In
1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the
Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he
met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is
round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was
going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported
only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''
And
therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally
reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all
happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the
dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether
globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's
time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others
already are, and there is no time to waste.
I wish
I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world
quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the
Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore,
working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In
short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes
from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from
Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the
more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off
covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had
missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys
Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software
industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global
video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which
he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual
meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project
at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the
screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers
all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above
the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys
workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.
''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening
today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is
that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era,
when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband
connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same
time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and
there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and
proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to
Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone
to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around
2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work,
intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be
disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again --
and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially
work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is
really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
At one
point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that
rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He
meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global
knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for
this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed
road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is
being leveled.''
''What
Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened.
Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''
Here I
was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon,
looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational
technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the
world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his
country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of
his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which
he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting,
he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great
opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!
This
has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the
world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was
countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0
(1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was
spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0
(which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size
tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic
force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in
Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization
3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small
groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the
global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own,
collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from
the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it
is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and
2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But
going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only
going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse --
non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are
going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.
''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania
or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the
tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,''
said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first
commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going
to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less
about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the
Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''
Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the
flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting
all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the
downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist
knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of
teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect
us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on
the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from
left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30
years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius
in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius
in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent.
They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat,
and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join
the innovation fray.
When
the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to
get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
How
did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?
It was
a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and
converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first
event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the
Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to
think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of
keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view
of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the
wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows
3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by
creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.
The
second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which
did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the
browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape
stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble,
which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic
telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global
Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground
fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data
and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston,
Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape
revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level.
Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different
places in more different ways than ever before.
No
country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India
had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most
respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral
degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to
America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them
rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on
ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called
fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now
you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to
work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the
bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American
shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The
overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American
economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and
so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads,
''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.
The
first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were
enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all
over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian
Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at
Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was
made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call
''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards
and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those
computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment
connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did
was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could
work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers
like never before.
Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application
connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in
which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge.
One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly
with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from
accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted
to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second
was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.
The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using
engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.''
I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics
operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to
repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS
really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is
Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of
efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in
China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading
partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is
Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and
mine, unlimited data all by themselves.
So the
first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next
six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The
10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice
over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new
forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with
any device.
The
world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000.
This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms
of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography,
distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this
platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable
breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,''
said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.
No,
not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people
in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history.
Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers
bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers
working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of
business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working
with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being
flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and
more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between
companies and among individuals.
Do you
recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the
last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last
20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to
collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin
as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge.
One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina,
the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public
speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.''
The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up
act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event,
I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business,
of government, of society, of life.''
As if
this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred
during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were
out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking
about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and
Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the
course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the
free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new
playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened,
right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more
horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks
to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to
leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came
to them!
It is
this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new
processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important
force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not
all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the
world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent,
that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force.
And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They
are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next
generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but
also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30
years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to
''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as
collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost,
high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on
everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't
bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge
consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia
-- ''with rich educational heritages.''
That
is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will
continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field
legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap
right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken
costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new,
state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in
use in China today than there are people in America.
If you
want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you
two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were
involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft
Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese
universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from
China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science
students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their
Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job
there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at
Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300
other people just like you.''
The
other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who
started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights
to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao
said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit.
Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level
before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an
infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the
best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and
today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is
gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and
they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and
it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so
many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least
resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu,
he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite
easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up
and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same
infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are
diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''
Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western
Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and
raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in
innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that
before.''
Rao is
right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold
war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio,
when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the
air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the
Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched
siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war
when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''
That,
however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''
The
long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts
before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing
things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our
secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it
is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,''
says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world
that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and
we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice
coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but
there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to
have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''
If
this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the
cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space
race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from
those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from
the fact that all the walls are being taken down and many other people can now
compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that
world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and
North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing
extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in
that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is
building strong individuals.
Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and
focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a
president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more
young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband
infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American
become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime
employment.
We
have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism,
maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed,
the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been
replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in
Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev
threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice
eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece
of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding
a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl
of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line
just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It
simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''
No,
Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the
flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We
in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we
have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in
what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls
a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and
engineering base.
''If
left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D.
in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to
innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services
and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily
widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product
of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.''
Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have
gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce
Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense
of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not
producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by
importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now
stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely
keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for
exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key
reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we
are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O.
wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are
doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people
than their American workers.
These
are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the
governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is
''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see
when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In
math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By
eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students
are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage
of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In
2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the
United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's
degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in
engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best
supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''
We
need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer,
because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw
away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is
no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run
a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.
When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner
-- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat
world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your
homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
I
repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain
quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A
crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''
The first hallucination I had was while
shopping an Eagle supermarket in Iowa City. In the fresh fruit and vegetable
aisle, my field of vision began to get cloudy and saffron-colored, and by the
time I made it to frozen foods, I could barely see. Going to the cashier took
almost more courage than I had, because I was afraid she would notice
something wrong with me, that I wouldn’t be able to write the check and would
have to ask for help, embarrassed by my crippled tongue—I could not have
described or classified my ailment. I put on what I hoped was a neutral face
and strolled up, and when my turn came, by God, I wrote the check, clumsily
but accurately enough, and the cashier smiled indulgently. I had to walk home
across several busy streets, but I made it, and spent the rest of the day
writhing on my bed in what, it turns out, was my first migraine.
The onset of a migraine is
accompanied by a peculiar feeling that something is going to happen, as if I
can feel the nervous disruption rising through the brain like a swimmer to the
surface, as anxious for air as the migraine is to make itself known. And if I
watch it come, the malaise becomes more general and unfathomable, as if I can
feel my body in the process of deformation, my head swelling to one side and
shrinking on the other, my eyes bulging, almost to the size of my palm. It is
then I run for ice and medication, if I can, but if I can’t, submit myself to
this meditation on pain.
Classical migraines, the type I
suffer from, not only have excruciating headache neuralgia, usually above an
eye or at the temple, not only the intense nausea of the common migraine, but
also a blind spot in the field of vision. The hallucination or scotoma
(meaning shadow) starts as a small glittering flake and builds, after a few
minutes, into a huge purple amoebae that shimmers and pulsates, a horrible
planet Jupiter hovering over the visible world. Wherever I turn my head, it is
there. It completely obscures, or more accurately erases, whatever should be
there, and so leaves me with an attendant sensation of confusion—where has the
world gone? What has taken it away? The world has disappeared with my ability
to perceive it, or so the child in me, prominent under stress, believes.
The migraine hallucination often
begins as an irregular zigzag streak through the central part of my line of
vision. This creates a kind of Cubist effect in the faces I look into: the
migraine etches through them, distorting an eye lower or higher than it should
be, or removing it altogether. And as I turn my head from side to side, I can
look around the hallucination, but not through it; I can fill in the blanks,
but when I stare face-on it seems that the person has exploded. The migraine
attacks the object in view almost the way a Cubist does, cutting it up into
planes and pieces, as if the continents of the mind were drifting apart and
the halves of vision, rational and irrational, breaking apart in opposite
directions, leaving a gap through which a light pokes so that depth and
dimension become illusory. A headache can disrupt the pillars of my
assumptions: that the world is solid and more or less stationary in space.
During a migraine, I discover perception is a two-dimensional screen that can
be ripped apart, revealing oblivion, not solidity, beneath me.
What is this oblivion? I have
wondered if it might be constricted blood vessels in the eye, or a problem of
disoriented synapses. Oliver Sacks, in his wonderful book
Migraine, thinks it might be electrical
disturbances in the optic nerve. Considered aesthetically, the scotoma is
artwork, a kind of deep symbol, and I wonder if it might not be an emblem of
the imagination itself, since its job is to appropriate the innocent
appearances of the world and distort them. Coleridge said:
It is clear, then, that the
imagination must derive its very power from the act of dissolution, the
acidic destruction of primary perception into material malleable enough
for the imagination to work upon, just as the potter must work the clay
before he considers it suitable. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
order to recreate; it inverts the material to make it anew.
Migraine is destructive in that it
causes intense pain, as if someone were pressing a diamond through my eye to
find a particular nerve cord. It is a hard, constant pain so relentless and
out of control that it must come from outside myself, though I know it
doesn’t. The pain is caused by blood vessels contracting and then expanding
wildly so that blood seeps out into surrounding tissue, but this physical
damage seems incommensurate to the pain, as if the migraine were lavishing
itself on me.
But there is
something constructive about migraine. Just as the imagination dissolves the
world to create it anew, so the migraine dissolves perception in a vial of
pain to create it anew in hallucination, like a wild slash of paint. William
Carlos Williams said, “The imagination is a --,” meaning that the imagination
becomes whatever the senses feed it. Like the migraine, the imagination
removes the world in favor of itself, replacing the “real world” the optic
nerve picks up with its own artwork.
And this artwork, scrawl as it is,
seems hostile and bitter, like graffiti. I can’t help feeling it has a
message, a hidden language that will probably never find its translator; it
has a kind of symbolist-solipsist perfection in its abstract, unknowable,
God-like detachment.
My second migraine was in a Long John
Silver’s fast food restaurant—part of the fun the affliction has with you is
the places it picks to come at you, places where you find yourself either
stranded for a time or compelled not to scream out loud. This time the
hallucination came in a clearish purple and white, rather than saffron, as I
worked through my plate of fried fish and, laughing nervously out of macho
dismissal of pain, described the symptoms to my (then) wife who correctly
diagnosed me and insisted we begin the long walk home before the attack turned
worse. Of course, it was winter with the sun glaring on the ice, so as she
predicted it got worse and worse. I craved darkness and silence, and ever
since then I can barely stand the sun on a cloudy day, let alone a bright one.
This made me realize that my eyes,
the instruments of vision, are also the instruments of torture. Any bright
light, especially hot summer glare, can cause a blind spot to appear, the way
harsh images of light stay on the eye even after you’ve turned away. Brilliant
days, the most beautiful days, are also the most dangerous. I avoid looking at
crisp, glossy surfaces and chrome, glass and mirrors, and even strong
headlights in traffic at night. Migraine elaborates the glare, using it as a
springboard to overpower the surfaces of what I perceive. It even affects the
speech. Often during an attack, I can’t produce the word I am looking for, so
randomly related words are substituted by the confused brain working to get
around the void and paralysis.
The migraine aura also produces an
extreme sense of detachment from all my surroundings, and a feeling of
hibernation or distance, as if I were packed inside a wall of Styrofoam. The
world continues to go on as if nothing has happened, little realizing that for
me everything has happened: I am having a migraine, I must lie down, I am
blind. And this defines me, creates a horrible fascination for the
hallucination that verges on the decadent and narcissistic. As the scotoma
grows outward or larger like an approaching cloud of unknowing, so does the
psychic malaise grow as it both strives to see around the cloud, see into it,
and repress it, all at the same time. In appearance, it is usually a
silvery-purplish scintillation of crystalline light that seems to shimmer with
the same consistency as a mirage on a highway. It contains no exact form,
though its edges seem geometrically sharp, almost like the edges of a circular
saw. In this formlessness it seems like some primal material awaiting a
demiurge, unless, as I suspect, I simply cannot see the forms that are
there—vague crystalline castles rising from liquid streets, much like those
sold in pill form to children through comic books; once dropped in water, the
crystals form themselves into arabesques of red and blue, like bizarre towers
or perverse trees, forbidding, dangerous, death-like. But it resembles nothing
so much as nothingness, a piece of film that has been scratched so that, when
projected, the light itself shows through on the screen.
Although the scotoma seems large
while undergoing the hallucination, part of the horror is that I know it is
really small, a part of me, projected onto the thin screen between the world
and me. I watch it the way I watch a movie in a cinema, as a passive observer,
making tenuous abstractions on the “meaning” of the images. Projected film,
like sensuous perception, floats on an ocean of light always ready to swallow
it back up and return it to its primal state, oblivion. Once in the Threepenny
Theater in Chicago, I watched a film get stuck in the projector and the
intense heat of the lamp melt the frame from the inside out. That is what a
migraine looks like, only slower, the center of an empty house of mirrors.
From glass to glass, the empty light forms a pattern of weaving and
interweaving with nothing to interrupt it until it catches something—a
face—and dissolves it into endless reflection.
The headache begins to subside, the
hallucination to sink back into the cracks of vision. It is as if the tide
were going out.
But there is another paradoxical side
to this, the personality of the hallucination. It will not leave the field of
vision, it persistently follows me no matter how deliberately I flee, it is
specific to me as only I can see, as if it were an Old Testament vision,
wheels within wheels. And like the prophets, it bears a message of destruction
and mortality, a kind of banner: this is a
taste of death, now it will come and overwhelm you like a claw punching
through a curtain.
Migraines are most terrifying when I
get them while teaching, because I feel a strong urge to stop the class,
though I do not want to admit a weakness as strange as blind spots, so I
continue with the scotoma obscuring more and more of the page I am reading
aloud, until I am sure I am making mistakes and fear that the students know
something is wrong, but I dare not stop for fear the last bit of order in my
class will collapse in embarrassment. One time I was teaching a High School
for the Arts poetry workshop while the aura crept over me, with the added
problem of the youthful situation, leaving me blind and close to speech
impaired. My fear of admitting weakness proved the stronger—I did not stop,
since I was close to the end of the period, even though I later realized I
must have been staring strangely into the face of one student, without
realizing it as I could not see her. I am afraid to wonder what she must have
thought, especially because the class before she had surprised me with her
entire senior project—all nude photos of herself—and she was quite something
to behold. And there I was, nearly drooling, staring into her face.
As the hallucination reaches its
height, the disruption of the motor functions begins to taper off; cold vapors
of numbness crawl over the hands and arms, the headache begins to subside, and
the hallucination itself begins to subside, break up and sink back into the
cracks of vision. It is as if the tide were going out. Nevertheless, the right
side of my face retains a tingling sensation, as if a cold hand were still on
it, disinclined to let go. And for hours the malaise, or the sense of having
been shocked by something, lingers, as if the body needed a kind of
decompression after rising through cold, deep water. Migraine is a kind of
visitor from another world, which, for a while, tears a bit of my world out
and replaces it with its own creation, a shimmering creature that erases
everything in its path, a kind of mad, blind imagination roving over me, a
rebuke and a censure. The pain subsides and washes out of the senses, though
the body still feels marked. But my vision is restored.
Becoming a patient of
migraines was part of my coming of age: it happened when I was first learning
seriously about writing poetry, when my first marriage was dissolving due to
lack of interest, when my second was appearing out of the wings, when my
middle twenties and the middle Eighties were about to turn late. Perhaps this
is why I associate migraines with the imagination: trial by fire, ordeal of
initiation, they imitate the purging work of writing, revision, where for me
the essence of imagination lies. A migraine closes off the world and reworks
you until it gets you where it wants you. And the sense of relief when one
passes over like a thunderstorm is very like the feeling when I more or less
have finished a draft of a poem: something has gone out of me, something
almost tactile. This year (1988) I turn thirty, and though I don’t by any
means feel middle-aged, I do feel something going out of me, replaced by
mortal time accumulating like film on the take-up reel of a projector. Could
migraines be an emblem of the interior clock, a sort of visual alarm going off
to signal it is time to wake up after all this sleepwalking? I have never felt
more awake than I feel after a migraine, but it is a bittersweet taste to
regain the control of your bodily senses with the knowledge of how limited,
how fragile they are.
5 girls' deaths highlight child-labor woes in China
Some estimate 10 million kids help fuel the manufacturing engine, often in harsh
conditions
By Ching-Ching Ni
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
May 22, 2005
BEIXINZHUANG, China -- Christmas was just two days away, and snow was falling
when the five factory girls finished their shift. They had been working 12
hours, it was already after 1 a.m., and their dorm was freezing cold. One of
them ran out to grab a bucket and some burning coal. The room warmed slightly.
They drifted off to sleep.
Next morning, none of them woke up, poisoned by the fumes. But their parents
believe at least two of the girls died a much more horrible death.
They charge that the owner of the canvas factory where they worked was so
impatient to cover up the fact that three of the unconscious workers were
underage that he rushed the girls into caskets while some were still alive.
"You see the damage on the corner of the box, the bruises on the side of her
head, and the vomit in her hair?" said Jia Haimin, the mother of 14-year-old
Wang Yajuan, pointing to pictures of her daughter lying in a cardboard casket
stained with vomit and appearing to show evidence of a struggle.
"Dead people can't bang their heads against the box. Dead people can't vomit. My
child was still alive when they put her in there."
The case, made public months later by New York-based Human Rights in China,
highlights this country's often hidden problem of child labor. The Chinese
government officially forbids children younger than 16 from working, but critics
say it does little to enforce the law.
Statistics are hard to come by, but by some estimates, as many as 10 million
school-age children are doing their part to turn China into a low-cost
manufacturing powerhouse.
"We know enough about the problem to know child labor is extremely widespread,"
said Robin Munro, research director at China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based
labor-rights organization focused on mainland China.
"The rural education system in many parts of the countryside is in a state of
virtual collapse," Munro said. "There is a high dropout rate of children under
16. They are not just sitting around doing nothing. It is safe to assume most
are engaged in some kind of work illegally."
Children, some as young as 4, roam China's prosperous coastal cities, begging on
the streets or selling roses deep into the night, apparently victims of schemes
that use youngsters as bait. Even infants are being rented out as maternal cover
for women selling pirated porn movies on the streets.
In 2000, state media reported that 84 children had been kidnapped from southern
China's Guizhou province to work in coastal cities assembling Christmas lights.
The youngest was 10.
In 2001, an explosion at a rural school in Jiangxi province killed 42 people,
most of them 3rd and 4th graders who were believed to be making fireworks.
Classes of kids contracted out
Labor activists say a growing number of rural schools have contracted entire
classes of students to work in urban factories, supposedly to help defray school
costs.
"They call it work-study programs," Munro said.
In principle, China is committed to ending child labor. According to the
International Labor Organization, China has ratified two ILO conventions on
labor practices. Article 138 forbids minors under 15 from working. Article 182
bans the worst forms of child labor, including prostitution and slave labor.
But this is a country where making laws is much easier than implementing them.
"This is a society in transition," said Hans van de Glind of the ILO's office in
Beijing. "The intention is there to make progress."
On the dusty plains of Beixinzhuang village, in northern China's Hebei province,
grieving parents blame poverty and lack of opportunity for sending their
children to the factories.
"Rural families are not like city people--not all children can afford to go to
school. So they work to help alleviate the family's burdens," said Sun Jiangfen,
the mother of Jia Wanyun, one of the 14-year-old canvas-factory workers who died
in December. "In this village, every family has a child working in a factory."
Sun's daughter had been on the job about a month when the accident occurred in
the girls' sleeping quarters. She had quit school the previous spring, moving
about 35 miles away to an industrial suburb of Shijiazhuang, because her parents
needed her help to put her 12-year-old brother through school.
Many rural girls drop out because their families can't afford to pay more than
one tuition. Two children in school, which costs about $300 per student, would
have been too much for her migrant construction-worker father and farmer mother.
The girl was promised about $100 a year in wages, but she hadn't been paid
because she was still considered an apprentice, her mother said.
Both of Wang Shuangzheng's daughters had worked at the canvas factory spinning
yarn. His 21-year-old stopped recently after marrying; his younger daughter, Jia
Shiwei, picked up the slack when she was 15 and had been working there two years
before the accident.
Family tries to carry on
The family last saw her during autumn harvest when she came home to help. Her
grandmother suffered a stroke when she learned of the girl's death, and the
family is still in shock.
"She wanted to go, and I couldn't stop her. My son's getting married, and we
need the money," said Wang, a farmer.
Another villager, Wang Shuhai, has been ill for years with a heart condition. He
is unable to work, and his family is deep in debt because of his medical
expenses. He is tormented by the thought that his daughter, Wang Yajuan, died
because of him. She had called only once since leaving for work last fall, he
said.
"She said she didn't want to stay there anymore. The work was too hard, and the
food was terrible," said Wang, holding up a school photo of a fresh-faced little
girl in a ponytail. "I told her to stay, because if you leave, you wouldn't be
paid. The child listened to me."
According to relatives, the girls rarely talked about how hard the conditions
were.
"They don't want us to worry," said Jia Shitong, 24, Jia Shiwei's brother. "But
think about it--12 hours a day with no weekends off. How can it not be
exhausting?"
Quick meal, bed, death
The day of their final shift, parents say, the girls ate a quick meal before
going to bed, sleeping five to a room, sharing two single beds shoved together
for maximum warmth.
"It must have been really cold," said Sun, Jia Wanyun's mother.
For a while, the families fought the official ruling that their children had not
been buried alive. They persisted even after the long-awaited autopsy that came
late last month, reconfirming the government's earlier report.
"They ripped my daughter's heart out. The least they can do is give me some
justice," said Jia Haimin, Wang Yajuan's mother.
Eventually they accepted a compensation package of about $12,000 each and agreed
to drop all charges, according to the families' Beijing lawyer, Li Wusi.
"Sure, there are still lingering doubts about how they died," Li said. "But what
choices do their parents have? Farmers have very low status in Chinese society.
Farmers' daughters are the lowest of the low."
Louis Rene Beres is a
professor in the political science department at Purdue University who cannot be
reached by cell phone
June 12, 2005
I belong. Therefore I am.
This is the unheroic credo expressed by cell-phone addiction, a not-so-stirring
manifesto that social acceptance is vital to survival and that real happiness is
solely the privilege of mediocrity.
This largely undiagnosed techno-condition represents much more than a reasonable
need to remain connected. After all, when one looks closely at these
communications a clear message is delivered: Talking on a cell phone makes the
caller feel more important, more valuable, less alone, less lonely.
At a time when "rugged individualism" has become a nostalgic myth in America,
being witnessed in conversation with another--any other--is presumed to be
absolutely vital. Certainly, the nature or urgency of the particular phone
conversation is mostly irrelevant. In many readily observable cases the exchange
consists of meaningless blather punctuated by monosyllabic grunts. There is no
vital content here; certainly nothing to resemble a serious reflex of thought or
feeling.
All that really matters is that the caller be seen talking with another human
being and that the conversation push away emptiness and anxiety.
How sad. The known universe is now said to be about 68 billion light-years
"across," and yet here, in the present-day United States, being seen on the
phone--preferably while walking briskly with rapt inattention to one's immediate
surroundings, including life-threatening car traffic or heavy rain--is a
desperate cry to every other passerby: "I am here; I have human connections; I
count for something; I am not unpopular; I am not alone."
The cell phone, of course, has not caused people to display such feelings.
Rather, it is merely an instrument that lets us see what might otherwise lie
dormant in a society of dreadful conformance and passionless automatism.
Ringingly, it reveals that we have become a lonely crowd driven by fear and
trembling.
There exists, as Freud understood, a universal wish to remain unaware of
oneself, and this wish generally leads individuals away from personhood and
toward mass society. Hiding what might express an incapacity to belong, trying
to be a good "member," the anxious American soon learns that authenticity goes
unrewarded and that true affirmations of self will likely be unpardonable.
Humans often fear ostracism and exclusion more acutely even than death, a
personal calculus that is largely responsible for war, terrorism and genocide.
It is small wonder, then, that something as harmless as a cell phone should now
have become a proud shiny badge of group standing.
The inner fear of loneliness expressed by cell-phone addiction gives rise to a
very serious and far-reaching social problem. Nothing important, in science or
industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy can ever take
place without some loneliness.
To be able to exist apart from the mass--from what Freud called the
reconstituted "primal horde" or Nietzsche the "herd" or Kierkegaard the
"crowd"--is notably indispensable to intellectual development and creative
inquiry. Indeed, to achieve any sense of spirituality in life, one must also be
willing to endure being alone.
All of the great religious leaders and founders sought essential meanings
"inside," in seclusion, deep within themselves.
But personal sadness in America seems to grow more intense wherever
communication is difficult and wherever fears are incommunicable. In one sense,
cell-phone addiction is less an illness than an imagined therapy.
Ultimately, in a society filled with devotees of a pretended happiness, it is
presumptively an electronic link to redemption.
But the presumption is all wrong.
