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2009
Last call
One of the things
you learn early as a writer is that the hardest parts of a story
are the beginning and the end. The beginning of my story as a
Washington journalist was over 50 years ago; the middle has encompassed
all or part of one quarter of America's presidencies, and the
end will come sometime this year.
I will continue
to edit the national edition of the Progressive Review, which
has more readers than ever but my wife Kathy and I are moving
to Maine where we have deep ties, for me going back more than
six decades.
I am leaving my
birthplace, a town I have loved but also a place in which I have
felt increasingly an exile as local values, culture and community
faded - not because they lacked merit but because they did not
produce enough power or profit for someone.
It has become a
city where the police chief erects apartheid style roadblocks,
where the deputy mayor hides a community library in a high rise
like it was just another Starbucks, and where the government
is spends over $600 million on a baseball stadium but can't keep
its recreation centers open all weekend.
It is a city of
magnificent views and dismal viewpoints, wonderful communities
and dubious egos, natural spaces and artificial words. It is
a city that too often can't tell the difference between intelligence
and wisdom and, as Russell Baker once noted, the difference between
being serious and being somber.
It is also a city
in which all politics becomes office politics, and where imagination
and free thought are restricted to thirty minutes on weekdays
and violators will be towed.
Still, Washington
has always been an unsortable amalgam of decadence and decency,
undeserved profit and unrequited purpose, subterranean conspiracies
and high ideals. Walt Whitman found himself "amid all this
huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals, axe-grinders, &
incompetencies & officials that goes by the name of Washington."
Even earlier, Captain Frederick Marry noted, "Here are assembled
from every state in the union, what ought to be the collected
talent, intelligence, and high principles of a free and enlightened
nation. Of talent and intelligence there is a very fair supply,
but principle is not so much in demand; and in everything, and
everywhere, by the demand the supply is regulated."
One of the things
that affects the city's crosscurrents of felicity and felony
is what is happening elsewhere in the nation. As a weak colony
filled with professional migrants, DC is a beta edition of both
the good and the bad. Just as Washington was once deep into the
civil rights and peace movements, today it accurately reflects
national values sown in the Reagan-Clinton-Bush era that have
caused the disintegration of the republic's economy, its global
status and its constitution.
You can feel it
wandering around downtown, where every last centimeter of the
zoning envelope is filled with the dull high rises of a second
robber baron era. You see it in the endless piling on of new
civil and criminal offenses in place of decent and effective
policies. You find it in the official subservience and subsidy
to those who already have more than their fair share. You observe
it in a school system that values rigid tests and rules but not
thoughtful questions and creative ideas.
You see it in the
failure to lift a hand to help those unable to play DC's harsh
games. And you see it in the increasing division between free
and locked down Washington, the former being those parts where
you can still cross a threshold without having to prove you are
not a terrorist.
Which is not to
say you can not find many good things hidden beneath the hubris,
behind the ubiquitous fear in the world's most guarded place
and under the false renaissance of a city that has spent billions
on convention centers, stadiums, arenas, but which can't even
provide as many jobs for local residents as it did 20 years ago.
You just have to
look harder.
You'll find it still
in the neighborhoods like the one I shall miss most: Capitol
Hill.
You'll find it in
the little oases of commercial sense and service like Frager's
hardware store, Distad's auto repair shop and all the other small
businesses that get mainly bills and regulations from the city
government while the favors go to the big guys.
You'll find it over
lunch at places like Jimmy T's, Ben's Chili Bowl and La Tomate.
You'll find it in
the files of the Washingtoniana collection at the DC Library,
on a trail sign or in an exhibit at the Historical Society of
Washington.
You'll find it at
the FDR Memorial late on a spring evening or in a quiet spot
in some hidden corner high in Rock Creek Park.
You'll find it in
a black community that has bravely maintained its values in the
face of repression, indifference and socio-economic cleansing.
I first did as a young man going to the Howard Theater and as
a 20-something member of SNCC, and later in so many ways and
places as I was welcomed by, and learned from, those who used
the power of decency and friendliness as bridges across cultures
and to overcome pain.
You'll find it among
the activists of the DC Statehood Green Party who for nearly
four decades have risen to the challenge presented by its first
leader, Julius Hobson: "What do you want: a Disneyland for
the rich or a state for free people?" Youll fine it in their
refusal to be silent in a city so colonial, corrupt and contented.
You'll find it among
the teachers resisting the dismantling and corporatization of
public education.
You'll find it in
the artists and musicians who take us away from bitterness and
contentions and into better places, those still holding on in
a city determined not to even leave them with a pad cheap enough
to rent.
You'll find it among
those who seek to preserve not only open space and fine buildings,
but great communities and wonderful institutions.
You'll find it among
those trying to help fill monstrous gaps in government services
by working at a food bank or shelter, counseling former prisoners,
providing free legal service, or teaching children what the school
system can't or won't.
You'll find it in
a small band of journalists who haven't deserted the real city
in favor of grander stories and sources.
You'll find it among
the neighborhood commissions who still sometimes get those downtown
to pay attention to things they would rather ignore.
And you'll find
it in the shared memory of those who give the city life instead
of draining it, add to the local saga rather than diminishing
it, and are there for us when so many others aren't.
One place you won't
find it much longer, though, is at my place. Sometime this year
I'll be off to write the rest of my story someplace else. Thanks
for all the good times, the encouragement, the inspiration, the
example and the dreams.
Just remember, despite
what others would have you believe, a vote in the House leaves
you no better off than Algeria when it also was a colony; Washington
never was a sleepy southern town and it never was a swamp; there
is a J Street (albeit hidden in Northeast and spelled Jay), and
most of the people who do serious wrong in this fair city come
from somewhere else. We try to teach them different but they
never seem to get it.
Thanks for the fun
and, as Adam Clayton Powell Jr used to say, "Keep the faith,
baby."
Leaving
DC
Sometime this year
the Review will be moving fulltime to its New England regional
headquarters in Freeport, Maine, previously home only for the
estivatory editions of summer.
I have deep ties
to Maine, going back more than six decades. I have long lived
as a geographical split personality, with the phrase bi-coastal
meaning in my case Casco Bay and the Potomac River. Wherever
my physical presence, part of me was in another place, symbolized
by the day when I was quoted in both the Washington Post about
Marion Barry and on a Portland TV station about alternative agriculture.
My views of the city have always had a touch of tide and pasture
in them.
Based on past experience,
there is no evidence that this change will in anyway alter the
journal's content or its editor's irascibility, so readers have
nothing to fear. But as your editor has now covered Washington
for all or part of ten of America's presidencies, it seems a
good time to try something a little different.
Some random anecdotes
from these past 50 years can be found here.
In compiling the
these tales, I was struck by how few were of federal rather than
local Washington. The stories of federal Washington involve power,
intrigue and associated conflicts that, dramatic as they may
be at one moment, are easily replaced by others a few moments
later. The stories of local Washington are stories of real people
and places living and struggling in a center of power, intrigue
and associated conflicts. These stories survive because they
come from heart, culture and community rather than depending
on the transitory misadventures of ambition.
My writings about
the nation's capital have been grounded in what the theologian
Martin Marty described as the need to have a place from which
to view the world. Too much of what is written about this city
lacks such a place.
I am leaving my
birthplace, a town I have loved but also a place in which I have
felt increasingly an exile as local values, culture and community
faded - not because they lacked merit but because they did not
produce enough power or profit for someone.
It is a city of
magnificent views and dismal viewpoints, wonderful communities
and dubious egos, natural spaces and artificial words. It is
a city that too often can't tell the difference between intelligence
and wisdom or, as Russell Baker once noted, between being serious
and being somber.
It is also a city
in which all politics becomes office politics, and where imagination
and free thought are restricted to thirty minutes on weekdays
and violators will be towed.
Still, Washington
has always been an unsortable amalgam of decadence and decency,
undeserved profit and unrequited purpose, subterranean conspiracies
and high ideals.
Walt Whitman found
himself "amid all this huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals,
axe-grinders, & incompetencies & officials that goes
by the name of Washington." Even earlier, Captain Frederick
Marry noted, "Here are assembled from every state in the
union, what ought to be the collected talent, intelligence, and
high principles of a free and enlightened nation. Of talent and
intelligence there is a very fair supply, but principle is not
so much in demand; and in everything, and everywhere, by the
demand the supply is regulated."
One of the things
that affects these crosscurrents of felicity and felony is what
is happening elsewhere in the nation. As a weak colony filled
with professional migrants, DC is a beta edition of both the
good and the bad. Just as Washington was once deep into the civil
rights and peace movements, today it accurately reflects national
values sown in during the Reagan-Clinton-Bush era that caused
the disintegration of the republic's economy, its global status
and its constitution.
I was born in Washington
during the New Deal, for which my father worked. I also went
to a segregated public elementary school and lived a segregated
life as a child. Thus, from the beginning, I was introduced to
the painful contradictions of American democracy.
We left Washington
when I was ten but there was an idealism among their friends
from that era that I always admired. Years later, my wife and
I joined my then widowed mother at a 50th anniversary of the
New Deal at the Mayflower Hotel. The median age was probably
75 but I have seldom been in a room with so much energy and enthusiasm.
Even the guest speaker, Hubert Humphrey, had a hard time keeping
up with his audience.
In all my years
in this town, there has only been one other period that has come
close: the Great Society. Like the segregated city into which
I was born, there were huge inconsistencies, headlined by the
Vietnam War, but it was also true that Lyndon Johnson got more
good legislation passed in less time than any president in our
history. And Washington was once again filled with those who
truly cared.
Such moments, however,
are not only rare; they are typically born not in Washington
but in what is happening elsewhere - such as a depression, civil
rights movement, riots or the rise of the 60s counterculture.
It's one reason
I don't worry about leaving Washington: most of the time Washington
doesn't make news; it only reacts to it.
And slowly. As Phil
Hart once put it, the Senate is a place that does things twenty
years after it should have.
Which is why for
some three decades, Washington has contributed so little to the
nation other than to endorse, codify and promote policies leading
to the collapse of the First American Republic. Since 1976 Congress
has passed more laws than it did in the previous two centuries.
And to what end? To place us in the dismal condition in which
we now find ourselves.
I sometimes find
myself reciting the lines of Tennessee Williams in Camino Real:
"Turn back stranger, for the well of humanity has gone dry
in this place. And the only birds that sing are kept in cages."
Those of us who
have fought for alternative approaches have constantly been met
with contempt and disinterest by those in power, whether in politics
or the media. The Review, however, has been around long enough
for there to be a scorecard and if you go back 20, 30, 40 years
you'll find that those seeking other ways were far ahead of the
curve on such issues as civil rights, education, self-government,
foreign policy, civil liberties and the environment. It was the
capital's elite, and not us, who were extreme and radical - extremely
slow and radically wrong. Yet one of the privileges of power
is to set standards, even if they are the standards of the slowest
kids in the class. Another privilege is never having to say you're
sorry. Which is why, beginning in the 1980s, we began to lose
the struggle and have been doing so ever since.
Then why have I
stayed so long? My fascination an affection for the local city
aside, I was spurred by Chancellor Willy Brandt, who fled Germany
as a young man in the 1930s, became a Norwegian citizen but returned
to his homeland after the war. Asked why he had come back, Brandt
said because it was more important to be a democrat in Germany
than in Norway. I have long felt, lonely as it often has been,
the same way about staying in Washington.
I sometimes describe what I do as drawing pictures on the walls
of the Lascaux Caves of our times. Leaving sketches of what democracy
and constitutional government once looked like as they galloped
through the countryside.
As in Orwell's 1984, it was mainly in cities like Washington
that we lost our way. Only ten percent of the people in his book
lived in the capital he described. The rest, the proles, still
lived largely free of the dismal, cruel dysevolution of which
he wrote.
Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University described
Orwell's countryside this way:
"The proles
were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the
most cheerful and optimistic. The proles were also the freest
of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased. They could
come and go, and talk openly about whatever they felt like without
having to worry about the Thought Police. . .
"[Orwell] also
concluded that the hope for the future was contained within this
group. At several points in the book, Winston, the hero, made
a point of mentioning that the proles were the hope for the future
and the only ones who could end Big Brother's tyranny, since
they were the only group still allowed to have feelings and opinions.
. . "
Similarly, you can still find a noticeably freer America simply
by leaving the major centers of our post-constitutional society
- away from those places where the most honored have done us
the most damage.
The geographical parochialism of those who have made this mess
leaves vast acres of our land still hospitable to dreams and
perhaps even to the eventual eviction of those who have done
us such wrong.
Further, the difficulty that large cities will have adapting
to a dramatically different economy and ecology adds to the appeal
of places like Maine - places skilled in survival, kinder to
the environment and still appreciative of freedom.
One also finds in
such places not only a deep culture of the past but one increasingly
invigorated by those - in the best tradition of immigrants -
courageous and imaginative enough to have moved there. In such
ways such places offer not only a recovery of what one may have
thought had disappeared forever but the possibility of another
beginning in a land that has badly gone astray.
I shall report from
time to time on how it's going.
2007
The Review
and blogging
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S claim that this
is the tenth anniversary of the blog - as well as some of the
critical reaction to the story - led us to our archives to find
what we could about our role in this tale.
We've tried to avoid the word blog - preferring
to call ourselves an online journal - but the phrase has a ubiquity
one can't duck.
The Wall Street Journal claimed, "We
are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded
by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and
gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he
appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his
site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: 'I decided to start my
own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily
basis,' and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the
primordial root of the word 'weblog.'
"The dating of the 10th anniversary
of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger,
are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged
with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld,
were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard.
And before them there were "proto-blogs," embryonic
indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by
widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to
mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."
While we refer to Barger as the sainted
Jorn Barger - he has been repeatedly kind to this journal over
the years - the WSJ has got things somewhat mixed up. It is certainly
true that Barger blessed or cursed us with the word blog, but
whatever you called it, something was already underway, including
at the Progressive Review. As evidence, we would quote from the
very issue cited by the WSJ: Barger's December 23, 1997 Robot
Wisdom WebLog in which he writes:
"There's a new issue of the Progressive
Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton.
. . The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation
of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993. Its
editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper
should be, USA Tomorrow . . ."
Barger's contribution was not just one
of nomenclature, but of gracing the Web with an eclectic spirit
and curiosity, tapping its holistic wonders and happily mixing
technology, politics, literature, philosophy and rants. In musical
terms, Barger showed us how to swing.
A few examples from that last week of December
1997 illustrates the point (the copious links are not included)
- This Day in Joyce History. . . On this
date in 1891, Dante Riordan left the Joyce household after the
Xmas fight depicted in Portrait. In ?1893 the fictional Rudy
Bloom was born. In 1916, Portrait was published by Huebsch. In
1931, John S. Joyce died. In ?1953 John Kidd was born.
- Two of the most readable computer journalists--
John Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle-- are about to launch a Siskel/Ebert-style
weekly debate site, using 'wallet' technology to charge a dime
a week. . .
- Gorillas make gorgeous representational
art. . .
- Email from Frankie? TV.Com claims Frank
Sinatra will sometimes answer friendly email. The Sinatra Family
site is endearingly naif. . .
- A couple of x-rated essays at Salon:
Susie Bright's very sweet appreciation of the Pam Anderson/ Tommy
Lee bootleg sex video
- Sixties icon Kerry Thornley, intimate
of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jim Garrison and Robert Anton Wilson,
and author of the Principia Discordia is in poor health, and
fans are encouraged to order a copy of PD straight from the source,
autographed on request.
- The mass media's undeclared war against
the Net is nowhere clearer than in their assaults against Ian
Goddard's TWA800 website. CNN has baldly falsified a report that
Goddard recanted his site as a hoax. . .
- How has the Newt Right so successfully
blindsided the progressive Left? A dryish analysis in The Nation
argues that we don't lack the funds, but we're spending them
with self-defeating unfocus. . .
- I am having a fear of modern business
practices: A fine culture critic named Tom Frank (not to be confused
with Troll Mennie) explores Fast Company, the bastard spawn of
Wired and Forbes. . .
- Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria (age
20) has been elected Swede of the Year by the evening paper Expressen.
Last month it was announced that she's suffering from an eating
disorder. . .
- Garrison Keillor, quoted on newsgroup
misc.activism.progressive: "We're in the clutches of a bunch
of folks trying to turn the U.S. into a third world country.
Two hundred billionaires, and 260 million poor people. And they
haven't done enough damage yet to be beaten."
Duncan Riley offers this critique of the
WSJ article:
|||| According to my history of blogging
(still No. 3 on Google BTW, and heavily researched at the time)
blogging turned 11 on January 10, the date in which the first
credited blogger (according to Wikipedia as well) Justin Hall
commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries,
although each daily post is linked through an index page. On
the journal he writes "Some days, before I go to bed, I
think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write
a little about what learned me." In February Dave Winer
follows up with a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy
Project. Winer has often claimed that he was the first blogger,
I've long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot
point: both were blogging in 1996. . . ||||
According to Wikipedia, "A blog (a
portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written
in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological
order. 'Blog' can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain
or add content to a blog. Blogs provide commentary or news on
a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some
function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines
text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other
media related to its topic.
At least as early as 1993, the Progressive
Review was sending a faxed blog-like substance to our media list
as a supplement to the print edition. The earliest mention of
an online edition that we could find comes from the August 1994
edition: "If you have an Internet address, send it to us
on a postcard or to ssmith@igc.org and we will add you to our
Peacenet hotline mailing list. You can also find us at alt.activism
and alt.politics.clinton. Sorry, offer not good for networks
that carry e-mail charges"
There then followed a series of blog-like
entries.
But none of that really counts because
it wasn't on the Worldwide Web. But by June 1995, the Progressive
Review was on the web, where only about 20,000 other websites
existed worldwide. We announced it like this:
"The Review now has a site on the
World Wide Web. Pay us a visit at: http://prorev.com/ F Here
is some of what you'll find: The Crash of America: How this country's
elite ruined the economy, fouled the environment and left Newt
Gingrich in charge. From the March 1995 issue. The fully informed
jury movement: The right of juries to judge both the law and
the fact dates back to the trials of William Penn and Peter Zenger.
. ."
Still not bloggish, as we initially only
posted longer articles. But within a few months - we were promising
that "The Progressive Review On-Line Report is found on
the Web" and our quasi-blogging had begun.
While we weren't the earliest we were certainly
in same 'hood and we may hold some sort of record for consistency.
We are still brought to you by Turnpike and we are still using
Adobe Page Mill to post our non-blog pages. A year or two ago
we ran into an Adobe sales rep at Best Buy and mentioned our
loyalty, saying that "we still love it." She looked
quite cross and said, "That's what a lot of people say."
The Web would come to value style over
substance in design and conventional loyalty over free thinking
in politics. But, inspired by a few like Jorn Borger, we have
tried to keep our layout simple and our thoughts complex. In
the game of Internet high-low poker, we went low and it doesn't
seem to have a hurt a bit.
Thanks for sticking around.
The
fight that doesn't matter
Last night, browsing
through Sartre before bedtime, I came across this:
"Existentialism
isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God
does not exist. Rather it declares that even if God did exist,
that would change nothing. . . Not that we believe that God exists,
but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue."
It struck me as
I read this that here was the key to the currently inflated battle
between church and state: in the end it doesn't matter. The moral
Christian, Jew or Muslim and the moral rationalist will follow
much the same path. Keep them away from the pulpit and you may
not be able to tell them apart.
The difference lies
not in their actual life but in what they believe about it. The
existentialist, for example, believes that existence - and behavior
in it - precedes and defines essence. The religious true believer
thinks it's faith, or what is known in science as speculation
and, in gambling, a bet.
Now one can have
an interesting debate about this, but the point here is that
as far as politics and social policy are concerned the difference
should make no difference once it moves to the level of actually
doing something rather than just talking about, celebrating or
praising why you're doing it.
Of course, politically,
it does make a difference. One reason is that there are a hell
of a lot more registered practicing Christians than there are
registered practicing existentialists. Another is that politicians,
aware of this demographic, find it much easier to pander to the
faith that drives these voters rather than to the works the faith
demands.
Thus, whether in
the White House or in Selma, you never hear politicians described
themselves as "works-based Christians," because it
is much easier to associate oneself with unchallengeable holiness
than with intended products too simple to observe and assess.
There was a time
when there are a lot more works-based Christians around to serve
as models. At one point, for example, we had Father Drinan in
Congress, Father Baroni in the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and Father Kemp on the DC school board. During the
war on poverty I found myself constantly in the company of preachers,
some of whom became close friends. When I asked myself why, my
answer was in part that while the engines driving us were different,
our intended routes were the same. We accepted uncertainty, honored
inquiry and persisted in the hope that what we did that day might
make a difference.
Today's obsession
with faith is driven by a number of causes, among them the deterioration
of American culture and democracy, a desperate searching for
certainty, evangelical abuse and heresy, political cynicism and
deceit, as well as a media that perpetuates the illusion that
it is better to raise one's hands in prayer than to use them
for good in this life and on this day.
Of these forces,
it is the media that often wields the greatest clout - a media
that pretends to be fact-based and objective yet all but writhes
in the aisle, screams Hallelujah and shouts Jesus' name when
a fraudulent pol mounts the pulpit or a president declares some
carefully concocted connection with the Almighty for his war
or budget policy. This adulation of false faith and the indifference
to true works is not only cynical but is helping to destroy America.
It has also helped
turn the press from being reporters to being mere acolytes at
the holy communion of America's powerful. If, on the other hand,
the media followed the lead of Sartre, it would do us all a great
service. Instead of telling us what politicians pretended to
believe it would report on what they actually did. . . moving,
one might say, from faith-based to fact-based reporting
A dummy's
guide to disloyalty
Lately, I've been
trying to figure out how to pass on state secrets to someone
without getting into trouble. I don't actually have any such
secrets, mind you, but the matter is getting so hopelessly complex
that I thought I better straighten it out before I responded
to the small flower pot my neighbor across the street regularly
puts on the sill of his right second floor window.
There are a number
of models, each with their own hazards.
The most dangerous,
clearly, is that used by former FBI agent Robert Hanssen. Hanssen's
main error was to give the secrets to the Russians before Bush
became pals with Pootie, to gave them really valuable stuff,
to take a lot of money for it, and to do it around a photogenic
and photomnemonic young assistant able to work well with photodocumentarian
movie producers.
Considerably less
costly was the route followed by Sandy Berger. For one thing
he lifted his documents from the National Archives where even
the secrets are more boring than those in real life. There is
no evidence that he took any money for them and his beneficiary,
while unknown, is more likely to have been a presidential candidate
rather than some nasty Russian. For his penalty, as one observer
put it, "He had to pay a $50,000 fine and pick up some garbage
on the side of the road in Virginia." A friendly media made
as little of it as it could, albeit quoting Berger's lawyer as
saying, "It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial
things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . .
. for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake." From the
coverage, it is fair to assume that much of the media agreed.
As this is written,
I don't know the price Scooter Libby will pay - if any - for
his alleged offenses - if proved. But not one mainstream journalist
has yet explained why it is so much worse to lie about passing
on the identity of an apparently not all that covert CIA official
than it is to remove state secrets from the archives. If convicted,
Libby - accused in the prosecutor's own words of a 'dumb lie'
- will, at least until the pardon, face a dramatically greater
punishment than Berger. And the befuddling thing is that no one
in establishment Washington - regardless of their clearance -
seems to give a damn.
I do, however, have
the uncomfortable sense that if I were to steal some documents
from the National Archives and stick them in my sock I might
be treated more like Patrick Fitzgerald plans to treat Libby
so I guess I better not try.
There is, however,
one further possible route. Pass on the stuff, reveal the covert
identity, but not to benefit the Russians or a fellow politician.
Instead, give it to some officials at AIPAC to pass on to Israel.
