The Real Reason for the Gore Separation

When Al and Tipper Gore decided to separate the news hit many people hard. The Gores were a loving couple; they had just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary; they had enjoyed substantial material success; and they had a bevy of beautiful children and grandchildren.

If the Gores couldn't make it, thought many people, what hope was there for the rest of us? The kiss that Al planted on Tipper's lips at the 2000 Democratic convention has almost become an iconic image of conjugal bliss.

No one has any real idea of what went on in the privacy of the Gore home. To their credit the Gores have kept their private life out of the media.

Still and all, we feel that we know politicians personally, and we have never had any reason to see Al Gore as a skirt-chaser in the Bill Clinton or even the Mark Sanford mode. We are all reasonably confident that there is no shameless vixen or Argentinean hussy hiding behind the curtains.

As some have suggested, we might be wrong. But then again, one finds it hard to believe that a forty year marriage flounders because of an indiscretion.

But what if all the information that we need to know is right there, out in the open, right in front of our eyes.

As best as I can tell more marriages have failed for alienation of affection than from an erotic romp. You do not need to have committed an act of infidelity to become emotionally alienated from your spouse. Sometimes it is even more painful when there is no love interest, when your spouse is there in the flesh but not in the spirit, when he has become so completely disengaged from the everyday life of a marriage that you feel you are dealing with a zombie.

I will speculate that the Gore marriage fell apart because Al Gore fell in love with something else. Not with another woman, not with another person, but with a cause. The Gore marriage failed because Al Gore was seduced by the cause of global warming.

Al Gore did not simply come to believe in its truth; he became its most prominent public spokesman. From losing presidential candidate Al Gore became a prophet, a world savior, someone who might have thought that God took the presidency from him because He had something bigger in mind, something more global and more consequential: saving the planet from global warming.

Being a prophet, Al Gore was never home. He circled the globe; he traveled around like an itinerant preacher, advancing the cause of global warming.

Reports tell us that the Gores had, for some time, been living separately. Link here. Tipper was home alone.

And Al Gore was not just traveling around. He had become the subject of mass adulation. He was feted and praised and even worshiped for his work on the environment. He won a Nobel Prize; he made a fortune; he was everywhere doing everything to save the planet.

George Bush could have the presidency; George Bush could have his wars; Al Gore was saving the world. And he did not even have to deal with everyday banalities.

The Gore marriage is not the only one that has been sundered by the zealotry of one of its members. You cannot truly love a cause and remain fully engaged in your marriage to another human being. You cannot sustain the routines that nourish a marriage after your mind has been taken over by an ideology.

Human beings get and often stay married. Zealots remain fully committed to their cause, marriage or no marriage. And some spouses, faced with the choice between losing their marriage and joining their spouse in their fanatical devotion to an ideal, feel compelled to take up the same cause.

Apparently, Tipper Gore did not want to do so.

And why should she. When your husband is thrown into paroxysms of anguish over the fate of the polar bears, how much affection can be left for you. When you discover that, despite all of this anguish, the polar bear population has been growing, not decreasing, that must count one irony too many.

How much emotion do you have for the mundanities of everyday life when you have given your life over to a higher cause. If your wife is not along for the ride, she will naturally feel that her concerns and her interests, are of no consequences, barely deserving of your attention. Fanatical devotion to a cause propels you into another world, a world where simple pleasures are compromised by ideological considerations, and where everyday concerns are reduced to trivialities.

No marriage can ever provide the feelings of permanent rapture and ecstasy that you feel when you have sacrificed your life to a cause.

Did Al Gore know that becoming an environmental zealot would cost him his marriage? I think not. When people get seduced by causes they get caught up, enraptured by the cause, by the new feeling of absolute power, of being privy to God's truth, and they end up not knowing what has hit them. Of they are really zealots they do not care.

Devoting your life to a cause feels a bit like becoming a saint. Your primary allegiance, even your sole allegiance, is to this great cause, this cause that puts you with the angels and gives you a higher purpose.

A cause makes you a member of a cult. It offers you new friends, a new status, a new level of utter adoration, and, in Al Gore's case, riches beyond your dreams.

