The Weird Capital-E Experience Mantra

It's all about Experience...but really, what kind are we talking about?

God bless him, blogger and CNN contributor Roland Martin has finally pointed out that Hillary's math is completely...weird. Indeed, we're forgetting that if we're talking congress, Obama has 11 years as an elected lawmaker as opposed to Hillary's 8. And that's not the whole of it either.

I keep wondering why no one from the Clinton camp claims (just to be consistent) that Laura and Barbara Bush have all this experience that would've made them capable of being the best senators ever. Why is actually working on ground level with normal non-elite-type people (in other words, real Americans) for years and years without much credit and then working with the nitty-gritty of state government not as important as attending bruncheons with gold-rimmed china and flying in private jets and engineering failed health care plans? The math says that Barack has been in government office 4 years longer than Hill. If she denies that state government counts as Experience, she's saying Bill didn't really have enough experience to be president of the US of A.

Of course, I personally count Obama's unsung years of experience as a community organizer as being just as important as his years in Congress, and I'm glad that he does, too. What other candidate has had the generally invisible experience of working in the trenches with a community, for a community? None. That's why they have no clue what its value is--the value of rolling with the punches day in and day out, trying to unify people who think they're enemies, learning step by step to empower a unique group of individuals to find solutions and bring about the change they need for themselves. But really, would it be so risky for us to have a president who actually has lived like a normal American and worked for communities without any other motive than to actually (gasp!) empower a community to bring about change for themselves...all without even looking for a photo op?! Heaven forbid!

Next thing we know, Hillary will be claiming to be the Second Black President of the United States just because she's eaten junkfood and McDonald's with Bill and listened to him playing the sax (you know, since Toni Morrison claimed that those were the prerequisites for being a bona fide black person).

I console myself by assuming that the voices who are regurgitating the whole Experience Mantra have just not had the chance to really hear from Obama beyond the usual sound bytes. (Or sit down and do the math.)

And then there's the whole I Have the Most Foreign Policy Experience contest. Rudy Guiliani already revealed the pointlessness of this dehydrated peeing contest by claiming the title for himself due to his Ground Zero photo ops that put him in close vicinity to the 9-11 terrorists. Perhaps this whole Most Experience thing without the missing, ever-important qualifier (i.e. what kind of Experience?) is just the Wrong Question, period. After all, everyone knows that John McCain has more notches on his belt in terms of years in this category than Hill or Rudy or Barack.

So...new question: Who has the Most ______Experience?

I choose "Insanely Practical" as the qualifier.

Does someone who's only visited other countries in the context of staged tours or talks with a country's elite really know the outside world better than someone who has lived as an integrated foreigner outside the US--and has lots of family members living on other continents?

Here's a little example. My boss recently visited a country I once lived in. It was a staged tour and she met with elite-government types who wanted to give certain impressions of their country. This wasn't at all an invalid experience. In fact, she got more experience than I did within the realm of Powerful People with Agendas--who are also a very real part of the country. This can be genuinely helpful experience. But did she get a broad picture of the public and their worldview or culture? Does she understand how the common person in that country thinks? She'd have to go back for another visit to get a taste of that.

As for me, my experience was limited, too. I was a younger adult then, and I didn't live there long enough to start thinking like the average citizen even though I was immersed in their culture; I was, of course, always going to be a foreigner. But I lived in a non-expat mixed-income neighborhood (the mix all being on the low side)--and had close relationships with my neighbors. I knew what it was like to not enjoy civil liberties that the country claims are given and, while I was a foreigner with more freedoms than others, I had friends who had to deal with human rights abuses on a daily basis. Did my boss see any of that--did this tour allow any of those real life issues to be pondered or understood close-up? We both had limited experience, but I don't think anyone would say, "Oh yeah, your boss' week-long trip gave her a better understanding of the country's culture and needs and worldview."

In this sense, I give Hillary's claims way less credit and Barack's WAY more.