This encouraging possibility is raised by a report in Secrecy
News about the espionage trial of two former AIPAC officials
which is not going so well for the government. Judge T.S. Ellis
III has raised all sorts of obstacles but the one most cheering
to a prospective spy is this one:
"The nature
of the relationship between the governments of the U.S. and Israel
may also have a bearing on the defendants' state of mind, the
Judge wrote, in language that may foreshadow close
scrutiny of U.S.-Israel relations at trial: 'The more specific
the details of the alleged cooperation between the two governments,
the more probative [i.e., legally significant] such cooperation
becomes," Judge Ellis wrote. In another important observation,
the judge wrote that 'testimony that disclosures of alleged NDI
were viewed by defendants, or their contacts in the diplomatic
establishment, as beneficial to the United States' interests
is exculpatory.'"
In other words,
if you want to spy for Britain or Israel, you have a pretty good
chance of getting away with it, at least in Judge Ellis' courtroom.
There are, to be
sure, a few residual moral questions such as precisely how closely
the goals of Israel and the U.S. are really aligned and who gets
to cut the deal: the President, Congress or the people? And which
policies are covered: attacking Iran, starving Palestinians,
invading Lebanon?
So it remains a
bit tricky, but, for the moment, if you want to steal state secrets
in the safest possible fashion, just make sure AIPAC gets a copy.
Growing
up part Jewish
I grew up part Jewish.
It was hard not to if you lived in a New Deal family where your
father was involved in things like starting Americans for Democratic
Action. My own introduction to politics came as a pre-teen stuffing
envelopes for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he helped
organize the removal of Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican
machine. Shull was one of those who early convinced me that there
were three branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and
your Liberal Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful.
I was certain that Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions
and win elections for the good guys.
If you think I'm
kidding, consider this: for many years we lived across the street
from a prominent activist couple - she black, he Jewish. One
day one of their sons came over and slumped at our kitchen table.
"What's the matter?" asked my wife. "I had a terrible
night," the boy explained. "I dreamt I was Jacob Javits."
He had already learned to fear becoming a Jewish Republican.
Although I knew
Jews went to synagogue, I wasn't all that impressed. After all,
as my friend Peter Temin was going to Hebrew school on Saturdays,
I got to go to the Henry Glass music store and take drum lessons,
clearly the better deal. During the week we went to a Quaker
school where perhaps a quarter of the students were Jewish and
nobody thought it odd. The tradition continues. The joke about
Washington's Sidwell Friends School is that it is a place where
Episcopalians teach Jews how to act like Quakers.
Much later I would
figure out what Quakerism and Judaism had in common: a blend
of individualism, pragmatism, and responsibility, with a particular
emphasis on the last. You didn't come into the world pre-ordained
and your primary goal wasn't to leave it saved; what really mattered
is what you did in the meantime.
For much of my life,
what I have done and what I have thought have been deeply influenced
by existential Judaism and its practitioners. I can't even begin
to count the number of times I have come across Jews in the lonely
corners of hope trying to do what others, through lack of interest
or courage, would not.
But a number of
things have happened since I was first introduced to Judaism.
The direct ties to the often radical Jewish immigrant tradition
began to fade. The offspring of the immigrants became wealthier
and less involved. America of whatever ethnicity began paying
less attention to others and more to itself.
As I put it once,
"The great 20th century social movements [were] successful
enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful
enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough
to ignore those left behind. The minority elites had joined the
Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen
people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic
intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest
drove around town in their Range Rovers, who would speak for
those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, fugitives from
the law of averages? The work of witness remained."
A whole history
began to disappear. A part of the story was told by journalist
Paul S. Green in his memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to
the War in Europe. He notes that by the dawn of the 20th century
"Jewish youth
in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow focus
of their lives. They were determined to take part in the opportunities
opening up around them - exciting new developments in science,
the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into conflict
with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way
of life, they began to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict
age-old Orthodoxy of their ancestors. "
Out of this grew
several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked towards
retrieving a Jewish nation. Others were socialist, ranging from
hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as
"An organization
of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish
culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional
religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist government
- evolutionary rather than revolutionary - could hope to bring
together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and
religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing
an end to anti-Semitism and pogroms."
And so we find,
not too many years later, the New York City Jewish cigar-makers
each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them
as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature.
And the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers,
became the first president of the American Federation of Labor.
Green's own family
joined the rebellion:
"In embracing
the principles of free-thinking non-religious belief, my parents
had made a profound break with the past. The generation gap with
their own parents was unbelievably deep. They had been born and
brought up in a world that brooked no deviation. . . They were
turning their backs on the fearsome God of their forefathers
who had ruled Jewish lives for thousands of years. . . They realized
that maintaining their beliefs set them apart from the mainstream
of Jewish life, but the fact that they were a small minority
did not bother them. "
They became part
of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social
conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped
to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this
country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics
controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern
social democracy disproportionately came from native populists
and immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.
It is certainly
impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement,
or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in
fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious,
conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on
20th century modern American politics.
Sadly, however,
social and economic progress inevitably produced a dilution of
passion for justice and change not just among Jews but within
the entire post-liberal elite. And, in many ways, Israel became
the icon that replaced the cause of social justice. This is not
to say that the two are antithetical. That certainly wasn't the
case when I was younger. But as Jewish rhetoric and politics
became increasingly in the hands of powerful conservative interests,
an iconic, unexamined Israel began to serve Jews much as an absurdly
trivialized Jesus has been used by the powerful conservative
Christian interests to serve their ends. And other things just
got forgotten.
Just as it is important
for Americans not to define their country's past by the tragic
distortions of the past quarter century, it is important for
Jews not to be misled by a powerful right wing's reduction of
Judaism to the goals of a deeply misguided and militaristic nation.
The fact is both
America and Israel have badly damaged themselves through grandiosity,
arrogance and narcissism. Beyond that is a truth few want to
admit: no culture, no ethnicity, no value system can exist in
a vacuum any more. This is not the fault of terrorists or anti-Semites.
It's the result of television and multinational corporations
that have usurped the role of culture, values and ethnicities.
Add to that Israel's demographic trends and you've got a problem
that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help you with in the slightest.
The answer, to the
extent there still is one for the human species, is to be found
in honest, personal witness. You can't save Christianity with
hypocrisy and you can't save Judaism with missiles. What might
work, however, is to reach back into the past of one's own culture
or ethnicity and find examples of actions and behaviors that
produced positive change. Neither Christians nor Jews have always
been as absurdly self-destructive as they are today. And before
they offer any more dangerous directions for dealing with today's
problems, they need to rediscover their own good paths.
It is along such
paths - and not on battlefields - that faith is solidified, admiration
is encouraged, and loyalty is attracted. And along the way you
may even pick up some unorthodox stragglers like me.
2006
Dealing
with myths
Having been an anthropology
major, I don't get as riled up about mythology in public life
as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign,
sad, or deadly but mostly they're there to fill the empty places
in reality.
Sometimes myths
are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality
isn't powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves
the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.
It is widely told
that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following
a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a
white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant
black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.
But the Annals of
American Survey notes:
"The authoritative
work by historian Spencie Love entitled, One Blood: The Death
and Resurrection of Charles Drew, described how the myth has
been cultivated because of the time and place of Dr. Drew's death
and serves as an unfortunate filler between living memory and
written history. True enough, a 23-year-old black World War II
veteran by the name Maltheus Avery was critically injured in
an auto crash on December 1, 1950, exactly 8 months after Dr.
Drew's death. He was a student at North Carolina A&T, a husband,
and a father of a small child. Like Dr. Drew, he was treated
initially at Alamance General Hospital. He was transferred to
Duke University Hospital and subsequently turned away because
they had exhausted their supply of beds for black patients. Mr.
Avery would die shortly after arrival at Lincoln Hospital, Durham,
North Carolina's black facility. Spencie Love's book discusses
how the story of the lesser-known Maltheus Avery confronted the
circumstances of the death of the more prominent Dr. Drew, and
thus a myth was born."
Something similar
was at work in the black response to the OJ Simpson case. To
many blacks, Simpson was carrying the mythic weight of decades
of ethnic abuse under the justice system. In a column at the
time for Pacific News Service, a black journalist, Dennis Schatzman,
outlined some of the black context for the Simpson trial:
Just last year,
Olympic long jumper and track coach Al Joyner was handcuffed
and harassed in a LAPD traffic incident. He has settled out of
court for $250,000.
A few years earlier,
former baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan was "handcuffed
and arrested at the Los Angeles airport because police believed
that Morgan 'fit the profile of a drug dealer.'" He also
got a settlement of $250,000.
Before that, former
LA Laker forward Jamal Wilkes was stopped by the police, handcuffed
and thrown to the pavement.
A black man was
recently given a 25-year to life sentence for stealing a slice
of pizza from a young white boy.
In 1992, a mentally
troubled black man was shot and killed by LA sheriff's deputies
while causing a disturbance in front of his mother's house. Neighbors
say they saw a deputy plant a weapon by the body.
Simpson case detective
Mark Fuhrman was accused of planting a weapon at the side of
a robbery suspect back in 1988. The LAPD recently settled for
an undisclosed amount.
In North Carolina,
Daryl Hunt still languishes in jail for the 1984 rape and murder
of a white newspaper reporter, even though DNA tests say it was
not possible.
These examples would
be rejected as irrelevant by the average lawyer or journalist
but in fact OJ Simpson's case served as the mythic translation
of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should
have been on CNN but weren't. Everything was true except the
names, times and places. In Washington, they do something similar
when stories can't be told; they write a novel.
Something parallel
took place around the same time when militia members imagined
that the Bloods & Crips were being armed by the US government
or when blacks believed the same thing about the militias. Or
when the UN was thought to on the verge of invading the U.S.
Like urban blacks
considering the justice system, the rural right saw things the
elite would prefer to ignore. It observed correctly phenomena
indicating loss of sovereignty for themselves, their states and
their country. They saw treaties replaced by fast-track agreements
and national powers surrendered to remote and unaccountable trade
tribunals. And they saw a multi-decade assault by the federal
government on the powers of states and localities.
Like urban blacks,
they were not paranoid in these observations, merely perceptive.
But because the story could not be told, could not become part
of the national agenda, they turned, as people in trouble often
do, to a myth -- and, yes, sometimes a violent myth -- that would
carry the story.
We tend to get very
self-righteous when dealing with other people's myths but very
tolerant about our own. Thus a conference dedicated to spreading
doubt about the Holocaust is an outrage but a generation of teaching
Americans fabrications about the economy in the name of robber
baron capitalism is perfectly fine even if it has done infinitely
more damage than an anti-Holocaust conference.
The Holocaust conference
was a mythological alternative to doing what many participants
would like to do but can't: invade and destroy Israel. Defeat
is a prime breeding ground of myth.
But even as the
Washington Post was attacking the conference, it was slipping
in its own myth, witness this report:
Even by the standards
of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of ultra-orthodox Jewish Hasids
took a step into the world of the very strange, if not the meshuga,
or crazy, when they showed up as honored guests at a conference
of Holocaust skeptics and deniers in Tehran. With a hug and a
smile for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rabbi Aharon
Cohen walked into a conference room with former Ku Klux Klan
leader David Duke, discredited academics, and more than a few
white supremacists and served up a rousing welcome speech. .
.
Neturei Karta is
best understood within the confines and context of Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, which harbors the world's largest ultra-orthodox Jewish
shtetl, or community. Here the garb -- black coats and hats for
the men, wigs and demure dresses for the women -- is that of
the 18th century, Yiddish is the lingua franca and there is no
deviation from the teachings of Torah and Talmud. The Satmar
sect dominates this ghetto, and anti-Zionism is central to their
identity. . .
Neturei Karta acknowledged
never before having gone to a Holocaust deniers meeting but offered
no apologies; they are practiced practitioners of the outrageous.
Chaim Freimann used to hang around hotels in Washington during
the 1992 Mideast peace talks, wearing a Palestinian flag in his
lapel and giving old-comrade greetings to Hanan Ashrawi, the
Palestinian spokeswoman.
The Post thus declared
as outrageous the idea of a Jew being on friendly terms with
a Palestinian. And what is a Jew doing at Mideast peace talks
anyway?
Once again, proof
that it's a lot easier to explode the other guy's myth than to
examine one's own.
America's view of
the Holocaust, for example, is filled with its own myths. Such
as the one that redefines Nazism and the European conflict primarily
by its anti-Semitic manifestations, safely exempting us from
considering the changes in German governance that led to these
manifestations, changes that are becoming uncomfortably familiar
in America.
And it is missing
important stories, stories like the one Richard Rubenstein tells
in the Cunning of History about a Hungarian Jewish emissary meeting
with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944
and suggesting that the Nazis might be willing to save one million
Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's
reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall
I put them?" Writes Rubenstein: "The British government
was by no means adverse to the 'final solution' as long as the
Germans did most of the work. " For both countries, it had
become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we
understand "as the expression of some of the most profound
tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."
And this one from
the Village Voice:
The infamous Auschwitz
tattoo began as an IBM number. And now it's been revealed that
IBM machines were actually based at the infamous concentration-camp
complex. . . The new revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz
area constitutes a final link in the chain of documentation surrounding
Big Blue's vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised
at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through
its Geneva office. . . IBM spokesman Carol Makovich didn't respond
to repeated telephone calls. In the past, when asked about IBM's
Polish subsidiary's involvement with the Nazis, Makovich has
said, "IBM does not have much information about this period."
When a Reuters reporter asked about Poland, Makovich said, "We
are a technology company, we are not historians."
Similarly, in a
mythology obsessed with Israel, the American story of secular
Judaism has all but disappeared. Last century's great immigration
of European Jews brought with it many rebels who had rejected
Zionism if not religion. As I wrote in Why Bother: "They
became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the
politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century
America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values
that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants
and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics,
the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came
from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly
impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement,
or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in
fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious,
conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on
20th century modern American politics."
These stories make
the Holocaust more complex than we would like it to be.
Elsewhere in Why
Bother, I discussed a less contentious example of myths at work:
Consider, for example,
the Ojibwa, described by Brian Morris in Anthropology of the
Self. These Indians, a group of nomadic hunters and fishers living
east of Lake Winnipeg, "do not make any categorical or sharply
defined differentiation between myth and reality, or between
dreaming and the waking state; neither can any hard or fast line
be drawn between humans and animals. . . . A bear is an animal
which unlike humans hibernates during the winter, but in specific
circumstances it may be interpreted as a human sorcerer. . .
. The four winds are thought of not only as animate by the Ojibwa,
but are categorized as persons."
Not only may a culture
define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances,
it may also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not
a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really
exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence
people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger or
attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they
are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify
such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally
equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy
as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the
deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave:
in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but
undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created
equal" but really mean only white male property owners.
Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel.
Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries
and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was
really meant by the change. . .
Here is how anthropologist
Morris describes his own western culture: "It is individualistic,
and has a relatively inflated concern with the self which in
extremes gives rise to anxiety, to a sense that there is a loss
of meaning in contemporary life, to a state of narcissism, and
to an emphasis in popular psychology on 'self actualization.'
"
Bad as this sounds,
though, you will probably get along better in New York or Chicago
with a loss of meaning, state of narcissism, or overflowing self-actualization
than if you try to escape your angst by acting like the Ojibwa.
In the Big Apple, to lack a sharply defined differentiation between
myth and reality, between dreaming and the waking state; or between
humans and animals, risks not only ridicule but actual legal
sanctions. Even in a culture that celebrates the power of the
individual, the restraints on that individualism are substantial
and we, like peoples everywhere, go about our daily business
regarding them as largely normal."
Mythology soars
when a culture is under threat or in great isolation. Might the
fact that the U.S. hasn't talked with Iran for 27 years have
anything to do with the latter's current treatment of the Holocaust?
And what changes
this? I have argued that if you want to bring peace in the Israeli-Palestine
conflict you just put a few Wal-Marts. Thus you would rid the
area of both feuding cultures and replace them with Wal-Mart
customers.
The theory behind
this is more serious than it appears. People get on better when
there is something more important going on than what it is that
divides them. Thus, despite all the talk about cultural diversity
in liberal circles and on campuses, the places where you are
most likely to find people of different ethnic backgrounds mixing
well include shopping malls, the military, sports teams and ethnic
restaurants. Key to the relationship is the fact that everyone
thinks they're getting something out of the deal.
The same principle
would work in foreign policy. The best way to deal with a harmful
myth is to eliminate the anger, isolation and other problems
that caused it to thrive in the first place. You replace them
with a deal that works well for everyone.
These myths are
not the problem; they are just good warning signs of the problem.
Solve the problem and you'll get much better myths.
A dummy's
guide to disloyalty
Lately, I've been
trying to figure out how to pass on state secrets to someone
without getting into trouble. I don't actually have any such
secrets, mind you, but the matter is getting so hopelessly complex
that I thought I better straighten it out before I responded
to the small flower pot my neighbor across the street regularly
puts on the sill of his right second floor window.
There are a number
of models, each with their own hazards.
The most dangerous,
clearly, is that used by former FBI agent Robert Hanssen. Hanssen's
main error was to give the secrets to the Russians before Bush
became pals with Pootie, to gave them really valuable stuff,
to take a lot of money for it, and to do it around a photogenic
and photomnemonic young assistant able to work well with photodocumentarian
movie producers.
Considerably less
costly was the route followed by Sandy Berger. For one thing
he lifted his documents from the National Archives where even
the secrets are more boring than those in real life. There is
no evidence that he took any money for them and his beneficiary,
while unknown, is more likely to have been a presidential candidate
rather than some nasty Russian. For his penalty, as one observer
put it, "He had to pay a $50,000 fine and pick up some garbage
on the side of the road in Virginia." A friendly media made
as little of it as it could, albeit quoting Berger's lawyer as
saying, "It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial
things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . .
. for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake." From the
coverage, it is fair to assume that much of the media agreed.
As this is written,
I don't know the price Scooter Libby will pay - if any - for
his alleged offenses - if proved. But not one mainstream journalist
has yet explained why it is so much worse to lie about passing
on the identity of an apparently not all that covert CIA official
than it is to remove state secrets from the archives. If convicted,
Libby - accused in the prosecutor's own words of a 'dumb lie'
- will, at least until the pardon, face a dramatically greater
punishment than Berger. And the befuddling thing is that no one
in establishment Washington - regardless of their clearance -
seems to give a damn.
I do, however, have
the uncomfortable sense that if I were to steal some documents
from the National Archives and stick them in my sock I might
be treated more like Patrick Fitzgerald plans to treat Libby
so I guess I better not try.
There is, however,
one further possible route. Pass on the stuff, reveal the covert
identity, but not to benefit the Russians or a fellow politician.
Instead, give it to some officials at AIPAC to pass on to Israel.
This encouraging possibility is raised by a report in Secrecy
News about the espionage trial of two former AIPAC officials
which is not going so well for the government. Judge T.S. Ellis
III has raised all sorts of obstacles but the one most cheering
to a prospective spy is this one:
"The nature
of the relationship between the governments of the U.S. and Israel
may also have a bearing on the defendants' state of mind, the
Judge wrote, in language that may foreshadow close scrutiny of
U.S.-Israel relations at trial: 'The more specific the details
of the alleged cooperation between the two governments, the more
probative [i.e., legally significant] such cooperation becomes,"
Judge Ellis wrote. In another important observation, the judge
wrote that 'testimony that disclosures of alleged NDI were viewed
by defendants, or their contacts in the diplomatic establishment,
as beneficial to the United States' interests is exculpatory.'"
In other words,
if you want to spy for Britain or Israel, you have a pretty good
chance of getting away with it, at least in Judge Ellis' courtroom.
There are, to be
sure, a few residual moral questions such as precisely how closely
the goals of Israel and the U.S. are really aligned and who gets
to cut the deal: the President, Congress or the people? And which
policies are covered: attacking Iran, starving Palestinians,
invading Lebanon?
So it remains a
bit tricky, but, for the moment, if you want to steal state secrets
in the safest possible fashion, just make sure AIPAC gets a copy.
Potomac
playround
Phil Hart said the
Senate was a place that did things 20 years after it should have.
The same could be said of much of the rest of Washington. In
fact the yet-to-be accomplished U.S.-Iranian negotiations are
now at 27 years and still counting.
The common presumption
is that such tardiness is a function of politics. In fact, it
is more a product of culture, a culture founded on infantile
presumptions about the proper image one should present. Thus
you find grown men walking around the Pentagon with rows of ribbons
on their uniformed chests to remind everyone of their purported
accomplishments. You have ex-preppies plotting invasions against
small countries to prove their machismo. You have graduates of
Yale and Princeton, whose daddies - as LBJ said - wouldn't let
them into the stock brokerage firm - figuring out the best way
to torture people for the CIA. You have drones from business
and law schools trained to think that certainty is an adequate
substitute for competence. You have journalists getting big bucks
for the privilege of sitting through endless, newsless White
House briefings and flying off with the president to his ranch.
And you have experts at think tanks trading arcane knowledge
apparently unaware that their resulting decisions might affect
real people.
Although there are
far more women engaged in this charade than was formerly the
case, the culture is primarily based on childish male notions
of strength and prowess. The women who get to the top in such
a culture often do so because they emulate its values rather
than offering an alternative, witness the cruel capitalism of
Margaret Thatcher, the indifference of Madeleine Albright to
the deaths caused by Iraqi sanctions, or the heartless aggression
of Condoleezza Rice.
We don't read about
this or hear about it because the mass media is a fulltime participant
in this never consummated ritual of manhood that our politics
have become. In tribal times, the ritual would have been followed
by manhood. In Washington, the ritual never ends.
The costs can be
enormous. The Vietnam War, for example, was driven in part by
Harvard faculty members trying to prove their virility. Over
the last fifty years, a narcissistic establishment absorbed in
its self-image and indifferent to its consequences, has destroyed
constitutional government, made the United States hated around
the world and done so much damage to the environment that two
major scientists recently suggested that we better plan to find
ourselves another planet.
The immediate problem
is Iraq, now so much a mess that they had to call in a commission,
which is to say some adults. As Representative Frank Wolfe put
it, "there's almost a biblical thing about wise elderly
people. . . I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor is not looking for another
job. So they can speak truth."
In other words,
to do in Washington what you're supposed to do, you have to be
retired.
What's missing here
is rational adulthood. What's lacking is a town that attracts
those still full of energy but mature enough to put away childish
things and moral enough to serve their land ahead of themselves.
Instead we have a city overflowing with those whose egos and
ambitions are trapped in almost teenage garb.
And so we have to
wait 27 years for anyone to dare to suggest that it might be
wise to talk with Iran. That's not a thoughtful issue for discussion
on NPR or the News Hour. That's a matter for a therapist.
If George Bush has
done one service he has brought the capital's destructive childishness
out of the closet. What has still to be recognized, however,
is that he is not an exception but merely a sadly extreme example
how the place really works.
Pilgrim's
folly
I have considered
Pilgrims among the most overrated American historical figures
ever since he wrote a college paper in Robert G. Albion's class
on forty recorded voyages to New England before the Mayflower.
And that didn't include all the ones made by those who didn't
- or didn't know how - to write it down. About a decade before
the Pilgrims, for example, Samuel Champlain not only visited
Plymouth harbor, he charted it, including Plymouth Rock.
But history favors
occupiers over explorers, hunters, fishermen, and traders. And
the literate over the literate. If you want to be remembered
here, you have to stay here. And write it down.
A wonderful history
of Maine, "Lobster Coast," also suggests that the Pilgrim's
Thanksgiving dinner didn't hold up all that well. That winter
the Pilgrims were forced to go to get food from some of their
pre-arriving countrymen manning a trading post on a Maine island.
The first Europeans
to visit New England waters were probably Scandinavian fishermen,
who could make the northern transit of the Atlantic and never
be more than a few hundred miles from shore. John and Sebastian
Cabot, five years after Columbus, passed through and charted
Maine's Casco Bay on their way from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas.
By 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold arrived at Cape Neddick, his
presence was considered by the Indians to be less than remarkable.