Al Gore was clearly too smart to be seduced by an intern or some everyday trollop. But he was not smart enough to prevent his mind from being seduced by an idea.

He may have thought he was invulnerable because he knew that he would never fallen for the wiles of a Monica Lewinsky. But he was totally vulnerable to a form of seduction that preyed on his intellectual vanity.

Vanity is vulnerability. Intellectual vanity is especially vulnerable because you are led to believe that you deserve all the praise you are receiving, even to the point that it is God's way to acknowledge an inconvenient truth that the American political system ignored.

Blockades in Perspective

In The Daily Beast Andrew Roberts offers some much-needed historical perspective on blockades. Of course, there are many articles out there condemning the Western leftist knee-jerk anti-Israeli response to the recent flotilla incident, but I find Roberts to be especially cogent and persuasive. More so considering the venue. Link here.

Coaching Lessons: What Price Loyalty?

A man and his wife meet up at a tavern for a quick after-work dinner. When he sees her walk through the doors he knows instantly that she is in a bad mood. Soon he discovers the reason: she got into a conflict with one of her co-workers. Now she wants to tell him exactly what happened.

For his part, he wants to help. He listens carefully, steps back from the situation, puts himself above the fray, and asks a series of probing questions, the kind that an investigator would ask. He wants to discover the truth; he wants to know who was right and who was wrong.

Perhaps he sees himself as an investigative reporter or maybe he believes that he should be the judge who will have to figure out who to blame.

In his mind someone is right and someone is wrong. He is committed to truth and justice; he wants it to prevail.

I hope I don't have to tell you that however upset his wife had been when walking into the tavern, she is, by now, incensed... at him. He might see himself as fair-minded and objective. She sees him as disloyal.

And she is right. Under the circumstances his first ethical duty is to show solidarity, to take her side, to be with her, and to show her that they are in it together.

Some psychologists describe this in terms of empathy, and I think that their point is well taken. But the real question is not so much whether he feels her pain, but whether he is exhibiting loyalty.

Once he has established that he is on her side, then he might or might not help her to solve the problem. It will depend on whether she wants any guidance in the matter. If he is going to help, his goal should be to help her to win the battle or to solve the problem.

If he maintains his distance, looks for objective truths, and sees the situation as something that needs to be adjudicated, he will have undermined his marriage.

Let's change the scenario, just slightly. Imagine that this soon-to-be-very-unhappy couple is having dinner at the same tavern with two of their good friends. Imagine that the wife expresses the same degree of frustration about the same conflict with the same co-worker.

Given that friendship has certain rules of engagement, her friends will most likely be utterly sympathetic. They will take her side.

What will happen if her husband decides that he loves the truth so much that he must point out her errors to show how she aggravated the conflict. Now, he is not merely disloyal; he has also humiliated his wife in front of their friends.

Clearly, we are in the realm of major ethical lapses. Just as clearly we are witnessing the kind of behavior that makes it nearly impossible for people to get alone.

If the husband becomes defensive, he might try a rationalization that you have probably heard more often than you would have liked. He might assert that his criticism is really an act of love, that he loves her so much that he cannot stand seeing her be less than he wants her to be.

Ask yourself this? On their next anniversary do you think that he should offer a piece of jewelry that express how loving and caring she is, or should he offer a lifetime membership in Weight Watchers because he thinks she's been getting too fat?

If the latter is an honest expression of his feelings, it's a very good argument for keeping your feelings to yourself, or better,for learning to respect other people's feelings.

The ethic that values loyalty is based on the social connection called friendship. And friendship, as Aristotle said, is based on seeing the best, not the worst, in your other people.

Why was Aristotle right? Because if you are constantly noticing the worst in people or constantly talking about what it wrong with them, they are not going to be your friends. Instead of befriending them, you have been acting as though they are actual or potential foes.

Let us look at this in a larger context. You have noticed that certain of our fellow citizens make a habit of criticizing their country. They find fault with whatever it does; they diminish its successes; they even find virtue in the actions of its enemies.

If you ask them why they have such a negative attitude, they will often reply that they love their nation so much that they want it to live up to its ideals, and that it cannot live up to its ideals if no one is going to point out its faults, flaws, and failings.