Trying to fill some vacancy within themselves, the compulsive cell-phone users
should now remind us of a revealing image from T.S. Eliot: They are the "hollow
men," they are the "stuffed men," leaning together as they experience painful
feelings of powerlessness. More than anything else, they fear finding themselves
alone, and so they cannot find themselves at all.
The noisy and shallow material world has infested our solitude; upon all of us
the predictable traces of herd life have now become indelible. Facing an
indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse, we Americans seek both meaning and
ecstasy in techno-connections.
But we discover instead that the way is cruelly blocked by an insipid mimicry
and endless apprehension. Do we dare to disturb the universe, or must we
continue to die slowly, prudently, always in responsible increments, without
ever taking the chance of becoming fully born?
One conveniently forgets that life is always death's prisoner.
Yet, once we can come to grips with this liberating idea we can begin to take
our numbered moments with more intense pleasure and with true confidence in
ourselves as unique. For now only our self-doubt seems inexhaustible, but this
is because we routinely look to others to define who we are and because we
despair when we do not measure up to these manufactured definitions.
In a sense, the attraction of the cell-phone machine is derivative from our own
machine-like existence, a push-button metaphysics wherein every decision and
every passion follows a standardized and uniformly common pathway.
We believe that we are the creators of all machines, and strictly speaking, of
course, this is correct. But there is also an unrecognized reciprocity here
between creator and creation, an elaborate pantomime between user and used.
Increasingly our constructions are making a machine out of man. In an
unforgivable inversion of Genesis, it now even appears that we have been created
in the image of the machine.
Cell-phone addiction is merely the very visible symptom of a pervasive
pathology. The underlying disease is a social order built upon nonsense, a
literally mindless network of jingles, advertised meanings and ready-made ideas
that deplores individuality and celebrates slogans.
Our American society has lost all sense of awe in the world.
Cell phones in hand, we talk on and on because we would rather not think, and we
would rather not think because there is no apparent emotional or material payoff
for serious thought.
Holding fast to our cell phones, our fondest wish is that we should soon become
interchangeable. We should be careful what we wish for.
SACRAMENTO -- Sergio Chaparro's information-technology students had more than
just a healthy attachment to their cell phones.
When he asked them to shut them off for three days, they panicked.
"They were afraid. They were truly afraid," Chaparro, then an instructor at
Rutgers University in New Jersey, recalled of the assignment last year. "They
thought it was going to be a painful experience, and they were right."
Only three of about 220 students managed to complete the assignment.
To Chaparro, now an assistant professor at Simmons College in Boston, the
experiment confirmed what he strongly suspected was a widespread psychological
dependence on cell phones.
"I think it's critical that people realize their level of dependency, and
possibly do something about it," he said.
Business executives. Soccer moms. Travelers. Teenagers. All of them adore their
cell phones. But when does love turn into addiction?
High school paranoia
A Korean study found recently that nearly a third of high school students showed
signs of addiction, including paranoia, when they were without their phones, and
two-thirds were "constantly worried" that they would miss a text message when
their phones were off.
In Britain, researchers concluded that people are so intimately connected with
their cell phones that they see them as "an essential item, an extension of
self."
"No other medium has infiltrated society so widely and so quickly" to alter
lifestyles, and "no other portable medium is used so frequently," wrote
researchers for Teleconomy Group. They surveyed 210 consumers about their use of
mobile phones.
Here in America, research on emotional attachment to cell phones has been
sparse. But Joseph Tecce, an associate professor of psychology at Boston
College, said it is a rich field to be mined.
Like substance abuse, Tecce said, excessive use of cell phones can lead to
personal problems.
"If you try to exert control over your use of the phone and you can't do it,
that's dependence. That's addiction," said Tecce, who studies "psychobiological
behavior" including addictions and phobias.
"People who instantly reach for the cell phone every time they feel uneasy or
anxious about a problem are relying too much on it," he said.
Ultimately, said Tecce, such behavior undermines self-reliance and reduces
self-esteem.
"Like many rewarding experiences, leaning heavily on cell phones for advice or
psychological nurturance is effective in reducing anxiety in the short term, but
harmful in the long term," he said.
"How? By taking away control of one's behavior and placing it in the hands of
others. After all, a problem might arise without a handy cell phone, and then
helplessness rules the hour."
Too much yapping on the cell phone, Tecce added, can also lead to "a constant
state of distraction" that "takes away a key component of happiness, the
pleasure of total absorption of one activity to the exclusion of everything
else."
Tecce recommended that cell phone abusers "put themselves on a quota system,
either so many minutes per day or so many calls per day" in an effort to break a
serious habit.
Dependence on electronic devices is hardly limited to cell phones, said Bill
Lampton, a communications specialist and author in Georgia. Electronic mail, he
said, is equally addictive.
"Not long ago my e-mail system was down for 24 hours," recalled Lampton, author
of the book "The Complete Communicator."
"How did I feel? Isolated, marooned, in a sense almost rejected because I
couldn't contact business and personal associates."
As for the cell phone, "It's not an exaggeration to say that it has become our
contemporary pacifier," Lampton said. "As long as we're holding it, we don't
show signs of unrest.
"The difficulty comes when we lose our perspective on a tool that we're supposed
to control -- not let control us."
David Mullinax, a lobbyist who does business in Santa Barbara and Sacramento,
admitted an addiction to his BlackBerry, a wireless gadget that, among other
things, transmits e-mail.
`Information overload'
"Absolutely," he said.
"`Crack'-Berry is appropriate nomenclature."
Despite his attachment to the device, Mullinax said, it often makes him feel
"bludgeoned with information overload" and ultimately feeling "weak and
ineffectual."
"It's like being caught in a wave and being tossed around like a rag doll,
unable to control where you're going and not able to assimilate the information
into anything truly worthwhile," he said.
Cell phones are particularly seductive because they are relatively cheap,
readily available and highly portable, Chaparro said.
"Society as a whole has created a dependency," he said.
Marketing of cell phones is relentless, and access to pay phones and other "land
lines" is growing more and more limited, Chaparro noted. So people feel they
"have" to carry cell phones. And once they do, they tend to overuse them.
In his class last year, Chaparro said, he learned "amazing things" about the
cell phone culture of his students.
Phone's a lifeline
"For most of them, the phone was a lifeline in many ways," he said.
"I had one student who went on a spring break trip to Florida, lost her cell
phone, and her mom had to FedEx another one from home right away. She said, `I
didn't feel secure, Sergio. I couldn't even call to rent a car.'"
Against his better judgment, Chaparro said, he recently broke down and bought a
cell phone for himself.
"And let me tell you, it's addictive," he said.
"I have the very simplest one, the cheapest one ever, no camera, no text,
nothing. I pay the minimum. But sometimes I feel I can't leave home without it."
As cell phones become ubiquitous, people's "addiction" is likely to increase, he
said.
"We need some voices out there to tell people to be cautious," Chaparro said.
"It's not about stopping progress. It's about making people realize there are
other ways to interact."
SOMERVILLE, Mass. -- Gary Hirshberg isn't the first parent to become frustrated
by the lack of healthy fast-food options for his kids during a road trip. But as
president of Stonyfield Farm yogurt company, Hirshberg was in a position to do
something about it.
Now, six years after that fateful vacation in northern California, Hirshberg is
overseeing a project he hopes will spark a revolution in the fast-food industry.
It's called O'Naturals, a small chain of fast-food restaurants in the Northeast
that offers everything from carrot ginger soup and organic smoked tofu to bison
meatloaf sandwiches, and macaroni and cheese, much of it made with organic or
natural ingredients.
O'Naturals opened its fourth store in April in a former bakery at the edge of
the trendy Davis Square neighborhood in Somerville, a Boston suburb, and plans
are under way to expand the chain across the nation through franchises.
"We call it `fast food with a mission,'" said Hirshberg, who envisions his
restaurants shaking up the restaurant business in much the same way that Whole
Foods Market shook up the grocery trade.
At a time when McDonald's is championing salads and Burger King is offering a
veggie burger, Hirshberg and a handful of other entrepreneurs are taking things
a step further, emphasizing how the food is produced as much as how it tastes.
One of the most successful examples is the Chipotle chain, which has 450
restaurants nationwide and is partly owned by McDonald's. Several years ago it
began offering tacos and burritos with Niman Ranch pork, which means the pigs
are raised outdoors and do not eat feed containing hormones or antibiotics. Pork
sales at the restaurant jumped sixfold, and Chipotle recently started offering
antibiotic-free chicken at many of its restaurants.
"If you take a Niman Ranch pork chop and take it next to a factory farm pork
chop, there's a big difference," said Steve Ells, founder and chief executive
officer of Chipotle. Besides selling food that tastes better, Ells said, selling
food raised in a more humane and environmentally sustainable way is the right
thing to do.
Doubters remain
"We really think we can change the supply chain for the better," he said, noting
that Chipotle is slowly adding organic ingredients if supplies are available and
not too costly.
"We don't want to serve an $18 burrito," Ells said, adding, "You can't flip a
switch and have it all free-ranging and organic overnight."
Not everyone is convinced that healthy fast food will succeed any better than it
has in the past. "If I had a nickel for every time somebody told me times are
different, I'd be a millionaire," said Harry Balzer, vice president of the NPD
Group, which tracks what people eat.
In Colorado, the Good Times burger chain is following a formula similar to
Chipotle's, making hamburgers from "all-natural" beef that doesn't contain
hormones or antibiotics.
In Tampa, the EVOS chain offers tacos made with free-range beef and hormone-free
chicken. Its french fries are baked rather than fried, reducing fat by
three-quarters.
"I think the trends are definitely going in that direction," said Steven
Hoffman, president of Compass Natural Marketing in Colorado, a marketing
consultant for organic and natural-foods companies. "Look at Whole Foods Market.
It's a $4 billion company. This is spilling out into fast food. It is probably
the last frontier for healthy foods."
McLean Deluxe failed
While Hoffman is optimistic that the new healthy fast-food restaurants will
succeed, a history of spectacular health-food failures suggests otherwise.
Remember the McLean Deluxe? The burger was lower in fat thanks to a seaweed
derivative mixed with the meat, but when McDonald's offered the sandwich to
consumers in the early 1990s, few were interested.
Similarly, the D'Lites chain in the early 1980s offered low-fat burgers on
multigrain buns, vegetarian sandwiches and salads, and it quickly grew to 104
restaurants, prompting one of its founders to proclaim, "We're on the leading
edge of an up-and-coming consumer wave." But the D'Lites wave crashed about five
years after it began.
Harry George, an Evanston native who lives in Arizona, hoped to turn the Blind
Faith Cafe, the popular vegetarian restaurant in Evanston, into a chain of
restaurants, albeit more formal than fast-food stores. He opened a second Blind
Faith Cafe on Lincoln Avenue several years ago but it closed after a year, a
failure he attributes to poor location and inadequate parking.
"Our thought was to expand Blind Faith Cafe to five units," George said. "Five
is kind of the magic number for getting outside revenue for restaurants, because
then you can prove it's the concept and not the location."
Balzer said O'Naturals may well find a sizable niche like Whole Foods, which now
has 170 stores and 59 in the works. But if Hirshberg hopes to play at the level
of McDonald's, with more than 30,000 locations, his restaurant will have to
compete with other mega-chains on taste, convenience and price, Balzer said.
"The major shift in the supermarket industry was not Whole Foods," he said. "It
was Wal-Mart. How did they do it? By making it healthier? By making it easier?
They own cheap."
But Hirshberg said the success of Stonyfield Farm, now America's largest organic
yogurt business, shows that Americans are willing to pay more for higher-quality
food. He likens the costs at O'Naturals, where sandwiches cost $6 to $7.50, to
the Panera Bread chain.
"Some of our fastest-growing items are a dollar or more than our competition,"
Hirshberg said, referring to Stonyfield. Noting the success of Cosi and Panera,
he said there are "big, big changes happening in this country as people realize
that you get what you pay for."
The inspiration for O'Naturals was a Hirshberg family vacation in northern
California in 1999, when family members became "frustrated hostages to junk
food." He later had an epiphany when he took a carload of kids to the deli
counter at Whole Foods, and they happily dined on organic pizza and other
healthy fare.
Hirshberg enlisted an old friend to run O'Naturals day-to-day, a former
executive from L.L. Bean named Mac McCabe. They opened the first O'Naturals in
Portland, Maine, in 2001 and now envision not only more freestanding stores, but
also O'Naturals counters in airports and supermarkets.
Noting the checkered history of health-food joints, Hirshberg said he and McCabe
were careful to focus first on taste. O'Naturals uses organic ingredients
whenever possible and food that is less processed than the fare found at
traditional fast-food restaurants.
"We don't really talk about healthy anywhere in our restaurant," Hirshberg said.
"That's very intentional. Not because it isn't. We want them to enjoy the food
for the food, and then to feel that health is a benny."
- - -
THE LATEST FAST-FOOD TREND isn't about secret sauces, it's about promoting
freshness, quality ingredients and healthful eating. Among the claims:
O'NATURALS
Locations: 4
Opened: 2001
Ingredients do not contain additives or preservatives. The chain also uses
organically raised or grown ingredients in many of its items.
CHIPOTLE
Locations: 450
Opened: 1993
Uses mostly animals raised outdoors without hormones or antibiotics.
McDONALD'S
Locations: More than 30,000
Opened: 1955
Offers a fruit and walnut salad.
BURGER KING
Locations: More than 11,000
Opened: 1954
Has added Morningstar Farms garden veggie burgers to the menu.
Up until the jury acquitted Michael Jackson of sexually molesting a
young boy the other day, the criminal case against him was
unremarkable. Except for the celebrity, it was something common,
something you'd find at the bottom of a garbage can on a hot morning
in June.
But from now on it becomes remarkable. Our reaction to the Jackson
verdict tells us much about how far we'll go to accommodate celebrity,
just as the court case told us about the predators, from Jackson and
the alleged victim's family to the show-biz reporters and shrieking
legal shills who attached themselves to this story, so many rubbing
their fingers together, quickly, furtively.
There were the delighted squeals of Jackson's fans outside the
courthouse. There was Rev. Jesse Jackson sobbing some grateful public
tears at the good news for the pop singer before leading a prayer of
thanksgiving, appropriately enough in a hotel bar in Chicago.
Again, Jackson was acquitted, so in the eyes of the law he is not a
sexual predator. And while some jurors and much of the public consider
the singer to be a creep, his record is clear--he was not convicted.
Yet there is clearly something predatory about Jackson's behavior. He
has lavished favor on parents, with access to celebrity, and in
exchange for all the goodies he gets what he wants--a boy in his bed.
And any mother who would put her child into the bed of a strange man
as she accepts his gifts is a pimp. No, I take that back. She's worse.
A pimp sells another person's flesh for money, and a mother who'd do
such a thing sells her own. As they balanced these in the hierarchy of
evil, the jury sided with the predatory star, and not with the woman
they saw as a lying schemer who pimped her son.
I avoided this story because it was so show-biz, the sexually confused
and infantile pop icon, once black and now bleached, whose appetite
has been shielded by music money and Hollywood power, and by the
mother who didn't call police, but first called a lawyer to craft a
hefty settlement.
Except for the Hollywood angle, and our peculiar American attitude
toward celebrity, our yearning for it, our eagerness to forgive it,
the rest is as pathetic as what you'd learn at any criminal court
building: that some kids are sold for drugs, some for an adult's peace
of mind.
"I feel that Michael Jackson has probably molested boys," juror
Raymond Hultman, 62, told CNN, echoing the statements of other jurors.
"To be in your bedroom for 365 straight days and not do something more
than just watch television and eat popcorn, that doesn't make sense to
me. ... But that doesn't make him guilty of the charges that were
presented."
There was reason for doubt. And, naturally, the prosecutor will be
criticized for being overzealous. But many prosecution critics have
shielded themselves from moral responsibility by publicly hoping that
Jackson won't take any more little boys to his bed. Well, here's some
news to soothe them.
"He's not going to [take little boys to bed with him] because it makes
him vulnerable to false charges," a Jackson spokesman/lawyer/spinner
was quoted as saying Tuesday.
And, it's not good business to get caught taking little boys to bed,
either, as music and Hollywood executives have been saying. As one
celebrity journalist said on Fox News after the verdict, shaking his
head, sighing, "Kids will bring you down if you sleep with them."
There's also the new race angle, which is odd because Michael
Jackson's attitude toward racial identification is ambivalent at best.
Yet according to a Gallup poll, whites by a roughly 2-1 margin thought
he was guilty; and non-whites thought he was innocent by the same
ratio.
Like the O.J. Simpson murder trial, it is believed that the
particulars were layered against historical grievance, as if the
alleged victim and Jackson carried the issues of slavery and
discrimination with them, rather than the pathology of a formerly
black pop star who likes sleeping with little boys, including the one
whose mother is Hispanic and presumably not the descendant of Southern
plantation owners and segregationists.
We've also been given the soap opera angle, the "Who dissed who in
court" business, and how the jury didn't like the mother or the noise
she made under oath. "I disliked it intently [sic] when she snapped
her finger at us," one juror, a 79-year-old great-grandmother, was
quoted as saying. "That's what I thought, `Don't snap your fingers at
me, lady.'"
And don't forget the rehabilitation angle: Will Jackson's image be
reformed by those who stand to profit by what's left of him?
Show biz is somewhat about talent, but it's more about promotion,
about money, about pimping the fantasy of flesh. It's been that way
since the first Hollywood starlet was privately interviewed by the
first Hollywood big shot after the first big Hollywood lunch.
PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 21 - In what is likely to be the final chapter in a
story that has troubled a generation, a jury pronounced Edgar Ray Killen
guilty of manslaughter on Tuesday in the deaths of three young and idealistic
civil rights workers who disappeared on a summer night here exactly 41 years
ago.
Mr. Killen, 80, sat in a wheelchair, the thin, greenish tubes of an
oxygen tank under his nose, his expression impassive as the verdict was read
aloud. Throughout the courtroom, people wept - the Killen family on the right,
the victims' relatives on the left, as well as townspeople deeply invested in
seeing the case brought to trial in hopes that Neshoba County could overcome
its past.
Roscoe Jones, a tall, elderly black man with tear-rimmed eyes who had
worked alongside the three men who died, pushed his way through the crowd to
the side of Rita Bender, a diminutive white woman who had been married to one
of them. "Excuse me," Mr. Jones said, politely urgent. "Excuse me." When he
reached Ms. Bender, they embraced.
The disappearance of the three men, Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner,
24, and James Earl Chaney, 21, on June 21, 1964, drew the national news media
and hundreds of searchers to Neshoba County, while Mississippi officials said
publicly that the disappearance was a hoax intended to draw attention. When
the three bodies - two white, one black - were found under 15 feet of earth on
a nearby farm, the nation's horror helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
The case, dramatized in the movie "Mississippi Burning," is one of the biggest
in what some have called the South's "atonement trials" revisiting
civil-rights-era atrocities.
Jurors said the evidence fell short of what they needed to convict Mr.
Killen, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, of murder.
"I should say I heard a number of very emotional statements from some of
the white jurors," said Warren Paprocki, 54, a white juror. "They had tears in
their eyes, saying that if they could just have better evidence in the case
that they would have convicted him of murder in a minute. Our consensus was
the state did not produce a strong enough case."
The defense plans to appeal. "At least he wasn't found guilty of a willful
and wanton act," said James McIntyre, one of Mr. Killen's lawyers.
"Manslaughter is a negligent act."
Although the federal government tried 18 men, including Mr. Killen, on a
conspiracy charge in 1967, Mr. Killen - a preacher and sawmill operator - was
the first to be charged by the state. The 1967 jury deadlocked over Mr.
Killen, and he has maintained his innocence. He faces up to 20 years in prison
on each count when he is sentenced on Thursday.
As he was wheeled out of the courthouse, Mr. Killen swatted away television
cameras and microphones.
With witnesses dead and memories fading, he could be the only one of the
mob of Klansmen responsible for the killings to be tried. Prosecutors say that
a grand jury heard all the available evidence against the eight original
defendants still living but returned only one indictment, against Mr. Killen.
While some in Neshoba County said it was too late and too painful to revisit
the episode, others thought that in doing so, the county might find
redemption.
"Finally, finally, finally," said Jim Prince, the editor of the local
weekly newspaper, The Neshoba Democrat. "This certainly sends a message, I
think, to the criminals and to the thugs that justice reigns in Neshoba
County, unlike 41 years ago."
Ben Chaney, James Earl Chaney's younger brother, said he spoke briefly to
his 82-year-old mother after the verdict. "She's happy," he said. "She finally
believes that the life of her son has some value to the people in this
community."
But for some of those who had hoped to see Mr. Killen convicted of murder,
the manslaughter verdict was less than a total victory. "The fact that some
members of this jury could have sat through that testimony, indeed could have
lived here all these years and could not bring themselves to acknowledge that
these were murders, that they were committed with malice, indicates that there
are still people unfortunately among you who choose to look aside, who choose
to not see the truth," Ms. Bender, who was married to Mr. Schwerner, said
after the trial.
To Nettie Cox, the first black to run for mayor in Philadelphia, the
verdict was an affront. "Manslaughter," Ms. Cox said, putting her hands to her
temples. "I just can't absorb manslaughter."
But two jurors interviewed said there was not enough evidence that Mr.
Killen, who was accused of orchestrating the killings and recruiting the mob
that abducted the men and beat Mr. Chaney, shooting all three, had intended
for the men to die.
Both the defense and the prosecution failed to impress the jury of nine
whites and three blacks. Jurors said neither presented enough witnesses and
that the case relied too heavily on transcripts from the federal trial.
On Monday evening, after deliberating more than two hours, the jury
reported to Judge Marcus Gordon that they were evenly divided, and he
dismissed them for the night. But after deliberating for nearly three hours on
Tuesday morning, they reached a unanimous verdict.
Jurors disputed an inference that manslaughter may have been a compromise
verdict. One, Troy Savell, a white history teacher and coach, said he was
initially in favor of acquittal, but his opinion changed as the jury
deliberated. "I think the reasonable doubt was not there that he didn't have
anything to do with it," Mr. Savell said.
Mr. Paprocki said race did not play a role in the deliberations. One of the
three blacks on the jury was vocally in favor of a murder conviction at first,
Mr. Paprocki said, but he was not sure where the other two stood.
Willis Lyon, the only one of the three black jurors who could be reached by
phone on Tuesday, said: "The only thing I'll say to that regard is that we
were as fair with Mr. Killen as we could have been. I think we gave him as
fair a verdict on his behalf as was allowable."
Reached by phone, Shirley Vaughan, the forewoman, said she was emotionally
drained by the trial and reluctant to speak. "With the little amount of
evidence that we had, we did the very best that we could," she said.
Mark Duncan, the county district attorney, said he did not blame the jury
for finding Mr. Killen guilty of a lesser charge than murder, pointing out
that three of the four key witnesses were dead. "I think it was asking a lot
of a jury to convict a man based on testimony of people who they couldn't see.
All they had were their words on paper."
Mr. Duncan's partner in the prosecution, Attorney General Jim Hood, said
two witnesses that had come forward since the case was reopened in 1999 had
died, one by suicide and the other under questionable circumstances.
There were other obstacles for the prosecutors. Although seven of the
original defendants, besides Mr. Killen, are still alive, they refused to
testify before the grand jury in exchange for immunity, Mr. Hood said.
Confessions and other statements about the crime were not admissible if the
witness was not available for cross-examination, they said.
Asked about the possible legacy of the trial, Mr. Hood said: "I'm just a
prosecutor, I don't pretend to be a sociologist. I will allow the historians
to analyze what impact this trial may have on this community and the state of
Mississippi and its reputation throughout the world."
Jurors, on the other hand, said they were keenly aware of the significance
and symbolism of the trial. "I felt dispirited last night because of the
six-six split," Mr. Paprocki said. "I was very concerned that in the event of
a hung jury that it would just reinforce the prejudicial stereotypes that have
been attached to Philadelphia and Neshoba County. I was very much saddened by
the fact."
But on Tuesday, he said, "Folks that had been fairly well saying no, they
just couldn't convict him, said, 'Well, manslaughter.' I don't know what
happened. It was fairly dramatic. It made quite an impression on me."