John Bereton, the chronicler of the voyage, wrote:
"One who seemed
to be their commander wore a coat of black work, a pair of breeches,
cloth stockings, shoes, hat and band. . . They spoke divers Christian
words and seemed to understand more than we, for lack of language,
could comprehend. . . They pronounced our language with great
facility; for one of them sitting by me, upon occasion I spake
smilingly to him with these words: 'How now sirha are you so
saucy with my tobacco,' which words (without any further repetition)
he suddenly spake so plaine and distinctly as if he had been
a long scholar in the language."
As far back as 1524,
Giovanni da Verrazano, arriving to the west of Casco Bay near
Ogunquit, got a reception from the Indians that suggested more
than a little previous contact with Europeans or "the boat
people" as the natives called them. The Indians insisted
on standing on a cliff and trading with Verrazano's crew by use
of a rope. "We found no courtesy in them," Verrazano
complained. Worse they rounded out the transaction by "showing
their buttocks and laughing immoderately."
As for Robert G.
Albion, who got your editor started on all of this, his course
was considered a "gut" at Harvard, heavily attended
by football players and other lightweights. While I fit the latter
category, I also was an avid sailor and an admirer of Albion's
mentor, maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morrison. Much later,
I realized another reason Albion didn't get much credit at Harvard;
he was, well ahead of his time, a social historian on a campus
that believed deeply that history was the work of great men.
Nonetheless, another student of Albion named his motor yacht
the "Robert G. Albion," making the professor probably
the only Harvard professor ever to reach this pinnacle of honor.
Milton Friedman: Killing
America softly with his song
You'd never guess it from the sycophantic
obituaries, but Milton Friedman did more damage to American democracy
and culture than just about any figure in the 20th century.
The sycophancy isn't surprising.
Friedman was blessed with it from the start. For example, the
supposedly liberal PBS starred him in a ten part series, "Free
to Choose" in 1980 just in time to help Reagan win the presidency.
To this day, even NPR babbles about the "free market"
when you all you have to do is count the number of lobbyists
in Washington to understand that such an economy doesn't exist.
Further, one of the best kept secrets
of economics is that there are lots of systems that work provided,
that is, you don't care who they work for. Feudalism, for example,
was great if you were a lord, not so efficient a marketplace
is you were merely a serf. And each system works differently
depending on the culture in which it operates, which is why communism
in the Soviet Union, China and Italy meant such different things.
In the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its
social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who
live there.
This is why the commentaries on
Friedman were so consistently wrong. They treated economics as
though it was a cold science when, in a mind as distorted as
Friedman's, it was really just a sort of creationism myth applied
to money.
If you read far enough down the
stories, you would find, grudgingly, a single quote from a critic.
The Washington Post cited Galbraith biographer Richard Parker
who said that Friendman's "passionate calls for financial
and securities market deregulation played no small role in ushering
in the half-trillion dollar S&L fiasco of the 1980s and the
deeply corrupt Wall Street stock market boom of the 1990s. His
tax-reduction-at-all-costs policies helped lead to the nation's
yawning budget deficits." And the Wall Street Journal admitted
deep in its account, "Critics said he inspired policies
that put millions of people out of work in pursuit of low inflation
and demonized almost everything the government did, no matter
how beneficial or democratically chosen. 'Milton Friedman didn't
make a distinction between the big government of the People's
Republic of China and the big government of the United States,
said James Galbraith, professor of government at the University
of Texas."
But for the most part both public
figures and the media bought Friedman's mythology, never stopping
to look critically at the effect it had on America. Here are
a just few things that have happened since America's elite swallowed
the Friedman myth:
- Real income down
- Real manufacturing wages down
- Top one percent's share of wealth up
- Income gap between rich and poor up
- Family indebtedness up
- Bottom forty percent's share of wealth down
- CEO pay as a percent of average workers' pay up
- Workers covered by pensions down
- Workers covered by health plans down
- Age at which one can receive Social Security down
- Personal bankruptcies up
- Housing foreclosures up
- Median rent up
But the worst damage of Friedman
economics is not fiscal but what it has done to the social and
moral principles that made America what it was before the greedsters
of neo-capitalism began taking it apart. The underlying principle
of laissez faire economics is that power is intrinsically good
and decency intrinsically irrelevant.
No society can long function on
such a lie. It is essentially that of the Mafia with the exception
being that you don't have to always ignore the law to get what
you want; often, with the help of your lobbyists and purchased
politicians, you can just change it to fit your needs.
The moral vacuum was clear from
the start. Ronald Reagan said things like "We were told
four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every
night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
And: "Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for
freeloaders."
As for Margaret Thatcher, whose
platform of public selfishness was used as a model for the Reagan
campaign, she thought there wasn't even anything one could call
a community: "There is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families." Thatcher
wrapped herself in economic slogans that justified greed not
only to accomplish economic ends but also to deal with gays and
abortions and everything else she didn't like. In her paradigm,
the free market and Victorian tyranny formed a civil union. By
the time Reagan, Bush, and Clinton were through with the concept,
they had created a gaping corporate exemption from common morality
and decency. The market not only offered adequate justification
for any act, it had replaced God as the highest source of law.
We have paid a terrible price for
this corruption of our culture by the new robber barons egged
on by Friedman and his ilk. We so accept their foul standards
that we don't even discuss or debate them. We have become prisoners
of their lie.
Martin
Luther King Day, Bull Connor years
I would like to
celebrate Martin Luther King Day but I can't get Bull Connor
out of my mind. I look for reminders of Martin Luther King but
they are either old and weary or in lonely, small places. Reminders
of Bull Connor are all around us.
The spirit of Bull
Connor can be found in our foreign policy, in our police methods,
in our treatment of the weak and the poor, in our abuse of the
Constitution, in the implicit values of our media, in the violent
forms of entertainment we prefer and our contempt for those who
are different than ourselves, even in how we raise and teach
our children. And, of course, as Charles Rangel said, "George
Bush is our Bull Connor."
Bull Connor was
more than a brutal police commissioner. In describing William
Nunnelly's biography of Connor, Neal Tate writes, "Connor
had the backing of the local corporate elite in spite of his
declarations of being free of outside influence. Connor helped
the industrial elite by 'controlling strikes...silencing radicals.
. . Connor was exactly what companies that controlled Birmingham
were looking for. . . ' He was counted on to keep the status
quo. Connor 'stayed on the good side of the business leaders...
[and was] always receptive to corporate suggestions.' His preaching
about economy in government and no new taxes reflected the influence
of Birmingham's industrial and financial interests, who 'always
insisted in cheap government with only bare essential services.'
"
In short, a Bush
era conservative without the social graces.
It is hard to remember
without reminders: an object, a story, a contemporary version
of what we are trying to recall. The sense of Martin Luther King
seems to have vanished. You won't find him in the Senate. You
won't find him on CNN, nor C-SPAN nor NPR. He's even hard to
find in the pulpit or in the streets. Bull Connor, on the other
hand, is everywhere.
In that sense, we
are living in a Birmingham before anything happened. Before Bull
Connor was challenged.
But eventually he
was, and here is what one man named King said about it:
I remember in
Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there,
we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after
day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would
tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just
went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn
me around."
Bull Connor next
would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said
to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew
a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the trans-physics
that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain
kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before
the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some
other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist,
and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. That
couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we
would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and
we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my
head I see freedom in the air."
And then we would
be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked
in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in,
and old Bull would say, "Take 'em off," and they did;
and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall
Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in jail, and
we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved
by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And
there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to;
and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won
our struggle in Birmingham.
Who cares
who was a communist?
Reading about Arthur
Miller's alleged Communist connections brings to mind some unfinished
business for American historians: a fair account of American
Communists. Even today, the image projected by the media is heavily
tilted towards the FBI version of the tale, an absurd melding
of fact, rumor, fiction, and extreme rightwing bias.
In fact, many American
Communists were simply people driven by a deep concern for human
justice. If, for example, you went into the south before the
civil rights movement and found a white working on the issue,
it would not be surprising to discover that the activist was
a member of the Communist Party, about the only one that cared
at the time. Even in the 1960s, it was not unusual to run into
former Communists providing important leadership, using their
years of activist experience.
Were these evil
people? Far from it. They were among the decent people in politics.
Many were in the arts strong, sensitive and deeply idealistic.
Others were in the labor movement helping unionists become so
successful that more than a few would end up voting Republican.
You can't tell the story of American social democracy without
the story of American communism.
Where the trouble
began was not with domestic politics but with the foreign. Precisely
because they were so idealistic, many had a hard time melding
ideology with what was actually going on. Even today, there are
echoes of this in left debate: a conflict between intellectually-based
and reality-based discussions of politics - issues of faith versus
those of fact.
Nowhere was this
more striking than with American Communists who defended the
Stalin regime. A handful engaged in espionage they justified
by their beliefs, but most simply tolerated, excused, or explained
away the Soviet beast. The fact that Adolph Hitler was there
as a convenient negative comparison didn't hurt.
Lest one become
too sanctimonious about this, however, it is useful to compare
the naivete of American Communists with that of the American
establishment which has supported an extraordinary line of dictators
and other monsters and helped create more such as Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Ladin.
As one who, at the
age of 23 because of his parents' not atypical associations in
the Washington of the time, found himself a victim of the Communist
hysteria foisted by the FBI and others, I have long understood
how distorted the story has been.
But when I read
Marx in college, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was
about. In fact, having stuffed envelopes in a political campaign
when I was only 11, I was never sure of what the purpose of political
theory was. Both Communists and political science professors
struck me as members of odd sects far removed from the reality
of politics. I didn't hate or fear them; I just didn't want to
join them.
But misguided as
some of their views and stupid as some of their allegiances were,
the Communists I have run into have been a far better bunch than,
say, the cruel, selfish egos of the Republican right.
Besides it can get
confusing. I remember covering a major local meeting once and
sitting behind the one Republican present. I was amused by the
fact that he had been regularly voting in the minority with,
among others, a man I knew was still a Communist. At one point
the Republican turned to me before a vote and said, "Now
we'll see how the hard left handles this one." I replied,
"I hate to tell you this but you've been voting with the
Communists all evening."
It is now almost
time that some historian develop the courage to tell the story
of American communism, not as the FBI and media would have us
believe, but as the complicated, fascinating, and inconsistent
story that it really is.
Running
things
Kind reader William
Davidson writes to ask, "Sam, I want to know why we can
not get you to be the president." Your editor tries to soft--pedal
the many nice notes he receives but this one is so excessive
it deserves some sort of response.
In fact, I reached
the pinnacle of my political career when I was elected a neighborhood
commissioner. One term of this remarkably complex task sated
all further political ambition. My problem, I slowly discovered
over the years, was that while I have, run, or helped to run,
such varied things as a Coast Guard vessel, radio station, political
organizations, a band and an alternative agriculture center,
I didn't really enjoy the running part all that much. It seems
that the more power you have, the more removed you become from
what attracted you in the first place. I also found myself enjoying
groups and places where no one seemed to be running things because
everyone was.
My father liked
running things along the principles set forth in Winnie the Pooh:
"It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing
a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought
About It.." My mother, however, took an aptitude test that
told her she was not likely to do well on boards and committees.
She came home and immediately resigned from all of them. I have
tried to take a more moderate position, which is to say that
I join new boards doing something worthwhile but typically only
to the point when they discover they don't have a personnel committee,
a sure sign that they are getting too bureaucratic for my tastes.
The serious part
of this ramble is that I suspect that there are many people like
myself who could do a halfway decent job (thereby busting the
curve) in politics or other places of power but avoid them out
of ADD: ambition deficit disorder.
The guy who used
to print the Review insisted that politicians should only be
allowed one term and only one office during a lifetime. This
idea fit well with one I have suggested, namely that each legislative
body have a certain number of members picked by lot in order
to provide a living benchmark. Perhaps, for starters we could
have a separate house of Congress for lottery winners and short-timers:
the Recalcitrant Branch. Our role model would be Cincinnatus
who served as dictator just long enough to defeat the Aequi -
it took 16 days - and then returned to his farm where the really
serious work remained unfinished. Another model would be Benjamin
Franklin who believed one should never seek nor refuse a public
position.
I do occasionally
have the fantasy that I would make an excellent post-revolutionary
leader - the sort of guy who could cool things off, get the various
factions working together, and move from armed critique to placid
programs. The problem with this fantasy is that I would have
had to have also been a revolutionary leader to get the job in
the first place, something at which I would have been terrible.
Further, a dissident faction would quickly discover my ambivalence
towards power and remove me from office either by election or
by coup and/or sudden death. At which point I quit my day dreaming
and return to my true love, writing.
Hendrik
Ibsen made me do it
I'm a little late
getting down to work today because I've been attending a Norwegian
Embassy symposium at the Library of Congress celebrating the
one hundredth anniversary of the death of the man who helped
to ruin my life: Henrik Ibsen.
I don't really hold
it against him and I'm far from the only one who has been affected
by the Norwegian playwright. At this moment, for example, some
184 performances of Ibsen's plays are being readied around the
world, including one at Washington's Shakespeare Theater next
fall. Others will take place in Nepal, Bangladesh, Palestine,
Mexico, Chile, Cuba, Australia, Argentina and South Korea. New
translations are underway in Polish, Farsi, Vietnamese, German
and French.
Ibsen introduced
to the stage, and helped define, the existential and humanistic
side of what would become the 20th century. Unfortunately, within
a decade of his death, tanks and submarines would make it clear
who would really be in charge of the century and it wasn't to
be existentialists and humanists.
Nearly a hundred
years before Earth Day, he wrote a strongly ecological play and
declared in his notes for another work, "There are two kinds
of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely
different one in woman. They do not understand each other; but
in matters of practical living the woman is judged by man's law,
as if she were not a woman but a man." He also wrote about
child abuse, incest, business ethics, venereal disease and media
morality.
He has been praised
as the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. Freud credited
him with helping him discover the Oedipus complex. The National
Committee for the Promotion of Ibsen describes his writings as
"alive and relevant, constantly rejuvenating new generations."
And that's just for starters.
But in a new book,
Said About Ibsen, novelist Nikolaj Frobenius points out that
there is another Ibsen: "An argumentative, provocative,
stubborn and prickly sod."
This was the Ibsen
I met in the 1950s in high school, an Ibsen alien to everything
the 1950s stood for, as removed from the gestalt of 20th century
American Pleasantville as he had been from conventional 19th
century Norway. A still subversive Ibsen.
One of the Ibsen
plays I read was the Arthur Miller adaptation of An Enemy of
the People about the doctor had tried to warn his spa-dependent
town of the ecological dangers of their polluted water system
. At first, the town is receptive but when they find out how
much it will cost to repair they turn against Dr Stockmann and
he then turns against them. At point he says of the town, "It
should be razed to the ground, I tell you! And wiped out, like
vermin, all of those who live with the lie."
If the play had
been commissioned by Move On and written by Michael Moore, Dr
Stockmann would have been an unblemished hero. But Ibsen was
a writer, not a polemicist. And so, a half decade before Silent
Spring, a young man was able to learn in one play about ecological
hazards, whistle-blowing, and the hubris that can come from just
being right.
With it, life became
far too complicated to just settle down as a happy 1950s lawyer,
doctor or corporate executive, especially if you had also read
a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Willie Loman musing, "After
all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the
years, you end up worth more dead than alive." Or one year
after graduation, picking up William Whyte's Organization Man:
"The corporation
man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for
the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected
almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee
off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who win end up in
the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic,
the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual
on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate
in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in
a Wall Street law factory. . .
"Listen to
them talk to each other over the front lawns of their suburbia
and you cannot help but be struck by how well they grasp the
common denominators which bind them. Whatever the differences
in their organization ties, it is the common problems of collective
work that dominate their attentions, and when the Du Pont man
talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the army man,
it is these problems that are uppermost. The word collective
most of them can't bring themselves to use--except to describe
foreign countries or organizations they don't work for--but they
are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to
organization than were their elders."
The problem with
such an education is that it is far easier to write and read
about it than to actually live with the message. At Germantown
Friends School I was, politically and philosophically at least,
non-radical and normal. One year later I would learn that Harvard
wasn't interested in Ibsen, Sloan Wilson or William Whyte; and,
still later, Washington even less so. And so, with no little
help from Henrik Ibsen and those who followed, I became an outsider.
Even one among my
supposed allies. Because if you approach things as a writer you
see too many things to please the truly committed. For example,
I have never subscribed to the notion that those who disagree
with me politically are therefore evil. Some of this comes from
living in a large family but I suspect the lesson of Dr. Stockmann
lingers as well: the underrated dangers of righteousness. And
so I found myself siding with Al Camus who, when asked if he
were willing to die for his beliefs, responded, "of course
not, what if I am wrong"?
Yet oddly, and without
premeditation, I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life
dealing with whistleblowers like Dr Stockmann, both as a journalist
and as a board member of a fund backing groups helping whistleblowers.
I wrote about it in Why Bother?
Whistleblowers,
in the course of doing their jobs, typically stumble upon facts
that point to danger, neglect, waste, or corruption. Far too
often this discovery is met not with approbation and as a sign
of exemplary public service, but rather as a threat to the agency
or company. Among the consequences: firing, reassignment, isolation,
forced resignation, threats, referral to psychiatric treatment,
public exposure of private life and other humiliations, being
set up for failure, prosecution, elimination of one's job, blacklisting,
or even death. . .
From the doctor
in Ibsen's Enemy of the People to Karen Silkwood, the nuclear
industry worker killed after her car was forced off the road
on her way to talk to a reporter, speaking truth to power has
proved costly. The Mongolians say that when you do it, you should
keep one foot in the stirrup.
Whistleblowers fall
easily into traps that can hurt if not destroy them. They may
become monomaniacal, paranoiac, depressed, confused, and terribly
lonely.
On the other hand,
whistleblowers have forced the cancellation of a nuclear power
plant that was 97% completed, potentially prevented widespread
illness due to poor meat inspection, ended the beating of patients
in a VA hospital, and exposed multi-billion dollar waste in the
Star Wars program.
And not all whistleblowers
are defeated. When Ernest Fitzgerald discovered a $2 billion
cost overrun on a military cargo plane, Richard Nixon personally
ordered his staff to "get rid of that son of a bitch."
Twenty-five years later Fitzgerald was still on the job. . .
One study found
that 232 out of 233 whistleblowers reported suffering retaliation;
others found reprisals in about 95% of cases. As Admiral Hyman
Rickover told a group of Pentagon cost analysts: "If you
must sin, sin against God, not against the bureaucracy. God may
forgive you, but the bureaucracy never will."
The whistleblower,
the outsider, the rebel, always faces the dilemma that trapped
Dr. Stockmann. I didn't like his solution, but I understood it.
There is no textbook for the outsider, only stories like Ibsen's.
Here's how I tried to explain it in my memoir, Multitudes:
I didn't plan it
this way. I didn't want it this way. In truth, a large part of
me still would like to have been one of the popular boys in the
class, but things kept getting in the way - some addictive confluence
of moral aggravation, periodic accident, undisciplined imagination,
sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly suppressing chronic
shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic existentialism,
recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness, and an abiding intolerance
for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding
tide after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this
time I'll float off.
Some people take
it personally, as though I rebelled simply to annoy them. They
make little jokes about the fact that I'm different, as if I
had a moral obligation to be like them. When they see someone
like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their
imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who
might abscond with their most precious possession: the tranquility
of unexamined certainty.
But it's really
more like Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:
"You do not
become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take
up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and
placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt
to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of
society . . . "
Those dissidents
who somehow remain connected to the normal find themselves alone
in the crowd. Even in my home town, I often feel an exile - as
though all had emigrated except for me, as though somehow I had
missed the ship. . .
Emerson understood
the problem:
"You will always
find those who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's
opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude."
Still, you can't
talk about such things because it would further confirm the belief
that you are best ignored, dismissed, or considered absurd. So
you become the charming stranger from a strange place, you tell
the jokes first, and you change the subject when it starts to
get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking
that you are one of them even though you really blend better
with those the urban itinerant Joe Gould described as the "cranks
and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the
would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."
Still, among the
illusions of my life has been that if I stuck it out long enough,
time would provide the acceptance that my words and thoughts
had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say that when you're young
you're blamed for things you didn't do and when you're older
you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like that, in part
because just when I should have started coasting, the world around
me took a nasty, greedy, and dangerous turn. America began destroying
itself. It was the wrong time to start fitting in .
True, the best period
for a revolution of the good is when one is young. To be twenty
or thirty and part of an uprising of the collective soul is a
rare gift of life. It does spoil you, though, for you go through
the rest of your time wondering why that moment went away and
why nothing seems able to bring it back.
What was unexpected,
both in timing and intensity, was that I would not only live
through one of America's great revivals but during a subsequent
era when my country -- without debate, consideration, or struggle
-- decided it really didn't want to be America any more.
And so today, sitting
in a library that was under construction as Hedda Gabler and
the Master Builder were being written, across the street from
a US Congress that still won't deal with problems such as polluted
water systems, I felt blessed by the ghost of that argumentative,
provocative, stubborn and prickly sod. May he rest in peace.
And keep everyone else riled up.
The hazards
of estivation
A reader - and Democratic
candidate for a New England state legislature - writes: "I
have been a subscriber to both Progressive Review as well as
Undernews for some time now. Recently the issues have become
sporadic and now nothing. As a convert to SHAFARism I feel my
'faith' has abandoned me. Woe is I." [1]
There are two explanations,
neither particularly satisfactory. The first is that the Review
has been in its normal estivation mode. [2]
We usually announce
this but what with 40% of Americans not even able to take a vacation
this summer - some because they are running for state legislature
- and with that ubiquitous excuse, a war or terror, your editor
thought it better to pretend that he was still hard at work in
the steamy capital rather than enjoying the pleasures of the
Review's New England regional headquarters, overlooking beautiful
northwest Casco Bay.
At odds once again
with mainstream culture, your editor prefers the values expressed
by Paul LaFarguein 1907 in The Right to be Lazy & Other Studies:
"Jehovah, the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers
the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work,
he rests for all eternity."
The other explanation
forces me to reveal one of the deepest secrets of journalism,
which is that news is largely the artificial creation of reporters,
editors and other media hacktoids. I discovered this years ago
when I found I could date the seasonal end of news by an abrupt
drop off in press releases arriving in our office after June
15. Now, with the Internet, I sense the same phenomena marked
by the sudden paltry flow of RSS headlines and a large number
of journalist-readers announcing by e-mail that they are out
of the office until a date certain. Something similar happens
every Thanksgiving and Christmas, which are probably the safest
times to be alive, since no terrorist would waste a bomb knowing
that so much of the media was off visiting relatives and not
caring about what happened.
I will, however,
say in my defense that - as is usual in rural and waterfront
communities - it has been impossible to be inert for long. For
example, this summer we have had two power outages of more than
8 hours. Standard practice is to call Central Maine Power and
punch in your account number. This allows CMP to aggregate the
reports and narrow down the possible wire malefactors under its
control. It also wins you a phone call when the lights come back
on. One night the call came at 2 am. I tried a switch but it
didn't work, so said to hell with it and went back to bed.
But as I lay there,
visions of melting ice cream in the fridge ballooned in my brain
until sleep became impossible. I arose and messed with the Gen
Tran switches from my portable generator to no avail. I then
got in my car to find the wires I knew had fallen in the nearby
woods and as I turned out of the drive the woods became alive
with an orange glow.
With the power restored
further up the line, our fallen wire had apparently done its
mischief and started a fire accompanied by a strange electric
moaning sound. It's not the sort of thing the brain - especially
one previously only filled with visions of melted ice cream -
can deal with easily alone at two am.
But I pulled myself
together, called the local volunteer fire department, assured
them that the blaze was only about three fireplaces large, and
waited. Within minutes a small truck was there, the fire had
almost burned itself out, and CMP was on the way.