One might reply that our nation has been a towering success for all these many years precisely because it did not become obsessed with picking its wounds and engaging in a fruitless pursuit of an unattainable perfection.

But that is not going to make too much of an impression on our idealistic neighbor.

Does this man love his country? It depends on whether you believe that true loyalty is the kind that exists in his heart or the kind that is expressed in his public behavior. Relentless criticism of his country does not make him unpatriotic, but it does not make him a patriot either.

Loyalty is the social virtue that asserts your social connection to people and to groups. They might be groups you belong to or groups with which you identify. You can be loyal to a baseball team without playing second base.

What would one say then about American Jews who have an emotional and spiritual connection to Israel, and yet, who criticize all of its faults and failings, to the point where they even express a certain amount of sympathy for terrorist groups that want to destroy it. To name names, the J Street crowd comes to mind, as does, most recently Peter Beinart.

Are they being loyal to Israel? Do they maintain a friendly relationship with the Jewish state? Of course, they do not.

Perhaps they believe that they have a higher loyalty, or that their loyalty to America's values precludes them feeling any loyalty to the only Middle Eastern nation that embodies those values.

If they insist that they are loyal to the truth or justice, or some such ideal, I would reply that you cannot be loyal to an ideal. If you become part of a cult that treats these great ideals as idols to worship, then you might think of yourself as being loyal to that group, but that is all.

Loyalty is basic to all social ties. You are expected to be loyal to your family members, to your friends, to your company, to your nation, to your religious community, and so on. And we should never underestimate the power of loyalty as producing social cohesion.

As some people might be thinking, there are surely instances where a person or a group will forfeit its right to your loyalty. If a man discovers that his wife is a serial killer, then he does not have a social obligation to remain loyal to her. If he discovers that his company is involved in an organized criminal conspiracy to poison half the planet, he no longer has a duty to be loyal to the company.

Extremes do not make the rules, however, and the fact that we can imagine extreme cases where loyalty might be suspended does not imply that it is less important. Nor does it imply that the conditions for its suspension are any less than extreme.

Take whistle blowers. We all admire people who dispense with their company loyalty in order to reveal corporate malfeasance. If your company is large enough and if the malfeasance is egregious enough, being a whistle blower will almost certainly get you of 60 Minutes and offer you at least 15 minutes of fame.

And yet, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains in its entry about loyalty, whistle blowing must be a last, not a first or second or third, resort. The fact that you have discovered something wrong does not immediately absolve you of all requirements to be loyal to your company. To ensure yourself of the extremity of the situation you will need to work through corporate channels and to try to effect change from within.

Even when you are absolutely in the right and you have no real choice but to expose criminal corporate activities, the chances are good that when you get home from your 60 Minutes interview you will find yourself ostracized by your friends and neighbors, a pariah in your community, and a social reject. You will also discover that the same stigma has been transferred to your family.

I am not just trying to sound a cautionary note. I am using this example to point out that loyalty is a very, very powerful social virtue, and that, whenever you have the option, it is better to exhibit it than not.

Israel Under Siege, Part 2

Yesterday I suggested that the key to understanding the Turkish-led attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza was the foreign policy reset effected by the Obama administration. Now that Israel seems to have lost the support of its most important ally, the situation in the Middle East has changed dramatically. Link here.

Today, I have read two articles that also see the crisis from a similar angle, and I link them for your interest. The first, by Victor Davis Hanson, offers another historical perspective, one that bristles at the irony of the Turks being an arbiter of ethnic violence. But Hanson also makes a telling and salient point that deserves more emphasis: those who are piling on Israel and are defending the rights of terrorists seem themselves to have been affected by terror. They acting out of their own fear, much in the same way that Western media outlets have been cowed into not publishing any offensive cartoons about Islam. The next time you ask yourself why people resort to terrorist tactics, one answer must be that in many instances it works. Link here.

And today Michael Goodwin wrote a column analyzing how the crisis was precipitated by the absence of American leadership. As he puts it, Turkey had been preparing to send the flotilla for weeks; it had announced it clearly to the world. Where was American leadership? Where were our president and secretary of state? Link here.

