Here are the answers to my State of the Union Quiz: George, Bill, or Osama?

On justice:

1. “We are people who do not stand for injustice and we will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting.” Osama

2. “And with our NATO allies, we are pressing the Serbian government to stop its brutal repression in Kosovo, to bring those responsible to justice and to give the people of Kosovo the self-government they deserve.” Bill

3. “At the start of 2006, more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half — in places like Syria and Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Iran — because the demands of justice and the peace of this world require their freedom as well.” George

On the nation:

1. “We don’t mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat.” Osama

2. “You know, no nation in history has had the opportunity and the responsibility we now have: to shape a world that is more peaceful, more secure, more free.” Bill

3. “Members of Congress, however we feel about the decisions and debates of the past, our nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies and stand behind the American military in its vital mission.” George

On the nation’s resolve:

1. “Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning. The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home.” George

2. “Don’t let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years and we bled their economy and now they are nothing.” Osama

3. “Tonight, as I deliver the last State of the Union address of the 20th century, no one anywhere in the world can doubt the enduring resolve and boundless capacity of the American people to work toward that ‘more perfect union’ of our founders’ dreams.” Bill

On Osama:

1. “As we work for peace, we must also meet threats to our nation’s security, including increased dangers from outlaw nations and terrorism. We will defend our security wherever we are threatened, as we did this summer when we struck at Osama bin Laden’s network of terror.” Bill

2. “And one of the main sources of reaction and opposition is radical Islam; the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death. Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously.” George

3. “A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain.” Osama the slam poet

On Social Security:

1. “So let me say to you tonight, I reach out my hand to all of you in both houses and both parties and ask that we join together in saying to the American people: We will save Social Security now. Now, last year, we wisely reserved all of the surplus until we knew what it would take to save Social Security. Again, I say, we shouldn’t spend any of it, not any of it, until after Social Security is truly saved.” Bill

2. “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security, yet the rising cost of entitlements is a problem that is not going away. And with every year we fail to act, the situation gets worse. So tonight I ask you to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This commission should include members of Congress of both parties and offer bipartisan solutions. We need to put aside partisan politics and work together and get this problem solved.” George

3. “The best death to us is under the shadows of swords.” Osama the slam poet, on crack

Click here for the full transcripts:

1999 State of the Union address, by Bill Clinton

2006 State of the Union address, by George W. Bush

2006 State of the Jihad address, by Osama bin Laden

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Answers to the “Racist (and mysogynist!) roundup” quiz:

1. B. The manager said, “Bin Laden is in charge of the kitchen.”

2. A. Miss Jones said to Miss Info, “You feel superior, probably because you’re Asian,” to which Mr. Lynn responded: “I’m gonna start shooting Asians.” The boardgame was “Chinkopoly,” and the song was “We Are the World.”

3. I am sad to say, as someone raised in New Jersey (South Jersey!), the answer is D.

4. A. Star (Troi Torain) called her a “bitch” and a “filthy rat-eater.”

5. D., though the wire service that carries Coulter’s columns, Universal Press Syndicate, eventually edited the column to read: “That dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas.”

Gosh, those racists/mysogynists say the darndest things! Do let me know if you hear about any more hilarious mysogynist/racist/etc. bits of news, in the States or elsewhere — you just can’t get enough of these people! (Did I say “these people”?)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Darfur is just the latest in military and paramilitary attacks in the name of ethnic cleansing and its terrifying relationship with oil development. The Nuba, Nuer, and Dinka are all minority groups within Sudan that have been terrorized and displaced in the last 20 years of the Sudanese civil war. The Nuba are the most widely known because of German photographer Leni Reifenstahl’s idealized portraits of the historic tribes people. For a complete history, see “Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights” at  film at the Human Rights Watch website.

In The Fray Contributor

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s theory for a post-Cold War United States claimed that the “Confucian” states represented by China and the “Islamic” states would unify against the West in a civilization war for the fate of humankind. This theory was heavily criticized by theorist Edward Said for the racial and colonial stereotypes upon which this theory relied. Conservative policy analysts believe 9/11 proves Huntington’s thesis to be correct.