Ariel Hart contributed reporting from Atlanta for this
article.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has taken America by storm. Like Kanye West, another
fast-rising black Chicagoan, Obama seems to have the wind of fortune at his
back. That wind, once blocked by barriers of racial bias, is pushing many black
men toward unprecedented success in the fields of cinema, athletics, media,
medicine, theater and many other areas of American life.
These are genuine milestones for a nation steeped in racial segregation and
racist violence. But they obscure a much more painful reality: Black men are
vanishing.
A huge gender gap has long been a feature of life for African-Americans in the
public-housing developments of America's large cities where black men are like
ghosts. A vast majority of leaseholders in the Chicago Housing Authority are
women, for example. This chronic gender imbalance has debilitated many
neighborhoods once defiantly robust.
But as we enter the 21st Century, the growing gap between black men and women is
threatening the viability of the entire African-American community.
An article by Jonathan Tilove in the May 8 edition of the Star Ledger in Newark,
N.J., noted that according to census numbers "there are nearly 2 million more
black adult women than men in America." This imbalance is alarming enough, but
with nearly another million incarcerated or in the military the real gap is "2.8
million, or 26 percent. The comparable figure for whites was 8 percent," he
wrote.
Tilove's article focused on East Orange, N.J., and found there are 37 percent
more adult women than men. As the black population ages, the gap widens. "By the
time people reach their 60s in East Orange, there are 47 percent more black
women than men."
Besieged by poverty and the disease, violence and mass incarceration that
accompany it, African-American men increasingly are missing in action, leaving
black communities everywhere haunted by their absence.
There are more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New
Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland, Tilove noted. In New York City the number is 36
percent and 37 percent in Philadelphia.
This growing gender gap has devastating implications for the future of black
America. The most obvious is the growing lack of marriageable mates for black
women. Among well-educated, professional black women--a group that is growing
rapidly--the gap is a chasm.
Black women are making unprecedented progress, and that's good news. But as they
advance, black men are falling even further behind and that pattern is likely to
continue.
The recent edition of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education warns that a
"large and growing gender gap in African-American higher education has become a
troublesome trend casting a shadow on overall black educational progress." The
journal reports that in 2001 there were 1.1 million black women enrolled in
higher education, while only 604,000 black men were enrolled. The more
successful a black woman becomes, the more likely she will end up alone, said
Walter Farrell of the University of Wisconsin in a March 2002 Washington Monthly
piece. Professional black women are having fewer children, and that means a
growing percentage of black children are being born into less-educated,
less-affluent families.
Black women's prospects for family formation may be getting slimmer, but they
remain reluctant to marry outside of their race. The 2000 census revealed that
in 73 percent of black-white couples, the husband was black and the wife was
white.
It's important to note that black women are the fastest-growing group of inmates
in the nation's prisons. And they still bear the brunt of urban poverty as
single parents in the commercial wastelands that too often are their
neighborhoods. But overall, they are rising as black men are falling.
The reasons for this imbalance are many: high rates of infant mortality,
homicide and AIDS are big factors in the winnowing of black youth. Through
middle age and beyond, black men are disproportionately felled by cardiovascular
disease and cancer (particularly prostate cancer).
But many experts are concluding that mass incarceration may be the leading
culprit in accelerating this gap, and that diagnosis seems right to me.
This nation begins tracking black men into the criminal justice system at a very
early age. According to a study by researchers at Yale University titled
"Pre-Kindergartners Left Behind," the process begins in pre-kindergarten, where
black children are more than twice as likely to be expelled as children of other
races. The study found that boys are expelled 4.5 times more often than girls.
The tracking continues in elementary school, where African-American males are
assumed to be academically deficient and inclined toward criminality. A vivid
example of that process was unearthed in a study by Chicago's North Lawndale
Accountability Commission, which found there were more than 8,000 in-school
arrests in the city in 2003, with 10 percent involving children 12 and younger.
The group said black children received the harshest treatment.
Many black boys grow resentful of a system that routinely dismisses their
potential and become alienated from scholastic activity and fail to graduate
from high school. Lacking marketable skills, these men are resolutely shunned by
employers. The Community Service Society of New York last year found that only
51.8 percent of black men ages 16 to 64 were employed in that city from 2000 to
2003.
What's more, the city's Commission on Human Rights recently released a survey
that found white men with felony convictions have just as much chance of getting
a job in New York City as black men with no criminal history.
Little is left for these men but a ruthless underground economy of drug commerce
that takes its toll in lethal violence (homicide is a leading cause of death for
young black men) or eventual incarceration. And this chronic process of mass
incarceration has introduced a host of destabilizing elements into
African-American culture.
This is a crisis that demands strenuous race-specific intervention. It may be
fashionable to dismiss this demand as a relic of days past. But unless we act
urgently, the real relic may be our hopes for a future of racial harmony.
He was not warm or cozily familiar. He was cool and even a little
supercilious. If you invited Peter Jennings into your living room, he would be
likely to raise an eyebrow at the stains on the coffee table. He was not
America's best friend or kindly uncle. But in an era of chatty newscasters,
jousting analysts and hyperactive commentators, he was a rare voice of
civility.
That old-school formality is what will most be missing on the network news.
On ABC, Mr. Jennings was a smooth, sophisticated anchor who could gracefully
wing his way through the rawest breaking crises, from the Challenger explosion
in 1986 to the Sept. 11 attacks. But so can many of the men and women who have
been groomed to take his place someday.
What Mr. Jennings had that will be harder to replace was a worldliness that
was rooted in his personality and also in his rich background of experience in
the field.
Mr. Jennings, who died on Sunday, worked hard his entire life to overcome a
flighty beginning: he never attended college, and got his start on Canadian
television with the help of his father, a senior executive at the Canadian
Broadcasting Company. Mr. Jennings became famous as the host of a dance show
for teenagers and was only 26 when ABC News recruited him to be an anchor,
more on the basis of his good looks and smooth delivery than anything else. He
made up for it later, working as a correspondent in Vietnam, Beirut and
Europe. His colleagues teased him about his dashing trench coats, but nobody
looked better in Burberry or in black tie.
He took himself and the news seriously, so seriously that after the
networks cut back on convention coverage in 2004, he insisted on anchoring
those events gavel to gavel on ABC's tiny digital cable channel.
When bad things happened to the country, he was reassuringly calm and
self-possessed, delivering live coverage of Sept. 11 without alarm or
emotionalism. (And those few moments when he let some feeling show, choking a
little and urging viewers to "call your children," brought home the gravity of
the attack all the more poignantly.)
When bad things happened to him, he showed the same aplomb. When Mr.
Jennings announced that he had to step down to be treated for advanced lung
cancer in April, he shunned any hint of self-pity, thanking viewers for their
support in the most reticent way possible.
"I will continue to do the broadcast; on good days my voice will not always
be like this," he said, straining to sound jaunty. "Certainly, it's been a
long time. And I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesn't
value - deeply - the audience's loyalty should be in another line of work."
Mr. Jennings was not the last of the great white male news presenters,
though it might have seemed that way after Tom Brokaw retired from NBC, Dan
Rather resigned from CBS and CBS's chairman, Les Moonves, declared that the
era of Voice of God anchors was over.
Brian Williams on NBC is as natty, self-possessed and buttoned-down as Mr.
Brokaw and Mr. Jennings combined. Charles Gibson, who stepped in most often to
replace Mr. Jennings when he began cancer treatment, proved a comfortingly
familiar, competent face. For now at least, Bob Schieffer at CBS has
introduced a no-nonsense note of the elder statesman after the nightly
roller-coaster ride that was Dan Rather.
All of them remain in the classic anchor mold, but not one of them has the
hauteur and dignity that Mr. Jennings brought to the news. Network newscasts
have lost much of their audience and authority, but throughout all the
setbacks, erosions and even his own fatal illness, he never lost his uncommon
touch.
Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J
Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for
Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course,"
he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own
allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq
plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32
percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The
two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for
Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings
plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our
long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush
has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged
standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment
shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so
eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay
soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill
O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is
chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to
waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a
job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped
expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this
sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top
war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of
late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a
global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with
your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a
conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war
afloat with the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's
historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr.
Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war
just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and
hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had
high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence
that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive.
He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he
able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a
single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted
State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa
were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11
and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave
young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine
reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just
three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine
reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional
election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a
"chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock
conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are
reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call."
The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no
avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen
and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia,
instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in
Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his
Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as
Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a
standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the
blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's
inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics
from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a
9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's
"Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not
because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered
"better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was
easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk
"war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al
Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a
doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last
year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I
look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he
learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions."
But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr.
Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the
general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be
required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security
that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before
9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding
us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the
rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to
put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14
of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he
spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set
a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring.
Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but
it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now
is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum
and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this
war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary
deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not
another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los
Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax
cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start
sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required
to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the
security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has
never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo
Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations
(in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more
inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom
we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater
disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed
to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might
prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution
into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet"
about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the
vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last
throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta
there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the
pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the
terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, a group of prominent
Iraqis has struggled for weeks to complete the country's new constitution,
haggling over the precise meaning of words like "Islam," "federalism" and
"nation."
Out on the streets, meanwhile, a new bit of Arabic slang has
slipped into the chatter of ordinary Iraqis: "allas," a word that denotes an
Iraqi who leads a group of killers to their victim, usually for a price. The
allas typically points out the Shiites living in predominantly Sunni
neighborhoods for the gunmen who are hunting them. He usually wears a mask.
"The allas is from the neighborhood, and he had a mask on," said Haider
Mohammed, a Shiite, whose relative was murdered recently by a group of Sunni
gunmen. "He pointed out my uncle, and they killed him."
The uncle, Hussein Khalil, was found in a garbage dump 100 yards from the
spot where his Daewoo sedan had been run off the road. Two bullets had entered
the back of Mr. Khalil's skull and exited through his face.
Around the same time, someone found some leaflets, drawn up by a group
called the Liberation Army. "We are cleansing the area of dirty Shia," the
leaflet declared.
The rise of the allas (pronounced ah-LAS) stands as a grim reminder of how
little can be reasonably expected from the Iraqi constitution, no matter how
beautiful its language or humane its intent.
In 28 months of war and occupation here, Iraq has always contained two
parallel worlds: the world of the Green Zone and the constitution and the rule
of law; and the anarchical, unpredictable world outside.
Never have the two worlds seemed so far apart.
From the beginning, the hope here has been that the Iraq outside the Green
Zone would grow to resemble the safe and tidy world inside it; that the
success of democracy would begin to drain away the anger that pushes the
insurgency forward. This may have been what Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice was referring to when, in an interview published in Time magazine this
month, she said that the insurgency was "losing steam" and that "rather quiet
political progress" was transforming the country.
But in this third summer of war, the American project in Iraq has never
seemed so wilted and sapped of life. It's not just the guerrillas, who are
churning away at their relentless pace, attacking American forces about 65
times a day. It is most everything else, too.
Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of
high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area
between the forts is a lawless no man's land, menaced by bandits and brigands.
With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the
electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.
With armed guards in tow, I drove across the no man's land the other day to
pay a visit to Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister. Unlike many senior
Iraqi officials, who have long since retreated into the Green Zone, Mr.
Chalabi still lives in a private home. To get there, you must pass through a
series of checkpoints at the outskirts of his neighborhood, manned by guards
and crisscrossed by concrete chicanes. At the entrance to Mr. Chalabi's
street, there is another checkpoint, made of concrete and barbed wire, and
more armed guards. Then, in front of Mr. Chalabi's house, stands yet another
blast wall. When Mr. Chalabi walks into his front yard, even inside his own
compound, a dozen armed guards surround him.
Inside his house, Mr. Chalabi described one of his most recent efforts, to
help broker a cease-fire in the city of Tal Afar, 200 miles to the north.
"I had all the sheiks here with me," he said.
On my way home, I noticed that a car was following me. Three times, the
mysterious car accelerated to get close. Two men inside: a young man, maybe in
his 30's, and a bald man behind the wheel. As the car drew close, my chase car
- a second vehicle, filled with armed guards, deployed to follow my own - cut
the men off in traffic. I sped away.
Americans, here and in the United States, wait for the day when the Iraqi
police and army will shoulder the burden and let them go home.
One night last month, according to the locals, the Iraqi police and army
surrounded the Sunni neighborhood of Sababkar in north Baghdad, and pulled 11
young men from their beds.
Their bodies were found the next day with bullet holes in their temples.
The cheeks of some of the men had been punctured by electric drills. One man
had been burned by acid. The police denied that they had been involved.
"This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened," Adnan al-Dulami,
a Sunni leader, said.
For much of last year, the soldiers of the First Cavalry Division oversaw a
project to restore the river-front park on the east bank of the Tigris River.
Under American eyes, the Iraqis planted sod, installed a sprinkler system and
put up swing sets for the Iraqi children. It cost $1.5 million. The Tigris
River Park was part of a vision of the unit's commander, Maj. Gen. Peter W.
Chiarelli, to win the war by putting Iraqis to work.
General Chiarelli left Iraq this year, and the American unit that took over
had other priorities. The sod is mostly dead now, and the sidewalks are
covered in broken glass. The sprinkler heads have been stolen. The northern
half of the park is sealed off by barbed wire and blast walls; Iraqis are told
stay back, lest they be shot by American snipers on the roof of a nearby
hotel.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the new American ambassador here, has publicly prodded
the Iraqis to finish the constitution by Aug. 15, the date they set for
themselves. On several occasions, Mr. Khalilzad has described the Iraqi
constitution as a national compact, a document symbolizing the consensus of
the nation.
And there's the rub. When the Americans smashed Saddam Hussein's regime two
and half years ago, what lay revealed was a country with no agreement on the
most basic questions of national identity. The Sunnis, a minority in charge
here for five centuries, have not, for the most part, accepted that they will
no longer control the country. The Shiites, the long-suppressed majority, want
to set up a theocracy. The Kurds don't want to be part of Iraq at all. There
is only so much that language can do to paper over such differences.
Last week, one of the country's largest Shiite political parties held a
ceremony to commemorate the death of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a
moderate Shiite cleric who was assassinated by a huge car bomb two years ago.
The rally was held in the Tigris River villa once occupied by Tariq Aziz, one
of Mr. Hussein's senior henchmen. Nowadays, the house is controlled by the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the dominant
parties in the Shiite coalition that heads the Iraqi government.
Inside a tent where the ceremony unfolded, a large poster depicted three
men: Mr. Hakim, the dead ayatollah; Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the
nation's most revered Shiite leader; and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the late
ayatollah's brother and, as the head of the Supreme Council, perhaps the
country's most powerful political leader. The portraits stood as a kind of
trinity, symbolizing the fusion of Islam and politics.
Outside the tent, a third member of the Hakim family stood in a receiving
line. Amar al-Hakim, Abdul-Aziz's son and heir to the family dynasty, seemed
in an upbeat mood. Like most Shiite political leaders here, Mr. Hakim seemed
untroubled by the disputes in the constitution.
"We can all get along," Mr. Hakim said, smiling, "but I don't think we have
to give anything up."
Throughout the ceremony, Mr. Hakim's compound was guarded by members of the
Badr Brigade, the party's black-booted Iranian-trained militia. When the
Americans were in charge here, they leaned hard on Mr. Hakim to disband it.
But in one of his first official acts, Mr. Hakim publicly legalized his own
private army.
With all the hubbub at Mr. Hakim's house, it was easy to miss what was
going on in the house next door. Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and
Kurdish leader, was getting ready to hold a dinner for the country's senior
political leaders, Mr. Hakim included, to break the logjam over the
constitution. Mr. Talabani's house, too, was guarded by a militia, but a
different one from Mr. Hakim's. Here, it was the pesh merga who stood by with
their guns, loyal only to Mr. Talabani.
The pesh merga fighters, milling about outside Mr. Talabani's villa and
smoking cigarettes, said they had come all the way from the mountains of
Kurdistan to protect their boss. None of them spoke a word of Arabic. To them,
Baghdad was a foreign land.
Amid such bleakness, it is a wonder that anyone comes forward at all. Yet
still the Iraqis do, even at the threat of death. One of them is Fakhri al-Qaisi,
a dentist and Sunni member of the committee charged with drafting the
constitution. Dr. Qaisi knows people close to the Sunni insurgency and, as
such, has come under suspicion by the Americans and the Shiite-dominated
government.
By Dr. Qaisi's count, the Americans have raided his home 17 times, once
driving a tank into his dental office. Members of the Badr Brigade, the Shiite
militia, recently killed his brother-in-law, Dr. Qaisi said, and appear to be
aiming at him too. Now, because he has joined the constitutional committee, he
has begun receiving death threats from Sunni insurgents as well.
"Everyone wants to kill me!" Dr. Qaisi said with a laugh, seated in a Green
Zone lounge during a break from constitution drafting. "The Americans want to
kill me, the Shiites want to kill me, the Kurds want to kill me and even the
insurgents."
"Every night, a different car passes by my house," he said.
To protect himself, Dr. Qaisi has taken to spending nights in his car,
though he allows that he sometimes stops by his home during the day to visit
one of his three wives.
For all his problems, and all the problems facing Iraq, Dr. Qaisi expressed
a firm belief that national reconciliation in Iraq was still possible, if
leaders like himself could show the strength to give a little.
In this regard, as in so many others here, it's impossible to know. In the
middle of a conversation, Dr. Qaisi stopped talking, recognizing that at the
table next to him was Abu Hassan al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr Brigade.
That's the organization that Dr. Qaisi believes killed his brother-in- law,
and the same group, he believes, that would like to kill him now.
Dr. Qaisi rose from his seat, and so did Mr. Amiri.
"It's so nice to see you," Dr. Qaisi said. "We should get together."
The two men embraced, and kissed each other's cheeks.
"Yes," Mr. Amiri said, his arms wrapped around Dr. Qaisi. "We really
should."
For those who long considered it folly to settle a handful of Jews among
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the decision to
remove them starting this week seems an acceptance of the obvious. What
possible future could the settlers have had? How could their presence have
done the state of Israel any good?
But for those, like Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, who created and nurtured the settlements, the move to dismantle them
is something very different. It is an admission not of error but of failure.
Their cherished goal - the resettlement of the full biblical land of Israel by
contemporary Jews - is not to be. The reason: not enough of them came.
"We have had to come to terms with certain unanticipated realities,"
acknowledged Arye Mekel, Israeli consul general in New York. "Ideologically,
we are disappointed. A pure Zionist must be disappointed because Zionism meant
the Jews of the world would take their baggage and move to Israel. Most did
not."
David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the
1980's, noted: "The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on 'the two
banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about
'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that
this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve."
The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of
the early Zionists, as Ambassador Mekel noted, most of the world's Jews have
not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world's 13 million to 14
million Jews, a minority - 5.26 million - make their home in Israel, and
immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews
immigrated to Israel.
Of course, Israel is a remarkably successful state, a democracy with a high
standard of living and many proud accomplishments. Yet the misery that
Zionists expected Jews elsewhere to suffer has not materialized. More than
half a century after the establishment of the Jewish state, more Jews live in
the United States than in Israel.
The second explanation for the shift in settlement policy is that the
Palestinian population has grown far more rapidly - and Palestinians have
proved far more willing to fight - than many on the Israeli right had
anticipated. On Thursday, the newspaper Haaretz reported that the proportion
of Jews in the combined population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza had
dropped below 50 percent for the first time. This means, many Israelis argue,
that unless they yield territory, they will have to choose a Jewish state or a
democratic one; they will not be able to have both.
While all acknowledge that Jewish immigration never achieved anticipated
levels and that the Palestinian population has ballooned, the question of the
role played by Palestinian violence in Mr. Sharon's decision to disengage is
hotly contested. Some argue that the two Palestinian intifadas, or uprisings,
from 1987 to 1993 and from 2000 to the present, drove Israel out. Others say
that Israel's increasingly effective counterterror measures - the building of
a barrier, killings of terror leaders and military reoccupation of selective
Palestinian cities - broke the back of the insurgents, allowing Israel the
sense of strength to walk away. In fact, both factors seem likely to have
played a role.
"Of course terror has a role in the disengagement," said Michael Oren, a
senior fellow at the Shalem Institute, a conservative Jerusalem research
group. "It convinced us that Gaza was not worth holding onto and awakened us
to the demographic danger. It took two intifadas for a majority of Israelis to
decide that Gaza is not worth it."
A senior Israeli official who spent years closely associated with Likud
leaders, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
topic, said that Israelis long had little respect for Palestinians as
fighters, but that had changed.
"The fact that hundreds of them are willing to blow themselves up is
significant," he said. "We didn't give them any credit before. In spite of our
being the strongest military power in the Middle East, we lost 1,200 people
over the last four years. It finally sank in to Sharon and the rest of the
leadership that these people were not giving up."
Some came to a similar conclusion much earlier. The Israeli left has been
calling for a withdrawal from Gaza for years, and even many on the right
believed settlement there to be futile and counterproductive. Mr. Kimche, the
former foreign ministry official, recalled that when Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir of the conservative Likud party was running against Yitzhak Rabin of
Labor in the early 1990's, several Shamir advisers told him: "Unless you
withdraw from Gaza, you're going to lose these elections." He did not
withdraw; he lost.
Mr. Rabin himself said that he decided to negotiate a withdrawal with the
Palestinians when he realized how unpopular military service in Gaza had
become.
"He said privately - I heard him say it - that military reservists don't
want to serve in the occupied territories and while they are not formally
refusing they are finding excuses to stay away," Yoel Esteron, managing editor
of Yediot Aharonot, recalled. "That put a real burden on the army and it meant
we couldn't stay there forever."
With Gaza soon no longer in their hands, Israelis will face a much more
complex set of decisions regarding the occupied West Bank. Settlements in
distant corners of the West Bank are also being dismantled in the coming
weeks, but no one knows how much more land Mr. Sharon and his successors will
be willing to yield. What is clear, however, is that the internal Israeli
logic of what is taking place this week - a scaling back of ambition in the
face of reality - could lead to traumatic withdrawals of larger numbers of
people on the West Bank.
As Mr. Sharon said in an interview with Yediot published on Friday, when
asked about other isolated settlements, "Not everything will remain."
Nature apparently thinks you can, according to two University of Chicago studies
providing the first scientific evidence that the human brain is still evolving,
a process that may ultimately increase people's capacity to grow smarter.
Two key brain-building genes, which underwent dramatic changes in the past that
coincided with huge leaps in human intellectual development, are still
undergoing rapid mutations, evolution's way of selecting for new beneficial
traits, Bruce Lahn and his U. of C. colleagues reported in Friday's issue of the
journal Science.
The researchers found that not everyone has these genes but that evolutionary
pressures are causing them to increase in the population at an unprecedented
rate. Lahn's group is also trying to determine just how smart these genes may
have made humans.
One of the mutated genes, called microcephalin, began its swift spread among
human ancestors about 37,000 years ago, a period marked by a creative explosion
in music, art, religious expression and tool-making.
The other gene, ASPM (abnormal spindle-like microcephaly-associated), arose only
about 5,800 years ago, right around the time of writing and the first
civilization in Mesopotamia, which dates to 7000 B.C.
"People have this sense that as 21st century humans we've gotten as high as
we're going to go," said Greg Wray, director of Duke University's center for
evolutionary genomics. "But we're not played out as a species. We're still
evolving and these studies are a pretty good example of that."
Just as major environmental changes in the past, such as dramatic shifts in the
climate, food supply or geography, favored the selection of genetic traits that
increased survival skills, the pressures on gene selection today come from an
increasingly complex and technologically oriented society, said Lahn, a
professor of human genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
"Our studies indicate that the trend that is the defining characteristic of
human evolution--the growth of brain size and complexity--is likely still going
on," he said.
"Meanwhile, our environment and the skills we need to survive in it are changing
faster then we ever imagined. I would expect the human brain, which has done
well by us so far, will continue to adapt to those changes."
Evolutionary changes occur when a member of a species experiences a mutation in
a gene that gives him a new skill, like running faster, seeing farther or
thinking better. The genetic mutation increases his likelihood of survival and
having more children, thereby allowing the new mutation to spread quickly
through the population.
That's what happened to the microcephalin mutation, which now occurs in 70
percent of all people, and the ASPM gene mutation, which so far has spread to 30
percent of all people.