One moral of the story is that we should never again send a bunch of amateurs to do a job that requires the kind of wisdom you only gain from experience.

The Politics of Natural Disaster

When trying to grasp the significance of the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe and its impact on the Obama presidency, I evoked the Chinese concept of the mandate of Heaven. The term refers to a dynasty's political legitimacy, something that cannot be imposed but must be inspired by the leader's ethical conduct. In my post I suggested that if we were thinking as the Chinese do we would say that a leader who fails to act properly when faced with a natural disaster is losing the mandate of Heaven. Link here.

Of course, the challenge for any reader is understanding the complexity concept. For that several voices are often better than one. Other writers have gotten the same impression I have, and have articulated it somewhat differently, so I want to link some of their comments.

In this one Maureen Dowd describes how Obama has been flailing and failing at this crisis. She then goes on to describe the loss of political legitimacy, and thus she provides a different look at the problem. Link here.

And then Tunku Varadarajan offers his own analysis of the effects of the crisis in The Daily Beast. Even though he does not use the term Varadarajan sees Obama as being in the process of losing the mandate of Heaven, something that he considers very grave indeed. Again, a perspective that has some overlap with mine, but that is sufficiently different to be instructive. Link here.

Finally, Dick Morris, surely a partisan here, just wrote an article trying to make Obama's response to the oil spill a metaphor for his presidency. Link here.

Capitalism Returns... with a Vengeance

Remember all the stories about how free markets had failed and how capitalism was doomed? They peppered the opinion pages and the left wing blogosphere for months in the aftermath of the2008 financial crisis.

These stories were everywhere, to the point where you might have believed that Paul Krugman had been cloned and cloned and cloned again.

If you do, I'm sure you also remember all the stories about how only government could save us from capitalist greed. So we elected Barack Obama, a man who would help us to socialize the losses in the banking system, take over the automobile industry, move toward nationalizing the health care system, regulate the markets, and implement government spending programs that would pay out generous salaries and benefits to the unionized workers who had sent him to the White House.

The drumbeat for government control was so strong and so strident that, at first, only a few had the courage to stand against it. Didn't we all want to become like the great social democracies of Europe, with their socialized medicine, daily siestas, and six weeks of paid vacation?

In the past few weeks, this European democratic socialist worker's paradise has been revealed to be a fraud, a sleight of hand, a pipe dream, an exercise in rank denial and living beyond your means.

And when you deny reality, by pretending that you can live beyond your means forever and a day, then reality is going to come back to bite you.

Everyone knows that the great European social democratic experiment has failed. The governments of Southern Europe-- the Club Med governments-- are broke. Their efforts to engineer social justice, to provide salaries and benefits beyond what the economy could sustain, have turned out to be a racket taxing the productive segments of the economy and handing out favors to those who were not being motivated by profit.

Now, the world seems to have woken up to reality and responsible leaders have started to try to undo the ill effects of these experiments in social democracy.

In America, the Tea Party movement has struck a blow for fiscal sanity. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has become a hero for many by cutting spending and refusing to increase taxes. Better yet, Christie stood up to the public employee unions whose contracts were bankrupting the state.

Now, to the surprise of many, Andrew Cuomo, Democratic candidate for governor of New York, is running his campaign on the same principles that have defined Gov. Christie's administration.

Even better, in Europe, the home of social democracy and experiments in engineering social justice, the same thing is happening. One can only hope that it is not too late.

As Andrew Roberts writes in The Daily Beast, governments all over Europe are responding to their financial crises by enacting policies that remind him of Margaret Thatcher. Link here. Speaking for educated European opinion, Roberts declares: "Instead of embracing socialism, we are all Thatcherites now."

What are these European governments, led from the left and the right, doing? Why, they are cutting spending, raising the retirement age, and reducing salaries of unionized civil servants.

To Roberts this is: "the last gasp of a dying leftist ideology." As he sees it, the Great Recession that was going to break the back of capitalism has actually revealed the ultimate failure of left wing quasi-socialist schemes.

But if Papandreou and Zapatero and Berlusconi and Sarkozy and Socrates and Cowen have figured it out, how long will it take Barack Obama to catch on? How long will it take him to realize that his free spending, government controlling, income redistributing policies are putting us on a pathway to European-style doom?