People who are saying to Obama's statement (about his family and his childhood years in Indonesia outranking his senate trips), "Oh puh-leeze, I visited Paris, and that doesn't make me a foreign policy genius" don't get his point only because, like most Americans, they haven't really lived outside the country in an integrated way (i.e. not the same thing as study-abroad, yo.). Having grown up outside America in yet another part of the world, I know that living somewhere before the formative age of ten is absolutely huge in shaping your worldview, and everyone I know who, as a child, has had to be a cultural outsider trying to fit in another culture gets this. (And sorry, being an insulated military dependent doesn't compare to Obama's childhood experience, as has been ignorantly suggested. The kid was in put local schools, for goddness' sake!)

No matter what sort of cultural dissonance you struggle with as a child, your appendages stuck in different worlds like a seemingly impossible Twister pose, you learn to respect people different from you--and learning real respect like this as a child gives you priceless experience that shapes the rest of your life. You learn to recognize that not everyone thinks like you and that they deserve to be understood within their own context--just as you'd want them to try to understand you. For that matter, a Third-Culture Kid's intimate knowledge that more than one valid context (not just your own) actually exists is, in and of itself, experience that a majority of Americans have the luxury of avoiding. But as deceptively simple as this kind of experience may appear to the kind of American that Hillary was shaped to be, we'd all have to agree that this is way more experience than our last few decades of presidents could hope to claim.

At the end of the day, all this talk of Experience alone will continue to be pointless (and weird) unless we--average Americans that we are--start caring more about the missing fill-in-the-blank qualifiers preceding this ever-needful quality. And at the end of the day, the kind of experience we choose in a leader will largely determine what kind of experience we will have of the world outside our borders--and the kind of experience that outside world will have of us.

That's just not the way we do things around here

Hello, McObama? We don't talk to our enemies, remember?

Barack Obama has made some "irresponsible and frankly naïve" statements. At least, that's the buzz I'm hearing in response to his statement in the CNN-YouTube debates that, were he to be elected, his hope and intent would include dialog without precondition with some of America's worst fans. Including "dictators." Particularly those who play around with nuclear power or don't let us control their oil (or both).

Clinton's people and Obama's right-wing opponents set out from the beginning to paint him as an idealistic greenhorn (hence, "Obambi"). And for voters just beginning to get acquainted with him, it's not hard to assume that Hill has way more of the experience that actually counts, seeing that she's already lived at the White House for longer than twice Obama's time in Congress—and, of course, she would theoretically have the most important friends on her myspace page (well, minus David Geffen, of course). And, she's BFF with none other than America's First Black President (help, us Lord).

It's undeniable: Hill has experience.

But I wonder what kind of experience is most desperately needed at this point in our nation's history. I wonder if, perhaps, there might just be wisdom in a simpler, less seemingly tried-and-true (sorry, I meant "tried-and-tried") understanding of where a new administration would actually need to start out, were they to actually do something constructive in that obnoxious realm of foreign policy.

Still, it's undeniable: Clinton sounds good and rational, playing the part of the wise veteran, admonishing her junior colleague and opponent that she thinks the obviously judicious approach when it comes to dictators is caution. It's also undeniable that such a wise, rational statement is a bit too convenient and wonderfully non-committal. Politically speaking, her response was smart. She wins that round of Jeopardy! But I wonder if, perhaps, we should actually be puzzling over a completely different category of answers and their respective questions.

Perhaps, for too long, American foreign policy has been brazen and arrogant in all the wrong areas and only cautious and non-committal and conveniently tripping over red tape when Washington is uncomfortable, its mouthpieces and wizards-behind-the-curtains worried about personal reputation/careers/assets/special interest groups/etc. Sure, caution sounds pretty great to us these days as the war trudges on and we reap the consequences of our lack of caution. But perhaps we're too quick to embrace so-called caution when we really don't want to step outside our comfort zone.

Perhaps Obama has not made a "naïve" statement after all. Perhaps we're quick to write off his perspective because it seems the rational thing to do. But I have a hard time believing that such a statement came out of a naïve idealism when his track record reveals someone with a broad scope of multi-faceted intelligence and passion for learning—and an understanding of non-American culture that no past president has acquired through personal life experience (that is, outside the realm of diplomacy and politics).

