|
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://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/
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 |