At 4:30 am I got
another call. Still half asleep I said in full greeting, "Thank
you very much." The woman at the other end laughed and replied,
"I guess you were expecting me."
I have also been
deep into a locally hot and totally unanticipated issue during
which I have spent two and half hours at the state attorney general's
office, written one op ed for the Portland Press Herald, two
letters to the editor and come up with a pull-out quote used
by another newspaper. I have also testified before the Freeport
planning commission citing James Madison among other things.
Unlike easy federal
issues like Iraq, gay marriage and abortion, local matters are
far too complex to sum up in a few sentences. Suffice it to say
that it involved some residents of a development being unhappy
with a semester program in coastal studies for 32 high school
girls being planned for a small corner of what was formerly my
parents' organic beef farm, which they started in the 1950s.
The farm is now a non-profit (that I once headed), struggling
to stay alive and burdened by too many decrepit but historic
rural structures. The coastal studies program would result in
one of these burdens being lifted from the farm as well as some
additional income. But some of the increasingly suburban neighbors
thought it would be a travesty of rural life.
The issue has made
me realize how far rural reality has drifted from urban consciousness.
There is a romantic notion that farms simply exist when, in fact,
some 90% of farm family income these days comes from non-farm
sources.
My investigations
also reminded me of how important rural education has always
been to rural America - from one room school houses to land grant
colleges.
As I noted in a
letter to the Falmouth Forecaster: "According to Freeport's
zoning ordinance, uses within the RRII Zone are 'limited to those
which are compatible with its historic and rural qualities.'
"Well, schools
were a prolific part of the rural landscape including several
in the area such as the Litchfield School, one near Flying Point,
and one within easy walking distance of the proposed coastal
studies program. . .
"One town in
Maine had 14 schools in the 19th century. Typically such schools
were placed about three miles apart, hardly an oddity in the
rural landscape.
"You could
not have had American agriculture without rural schools. They
were inseparable. One study reports, 'During the 1930s about
one-half of all children went to school in rural areas, where
the proportion of children to adults was higher than in the cities.'
. . . In short, if you really want to be true to the landscape's
'historic and rural qualities' we would need more and not fewer
schools."
I concluded my talk
to the planning commission by saying that "Finally, if you
wish to preserve historic buildings, farmland, and open space,
you must constantly be educating a new constituency. You can
not have the things you value yet fail to teach our children
their value. If we had been blessed with many more coastal studies
programs over the years we might well not be in the ecological
danger we now face."
And, I might have
added, we might have fewer power outages as well.
So there are several
weak excuses for the seasonal entropy of the Review. Shortly
after Labor Day, I hope to ease myself back into hyperactivity
- unproductive as it seems to be these days. Meanwhile, gentle
reader, I appreciate your constant patience and forbearance.
[1] SHAFARS
are comprised of - according to a Review article some time back
- skeptics, humanists, agnostics, free thinkers, atheists and
rationalists.
[2] Estivation
is the same as hibernation except it occurs during summer.
The Luddites
at Microsoft
ON THIS DATE in 1811, Ned Ludd and friends
smashed weaving machines in effort to preserve jobs for the workers.
Last weekend your editor observed the anniversary by attempting
to recover from the ill effects of a smashed machine, in this
case a computer.
It occurred to me, as I toiled away on
the minutia of data retrieval, that the Luddite tradition was
alive and well at Microsoft, only rather than the manufacturing
equipment being the target, it is now the final product. And
rather than destroying machinery in order to permit employees
to retain old ways, Microsoft employees are destroying machines
with delayed fuses in order to force the rest of us into new
ways. They have taken the old scheme of planned obsolescence
and combined it with chaos theory to create vicious and unpredictable
interruptions in our lives. And because of the high volume of
calls, they can't speak to us about it right now.
I know of no machine I have owned from
my first Lionel train to my last car that ever displayed as many
manifestations of ill health as the average computer. Further,
while I have lost cars to thieves, collisions with errant cows,
and old age, I have never had one crash in the totally inexplicable
manner of a computer.
And so it was that during the past three
days, I have made one visit each to Radio Shack, Staples, and
Office Depot and two to Comp USA. I have had two lengthy conversations
with Sony Technical Support and four with Checkfree. I have cursed
my carelessness, gloried in unexpected gems still on my high
selective backup discs, and been amazed at how many files one
man can create between computer upgrades.
Even though Sony Technical Support assured
me that there was no hope for my machine short of wiping clean
the hard disc, I discovered a $50 wonder from On Track that allowed
me to delve into the mysteries of DOS for the first time in years.
And so I sat for hours in front of a 13"
black sky, filling it with alphanumeric constellations and feeling
a bit like God and a bit like a damn fool. Somewhere in an unused
corner of my mind the difference between DIR W and DIR P still
lurked and as time wore on I found the uses of *.* and its variations
slowly returning. I could, despite the contrary assurances of
Sony, retrieve modest sized files as long as I remembered what
was in them, based on the truncated nomenclature of DOS in which
WHITEWATER SCANDALS CHAPTER 10 becomes WHITEWA~.DOC.
I've done as much as I can for the moment
and the old machine will sit behind me for a month or so in case
I can remember other goodies still hidden on it. If, when I reformat
it, it still works, it will be exiled to my home where the present
occupant lacks a shift key.
Meanwhile, I have a new machine. Which
means I have moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, which means
that (a) my old printer doesn't work with it (b) the old printer
cable doesn't work with it and (c) I no longer can sneak on an
old Excel program whose serial number I lost but worked fine
except for a series of error messages. These are not revelations
that arrived simultaneously, but were spaced with annoying distance
across the past three days. And they all cost money.
My wife tells me I am far too stingy about
all this, but I can't get over the feeling that one of the world's
richest men ought to be able to manufacture an operating system
that lasts at least as long as my Plymouth minivan, which not
only is happily in its seventh year but has outlasted its own
brand name.
Instead, I am forced by the reverse Luddites
of Microsoft to upgrade when all I want to do is just want to
keep on trucking. I don't believe it is really Bill Gates' business
to decide when I should improve my lot in life, and it is certainly
not his privilege to do so in a totally unannounced fashion.
At the very least, he could not be so damn
patronizing about it. With each new Windows upgrade I find my
work increasingly interrupted by strange cartoon creatures making
gratuitous suggestions, balloons telling me the obvious, and
formerly useful space taken up by visual therapy guiding me towards
purportedly rational computer behavior. In time, I remove most
of these invasions of privacy and sanity and get the machine
back to looking as much like Windows 95 as possible. Still, each
new edition presents novel challenges; I have already been peremptorily
ordered a number of times to send an "error report"
to Microsoft. But since I bought an operating system and not
a long term relationship, I have simply ignored the command.
Meanwhile, I love my minivan more than
ever. I have never had to have a conversation with Heather or
Justin in technical support in order to get to the end of the
block, it has no funny creatures leaping out at me, most of the
time it does its job, and, best of all, when it doesn't feel
well, not only does it usually warn me in time, there are scores
of people in my town alone who know what to do about it and have
it ready for me by the end of the day. Would that computers worked
as well. SAM SMITH
The hazards
of cleaning the attic
I'M A LITTLE LEARY
of the plans to renovate the National Museum of American History.
There seems to be a notion abroad that the problem with museums
is the space they're in when, in fact, it's often more a matter
of what's on the walls and on the floor.
I recently spent
some time in the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art, which
is full of new space. I suddenly had a subversive idea. I walked
into a large gallery and stood in the middle of the room, about
as far from the works as they would have typically been had I
purchased them for a new McMansion on the California coast.
I found myself alone.
Close to 90% of the others in the gallery stood about one to
five feet away from the paintings, reading the labels, examining
the brush strokes and looking thoughtful. I had positioned myself
where I assumed many artists would prefer me to gaze at their
work, but I felt like a philistine. I also had a hard time seeing
the paintings behind all the people crowded around them.
The point is that
people often behave differently than how others - such as artists
and museum directors - think they should. In fact, the crowd
in MOMA would have been perfectly happy viewing the art had it
been hung inside a railroad car. I stood there and gloated about
the millions that had been spent to make me happy in my "space."
Here's how Jacqueline
Trescott of the Washington Post describes the plans for NMAH:
"After four
decades of sending visitors through a maze of hallways and galleries,
the museum is planning to redo the core of the building, adding
10-foot-high 'artifact walls' on the first and second floors
-- glass cases that will display hundreds of items from the museum's
vast collections. The center of the 750,000-square-foot building
will have an atrium with a new skylight and a glass staircase
that will allow visitors at the entrance from the Mall to see
all the way through the building to the entrance on Constitution
Avenue. . .
"The announcement
of the new plan for the building comes four years after a blue-ribbon
commission issued a report sharply critical of the museum's layout
and organization. The report said the museum didn't meet any
obvious test of comprehensibility or coherence," adding
that even its employees got lost in the building. It suggested
old-fashioned timelines, directories of the events of American
history and a more coherent narrative.
"The panel
was most concerned that the museum was claustrophobic, uninspired
and cluttered. 'Now it has opened up the lines of sight horizontally
and brought in light vertically,' [commission chairman Richard]
Darman said."
In fact, the museum
as it now exists is one of the most popular in the world. It
is indeed cluttered, just like an enticing attic or basement;
and it is sometimes uninspired but never claustrophobic or incoherent.
It represents, with surprising honesty, the anarchistic chaos
of American virtues.
Now, I admit I'm
biased. The museum is filled with things I like, starting when
you first walk in the door and ahead of you are the chairs, tables
and counters from the ice cream parlor down the street from where
I lived as a kid. Then there's the steam engine that is so big
they had to build the museum around it and the upright transposing
piano made for Irving Berlin. Berlin was self taught and preferred
to play on the black keys, just like Mr. Platt, my anthropology
teacher, who also gave me pop piano lessons in high school. In
another room, there's a big navigational buoy sitting like a
Roman statue to warm the heart of ex-coastguardmen like myself
and an actual piece of Route 66 as well as a mid 1980s minivan
just like the one I used to have.
Yes, I'm biased,
but approximately three million people each year find similar
icons with which they can recall, relax, reflect, and bore their
families talking about.
But planners prefer
things neat, comprehensive and with a coherent narrative. Not
to mention timelines, even if nothing much happened in 1837 and
even if time lines are not a particular useful way to organized
as multifaceted a culture as America's.
And they love that
space. Says Trescott, "The museum is planning to redo the
core of the building, adding 10-foot-high 'artifact walls' on
the first and second floors -- glass cases that will display
hundreds of items from the museum's vast collections. The center
of the 750,000-square-foot building will have an atrium with
a new skylight and a glass staircase that will allow visitors
at the entrance from the Mall to see all the way through the
building to the entrance on Constitution Avenue."
The problem here
is a combination of too little and too much. Once I've spent
ten seconds seeing all the way through the building to the entrance
on Constitution Avenue, what will I do next? Probably ask a guard
where they've put the trains. On the other hand, ten foot artifact
walls with hundreds of items - based on other such exhibits I've
seen - will quickly wear me out. Such things remind me of the
back room of shoe stores and I'll probably soon ask a guard whether
they still have Irving Berlin's piano.
There is a tendency
in the museum world these days, as elsewhere in America, to use
design as a substitute for evidence, style as a substitute for
reality, empty space as a substitute for substance, and abstract
words as a substitute for specific knowledge. Ironically, it
all costs a lot of money that could better be spent on creating
the sort of alternate realities that actually draws people to
such places.
The sad thing is
that the Museum of American History already understood this.
Now it seems to want to forget it all.
MORE
MUZIM MUSIN'
2005
Brief
encounter with the normal
Upon reading the
lead story in today's Washington Post the thought occurred that
if I weren't a dissident journalist I'd make a hell of a member
of the establishment. The thought quickly dissipated even though
my futile arguments that the president needed multiple sources
of intelligence information rather than having it all filtered
through one assistant had now been recommended by an official
panel.
The story began,
" A presidential commission assigned to look into the intelligence
failures leading up to the Iraq war will recommend a series of
changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's
spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled
fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday."
My idea was that
on such matters the president should have at least as many sources
as a reporter, and besides did you really want to rely on John
Negroponte to find out whether death squads were coming back
in Central America? But such doubts had been met with the usual
blank stares and occasional ex cathedra inference that, unlike
the inferrer, I didn't really understand.
Yet even with my
new high level support, I am still left with a fatal problem.
It was the same one faced by the comedian being interviewed:
REPORTER: And to
what do you attribute your great. . .
COMEDIAN: Timing.
Nothing one says
or does in Washington matters if it is said or done before the
right time, typically that moment when the media, think tanks
and "thoughtful observers" all finally agree it needs
to be done - usually upon the suggestion of whoever is in the
White House.
What makes this
difficult is that Washington - as Phil Hart once said of the
Senate - is a place that does things 20 years after they should
have been done. Outside of evangelical quarters, there is hardly
anywhere in America less comfortable than the capital with unconventional
or new ideas.
Even if Henry Kissinger
eventually agrees we should get out of Vietnam or the Washington
Post finally comes to accept the notion of global warming, that
doesn't imply one can suggest such things before the appropriate
moment. Absent, for starters, a presidential commission report,
a new White House or Pentagon "strategic vision," or
a Brookings analysis, offering a new idea is the Washington version
of insurrection.
Further, my experience
has been that the more high placed is the person to whom one
introduces a new idea, the more likely this individual is to
be uncomfortable, dismissive, or suddenly in need of another
drink. Unchallenged myopia is one of the most cherished privileges
of power.
Once an idea has
the appropriate imprimatur it is immediately treated as worthy
of discussion, advocacy and thoughtful comment. It makes absolutely
no difference if the idea is dangerous or absurd - Hillary Clinton's
healthcare plan and George Bush's No Child Left Behind Act are
recent examples. It is the source and not the logic that matters.
Tom Friedman can
now lunch out on it, Jim Lehrer can stage one of his turgid faux
debates, and Sebastian Mallaby can define it as possessing gravitas,
a Washington synonym for mental ponderosity and verbal obesity.
As one who has been
putting forth new ideas in Washington for a number of decades,
my efforts have earned me such identifications as radical, eccentric,
crazy, trouble-maker, and, as late as an introduction last evening,
local revolutionary. But I have become absolutely convinced that
the problem is not in my ideas but in their novelty. It's not
even that they are terminally unacceptable - after all much of
what I have advocated has come to pass - but that the other person
hasn't been given the talking points with which to respond. In
the end, I often try to calm them by suggesting that I'm not
really a radical at all, merely a moderate of a time that has
not yet come.
I sympathize with
them in a way, though. I remember being annoyed by some of my
freshman classmates who started quoting Marx in a course before
that part of the reading was even due. On the other hand, I was
at the time only a freshman and not a high government official
or Washington correspondent for some major publication.
Now that the national
commission has spoken, it will not change my life in the slightest,
however, because the other aspect of this timing business is
that precocious thought remains a sin even after the thought
itself becomes acceptable. The FBI once had a name for this:
Americans who took part in the Spanish civil war were listed
in the records as "premature anti-fascists."
Still it was nice
to feel normal in Washington if only for a few minutes. Now about
that single payer health care I was mentioning. . .
What the
Christian right forgets about the Bible
[This appeared
in the Progressive Review during the Reagan administration. Not
much has changed.]
Our text for today
is found in the eighth chapter of 1 Samuel. When Samuel got old
he appointed his sons as judges over Israel. As so often occurs
with nepotism this didn't work out: the offspring taking dishonest
gain and bribes and perverting justice. So the elders of Israel
paid a call on old man Samuel and suggested that he appoint a
real king like other nations had. This didn't sit too well with
Samuel so he took the matter to the Lord and the latter said
in effect, "If you feel bad, think how I feel. Look, I brought
these bums out of Egypt and what do I get for thanks? They go
and serve other gods. Now they want to ditch you too.
"So Sam, here's
what's going to come down. We're going to give them a real king
and see how they like it." Continuing in the more literal
translation, the Lord said: "However^ you shall solemnly
warn them and tell them of the procedure of the king who will
reign over them."
Here were the ground
rules the Lord laid down through Samuel: "This will be the
procedure of the king who will reign over you: he will take your
sons and place them for himself in his chariots and among his
horsemen and they will run before his chariots. And he will appoint
for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some
to do his plowing and to reap his harvest and to make his weapons
of war and equipment for his chariots.
"He will also
take your daughters for perfumers and cooks and bakers. And he
will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your
olive groves, and give them to his servants.
"And he will
take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards and give to his
officers and to his servants. He will also take your male servants
and your female servants and your best young men and our donkeys
and use them for his work. He will take a tenth of your flocks,
and you yourselves will become his servants.
"Then you will
cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen
for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer your in that day."
I submit this as
further evidence that the Lord is not a conservative but probably
a libertarian - if not an anarchist. It is one of the tragedies
of modern political debate that the Bible has been surrendered
to the right, even when it is clear, as in this case, that the
Almighty approves of neither authoritarian regimes, military
build-ups nor the concentration of land-holdings. Consider as
well the little noted fact that the Bible is far clearer on the
evils of usury than of abortion and that it not only is far less
prudish about human sexuality than some in office, it even suggests
an alternative approach to pornography, urging that if one's
eye offends thee, one eye and not the vision should be removed.
Further, as some deep ecologists have noted, the Bible suggests
that the earth is the Lord's and not the property of multinational
corporations.
The ultimate irony
of the conservatives it that they pretend to be a bastion of
Christian politics when, in fact, they are comprised in no small
part of despoilers, usurers, war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters
and groupies of false prophets - all of whom are frowned upon
by the book it pretends to follow. And its opponents, who are
more faithful to the words the conservatives only quote, are
often such good Christians that they never say a mumblin' word
about it all.
 PHOTO BY JAMACDONALD
On the
west side of the Capitol
YOUR editor enjoyed
lunch today with his wife at Jimmy T's five blocks down East
Capitol Street from where George Bush and his capos were being
given four more years to do damage to their country, its constitution,
its culture, and its environment -- not to mention further mischief
to the rest of the world. The inauguration was taking place on
the opposite side of the Capitol and there were hardly any cars
or people and no signs of security.
The counter at Jimmy
T's was full so we sat in a booth. The TV was on but no one looked
at the inauguration and the sound was turned to WASH-FM - loud
enough so you couldn't hear the helicopters overhead. For as
long as it takes to eat a short stack with bacon and drink a
cup of coffee we could pretend everything was okay.
The other day I
walked by the Capitol and found myself wondering why we weren't
more paranoiac during the Cold War. When Johnson and Kennedy
and Nixon were president you could still wander about the Capitol's
halls and through the associated office buildings as though you
were actually a part owner. Yet if Tom Ridge had been in charge
of setting the alerts for that era, he would have run out of
colors. We were in far more danger than we are now.
Even if one wants
to argue that a dirty bomb in a backpack is more dangerous than
a clean bomb sent by a rocket or that a few suicidal young Arab
guys are more dangerous than divisions of well dressed Soviet
troops, you still do have to argue the point and that in itself
suggests that the response should be somewhat similar.
But there's little
similar about it and as I walked down the hill by the Capitol
it suddenly struck me that this isn't about me and you; it's
about them. We are being governed by some intensely frightened
people. From George Bush on down. Much of the homeland security
business, in Washington at least, is to provide personal protection
to important people from the consequence of the extremely bad
things they are doing. We are the victims of both Al Qaeda and
Il Dubya, told to give up our rights and freedoms so that the
worst leaders of our entire history can go about their business
without having to suffer for it. The whole city of Washington
has become the armored vest of the Bush administration and Congress.
Preppies at the gate
ALTHOUGH DANA MILBANK
has done some good reporting from the White House he continues
to display a curious anti-Nader fetish, most recently making
fun of Nader selling books on his website. Given that Nader,
David Cobb of the Greens, and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarians
were clearly the three most decent human beings in the race who
got any notice, the question arises: why does Milbank so dislike
honesty and decency in a politician?
Ironically it may
lie deep in the same preppy arrogance that Milbank's other target,
George Bush, displays so regularly. It is the assumption that
only people who act like them and belong with them matter. The
rest are fools.
You don't even have
to have gone to a prep school to pick up this nasty trait. Four
years at Harvard or Yale are plenty to develop what songwriter
Alex Jay Lerner described to as an "indubitable, irrefutable,
inimitable, indomitable, incalculable superiority."
And since such people
often go far in public life, it becomes a curse that affects
us all. It was the arrogance of the Harvard faculty that helped
mire us in Vietnam. It was the arrogance of George Bush that
has us mired in Iraq. And no small part of the origins of such
arrogance can be found in the training of such schools as Yale
and Harvard especially if - as in the case of Bush, Kerry and
Milbank - you add in the perverted and power lusting curriculum
of Skull & Bones.
One can identify
this way of thinking easily. Just ask a hard question and see
how dismissive the answer is. Take Milbank being asked whether
it wasn't strange for the Washington Post to have assigned a
Bonesman to cover the election in which two Bonesmen were running.
His response:
"I have been
assigned to monitor all secret hand signals during the debates.
. . I have it on good information that if this one gets tied
up in a recount, [late Supreme Court Justice and Bonesman] Potter
Stewart will return from the grave to write the majority opinion."
The odd thing about
people like Milbank is that they expend so much effort trying
to prove how sophisticated and grownup they are, yet in the end
basically display a remarkable childishness. They are culturally
imprisoned in a narrow set of values and perceptions and even
in conversation repeatedly use the techniques of power - such
as putdowns and dismissiveness - in place of intelligent argument.
Thus, they become
little more than members of a club, rather than grownup members
of the society they purport to serve or run. It is the irony
of institutions like Yale and Harvard that they produce so many
childlike products. And it is the thing that in the end make
Dana Milbank and George Bush have far more in common than either
would wish to admit.
Standing room
only
Washington's subway
system is considering removing some if not most of the seats
from its cars, thus converting its rolling stock into high capacity
freight cars for those it used to consider its valued customers.
In one concept there would be just 16 seats in a car for 225
passengers.
While we have become
accustomed to the disrespect of citizens by the police, airport
screeners and so forth, we are less aware of the many ways in
which government and large corporations increasingly demonstrate
contempt for those they are supposed to be serving.
For example, corporations
regularly add conditions to what was once a simple transaction.
We no longer buy things from a pleased firm; we have to "accept"
or "agree" to a lengthy list of stipulations in order
to do so. I received an electronic device for Christmas and came
within seconds of throwing away a small yellow piece of paper
full of small print that in fact contained a code needed to make
the thing work. This is a long way from the time when the worst
corporate cop-out was that batteries were not included.
Politics also overflows
with contempt for the citizen, largely in the form of covert
bribes known as campaign contributions that have made a handful
of individuals infinitely more important than the average voter.
Respect is essential
in a functioning society, yet not only are we losing the concept,
we don't even hear much about it - with a few exceptions such
as Richard Sennett's interesting book on the topic. In a society
where citizens exhibit mutual respect, class and ethnic conflict
is mediated, people feel better about themselves and children
are sent in good directions. In a society lacking respect, we
start to behave like too many rats in a cage, we lose the sense
of both the needs of others and of their value to us, and adult
and children alike become lonely warriors in false empires of
one.
In recent years,
thanks in large part to the post-9/11 panic but also to a general
disintegration of local culture, respect has been markedly disappearing
from my home town of Washington. The cops have gotten meaner
and more brutal, the processes more pointlessly complex, the
interactions between strangers more sullen, the local politicians
less interested in what people say, the bureaucracy more burdensome,
and the weakest - including the poor, the homeless and our children
- more mistreated or ignored.
It may seem trivial
to add to such a list the proposed removal of seats on the Metro.
But it is precisely in such small ways that respect or disrespect
is demonstrated and announces its priority. I, for example, make
a point of saying "sir" or "ma'am" to cabbies
and clerks. I suspect I am in a tiny minority, but like Blanche
Dubois, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers and
have tried to return the favor, not for reasons of ettiquette
but because it makes life far more pleasant and interesting.
