Divided, we stand.., still

...By this time in 1986 Democratic presidential hopefuls like Dick Gephardt and Bruce Babbitt were marching through the meeting halls of Iowa and New Hampshire in search of voters...

...aced with an ongoing stalemate, there is talk of both parties changing the rules...

...This parliamentary turn has its roots in the Vietnam era, when the Watergate affair was, in effect, the means by which a Democratic Congress brought an end to what had become a Republican president's war in Southeast Asia...

...In what is a far less well-known development, some liberal Democrats are looking at the possibility of changing the rules for the electoral college...

...It's hard to see how they could be imposed by ordinary legislation...

...Due, in part, to this low turnout among young voters tending toward Republicans, the 1990 midterm electorate was the oldest in history...

...That in turn produces our divided and ineffective government...

...Now with the tables turned, White House Republicans think they have a winner in calling for congressional term limitations...

...John Taylor (The Primal Vision, 1963) even asserts that Africa, if true to herself, remains stubbornly inarticulate, for myth can only be analyzed when it is dead or dying...

...But now party government has been undermined by file decline in party loyalty, a decline that has led to the current stalemates in domestic and foreign policy...

...DIVIDED, WE STAND...STILL THE POLITICAL DEADLOCK IN WASHINGTON FRED SIEGEL he United States has, for all practical purposes, become a parliamentary rather than a presidential democracy in the conduct of foreign affairs...

...Not that tradition is nonexistent, but it is handed on orally, and, when it comes to spirituality, the living contact with ultimates is passed on more through chant and dance, through symbols and proverbs than through scriptures and systematic teaching or writing...

...he late Richard J. Daley, for better or worse one of the very symbols of the Democratic party, once presided over a self-consciously Democratic electorate in Chicago in which party loyalty was part and parcel of personal identity...

...In order to understand and appropriate the best in African spirituality one would need to spend many years, having learned the local language (one of hundreds of languages in Africa), as a participant in the life of some traditional African religious group...

...This African venture turned out to be much more difficult than the earlier Hindu-Buddhist one...

...Liberal congressmen who mocked earlier calls FRED SIEGEL, author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (Hill and Wang), teaches in the humanities department of The Cooper Union in New York City...

...He has vetoed Democratic-sponsored bills that would have legislated protections for Chinese students, specified the terms of negotiations with Japan over the FS-X fighter, and prohibited members of the executive from soliciting funds from foreign govemments...

...Barring a calamity in the Gulf or a prolonged and severe recession, the complex set of presidential primary rules first put in place for the 1972 race and modified repeatedly thereafter are likely to make it very difficult for the Democrats to unify early on behind a single candidate...

...Technical changes can make a difference...

...I found this a much more difficult task than the earlier one, for reasons that will soon become apparent...

...From this they unreasonably conclude that Congress need not be consulted to initiate even large-scale hostilities...

...The Constitution gives the Congress the right to set its own standards for membership and the Democrats who control Congress, not to mention Republican incumbents, are not going to vote against themselves...

...But in the case of a significant thirdparty vote, as in 1968 with George Wallace or 1980 with John Anderson, it also raises the possibility of political instability if no one gets an electoral majority and the election is thrown into the House of Representatives...

...The current debate over the Persian Gulf has tapped a rich vein of hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle...

...But America's political problems are far more than technical...

...This is a system that's wreaked havoc on the Democrats, however, ever since the McGovern reform introduced it into the party's primary process...

...for "original intent" on issues like abortion and capital punishment are now waving article 1, section 8 about as if it were a talisman...

...For dialogue is something more than the exchange of rational reflection...

...This does not mean that Africans are tongue-tied, as anyone who has listened to an African preacher, either in Africa or elsewhere, can attest...

...It is multiple and various...

...Nevertheless, I do not believe it is impossible...

...Yet beginning in 1982 the Democrats have gone from being eight Senate seats down to being ten seats up after the 1990 midterm elections...

...The prognosis is for continuing stalemate...

...Once again, I wanted to see how Christian spirituality, above all in my own life, could be enriched by direct contact with and participation in the spiritual life of another tradition, this time, Africa...

...Many of them did switch, but the 1990 Democrats saw numerous Republican switchers defeated, most notably Congressman Bill Grant in northern Florida...

...Bush, arguing that Congress has breached the constitutional separation of powers by trying to micromanage foreign affairs, has repeatedly reasserted executive prerogative to little effect...

...But the overall picture is captured by a despairing Republican consultant who moaned that "the Democrats will control the Congress well into the twenty-first century...