In The Fray Contributor

The common understanding of Immanuel Kant’s morality focuses on the means/ends distinction made in contrast to utilitarianism (the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number). Deontology gets reduced: do not use humans as means, and no outcome, no matter how good, can justify immoral action.  What is overlooked is Kant’s theories about the origins of moral duty or the compulsion towards moral action that each of us is supposed to feel deep down. In this way, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason preserves an element of faith to prove the moral character of humans. What Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek do is disentangle this notion of “compulsion” and “morality” from the Protestant values that Kant asserted where natural and therefore universally True. In de-moralizing the “duty” in Kant, Zupancic particularly changes the standards for determining ethical action. Instead of relying on biblical origins for the good, Zupancic and Zizek argue that the ethical is that which you will die for. The idea is that being willing to die for something is “pathological”, or literally insane, and that it must be, in a sense, disinterested or, at least, not self-serving because it goes against what Freudians and psychoanalysts believe is the most basic human drive — self preservation — or what Freud calls the “reality principle.” Zupancic explains this relationship between the reality principle and psychoanalytic ethics in her book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, writing:

To use an historical example, anti-slavery hero John Brown was considered by all accounts of his white contemporaries to be totally insane. And by white standards of the time, he was insane because he was willing to die, and did die, to change something that in no way threatened his particular way of living. Thus, John Brown wagered his safety and privilege in his act of sacrifice and went against every natural human tendency of self-preservation and self-interest. He raised the freedom of African Americans to the status of something that was literally more valuable than himself.

In The Fray Contributor

An ancient Greek Dramatist (526 B.C.- 456 B.C.) whose works like Agamemnon are drawn on for thinking about tragedy. The tragic ethos that is used by authors like Judith Butler, Michael Dillon, and others is used to discount the often accepted view that violence and atrocity can be pinned on particular people or particular human decisions. Instead, tragic events are evaluated as products of systems and global trends that exceed any one individual or group of individuals. This political position at least limits the finger pointing that is often counterproductive in determining why, for instance, people would be motivated to blow up buildings or why people would be desperate or angry enough to die for a particular cause. Using a tragic view of politics can make it possible to ask these more systemic questions that get lost in the shuffle of revenge and blame.

In The Fray Contributor

This is a literary device that uses a commonly held attribute to stand in for something else. In the example given of George W. Bush’s September 11 address to the nation, Bush can simply say that the conflict is one between good and evil without needing to explain that the U.S. are the “good guys” and that terrorists are the “bad guys.” What is dangerous about this technique is that is prevents any discussion of how these terms are applied, it makes them off limits by relying on “common sense.” In the instance of this speech, it also allowed the “bad” to represent all of Islam without Bush having to answer for such a bigoted assertion. Often metonymy allows the speaker to communicate something that he or she would not like to take responsibility for.

In The Fray Contributor

Borrowing from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s understanding of language and power as being intimately influential on one another; redeployment refers to the degree to which the intended purpose of one’s language is often irrelevant to the ways that language gets used. Instead, ideas that are so loaded with meaning, also known as ideographs, like democracy, freedom, heroism, etc., are attached to political positions that are broadly accepted. For instance, calls for democracy have effectively been deployed for the purposes of Marxist revolutions and capitalist expansion. The Cold War was a conflict between two national ideologies that, at the level of explicit discursive form, disagreed about nothing. As Foucault writes in Politics and the Study of Discourse:

… discourse is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said.  The discursive field is, at a specific moment the law of this difference.”

In The Fray Contributor

In Roland Barthes’ classic, Mythologies, he describes tautology as one of the eight vital rhetorical strategies by the right. Conservative ideology is indebted to a particular, but broadly accepted, concept of common sense. The right uses these norms about how the world works to defend that which cannot stand up to reason and debate. For example: Why must nations go to war? The conservative replies: because that is what nations do. Debate is foreclosed by locating the answer within the question and covers over the rhetorical slight of hand by appealing to one’s authority or history to prevent further discussion. In Barthes’ words, “In tautology, there is a double murder: one kills rationality because it resists one; one kills language because it betrays one …  [tautology] can only of course take refuge behind authority.” Any alternative view of the world is cast off as naive or utopian. Judith Butler argues that this rhetorical strategy has been widespread in the attempts by conservatives of both the right and the left to prevent discussion of 9/11. Butler writes:

The raw public mockery of the peace movement, and the characterization of anti-war demonstrations as anachronistic or nostalgic, work to produce a consensus of public opinion that profoundly marginalizes anti-war sentiment and analysis, putting into question in a very strong way the very value of dissent as part of contemporary U.S. democratic culture.

In The Fray Contributor