Israel Under Siege

Yesterday Israeli commandos interdicted a flotilla that was trying to break the blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Sent from Turkey, supported by pro-Hamas groups, the flotilla sought to open a channel through which it could re-arm Hamas. The war continues.

No one should be shocked to see the torrent of recrimination directed against Israel. Educated European opinion, coupled with no small amount of educated American opinion, has bought the oppression narrative that Hamas and other Palestinian groups have been selling. They have come to believe that Israel, by the fact that it exists, is responsible for all of the ills that have befallen the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East.

If the current war between Israel and the Palestinians is taking place in the arena of public opinion, Israel seems to have suffered a loss, regardless of whether it was right or wrong to do what it did. For a larger analysis of the public opinion war, see George Friedman's essay here.

Given the fact that Israel is still the most formidable military power in its neighborhood, those who seek its destruction have given up on the idea of a military confrontation. They have been trying instead to win back what they consider to be their Allah-given territory on the battlefield of public opinion.

They want Israel to be branded a pariah state, to be stripped of its political legitimacy, and to be forced to yield to Palestinian demands, especially the demand for a right of return. Clearly, Palestinian interests do not want a separate state, alongside the Jewish state. They want to flood Israel proper with Palestinians, the better to drive the Jews into the sea.

But how does it happen that Israel is losing the public opinion war? How does a country that has demonstrated the value of free enterprise and democratic liberties find itself alone and isolated against world public opinion? Doesn't Israel embody American and European values? Why are so many supposedly intelligent people throwing their wholehearted support to Palestinian terrorist organizations, organizations that have made it a point of pride to oppress their own people?

Of course, Israel has always lived under siege. But it has always had a friend and ally standing by its side. Israel may be a small nation, but it has always enjoyed the full support of the world's one remaining superpower.

Until now. The Obama administration has made fairly clear that it is no longer willing to maintain a special relationship with Israel. When Obama tilted away from Israel, when he started treating it as the problem and not the solution, when he labeled Israeli settlements the primary obstacle to peace, and when it gave Israel a very public tongue-lashing over an apartment project in East Jerusalem, Israel found itself in the unenviable position of being nearly friendless.

And then, the coup de grace was delivered by Obama himself when he received the Israeli Prime Minister as he would the leader of a rogue state, a pariah regime. Obama's disgraceful snub of Netanyahu at the White House made clear to the world that the United States was stepping away from its alliance with Israel.

Countries that had maintained something like an even-handed approach to the conflict, for fear of alienating the United States, understood that they could take domestic political advantage of the situation by siding with the Palestinians. As they read the shifting sands of international political alliances, they no longer had to fear America.

When you are a relatively small state under constant siege you need all the friends you can get. When America elected Barack Obama it deprived Israel of its most important ally. With Obama leading the anti-Israel propaganda war, the rest of the world saw that it had received a green light to pile on. And to test the blockade of Gaza with perfect impunity. Without its superpower friend by its side Israel became vulnerable in ways it had never been.

The incident in the Mediterranean was a direct consequence of Obama's foreign policy naivete.

Of course, Obama himself had recognized that he had made a complete hash of the relationship with Israel. He had invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to the White House for a diplomatic do-over this week.

But the forces of barbarism and reaction much preferred the old policy of treating Netanyahu as the leader of a rogue state.

Since Netanyahu was forced to cut short his visit to North America yesterday and to rush back to Jerusalem, the flotilla did accomplish at least one of its goals.

There is a larger, ethical issue here. How do you react when a friend is in trouble? What do you do when a friend is under siege? Do you step back to evaluate the charges? Do you adopt the role of judge or juror, believing that impartiality is morally superior to taking sides?

Of course you don't. When a friend is in trouble, you should know that you are being called upon to show the virtue of loyalty. Friendship involves taking our friends at their best; it does not mean that you stand back and treat them as indicted criminals whose cases has not yet been decided.

It's not about who is at fault; who is to blame; who is to be punished. It's about who your friends are, and whether you are more loyal to your friends than to an ideal.