...Government in America was party government until the 1956 election, when Eisenhower became the first president in American history not to carry in with his election a congressional majority...

...And in the fight over the Persian Gulf for hearts and minds, Bush has, in effect, challenged Congress's claim to truly represent public opinion...

...Indeed, he sees this primal awareness, uncluttered by reflective thinking, as one of the most prized elements of African spirituality...

...If one were to undertake a study of what might be learned from, say, Karamajong spirituality, with the help of such informed scholars as Bruno VitelIi (Aspects of Karamajong Ethnosociology, Verona, Museum Combonianum, No...

...For Aylward Shorter, whose writings have been most helpful in my search for African spirituality, the dialogue is hindered by the lack of direct shared experience of African Traditional Religion (henceforth ATR) on the part of the non-African inquirer, and the absence of a tradition and experience of systematic articulation on the part of the traditional African...

...In 1980 the split among 18-29 year olds was 54-33 Democratic...

...Two years ago the sabbatical came round once again and I decided to embark on a similar project...

...The Democrats have overall control in 19 states with 167 districts (38 percent of the seats...

...In what is effectively a reprise of his 1988 campaign tactic of calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's flag-burning decision, Bush has at one and the same time put himself on the popular side of an issue and placed his congressional critics in a potentially awkward position...

...For in Africa there are hundreds of distinct, different, and to a great extent unrelated tribes, or to use the more acceptable current expression, traditional ethnic groups...

...Worse yet for the Republicans, despite a decade of GOP presidents, the state legislatures in charge of redrawing the congressional district boundaries for the 1990s are still firmly in Democratic hands...

...When the 1980s began with Ronald Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter, the Republicans were filled with realignment dreams, hoping to encourage conservative Southern Democrats to switch parties...

...To win the House in 1992, Republicans would have to capture an almost unprecedented fifty-one seats...

...Shorter, in his Priest in the Village (Geoffrey Chapman, 1979), suggests that the most effective approach is for the non-African inquirer to immerse himself or herself in an African traditional community, rather than require systematic 14: Commonweal...

...The same fault lines reappeared in Reagan's second term when Iran-contra became the means by which the Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, took over the conduct of foreign affairs in Central America without formally deposing the Republican president...

...Literature Bureau, 1982), that would be a different matter...

...But if the Republicans' prospects in Congress are grim, the Democrats' chance of restoring effective government by capturing the presidency, though better, are still not good...

...Yet in the wake of Watergate, Democrats were able to capture only forty-seven seats...

...E THE ORDINARINESS OF GOD AN AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY DANIEL J. O'HANLON bout fifteen years ago, during a sabbatical year, I spent thirteen months in India and the major Buddhist countries, in an effort to deepen my own Christian life through direct contact and involvement with Hindu and Buddhist spirituality...

...In the late 1940s, a Republican Congress still chafing from FDR's successes and faced with a Democratic lock on the chief executive slot, proposed and succeeded in ratifying the Twenty-second Amendment that limited the presidency to two terms...

...The argument for a proportional as opposed to winner-take-all system for each state's electoral vote is that it provides a fairer representation of the state's sentiment...

...But his son, Chicago's current mayor, Richie Daley, recently explained: "I don't think anyone really cares if there is a donkey or an elephant next to somebody's name...

...The Constitution was the product of a moral Newtonianism that sought to hold power in place by counterbalancing one political force against another in much the same manner that opposing physical forces kept the planets on a steady path...

...Here are some of the reasons, which in themselves are instructive about the nature of African spirituality...

...If Bush's problem is a push for power without legitimate authority, the Congress suffers from a reach for power without accountability...

...The Republicans' popular vote lead over the Democrats for the last six presidential elections is 53-43, a margin unequaled since the New Deal...

...The Republicans will probably be able to save some of their seats from creative gerrymanderers by making a bargain with African-American legislators to carve up liberal Democratic seats so as to create more black and more Republican districts...

...Ticket-splitting has created a kind of dual sovereignty in which the primary political struggles are less electoral than administrative and branch fights for competitive advantage...

...In fact term limitations were so appealing in California that they helped win the governorship for a nondescript candidate, Senator Pete Wilson...

...Barring any cataclysms, the current stalemate is likely to be with us for a long time to come...

...Scholars are divided on the issue of how far one can go in generalizing about African religion...

...But to generalize about African spirituality is more problematical...

...Bush, however, emboldened by public opinion polls that show widespread hostility to what now seems to be "the permanent Congress," has proposed to circumvent those difficulties with a constitutional amendment imposing term limitations...