Our officials -
certainly those in my town - have become remarkably indifferent
to such concerns. One Metro board member actually said, "Part
of the goal is not just squeezing more people on the train, but
making the overall experience better." That makes no sense;
it convinces no one; but as long as you can get away with it,
so what?
The fact is the
early myths of Metro as a transit system have proved badly wrong.
It has created more development than it can handle, thus actually
contributing to street traffic; it has pulled jobs and residents
out of the city while vastly increasing the number of non-taxpaying
commuters coming into downtown; and it is now running out of
money and equipment to do what it so vastly over-promised.
And the transit
system originally meant to serve us has now become our responsibility
to save. Our role has shifted from passenger and valued customer
to mere input into the ongoing budgetary process.
If you watch for
it, you'll come up with your own examples of the increasing disrespect
of the powerful towards the ordinary. You don't even have to
be poor. You just have to be one of those not in charge.
Living
with the American family
Since the election
the tone of our Feedback section has become more vituperative
that at anytime I can recall. The anger is mostly not coming
from the right but from liberal Democrats and is not directed
at wrong-headed policies but at - in the opinion of our correspondents
- wrong-head people and wrong headed sections of the country,
particularly the south.
The irony is that
these messages followed a piece in which I suggested that the
future of a better politics lay partly in the toleration of some
differences in order to unite on other matters, that there was
no progress in polarity but rather in unexpected alliances. The
first reactions were highly favorable but then began to shift
into a crueler rhetoric of a sort that if, say, directed against
gays or women, would get one censored or banned on many campuses.
I had always assumed that diversity included people who didn't
agree with me; many of our correspondents apparently do not share
that view.
My thoughts on this
matter stem in part from having lived in a part of the country
that is a major target: the south. Washington is not really the
south you may say, but I come from a time when it was very much
so and my early reporting included covering the city's struggle
to break away from its segregated past and related heritage which
dated back as far as the Civil War when over half of the officers
in the DC militia resigned and joined the Confederacy.
My experiences,
which have ranged from going to a segregated school to working
in SNCC, have affected my view of how change is really brought
about. For example:
- I have seen Washington
break with its segregated past becoming one of the most progressive
cities in the country but then turning its back on its hard-won
new values to become a corrupt and contented place where ethnic
discrimination has been replaced by socio-economic cleansing.
- I have seen people
with various degrees of willingness and fairness give up their
old ways for something better. I have watched former voices of
fairness become corrupt and indifferent.
- I have seen once
deep antagonists discover common ground and use it for useful
purposes.
- I have seen hate
wither and decency sprout, but I have also seen the once fair-minded
start to use the sort of slyly invidious distinctions that supported
segregation to justify other forms of discrimination.
- I have seen principles
and tactics, such as those invoked by Saul Alinsky, bring people
together who are theoretically not supposed to be together and
form powerful new coalitions. Out of these coalitions, diversity
stopped being just a theory and became a personal experience
and habit.
I have, as a result,
learned to concentrate on specific wrongs at specific times and
to expect, indeed try to foster, the unexpected.
It is bad enough
when the right engages in slapstick slander against others, but
it is scary to see liberal Democrats picking up the habit as
well. Are we on our way to a sort of American Bosnia or Middle
East?
We do not have to
accept insults but that does not mean we have to match them and
raise them ten. It is certainly, for example, within the realm
of reasonable politics to start a boycott against a city or state
that has show rank prejudice against gays, but we must always
concentrate our efforts on those in power and not the powerless
who, through propaganda and maleducation, have come to believe
them.
I once asked the
black journalist Chuck Stone how to get along with other Americans.
As columnist and senior editor of the Philadelphia Daily News,
75 homicide suspects had surrendered to him personally rather
than take their chances with the Philadelphia police department.
Stone also negotiated the end of five hostage crises, once at
gun point.
He said that he
had learned how to listen and to believe in building what he
called the "the reciprocity of civility." His advice
for getting along with other Americans: treat them like a member
of your family.
Which reminded me
of something my father had told us from time to time: "You
don't have to like your relatives, you just have to be nice to
them." It might work with the greater American family as
well.
A
conversation with God
[Encouraged by
our two leading presidential candidates I decided to also try
to have a conversation with the Father Almighty. I got through
without any trouble ]
SAM - Hey Pops,
this is Sam down on earth just checking in.
GOD - Good to hear
from you. I get so tired of those suck-ups at the Christian Coalition
and the Republican National Committee. Like I told them, the
deal was I work six days, take the next day off, and then get
at least three millennia in comp time.
But, no, they keep
calling me and saying stuff like "You're with us if we take
down Fallujah, right?" and I tell them they're on their
own but then they run it through the spin cycle and the next
thing I know I got a bunch of dead or angry Muslims on my hands.
SAM - Got any thoughts
on the race?
GOD - Well, I wish
that Shilling guy wouldn't give me so much credit for his pitches
in the World Series. I mean, where does that leave me with those
born-agains on the Cards and the Yankees? I try to be fair, you
know, but everyone keeps insisting I'm their God and then using
it as an excuse to beat the shit out of somebody else. Besides,
I've been a Red Sox fan since at least 1932 and it hasn't done
them much good until now.
SAM - I didn't know
you used language like that.
GOD - Where do you
think Howard Stern learned it? I'm God to all people, after all,
not just to George Bush and Michael Powell.
SAM - I was actually
asking about the presidential race.
GOD - Oh that one.
Well, I got to say I'm pretty disappointed in how you all are
handling your democracy. Kind of wished I had thought of that
one a little earlier myself, but then when Tommy Jefferson and
the gang came along I had real hopes that the earth might work
out better than it seemed. Now it's only two centuries later
and you folks are about to blow the whole deal. I don't believe
in messing with things, but I did try to warn them with those
Florida hurricanes and all. I guess I was too subtle. I'd hate
to think I'd have to come back down there but I'm getting pretty
pissed. . .
SAM - Sounds like
you're backing Kerry.
GOD - Well, I'm
tempted but my basic rule is create and then stand back. But
it's me damn tough, especially when you've got that Bush guy
taking my name in vain every chance he gets and talking about
sanctity of life and then going out killing a whole bunch of
people. Thing I want to know is why does the sanctity of life
expire after only nine months? It should have a longer warranty
than that.
SAM - So you got
anything less than an endorsement, say like a suggestion?
GOD - Me yes, here's
my tip for swing states: vote Kerry and then gain absolution
by voting for every Green elsewhere on the ticket. It's that
old Catholic trick: sin and then say a few Hail Marys. I like
those Catholics because they still sin. The trouble with the
born-agains like Bush is that they think they're always right
because they claim I said so. Never said no such thing. Ever
heard of Bush admitting he was wrong after he found Jesus? I
mean, my me, if that was the case I could close down this place
and move to Texas. You don't need two heavens.
SAM - Didn't know
you were a Green.
GOD - Well, I got
to admit I prefer folks who try to do my will over those who
claim I blessed them and then do whatever they want. Remember
my man Frankie over at Assisi? He said, always preach the gospel
and if necessary use words.
It was like I was
telling my son the other day: you know, if you go back on earth
you might want to think about registering Green. And he says,
but Dad, I thought Bush was the Big Christian. And I said, my
me, if Bush had been born in that manger instead of you he would
have had cut some Enron type deal with Pontius Pilate, privatized
miracles, outsourced charity, and give a big tax deduction to
crucifix manufacturers.
SAM - I thought
maybe you were more the Ralph Nader type.
GOD - Oh, I like
Ralph and he and I are pretty much on the same wavelength. But
it's like I tried to tell him, you don't have to do my will every
damn moment. I said, why don't you take some time off, and get
back to my will after the election?
SAM - Doesn't look
like he listened to you.
GOD - Nope, but
keep in mind that I'd still take him over the whole Democratic
and Republican Party combined. And, me, have those Democrats
been mean to him. They don't hold a candle to him but they treat
him like dirt. Now I admit, the saintly can be a real pain in
the butt, but, me knows, they do more for the world than the
average politician.
SAM - Well, this
is quite a different take on the election than I've been hearing
from certain Catholic bishops and members of the Christian right.
GOD - So you think
I'm going to go to all the trouble to create a world and then
pass on my opinions through the likes of some pompous priest,
Pat Robertson, or George Bush? I am the almighty after all. I
don't have to use charlatans to get my word out. Hell, I'd rather
use Jessica Simpson as my emissary.
SAM - Well, that
raises a whole new issue, but I've taken enough of your time.
GOD - No problem,
mate. Just answer me one question
SAM - Sure
GOD - I thought
you didn't believe in me so how come we're having this conversation?
SAM - Well, you
know what they say about us journalists. We'll do anything for
a story.
GOD - Okay, but
don't go soft on me. I get so tired of talking with phony true
believers. Especially the ones who give big tax cuts to the rich
and bomb the hell out of people they don't like.
SAM - If you want
I could get you a list of states with same day registration
GOD - You tempt
me but I think I'll stay here and wait to see how it all comes
out..
A
confederacy of doers
I had never been
invited to dinner by Ralph Nader before, so I figured I'd better
check it out.
The hall where the
drinks were being served could have been at any one of the scores
of events Washington was throwing that night, but the difference
soon became apparent. The difference was in the cause and the
crowd. It was a confederacy of doers gathered to celebrate the
40th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important
books of our moment in history: Unsafe at Any Speed.
It had to be a large
room because Nader, after all, was the guy who introduced cloning
to contemporary progress. The business of leadership, he says,
is creating more leaders, not more followers and the fruits of
his labor were there: people like Lowell Dodge, Joan Claybrook,
Sid Wolfe, John Richard, Teresa D'Amato, Russell Mokhiber, and
Carl Nash. And reporters who shared or spread Nader's sense that
the truth - whether in a Vietnam village or in a automobile factory
- even if it doesn't set you free, may at least keep you alive.
Reporters like Jim Ridgeway, Bill Greider and Sy Hersh. And people
who had taken the Nader idea and applied it to other things,
like Linda Schade of True Vote, currently leading the fight to
make elections in Maryland safe at any speed of vote count.
Auto safety seems
so reasonable today, but when Nader proposed Unsafe At Any Speed
to a big publisher, he replied that "Alas, I fear it would
only be of interest to insurance agents." Around that time,
my wife, then assistant press secretary to Senator Gaylord Nelson,
pitched a auto safety article to Parade Magazine that drew on
Nader's work. They weren't at all interested.
The auto manufacturers,
however, quickly saw the importance. Jim Ridgeway - whose coverage
of Nader drew the attention of Unsafe's eventual publisher, Richard
Grossman - described in a 1966 article the industry's reaction
to the "lanky Washington attorney of 32 who recently has
been getting publicity because he went after the automobile makers."
His landlady got a call to find out whether he paid his rent
on time. His stockbroker was called by an investigator who claimed
to be representing someone who wanted to hire Nader. The editor
of a law journal for which Ralph had written was approached the
same way and asked about Nader's drinking habits. An attractive
brunette approached him and said that a group of her friends
were interested in foreign affairs and they wanted to get all
viewpoints. Would he join them? He claimed to be from out of
town. Oh that's all right, the woman said. The meeting's tonight.
The next day, the man to whom Nader had dedicated his book, got
a call from an investigator wanting to know about the activist's
sex life and left wing leanings. And later that afternoon, Nader
discovered two men following him as he flew back from Philadelphia
from an appearance on the Mike Douglas Show. . .
If that all seems
out of another time, consider this: from the moment Nader testified
to the Ribicoff committee on Capitol Hill to the time that America
had new federal car safety legislation that is still saving lives
took all of about six months. Try to get anything done in Washington
today in six months.
But that was a time
of Phil Hart and Gaylord Nelson, not Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham.
And a time of Jim Ridgeway and Sy Hersh and not of TV toy journalists
who look as though their last beat had been covering themselves
at a beauty parlor.
Of course, the stories
are still there. Dr. Sid Wolfe is doing much the same thing with
medicine that his friend once did with the auto industry. Medicine
- that's medicine, not disease - is one of our major causes of
death through such things as adverse drug reactions and hospital
infections.
Yet if you read
the morning paper, you will get little idea of the problem other
than as incidents without context, as if each bad drug was an
exception to the general rule of benign health care. Perhaps
even the user's fault.
Just like, forty
years go, they said about auto crashes. Until Ralph Nader came
along.
Ship of
fools
THE SHIP OF STATE
these days is a vessel full of fools, steered by an administration
engaged in the reckless endangerment of its citizens as a servile
and sycophantic media cheers it on.
Less obvious in
Washington, however, is the almost total lack of voices of calm
and care. Once, such voices belonged to people sometimes referred
to as 'wise heads." They weren't really that wise at all;
but they did help sometimes to keep the ship off the rocks.
In normal times,
they were negative forces, restricting political, social and
economic progress in the name of the status quo. They weren't
even necessarily particularly honorable, for they included hustlers
like Clark Clifford.
Their main virtue
was that they periodically kept presidents and other politicians
from making us all victims of their foolishness. This didn't
require wisdom so much as simply the respected advocacy of traditional
establishment ways.
But something strange
has happened. America's establishment is no longer traditional.
Many of its lawyers are not keepers of precedent at all, but
wildcat litigators treating every social concept and value as
just one more new well of legal opportunity. Its politicians
rise from mounds of selfish cash rather than from complex and
deep-rooted constituencies. Its academics and journalists have
joined the cult of celebrity. Its business people have adopted
the ways of gamblers and bootleggers rather than of producers
and their accountants have destroyed the evidence. In short,
the establishment class no longer cares all that much about the
status quo, in part because in a derivative reality you are either
climbing over someone else or you're dead.
So if you seek,
in the midst of the present madness, some non-heretical voices
saying, "hey, slow down," or "think again"
you won't find them. And without that, even the normally heretical
voices become more cautious and quiet until the silence is deafening.
The
Bronx ate my postings
Your editor's casual
inattention to duty over the past few days is in part the result
of an unpredictable pleasure of parenthood: being swept into
the migratory path of one's children - in this case from Long
Island to the Bronx.
For the past eight
years I have been an occasional visitor to Suffolk County, discarding
stereotypes in favor of a view based on innumerable random experiences
ranging from the pleasures of the Montauk coastline to the less
pleasurable experience of being imprisoned with my wife and a
crew member for 45 minutes aboard the Bridgeport to Port Jefferson
ferry on a 85 degree day.
I have come to learn
that Long Island does indeed have more shopping malls per square
mile than just about any place on earth, but that not far behind
is the acreage devoted to farming, some of the most productive
in the state, that no one had bothered to mention to me. I have
learned to expect to drive within blocks from a corner dominated
by a futon discount store to a revolutionary era post road whose
buildings and trees still remind one of what once happened here.
It is a place where
the past and present have been dumped together, a place that
can spawn both Walt Whitman and Bill O'Reilly, and where patriotic
icons of post-constitutional America sprawl about the landscape
like exhausted geese unable to reach their destination, yet where
you can attend a Unitarian church and hear a guitar backed choir
singing about Joe Hill.
Except when out
on the battlefield known as the Long Island Expressway, the residents
seem quite content with their inconsistencies. They neither brag
about them nor even seem to notice them. It is the stranger,
arriving with misapprehensions, who finds it all extraordinary.
But now, as uncontrollably
as a tie-up at exit 47, it is time to leave Long Island and make
friends with North Bronx, site of my daughter-in-law's next adventure
with the medical profession. From a little cottage within walking
distance of Long Island Sound to the eighth floor of an apartment
building overlooking a subway yard and distant Manhattan. From
a landlord who happily enclosed a porch for our granddaughter
to the complexities of getting a new rug in an old, large New
York apartment building. To one who has always felt threatened
by the negotiations of everyday New York life, I watched with
amazement as my son and wife double-teamed the issue with the
aid of a cleaning woman who said she had told the super "I
wasn't going to clean that rug because it was a waste of money.
He was going to have to get a new one anyway."
Even as this is
written the apartment is being repainted and rerugged and I have
turned my energies to other matters like checking out the stores
within walking distance and finding some lights for under the
kitchen cabinet. We also ate in a restaurant that offered cream
cheese for your bagel in two varieties: full or schmeared.
I am already proud
of my new proxy neighborhood and am making secret plans to run
my granddaughter for lieutenant government based on her connections
with both Suffolk County and the Bronx. She walks with the self-assurance
of a New Yorker so the rest shouldn't be difficult.
Meanwhile, I apologize
for the dilatory postings and expect things to be back to normal
by Tuesday.
What
I learned on my vacation
SOME YEARS BACK
a high schooler by the name of Sam used to take out our office
trash and serve as our computer consultant (in no particular
order). Sam is now with a major government contractor complete
with a top secret clearance, but I always save up a question
or two for when our paths cross, as they did this summer at a
wedding.
I asked Sam what
it meant when one of my laptops refused to start at all unless
I randomly pushed various buttons twenty or thirty times until
I happened on the right combination.
"Sounds like
you need a new computer."
I wasn't going to
let him get off that easily, so I mentioned that Maine had been
extraordinarily damp this year and did he think that might have
something to do with it. He immediately brightened and told me
of the time he had recovered a wet cell phone by sticking it
in the oven for an hour at 150 degrees. Sam suggested that I
do the same.
On my return I quickly
decided I had a choice: either Best Buy or the oven. I chose
the latter and, being a bit more conservative than Sam, put my
laptop in for a half an hour on warm. It then started up immediately.
Unfortunately, the
bad weather continued and my laptop returned to its persnickety
state. Not wanting to press my luck, I fooled around with the
buttons and discovered something further. On the front edge of
the Toshiba were a series of buttons I had heretofore ignored.
On testing them, I discovered that, in the right sequence, my
computer would still not turn on, but that Dinah Washington,
who was neatly stored in my media library, would. Further, a
little experimentation informed me that once I heard Dinah I
was only a button push or two away from full operation. I have
been doing this ever since, adding only a minute of downtime
to my day, and holding Best Buy at bay for at least another month.
Calm down
everyone
The current hysteria
over the outing of a CIA official by Robert Novak is of little
benefit to anyone except those wishing to perpetuate the myth
of the agency among the general populace. The incident is a classic
case of the capital's concern for an issue being in inverse proportion
to its importance.
The media attention
is being driven by a number of puerile factors:
- Some Bush capos'
desire to embarrass Joseph Wilson.
- The CIA's desire to embarrass George Bush
- The Democrats desire for an issue, any issue, that might work
- And the media's desire for an issue it can understand.
To get an idea of
how silly this frenzy is, consider what is being alleged - that
Novak endangered the life of a CIA operative by revealing her
name.
If she had really
wanted to keep her cover, the first thing she should have done
is divorce Wilson. Surprising as it may seem, the evil forces
of the world are quite aware that CIA agents are omnipresent
on diplomatic staff, hanging around ambassadors, and so forth.
A would-be assassin merely has to narrow the field down from
about a dozen people to pick his target. They don't need the
help of the Prince of Darkness. In fact, the proper of Novak
when told about Wilson's wife should have been, "So?"
I asked an old Washington
hand how he would pick out the chief agency person at an embassy.
His answer: "the one who was too much of a smart ass and
[being on another's payroll] didn't have respect for the ambassador."
Over the years,
much of the best work of the CIA has been done by those who in
a different environment would be known as scholars or senior
fellows. They get their status by knowing more about their subject
than most other people and not by handing explosive cigars to
their subjects. The good ones, as in other places such as the
campus or the newsroom, are, however, the exception. More fall
into that category well encapsulated by Lyndon Johnson when he
told an aide to bear in mind that the agency was filled with
Princeton and Yale graduates whose daddies wouldn't let them
into the stock brokerage firm.
The evil forces
don't usually assassinate analysts. Instead, they go after their
opposite numbers in the spy game. In this game, the agency's
record has been pretty pitiful ranging from painstakingly building
a secret tunnel in Berlin only to find out later that the East
Germans knew about it all along, to totally misrepresenting the
Soviet economy, to not being able to find bin Laden.
The agency has been
able to avoid responsibility for its history of failure largely
because of a sycophantic media, some of which - hundreds during
at least one period - were either directly in its employ or at
its service. Given the contemporary lack of honor in the media,
one might reasonably surmise that the day of the agency-embedded
journalist has returned.
The CIA has all
the virtues and failings of a government bureaucracy but without
even the minimal open oversight that other departments get. During
its history, only a tiny number of agents have been killed or
endangered by the media. Its own failings, exercises in institutional
machismo, career stuffing, and foolhardy fantasies have cost
far more lives.
Howe many? Well,
the notorious CIA official James Angleton said shortly before
his death, "You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave
people killed. . . We played with lives as if we owned them.
We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened. . .
"Fundamentally,
the founding fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better
you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would
be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other.
Outside their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was
a desire for absolute power. I did things, that in looking back
on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in
it. . . Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank
Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them
you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would
deservedly end up in hell. . . I guess I'll see them there soon."
So calm down and
think about something else more important, say like the law known
as the Constitution that George Bush broke - by failing to uphold
it in his lies to the people and the Congress about Iraq.
Born
again economics
Putting
the money changers back in the temple
WHILE A LOT OF attention
is being paid to evangelical Christian extremism, far less is
directed towards an equally dangerous religious sect - the practitioners
of evangelical economic extremism.
Although the latter faith is not often regarded as an actual
religion, it has far more in common with evangelism than it does
with rational intellectual inquiry or thoughtful academic analysis.
Along with the Christian extremists, the economic evangelists
share an arrogant certainty, single factor fetishism, missionary
mania, belief in intelligent design, an unlimited desire to impose
their myths on others, and a rhetoric that is only meaningful
if you already accept their premises. Their arguments are largely
based on iconic folkloric texts and ignore the true variety of
human existence and its communities and families.
And they both speak
in tongues, which they consider a good thing. The big difference
is that while the Christian bible has the money changers being
chased out of the temple, the free market bible wants them back
in again.
One sect blasphemes its namesake by practicing such unchristian
traits as bigotry, intolerance, and aggression. The other mocks
its namesake by fostering an economy that is free only to those
who manipulate or steal from it.
In the end, both share an extraordinary narcissism with one putting
their own salvation before everything else, the other doing the
same with their own power and fiscal fortunes.
There are, of course, plenty of nice economists just as there
are plenty of good Christians. The former practice their faith
for the betterment of society just as good Christians practice
love, charity, and forgiveness. They use their faith as a guide
for themselves rather than as a weapon against others.
Increasingly, however,
both Christians and economists have been tarnished by roving
bands of heretical Talibanic bullies who have left the sanctuary
of church and classroom to enforce their narrow and mean will
upon the land. The one would have us believe that abortion and
gay marriage are more important than housing, health and a breathable
environment; the other that salvation lies in letting the robber
barons do just what they want.
And as their false doctrine has caused countless suffering to
others, these false prophets have gained status and wealth, an
issue so profoundly raised by Ray Stevens in his epic work "Would
Jesus Wear a Rolex":
Would Jesus be political
if He came back to earth?
Have His second home in
Palm Springs, yeah, and try
to hide His worth?
Take money, from those
poor folks, when He comes
back again?
For twenty five
years, while one sect has increasingly controlled what we watch
and read and how we mate, the other has helped create an ever
more monopolized economy, indifferent to either conscience or
consumer. One believes that their particular God and Jesus reveal
all truths. The other says it's the market and money that does
it.
In fact, it is hard
to imagine a free market in a real world, and certainly not in
Washington where 35,000 corporate lobbyists work hard to make
sure the market is anything but free, as the politicians they
have indentured and the media they have fooled prattle endlessly
about said market's virtues.
Although free market
advocates parade themselves as - and often appear to be - highly
intelligent people, they are either exceptionally deluded or
are perpetrating a massive fraud. As Robert Kuttner has pointed
out, "There is at the core of the celebration of markets
a relentless tautology. If we begin, by assumption, with the
premise that nearly everything can be understood as a market
and that markets optimize outcomes, then everything else leads
back to the same conclusion -- marketize! If, in the event a
particular market doesn't optimize, there is only one possible
inference: it must be insufficiently marketlike. This epistemological
sleight of hand is an astonishing blend that blurs the descriptive
with the normative. It is a no-fail system for guaranteeing that
theory trumps evidence."