Other experts called the U. of C. studies stunning but said that while the two
genes appear to make people smarter by helping to engineer bigger brains, there
are many more genes involved in brain building and human intelligence and
cognition.
"It's very exciting but it's really just the beginning of a whole new phase of
research," Wray said. "These aren't going to be the only genes and these aren't
going to be the only changes. We don't even really know exactly what these
changes mean, but it's a glimpse into the future of our understanding of how the
human brain came to be and function the way it does."
Probing the genes of intelligence has been controversial in the past and is
likely to be so now because of fears that the knowledge could be misused to
grade people's intelligence based on their genes.
But intelligence is a complex issue that is greatly influenced not only by the
genes people inherit, but also by their early learning experiences.
Researchers have learned over the last two decades that genes and the
environment work together--genes provide for a range of possible outcomes and
the environment determines which specific outcome is likely to occur.
Most of the brain, for instance, gets built after birth when learning
experiences determine the way in which brain cells connect to each other. How a
brain gets wired directly affects its computing power.
"There are genetic differences that make each of us unique," Wray said. "But
there's no way for you to look at a single gene and say `OK, you've got this
mutation, you're smarter than someone else.' Maybe at some point we will know
that but not with these genes."
Ever since the human line diverged from other primates between 6 and 8 million
years ago the human brain grew steadily bigger as a result of selective genetic
mutations. Chimps, our closest primate relative, on the other hand, stayed
pretty much the same.
Some 200,000 years ago, the anatomically modern human emerged with a brain three
times the size of a chimp's. As humans got smarter, Lahn said, selection
pressure for smartness became intensified.
The microcephalin and ASPM genes played a big role in expanding the size of the
brain. People born with defects in these genes develop brains that look normal
but are only one-third the size of a full-grown human brain. As a result, their
mental capacity is sharply reduced and they cannot live on their own.
To show that brain evolution is an ongoing process, Lahn's team studied the
genes of more than 1,000 people representing 59 ethnic populations worldwide.
Their genes were compared with those of the chimpanzee to provide a historical
marker as to what the genes looked like before they diverged.
Both the microcephalin and ASPM genes come in a number of different varieties.
They all do the important job of building the brain but with slightly different
variations that occur among specific population groups. At this point scientists
are trying to understand what extra benefits seem to be conferred by the
variations.
The new variations in the microcephalin and ASPM genes occurred at a frequency
far higher than would be expected by chance, indicating that natural selection
was driving their spread in the population.
The U. of C. researchers found that one variety of the ASPM gene identified as
haplogroup D occurs more frequently in Europeans and surrounding populations,
including North Africans, Middle Easterners and South Asians. A specific variety
of the microcephalin gene, also called haplogroup D, was most abundant in
populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
"What we're seeing is that there is genetic variation in the human population
that selection cares about," Wray said. "It means that evolution is still
happening."
ONE NEEDS TO know but three words to play poker: call, raise or fold.
Fold means keep the money, I'm out of the hand; call means to match your
opponents' bet. That leaves raise, which is the only way to win at poker. The
raiser puts his opponent on the defensive, seizing the initiative. Initiative is
only important if one wants to win.
The military axiom is "he who imposes the terms of the battle imposes the terms
of the peace." The gambling equivalent is: "Don't call unless you could raise";
that is, to merely match one's opponent's bet is effective only if it makes the
opponent question the caller's motives. And that can only occur if the caller
has acted aggressively enough in the past to cause his opponents to wonder if
the mere call is a ruse de guerre.
If you are branded as passive, the table will roll right over you — your
opponents will steal antes without fear. Why? Because the addicted caller has
never exhibited what, in the wider world, is known as courage.
In poker, one must have courage: the courage to bet, to back one's convictions,
one's intuitions, one's understanding. There can be no victory without courage.
The successful player must be willing to wager on likelihoods. Should he wait
for absolutely risk-free certainty, he will win nothing, regardless of the cards
he is dealt.
For example, take a player who has never acted with initiative — he has never
raised, merely called. Now, at the end of the evening, he is dealt a royal
flush. The hand, per se, is unbeatable, but the passive player has never acted
aggressively; his current bet (on the sure thing) will signal to the other
players that his hand is unbeatable, and they will fold.
His patient, passive quest for certainty has won nothing.
The Democrats, similarly, in their quest for a strategy that would alienate no
voters, have given away the store, and they have given away the country.
Committed Democrats watched while Al Gore frittered away the sure-thing election
of 2000. They watched, passively, while the Bush administration concocted a
phony war; they, in the main, voted for the war knowing it was purposeless, out
of fear of being thought weak. They then ran a candidate who refused to stand up
to accusations of lack of patriotism.
The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became
increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize
the initiative.
John Kerry lost the 2004 election combating an indictment of his Vietnam War
record. A decorated war hero muddled himself in merely "calling" the attacks of
a man with, curiously, a vanishing record of military attendance. Even if the
Democrats and Kerry had prevailed (that is, succeeded in nullifying the
Republicans arguably absurd accusations), they would have been back only where
they started before the accusations began.
Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker
table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over Kerry
in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that
Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A possible
response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: "I served. He didn't. I
didn't bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in
the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a
deserter."
This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the
opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in
poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is
that aggression will prevail.
The press, quiescent during five years of aggressive behavior by the White
House, has, perhaps, begun to recover its pride. In speaking of Karl Rove, Scott
McClellan and the White House's Valerie Plame disgrace, they have begun to use
words such as "other than true," "fabricated." The word that they circle, still,
is "lie." The word the Democratic constituency, heartsick over the behavior of
its party leaders, has been forced to consider applying to them is "coward."
One may sit at the poker table all night and never bet and still go home broke,
having anted away one's stake.
The Democrats are anteing away their time at the table. They may be bold and
risk defeat, or be passive and ensure it.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments,
and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent
believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our
Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline,
but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms.
Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the
Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of
four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our
current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben
Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is
Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be
further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.
On this essential matter, most Americans-most American Christians-are simply
wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved
gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a
Christian nation-and, overwhelmingly, we do-it means something. People who go to
church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons;
increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11
percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular
way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that
Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he
is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly
Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That
paradox-more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to
stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese-illuminates the hollow at the core
of our boastful, careening culture.
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth.
Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere
around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison,
is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans-about 75
percent-claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent
say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent
overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is
nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic
one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the
behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in
Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of
pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers.
What if we chose some simple criterion-say, giving aid to the poorest people-as
a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his
crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way
you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the
hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and
visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy,
among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide
fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And
it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead.
Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to
twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of
their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared
with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring
for the least among us you want to propose-childhood nutrition, infant
mortality, access to preschool-we come in nearly last among the rich nations,
and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already
knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the
overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories,
categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the
numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last
year that the number of households that were "food insecure with hunger" had
climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political,
choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment,
we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate
four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations
greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least
should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been
told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that
executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is
theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our
marriages break up at a rate-just over half-that compares poorly with the
European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by
the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy,
where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the
godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy?
We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline-like, say, keeping your
weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need
to ask?
I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some
of the most depressing places on earth.
Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New
Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard
Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.
You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and
betrayed by your government.
At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had
as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders,
over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses
included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by
patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and
unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair,
wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."
At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and
died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.
As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St.
Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not
responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General
Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of
these people."
President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he
may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one
drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head
during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep
going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised
speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention
during days when so many lives could have been saved.
He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up,
something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom
W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on
the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young
Americans.
How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?
Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina,
with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to
face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding
act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.
Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the
stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had
to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.
Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the
president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery
grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news
about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of
newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew
down to the Gulf Coast.
Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that
religion's cultural centrality was a thing of the past. For Georg Hegel,
following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment, religion had been surpassed by
reason's superior conceptual precision. In The Essence of Christianity
(1841), Ludwig Feuerbach depicted the relationship between man and divinity as a
zero-sum game. In his view, the stress on godliness merely detracted from the
sublimity of human ends. In one of his youthful writings, Karl Marx, Feuerbach's
most influential disciple, famously dismissed religion as "the opium of the
people." Its abolition, Marx believed, was a sine qua non for human betterment.
Friedrich Nietzsche got to the heart of the matter by having his literary alter
ego, the brooding prophet Zarathustra, brusquely declaim, "God is dead," thereby
pithily summarizing what many educated Europeans were thinking but few had the
courage actually to say. And who can forget Nietzsche's searing characterization
of Christianity as a "slave morality," a plebeian belief system appropriate for
timorous conformists but unsuited to the creation of a future race of
domineering Übermenschen? True to character, the only representatives of
Christianity Nietzsche saw fit to praise were those who could revel in a good
auto-da-fé -- Inquisition stalwarts like Ignatius Loyola.
Twentieth-century characterizations of belief were hardly more generous.
Here, one need look no further than the title of Freud's 1927 treatise on
religion: The Future of an Illusion.
Today, however, there are omnipresent signs of a radical change in mentality.
In recent years, in both the United States and the developing world, varieties
of religious fundamentalism have had a major political impact. As Democratic
presidential hopefuls Howard Dean and John Kerry learned the hard way,
politicians who are perceived as faithless risk losing touch with broad strata
of the electorate.
Are contemporary philosophers up to the challenge of explaining and
conceptualizing these striking recent developments? After all, what Freud,
faithfully reflecting the values of the scientific age, cursorily dismissed as
illusory seems to have made an unexpected and assertive comeback -- one that
shows few signs of abating anytime soon.
Jürgen Habermas may be the living philosopher most likely to succeed where
angels, and their detractors, fear to tread. Following Jacques Derrida's death
last October, it would seem that Habermas has justly inherited the title of the
world's leading philosopher. Last year he won the prestigious Kyoto Prize for
Arts and Philosophy (previous recipients include Karl Popper and Paul Ricoeur),
capping an eventful career replete with honors as well as a number of
high-profile public debates.
The centerpiece of Habermas's moral philosophy is "discourse ethics," which
takes its inspiration from Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. For Kant, to
count as moral, actions must pass the test of universality: The actor must be
able to will that anyone in a similar situation should act in the same way.
According to Kant, lying and stealing are immoral insofar as they fall beneath
the universalization threshold; only at the price of grave self-contradiction
could one will that lying and stealing become universal laws. Certainly, we can
envisage a number of exceptional situations where we could conceivably justify
lying or stealing. In Kant's example, at your door is a man intent on murdering
your loved one and inquiring as to her whereabouts. Or what if you were too poor
to purchase the medicine needed to save your spouse's life?
In the first case you might well think it would be permissible to lie; and in
the second case, to steal. Yet on both counts Kant is immovable. An appeal to
circumstances might well complicate our decision making. It might even elicit
considerable public sympathy for otherwise objectionable conduct. But it can in
no way render an immoral action moral. It is with good reason that Kant calls
his imperative a categorical one, for an imperative that admits of exceptions is
really no imperative at all.
Habermas's approach to moral philosophy is Kantian, although he takes
exception to the solipsistic, egological framework Kant employs. Habermas
believes that, in order to be convincing, moral reasoning needs a broader,
public basis. Discourse ethics seeks to offset the limitations of the Kantian
approach. For Habermas, the give and take of argumentation, as a learning
process, is indispensable. Through communicative reason we strive for mutual
understanding and learn to assume the standpoint of the other. Thereby we also
come to appreciate the narrowness of our own individual perspective. Discourse
ethics proposes that those actions are moral that could be justified in an
open-ended and genuine public dialogue. Its formula suggests that "only those
norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the appro-val of all
affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse."
Until recently Habermas was known as a resolutely secular thinker. On
occasion his writings touched upon religious subjects or themes. But these
confluences were exceptions that proved the rule.
Yet a few years ago the tonality of his work began to change ever so subtly.
In fall 2001 Habermas was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German
Publishers and Booksellers Association. The title of his acceptance speech,
"Faith and Knowledge," had a palpably theological ring. The remarks, delivered
shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, stressed the importance of
mutual toleration between secular and religious approaches to life.
Last year Habermas engaged in a high-profile public dialogue with Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger -- who, on April 19, was named as Pope John Paul II's successor
-- at the cardinal's behest. A number of the philosopher's left-wing friends and
followers were taken aback by his willingness to have a dialogue with one of
Europe's most conservative prelates. In 2002 Habermas had published In
Defense of Humanity, an impassioned critique of the risks of biological
engineering and human cloning. It was this text in particular, in which the
philosopher provided an eloquent defense of the right to a unique human identity
-- a right that cloning clearly imperils -- that seems to have piqued the
cardinal's curiosity and interest. Yet if one examines the trajectory of
Habermas's intellectual development, the Ratzinger exchange seems relatively
unexceptional.
Glance back at Habermas's philosophical chef d'oeuvre, the two-volume
Theory of Communicative Action (1981), and you'll find that one of his
key ideas is the "linguistification of the sacred" (Versprachlichung des
Sakrals). By this admittedly cumbersome term, Habermas asserts that modern
notions of equality and fairness are secular distillations of time-honored
Judeo-Christian precepts. The "contract theory" of politics, from which our
modern conception of "government by consent of the governed" derives, would be
difficult to conceive apart from the Old Testament covenants. Similarly, our
idea of the intrinsic worth of all persons, which underlies human rights, stems
directly from the Christian ideal of the equality of all men and women in the
eyes of God. Were these invaluable religious sources of morality and justice to
atrophy entirely, it is doubtful whether modern societies would be able to
sustain this ideal on their own.
In a recent interview Habermas aptly summarized those insights: "For the
normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more
than just a precursor or a catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which
sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous
conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human
rights, and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and
the Christian ethic of love."
Three years ago the MIT Press published Religion and Rationality: Essays
on Reason, God, and Modernity, an illuminating collection of Habermas's
writings on religious themes. Edited and introduced by the philosopher Eduardo
Mendieta, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the anthology
concludes with a fascinating interview in which the philosopher systematically
clarifies his views on a variety of religious areas. (A companion volume, The
Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, also
edited by Mendieta, was published in 2004 by Routledge.)
On the one hand, religion's return -- Habermas, perhaps with the American
situation foremost in mind, goes so far as to speak of the emergence of
"post-secular societies" -- presents us with undeniable dangers and risks. While
theodicy has traditionally provided men and women with consolation for the harsh
injustices of fate, it has also frequently taught them to remain passively
content with their lot. It devalues worldly success and entices believers with
the promise of eternal bliss in the hereafter. Here the risk is that religion
may encourage an attitude of social passivity, thereby contravening democracy's
need for an active and engaged citizenry. To wit, the biblical myth of the fall
perceives secular history as a story of decline or perdition from which little
intrinsic good may emerge.
On the other hand, laissez-faire's success as a universally revered economic
model means that, today, global capitalism's triumphal march encounters few
genuine oppositional tendencies. In that regard, religion, as a repository of
transcendence, has an important role to play. It prevents the denizens of the
modern secular societies from being overwhelmed by the all-encompassing demands
of vocational life and worldly success. It offers a much-needed dimension of
otherness: The religious values of love, community, and godliness help to offset
the global dominance of competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and manipulation that
predominate in the vocational sphere. Religious convictions encourage people to
treat each other as ends in themselves rather than as mere means.
One of Habermas's mentors, the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer,
once observed that "to salvage an unconditional meaning" -- one that stood out
as an unqualified Good -- "without God is a futile undertaking." As a stalwart
of the Enlightenment, Habermas himself would be unlikely to go that far. But he
might consider Horkheimer's adage a timely reminder of the risks and temptations
of all-embracing secularism. Habermas stressed in a recent public lecture "the
force of religious traditions to articulate moral intuitions with regard to
communal forms of a dignified human life." As forceful and persuasive as our
secular philosophical precepts might be -- the idea of human rights, for example
-- from time to time they benefit from renewed contact with the nimbus of their
sacral origins.
Last April Habermas presented a more systematic perspective on religion's
role in contemporary society at an international conference on "Philosophy and
Religion" at Poland's Lodz University. One of the novelties of Habermas's Lodz
presentation, "Religion in the Public Sphere," was the commendable idea that
"toleration" -- the bedrock of modern democratic culture -- is always a two-way
street. Not only must believers tolerate others' beliefs, including the credos
and convictions of nonbelievers; it falls due to disbelieving secularists,
similarly, to appreciate the convictions of religiously motivated fellow
citizens. From the standpoint of Habermas's "theory of communicative action,"
this stipulation suggests that we assume the standpoint of the other. It would
be unrealistic and prejudicial to expect that religiously oriented citizens
wholly abandon their most deeply held convictions upon entering the public
sphere where, as a rule and justifiably, secular reasoning has become our
default discursive mode. If we think back, for instance, to the religious
idealism that infused the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, we find
an admirable example of the way in which a biblical sense of justice can be
fruitfully brought to bear on contemporary social problems.
The philosopher who addressed these issues most directly and fruitfully in
recent years was John Rawls. In a spirit of collegial solidarity, Habermas, in
his Lodz paper, made ample allusion to Rawlsian ideals. Perhaps Rawls's most
important gloss on religion's role in modern politics is his caveat or "proviso"
that, to gain a reasonable chance of public acceptance, religious reasons must
ultimately be capable of being translated into secular forms of argumentation.
In the case of public officials -- politicians and the judiciary, for example
-- Rawls raises the secular bar still higher. He believes that, in their
political language, there is little room for an open and direct appeal to
nonsecular reasons, which, in light of the manifest diversity of religious
beliefs, would prove extremely divisive. As Habermas affirms, echoing Rawls:
"This stringent demand can only be laid at the door of politicians, who within
state institutions are subject to the obligation to remain neutral in the face
of competing worldviews." But if that stringent demand is on the politician,
Habermas argues, "every citizen must know that only secular reasons count beyond
the institutional threshold that divides the informal public sphere from
parliaments, courts, ministries, and administrations."
With his broad-minded acknowledgment of religion's special niche in the
spectrum of public political debate, Habermas has made an indispensable stride
toward defining an ethos of multicultural tolerance. Without such a perspective,
prospects for equitable global democracy would seem exceedingly dim. The
criterion for religious belief systems that wish to have their moral
recommendations felt and acknowledged is the capacity to take the standpoint of
the other. Only those religions that retain the capacity to bracket or suspend
the temptations of theological narcissism -- the conviction that my religion
alone provides the path to salvation -- are suitable players in our rapidly
changing, post-secular moral and political universe.
Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature, and
political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His
books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With
Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004).
Thomas Edison
was a great inventorbut a lousy prognosticator. When he proclaimed in
1922 that the motion picture would replace textbooks in schools, he began a long
string of spectacularly wrong predictions regarding the capacity of various
technologies to revolutionize teaching. To date, none of them—from film to
television—has lived up to the hype. Most were quickly relegated to the
audiovisual closet. Even the computer, which is now a standard feature of most
classrooms, has not been able to show a consistent record of improving
education.
"There have
been no advances over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to
broader access to computers," said Stanford University professor of education
Larry Cuban in 2001, summarizing the existing research on educational computing.
"The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is
even more contested." Part of the problem, Cuban pointed out, is that many
computers simply go unused in the classroom. But more recent research, including
a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries,
indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically
than those who use them rarely or not at all.
Whether or not these assessments are the last word, it is
clear that the computer has not fulfilled the promises made for it. Promoters of
instructional technology have reverted to a much more modest claim—that the
computer is just another tool: "it's what you do with it that counts." But this
response ignores the ecological impact of technologies. Far from being neutral,
they reconstitute all of the relationships in an environment, some for better
and some for worse. Installing a computer lab in a school may mean that students
have access to information they would never be able to get any other way, but it
may also mean that children spend less time engaged in outdoor play, the art
supply budget has to be cut, new security measures have to be employed, and
Acceptable Use Agreements are needed to inform parents (for the first time in
American educational history) that the school is not responsible for the
material a child encounters while under its supervision.
The
"just-a-tool" argument also ignores the fact that whenever we choose one
learning activity over another, we are deciding what kinds of encounters with
the world we value for our children, which in turn influences what they grow up
to value. Computers tend to promote and support certain kinds of learning
experiences, and devalue others. As technology critic Neil Postman has observed,
"What we need to consider about computers has nothing to do with its efficiency
as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception
of learning."
If we
look through that lens, I think we will see that educational computing is
neither a revolution nor a passing fad, but a Faustian bargain. Children gain
unprecedented power to control their external world, but at the cost of internal
growth. During the two decades that I taught young people with and about digital
technology, I came to realize that the power of computers can lead children into
deadened, alienated, and manipulative relationships with the world, that
children's increasingly pervasive use of computers jeopardizes their ability to
belong fully to human and biological communities—ultimately jeopardizing the
communities themselves.
Several years ago I participated in a panel discussion on Iowa Public Television
that focused on some "best practices" for computers in the classroom. Early in
the program, a video showed how a fourth grade class in rural Iowa used
computers to produce hypertext book reports on Charlotte's Web, E. B.
White's classic children's novel. In the video, students proudly demonstrated
their work, which included a computer-generated "spider" jumping across the
screen and an animated stick-figure boy swinging from a hayloft rope. Toward the
end of the video, a student discussed the important lessons he had learned:
always be nice to each other and help one another.
There were
important lessons for viewers as well. Images of the students talking around
computer screens dispelled (appropriately, I think) the notion that computers
always isolate users. Moreover, the teacher explained that her students were so
enthusiastic about the project that they chose to go to the computer lab rather
than outside for recess. While she seemed impressed by this dedication, it
underscores the first troubling influence of computers. The medium is so
compelling that it lures children away from the kind of activities through which
they have always most effectively discovered themselves and their place in the
world.
Ironically, students could best learn the lessons implicit
in Charlotte's Web—the need to negotiate relationships, the importance of
all members of a community, even the rats—by engaging in the recess they missed.
In a school, recess is not just a break from intellectual demands or a chance to
let off steam. It is also a break from a closely supervised social and physical
environment. It is when children are most free to negotiate their own
relationships, at arm's length from adult authority. Yet across the U.S., these
opportunities are disappearing. By the year 2000, according to a 2001 report by
University of New Orleans associate professor Judith Kieff, more than 40 percent
of the elementary and middle schools in the U.S. had entirely eliminated recess.
By contrast, U.S. Department of Education statistics indicate that spending on
technology in schools increased by more than 300 percent from 1990 to 2000.
Structured learning certainly has its place. But if it
crowds out direct, unmediated engagement with the world, it undercuts a child's
education. Children learn the fragility of flowers by touching their petals.
They learn to cooperate by organizing their own games. The computer cannot
simulate the physical and emotional nuances of resolving a dispute during
kickball, or the creativity of inventing new rhymes to the rhythm of jumping
rope. These full-bodied, often deeply heartfelt experiences educate not just the
intellect but also the soul of the child. When children are free to practice on
their own, they can test their inner perceptions against the world around them,
develop the qualities of care, self-discipline, courage, compassion, generosity,
and tolerance—and gradually figure out how to be part of both social and
biological communities.
It's true that
engaging with others on the playground can be a harrowing experience, too.
Children often need to be monitored and, at times, disciplined for acts of
cruelty, carelessness, selfishness, even violence. Computers do provide an
attractively reliable alternative to the dangers of unsupervised play. But
schools too often use computers or other highly structured activities to prevent
these problematic qualities of childhood from surfacing—out of fear or a
compulsion to force-feed academics. This effectively denies children the
practice and feedback they need to develop the skills and dispositions of a
mature person. If children do not dip their toes in the waters of unsupervised
social activity, they likely will never be able to swim in the sea of civic
responsibility. If they have no opportunities to dig in the soil, discover the
spiders, bugs, birds, and plants that populate even the smallest unpaved
playgrounds, they will be less likely to explore, appreciate, and protect nature
as adults.
Computers not only divert students from recess and other
unstructured experiences, but also replace those authentic experiences with
virtual ones, creating a separate set of problems. According to surveys by the
Kaiser Family Foundation and others, school-age children spend, on average,
around five hours a day in front of screens for recreational purposes (for
children ages two to seven the average is around three hours). All that screen
time is supplemented by the hundreds of impressive computer projects now taking
place in schools. Yet these projects—the steady diet of virtual trips to the
Antarctic, virtual climbs to the summit of Mount Everest, and trips into
cyber-orbit that represent one technological high after another—generate only
vicarious thrills. The student doesn't actually soar above the Earth, doesn't
trek across icy terrain, doesn't climb a mountain. Increasingly, she isn't even
allowed to climb to the top of the jungle gym. And unlike reading, virtual
adventures leave almost nothing to, and therefore require almost nothing of, the
imagination. In experiencing the virtual world, the student cannot, as
philosopher Steve Talbott has put it, "connect to [her] inner essence."
