal enmities that have been put away at last for the sake of the future. Like a bush fire in the heat of an Australian summer, these old tales are more easily ignited than extinguished.

Northern Ireland, I believe, needs to brand these acts as criminal and deranged and deny them any status as political acts of resistance. They belong to the same story of human insanity that the murders in Germany and the USA reflect. They do not belong to any larger story, they do not have any larger significance unless we decide to interpret them that way. And if their perpetrators insist  that they killed in order to free, as the Continuity IRA will claim, we need to treat them as insane too, people locked inside a story of their own deranged anger.

The story that we weave around trauma dictates how we will act in response. If 9-11 had been storied as the brazen act of crazy zealots like the  NY attacks of 1993 or the Oklahoma City bombings, then we would not have fueled the big story that the terrorists wanted us to tell of them. They were virulently anti-USA, and we took them at their word and embarked on a war that looked to the Muslim world as Anti-Islam. We got sucked into the exact same story that these sick terrorists acted out of. We gave them significance, a larger meaning, made them heroes of Islamic fundamentalism rather than exposing them as fools captive to unholy delusions. President Bush elevated them to martyrdom status in asking “Why do they hate us.?” but that is not a question you ask a paranoid. Paranoids are out to get everyone. Don’t take it personally.

The most dangerous kind of attention we can pay to these crazies is to treat their stories as sensible. The deaths in Germany and the USA were senseless, tragic and random, and they do not deserve any more sense than that. So too in Belfast, these acts were committed to revive that old story, but that story makes no sense anymore, and so their acts do not even deserve the status of terrorism. These people are mad, crazy, criminally insane. That does not make the pain any less, but it makes our response more powerful in totally disqualifying the story that gave these criminals their inner sense of justification. To tell them that their act was meaningless is the ultimate rejection. These were senseless killings and that kind of random insanity should pose no greater threat to a civil and sane society than a horrible air crash or a hurricane.  It happens,  and we deal with it.

Humans cannot live long or act effectively without meaning. To even for a minute attach significance where there is none is to feed the very story that sparked the killings. It is not the story the killers tell that matters. What matters is the story we tell about them.

“In the Republic of Stories” is a 6 month experiment to apply a narrative critical mind to the Presidential election process as it is covered by the mainstream media. What makes it distinct from the other political blogs out there is that we are playing the role of the NARRATIVE ANALYST, not the pundit or someone who has any particular party preference. We are the Center for Narrative Studies based in Washington DC and our mission for the past 14 years has been to “shape the stories that shape us.” Go do www.storywise.com for more information.

What has prompted reviving this by-line from the old CNS NARRATIVE MATTERS Newsletter is the frquent use of the word “narrative” by our TV pundits and experts. For intance, they speak of “Obama’s narrative” challenging Clinton’s” or “McCain’s narrative” not exactly fittiing the conservative agenda. If the so called experts are now using “narrative” in their prime time lexicon, we feel its time that narrative practitioners enter the fray to demonstrate that a narrative approach is more than just throwing that word around as a new cliche. We want to demonstrate that “story” is both a tale told and a method of meaning-making. We want to show of and demystify “story” as the dominant strategy driving the election and an increasingly popular metaphor to desribe it.

We set ourselves some specific goals. This analysis must prove that

• It is relevant,
• It is not just a rip-off or a recycling of the chatter from the commentariat.
• It must add light and not just heat to the dialog.
• It must also carry its own explanatory power to help us understand the drama that is unfolding.
• It must demonstrate not only explanatory value but predictive power.That is not to say that we can predict the winner or the loser but we can predict how certain stories will unfold. Stories give us reliable maps.
• Lastly, with millions of other blogs out there, we want to test to see if we can attract an audience and draw collaborators who will take off the political lens, or the media masks and get as curious as we are in the Presidential election as an epic unfolding in real time.

Democracy is a story in which the hero is the people, not just the winning candidate. When the people vote, they are making their voices heard. In French, the word for vote is the same as voice. In the Republic of Stories, we want to champion a view of democracy in which every voice counts, and every story has a right to be told, not just the Stories that come blaring out at us from CNN and FOX.

The Republic of Stories is what makes our democracy vibrant and our election process exciting. But some stories are dangerous, some stories drown out or disqualify other stories, and some stories deliberately feed our fears. The “story of power” can too easily boil down to “the power of story,” where millions are being spent by the electoral spin-meisters targeting us as their uncritical story consumers. This column offers a form of consumer protection from those stories that threaten to turn the Republic of Stories into a Tyranny of the Deaf and the Dumb!

EPILOGUE-WHAT BEGAN AS A BLOG BECAME A BOOK-THE PRESIDENTIAL PLOT

The project that is desribed above was completed, not as a continual blog as intended but as a published book called The Presidential Plotp- the Story, the Map and the Conspiracy to elect a President. It is now available at http://www.lulu.com/content/3972295. Here is the opening page.

“We are all suckers for a good story; it’s not just that people lie to us. We lie to ourselves. We are the willing confabulators of our fictions and if you don’t believe me, let’s remind ourselves of a few recent stories.

Remember Iraq? There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s) but most of us wanted to find them because we knew Saddam was a baddie! He should have had them. It so fit the story. Now we are blaming the Government, so we don’t have to blame ourselves, but even 65% of Democratic voters originally bought the horror movie of “Smoking gun to mushroom clouds.”

Remember how Enron was re-inventing the energy business? All the Harvard business gurus were lauding it for setting new standards of excellence and profitability. We didn’t want to know about any bottom line finagling until they ran out of money. But big business, who are paid to know, and government, who are paid to regulate, bought it big time. Ken Lay was a White House VIP, a member of the Board of Harvard Business School no less.

And lest we forget Katrina-FEMA was a great agency. They knew how to handle hurricanes and were doing one “heckuva of a job,” because our President told us so. Then we saw the bodies floating and the people abandoned on housetops. The images didn’t fit the story, though ‘heck,’ as a euphemism for “hell” was at least accurate!

Katrina-Enron-WMD’s, I am sure you can name even more-the Boston Archdiocese, Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Corporations now produce stories as an industry, and whether they be the military, the White House or Wall Street,they wield enormous power over us, until sometimes, reality has its revenge and firms go bust, wars go bad, and levees break. But by then, it’s too late. And we are left to wonder: Why were we suckers for the story in the first place?