In fact, any moderately
observant person, not brainwashed by a quarter century of contrary
missionary zeal, would notice that in addition to money, humans
are affected by such things as community, religion, family, friends,
social ambition, politics, virtue, and psychological faults and
strengths. In short, the market driven society is just another
form of false salvation being foisted on the unwary citizen,
in this case by the Elmer Gantries of rightwing economics.
As with various
forms of religious excess, the media has played a deeply enabling
role. From the moment the Jerry Falwells of free markets - Thatcher
and Reagan - commenced their con, the media bought into it with
hardly a scintilla of skepticism. To this day one can easily
assume from the media that there is a constitutional amendment
guaranteeing a free market.
The damage evangelical
economics has done of the country has been stunning, ranging
from the extreme monopolization of American business to the disintegration
of our language into a collection of corporate cliches. It has
destroyed pensions, made decent healthcare and housing ever more
difficult, and threatened social security. And yet none dare
call these tyrants bullies, fools or liars.
In the end, it may
be argued that all promises of salvation are false, but if a
Christian evangelist and a market missionary should happen to
ring your door at the same time, go with Jesus. Even the most
extreme Christian advocate will at least offer you food, shelter,
and warmth. The free marketer will leave you dying in the gutter,
and standing over your last gasps, proudly tell you that the
market was right again.
2004
Zero
tolerance: fool's goal
During the Cold War someone defined the
difference between the major parties this way:
In America everything is permitted that
is not prohibited.
In Germany everything is prohibited that is not permitted.
In France everything is permitted even though it is prohibited.
In Russia everything is prohibited even though it is permitted.
One of the ironies of that great conflict
is that while the Soviets lost the political struggle, they seem
to have won the cultural one; America is not only engorging itself
on prohibition it constantly brags about it. Raising gross oversimplification,
automated distrust, and cultural intolerance to a national credo,
one need only declare "zero tolerance" towards some
malfeasance to be loudly applauded by public and media alike.
And of what are we zero intolerant? Of
students, the poor, those who prefer drugs less addictive or
damaging than vodka or tobacco, the alienated, the unconventional,
the mentally ill, and any other group that stands zero chance
in such a culture.
We are not, however, totally without tolerance,.
For example, we tolerate television and movies and computer games
that teach some young people how to kill and maim. We tolerate
a president who is the anti-democratic, dissembling companion
of a gaggle of certified felons and lesser miscreants. We are
tolerant of anyone with enough zeroes after the dollar sign in
their gross income. We tolerate the destruction of our national,
state and local sovereignty by an international gang of lawyers
and their corporate clients. We tolerate an extraordinary and
growing maldistribution of wealth. The destruction of the environment,
the commercialization of community and sport. And so forth.
There is, in fact, no ethical principle
that guides us as we veer from cruel suppression to self-serving
laissé faire. In its ad hoc nature, its absurd results,
and the uniform vulnerability of the targets, zero tolerance
reminds one of nothing so much as southern justice before the
civil rights movement or the unequal ministration of the law
in a police state. In many ways zero tolerance is just another
way of saying we have legalized prejudice and hate as well as
arbitrary and capricious power.
We have also legalized violence. The bully
on the playground and the abusive husband provided prototypes
for zero tolerance because, like the abusive and bullying politician
of today, they exercised power without reason or justice against
a victim too weak to resist.
It is also a fool's paradise. Too often
zero tolerance has arithmetically similar results, a fact typically
ignored by a media easily infatuated with any idea that sounds
as though it might work. Thus we don't hear much about the failure
of those once vaunted boot camps, the "crackdowns"
without results, and the dark side of simplistic remedies.
Until that is, as in Maryland recently,
the government is forced to concede that its guards had, in the
words of one account, "routinely beaten and brutalized cadets,
smashing heads into the ground, gouging eyes and, in one case,
fracturing a wrist."
There is also short shrift given to less
brutal and simplistic approaches. For example, a 1996 study by
the Rand Institute found that programs to help youths finish
high school were five times more cost effective than harsh jail
terms. The study also found that parent training programs prevented
approximately 160 crimes for every million dollars budgeted for
them. In contrast, "three strikes" measures were found
to prevent only 62 crimes for every million dollars budgeted.
Meanwhile, the most disastrous example of zero tolerance - the
war on drugs - continues on autopilot even as the government
itself is forced to admit failure.
We live in a time when we are constantly
being taught by government and media to forget our most basic
instincts, the lessons from our own past, and the wisdom of those
who helped us along the way. There is an unstated presumption
that we have somehow moved into a period so complex and novel
that our own culture and tradition have no further use. If we
are to be saved, we must instead upon external protectors such
as the law, the military, and a proliferation of plenary prohibitions.
Only the frightened, the defeated, the
vengeful, and the badly confused would voluntarily accept such
a coup against reason. And even if one explains as simple prejudice
the mistreatment of ethnic minorities, the homeless, the addicted,
and the otherwise hapless, how does one explain the use against
our own young of infinite intolerance -- which is, after all,
the unspoken corollary of zero tolerance?
Do we really hate them that much? If we
cannot treat our own young with compassion, love, and respect
then what human is left in us? What worse epitaph for a country
than that it despises its own offspring?
Perhaps there is a connection between our
treatment of the young and the shrinking years of productive
work in America. Richard Sennett in The Corrosion of Character
points out the problem at the other end: the number of men
aged 54-65 still in the workplace dropped from nearly 80% in
1970 to 65% in 1990. The rate of involuntary dismissal has doubled
in the last twenty years for men in their 40s to early 50s. Combined
with a later age at which the young become significantly employed,
this has greatly narrowed the lifespan of individual usefulness.
Adolescents who ran farms and captained
ships when this country was young and its median age was in the
teens, have now become surplus demographic inventory. Perhaps
this explains our growing intolerance of youth as we cull from
those huge cold warehouses called high schools that minority
compliant and competent enough needed to fill the country's productive
requirements. The rest we label, dismiss, ignore, punish, and
cage if need be.
I do not say we do this consciously, but
increasingly I can find no better explanation for the mean-spirited
measures espoused on behalf of "normalcy" and for the
distaste we display towards our young. We don't need them, we
don't want them, and we say they are to blame, not just for the
errors of their ways, but for existing in the first place.
So grudgingly welcomed into contemporary
American culture, the young may react with confusion, creativity,
anger, or depression. We can expect a wide range of responses
but we should not be surprised if among them is pure rage itself
scaled from the silent to the explosive. This rage doesn't describe
a generation, it is not normal, but given the dysfunction of
adult America and the technical training in destruction provided
by television and movies, we should consider ourselves lucky
that it does not reveal itself more often.
And it's not just the young. Joel Dyer,
author of Harvest of Rage, notes that there are 15 million poor
middle-age white men in this country "who have more in common
with urban blacks and Hispanics than they do with the average
CEO." This constituency has, like that of the young, has
been cast adrift by our culture. Says Dyer in an interview in
the Sun Magzine, "Once long-term depression, chronic depression,
has set in, only three things can happen: One, you can get help
through counseling and the like. But because most people caught
in an economic crisis don't have insurance. . . that option doesn't
exist for the bast majority. The next option is that you turn
the anger inward, which means maybe you kill yourself or drive
your family away . . . The last option is that you turn your
anger outward, into some form of anger."
Dyer points out that there's no help for
these men from the left which has vilified them as "rednecks"
and "Bubbas" and they become easy clients of preachers
of violence. Just like those kids we dismiss as Goths or part
of a "trench coat mafia."
It doesn't have to work out like this.
We could make it the nation's business to find a place for everyone,
not just for the abandoned young but the abandoned middle-aged
and older American as well. We could teach and practice a discipline
that grew along with compensating respect and compassion rather
than under a cascade of threats and punishments. We could turn
our backs on simplistic notions and our hands towards building
communities in which no group is considered expendable or irredeemable.
And, most of all, we could model ourselves on those who -- because
of their kindness, wisdom, and tolerance -- were able to help
even us to grow up as reasonably decent human beings.
 JOHN WIEBENSON
John Wiebenson
Architect John
Wiebenson died
the way he lived - helping somebody and fixing something. He
had gone to Martha's Table to check out a fumed filled space
below an old auto garage planned as part of the social service
organization's expansion. The fire department said later that
only 4% of the air down there was oxygen, not enough to keep
someone alive. In fact, for several hours the only people who
went in wore gas masks and hazmat clothing.
But Wiebenson was
not easy to dissuade once he decided something needed to be done.
And he had imported to this capital of risk aversion some of
the casual affection for adventure of the Colorado in which he
had been raised. Wieb, as everyone called him, simply did what
he thought had to be done.
Which is one reason
there was housing for Resurrection City in the 1960s and the
Old Post Office is still on Pennsylvania Avenue and some of the
niftiest maps of DC were published and Bread for the City got
a new headquarters. And some landscaping. The Washington Post
that the organization had told Wieb it couldn't afford any landscaping.
The executive director "arrived at the site one Sunday to
find Wiebenson there, digging with a shovel and pulling weeds."
Wieb was also one
that tiny party of architects who really understand that buildings
are meant to serve people and not the other way around. He also
understood that one of the ways this happened was with spaces
that made you happy. Joanne Leonard wrote in the Washington Post,
"With cutout paper letters stuck to the window of his Connecticut
Avenue office, John Wiebenson identifies himself and his partner,
Kendall Dorman, as 'basic' architects."
I knew that office
well because for 23 years I was a subtenant in a back room at
ridiculously low rent. It was a complicated arrangement because
while I was Wieb's tenant, he was my cartoonist, and I had the
only fax machine on the floor. And the only bathroom. Wieb created
for the DC Gazette (now the Progressive Review) the first urban
planning comic strip in the country, Archihorse, a subtle graphic
blend of his professional and geographic background.
One of the things
I noticed along the way was how comfortable Wieb was with something
that either bores or baffles some architects - the details of
making your dreams actually function. There was just no conflict
in Wieb's mind between imagination and results. It had to be
different and it had to work.
His house was right
around the corner on S Street where he lived with Abigail - his
wife, anchor to windward, enthusiast, calmer down, brightener
up, and head of Lowell School - plus three sons striving to outdo
their father in independence, competence, and humor. They lived
in an anarchistic mélange of styles, but mostly in a place
that, while lacking the look, still somehow had the feel of a
western cabin that you had just entered after a long ride in
the snow.
It was there that
Wieb had presided over Wild Man Nights, Friday meals at which
he and his young sons would prepare and eat a meal without any
utensils or normal table manners, picking up steaks in their
hands and smashing baked potatoes with their fists while reading
and discussing the latest comic books. Like most of what Wieb
did or built, Wild Man Nights had several primary characteristics:
they were different, they were fun, and they worked.
What you have read
here over the years has been deeply affected by my proximity
to this remarkable man who loved freedom and common sense and
helped me to cling on to them. I hope I can still do it without
his encouragement and laughter.
Role
model
ONE OF THE MOST
PLEASANT SCENES on television this weekend was that of Andy Roddick
winning his championship. As the Washington Post put it: "Roddick
yelped. He cried. Every sentiment he'd ever tucked into his 6-foot-2
frame boiled over and out onto the court, until all he could
do was stagger toward his family in the stands, repeating 'I
don't believe it, I don't believe it' over and over again. .
. For two weeks, he'd been careful. For two weeks, he'd been
cautious. For two weeks, Andy Roddick had kept his bubbling emotions
from washing him out of this U.S. Open. . . Holding the trophy
five minutes later, he wasn't any more calm, nor any more trusting.
. . He hugged the silver cup tightly, daring anyone to take it
away from him, and when it wasn't nearby after a trip to the
locker room, he asked for it again."
Roddick's joy and
enthusiasm was in marked contrast to the standard victory reaction
these days. Somewhere along the way, unabashed pleasure at winning
has typically been replaced by a pugnacious and self-righteous
gesture that is somehow both triumphant and angry in which the
victor clenches fists, pumps arms upward, and grimaces without
a hint of grace or sportsmanship. Thanks to Roddick, we got to
see what winning a championship used to be about.
My
summer
In a few days your
editor will return to that town of which - in Gore Vidal's novel
of the same name - Senator Burden Day remarks, "hypocrisy
is our shield; inaction is our sword." It is a place where
(as Russell Baker once noted) solemnity is confused with seriousness
and where clichés pass for ideas, projections cross-dress
as reality, and no one can remember what anyone did more than
six months ago.
To suggest how different
it has been the past few weeks on the shores of Casco Bay, Maine,
I have made a list of some things about which I have talked that
never seem to come up in Washington. The converse is also true.
For example, the topic of terrorism was raised only once, by
my younger sister who has recently joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary.
She mentioned that she had been assigned to patrol aboard a Casco
Bay Line ferry during the Code Yellow alert. And what, I asked,
would you have done if you had found a terrorist hidden among
the tourists and islanders on their way to Chebeague or Peaks?
"I would have told the captain," she explained. It
sounded sensible to me.
On the other hand,
here are some of the other subjects that did come up:
Is the tree whose
large limb fell across the Burnett Road likely also to collapse
against Charlie's house?
Is it true that
ospreys and seals, while accustomed to motorboats approaching,
are spooked by brightly colored kayaks?
Why are clam prices
so high and why isn't the lobster business better?
How Paul at the
Bow Street Market is dealing with his meat delivery problems.
Is grazing young
steers for the season and then selling them preferable to a year-round
livestock program?
A discussion with
Andy, the state park director, and his assistant Patty about
the best way to handle the brown tail moth crisis slowly spreading
along the Maine coast.
Further discussions
with the aforementioned on whether hardwood or softwood tree
were most likely to grow in an untended pasture.
Whether a dowser
should be called in to find a desired well. I offered a recollection
of the time when my father got Henry Gross up from Kennebunk
for a whole day. This man was so impressive - after all, he had
found water in Bermuda simply by dowsing over a map - that two
of his fans joined him on the daylong expedition to our farm:
one was the novelist Kenneth Roberts and the other was the actress,
Bette Davis. When my father died, the minister apologized to
the family as we approached the grave site for the diggers had
struck water. To the minister's mixed confusion and relief, we
all laughed.
What is the best
dinghy to replace the old leaky one? And what to call it?
Simultaneous contact
with which two metal objects gets the lawn mower going despite
a broken starter?
Can anyone remember
such a foggy August?
The politics of
buying a lighthouse.
A brief conversation
with Tommy as he was leaving the Jamison Tavern after dinner
in order to go to Portland, where he would captain a tugboat
helping a tanker into port that night.
How to get a bit
out of a recalcitrant keyless chuck?
My latest acquired
Maine story, to wit: Bert and I was walkin' along the shore when
a seagull shat on his head. "You want me to get some toilet
paper?" I asked him. "Nope," he said, "that
bird's left already."
And soon, so will
I.
My
late Aunt Kate
Although a Republican,
my grandmother had been an active suffragette. She had three
sons. One was my father. Another was lost off Admiral William
Halsey's first command while going forward to secure an open
hatch in a stormy sea. The third was Ludlow, who gained early
folk hero status for me because of his acquisition of the entire
family attic for a large-scale train layout. By the time I found
it, the rolling stock was down to an engine and several cars,
but Ludlow had made his own rails and switches and had covered
all the attic floor with them in the manner of a major freight
marshalling yard.
 As
if this were not honor enough for one uncle, Ludlow had also
been married to Katherine Hepburn, a marriage that soon proved
incompatible with Hepburn's stage and movie career. They were
divorced three years before I was born.
My father always
seemed annoyed at the mention of Hepburn, perhaps out of loyalty
to his brother, and I felt tension when my mother would speak
fondly of her and of the lively dinners at Granny's house when
she was present. Granny also liked Hepburn. The three strong
women had much to talk about.
Even Ludlow, it
would turn out, was still fond of his ex-wife. In later years,
very quietly, the two would see each other and, after the death
of Spencer Tracey, spend weekends together. Once - only once
and when I was young - I met her. My father reluctantly took
his family backstage at a Philadelphia performance. She looked
down at us and explained how she really loved Lud but had loved
her work more. It sounded reasonable to me.
A cousin of mine
recalls as a youth being seated in the front row during a performance
and noticing that Hepburn seemed to be playing directly at him.
He was flattered, but not completely surprised. After all, Hepburn
had lived for a while at his grandmother's house when his mother
was young. Afterwards, he was taken backstage to meet the actress.
Hepburn remarked that she had noticed him in the audience. My
cousin was delighted until she added, "You were the only
person in the audience chewing gum."
Over the years my
father and Ludlow grew apart. Ludlow seemed disinterested in
seeing his brother. My parents finally invited themselves for
a visit in Connecticut on the way to Maine. There they found
a man struggling with a deeply alcoholic second wife and they
understood and the barrier was broken.
By then, however,
it was too late to get to know this charming and bright man who
had been an early expert on computer installations for banks
and who, to the end, still had a model railroad layout. I saw
him a few times, always with a sense of denied discovery.
So there were many
stories I never heard. Like the one Hepburn told in her autobiography
of Ludlow and a friend renting a stone hut near the Bryn Mawr
campus, where among other things Luddy, as she called him, took
nude photos of Kate. Like the time Luddy, before they were married,
accidentally set himself ablaze while lighting a fire with kerosene
with Hepburn leaping from the tub and directing, in the nude,
their housemates as they saved both my uncle and the house.
Things like that
weren't meant to happen in my family.
In her autobiography,
Hepburn regrets her treatment of Luddy, saying that "the
truth has to be that I was a terrible pig." She then describes
the uncle I never knew:
"Luddy could
make anything work - my life - the car - the furnace - the this
- the that. Carpenter-mechanic-plumber. It was great. But mostly
- from the beginning - he was - what shall I say? - he was there.
. . I could ask him anything. He would do anything. You just
don't find people like that in life. Unconditional love."
I think I, too,
would have liked him very much. Love in my family was always
conditional.
After my father
died, Ludlow and Kate made a number of visits to my mother in
Maine, usually in the fall after children and visitors had left.
On the first, she stopped by the home of an older neighbor to
ask for directions. Mrs. Nason, every bit as comfortable in her
being as the stranger, said, "Why you're Katherine Hepburn.
You must come in and have lunch." Hepburn settled for directions
and continued down the country road.
Ludlow and Kate
traveled with Hepburn's aging secretary and carried a toaster
oven so they could avoid eating in public. Visiting my mother,
however, had other risks, once verging on the mortal as my mother,
who drove with exuberance on the back roads, sideswiped a truck
coming the other way, totaling her car and in the process nearly
killing herself, Hepburn, her brother-in-law and the aging secretary.
Katherine Hepburn
did not take umbrage at this, however, perhaps because she and
my mother shared a fascination with each other, the actress once
telling a friend, "If someone would write a play about Eleanor,
I would take the part." I would have enjoyed seeing that
play. - SAM SMITH
FROM
'MULTITUDES: AN UNAUTHORIZED MEMOIR'
Time
Warp
I was 34 when the
draft ended. In the preceding years my own views had shifted
from those of a cold war liberal to those of an ambivalent apathetic
and finally to those of a situational pacifist. But whatever
my personal beliefs, I was deeply and constantly conscious of
the inevitability of the military's involvement in, and power
over, my life. The impact of this certainty on young men was
profound and it led also to a sense of inevitability about the
purposes for which the draft had been created.
My eldest son is
34. He was almost six when the draft ended. Our only conversation
on the subject I remember took place a bit earlier. We were driving
in the car and he, in a bit of precocious career planning, asked,
"Dad, do they draft baseball players?" I was troubled
to hear the fear and sense of inevitability being passed to yet
another generation.
I knew about it
because they had been passed on to me as well. Both my parents
had lost brothers in World War I and my mother had also lost
a cousin.
The fears, however
were soon gone and my son joined a generation coming to maturity
with war being only a distant, surrogated, and sanitized interruption
to the regular programming.
In this parable
of fathers and sons may lie an important part of today's story:
a generation raised to see war and its military instruments as
an essential part of life confronting another to whom war and
its accessories had become, for the most part, history.
Nothing has been
so moving and heartening as the young students walking out of
high schools and middle schools to protest this war and the millions
in the streets marching while there was still time to do something
about the madness rather than as a belated expression of regret.
For these seem manifestations of a changed consciousness in the
human spirit, one of those moments when the weak and many leap
ahead of the powerful and the few and alter history forever.
I have seen this
once before - during the civil rights movement, a rebellion not
just against the specifics of power but against the paradigms,
paradoxes, and presumptions that created that power, the lies
that made segregation as inevitable, say, as war.
One of the great
turnings in this struggle - and it happened like a virus rather
than as a revolution - was when the merely reprehensible became
truly incomprehensible as well.
Segregationists
were no longer only evil; they became anachronistic as well,
eventually so much so that when they would reappear, it would
be as if suddenly confronting a strange and vicious animal thought
long extinct.
I have had this
feeling in recent months, as though - totally unexpected and
unprepared - I had been tossed back into a Jurassic ecology surrounded
by violent creatures I believed gone except in memory and that
my sons would only have to confront in books and on film.
This is frightening,
it is surprising, it is unpredictable. But history moves in both
directions and America may well have run out of progress. Yet
even in the barbaric awfulness cabled into our homes there is
reason for hope - if the protests are truly what they seem: not
merely a complaint about policy but the rising of a new definition
of decency, calling not just for the end of a war but for an
abolition of our deepest assumptions about the inevitability
of war.
Hopeful as the manifestations
may be, the new abolitionism faces mighty hurdles. Among them,
of course, is a media that has become the pet poodle of power,
one inundates us with assurances of the normalcy of violence.
The semiotic bunker bombs began landing deep inside our brains
long before Iraq; you can find their provenance in TV's celebration
of state violence against drug users or in the tacitly approved
brutality of reality police shows.
Less noted is the
continued allegiance to state violence by the Anglo-American
academic elite. To unlearn what those middle schoolers walking
out of class already know about war requires some heavy education.
Places like Harvard
and Oxford - and their after-school programs such as the Washington
think tanks - teach the few how to control the many and it is
impossible to do this without various forms of abuse ranging
from sophism to corporate control systems to napalm. It is no
accident that a large number of advocates of this war - in government
and the media - are the products of elite educations where they
were taught both the inevitability of their hegemony and the
tools with which to enforce it.
It will be some time before places such as Harvard and the Council
on Foreign Relations are seen for what they are: the White Citizens
Councils of state violence. Still, in a little gift of history,
one of their lesser offspring, George W. Bush, may speed things
up a bit as he brags and blithers about, gleefully brutalizes,
perversely exaggerates, and cynically promotes cruel and authoritarian
ideas his brighter colleagues have worked so hard to wrap in
the costume of decency and democracy. He is the Council on Foreign
Relations out of the closet, the carefully contrived paradigm
run amuck, the great man of history turned dangerous fool, real
politik turned into absurdist caricature. For that at least,
we should thank him: he has shown us the true nature of a great
lie.
The final challenge
is the most confounding: violence resulting from the demands
of technological and bureaucratic 'progress.' What we call modern
warfare developed because we had the means to carry it out. Richard
Rubenstein has pointed out that Nazism could not have arisen
without the sort of bureaucracy needed to support the Holocaust.
It is no accident that both Hitler and Lenin turned to the teachings
of American technocratic apostle Frederick Winslow Taylor to
carry out their evil or that the Nazis used IBM cards to help
manage their death camps.
We prefer a simpler
story of the Holocaust as one of power and hate and ignore the
much more relevant one of technocratic organization. Thus we
don't hear its echoes in the Department of Homeland Security
or in journalistic celebration of new technologies of war.
At the heart of
a technocratic system is the willingness of individuals to give
up their own morality, judgment, and perceptions in return for
a job, perceived safety, or escape from fear - to become in Eric
Fromm's term, homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is
mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." Our
society is increasingly structured on this mechanization of the
human spirit and while the military may be the ultimate example,
the modern American corporation is not far behind.