On the
contrary, she is exposed to a simulated world that tends to deaden her
encounters with the real one. During the decade that I spent teaching a course
called Advanced Computer Technology, I repeatedly found that after engaging in
Internet projects, students came back down to the Earth of their immediate
surroundings with boredom and disinterest—and a desire to get back online. This
phenomenon was so pronounced that I started kidding my students about being BEJs:
Big Event Junkies. Sadly, many readily admitted that, in general, their classes
had to be conducted with the multimedia sensationalism of MTV just to keep them
engaged. Having watched Discovery Channel and worked with computer simulations
that severely compress both time and space, children are typically disappointed
when they first approach a pond or stream: the fish aren't jumping, the frogs
aren't croaking, the deer aren't drinking, the otters aren't playing, and the
raccoons (not to mention bears) aren't fishing. Their electronic experiences
have led them to expect to see these things happening—all at once and with no
effort on their part. This distortion can also result from a diet of television
and movies, but the computer's powerful interactive capabilities greatly
accelerate it. And the phenomenon affects more than just experiences with the
natural world. It leaves students apathetic and impatient in any number of
settings—from class discussions to science experiments. The result is that the
child becomes less animated and less capable of appreciating what it means to be
alive, what it means to belong in the world as a biological, social being.
So what to make of
the Charlotte's Web video, in which the students hunch over a
ten-by-twelve-inch screen, trying to learn about what it means to be part of a
community while the recess clock ticks away? It's probably unfair to blame the
teacher, who would have had plenty of reasons to turn to computers. Like
thousands of innovative teachers across the U.S., she must try to find
alternatives to the mind-numbing routine of lectures, worksheets, and rote
memorization that constitutes conventional schooling. Perhaps like many other
teachers, she fully acknowledges the negative effects of computer instruction as
she works to create something positive. Or her instructional choices may have
simply reflected the infatuation that many parents, community leaders, school
administrators, and educational scholars have had with technology.
Computer-based education clearly energizes many students and it seems to offer
children tremendous power. Unfortunately, what it strips away is much less
obvious.
When I was growing up in rural Iowa, I certainly lacked for
many things. I couldn't tell a bagel from a burrito. But I always and in many
ways belonged. For children, belonging is the most important function a
community serves. Indeed, that is the message that lies at the heart of
Charlotte's Web. None of us—whether of barnyard or human society—thrives
without a sense of belonging. Communities offer it in many different
ways—through stories, through language, through membership in religious, civic,
or educational organizations. In my case, belonging hinged most decisively on
place. I knew our farm—where the snowdrifts would be the morning after a
blizzard, where and when the spring runoff would create a temporary stream
through the east pasture. I knew the warmest and coolest spots. I could tell you
where I was by the smells alone. Watching a massive thunderstorm build in the
west, or discovering a new litter of kittens in the barn, I would be awestruck,
mesmerized by mysterious wonders I could not control. One of the few moments I
remember from elementary school is watching a huge black-and-yellow garden
spider climb out of Lee Anfinson's pant cuffs after we came back from a field
trip picking wildflowers. It set the whole class in motion with lively
conversation and completely flummoxed our crusty old teacher. Somehow that
spider spoke to all of us wide-eyed third graders, and we couldn't help but
speak back. My experience of these moments, even if often only as a caring
observer, somehow solidified my sense of belonging to a world larger than
myself—and prepared me, with my parents' guidance, to participate in the larger
community, human and otherwise.
Though the work of the students in the video doesn't
reflect it, this kind of experience plays a major role in E. B. White's story.
Charlotte's Web beautifully draws a child's attention to something that
is increasingly rare in schools: the wonder of ordinary processes of nature,
which grows mainly through direct contact with the real world. As Hannah Arendt
and other observers have noted, we can only learn who we are as human beings by
encountering what we are not. While it may seem an impossible task to provide
all children with access to truly wild territories, even digging in (healthy)
soil opens up a micro-universe that is wild, diverse, and "alien." Substituting
the excitement of virtual connections for the deep fulfillment of firsthand
engagement is like mistaking a map of a country for the land itself, or as
biological philosopher Gregory Bateson put it, "eat[ing] the menu instead of
your meal." No one prays over a menu. And I've never witnessed a child
developing a reverence for nature while using a computer.
There is a
profound difference between learning from the world and learning about it. Any
young reader can find a surfeit of information about worms on the Internet. But
the computer can only teach the student about worms, and only through abstract
symbols—images and text cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the
way children come to know worms by hands-on experience—by digging in the soil,
watching the worm retreat into its hole, and of course feeling it wiggle in the
hand. There is the delight of discovery, the dirt under the fingernails, an
initial squeamishness followed by a sense of pride at overcoming it. This is
what can infuse knowledge with reverence, taking it beyond simple ingestion and
manipulation of symbols. And it is reverence in learning that inspires
responsibility to the world, the basis of belonging. So I had to wonder why the
teacher from the Charlotte's Web video asked children to create animated
computer pictures of spiders. Had she considered bringing terrariums into the
room so students could watch real spiders fluidly spinning real webs? Sadly, I
suspect not.
Rather
than attempt to compensate for a growing disconnect from nature, schools seem
more and more committed to reinforcing it, a problem that began long before the
use of computers. Western pedagogy has always favored abstract knowledge over
experiential learning. Even relying on books too much or too early inhibits the
ability of children to develop direct relationships with the subjects they are
studying. But because of their power, computers drastically exacerbate this
tendency, leading us to believe that vivid images, massive amounts of
information, and even online conversations with experts provide an adequate
substitute for conversing with the things themselves. As the computer has
amplified our youths' ability to virtually "go anywhere, at any time," it has
eroded their sense of belonging anywhere, at any time, to anybody, or for any
reason. How does a child growing up in Kansas gain a sense of belonging when her
school encourages virtual learning about Afghanistan more than firsthand
learning about her hometown? How does she relate to the world while spending
most of her time engaging with computer-mediated text, images, and sounds that
are oddly devoid of place, texture, depth, weight, odor, or taste—empty of life?
Can she still cultivate the qualities of responsibility and reverence that are
the foundation of belonging to real human or biological communities?
During the years
that I worked with young people on Internet telecollaboration projects, I was
constantly frustrated by individuals and even entire groups of students who
would suddenly disappear from cyber-conversations related to the projects. My
own students indicated that they understood the departures to be a way of
controlling relationships that develop online. If they get too intense, too
nasty, too boring, too demanding, just stop communicating and the relationship
goes away. When I inquired, the students who used e-mail regularly all admitted
they had done this, the majority more than once. This avoidance of potentially
difficult interaction also surfaced in a group of students in the "Talented and
Gifted" class at my school. They preferred discussing cultural diversity with
students on the other side of the world through the Internet rather than
conversing with the school's own ESL students, many of whom came from the very
same parts of the world as the online correspondents. These bright high school
students feared the uncertain consequences of engaging the immigrants
face-to-face. Would they want to be friends? Would they ask for favors? Would
they embarrass them in front of others? Would these beginning English speakers
try to engage them in frustrating conversations? Better to stay online, where
they could control when and how they related to strange people—without much of
the work and uncertainty involved with creating and maintaining a caring
relationship with a community.
If computers discourage a
sense of belonging and the hard work needed to interact responsibly with others,
they replace it with a promise of power. The seduction of the digital world is
strong, especially for small children. What sets the computer apart from other
devices, such as television, is the element of control. The most subtle,
impressive message promoted by the Charlotte's Web video was that
children could take charge of their own learning. Rather than passively
listening to a lecture, they were directly interacting with educational content
at their own pace. Children, who have so little control over so many things,
often respond enthusiastically to such a gift. They feel the same sense of power
and control that any of us feels when we use the computer successfully.
To develop normally, any child needs to learn to exert some
control over her environment. But the control computers offer children is
deceptive, and ultimately dangerous. In the first place, any control children
obtain comes at a price: relinquishing the uniquely imaginative and often
irrational thought processes that mark childhood. Keep in mind that a computer
always has a hidden pedagogue—the programmer—who designed the software and
invisibly controls the options available to students at every step of the way.
If they try to think "outside the box," the box either refuses to respond or
replies with an error message. The students must first surrender to the
computer's hyper-rational form of "thinking" before they are awarded any control
at all.
And then what
exactly is awarded? Here is one of the most under appreciated hazards of the
digital age: the problematic nature of a child's newfound power—and the lack of
internal discipline in using it. The child pushes a button and the computer
draws an X on the screen. The child didn't draw that X, she essentially
"ordered" the computer to do it, and the computer employed an enormous amount of
embedded adult skill to complete the task. Most of the time a user forgets this
distinction because the machine so quickly and precisely processes commands. But
the intensity of the frustration that we experience when the computer suddenly
stops following orders (and our tendency to curse at, beg, or sweet talk it)
confirms that the subtle difference is not lost on the psyche. This shift toward
remote control is akin to taking the child out of the role of actor and turning
her into the director. This is a very different way of engaging the world than
hitting a ball, building a fort, setting a table, climbing a tree, sorting
coins, speaking and listening to another person, acting in a play. In an
important sense, the child gains control over a vast array of complex abstract
activities by giving up or eroding her capacity to actually do them herself. We
bemoan the student who uses a spell-checker instead of learning to spell, or a
calculator instead of learning to add. But the sacrifice of internal growth for
external power generally operates at a more subtle level, as when a child
assembles a PowerPoint slideshow using little if any material that she actually
created herself.
Perhaps more importantly, however, this emphasis on
external power teaches children a manipulative way of engaging the world. The
computer does an unprecedented job of facilitating the manipulation of symbols.
Every object within the virtual environment is not only an abstract
representation of something tangible, but is also discrete, floating freely in a
digital sea, ready at hand for the user to do with as she pleases. A picture of
a tree on a computer has no roots in the earth; it is available to be dragged,
cropped, shaded, and reshaped. A picture of a face can be distorted, a recording
of a musical performance remixed, someone else's text altered and inserted into
an essay. The very idea of the dignity of a subject evaporates when everything
becomes an object to be taken apart, reassembled, or deleted. Before computers,
people could certainly abstract and manipulate symbols of massive objects or
living things, from trees to mountainsides, from buildings to troop movements.
But in the past, the level of manipulative power found in a computer never
rested in the hands of children, and little research has been done to determine
its effect on them. Advocates enthuse over the "unlimited" opportunities
computers afford the student for imaginative control. And the computer
environment attracts children exactly because it strips away the very resistance
to their will that so frustrates them in their concrete existence. Yet in the
real world, it is precisely an object's resistance to unlimited manipulation
that forces a child (or anyone) to acknowledge the physical limitations of the
natural world, the limits of one's power over it, and the need to respect the
will of others living in it. To develop normally, a child needs to learn that
she cannot force the family cat to sit on her lap, make a rosebud bloom, or hurt
a friend and expect to just start over again with everything just as it was
before. Nevertheless, long before children have learned these lessons in the
real world, parents and educators rush to supply them with digital tools. And we
are only now getting our first glimpse of the results—even among teenagers, whom
we would expect to have more maturity than their grade school counterparts.
On the day my
Advanced Computer Technology classroom got wired to the Internet, it suddenly
struck me that, like other technology teachers testing the early Internet
waters, I was about to give my high school students more power to do more harm
to more people than any teens had ever had in history, and all at a safe
distance. They could inflict emotional pain with a few keystrokes and never have
to witness the tears shed. They had the skill to destroy hours, even years, of
work accomplished by others they didn't know or feel any ill-will toward—just
unfortunate, poorly protected network users whose files provided convenient
bull's-eyes for youth flexing their newfound technical muscles. Had anyone
helped them develop the inner moral and ethical strength needed to say "no" to
the flexing of that power?
On the contrary, we hand even our smallest children
enormously powerful machines long before they have the moral capacities to use
them properly. Then to assure that our children don't slip past the electronic
fences we erect around them, we rely on yet other technologies—including
Internet filters like Net Nanny—or fear of draconian punishments. This is not
the way to prepare youth for membership in a democratic society that eschews
authoritarian control.
That lesson hit
home with particular force when I had to handle a trio of very bright high
school students in one of the last computer classes I taught. These otherwise
nice young men lobbied me so hard to approve their major project
proposal—breaking through the school's network security—that I finally relented
to see if they intended to follow through. When I told them it was up to them,
they trotted off to the lab without a second thought and went right to
work—until I hauled them back and reasserted my authority. Once the external
controls were lifted, these teens possessed no internal controls to take over.
This is something those who want to "empower" young children by handing them
computers have tended to ignore: that internal moral and ethical development
must precede the acquisition of power—political, economic, or technical—if it is
to be employed responsibly.
Computer
science pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum long ago argued that as the machines we put in
our citizens' hands become more and more powerful, it is crucial that we
increase our efforts to help people recognize and accept the immense
responsibility they have to use those machines for the good of humanity.
Technology can provide enormous assistance in figuring out how to do things,
Weizenbaum pointed out, but it turns mute when it comes time to determine what
we should do. Without any such moral grounding, the dependence on computers
encourages a manipulative, "whatever works" attitude toward others. It also
reinforces the exploitative relationship to the environment that has plagued
Western society since Descartes first expressed his desire to "seize nature by
the throat." Even sophisticated "environmental" simulations, which show how
ecosystems respond to changes, reinforce the mistaken idea that the natural
world conforms to our abstract representations of it, and therefore has no
inherent value, only the instrumental value we assign to it through our symbols.
Such reductionism reinforces the kind of faulty thinking that is destroying the
planet: we can dam riparian systems if models show an "acceptable" level of
damage, treat human beings simply as units of productivity to be discarded when
inconvenient or useless, and reduce all things, even those living, to mere data.
The message of the medium—abstraction, manipulation, control, and
power—inevitably influences those who use it.
None of this
happens overnight, of course, or with a single exposure to a computer. It takes
time to shape a worldview. But that is exactly why it is wrong-headed to push
such powerful worldview-shapers on impressionable children, especially during
elementary school years. What happens when we immerse our children in virtual
environments whose fundamental lesson is not to live fully and responsibly in
the world, but to value the power to manipulate objects and relationships? How
can we then expect our children to draw the line between the symbols and what
they represent? When we remove resistance to a child's will to act, how can we
teach that child to deal maturely with the Earth and its inhabitants?
Our
technological age requires a new definition of maturity: coming to terms with
the proper limits of one's own power in relation to nature, society, and one's
own desires. Developing those limits may be the most crucial goal of
twenty-first-century education. Given the pervasiveness of digital technology,
it is not necessary or sensible to teach children to reject computers (although
I found that students need just one year of high school to learn enough computer
skills to enter the workplace or college). What is necessary is to confront the
challenges the technology poses with wisdom and great care. A number of
organizations are attempting to do just that. The Alliance for Childhood, for
one, has recently published a set of curriculum guidelines that promotes an
ecological understanding of the relationship between humans and technology. But
that's just a beginning.
In the preface
to his thoughtful book, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner writes,
"I am convinced that any philosophy of technology worth its salt must eventually
ask, 'How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are
and the kind of world we would like to build?'" Unfortunately, our schools too
often default to the inverse of that question: "How can we limit human beings to
match the best use of what our technology can do and the kind of world it will
build?" As a consequence, our children are likely to sustain this process of
alienation—in which they treat themselves, other people, and the Earth
instrumentally—in a vain attempt to materially fill up lives crippled by
internal emptiness. We should not be surprised when they "solve" personal and
social problems by turning to drugs, guns, hateful Web logs, or other powerful
"tools," rather than digging deep within themselves or searching out others in
the community for strength and support. After all, this is just what we have
taught them to do.
At the heart of a
child's relationship with technology is a paradox—that the more external power
children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to
develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents,
and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to
emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just
technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve
unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to
discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn,
will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and
at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live.
Bob Dylan is singing "The
Times They Are A-Changin'" in a television ad for health-care giant Kaiser
Permanente these days, and who could argue? With Led Zeppelin pitching Cadillacs,
the Rolling Stones strutting in an Ameriquest Mortgage ad and Paul McCartney
warbling for Fidelity Investments, it's clear that the old counterculture heroes
of classic rock are now firmly entrenched as the house band of corporate
America.
That only makes the case of John Densmore all the more intriguing.
Once, back when rock 'n' roll still seemed dangerous, Densmore was the drummer
for the Doors, the band with dark hits such as "Light My Fire" and "People Are
Strange." That band more or less went into the grave with lead singer Jim
Morrison in 1971, but, like all top classic-rock franchises, it now has the
chance to exploit a lucrative afterlife in television commercials. Offers keep
coming in, such as the $15 million dangled by Cadillac last year to lease the
song "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" to hawk its luxury SUVs.
A no-brainer
To the surprise of the corporation and to the chagrin of his former bandmates,
Densmore vetoed the idea. He said he did the same when Apple Computer called
with a $4-million offer, and every time "some deodorant company wants to use
`Light My Fire.'"
The reason?
"People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this
music," Densmore said. "I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to
this music, other people say they know someone who didn't commit suicide because
of this music. Onstage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and
magic. That's not for rent."
That not only sets the Doors apart from the long, long list of classic rock acts
that have had their songs licensed for major U.S. commercial campaigns, it has
also added considerably to Densmore's estrangement from former bandmates Ray
Manzarek and Robbie Krieger, a trio that last set eyes on one another in the
corridors of the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse last year.
"Everyone wanted him to do it," says John Branca, an attorney who worked on the
Cadillac proposal. "I told him that, really, people don't frown on this anymore.
It's considered a branding exercise for the music. He told me he just couldn't
sell a song to a company that was polluting the world.
"I shook my head," Branca said, "but, hey, you have to respect that. How many of
your principles would you reconsider when people start talking millions of
dollars?"
Densmore relented once. Back in the 1970s, he agreed to let "Riders on the
Storm" be used to sell Pirelli Tires in a TV spot in England. When he saw it he
was sick. "I gave every cent to charity. Jim's ghost was in my ear, and I felt
terrible. If I needed proof that it was the wrong thing to do, I got it."
Since then, the animus between the drummer and Manzarek and Krieger has
intensified.
In August, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gregory W. Alarcon ruled that
Manzarek and Krieger could no longer tour together as "Doors of the 21st
Century." The pair, with former Cult singer Ian Astbury handling Morrison's old
vocal duties, were in Canada at the time and grudgingly switched their marquee
to the acronym "D21C."
Joined by Morrison's estate
Densmore had filed the suit in 2003 to block the neo-Doors from using any
permutation of the old band's name. In this battle, he was joined by the
Morrison estate.
Manzarek said the view that Densmore is selflessly protecting the Doors legacy
is laughable.
"John is going to get about a million dollars for doing nothing," Manzarek said.
"He gets an equal share as us, and we were out there working. A free million
bucks. That's a gig I'd like."
Manzarek, 66, said his old friend should join the neo-Doors, not try to
undermine them. "He should come and play drums with us," Manzarek said, "not
fight us at every turn. We're all getting older. We should, the three of us, be
playing these songs because, hey, the end is always near. Morrison was a poet,
and above all, a poet wants his words heard."
Perhaps more years of life would have changed his view, but in 1969 it was quite
clear that the poet of the Doors did not want to be a pitchman.
The Doors had formed in 1965. As the decade was coming to a close, they were
hailed in some quarters as the "Rolling Stones of America." An advertising firm
came to the band with an offer: $50,000 to allow their biggest hit, "Light My
Fire," to be used in a commercial for the Buick Opel.
Morrison was in Europe and his bandmates voted in his absence; Densmore, Krieger
and Manzarek agreed to the deal. Morrison returned and was furious, vowing to
sledgehammer a Buick onstage at every concert if the commercial went forward. It
did not.
In November 1970, the lesson learned from the Buick fiasco was put in writing.
The Doors members agreed that any licensing agreement would require a unanimous
vote. Even before that, the band had agreed that the members would share equally
in all music-publishing rights, an arrangement that set them apart from most
bands. Those agreements also set the stage for Densmore to be a human handbrake
that again and again stops the Doors profit machine from speeding down new
avenues.
"There's a lot of pressure, from everyone," Densmore said recently with a weary
sigh. "Pressure from the guys, the manager, the Morrisonestate."
He was sitting in the back-house office of his Santa Monica, Calif., home. The
walls are covered with photos and newspaper clippings, among them a framed
Morrison poem about the vantage point of man beyond the grave. Among the lines:
"No more money/no more fancy dress/This other kingdom seems by far the best."
Popularity surge
Morrison is dead but hardly forgotten. Just the opposite, his popularity has
surged in the years after his heart gave out. There was the one-two punch of the
1979 release of the film "Apocalypse Now," with its signature moments using the
band's music, and the 1980 publication of the band tell-all book "No One Here
Gets Out Alive" by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. In 1991, another revival
was stirred by Oliver Stone's movie "The Doors." Since that film's release, 14
million Doors albums have been sold in the United States alone.
Those album sales combine with the money generated by radio airplay,
merchandising and the other royalty streams to put steady deposits into the bank
accounts of the surviving members and the Morrison estate. Densmore said that
the money coming in should relieve pressure on the band to drift into areas that
will trample the legacy. "When Ray calls, I always ask him, `What is it you want
to buy?'"
When Cadillac offered $15 million last year, the money made Densmore dizzy
("More money than any of us have made on anything we've ever done," he said),
but he was resolute. "Robbie was on the fence; Ray wanted to do it," Densmore
said. "All of it made me think about this book I want to write. It's about
greed."
Manzarek, on the other hand, describes the car commercial in tie-dyed hues."
Cadillac said we could all fly out to Detroit and give input as they start
putting together their hybrid models and the way they would be presented to the
public . . . artists and corporations working together, that's the 21st Century.
That's the true age of Aquarius. But John's ego wouldn't let him see it was a
good thing to do.
In the end, Cadillac held onto the motto "Break Through" but used a different
dark anthem -- the commercial, now in heavy rotation, features Zeppelin's
frenetic 1972 single "Rock and Roll." Cadillac's eight-figure offer was enough
to coax the band to take its first plunge into the advertising profit stream.
Even among the classic-rock purist audience, there is a shift in expectation.
Pete Howard, editor in chief of Ice magazine, a music publication tailored to
audiophiles and intense rock music collectors, not only thinks the Doors should
take money for the songs of the past, he believes they are risking their future
if they don't.
"They get a gold star for integrity, but they are missing a train that is
leaving the station," Howard said. "Advertising is no longer a dirty word to the
Woodstock generation, and in fact, in this landscape, the band will find that if
it relies on people who hear the music in films, on radio in prerecorded
formats, that with each decade their niche among music fans will narrow. It's
advertising -- with its broad audience and ubiquity -- that gets new ears."
Densmore now waits to see if his old bandmates will appeal the court decision
banning the use of the Doors name for their concert tours. For the time being,
Manzarek has said that the band will continue with the name Riders on the Storm.
Densmore said he would not dispute them on that. Manzarek said the fans and
reviews have been great, and Astbury has the same "dark, shamanistic, powerful,
Celtic-Christian, mystical" vibe as his old friend Morrison. Manzarek says the
group will soon record a new studio album.
"It doesn't matter what we call it, it's still Robbie and I together playing
`Light My Fire' and `Love Me Two Times.' John should come and play and let us
celebrate and keep this music alive," Manzarek said. "Look, what do I say to the
cynics? I would like to play with Jim Morrison again. But you know what? I can't
call him. I'm sorry. He's dead. He's busy. He's in eternity."
So what about that invitation from Manzarek?
"I would love to play with the Doors and play those songs again. I would. And I
will play again as the Doors. Just as soon as Jim shows up."
I've got a little, make that a big, problem with contemporary art auctions. Last
fall I set out to investigate it further. Beginning November 3, the day after
the U.S. presidential election, I went to as many sales during New York's big
fall auction week as I could stomach. This turned out to be a half-dozen spread
out among the major auction houses—Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips. I
learned a lot, but the problem only grew.