Perhaps, instead, he's recognized the place at which America must start over when this current administration, bull-in-the-china-shop that it's been, moves out with its wake of burned bridges and smoldering crops left trailing behind. Perhaps, just perhaps our only hope for picking up the pieces and building something new will be this: a willingness to be humble and shrewd enough to begin by engagement—by persistently pursuing the dialogue that eventually leads to relationship building.

In fact, it's naïve to imply that Obama is unaware that that Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are unlikely to ever be buddy-buddy with the U.S. Rather, Obama is merely recognizing that a position of real, substantive, constructive, and lasting "power" within the global community will stem out of a more subtle disarming which, in the long run, actually is more efficiently developed through relationship—again, built upon an ongoing human-to-human dialogue.

He seems to understand that, rather than retreating behind the standard mouthpieces and all their monotone, loaded words sprung from behind closed, locked doors, an effective head-of-state will have to proactively engage with our world, continuously deepening his/her experience-based understanding of that world. As naïve as I might sound, I wonder how things might change, were our leaders to practice shrewd but authentic engagement within their political world rather than retreating behind the walls of politics the way we're used to doing them. As a friend once said, would 9/11 have happened if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden met twice a year for coffee and chess?

Most of us (including the right wing) are aware that we as a country are probably not in very good standing with the rest of the world. And the most committed patriot would (hopefully) see that it would be preferable for our neighbors to see us as real people—equal humanity worthy of basic, mutual human respect—rather than merely the one large, slick-faced commercial for capitalism that much of the world has been led to believe America is.

I hate to "go there," back to our most collectively sore spot—but one has to wonder if the young men turned Al-Qaida terrorists would have felt so righteous in destroying the World Trade Center (something they saw as the face of America's immorality, greed, etc.) had they instead been acquainted with the true faces of the thousands of people who filled that shell—people who might have surprised them, had they been given a voice and been allowed to show a real, human face for the world to see and hear.

From what we now know of Al-Qaida (and other such cults that seem to prey on frustrated, idealistic (or hopeless), and often sheltered young men), in spite of their time spent in the West, the 9/11 terrorists had already developed a very cold, distant image of the US and what they believed it stood for long before they shaved their beards to go incognito—before they decided that defeating this selfish, steel-and-glass, pleasure-obsessed "monster" was a mission worth dying for. One must wonder how things might have been different, had they grown up knowing of America as an engaged country with an engaged leader, who, despite massive differences, related to their world with at least a cordial, authentic respect for it and doggedly sought to keep the conversation going in spite of tension or setbacks on either side.

Now, I recognize that, had some American (or other Western) neighbors invited these young men to dinner or at least sought to engage with them in some sense, it would not have been enough to avoid September 11th. Even at best, someone else would have taken their places, because this chasm between their world and ours has been eroding tirelessly and growing deeper for a very long time. But this is where, if we want to see change in our country's direction and change in the deeply troubled landscape of our world, we have to embrace a certain amount of simple wisdom—even if it be derided as naïvety.

We as Americans are an impatient people, as distinctly illustrated by our initiation of this war that we're still mired in years later. We were certain that Shock & Awe would take care of our apparent "problem" as quickly and completely as a Starbucks Triple Venti Vanilla Latte is supposed to make us happy and keep us awake and headache free, all in the time it takes to steam the 2% just so and present itself through the drive-through window for merely an half-an-hour's work pay!

So, for years and years, we've avoided the seeming "long route"—certainly a sometimes arduous and demanding and frustrating one—of dialog and relationship building, because it just takes too long. The results just can't be accounted for at the end of each week. We don't go back to school to exchange our career for the one we dream of because it'll take 4 long years, and we'll be 50 when we graduate; or we don't take up dance or surfing because most good dancers or surfers begin as children. Yet the adage holds fast: "Well, if you don't, you'll still be 50 in four years and you still won't have the degree and you still won't know how to dance."

Likewise, perhaps Obama recognizes that, if we don't start at square one any time soon, the next four years will come and go and we'll still be in the increasingly distressing predicament we're in as a nation today. So with that in mind, I think I'd like to warn Hill & Co. that they'd better think again. Perhaps, just perhaps, that greenhorn Obama is opting for a perspective that indicates far more experience and discernment when it comes to so-called "bad people" than what those pat answers we're so used to might actually imply. Perhaps it's time to redefine "responsibility."