So it's far too
early to cheer, but we have also come too far in the past few
months to despair. We must just keep on leading our leaders until
they also see war as wrong - and as archaic - as slavery or segregation.
Snow
job
This issue is coming
to you from the emergency center of the Progressive Review, just
six blocks from the U.S. Capitol, where - more than two days
after the snow started falling - the major arterial of East Capitol
Street has yet to be plowed.
Your editor has
spent much of this holiday weekend searching in vain for the
"massive snow storm" promised him by Channel 5. In
fact, the best I could come up with - absent cheating by measuring
drifts - was a moderately impressive 13" in my back yard.
Anyway, the problem
with snow in Washington is not the precipitation but the difficulty
in removing it. Some years back, when Marion Barry was mayor
and I was not yet on the Washington Post's blacklist, I was asked
by the paper to write an Outlook section piece about a recent
storm. I decided to compare Washington's snow removal with that
of another town I knew well, Freeport, Maine. As it turned out,
Freeport had one percent of Washington's population but ten percent
of its road mileage. If memory serves, Freeport did the job with
five trucks while it took 150 in DC - or three times as many
per mile.
In the most recent
storm the figure for DC was up to 300 trucks with plows although
the city's geography hasn't expanded in the interval. This would
mean that it now takes six times as many trucks per mile to clean
a Washington street than it took to clean a Freeport road a decade
ago.
Admittedly things
are a bit simpler in Freeport and there are not as many cars
parked where they shouldn't be. Further the pace is decidedly
slower. I once got a call from the local highway director who
wanted a meeting. I invited him over for coffee and after a half
hour of discussing the interesting irrelevancies of day he laid
out his problem: would I mind if he cut a few alders that were
blocking the view around a curve?
Still, a road is
a road and snow is snow whether they're in Washington or Maine.
Something else has definitely happened over both time and space
to make it much harder to plow a path - and it isn't the weather.
My suspicion is
that snowplowing, like everything else in this fair city, is
being over-managed. That would explain a snow plow going down
a street with a supervisor's pickup truck ahead or three plows
moving ad seriatim down an already well plowed street. Fortunately,
however, the mayor was in Puerto Rico when the storm broke so
he didn't have time for his normal response to crisis: which
would have been to call a 'town meeting' to seek input on outputting
the snow.
There is at least
six degrees of separation between DC's winter practices and the
small town plowers given 20 or 30 miles to clear and not to come
back until it's done. It is not that the latter are more competent,
it is just that their local governments have more trust in their
competency so the whole operation is much simpler.
As in public education
and other government matters, we are spending enormous sums to
make sure nothing goes wrong but in fact are just increasing
the number of people able to screw things up.
There are certain
jobs that do not lend themselves to the bureaucratic pyramid
- they are jobs in which employees carry most of the capacity
for good or evil in their own skill, judgment and ethical standards.
Jobs like teaching school, patrolling a beat, or plowing a street.
Training makes them better; bureaucratic systems rarely do.
It is something
that Washington doesn't understand at all, which is why I will
remain in the Review's emergency center save for an occasional
visit to the Congress Market or Jimmy T's grill until it all
blows over.
The American
way of death
America's growing
hypochondria - spurred by government, health industry, and the
media - takes another leap as the feds declare nearly twice as
many people as previously to have excessive blood pressure. Scaring
people about their health is one of the country's most profitable
industries, but it also drives up health costs something fierce.
Here are a few facts, based on recent government statistics,
to bear in mind when reading such stories:
- The average life
span of an American is 28 years longer than a century ago.
- 75% of that improvement
occurred between 1900 and 1950, the remaining 25% has been fairly
equally distributed over the last 50 years. Further, most of
the improvement has occurred at an earlier age. For a 65 year
old white male, for example, life span has only increased five
years in the past century.
In short, medicine
has done a fine job of improving America's longevity but it is
slowing down. The hyping of health problems - and declaring tens
of millions of people to be ill or health-impaired for one reason
or another - reflects far more a cultural and commercial choice
rather than a health one. And it is a choice far healthier for
drug companies than for citizens.
For example, in
a study not well covered in the American media (perhaps because
it challenges our health myths), WHO in 2000 ranked countries
by "healthy life expectancy," based on the number of
years lived in what might called "full health" - without
disability or crippling illnesses. WHO reported:
"Japanese have
the longest healthy life expectancy of 74.5 years among 191 countries,
versus less than 26 years for the lowest-ranking country of Sierra
Leone. . . The rest of the top 10 nations are Australia, 73.2
years; France, 73.1; Sweden, 73.0; Spain, 72.8; Italy, 72.7;
Greece, 72.5; Switzerland, 72.5; Monaco, 72.4; and Andorra, 72.3.
. .
"The United
States rated 24th under this system, or an average of 70.0 years
of healthy life for babies born in 1999. . . "The position
of the United States is one of the major surprises of the new
rating system," says Christopher Murray, M.D., Ph.D., Director
of WHO's Global Program on Evidence for Health Policy. "Basically,
you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you're an American
rather than a member of most other advanced countries."
The fascinating
thing about this is that among the top-rated countries are ones
like France who citizens take a decidedly less paranoiac view
of health issues than Americans who are trained to worry about
their every breath. But then what can you expect in a country
where the vice president argues his fitness for public office
by announcing that a doctor "watches me very carefully 24
hours a day?"
2002
New York
and Montana
IN KEEPING WITH
it never-ending struggle to prove that it is as sophisticated
at the New York Times, the Washington Post ran an odd and nasty
pre-Thanksgiving
story in
which the author Sarah Vowell, who works for NPR and based this
essay on her new book from Simon & Schuster, describes the
pain and suffering of having her parents visit her for the holiday.
Their faults include being clueless, boring, and from Montana.
It is not clear
just how boring the parents are because Vowell spends most of
her time boring us with her reaction to them. We do learn, however,
that her mother prefers to use white cornmeal processed by the
Shawnee Company in Muskogee while Vowell prefers yellow, which
merely proves that they have food fetishes in Montana just like
in Manhattan.
Vowell displays
the sort of arrogance towards the bulk of America that is particularly
common in New York City and Washington. She doesn't even feel
compelled to explain why her life is so much better than that
of her parents - she just assumes - wink, wink - that we will
understand.
Nor does she mention
that Montana, unlike Washington, has played only a minimal role
in dismantling the Republic over the past year; that, unlike
New York City, it has not created a grotesque language of advertising
and public relations as barren as any western plain; and, unlike
both cities, has not engaged in acts so upsetting to others in
the world that they feel compelled to kill themselves flying
planes into its most treasured icons.
In short, there
remains the possibility that there might be something that Vowell,
or the Washington Post, or NPR, or Simon & Schuster could
learn from a place like Montana. They might even figure out why
people who are repeatedly treated with disdain by the country's
elite tend to vote for those who seem to show them some regard,
even if it's not really true. In the end, Vowell's piece served
one purpose: it helped to explain the recent election results.
- SAM SMITH
What I
did on my vacation
 YESTERDAY
I drove to the Portland store of the Hannaford grocery chain
to watch the propitiously named governor of Maine, Angus King,
grill some Wolfe's Neck Farm steaks in the parking lot. Among
others present for steak and speeches were the president of the
state senate, the head of Hannaford, a herd of reporters, and
a couple of natural beef farmers who had driven 225 miles from
Fort Kent for the occasion.
The farmers, like
the rest of us, were there to celebrate the decision of Hannaford
to stock Wolfe's Neck Farm natural beef in about 75 of its Maine
stores, joining two dozen A&P outlets around New England
as well as some Fresh Fields stores. The farm is now the largest
supermarket supplier of natural beef in the greater Northeast
thanks to the creation of a marketing cooperative that for the
first time offers scores of Maine natural beef producers a cost-effective
way to get their meat into supermarkets and which, if all goes
well, will soon include some 24,000 acres of cattle land, rivaling
the state's much better known potato crop. Governor King noted
that this wasn't the only way Maine's agriculture was diversifying;
last year state farmers also shipped three million cases of broccoli.
According to another
state official, the natural beef breakthrough was the biggest
thing to happen in Maine agriculture in 20 years. For Wolfe's
Neck Farm, it was the biggest thing to happen in over 40 years.
I know because I was the only one present who had worked on the
farm at the start - when my parents began raising organic cattle
in the late 1950s. Even before 'Silent Spring,' they had won
a settlement from Central Maine Power Company not to spray anyone's
property in the state who didn't want it.
The farm gained
a fine reputation but the beef operation had tended to be marginal
at best. Which isn't to say that my parents didn't try. They
brought the first wood chipper and the first round hay bailer
into the state. They experimented with cafeteria feeding, trench
silos, and even plastic wrapped silage from which air was removed
by one of my mother's vacuum cleaners, which - not surprisingly
- didn't quite last the season.
The farm dealt with
all manner of problems including the day the commander of the
Naval Air Station in Brunswick called my mother to tell her that
the entire North American air defense had been immobilized because
14 of her cows were on his runway. Too impatient to await their
removal, the captain sent out the station fire engines with sirens
blaring which quickly scattered the 14 cows over 1,000 acres
of Navy property. They finally showed up a week later - all of
them - at the 7th hole of the golf course on the morning of the
Officers' Invitational Tournament.
There were other
problems such as the fact that there was only one meat processor
in the state who charged four times as much a head as did operations
in the West. Besides, my father considered corn a pesticide and
so the meat had an acquired, strikingly stringy taste.
 Before
my mother died, she gave the farm to the University of Southern
Maine, which was not a good idea. The first president told a
friend that she felt embarrassed to have cows under her and the
second president was a product of late 20th century management
training which put an inordinate emphasis on hubris and jargon
and very little on what one was actually managing. It would,
however, help me understand how the Russians felt when Jeffrey
Sachs arrived from Harvard to tell them how to do it, and, later,
why some of the biggest names in American business collapsed
so easily.
I was head of an
organization designated to help the university run the farm.
It did not go well. Any community participation or outside advice
was unwelcome - the "camel's nose under the tent" the
dean once said. One day the president said to me, "I know
what you want; you want a product champion" for the farm.
I told him that what I was really hoping for was someone on his
staff who actually gave damn about the place.
I gave up in frustration
and was succeeded by Peter Cox, former publisher of the Maine
Times. Some years later, in 1997, the university announced that
it no longer wanted the farm. A few of us scrambled up a community-based
non-profit to take over the operation.
The effects were
immediate. John McKnight would not have been surprised for ten
years earlier he had written, "The structure of institutions
is a design established to create control of people. On the other
hand, the structure of associations is the result of people acting
through consent. . . You will know that you are in a community
if you often hear laughter and singing. You will know you are
in an institution, corporation, or bureaucracy if you hear the
silence of long halls and reasoned meetings."
People began returning
to the farm's campsites arm; a day camp quickly developed a waiting
list. A newly formed Friends of the Farm gained hundreds of members,
many of them volunteers as well as donors, and the farm entrance
gained the appearance of a page from a Richard Scarry book, a
cacophony of animals, ages, and activities.
But the beef market
still languished - until farm manager Erick Jensen finally was
able to pursue his dream of bringing beef producers from all
over the state into a cooperative venture, a dream that required
driving hundreds of miles to encourage, solicit, and assist those
interested in the project - many from the poorest end of the
state. Jensen was also able to help the farmers produce just
the right feed mixture - which at Wolfe's Neck had included leftover
mash from the Gritty McDuff's brew pub - so their meat would
be as good as the Wolfe's Neck steak that had won praise from
Julia Child.
Much of what appears
in this journal is pretty grim, much of the story of agriculture
in Maine and elsewhere is pretty grim, but yesterday I was present
for one of the rarest of joys - the rebirth of something that
almost died. And the steaks weren't bad either.
PORTLAND
PRESS HERALD STORY
WOLFE'S NECK FARM
45 years
later
Forty-five years
ago this month I came back to my hometown of Washington at the
age of 19 to work as a radio reporter. I returned to college
in the fall with an offer of fulltime employment upon graduation
which I gladly accepted.
Since then I have
covered more administrations than Helen Thomas - although from
the street rather than from the West Wing. The street is a better
vantage point because that's where the news is.
Those in power make
far less news than one might assume reading the paper or watching
television. This is because they are mainly interested in preserving
the system that gave them power in the first place. News implies
that something has changed.
Even wars are better
covered in the field than in the Pentagon press room, which is
why the government tries so hard to keep journalists away from
the front and at the Pentagon. Russell Baker once said of his
years in Washington that he felt he was serving as a megaphone
for fraud.
I have sometimes
wondered whether, if Jesus were to return to earth, anyone would
notice. I have concluded that the best he would rate would be
occasional mention as a "Christian activist," "a
gadfly," or perhaps even a "conspiracy theorist."
Which is one of
the reasons being an alternative journalist has been so much
fun. You are still allowed to go after the news. In fact, most
of history's major changes during my lifetime have been far better
covered by those outside the media establishment. Not that it
doesn't catch up eventually, but it's a bit like the late Senator
Phil Hart's definition of the Senate: a place that does things
20 years after it should have.
Here are just a
few of the stories on which the major media was scooped, not
just by days but by years: the import of the civil rights, black
power, women's, gay, and other movements; the impossibility of
winning the Vietnam war; the level of anger in the urban ghettos;
global warming; the futility of the war on drugs; the loss of
American democracy and constitutional rights; the many downsides
of globalization; the myopia of our anti-Arab policies; the true
nature of the 1990s economic bubble. And so forth. . . .
In many of these
cases, the major media went far further than mere nonfeasance.
It provided moral cover for segregationists and corrupt politicians.
It helped discrimination gain tenure. It repeatedly excused economic
inequities as a natural state or presented them as containing
some yet to be revealed magic. It perpetuated myths about drugs
and their proper treatment that have caused incalculable pain
and death. It paraded as heroes some of the most corrupt figures,
corporations, and institutions of our time. It promoted economic
lies that served the interests of only a tiny number of the rich
and powerful. And perhaps most shamefully, it helped the recalcitrant
and the reckless deny the dreadful damage that our way of living
was doing to our planet.
Further, and in
direct contradiction to its own myths about itself, the major
media dismissed, ignored, or blacklisted voices that might have
raised some of these issues far earlier and with a much greater
audience.
Recently, much of
the media seems to have decided that news isn't real at all,
but only another form of entertainment. Thus we find Ashley Banfield,
with unconscious accuracy, being featured in her reports as "on
location," a phrase once reserved for the making of make-believe.
One of the advantages
of being in the journalistic underground is that your clip file
is far less embarrassing than those of more conventional scribes.
It is not that you were so prescient; it's only that history
seldom comes totally by surprise and the first job of a journalist
is to listen well and then write it down. My personal rule of
journalism is this: if I learn something and find myself saying,
"Holy shit!" - I know it's probably news.
If, on the other
hand, you spend your time transmitting official assurances of
tranquility, self-interested declarations of impending nirvana,
unsupported suppositions in the drag of fact, or personal judgments
more worthy of a rock groupie than of a skeptical observer, then
what you have written will eventually seem childish or stupid.
Of course, alternative
journalists would be nothing without alternative readers and
I consider myself blessed with as fine a lot as one could seek.
Thus I dedicate my future efforts as with those of the past,
to - in the words of Charles Lamb - "the friendly and judicious
reader who will take these papers as they were meant; not understanding
everything perversely in the absolute and literal sense, but
giving fair construction, as to an after-dinner conversation."
What Tim
McVeigh and I had in common
TIMOTHY MCVEIGH
AND I had something in common: we both memorized William Ernest
Henley's poem "Invictus." I don't why McVeigh did it,
but I did it as part of a grim Sunday lunch ritual during which
my siblings and I were expected to demonstrate our mnemonic skills
to my father's satisfaction. One of the examples was "Invictus"
which went like this:
Out of the night
that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch
of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place
of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how
strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
It was written by
William Ernest Henley, an English editor, writer, playwright
and poet who by 1877 had proved himself so unmarketable that
he had to "addict" himself to journalism for the next
ten years. He died in 1903, 98 years to the day that Timothy
McVeigh was executed.
Learning "Invictus"
was about the only thing that Timothy McVeigh and I had in common.
I went to a Quaker school and later entered the Coast Guard where
I learned how to save people. McVeigh went into the U.S. Army
and where he learned how to kill people. He became so proficient
that his military colleagues admired him and the U.S. government
gave him a medal. The war in which he fought continues silently,
with many people still dying because of the embargo and the toxics
we left behind. We don't call it terrorism, however, because
a government did it and not an individual.
Iraq was a good
place for an American to learn how to kill large numbers of innocent
people and then dismiss it as "collateral damage."
That phrase wasn't from a poem; McVeigh may have picked it up
from a White House press statement.
After I left the
Coast Guard I got a job. After Timothy McVeigh left the Army,
he didn't. This was not unusual. In fact, the unemployment rate
of veterans 20-24 years old is twice that of those who have not
had the benefit of Army training.
McVeigh has been
made to take responsibility for his part in creating the Oklahoma
City disaster. When does America take responsibility for its
part in creating Timothy McVeigh?
2000
The end
of treason
If treason, in one of its typical
forms, consists of trading the national interest of one's country
to another for profit, then FBI Agent Robert Hanssen had some
stiff competition. In the past decade or so this form of disloyalty
has been codified, advocated, and revered not only by our own
leaders in the government, media, and business, but by their
peers in what is still quaintly known as the "free world."
You can find it in its most precise form in various trade agreements
such as NAFTA and GATT, in its mathematical form in the listing
of foreign contributions to our political campaigns, and its
rhetorical form in the statements of many of our most favored
political commentators.
Beyond doubt, the new trade agreements
have done more damage to our national, state and local sovereignty
than any foreign enemy or all the spies of American history combined.
The last three presidents have helped give the Chinese more secrets
than they could ever have hoped to acquire through archaic techniques
of personal espionage. And in the end, we have learned not to
worry because it has all occurred for trade not treason, corporate
not individual profit, and public policy rather than private
perversion.
Consider, for example, some words
Vaclav Havel wrote in that intellectual Leisure World for lemming
liberals, the New York Review of Books:
"In the next century I believe
that most states will begin to change from cult-like entities
charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities,
into less powerful and more rational administrative units that
will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled
ways in which our planetary society is organized."
"The practical responsibilities
of the state -- its legal powers -- can only devolve in two directions,
downward or upward; downward, to the non-governmental organizations
and structures of civil society; or upward, to regional, transnational
and global organizations."
Thus in a few paragraphs, Havel
scraps democracy at every level of society leaving us to be run,
presumably, by business improvement districts and NATO. It is
a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-patriotic view, because
at none of Havel's levels is the consent of the governed considered.
He is not alone. Here was Strobe
Talbott writing in the July 20, 1992 issue of Time: "Within
the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be
obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority
. . . All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations
to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred
they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial
and temporary."
Agent Hanssen, you are hereby charged
with betraying the sacred trust of a cult-like entity - basically
a social arrangement that is artificial and temporary, otherwise
known as the United States of America. It just doesn't have quite
the ring of a capital crime.
In fact, though, nothing has been
more central to the character of American politics over the past
few decades than a cynical, corrupt, unconstitutional and, yes,
commercial betrayal of the national interest. The continuing
symbiosis of drug lords, politicians, and law enforcement has
betrayed our land and our constitution. The Iran-Contra affair
involved not just bad politics but the betrayal of America for
profit. The cover-up of the BCCI scandal by the first Bush administration
was a betrayal of America to protect, in no small part, foreign
profits.
Perhaps China represents the best
case in point since the Chinese know as much about espionage
as anyone. While the Soviets and then the Russians were allegedly
playing their John LeCarre games with Agent Hanssen, the Chinese
were taking care of serious business.
As journalist Robert Parry has noted,
"Little-noticed evidence from the Iran-contra files reveals
that it was the Reagan-Bush administration that opened the door
to sharing sensitive national security secrets with communist
China in the 1980s. This clandestine relationship evolved from
China's agreement to supply sophisticated weapons to the Nicaraguan
contras beginning in 1984, a deal with the White House that entrusted
China with one of the government's most sensitive intelligence
secrets, the existence of Oliver North's contra supply network.
In the years after that secretly brokered deal, the Republican
administration permitted trips in which US nuclear scientists.
. . visited China in scientific exchange programs. Those visits
corresponded with China's rapid development of sophisticated
nuclear weapons, culminating in the apparent compromise of sensitive
US nuclear secrets by 1988. Seven years later, in 1995, a purported
Chinese defector walked into US government offices in Taiwan
and turned over a document. Dated 1988, the document contained
detailed information about US-designed nuclear warheads. The
document showed that Chinese intelligence possessed the secrets
of the W-88 miniaturized nuclear bomb by the last year of Ronald
Reagan's presidency. China's first test of a light warhead similar
to the W-88 was conducted in 1992, the last year of George H.W.
Bush's presidency."
The Chinese connection exploded
with the arrival of the Clinton administration. A younger crowd
of American politicians had skipped the part about patriotism,
about the pledge of allegiance, about loyalty not only to country
but to much of anything other than themselves. The Clinton policy
towards China was merely an extension of these values: what's
in for us and how soon? The notion of national security was almost
alien to them; besides they had the new paradigm of globalization
to keep them warm. Here are just a few of the things that happened
along the way:
- Named Commerce Secretary, Ron
Brown treated his post as just another place to wheel and deal.
He was irrepressible, on one occasion okaying the sale of new
American engines for China to put in its cruise missiles. The
engines had been built as military equipment but Brown reclassified
them as civilian.
- Neither was Brown above doing
a little business on the side. The Saudis wanted some American
planes; Brown told them: you want the planes you also want a
phone contract with ATT. Cost of the planes and hardware: $6
billion. Cost of the phone contract: $4 billion. Part of the
deal, it turned out, was an ATT side agreement with a firm called
First International. The owner: Ron Brown
- According to the New York Times,
Clinton removed $2 billion in trade with China from national
security scrutiny. Among the results: 77 supercomputers - capable
of 13 billion calculations per second - that could scramble and
unscramble secret data and design nuclear weapons. These were
purchased by the Chinese without a peep stateside. At least some
of them would be used by the Chinese military.
- With the transfer of the Panama
Canal, four of Panama's ports ended up being controlled by a
company partially owned by Hutchinson-Whampoa Ltd., which in
turn was owned by Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire so close to the
Chinese power structure that he was offered the governorship
of Hong Kong. Another owner of the Panamanian ports was China
Resources Enterprise, called an "agent of espionage"
by Senator Fred Thompson. CRE was also a partner of the Lippo
Group, owned by the Riady family that played a central if mysterious
role in the rise of William Clinton. According to congressional
testimony by ex-JCS chief Admiral Thomas Moorer, Hutchinson-Whampoa
won the right to pilot all ships thought the Panama Canal, including
US naval vessels.
- President Clinton signed national
security waivers to allow four US commercial satellites to be
launched in China, despite evidence that China was exporting
nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, among other
nations. One of these satellites belonged to Loral. Nine days
later a Chinese Long March rocket carrying a $200 million satellite
belonging to Loral failed in mid-flight. A subsequent law suit
charged that the circuit board from the highly classified encryption
device in the satellite was found to be missing when the Chinese
returned debris from the explosion to US authorities, even though
a control box containing the circuit board was recovered intact.
After the crash, NSA reportedly changed the encoded algorithms
used by US satellites because of the apparent release of highly
classified information.
- President Clinton approved a waiver
allowing the launch of another satellite on board a Chinese rocket,
despite a recommendation by the Department of Justice that the
waiver would have a significant adverse impact on any prosecution
arising from its pending investigation of Loral.
- The NY Times reported in 1998
that the Defense Technology Security Administration said Loral's
unauthorized release of sensitive technology to the Chinese gave
rise to at least three "major" violations of US national
security, three medium violations and twelve "minor"
infractions.
- Throughout these dealings, the
CEO of Loral, Bernard Schwartz, contributed at least $1.5 million
to the Democrats, making him the single largest contributor to
these groups during the period in question.