Contemporary art
auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and
brothel. They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin, and trophy
hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the
codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. Everyone says
auctions are about "quality." In fact, auctions are altars to the disconnect
between the inner life of art and the outer life of consumption, places where
artists are cut off from their art. Auctions have nothing to do with quality. At
auctions new values are assigned and desire is fetishized. Consumption becomes a
sort of sacrament, art plays the role of sacrificial lamb, and the Ponzi scheme
that surrounds it all rolls on.
Auctions are like
stripteases: They rely on people being enticed by what's just out of reach. The
auctioneer announces the lot number, the crowd stirs, and a turntable revolves
to reveal the forlorn-looking work that is frequently guarded by one of the only
black people in the room. Echoing this antebellum nightmare, petite blondes in
little dresses sit close by. They're there to spot bids but rarely actually do
anything. Occasionally, a handsome swain, assumedly another employee, approaches
one of them from behind and whispers something into an ear. This lends a certain
kinkiness to the proceedings. Of the hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in
these rooms, only a tiny handful actually bid. The rest are there for kicks,
networking, tracking values, and who knows what. Meanwhile the ghostly "phone
bidders" buy their art in public and private at the same time.
In my season at
the auctions I saw seas of white people captivated by ruby-throated auctioneers
(all European, all insanely artificial in their mannerisms). These showmen
gesticulate and croon their odious, melodious, mathematical songs, "I have $4
million. Do I hear 5 million?" I looked on as three-quarters of a billion
dollars changed hands and silently bade farewell to works of art that will
probably not be seen again in public in my lifetime. I saw a Mondrian, a
Modigliani, and a Gauguin bring $21 million, $31 million, and $39 million
respectively. A Johns drawing fetched $11 million, a Warhol "Race Riot" $15
million, and a Maurizio Catalan went for $3 million. I felt faint when a Matthew
Barney photo in an edition of 10 that I had seen in his studio years before went
for $200,000, then felt fainter as a restaurateur from a canceled reality-TV
show bid up a photograph while a stunning blonde ground her pelvis against his
groin every time he waved his paddle. I was dumbfounded as a third-rate painting
by the second-rate Marlene Dumas broke the million-dollar mark, bought by one of
her dealers. Numbers didn't matter any longer as the crowd carried on and the
tote board tallied prices in international currencies. Suddenly, Bush's election
victory seemed quaint.
What's out of
whack at the auctions, however, isn't just the monetary values of the art, it's
the values of the people who are buying and selling it. Wealthy collectors and
their spawn tell everyone they love the art they own. Then—instead of selling
the top several works and being set for life and perhaps giving the rest to a
museum and changing the course of that museum forever (while receiving a tax
benefit for themselves)—they sell their collections at auction and everyone
applauds. These collectors don't have a clue about what it means to own art.
Like the auction houses, they're only interested in money and publicity.
The greed,
stupidity, and cupidity of many of the people who buy and sell their art at
auctions has created what I call the "parallel market": artists whose auction
prices far exceed what their work costs in galleries. Christie's international
co-head of post-war contemporary art, Amy Cappellazzo, ruefully admits, "Some
people prefer to spend $500,000 at auction on something they could buy privately
for $50,000." She calls these people "traders." Auction houses rely on the fact
that many of their buyers either don't know that much about art, that they'll
buy almost anything if it has the right name on it, or that they don't care. So
much for "quality."
Art worlders
continually grouse about the skyrocketing prices and privately say they hate
auctions. Yet, too many of them are making too much money off the system as it
is to step away. It’s becoming a vicious cycle. Recently The New York Times
featured a front page "Arts & Leisure" article titled "The X Factor" about why
the art of women doesn't sell at auction for the same prices as that by men.
Among other examples, it cited an Elizabeth Peyton painting that "only" sold for
$300,000 while John Currin and Luc Tuymans fetched more than a million. What the
article and all of us should ask is why any of them—good or bad—should
sell for much more than, say, $100,000.
Auctions have
always and only been commercial. By now, they're so craven they make you
see that art fairs might be ways that artists and gallerists can take back at
least some of the control. When this moneyed phase ends, a lot of people are
going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of
this. Whatever anyone says, auctions are nasty pieces of work.
Saturday night was the 10th day of the spreading youth riots that have much of
France in flames -- and it was the worst night ever since the first riot
erupted in a suburban Paris ghetto of low-income housing, with 1295 vehicles
-- from private cars to public buses -- burned last night, a huge jump from
the 897 set afire the previous evening. And, for the first time, the violence
born in the suburban ghettos last night invaded the center of Paris -- some 40
vehicles were set alight in Le Marais (the pricey home to the most famous gay
ghetto in Paris, around the Place de la Republique nearby, and in the
bourgeois 17th arrondissement, only a stone's throw from the dilapidated
ghetto of the Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement.
As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those
suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of
times, I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion
that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government
neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and
left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black
populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the
deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and
profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both
from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.
To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important
to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now
burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French
state.
If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is
today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there
was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years
of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes
glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign
colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no
Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow
the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by
two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French
birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers were considered passive and
unlikely to strike (unlike the highly political French working class and its
Communist-led unions.) This government-and-industry-sponsored influx of Arab
workers (many of whom saved up to bring their families to France from North
Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the Harkis.
The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins
de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France
during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence -- and who for
their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed
by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly
abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated
itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families
who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who
refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in
unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never
benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for
France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized
children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments.
France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income
housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") --
specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs
around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their
darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon,
Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers today
encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport
provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to
their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban
peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none
linking the ghettos to the urban centers.
Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated
suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken
elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in
winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial
amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and
difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are
truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both
apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is a cultural taboo in
the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their
children, and even for their male grandchildren of today -- who've adopted
hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of
extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political
content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to
rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.
The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des
Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of
100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin
Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice The Marche des
Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto,
Les Minguettes, with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic
worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand
to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else ... a
demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs,
little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes
beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair. In
recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating
through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a
separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq
Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse
when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist
discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like
hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been
meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in
her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, "Frere Tariq: discourse,
methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan," extracts from which have been
published in the weekly l'Express.) But the current rebellion has little to do
with Islamic fundamentalism.
In 1990, Francois Mitterrand -- the Socialist President then -- described what
life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":
"What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a
soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness,
imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life,
with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get
mad, time to FORBID."
Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words --
for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a
few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's
diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their
"gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.
The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the
conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days
of the rebellion, Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin decided
to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy,
lead the government's response to the youth's violence and arson. Chirac and
Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as
president in 2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block
Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M.
thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his
widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of
domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage
his presidential campaign.
But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto
youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of
repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise"
the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately
translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an
infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known
brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure
sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin
of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's
underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a
strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior
Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing"
without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very
aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many
Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of
the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses
completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille"
is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the
flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently
evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious
insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.
As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as
Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering
that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone
this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude
Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchaine -- told me, "That's not true -- this
isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying
to scare people. Sure, kids in neighborhoods are using their cellphones and
text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming so they can move
and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion is spreading because
the youth have a sense of solidarity that comes from watching television --
they imitate what they're seeing, and they sense themselves targeted by
Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. The rebellion is spreading spontaneously --
driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these
youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- they're arrested or
controlled and have their papers checked because they have dark skins, and the
police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' [a racist insult,
something like the American "towel-heads", only worse] and telling them,
'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right to look a
policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so
divorced from authority."
A team report in today's French daily, Liberation (where I was once a
columnist), interviews ghetto youths, and asks them to explain the reasons for
their anger. And, the paper reports, "All, or almost all, cite 'Sarko'....a
22-year old student says, 'Sarkozy owes us his excuses for what he said. When
I see what's happened, I come back to the same image: Sarkozy when he went to
Argenteuil, raising his head and thundering, Madame, we're going to clean all
that up. Result? Sarko sent every body over the top, he showed a total
disrespect toward everybody" in the ghetto." A 13-year-old tells the
Liberation reporters: "'It's us who are going to put Sarkozy through the
Karcher...Will I be out making trouble tonight?' He smiles and says, 'that's
classified information.'" Another 28-year-old youth: "Who's setting the fires?
They're kids between 14 and 22, we don't really know who they are because they
put on masks, don't talk, and don't brag about it the next day ... but instead
of fucking everything up where they live, it would be better if they held a
demo, or went and fucked up the people and the stores in Paris. We've got
minister, Sarko, who says 'You're all the same.' Me, I say non, we all say non
-- but in reply we still get, 'You're all the same.' That response from the
government creates something in common between all of us, a kind of
solidarity. These kids want to get attention, to let people know they exist.
So, they same to themselves, 'If we get nasty and create panic, they won't
forget us, they'll know we're in a neighborhood where we need help."
Yesterday, when Sarkozy -- who is Minister of Religion as well as Interior
Minister -- wanted to make an appearance at the Catholic Bishops' conference
in Paris, they refused to let him speak -- and instead, the Bishops issued a
ringing statement denouncing "those who would call for repression and instill
fear" instead of responding to the economic, social, and racial causes of the
riots. This was an unusually sharp rebuke directed squarely at Sarkozy.
Under the headline "Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors," Le Monde reports
today on how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect
of the ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20% annual cuts
in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths since 2003, cuts in
youth job-training programs and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth, cuts in
education and programs to teach kids how to read and write, cuts in
neighborhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them (when
Sarkozy went to Toulouse, he told the neighborhood police: "You're job is not
to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!") With fewer
and fewer neighborhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth
alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions and
then send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line
paramilitary SWAT teams). Budget cuts for social programs plus more
repression, is a prescription for more violence.
That's why Le Monde's editorial today warned that a continuation of this blind
policy creates a big risk of provoking a repeat of 2002, when the neo-fascist
Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the runoff.
And a majority of the country, empoisoned even more by racism after the
violence of the last ten days, seems willing to accept more and more
repression: a poll released last night on France 2 public TV shows that 57% of
the French support Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line approach to the ghetto youths'
rebellion, now spreading right across France. Sarko's demagogy seems to be
working -- at least with the electorate -- but it won't stop the violence, it
will only increase it.
TAMPA -- With a cheery smile, Mary Mavrick strolled the store's aisles, handing
out leaflets to workers while expecting to be nabbed any minute by security
guards.
"What's this? Oh!" a gray-haired Wal-Mart worker said out loud, as she read from
the one-page flier from the Wal-Mart Workers Association, a union-backed
experiment to win support from the retailer's workers without traditional union
organizing.
The flier read:
"Do you deserve respect from management? Does your family deserve more? Do you
deserve more."
Mavrick was already in the parking lot, her leaflets distributed to surprised
Wal-Mart workers by the time the guards told her to leave. She vowed to be back.
Her effort is a tiny part of a widening escalation of moves and countermoves
between the behemoth 1.3 million-worker company and its foes, which include
environmentalists, community activists and workers' rights advocates, much of it
directed by the Service Employees International Union.
But it's not the typical union effort. Staffed largely by national political
campaign veterans, it's a highly sophisticated publicity and Internet war aimed
at the hearts, minds and wallets of Wal-Mart shoppers and employees.
"Actually, I'm shocked at how much we've penetrated into Wal-Mart's
consciousness," said Andy Stern, SEIU's president. "We usually don't get this
much attention so quickly."
Stern says the goal isn't to launch an immediate effort to organize the
retailer's workers, but to change the company's behavior. That includes, he
says, boosting workers' salaries, providing better health care and paying more
attention to the U.S. communities in which the firm's 3,151 stores are located.
Wal-Mart officials said they were not worried about those who saw a fiercely
anti-Wal-Mart documentary, "Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Price." It was shown
last week in 8,000 venues, including at least 1,000 places of worship, said
Robert Greenwald, its director and producer, who is not connected to the union
drive.
The traditional route of showing the $1.8 million movie in theaters would have
attracted people whose minds were already made up, Greenwald said. Instead, he
wanted to reach "undecided or neutral" viewers.
The union bought 4,000 copies of the DVD for showings.
Company offers rebuttal
"The people who go there aren't the people who want to hear our message," said
Wal-Mart spokesman Bob McAdam. Nonetheless, Wal-Mart promptly churned out a
detailed written rebuttal of most of the points raised in the documentary.
"The company hasn't changed, but how we talk about us, has," said McAdam.
But others point out that Wal-Mart has clearly taken steps to garner public
support. They include making Wal-Mart stores more environmentally friendly,
supporting a hike in the minimum wage and introducing a less expensive
health-care plan.
A Wal-Mart memo that was recently leaked to opponents shows the company's
concern about "growing public scrutiny" and suggested ways to "move the needle
on Wal-Mart's public reputation."
While Wal-Mart officials say the memo was only a proposal dealing with the
growth of benefits costs, foes leaped on its suggestion that the company rely
more on workers with fewer years on the job because they receive less in
benefits.
So, too, the memo admitted that some critics were "correct" and that the
company's health-care coverage "is expensive for low-income" families. Nearly
half of the children of Wal-Mart employees are "either on Medicaid or are
uninsured," the memo said.
How much of a price Wal-Mart has paid for the bad publicity is hard to measure.
"There's been an impact, but it's far less than the impact of energy prices and
a lagging job market," said Mark Miller, an analyst with William Blair & Co.,
Chicago.
Chris Ohlinger of Service Industry Research Systems in suburban Cincinnati said
consumers' trust in the company has "significantly declined" from several years
ago. And that can parlay into a 1 percent drop in sales, he added.
Ohlinger doubted that the impact would be long lasting. Most consumers, he said,
are concerned more about low prices than anything else.
The difference now is that the battle against Wal-Mart has become much more like
a polished political campaign.
Coordinating like-minded allies across the U.S. is Wal-Mart Watch, based in
Washington, D.C., and initially funded by SEIU. It has reached out to
environmental and religious groups for support.
Wake-Up Wal-Mart is a smaller Washington-based group that was launched by the
United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Frustrated by its failure to gain a
footing over a decade among Wal-Mart's workers, the UFCW now favors virtual
campaigning instead of traditional organizing.
"It's community organizing in a new way," said Paul Blank, who heads Wake Up
Wal-Mart and was national political director of Howard Dean's presidential
campaign. "You give people the downloads and let them go out in their
neighborhoods and come up with new ways to get your message out."
Wake Up Wal-Mart recently set up the Wal-Mart Workers Association and invited
workers to join online or by telephone for the non-dues paying, non-union
association. Blank said thousands of workers have shown an interest.
A loss after a four-month-long strike in 2004 by the food workers union against
major grocers in Southern California convinced Stern that his own union needed
to mount an offensive against Wal-Mart.
"It just crystallized to me that a company with this kind of size and power is
going to either raise standards or lower standards," Stern recalled.
Group has multiple names
So Stern established Wal-Mart Watch, an umbrella organization. To workers it is
known as the Wal-Mart Workers Association and to community groups and others,
whom it also tries to reach, it is known as the Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform.
Much of the thinking behind the effort comes from Wade Rathke, the founder of
ACORN, a nationwide organization of grass-roots activists, and chief organizer
for an SEIU local in New Orleans.
"The notion of collective bargaining as it exists today is not feasible with a
workforce of this scale or a company of this kind," he explained.
With nothing else like it within organized labor in the U.S., Rathke calls the
Florida drive a step-by-step experiment. "We are very humble about this task.
Certainly the results are tentative and embryonic."
Rick Smith, a one-time auto-parts worker from Toledo and longtime SEIU organizer
who heads the Tampa-based effort, says Wal-Mart workers often are baffled by the
concept.
There's no talk of a union election or contract. Monthly dues are $5, which only
some of the 300 Wal-Mart workers who have signed up pay regularly. The dues,
Rathke says, are more symbolic than anything else.
Though Wal-Mart has thousands of workers in the region from Tampa to Orlando,
Smith is not discouraged by the small number of recruits.
"We've pretty much proven you can organize the workers," Smith said as he
shepherded showings of the anti-Wal-Mart movie.
Since beginning its work earlier this year, his group has aided Wal-Mart
workers, whose hours have been drastically cut by the company, to apply for
partial unemployment benefits. It has helped them link up to find baby-sitters
and car pools, and learn how to talk up their rights with company managers.
But it hasn't been easy, as organizers like Mavrick explained. It's hard
reaching workers outside of the stores. It's hard persuading them to think as a
group. And it is hard, they said, getting them to have the self-esteem to feel
that they can do better for themselves.
Donna Geierman has no problems in speaking up on behalf of the fledgling
association. But Geierman, a 13-year Wal-Mart veteran snarled in a worker's
compensation dispute with the company, says most of her colleagues are too
fearful.
"They are living from paycheck to paycheck. And they worry that they can lose
their jobs," she said.
Visiting a group of Wal-Mart workers taking a break outside their store here,
the whispered talk between Geierman and a handful of workers was about pressure
to work the hours mandated by their bosses.
"If you don't work their hours, they say `Hit the road,'" a young man told
Geierman. But then he stopped, dropped his head and lowered his eyes.
Showbiz people are prone to exaggeration, but when everybody is exaggerating
about the same thing, you know something bad is happening. There's a dark cloud
of unease hovering over Hollywood. A top CAA agent calls it "mayhem." A studio
marketer says "it feels like Armageddon." A production chief puts it this way:
"Each weekend there's more blood in the water."
Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point.
The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing
to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music
industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business.
Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games,
downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than
90% of the movies in theaters, the exceptions being "Harry Potter"-style
must-see events or the occasional youth-oriented comedy or thriller.
Anywhere you look, the news has been grim. Disney just reported a $313-million
loss for films and DVDs in its fiscal fourth quarter. Sony has had a disastrous
year, with only one $100-million hit ("Hitch") among a string of costly flops.
DreamWorks not only has had theatrical duds but also saw its stock plummet when
its "Shrek 2" DVD sales fell 5 million short of expectations. Even Warners, the
industry's best-run studio, laid off 400 staffers earlier this month.
Although the media have focused on the economic issues behind this slump, the
problem is cultural too. It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I
go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck
and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business
went into free fall. When MPAA chief Dan Glickman goes to colleges, preaching
his anti-piracy gospel, kids hiss, telling him his efforts don't help the
public, only a few rich media giants. Say what you will about their logic, but,
as anyone in the music business can attest, those sneers are the deadly sign of
a truly disgruntled consumer.
There are still optimists who say the sky isn't falling, who insist that a few
hits will turn things around, or gas prices will come down, or that the business
being off 7% this year has more to do with the absence of a left-field sensation
such as "The Passion of the Christ" than a long-term decline in moviegoing.
To them, I say — go ye to Costco or Best Buy and watch the giant HDTVs zooming
out the door, the TVs that used to cost $7500 that now go for $1995 and allow
middle-class people to have a marvelous moviegoing experience right at home
without $10.50 tickets, $4 popcorn, 20 minutes of annoying commercials and some
guy in the next row yakking away on his cellphone.
Once people spend all that money on a home entertainment system, they've got to
feed the machine. I've watched friends who used to regularly go to theaters
mutate into adjunct professors in DVD-ology, scanning the ads for the new video
releases and rhapsodizing over Netflix the way other people swoon over TiVo or
XM radio.
This only highlights the biggest crack in the system: that most of the movies in
theaters don't deserve a theatrical release, at least not by the rules of
today's game. Until the DVD and pay TV money kicks in, they're money losers. Yet
the studios are forced to spend more marketing money every year to chase after
increasingly resistant moviegoers, then go dark for months before spending
another big chunk to remind people the DVD has arrived.
The studios have no one but themselves to blame. Motivated, as always, by an
obsession with quarterly earnings, they began shrinking the DVD window from nine
months to six months to 90 days. Universal's "The Skeleton Key," which opened in
theaters in mid-August, made its DVD debut last week, barely three months later.
When the six-month window still held sway, the theater beckoned — half a year
felt like a long time away. Three months seems like just around the corner. All
too many movies, even ones with big stars in them, including "The Weather Man,"
"In Her Shoes" and "Dreamer," have died on the vine, with millions of Americans
staring at the TV spots and thinking, "I'll wait and see that on DVD."
And that's just the adult side of the equation. What's really driving the studio
folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency — young moviegoers —
has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just
AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads — either
because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV,
iPod and IM all going at the same time — not exactly a situation in which an ad
leaves much of an imprint. The only movies that are reliable drawing cards today
are behemoths such as "War of the Worlds" or "Harry Potter," or cheap
youth-oriented genre films such as "Saw II" or "The 40 Year-Old Virgin."
One of the movie industry's crucial failings is that it's simply too slow to
keep up with the lightning speed of new technology. Who would've believed six
months ago that the day after "Desperate Housewives" aired on ABC you could
download the whole show on your video iPod? But when someone pitches a movie, it
takes at least 18 to 24 months — if not far longer — between conception and
delivery to the movie theaters. In a world now dominated by the Internet,
studios are at a huge disadvantage in terms of ever lassoing the zeitgeist.
Everybody is making movies based on video games, but it seems clear from the
abject failure of movies such as "Doom" that it's almost impossible, given the
slow pace of filmmaking, to launch a video game movie before the game has
started to lose its sizzle.
New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant messaging
and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the streets fast enough to
stop suckers from lining up to see a new stinker. Even worse, the people who run
studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with
reality.
That's the only explanation for why Sony Pictures could've imagined there was
any compelling reason this summer to see a wan remake of "Bewitched." Or why any
of the studio's highly paid executives didn't wonder why it should shoehorn an
obscure family movie into the one-week window between the Disney-powered
"Chicken Little" and the latest "Harry Potter" juggernaut, especially when the
movie, "Zathura," has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the
warning "side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction."
The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room,
which puts only more distance between you and the rabble — ahem, your customers
— who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. Too often studio people have the
same ideas about the same things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing
one Hot New Thing after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate
Hudson to Colin Farrell, who've yet to connect with rank 'n file filmgoers.
What should studios do to come to grips with this new era? In a world bursting
at the seams with new technology, it's hard to justify the antiquated idea of
studio development, which keeps churning out movies such as "Be Cool," an Elmore
Leonard novel from 1999 that was hilariously out of date by the time it reached
theaters, having a storyline that revolved around Chili Palmer's exploits in the
music business, perhaps the least cool place on the planet.
Hollywood needs a new mindset, one that sees a movie as something that comes in
all shapes and sizes, not something that is wedded to the big screen. Studios
have to do what record companies refused to do until they nearly went out of
business: embrace the future.
People increasingly want to see movies on their terms, today on a big TV at
home, tomorrow on an iPod or cellphone. It breaks my heart that people have
fallen out of love with movie theaters, but if I were king, I'd start releasing
any movie with multi-generational appeal on DVD at the same time it hit
theaters, so the kids could get out of the house and the parents could watch at
home.
The music business has already adopted this two-tier system, selling downloads
and CDs simultaneously. TV networks are starting to do the same thing with their
shows. It's only a matter of time before movies are forced to do the same. The
day isn't far away — desperation being a great motivator for innovation — when a
studio opens a blockbuster on Friday in theaters and on Saturday on pay-per-view
(at $75 a shot) so fans could watch it with a bunch of friends at home.
As it stands, Hollywood has become a prisoner of a corporate mindset that is
squeezing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the system. It's not just that
studios are making bad movies — they've been doing that for years. They've lost
touch with any real cultural creativity. When you walk down the corridors at
Apple or a video game company, there's an electricity in the air that encourages
people into believing they could dream up a new idea that could blow somebody's
mind.
At the big studios, the creative voltage is sometimes so low that you wonder if
you've wandered into an insurance office. The dreamers have left the building.
Back in the 1950s, David Selznick, out walking one night with Ben Hecht, glumly
said, "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It'll just keep on
crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands."
As I said, show people like to exaggerate, but these days when I go around
Hollywood, I can see the crumbling pyramids too.
BERLIN -- Martin "Amok" Thomas is jabbing a right, but Frank
"so-cool-he-doesn't-need-a-nickname" Stoldt is as elusive as a ribbon in the
wind. He can't be hit.
Time!
The gloves come off, and the men hurry across the canvas to the chessboard. (You
heard it right.) Amok took a couple of body shots, and he's breathing hard, but
he had better focus. That Stoldt, though, everyone in the gym knows he's this
warrior-thinker, slamming the speed clock, cunningly moving his queen amid
unraveling bandages and dripping sweat, daring Amok to leave him a sliver of
opportunity.
Time!