...They want to switch to proportional voting so that a losing candidate would win electors in proportion to his or her total vote...

...But rather than exercise their responsibility to call Congress into session to fully debate the issue of war or peace, the congressional leadership, in effect, has undermined Bush's bargaining position with the Iraqis without taking responsibility for the consequences...

...I found the time enormously stimulating, and it was not too difficult to enrich my own life, especially, though certainly not exclusively, the life of prayer, through the experience...

...In 1990, referenda in California, Colorado, and Oklahoma approved term limitations for the state legislatures...

...He is largely correct...

...by 1988 it was nearly half the districts, as each successive generation became less and 12: Commonweal less loyal to a party...

...In 1944 voters in only 8 percent of the congressional districts split their vote...

...Republicans dominate only two states with 5 seats (1.1 percent...

...While article 1, section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to "declare war," the Bush people note that that language is far weaker than the draft version that had given Congress the power to "make" war...

...by 1989 it was 52-38 Republican, an astounding swing of 35 points...

...Over a period of about five months I visited Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe...

...It was a change in the political rnles that brought France out of the febrile Fifth 11 January 1991:13 Republic of the 1950s~ with its constant changes of government, into the present far more stable presidential system...

...This self-destructive deadlock, however, is not confined to foreign policy...

...The House now seems almost permanently out of the Republicans' reach...

...In a culture where we insist on choice in everything from supermarket cereals to the sex of unborn infants, it's unlikely we will ever return to the "brand-name loyalty" which rooted our politics in ongoing party commitments...

...During the Souter Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the Bush administration made a great show of insisting on judges who adhere to the "original intent" of the Constitution, but now it insists that foreign policy is an exception...

...I came across nothing to compare with Hindu ashrams or Buddhist monasteries and meditation centers where a participant observer may in some way experience the inner reality of African spirituality...

...Then there is the problem of where and how a Western Christian might experience and learn from African spirituality...

...But the mode is less "systematic...

...In addition to ticket-splitting, part of what explains the Republicans' presidential success and parliamentary failure is that the young voters crucial to GOP success in presidential years simply don't turn out for the midterm elections...

...Strong parties, whatever their faults, assured the informal means of partially overriding constitutionally divided power in order to ensure effective government...

...The same breach has now reappeared over the conduct of policy in the Persian Gulf...

...Furthermore, common ancient scriptures are nonexistent in the African tradition...

...But term limitations on Congress are another matter...

...The absence of strong ties produces ticket-splitting, voting for one party, say, for Congress and another for president...

...When the traditional African loses this "primal" experience, we become losers in the dialogue...

...The deficit is a product of a politics in which Republican presidents refuse to raise taxes and Democratic Congresses refuse to cut spending...

...And like the 1930s, the 1980s stand out as a period of unusual generational shifts...

...Each partner brings to it a unique and significant mode of communication...

...I lived in monasteries and ashrams, spending time with wise and holy teachers, and participated in sessions, meditation courses, and various kinds of "retreats," including time spent in Christian ashrams like Bede Griffiths's Shantivanam in South India and Enomiya Lassalle's Christian Zen Center in the mountains outside Tokyo...

...The last an echo of Iran-contra itself...

...Grant's loss--he represented a rapidly growing Sunbelt area crucial to Republicans--was a crushing blow...

...by 1956 it was 30 percent...

...Byarunhanga-Akiiki (Religion in Bunyoro, Kenya DANIEL J. O'HANLON, S.J., is professor emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California...

...This time no one has thrown his or her hat into the ring...

...The presidential wing of the Democratic party has never fully recovered from the disastrous divisions of 1968 and 1972 when Humphrey and then McGovern were the standard bearers...

...First of all, it is dangerous to generalize about "African religion...

...This has left the Democrats in seemingly permanent control of the Congress while the Republicans hold a lock on the presidency...

...There is little chance of the Republicans coming to power in the House...

...The deadlocks in both domestic and foreign policy demonstrate that the parties are no longer capable of conjoining the separate branches of government...

...outside of the party professionals and the interest activists who use the parties as vehicles for their causes, only a quarter of the electorate has a strong sense of party affiliation...

...Even before the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, President George Bush, himself implicated in Iran-contra, was engaged in an almost continuous constitutional combat with the Congress over the conduct of foreign policy...

...State referenda or legislation setting congressional terms would likely be overturned in the courts...

...4, 1988), or of Bunyoro spirituality, assisted by A.B.T...