- Softwar newsletter reported that
that some of the radios and cell phones being used by Chinese
police in their campaign against dissidents were those sold the
Chinese by Motorola after Clinton overrode human rights objections
by the State Department.
- In the end, the brunt of the evidence
was that the Chinese had obtained more American military secrets
over the past two decades than all the previous spies in American
history put together. They had basic information on all nuclear
weapons systems, they got our most advanced supercomputers, they
gained extraordinarily important information about satellite
systems. Some of this knowledge they used for themselves; some
they retrofitted and repackaged and sold to other countries like
Iraq, where it was used against our own fighter planes. While
the problem occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations,
it got completely out of hand under Clinton. Some of the information
was stolen, some was given to China in the classic manner of
spies, but a stunning proportion was obtained either as a direct
result of political and economic decisions by the Clinton administration
or as a result of what can best be described as premeditated
indifference.
- Three major players in the China
scandal - John Huang, Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung - were all
allowed by the Justice Department to cop pleas.
- Carol Cameron of Fox News reported
that cover stories provided by Chinese operatives to hide China's
illegal campaign contributions may have come from or been approved
by President Jiang Zemin. Johnny Chung told Congress he was under
orders from the Chinese to keep the whole thing quiet. His orders,
he said, came from a suspected Chinese intelligence operative
named Robert Luu, who worked for a Los Angeles law firm. In a
phone conversation tapped by the FBI, Chung was told by Luu to
say the campaign money came from the so-called princelings: Chinese
leaders' grown sons, who live, study and often live lavishly
in the West.
A transcript of the wiretap, obtained
by Fox News, contains the following:
LUU: "Shove the blame on the
shoulders of the princelings."
CHUNG: "So blame it on the
princelings. Do not implicate the Chinese government."
LUU: "Yes. Chairman Jiang agreed
to handle it like this; the president over here also agreed."
- Newsweek quoted intelligence officials
as saying that the Chinese "penetration is total. They are
deep into the (US nuclear weapons) labs' black programs."
- In an AP story ignored by major
media, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey accused the Clinton
administration of pursuing a policy of appeasement toward China
and likened it to the way Britain and France dealt with Nazi
Germany on Czechoslovakia before World War II.
- The Wall Street Journal wrote:
"Top business executives are issuing a blunt warning to
federal lawmakers: Vote against the trade deal with China, and
we will hold it against you when writing campaign checks.
- Operating with an interim top
secret clearance (but without FBI investigation or foreign security
check) Commerce official Huang requested several top secret files
on China just before a meeting with the Chinese ambassador. Huang
and the Riadys then held a meeting with Clinton. Not long after,
Huang went to work as a Democratic fund-raiser, but remained
on Commerce's payroll as a $10,000 a month consultant. Huang
raised $5 million for the campaign. About a third of that was
returned as having come from illegal sources. Among the problem
contributions: $250,000 to the DNC from five Chinese businessmen
in order to have a brief meeting with Clinton at a fund-raiser.
- Macao businessman Ng Lap Seng,
closely linked to a couple of major Chinese-owned enterprises,
was regularly bringing in large sums of money to the US, according
to customs records. On one occasion, he arrived with $175,000
and then two days later met with Charlie Trie and Mark Middleton
at the White House. That evening Ng sat at Clinton's table at
a DNC fund-raiser.
This is just a sample, not of treason,
but of politics as it has been practiced. Now, let's turn to
the recently arrested Agent Hanssen. So far there is no evidence
that he helped the Russians build a missile, suppress dissidents,
or buy US politicians. Instead, in the FBI's own words, "The
affidavit alleges that Hanssen compromised numerous human sources
of the US Intelligence Community, dozens of classified U.S. Government
documents, including "Top Secret" and "code word"
documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance
and value. It also alleges that Hanssen compromised FBI counterintelligence
investigative techniques, sources, methods and operations, and
disclosed to the KGB the FBI's secret investigation of Felix
Bloch, a foreign service officer, for espionage."
Hanssen's major alleged crime, in
other words, is not the betrayal of America but of the (note
capital letters used in the charge) US Intelligence Community,
its personnel, its manuals, and its tricks of the trade. Open
up Robert Hanssen and - as with a Russian doll - you just get
another spy who is busily betraying another spy, all of whom
are keeping secrets not so much from some foreign country as
from the citizens of their own.
It is all bizarre, incestuous, of
little known purpose, and, in the best postmodern manner, flexible.
Just as American politicians and lawyers have redefined bribery
so that the official bribee can escape punishment for the same
crime for which the citizen briber, so the rules of loyalty to
one's country now vary immensely not according to the nature
of one's action but according to one's position.
Don't look for it written down anywhere.
Except for the basic rule, laid down in 1613 by John Harington:
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why if it
prosper, none dare call it treason."
1994
The
gadfly thing
I was recently described
in an otherwise kind article in Washington’s City Paper
as a "political gadfly." This was neither the first
time nor will it be the last. It has happened to me so often
that I was able to tell the writer where the word came from (a
fly that bites and annoys cattle). In fact, it has happened to
me so often that I once had a dinghy called the Gadfly.
Gadflies are only
barely further along in the evolutionary chain of things than
maggots and slugs. They are frequently found resting placidly
on a pile of excrement. As readers well know, I never am at rest
sitting on a pile of shit.
Being called a gadfly
is a little like being bitten by one. It’s also, notes Jon
Rowe, like Ralph Nader being called a "self-styled consumer
advocate." Where, Rowe wonders, does one go to get a license
to become an properly appointed consumer advocate? To the Washington
Post Style Section?
People in Washington
who call other people gadflies tend to be either players
or people who wish they were. A player is someone trying to be
Assistant Secretary of HUD, someone who represents a major polluter
and claims to practice environmental law, someone who is paid
large sums of money to shout down Eleanor Clift on national TV
or who pays large sums of money to get politicians to wrestle
with -- and ultimately defeat -- their own conscience. Players
are annoyed by gadflies because they won’t play according
to the players’ rules. On the other hand, gadflies don’t
clutter up the bureaucracy making dull speeches, and they don’t
create toxic waste sites or corrupt the political system. They
tend to eat Mr. Tyson’s chicken rather than fly on his planes.
And at the end of the day, they have less explaining to do to
their children.
Players tend to
be quite insecure which is why they need such an elaborate support
system, including the Washingtonian magazine, the Gridiron
Dinner, the Washington Post Style section and the
Diane Rehm Show. Players consider themselves serious; gadflies
not. Russell Baker, a serious man, addressed this matter best
in a column in which he pointed out the difference between being
serious and being solemn. Baker observed that children are almost
always serious, but that they start to lose the trait in adolescence.
Washington is the capital of solemnity and few of its elite are
truly serious.
Gadflies, on the
other hand, are usually serious. A gadfly tends to be someone
with ideas, energy and a modicum of talent but who lacks a PR
firm, ghostwriter and a proper flair for networking. A gadfly
is someone who actually wants to get something done, but often
can’t -- largely because of all the players in the way.
EF Schumacher once
said, "We must do what we conceive to be the right thing,
and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we
are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right
thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part
of the disease, and not a part of the cure."
Gadflies would agree.
They think for themselves. But in Washington thought is something
players purchase, just like they purchase gas, condoms or political
access. People who think are considered part of the service industry
with commensurate compensation and social regard.
When gadflies feel
like using a bovine analogy, they think of themselves as mavericks
-- animals whose only sin has been to wander off from their colleagues.
They also, as they say in Texas, drink upstream from the herd,
which if you know anything about cattle is not a bad idea.
Take a run-of-the-mill
gadfly such as myself and then some average players -- say the
editorial board the Washington Post -- and compare their
records over a couple of decades. The gadfly approach to freeways,
urban policy, Vietnam, the environment and Bill Clinton will,
I think, hold up pretty well. The problem gadflies face is not
that they are irrelevant or wrong but that their timing is a
bit off. The FBI used to categorize members of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade as "premature anti-fascists." Similarly, many
gadflies are just moderates of an age that has not yet arrived.
1989
A surfeit
of prigs
In pre-revolutionary Connecticut,
being a common scold was a felony. Despite the currently overcrowded
conditions of our prisons there is much to be said for reviving
this offense, for few characteristics of our time have been more
burdensome than the noisy priggishness that has come over the
land.
For some years we had
a woman in our neighborhood who had the disconcerting habit of
standing on her front porch heaping opprobrium on passing children.
It didn't particularly bother the children, because the very
young are blissfully immune to priggishness, knowing that anyone
who behaves in such a manner properly belongs in an asylum.
The problem for adult
America is that we increasingly seem to be taking such people
seriously. We have elected a remarkable number to office, with
the inevitable result that prigs are now taking over appointive
positions as well - most disastrously on the Supreme Court which
now has its first prig majority in many decades.
Worse, prigs are in ascendancy
in places where they have previously been disqualified. For example,
prigs, while long allowed in the editorial offices of newspapers,
were largely banned from newsrooms. Prigs in show business were
limited to such activities as the Morman Tabernacle Choir, Up
With People and the Lawrence Welk Show. Now we even have priggish
rock stars, engaged, among other things, in pelvic proselytizing
against drugs. Prigs have even infiltrated the left.
But I'm getting ahead
of myself. To some readers, the word may seem a bit arcane so
a definition is in order. I like that of Webster's Third, in
part because the definer clearly doesn't care for prigs, priggishness
or priggism, perhaps because some prig is always trying to keep
certain words out of dictionaries.
A prig, according to Webster's
is, among other things, one who offends or irritates by obvious
or rigid observance of the proprieties: one self-sufficient in
virtue, culture or propriety often in a pointed manner or to
an obnoxious degree.
Being priggish is marked
by overvaluing oneself or one's ideas, habits, notions, by precise
or inhibited adherence to them.
And priggism is self-conscious
propriety of conduct; stilted correctness of behavior; prim adherence
to conventionality.
Woodrow Wilson, one of
the few politicians who actually dealt with the prig problem,
told a crowd in Pittsburgh in October 1914: If you will think
about what you ought to do for other people, your character will
take care of itself. Character is a byproduct, and any man who
devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become
a selfish prig.
The emphasis on salvation
in isolation that is so central to current evangelicalism (not
to mention certain strains of psychotherapy and contemporary
self-help literature) is an ideal breeding ground for the prig.
One can note, hi fact, some correlation between the presumed
level of God's direct notice and intervention in personal matters
and the level of priggishness a religion encourages.
But whatever the cause,
the relative priggishness of a religion becomes a matter of critical
importance when theology spills over, as it has with a vengeance,
into national politics. For when politicians and Supreme Court
Justices talk and think about God they are not talking of the
God of the deist, the llth Commandment ecologist, the Unitarian,
the Quaker, the liberal Catholic, the low Episcopalian, the Seventh
Day Agnostic or even the ancient god of the Jew. It is patently
clear from their language that they are describing The Great
Prig In the Sky -- lord, master and protector of the unctuous,
the self-righteous and the ostentatiously saved.
The prig, having no sense
of perspective, is constantly in danger of encouraging results
quite contrary to the intent declared by appearances. Thus we
find Common Cause, in its priggish approach to election reform,
baring no small portion of the blame for the curse of the political
action committee. The priggish aspect of Naderism has been blind
to the dangers of elevating litigation to the status of a moral
act. The flag prigs create flag burners. And the drug prigs,
of course, have simply left us with more drug problems.
Creeping propriety has
even affected institutions that should, by their nature, be immune,
including many of a progressive bent. This is perhaps the inevitable
result of a politics which has changed from an emphasis on coalitions
to a politics of the most precise special interest. Having moved
vigorously in recent decades from such simplistic divisions as
labor and capital, farmers and ranchers, and liberal and conservative,
we now find ourselves atomized into acronyms. The organizations
bearing these acronyms carry out their purported purposes, but
they also increasingly define and restrict us.
By implicit consent we
have limited ourselves to a maximum of two self-definitions,
e.g. we may be an eco-feminist, but if you tell someone, as I
occasionally do, that you are a quasi-Green, neo-populist, radical
conservative, semi-libertarian, pragmatic progressive, you must
expect to get a laugh, and that only at best. Most people will
think you're hiding something.
The problem with over-specialized
self-definitions is, firstly, that one's politics can become
as prissy as the dress of the dandy and, secondly, that eventually
it causes one to act on the belief that the explanation is true
and complete, making one seem less a real human and more a bumper
sticker.
The recent self-conscious
effort to upgrade the status of blacks by calling them African-Americans
demonstrates well the problems involved in excessive concern
with self-definition. One need only think of how black history
might have been different if a publisher had been asked to consider
a book called African-American Like Me or if Fats Waller had
written, "What did I do to be so African- American and blue?"
But the determinedly pious don't sing.
I tend to stay away from
political prigs even when I am in sympathy with their cause.
I can smell piety a mile away and prefer the company of sinners
just trying to do better to those who leave the strong impression
that you're not really good enough to join them. Besides they
might catch me eating a Big Mac.
Fortunately, there is
plenty of activism that doesn't ask too many questions or demand
that we save ourselves before, together, we try to mitigate the
damage that clearly faces all of us. Besides, the prigs never
attain the perfection they pretend. They not only irritate others
and deceive themselves, they miss that of the mystery of life
which lies in its contradictions and inconsistencies. The sinners
know, in their hearts, that they have more fun. Furthermore,
as the poet William Stafford pointed out, "If you purify
the pond, the lilies die
1991
Letter
to Moscow
In October 1991, when it was
uncertain who was in charge in Russia, the Review published this
open letter:
Dear Mike and/or Boris,
Excuse the first names but I understand
that you want to become more Americanized and we use first names
the way you use comrade, including the subtlety that a comrade
is not always a comrade.
This Americanization business is
tricky. There is no one American way of doing anything, only
an American way of letting things happen. Much of America's success
to date can be traced to one simple rule: don't make too many
rules. Much of America's failure to date has come from ignoring
this rule. Think of America not as a system but as an environment
and you'll begin to get the hang of it.
Sadly, Americans aren't taking very
good care of their political environment these days. They still
talk about political freedom and free enterprise, but those in
power increasingly have something else on their minds.
Thus, you should be careful when
you go to George Bush for advice about democracy or Harvard for
ideas about your economy. Neither has any great interest in freedom
and a great deal of interest in getting people to do things just
their way.
You've probably figured that out
about Bush already. He's shrouded his government with more secrecy
than any peacetime president in history and he has seldom met
a human right he likes.
If you really want to find out about
democracy go to a town meeting in Vermont. Watch a baseball game,
the sport that perhaps best blends the democratic ideals of individuality
and community. Spend some time in one of those wacky computer
software firm's where no idea is considered too wild to examine.
Listen to jazz and note how each musician is allowed extreme
freedom during a solo and yet how conscientiously they back up
the other musicians when it's their turn.
Democracy is not the answer, only
an excellent way of finding answers. If you presume to have too
many answers, you'll start acting like George Bush and not be
very democratic at all.
Of course, since there's no patent
on Americanism; anyone can claim it for their own. Remember that
your goal should be the American ideal, not American practice.
If you copy our current behavior you'll end up in as much trouble
as we are. One of our historians has said that early America
invented every important new political institution of that time
--- and none since.
So if you want to Americanize, there's
no better way to start than at the beginning. Read Paine, Thoreau,
Emerson and, of course, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Enjoy not only their wisdom, but their idiosyncrasies and their
failings. It will give you hope. Mike already has a leg up on
Jefferson. Jefferson was a slave-owner, who attempted unsuccessfully
to abolish slavery. Mike was a communist, but he got rid of his
demon.
You should also jump ahead a hundred
years or so and read Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken; it will give
you a good feeling for how greed and foolishness corrupted the
American ideal over the decades. To show you how perceptive Mencken
was, back in 1930 he wrote that communism "will probably
disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a climax,
and bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation
of capitalism or blows up with a bang. The former seems more
likely."
Then leap forward and read Martin
Luther King and learn how the sturdy American ideal could withstand
the worst abuse and still permit dreams again. America's history
has always been one of saints and scoundrels and the difficulty
of telling them apart, especially when they were the same people.
o
Here's a good American saying: necessity
is the mother of invention. Things aren't working out quite like
you planned it, but there's at least a chance that you'll be
forced to invent some good ideas as a result.
The nation state was never much
to brag about. Its major contributions to human history has been
incredible death and destruction. After World War II, nation
states started to disintegrate as institutions that had some
of the characteristics of countries began to take their place.
The United Nations, NATO, the World Bank and multinational corporations
all helped to weaken the idea of a nation long before the Armenians
and the Muscovites got restless. Sure, you and we thought we
were the most powerful nations in human history but that's because
we only counted the assets and didn't consider what the charade
was costing us. I mean, couldn't you use some of that money you
sent to Cuba now? And it would be kind of nice to replay Vietnam
all over again knowing what we know now.
So, Mike, don't feel too bad over
the break-up of the Soviet Union. Nobody really needs it anymore.
Besides, the real struggle in the world today has become that
between the peoples of the world and their increasingly authoritarian,
corrupt and unproductive governments. Your country was one of
the first to collapse in the wake of this conflict, but that
just gives you a head start into the new frontier.
Unfortunately, most of the people
who might advise you on where to go have spent much of their
life figuring out how to increase centralized authority. Their
expertise won't help you much now. The people who can help are
to be found in little noticed corners. For example, have you
talked to the Swiss about democratic confederations? They've
got over five hundred years of experience. Have you checked out
any books on Green philosophy or read the works of E.F.Schumacher
or Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale?
You're sort of on your own here,
but remember: they don't teach devolution at Harvard and they
don't practice it in Washington. You'll have to look elsewhere.
Finally, about this economic business.
You've got keep a sharp eye on those Harvard types and the Wall
Streeters and the Fortune 500 experts. These guys have spent
the past decade figuring out how to borrow money to buy corporations
rather than making things. As a result, as one of our Democratic
presidential candidates said the other day, "The cold war
is over and Japan won."
As far as Harvard goes, Jonathan
Rowe, in a Washington Monthly article on Poland put it nicely:
"Though any number
of Western advisers have had a hand in this program, the one
who has gotten the most attention is Jeffrey Sachs, the globe-trotting
whiz kid from Harvard. Sachs preaches a kind of macro-economic
machismo. Raise prices, hike interest rates, welcome bankruptcies
and unemployment as evidence that the fat of the communist years
is sweating off the body economic. 'Western observers should
not over-dramatize layoffs and bankruptcies,' Sachs wrote in
The Economist. 'Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, now
has too little unemployment, not too much."
This is the sort of Cambridge machismo
that got us into years of trouble in Vietnam. Nothing is more
dangerous than a Harvard professor proving his virility in national
or international policy.
I understand they're trying to get
you to buy something called the market system. Back before the
Reagan administration they always called it the free market system
but increasingly the adjective is being dropped. That makes sense
because the only thing free its most ardent advocates want is
their own way. And mostly, under Reagan and Bush, they've been
getting it. Peter Ustinov said the other day that monetarism
invites the money changers into the temple and then sells them
the temple.
At its core, the market system is
nothing more than what humans have been doing since they first
traded a stone axe blade for a hunk of meat. There is nothing
mystical, sacred or moral about it. And above all, there's nothing
in the US Constitution about it. The idea that capitalism and
democracy are inexorably intertwined is one of the worst conceits
of our business classes.
It ain't so. For example, most people
in this country were self-employed well into the 19th century.
Businesses that sprung up didn't flourish on competition because
there often wasn't any. You didn't need two banks or two drug
stores in the average town. Prices and business ethics were not
regulated by the marketplace but by a complicated cultural code
and the fact that the banker had to go to church with his depositors.
If you wanted to form a corporation you had to get a state charter
and prove it was in the public interest, convenience and necessity.
With the industrial revolution that
all changed. By the end of the 19th century the Supreme Court
had declared corporations to be persons and entitled to the same
protections as real people. And the myth of the virtue of competition
was blooming -- justifying one of the great rapacious eras of
American business.
Over the years it's gotten worse,
until sometime in the 1980s even the economic hustlers had to
admit tacitly that enterprise isn't very free anymore. Not only
isn't it free, it's not working well either, a fact that has
been neatly obscured by constant and largely irrelevant comparison
to communism.
I'll tell you a secret, which maybe
you know already. Our system is on the skids, too, another ungainly
monster of an economic system based too much on greed, centralization
and unfairness. So if you look for salvation in our way of doing
business you may only be buying yourself a few years grace.
Perhaps it has dawned on you that
to do it right you're going to have to replace both communism
and capitalism with something better. Again you'll have to do
a lot of looking. The Swedish model has much to offer -- although
it, too, as the Swedish voters have suggested -- has its excesses.
There is the cooperative system of Mondragon, Spain, and the
mini-industries of Bologna. Even in this country, you'll find
ideas worth considering. There are big consumer cooperatives
like Land of Lakes Butter and the United Services Automobile
Association that thrive happily amongst the conventional capitalists.
The town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, holds its professional football
team in community ownership. As a result, it's about the only
professional sports team in America that we know won't be moving
to someplace else. And, of course, in any small communities the
farmer's coop is taken for granted as a major economic unit.
These are, I hasten to say, real consumer-owned coops where real
people rather than party bureaucrats make the decisions.
In the matter of money, it may help
to know that in the early stages of this country, regional and
local currency was common, meeting the needs of communities that
had labor and products but lacked the paper by which to evaluate
them. America didn't even have a central banking system until
1913.
In more recent times, experiments
with local currencies have had surprising success. Let me give
you one small example. During our current recession, the lease
for a certain restaurant in Great Barrington, Mass., expired
and the local bank wouldn't lend restauranteur Frank Tortrello
money to move across the street. So Frank decided to print his
own. He called them Deli Dollars. Each sold for $9 and could
be redeemed for $10 worth of food after six months. Not only
did the idea provide Frank with enough money to make his move,
but it spread throughout the community. A local farm issued notes
with the slogan "In Farms We Trust," featuring the
head of a cabbage instead of the head of a president. New restaurants
followed with their own currency and the local bills started
showing up everywhere, including in church collection plate.
Remember that money is just another
way of accounting for the trading of time and goods. American
farmers do this trading all the time without ever writing it
down or exchanging pieces of paper. One imaginative American,
Edgar Cahn, has come up with a system under which people can
earn time credits by assisting the elderly, to be redeemed in
services when the creditor becomes aged. It's all done on computers.
And there are a number of places in America and Canada where
they're using 'green dollars' -- no bills or notes are issued,
just computer records of services provided and received.
So don't just think of America as
a place built with money. In reality it was also built by a lot
of people who found some good ways to function without it. One
of those ways was to help one another, which is why some Washingtonians
still call a suburban volunteer rescure squad before they call
911. They know it will get there faster and do the job better.
As Rowe put it: "Free market ideology stresses the impersonal
nature of contracts. Life is a succession of deals, all to maximize
personal benefits." And despite what you hear, that's not
the way a lot Americans view life, nor practice it,
On the other hand, another great
American prototype is the snake oil salesman. We spend a lot
of time in this country trying to fool each other. We call it
marketing. So be careful when you make your deals and listen
to your American experts. Keep in mind what a real American expert,
a southern farmer, told his son: "Trust everyone but get
cash for your cotton."
I wish you luck, guys. If you have
it, then maybe in a few years Americans will be coming to Moscow
for advice. Because we need help, too.
1986
Psalm
for the fast lane
The Lord is my mentor;
I shall want it all.
He feedeth me in world-class
restaurants and leadeth me beside the sparkling mineral waters.
He restoreth my house and
bringeth me in the path of good access.
Yea, though I jog through
the valley of the shadow of high rises I shall fear no viable
competition; thy clout and thy bottom line shall comfort me.
He shall prepare a game
plan against mine enemies, and shall bloweth dry my head and
my Volvo shall runneth over to Bloomingdales.
Surely perks and power
lunches shall follow me all the days of my life and 1 shall dwell
in an upscale neighborhood forever and ever.
For thine is the power
and the glory -
But not for long, sucker.
I'm right behind you. |