Velcro rips. Amok slides back into his Everlast gloves, bites down on his
mouthpiece, dances around the ropes. His king's in trouble, and his punches
couldn't knock lint off a jacket. Stoldt floats toward him like a cloud of big
hurt.
Such is the bewildering beauty of chessboxing. That's one word, as in
alternating rounds of four minutes of chess followed by two minutes of boxing.
Olympics-bound?
Victory is claimed in a number of ways, some of them tedious, but the most
thrilling are by checkmate and knockout. The sport's godfather, Iepe "the Joker"
Rubingh, believes that chessboxing is destined for the Olympics.
"It has enormous potential," says the Joker. "Chess and boxing are very
different worlds. Chessboxers move around in both. It's extremely demanding, but
extremely rewarding. It's all about control over your physical and mental being.
The adrenalin rush in boxing must be lowered to concentrate on chess strategy."
Some will snicker. The Joker knows this. But he is not deterred.
Former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis is a devoted chess player.
Ukrainian Vitali Klitschko, another heavyweight champ who recently retired, has
a keen intellect, and knows what to do when a queen sidles toward his king.
That's the kind of brawn and brain a clever marketing guy like the Joker thinks
he can turn into success, not the novelty kind of success, but genuine
prime-time, Caesars Palace spotlight success.
"I'd love to get them together," the Joker says of Lewis and Klitschko. "What do
you think they want -- $30 million?"
Without marquee names, however, there is a potential drawback. Will people buy a
beer and a hot dog and watch bare-chested smart guys in colorful satin shorts
play chess? They will, the Joker believes, if the match coincides with the
possibility of a knockout or spilled blood.
The World Chess Boxing Organization, founded by the Joker, 31, and some business
partners, held its first European tournament in Berlin in October. Five hundred
fans attended as Bulgarian Tihomir "Tigertad" Titschko be-came the new champion.
Titschko peers over a chessboard as if he's trying to deconstruct the theory of
relativity, and he hits like a big man who just found out his girlfriend is
cheating. He defeated Andreas "D" Schneider, a German actor in dark trunks who
punched well but succumbed in the ninth round to Titschko's blistering chess
attack, de-scribed as "the Dragon variation of the Sicilian defense."
11 rounds: 6 chess, 5 boxing
Chessboxers use words such as "aesthetics" and "arduous." They ponder
performance art, science, philosophy; they study grids, angles and buried
meanings in obscure books.
The rules might be considered simple: Eleven rounds, six of chess and five of
boxing. The first round is always chess. "That's because," says the Joker, "if
you go down in boxing there is no chess." A one-minute pause between rounds
allows opponents to slip on and off gloves and for the chessboard to be moved in
and out in the ring. If all is equal on the chessboard and the boxing scorecard
after the 11 rounds, according to the rules, "the opponent with the black pieces
wins."
Players are required to wear headphones during the chess part of the match.
"This is so no one in the audience can yell out, `Hey, be careful of the knight
on E-6,' " the Joker says.
The inspiration for chessboxing came to the Joker in 2003 after he glimpsed some
dark magical realism in a comic by Enki Bilal. "It's a futuristic story, and
there's a guy watching TV," says the Joker, "and on TV is a kind of chessboxing
match."
The Joker learned chess young from his father, with whom he also watched
American boxing matches on TV. The Joker studied German cultural history in
college. A painter, photographer and video artist, he followed the bohemians to
Berlin in 1997. Six years later, he traveled west to Amsterdam and took on Luis
the Lawyer in the world's first "official" chessboxing match.
"We're too focused on defining sport in one way," he says. "Look at the old
Olympics and the ancient Greeks. They had poets in the games, but in our society
we want to divide things. I don't like borders. You try to tell a story through
a game. Look at Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle, or
Bobby Fischer playing the Russians in chess." The Joker grabs his gear and
crosses the street to the gym.
He slips into the basement, past trophies and punching bags. This is his domain,
his club, where he trains potential stars. The guys are preparing.
They're an interesting bunch: There's Stoldt, a muscular Berlin cop and former
amateur boxer, whose wife was searching the Internet one day when she came upon
chessboxing and convinced him it might be his calling. There is Victor Abraham,
a classically trained baritone with close-cropped black hair and a mustache, who
also paints in the Bauhaus style. Jan Schulz, the club's trainer, can play two
games of chess at once and still seem as if he could handle physics. And there's
Amok, a Web site designer with good-size fists and long arms.
The Joker orders up a bout. Stoldt versus Amok.
Knights and bishops get a workout first. Then into the ring.
Though Amok has a nice reach, Stoldt is slipping in jabs and Amok is tiring.
Time!
Amok slides his queen to A-4, Stoldt drops a knight on 3-G. Stoldt takes a
knight with a bishop. Gloves back on. Amok is jabbing, but his arms are heavy.
Gloves off. Amok goes to F-4 with a knight. Stoldt's pressuring. The queens wipe
each other out. The ring again. Amok is sucking wind.
Smooth and quick, Stoldt goes for the kill. Knight to H-4.
The Joker pats Amok on the shoulder. Amok may be a contender one day.
The Joker has that same thought: Wouldn't it be the ultimate marketing coup for
chessboxing to arrange a match between Lewis and Klitschko?
He smiles at the possibility. Here comes another thought: "Look at Russia,
Ukraine. They're chessboxing nations and they don't even know it yet."
- - -
Other sport-game combinations we'd like to see
Twister kickboxing (right foot, green! left foot, opponent's face!)
Battleship water polo (you sank my goaltender!)
NASCAR Operation (remove gearshift from spleen)
Tai chi charades (you're a statue! no,a butterfly! toaster?)
Pole vaulting Monopoly (Miss your height, go directly to jail)
Sudoku soccer (you gotta do something with all that down time)
In
1813, as part of a correspondence with Isaac McPherson, Thomas Jefferson penned
a mini-disquisition on the peculiar issues confronting patent law: "That ideas
should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and
like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable
of confinement, or exclusive appropriation."
Information, to borrow a more recent slogan, wants to be free. According to
Lawrence Lessig's dazzling new book, The Future of Ideas, that freedom is
under assault, despite recent technological developments that would seem to
embody the Jeffersonian vision. "The digital world is closer to the world of
ideas than to the world of things," Lessig writes. "We in cyberspace, that is,
have built a world that is close to the world of ideas that nature (in
Jefferson's words) created: stuff in space can 'freely spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and
improvement of his condition."
And yet
the freedom of cyberspace and its capacity for mutual instruction is under fire.
The very ethos of the web--a kind of organized anarchy, free of both government
and private-sector control--has been gravely injured by recent events: changes
in copyright law, changes to the underlying architecture of the net, changes in
the competitive landscape of the digital economy. "The essence of the changes in
the environment of the Internet that we are observing now are changes that alter
the balance between control and freedom on the Net. The tilt of these changes is
pronounced: control is increasing."
The
word "control" itself is used advisedly. Lessig, now a professor at Stanford Law
School, begins The Future of Ideas with a shout-out to his former
colleague Andrew Shapiro, whose book The Control Revolution discussed the
battle between control and freedom without necessarily predicting which side
would win (or even which deserved to win). "Shapiro did not predict which future
would be ours," Lessig explains. "Indeed, his argument was that bits of each
future were possible, and that we must choose a balance between them. His
account was subtle, but optimistic. If there was a bias to the struggle, he,
like most of us then, believed the bias would favor freedom. This book picks up
where Shapiro left off. Its message is neither subtle nor optimistic.... we are
far enough along to see the future we have chosen. In that future, the
counter-revolution prevails. The forces that the original Internet threatened to
transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet."
Translated into another revolutionary's language, Lessig's is a story of all
that is air melting into solid. But is our digital future--not to mention the
present--really as grim as Lessig claims? Whether you accept the premise of
Lessig's argument, The Future of Ideas confirms what his first book,
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally promised: Lessig is one of the
brightest minds grappling with the consequences of the digital world today, as
deft and original with technical intricacies as he is with broad legal theory.
He manages to breathe new life into seemingly exhausted economic ideas--his take
on the tragedy of the commons is likely to entrance even the most jaded game
theorist--and tell some fascinating stories along the way, on the freewheeling
early days of the radio spectrum, or the distributed computing project that
harnesses spare processing cycles from thousands of computers around the world
to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.
The
Future of Ideas is also a
deeply iconoclastic work, at least when measured against the standard
assumptions of American politics. Lessig is sometimes cast as a trustbusting
progressive after his brief involvement as "special master" in the Microsoft
antitrust case (appointed by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to advise the court,
he was subsequently removed after Microsoft protested that he was biased against
the software giant). Lessig's positions can seem contradictory: The book is
fundamentally a celebration of decentralized innovation, and yet it is deeply
distrustful of too much power concentrating in the hands of the private sector.
Lessig is no middle-of-the-road New Democrat: He's a radical critic who doesn't
fit readily into any existing ideological camp. In a sense, you can see his
politics as distinctly net-native, closest in spirit to those of open-source
software, the semi-anarchic collective movement that engineered the
now-legendary Linux operating system.
Open-source software projects tilt heavily in the direction of freedom: No one
owns the underlying code behind Linux, and thousands have contributed to it. The
software grows more sophisticated over time for three central reasons: (1) The
ethos of the hacker community has a strong communitarian tradition that
encourages contributions, which are rewarded only by the respect of one's peers,
(2) modern software applications are modular enough to be built by committee,
with thousands of dispersed participants chipping in their ideas, and (3)
because the code base is openly shared with anyone interested in looking at
it--unlike Microsoft's hidden Windows source code--interesting new ideas "freely
spread from one to another over the globe," if not for the moral and mutual
instruction of man, then at least for the improvement of his printer drivers.
This is
the story of the triumph of the commons--free of both government and
corporate control. Its principles animate nearly every page of Lessig's book: a
mix of the libertarian's contempt for centralized control and the socialist's
belief in the power of communal property. This would sound schizophrenic and
impractical if it weren't for the empirical success of open-source projects like
Linux, or the widely used web server Apache--or indeed the web itself, which was
founded on nonproprietary standards. What are the politics of these new systems?
It is not, according to Lessig, "the traditional struggle between Left and Right
or between conservative and liberal. To question assumptions about the scope of
'property' is not to question property. I am fanatically pro-market, in the
market's proper sphere.... The arguments I draw upon...are as strongly tied to
the Right as to the Left.... Instead, the real struggle at stake now is between
old and new."
The
trouble, as Lessig sees it, is that the new is being challenged by the old. We
are in the midst of a kind of digital-age Restoration, in which the old emperors
of centralized control are returning to power after a brief but dizzying spell
of Glorious Revolution. The free flow of code and information is being channeled
once again in conventional directions, and the burst of innovation and media
diversity that the Net produced over the past decade is regressing to the days
of concentrated media oligarchies. "The promise of many-to-many communication
that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways
to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered," Lessig
writes. "What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of
the concentrated systems of distribution."
Lessig
cites a number of recent developments to support his grim prognosis, including
the increased role of cable companies in the net economy:
As the Internet moves from telephone wires to cable, which model should govern?
When you buy a book from Amazon.com, you don't expect AOL to demand a cut. When
you run a search at Yahoo!, you don't expect your MSN network to slow down
anti-Microsoft sites. You don't expect that because the norm of neutrality on
the Internet is so strong...
But the same neutrality does not guide our thinking about cable. If the
cable companies prefer some content over others, that's the natural image of a
cable provider. If your provider declines to show certain stations, that's the
sort of freedom we imagine it should have...
So which model should govern when the Internet moves to cable. Freedom or
control?
Lessig is not optimistic about the
cable companies' ability to adapt to the open-access neutrality that has been a
founding principle of the Internet to date--particularly when those companies
are part of massive content empires like AOL Time Warner. Lessig is typically
persuasive in his argument against these controlled systems, an argument that he
brilliantly mounts not by thundering against "evil" corporations but rather by
pointing to the success of previous open systems whose existence we now take for
granted. "When the United States built its highway system, we might have
imagined that rather than fund the highways through public resources, the
government might have turned to Detroit and said, Build it as you wish, and we
will protect your right to build it to benefit you. We might then imagine roads
over which only American cars can run efficiently, or exits and entrances that
tilt against anything built outside Detroit." Instead, the government built a
highway system that was open to all users and (almost all) uses--a foundation
for commerce and recreation that was biased only in the sense that it "tilted"
against mass transport. The Net was an equivalently open platform, engendering a
thousand unforeseen uses--everything from sharing music files to creating
hypertext archives of public domain books to hosting online auctions for Pez
dispensers and million-dollar artworks. The strength of the system lay in the
fact that there were no gatekeepers deciding which were approved activities and
which weren't.
Lessig is particularly concerned
about the resurgence of gatekeepers in the domain of copyright law. The past few
years have witnessed a dramatic expansion in the legal rights granted to
copyright holders: Books can now take more than a hundred years to enter the
public domain, and entertainment industry organizations like the Motion Picture
Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have
won a number of high-profile lawsuits--most notably against Napster and against
the hackers who broke the DVD compression scheme and distributed it over the
web. Lessig's fear is that the great connectedness produced by the Net may lead
to a system of near-perfect copyright control, as all appropriations of
intellectual property can theoretically be tracked, and unlawful appropriations
prohibited. Jefferson's "freely spreading ideas" starts to look more like
Foucault's take on Bentham's panopticon, with every bitstream monitored for
pilfered data. "The content layer--the ability to use content and ideas--is
closing," Lessig writes. "It is closing without a clear showing of the benefit
this closing will provide and with a fairly clear showing of the harms it will
impose.... [It is] mindless locking up of resources that spur innovation.
Control without reason."
The Future of Ideas succeeds
marvelously at its primary task, which is to persuade the reader of the virtues
of a balance between control and freedom in this new world, and of the
importance of understanding how technological changes can unintentionally alter
that balance. (In this respect, the book builds on the argument of Code,
which demonstrated the ways in which software architecture possesses the force
of law in digital environments.) There may be no thinker today grappling more
tenaciously with the legal issues unleashed by the digital revolution, and the
book's maverick positioning on the conventional political spectrum should make
it a landmark work for that reason alone. Ever since the open-source software
movement entered mainstream culture, its followers have been wondering about
what a larger political philosophy based on its values would look like. The
Future of Ideas is the first significant step in the formulation of that
philosophy.
That
said, it's hard to read a book that makes such bold claims about such a dynamic
and complex field, and not pose a few counterarguments, even if they run against
the grain of your habitual assumptions about the world. I've long shared
Lessig's amazement at the explosion of ideas and new voices unleashed by the Net
over the past decade, but because his argument rests so heavily on this
premise--the uncontrolled nature of the Net's underlying architecture as an
unparalleled engine for innovation--I found myself questioning the assumption
the more I heard it repeated. Two potential objections spring to mind. First,
the Internet proper is more than three decades old; its open protocols have been
evolving steadily since then, and yet compared with other high-tech industries
over that period--personal computers, semiconductors, nontelecom software--its
overall rate of innovation was not particularly noteworthy until the mid-1990s,
when the web took off. The period that followed was without question one of
tremendous innovation, but it was also a period bankrolled by an unprecedented
infusion of venture capital, which fueled both the exploration of just about
every conceivable web-based activity and the mass adoption of the medium itself.
Now, it may well be that the capital influx was a secondary effect, and the
primary cause of the explosion was the Net's open protocols. But then why did it
take so long to blossom?
The
distinction wouldn't matter so much if Lessig didn't point to the Net's track
record of innovation so often in his argument for maintaining--or
replicating--its distinctive balancing act between too much control and too much
freedom. Consider another area of software development: applications created for
the DOS/Windows platform over the past ten years. In areas where Microsoft
doesn't control the market with its own products--pretty much everything other
than the core applications in MS Office--the Windows-based software industry has
produced a staggering number of programs in a short amount of time, including
whole new genres of software: sales-force-automation applications, accounting
packages, video-editing tools, games. The Windows software ecosystem is broad
enough to support huge corporate giants with millions of customers, along with
niche producers selling to tiny markets. (It has also managed to cultivate
something that the web has had trouble with thus far: profitable companies.) And
yet Windows is the epitome of a closed architecture, its source code controlled
by a mighty centralized authority and defended by a phalanx of lawyers. So where
does that innovation come from? It's worth remembering that the Napster client
software itself, while inconceivable without the underlying connectivity offered
by the Net, was nonetheless originally written for the Windows platform.
Napster
brings us back to the question of Lessig's pessimism, and his vision of a
control counterrevolution. Nowhere is Lessig's dark outlook more convincing than
in his survey of recent changes to copyright law, and yet even here the
dystopian tone seems unwarranted: "The content layer--the ability to use content
and ideas--is closing." Closing on what time scale? Compare my ability to copy
books, music tracks and video clips today with what it was just five years ago.
Electronic books barely existed, and so copying books meant a laborious trip to
Kinko's; borrowing music from a friend meant swapping cassette tapes; and the
idea of high-quality video residing on your hard drive was laughable, given the
slower CPUs and smaller hard drives of the day. Even after the shutdown of
Napster, I have access to terabytes of music files via the more distributed--and
thus harder to shut down--Gnutella service, and soon those Napster-descendants
will be serving full-length movies as well. The law may be cracking down on the
technological explosion that made all this possible, and thus in some sense it
might be true to say that "control is increasing," particularly if you're
trained as a law professor. But on the ground--or perhaps it's better to say in
the ether--the technology is still outmaneuvering the counterrevolutionaries.
That's not cause to ignore Lessig's warnings, or ignore the remarkably
sophisticated model of technopolitics that he develops in The Future of
Ideas. But perhaps it's reason to hope that the forces of freedom--if they
have technology on their side--are still stronger than the forces of control.
Oct. 17, 2005
issue - Given his fondness for movies, it's not surprising that Reed Hastings
thinks about the future of home entertainment in terms that sound like they're
drawn straight from "Star Wars." The story line, according to the founder of the
DVDs-by-mail pioneer Netflix, goes something like this: as DVDs slowly give way
to online movies, consumers will face a stark choice. Will they side with the
"Forces of Control" or the "Forces of Freedom"? The Forces of Control are the
cable and satellite companies, which offer 50 to 500 channels of content that's
chosen by network programmers.
Opposing
this bunch are the Forces of Freedom, a group of companies that includes Netflix,
TiVo, Apple, AOL and Yahoo. Together the freedom fighters will offer something
like 5 million channels via the Internet, giving consumers the ability to watch
just about anything they'd like, whenever they'd like. "Instead of an electronic
program guide that viewers scroll through with a remote control, the keyboard
will be your remote control and your program guide will be Google or Yahoo,"
says Hastings.
It's no
secret which team Hastings, 45, is betting on. He built his empire on the
premise that people would rather have their rental movies delivered to their
mailboxes than have to haul themselves to the video store, enduring the
inconvenience and dreaded late fees along the way. As a tech company, Netflix
was a contrarian play. Even at the height of the dot-com boom, when Silicon
Valley buzzed with the promise of "transformative technologies" and "fat pipes"
that would allow consumers to quickly download all manner of content, Hastings
built Netflix on two disarmingly retro technologies: the DVD and the United
States Postal Service. For a monthly subscription fee averaging $17.99,
consumers would be treated to an unlimited number of rented DVDs, most delivered
within a day of being ordered online. "People were talking about beaming movies
to wristwatches," Hastings says. "We tried not to get drunk on the future, but
actually to predict it accurately."
So far, so good.
Today Netflix has 3.2 million members, and last quarter it did $5.7 million in
profits. In the imitation-is-flattery department, last year Blockbuster
executives, who once sneered that Netflix would never appeal to the masses,
launched a service modeled on Hastings's creation. Earlier this year Wal-Mart
pulled out of a similar effort to copy Netflix, signaling that even America's
biggest retailer couldn't compete with Hastings's freedom fighters. But as far
as the Netflix gang has come on old-school technology, its founder doesn't
dispute the notion that before long, many people will begin watching movies at
home over broadband. As that era dawns, Netflix faces a tricky pivot, requiring
a new business model. Although Hastings believes digital delivery will not
eclipse DVDs for at least a decade—and that high-definition DVDs will linger
long after that—he is moving now to transform the company from a mail-order
retailer into an Internet content provider.
As Silicon Valley
visionaries go, Hastings has an unusually diverse resume. After graduating from
Bowdoin in the early 1980s, he joined the Peace Corps and taught math in
Swaziland. He returned to California and became a computer programmer, selling
his first company, Pure Software, in the mid-1990s for $750 million. He then
attended Stanford's graduate school of education before earning a master's in
computer science. In 2000, he teamed up with venture capitalist John Doerr on a
ballot initiative to improve school funding in California. After that Hastings
served briefly as head of TechNet, the Silicon Valley lobbying group, and became
president of the California Board of Education.
He got the idea
for Netflix after renting "Apollo 13" from his local Blockbuster store. After
running up $40 in late fees, Hastings began wondering why video stores don't
offer members unlimited access for a flat fee, like a health club. His first
business plan relied on mailing VHS cassettes to customers, but in 1997 he
realized that DVDs, new at the time, would be easier to mail. In 1998, he
started Netflix from a warehouse in Silicon Valley.
Today there are 35
warehouses around the country, with an inventory of 42 million discs. Each day
they receive 100,000 new movies from studios and mail out 1 million DVDs to
customers. A corner of the original warehouse in Los Gatos serves as the Netflix
museum, including plastic remnants of the racks that workers used to pluck DVDs
from, by hand. Today those chores are automated. Workers still open envelopes,
stopping every 45 minutes for ergonomic exercises.
They'll need to
stay limber: in tech-savvy markets like San Jose, Oakland and Fremont, Calif.,
more than 10 percent of households subscribe to Netflix. Hastings expects to
have more than 4 million subscribers at the year-end, and more than 20 million
by 2010. Hastings sees downloadable movies as a long-term threat, and predicts
that his snail-mail model will be around another 20 to 30 years, both because
DVDs are very portable and convenient to customers and because movie studios
"want DVDs to last a long time because it's such a revenue and profit driver."
But that may be
optimistic. More than half of American households now have a broadband
connection to the Internet. And flourishing peer-to-peer tools such as
BitTorrent make it easy for those consumers to download TV shows and movie
clips. Digital music sharing has driven worldwide music sales down 13 percent in
the past six years, and video downloads could do the same to mail-order movies.
Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler says its "outrageous" to expect the
Netflix model to dominate the market for decades: "I'd give it five years or so"
before video on demand and other rivals eat away at its competitive position.
Netflix boosters
say it can survive even if DVDs go obsolete. Marketing textbooks traditionally
talk about how railroad companies stopped growing because they saw only
railroads, not the wider transportation business; but analysts seem to trust
Netflix's ability to think big. Safa Ratschy, managing partner at Piper Jaffray,
says Netflix is a lot more than a DVD-by-mail distribution system; its real
asset is a subscriber base that has learned to order on the Web, and is likely
to stick with Netflix as the digital era arrives.
Hastings envisions
Netflix becoming a destination Web site offering a mix of content: free,
ad-supported, premium pay-per-view and subscription. And with many Americans
upgrading to big-screen, high-definition TVs, Hastings is betting they won't be
watching on computer monitors. That is part of the rationale behind a deal
announced last year between Netflix and TiVo, which makes personal video
recorders that connect televisions to the Internet. Hastings won't elaborate on
plans for a "joint entertainment offering" —and says that Netflix is interested
"generically" in all platforms linking TV and Internet—but outsiders say it's a
smart match. "If you can deliver video to the box that's connected to the TV and
not to the PC, you're way ahead of the game," says Gartner media analyst Laura
Behrens.
In talking about
Netflix's future, Hastings repeatedly brings up AOL. He acknowledges it's an odd
choice, given the online pioneer's disastrous merger with Time Warner. "It's not
like we're going to say, 'OK, we want to be the next AOL'," he says. Still,
Hastings sees in AOL a subscription-based survivor: once a dial-up service for
online newbies, today AOL acts more like an infotainment portal, and has
retained many subscribers who get broadband service from another company. He
also sees HBO and DirecTV as having elements of the future Netflix model; both
are nationwide distributors that can cater to niche and local markets. Of
course, if a big media conglomerate moves in to buy Netflix, a very attractive
target, the future won't be Hastings's problem.
