Over red coffee cans and cigarettes

The essay is about what my grandmother would probably have said while discussing "one of the largest unforced errors in politics".

Unlike Michelle Obama, Tutu didn't think of the United States as "downright mean."

Grandma Revisits the Knesset Speech

As a teenager in Hawaii, I spent memorable weekends sitting across a kitchen counter from an old woman who exhaled plumes of smoke over my head. She was Helen to her friends and Tutu to her grandchildren. She would open a louvered window for the sake of our lungs, but could not abide the idea that standing next to it was the only socially acceptable way to enjoy a cigarette.

When Tutu tired of crossword puzzles, or wanted to postpone a four-block walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center for another can of Folger’s Coffee and the latest paperback mystery by Harry Kemelman, she would kvetch about politics, or fix me with a blue-eyed look, run a hand through blonde hair going gray, and tell stories.

Her ethnic background was Swedish and Celtic, which in disreputable circles might pigeonhole her as a typical white person. She left the Bronx for life in the tropics at the invitation of her eldest son when he became a rookie with the Honolulu Police Department.

Like other people in her old neighborhood, she had marinated in the Italian and Jewish cultures that mingled with her own. Tutu had the family recipe for all-day pasta sauce, knew a good matzo ball when she tasted one, and sometimes lamented the lack of delicatessens in Hawaii. Her side of the family was proof positive that the working-class boroughs of New York blended influences almost as seamlessly as the Honolulu suburbs where I grew up. The way she told it, you could drink New York tap water too, although you were unlikely to smell Plumeria blossoms on the breezes there.

Tutu died four years ago, but knowing about those Hawaiian weekends, you may not be surprised to learn that it was she who sprang to mind when one paragraph from a speech of almost 2,500 words made news earlier this month because President Bush denounced the appeasement of tyrants while he was in Israel addressing the Knesset.

Senator Barack Obama, wary of the president’s reputation for having an itchy trigger finger, interpreted the appeasement anecdote in that speech as an attack on the kind of unconditional dialog with foes that he calls a staple of “tough diplomacy.” Many Obama supporters seconded their man’s outrage, even as some pundits took pains to point out that President Bush, not known for subtlety, had neither named Obama nor described him in the alleged attack. In fact, the only Democrat mentioned in the speech was President Truman, whom President Bush hailed for having been the first world leader to recognize Israel.

True to form, at least one “moderate” Arab news outlet called the Bush speech an “act of lunacy.” If representative chatter on WZTK FM is an accurate barometer of national sentiment, then those Democrats who call into or host radio shows seem to agree. Conservative gadfly Pat Buchanan also criticized the speech. Bush “made a hash of history,” Buchanan charged, while arguing about the definition of appeasement and flipping rhetorically through the catalog of leaders who negotiated with unsavory peers at one time or another.

Buchanan was making a case until he tried to pin World War Two not on Nazi aggression but on British and Polish intransigence. In his reading of history, the problem was not that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain caved to Hitler, but that Chamberlain refused to abandon treaty obligations when German armies invaded Poland.

Like that idiosyncratic view and the Acme-brand products with which Wile E. Coyote tried doggedly to dispatch the Roadrunner, most of the talk radio discussion about the Knesset speech does not withstand careful scrutiny. If Tutu and I had parsed the speech together (and assuming that parsing happened now, rather than when I was a teenager watching Jaclyn Smith and Lynda Carter walk and fight beautifully on small-screen TVs), our conversation might have gone something like this:

“Tutu, did you hear about how Bush compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain because he wants to chat with dictators?”

“Did he really say that?”

“Obama says he did.”

“Well, Chamberlain was a putz. But we already talk to Iran and Syria, Sean. That's why there's a State Department.”

“Only it's not the guys at the top who talk. It's the underlings.”

“And for good reason. You want the president should talk to anybody?”

“People say not talking means you're scared.”

“Sometimes that. But it can also mean that you don't want to dignify craziness.”

“Bush should not have aired our dirty laundry overseas. I've heard that, too.”

“Not appeasing tyrants is dirty laundry now?”

Tutu had never had logical fallacies batted back at her by my debate coach, but she'd raised four kids and sworn off the bottle. Chatting with the people at Woolworth's drug store to whom she sold puka shell necklaces and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts kept her sharp.

“Tutu, one guy said the speech was like when the Dixie Chicks went to England and one of them said they were ashamed to share Texas with President Bush.”

“The Dixie Chicks?”

“Never mind. You think Bush should have said anything about how dangerous appeasement is?”

“Why not? He’s said that before, and Jews understand that kind of thing better than most.”

“What about hypocrisy, though? You know that Muqtada al-Sadr guy in Iraq? I heard we paid him to stop his guys from fighting with us.”

“Sean, when I'm not selling dashboard hula dancers, I look at TV. These old eyes can't read so much anymore. If we paid Mookie, it wasn't with a White House photo-op. So I don't see the hypocrisy.”

“Another caller said that this used to be a great country, but we're slipping.”

“Slipping how? Was he talking about kids who dress like hookers? Unless people stop paying even lip service to the Constitution, it's still a great country. What dictators think is not what makes this country great.”

“A guy named Tom Maguire agrees with you about that hypocrisy bit, Tutu. He said that what Obama does not understand is that a U.S. president can only meet with certain enemies if he already has a reputation for fighting those enemies. Nixon went to China because he could, but Obama has no international reputation.”

“Maguire is right. I still don't see the fuss.”

“Well, Obama thinks Bush is a schmuck for confusing diplomacy with appeasement in a speech to the Israelis, and his guys say Bush wouldn't know appeasement if he tripped over it.”

“But Bush said he was against appeasement?”

“Right.”

“Then what he said is no different than 'speak softly, and carry a big stick.' Before your time. But that wasn't a schmuck talking to the Knesset. That was a mensch.”