There's another,
lower-tech industry that may foreshadow the challenges Netflix faces:
automobiles. For years pundits have prophesied the replacement of the gasoline
engine by pollution-free fuel-cell-powered cars. Those predictions inspired
automakers to spend billions in R&D to prepare for this new world, which seems
to be coming much more slowly than experts expected. Similarly, Netflix is
preparing for the future, even though it believes the era of online movies is
more distant than some others do. "We're starting to invest now, even though
there's no real market for it today, so that when it comes, we're ready,"
Hastings says. "[But] DVD will last as long as the gasoline engine,
newspaper—any of your 'obsolete in the very long term' industries." If he's
wrong, those 42 million DVDs he owns will make for one heckuva yard sale.
With Nicole Joseph
in New York and Brad Stone in San Francisco
Cmdr. James Stockdale
parachuted out of his nose-diving Skyhawk over the North Vietnamese jungle in
September 1965, the war was still young. Little was known about the fate that
awaited American prisoners of war. It didn't take Stockdale long to gain a
clearer sense. After a few months in solitary confinement in Hoa Lo prison in
Hanoi, he was introduced to "the ropes," a torture technique in which a prisoner
was seated on the floor - legs extended, arms bound behind him - as a guard
stood on his back and drove his face down until his nose was mashed into the
brick floor between his legs. The North Vietnamese knew they were overmatched
militarily, but they figured they could at least win the propaganda war by
brutalizing American P.O.W.'s until they denounced their government and
"confessed" that they had bombed schoolchildren and villagers.
For his part, Stockdale
intended to return home with his honor intact. One afternoon, he was given a
razor and led to the bathroom - a sure sign that he was being readied for a
propaganda film. Instead of shaving, Stockdale gave himself a reverse Mohawk,
tearing up his scalp in the process. More determined than ever now, his captors
locked him in the interrogation room for a few minutes while they fetched a hat
for him. Stockdale glanced around, looking for an appropriate weapon. He
considered a rusty bucket and a windowpane before settling on a 50-pound stool,
and proceeded to beat himself about the face. Then, realizing that his eyes were
not yet swollen shut, he beat himself some more. By the time the guards had
returned, blood was running down the front of his shirt. For the next several
weeks, Stockdale kept himself unpresentable by surreptitiously bashing his face
with his fists. The North Vietnamese never did manage to film him.
As Hoa Lo filled with
American shootdowns - it would become known among prisoners as the Hanoi Hilton
- Stockdale transformed a loose colony of destabilized P.O.W.'s into a tightly
knit underground resistance movement with its own language (an alphabetical tap
code) and laws. Stockdale was the highest-ranking Navy P.O.W., but his authority
derived less from seniority than from that rare blend of virtues that enables a
small minority of men to thrive in what the Prussian military philosopher Karl
von Clausewitz called the province of danger.
Inside the interrogation
room, the military's Code of Conduct, which presupposes adherence to the Geneva
Conventions, was of little value. The torture was simply too intense to limit
statements to name, rank, serial number and date of birth. So Stockdale created
new rules designed both to protect America's war effort and to keep P.O.W.'s
alive. Stockdale ordered his men to endure as much physical abuse as they could
before acceding to any of their interrogators' demands - the key, in his view,
to preserving a sense of dignity - and to always confess to fellow inmates
everything they had been forced to divulge. To carry an unclean conscience was
to risk descending into a spiral of guilt and shame that would make them only
more vulnerable to themselves and their captors.
Desperate as he was to
return to his wife and four boys in Southern California, Stockdale was so adept
at living through privation and pain that he came to feel at home inside Hoa Lo.
He recalled long-forgotten details from his childhood, calculated natural
logarithms with a stick in the dust and pondered the physics of musical scales.
As he saw it, he was still at war, only it wasn't the Navy that had prepared him
for this sort of battle, it was two ancient Greek philosophers. From Aristotle,
Stockdale had learned that free will can exist within a state of imprisonment.
From Epictetus, the influential Stoic, he had learned about our ability to shape
experience by perception: as months of solitary confinement in leg irons and
brutal beatings turned to years, Stockdale would remind himself that "men are
disturbed not by things but by the view that they take of them." Most of all, he
became absorbed in his battles with his captors, whether that meant planting
fake notes for guards to discover or gleefully "tapping" his tales of
interrogation-room intransigence to his neighbors.
Not long after he was
finally released in early 1973, Stockdale said he had no intention of becoming a
professional ex-P.O.W., yet his 2,714 days in captivity powerfully shaped the
rest of his life. Stockdale drifted professionally - not like the
stereotypically disillusioned Vietnam vet, but in nevertheless unmistakable
ways. He was given different peacetime commands, all of which felt like
comedowns from his service in Vietnam, both as a commander and as an underground
prison boss. "In those jobs under life-and-death pressure, what I said, what I
did, what I thought, really had an effect on the state of affairs of my world,"
he would later reflect.
Stockdale retired from the
Navy in 1979 to become president of the Citadel, a civilian military college in
South Carolina, but quit a year later when the board blocked his efforts to rein
in the school's out-of-control culture of hazing. ("When you've been tortured by
professionals, you do not have to put up with amateurs," he told a friend,
explaining his abrupt decision to resign.)
Then came Stockdale's
ill-fated foray into politics. His friend
Ross Perot had assured him that he would be only a placeholder until he
could find a suitable running mate for the 1992 presidential election - a couple
of weeks, Perot told him. Stockdale had spent longer blindfolded, naked on the
floor, with an untreated broken leg in his cell in Vietnam. He figured he could
get through this fine.
He didn't. After
delivering the unforgettable opening line in the vice presidential debate - "Who
am I? Why am I here?" - Stockdale was reduced to a national laughingstock. Even
then there was a whiff of tragedy, a sense that he deserved better, but he
disappeared from the public stage before much more could be said about him. He
was last seen by many Americans in the person of Phil Hartman on "Saturday Night
Live."
The former
fighter pilot found solace in the world of ideas. He was inevitably pulled back
to Hoa Lo, and to a better understanding of the qualities that enable certain
men to stand up and turn their world around - "the rising of the few," as he
called it. For guidance, Stockdale turned to the writings of other ex-prisoners:
Viktor Frankl, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Stockdale gradually
came to see heroism not as a matter of consistent good judgment but as a single
act, or series of acts, performed in a particular context. And he came to see
heroes not as people who had carried out their duty with distinction but as
individuals who had, like himself, done something no reasonable person would
ever have felt justified asking them to do.
He was prodded to his feet
by rifle barrels. This was northern Tunisia, Nov. 29, 1942. Just after midnight,
following faulty intelligence, he had led his men into enemy territory. Now he
stood surrounded, trembling, sickened by the gravity of his mistake. A German
sergeant jammed a pistol into Joe Frelinghuysen's gut and joked that he'd been
easier to catch than a rabbit.
This indignity stayed with
him. He was flown to Italy and put in a series of Fascist-run prison camps in a
ountainous area northeast of Rome. There he studied the walls, filled with
self-recrimination.
He had been easier to
catch than a rabbit. It wouldn't happen again. He nourished himself with potato
peels sneaked from the cook's garbage.
He did push-ups, paced the
fence line of the camp. A guard gave him an Italian grammar book, which he
studied feverishly, memorizing 30 words a day.
He had been imprisoned
nearly 10 months - had lost 70 pounds and was tormented by nightmares - when
Dick Rossbach showed up. Rossbach didn't give a damn. He had tried to escape
twice already, once by flinging himself out the window of a moving train near
the Austrian border. Fear, Rossbach liked to say, was better than a martini.Nine
days later, they left together, wriggling in the twilight under one barbed-wire
fence, then another, then under two more and finally scaled a wall. They climbed
a dark mountain and did not look back.
Life from here on out
boiled down to one thing: not getting caught.
With his grasp of Italian,
Frelinghuysen was in charge of begging for food. In a small, silent village, he
encountered an old woman who, upon seeing him, gathered her skirts and fled. The
Germans had posted signs: anyone caught helping a prisoner would be shot. So
they slept in caves and in clearings in the woods. The only warm night came when
a sympathetic shepherd allowed them to sleep pressed up against his pregnant
sow. They ate what was handed to them: apples, cheese, a sheep's lung wrapped in
newspaper.
What felt perverse was how
beautiful the setting was. Frelinghuysen would later describe in his memoir the
stunning beech and oak forests of those valleys in the region called Abruzzi -
the flaming colors of autumn and the toylike villages stacked into the hills.
After three weeks, it felt
like the end. Rossbach had damaged his knee and could barely walk. Their skin
was filthy; their bodies were malnourished. If this was freedom, they were ready
to trade it for something that less approximated a slow, limping death.
But then, high in the
Apennine mountains, more than an hour's walk from the nearest road, they came
upon a stooped man with a black mustache, working his fields with a hoe. He wore
a sweat-stained hat and smiled easily. When they asked for food, he directed
them toward a stone farmhouse.
Being hunted by soldiers
with dogs can kill a person's faith, but there are simple things that revive it.
Inside the farmhouse, Rosa DiGiacomantonio - the wife of the man with the hoe -
served them sausage with steaming polenta, scooped from an iron caldron on the
hearth, flavored with garlic and pepper, drizzled with rich olive oil. She
poured two glasses of red wine.
Already, she had fed
dozens of these filthy, starved men. She'd chopped, simmered and ladled up just
about everything her family had harvested that summer. But the prisoners kept
coming. The farmhouse sat on a grassy saddle between mountain ranges, a natural
stopping point for P.O.W.'s picking their way south toward the Allies. The only
things she wouldn't share were the chickens' eggs, which she fed to Letizia, her
hugely pregnant daughter-in-law. That night, when the two fugitives asked for a
barn to sleep in, Antonio, Rosa's husband, led them instead to a candlelit room
with a double bed and spotless white sheets and a pink blanket. He all but
tucked them in.
Back home, Joe
Frelinghuysen had a wife named Emily and two small children who wouldn't
recognize him. To think of them was painful, so he avoided it. But for more than
two weeks in October 1943, he and Rossbach had the DiGiacomantonios, who fed and
helped shelter them and who jubilantly shared a bottle of tawny wine with them
on the night when Letizia, cloistered upstairs, gave birth to a son. Letizia's
husband, Berardino, became a friend - traveling to town to gather news of the
war, arranging for a doctor to look at Rossbach's knee. The doctor wrapped his
knee, but there was no time for it to mend. Nazi patrols were now searching
houses in the valleys below.
One day when the two
Americans were out doing reconnaissance, they were surrounded by three German
soldiers on a hillside. Rossbach grabbed the barrel of the corporal's gun and
pointed it to his chest, announcing that he was injured and demanding that they
shoot him right there. It was grand theater - Frelinghuysen knew this - a
diversion so that he, the only one able, could run. When the soldiers marched
them inside a nearby hut, Rossbach offered food to their bewildered captors.
When the Germans set down their rifles to eat, Rossbach looked impatientlyat
Frelinghuysen, then at the door.
He ran like hell. Leaving
his friend to an uncertain fate, he hurled himself outside and down a slick
embankment. He ran for miles, soaked by a hard, cold rain. For a while, they
chased him. Their bullets ricocheted off the trees.
He ran, then walked, then
finally dragged himself toward safety.
He crossed into British
territory 12 days later on Nov. 15, 1943.
He returned to his house
in New Jersey - to Emily and the kids, to his 1937 Dodge and his job in
insurance. He was snappish, disoriented. This time he had made it - and still
hewas full of self-recrimination.
Some soldiers put war
behind them, and others live it forever. Joe Frelinghuysen wanted only to make
amends. He tracked down Dick Rossbach, who had been badly beaten by the three
soldiers and then trucked to German prisons, eventually landing in a Russian
camp. Undaunted, Rossbach escaped again, talking his way to the American Embassy
in Moscow. When Frelinghuysen unloaded his guilt over having abandoned him,
Rossbach dismissed it. "Oh, for God's sake, Joe," he said. For many years they
met regularly in Manhattan for lunch.
The DiGiacomantonios
survived the war, though German soldiers lined up 26 people against a stone wall
in a nearby village and shot them for helping prisoners. In 1956, Frelinghuysen
returned to the farmhouse, carrying a gift of gold rosary beads for Rosa. While
his parents were content to stay on the farm, Berardino expressed a desire to
emigrate. Frelinghuysen found a way, creating a position in his family's dairy
business for an Italian cheesemaker. He settled Berardino, Letizia and their
children into a home near his own, and over time, let go of his guilt.
They live there still,
Berardino and his wife. During 1943 and 1944, they say, their family harbored
more than 100 escaped American and British soldiers. They can recall the
desperation and hunger and nervous gratitude these men showed at the time. But
only one found them again after the war. No one else even sent a letter.
In February 1942, a little
more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which effectively decreed
that West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry - whether American citizens or
not - were now "enemy aliens." More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans reported to
government staging areas, where they were processed and taken off to 10
internment camps. Fred Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants, was at the
time a 23-year-old welder at Bay Area shipyards. His parents left their home and
reported to a racetrack south of San Francisco, but Korematsu chose not to
follow them. He stayed behind in Oakland with his Italian-American girlfriend
and then fled, even having plastic surgery on his eyes to avoid recognition. In
May 1942, he was arrested and branded a spy in the newspapers.
In search of a test case,
Ernest Besig, then the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union
for Northern California, went to see Korematsu in jail and asked if he would be
willing to challenge the internment policy in court. Korematsu said he would.
Besig posted $5,000 bail, but instead of freeing him, federal authorities sent
him to the internment camp at Topaz, Utah. He and Besig sued the government,
appealing their case all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in a 6-to-3
decision that stands as one of the most ignoble in its history, rejected his
argument and upheld the government's right to intern its citizens.
After the war, Korematsu
married, returned to the Bay Area and found work as a draftsman. He might have
been celebrated in his community, the Rosa Parks of Japanese-American life; in
fact, he was shunned. Even during his time in Topaz, other prisoners refused to
talk to him. "Allof them turned their backs on me at that time because they
thought I was a troublemaker," he later recalled. His ostracism didn't end with
the war. The overwhelming majority of Japanese-Americans had reacted to the
internment by acquiescing to the government's order, hoping to prove their
loyalty as Americans. To them, Korematsu's opposition was treacherous to both
his country and his community.
In the years after the
war, details of the internment were lost behind a wall of repression. It was
common for Japanese-American families not to talk about the experience, or to
talk about it only obliquely. Korematsu, too, remained silent, but for different
reasons. "He felt responsible for the internment in a sort of backhanded way,
because his case had been lost in the Supreme Court," Peter Irons, a legal
historian, recalled in a PBS documentary. Korematsu's own daughter has said she
didn't learn of his wartime role until she was a junior in high school.
Korematsu might have faded
into obscurity had it not been for Irons, who in 1981 asked the Justice
Department for the original documents in the Korematsu case. Irons found a memo
in which a government lawyer had accused the solicitor general of lying to the
Supreme Court about the danger posed by Japanese-Americans. Irons tracked down
Korematsu and asked if he would be willing, once again, to go to court.
Perhaps Korematsu had been
waiting all those years for a chance to clear his name. Or maybe he saw, in
Irons's entreaty, an opportunity to vindicate himself with other
Japanese-Americans. Whatever his thinking, not only did Korematsu agree to
return to court but he also became an ardent public critic of the internment.
When government lawyers
offered Korematsu a pardon, he refused. "As long as my record stands in federal
court," Korematsu, then 64, said in an emotional courtroom oration, "any
American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or
a hearing." The judge agreed, ruling from the bench that Korematsu had been
innocent. Just like that, the legality of the internment was struck down
forever.
In the last decade of his
life, Korematsu became, for some Americans, a symbol of principled resistance.
President Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.
Six years later, outraged by the prolonged detention of prisoners at Guantánamo
Bay, Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, warning that the
mistakes of the internment were being repeated. Still, Korematsu's place among
contemporaries in his own community remained obscured by lingering resentments
and a reluctance to revisit the past. When he died from a respiratory illness in
March, not a single public building or landmark bore his name. It wasn't until
last month that officials in Davis, Calif., dedicated the Fred Korematsu
Elementary School. It was an especially fitting tribute for Korematsu, whose
legacy rested with a generation of Japanese-Americans who were beginning to
remember, at long last, what their parents had labored to forget.
Did President Bush intentionally mislead this nation and its allies into war? Or
is it his critics who have misled Americans, recasting history to discredit him
and his policies? If your responses are reflexive and self-assured, read on.
On Nov. 20, the Tribune began an inquest: We set out to assess the Bush
administration's arguments for war in Iraq. We have weighed each of those nine
arguments against the findings of subsequent official investigations by the 9/11
Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee and others. We predicted that this
exercise would distress the smug and self-assured--those who have
unquestioningly supported, or opposed, this war.
The matrix below summarizes findings from the resulting
nine editorials. We have tried to bring order to a national debate that has
flared for almost three years. Our intent was to help Tribune readers judge the
case for war--based not on who shouts loudest, but on what actually was said and
what happened.
The administration didn't advance its arguments with equal emphasis. Neither,
though, did its case rely solely on Iraq's alleged illicit weapons. The other
most prominent assertion in administration speeches and presentations was as
accurate as the weapons argument was flawed: that Saddam Hussein had rejected 12
years of United Nations demands that he account for his stores of deadly
weapons--and also stop exterminating innocents. Evaluating all nine arguments
lets each of us decide which ones we now find persuasive or empty, and whether
President Bush tried to mislead us.
In measuring risks to this country, the administration relied on the same
intelligence agencies, in the U.S. and overseas, that failed to anticipate Sept.
11, 2001. We now know that the White House explained some but not enough of the
ambiguities embedded in those agencies' conclusions. By not stressing what
wasn't known as much as what was, the White House wound up exaggerating
allegations that proved dead wrong.
Those flawed assertions are central to the charge that the president lied. Such
accusations, though, can unfairly conflate three issues: the strength of the
case Bush argued before the war, his refusal to delay its launch in March 2003
and his administration's failure to better anticipate the chaos that would
follow. Those three are important, but not to be confused with one another.
After reassessing the administration's nine arguments for war, we do not see the
conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege. Example: The accusation that
Bush lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs overlooks years of global
intelligence warnings that, by February 2003, had convinced even French
President Jacques Chirac of "the probable possession of weapons of mass
destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq." We also know that, as early as
1997, U.S. intel agencies began repeatedly warning the Clinton White House that
Iraq, with fissile material from a foreign source, could have a crude nuclear
bomb within a year.
Seventeen days before the war, this page reluctantly urged the president to
launch it. We said that every earnest tool of diplomacy with Iraq had failed to
improve the world's security, stop the butchery--or rationalize years of UN
inaction. We contended that Saddam Hussein, not George W. Bush, had demanded
this conflict.
Many people of patriotism and integrity disagreed with us and still do. But the
totality of what we know now--what this matrix chronicles-- affirms for us our
verdict of March 2, 2003. We hope these editorials help Tribune readers assess
theirs.
THE ROAD TO WAR: THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S NINE ARGUMENTS
Biological and chemical weapons
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
The Bush administration said Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
Officials trumpeted reports from U.S. and foreign spy agencies, including an
October 2002 CIA assessment: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as
well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions."
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Many, although not all, of the Bush administration's assertions about weapons of
mass destruction have proven flat-out wrong. What illicit weaponry searchers
uncovered didn't begin to square with the magnitude of the toxic armory U.S.
officials had described before the war.
THE VERDICT
There was no need for the administration to rely on risky intelligence to
chronicle many of Iraq's other sins. In putting so much emphasis on illicit
weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case
for war when others would have sufficed.
Iraq rebuffs the world
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
In a speech that left many diplomats visibly squirming in their chairs,
President Bush detailed tandem patterns of failure: Saddam Hussein had refused
to obey UN Security Council orders that he disclose his weapons programs--and
the UN had refused to enforce its demands of Hussein.
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Reasonable minds disagree on whether Iraq's flouting of UN resolutions justified
the war. But there can be no credible assertion that either Iraq or the UN met
its responsibility to the world. If anything, the administration gravely
understated the chicanery, both in Baghdad and at the UN.
THE VERDICT
Hussein had shunted enough lucre to enough profiteers to keep the UN from
challenging him. In a dozen years the organization mass-produced 17 resolutions
on Iraq, all of them toothless. That in turn enabled Hussein to continue his
brutal reign and cost untold thousands of Iraqis their lives.
The quest for nukes
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
Intelligence agencies warned the Clinton and Bush administrations that Hussein
was reconstituting his once-impressive program to create nuclear weapons. In
part that intel reflected embarrassment over U.S. failure before the Persian
Gulf war to grasp how close Iraq was to building nukes.
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Four intel studies from 1997-2000 concurred that "If Iraq acquired a significant
quantity of fissile material through foreign assistance, it could have a crude
nuclear weapon within a year." Claims that Iraq sought uranium and special tubes
for processing nuclear material appear discredited.
THE VERDICT
If the White House manipulated or exaggerated the nuclear intelligence before
the war in order to paint a more menacing portrait of Hussein, it's difficult to
imagine why. For five years, the official and oft-delivered alarms from the U.S.
intelligence community had been menacing enough.
Hussein's rope-a-dope
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
The longer Hussein refuses to obey UN directives to disclose his weapons
programs, the greater the risk that he will acquire, or share with terrorists,
the weaponry he has used in the past or the even deadlier capabilities his
scientists have tried to develop. Thus we need to wage a pre-emptive war.
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Hussein didn't have illicit weapons stockpiles to wield or hand to terrorists.
Subsequent investigations have concluded he had the means and intent to rekindle
those programs as soon as he escaped UN sanctions.
THE VERDICT
Had Hussein not been deposed, would he have reconstituted deadly weaponry or
shared it with terror groups? Of the White House's nine arguments for war, the
implications of this warning about Iraq's intentions are treacherous to
imagine--yet also the least possible to declare true or false.
Waging war on terror
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
Iraq was Afghanistan's likely successor as a haven for terror groups. "Saddam
Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror ... " the
president said. "And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he
will use them, or provide them to a terror network."
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
The White House echoed four years of intel that said Hussein contemplated the
use of terror against the U.S. or its allies. But he evidently had not done so
on a broad scale. The assertion that Hussein was "harboring terrorists and the
instruments of terror" overstated what we know today.
THE VERDICT
The drumbeat of White House warnings before the war made Iraq's terror
activities sound more ambitious than subsequent evidence has proven. Based on
what we know today, the argument that Hussein was able to foment global terror
against this country and its interests was exaggerated.
Reform in the Middle East
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
Supplanting Hussein's reign with self-rule would transform governance in a
region dominated by dictators, zealots and kings. The administration wanted to
convert populations of subjects into citizens. Mideast democracy would channel
energy away from resentments that breed terrorism.
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
U.S. pressure has stirred reforms in Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and
imperiled Syria's regime. "I was cynical about Iraq," said Druze Muslim
patriarch Walid Jumblatt. "But when I saw the Iraqi people voting . . . it was
the start of a new Arab world... The Berlin Wall has fallen."
THE VERDICT
The notion that invading Iraq would provoke political tremors in a region long
ruled by despots is the Bush administration's most successful prewar prediction
to date. A more muscular U.S. diplomacy has advanced democracy and assisted
freedom movements in the sclerotic Middle East.
Iraq and Al Qaeda
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
President Bush: "... Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common
enemy--the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had
high-level contacts that go back a decade.... Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members
in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases."
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Two government investigative reports indicate that Al Qaeda and Iraq had
long-running if sporadic contacts. Several of the prewar intel conclusions
likely are true. But the high-ranking Al Qaeda detainee who said Iraq trained Al
Qaeda in bombmaking, poisons and gases later recanted.
THE VERDICT
No compelling evidence ties Iraq to Sept. 11, 2001, as the White House implied.
Nor is there proof linking Al Qaeda in a significant way to the final years of
Hussein's regime. By stripping its rhetoric of the ambiguity present in the
intel data, the White House exaggerated this argument for war.
The Butcher of Baghdad
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell: "For more than 20 years, by word and by
deed, Saddam Hussein has pursued his ambition to dominate Iraq and the broader
Middle East using the only means he knows--intimidation, coercion and
annihilation of all those who might stand in his way."
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
Human Rights Watch estimates that Hussein exterminated 300,000 people. Chemical
weapons killed Iraqi Kurds and Iranians; Iraqi Shiites also were slaughtered.
Tortures included amputation, rape, piercing hands with drills, burning some
victims alive and lowering others into acid baths.
THE VERDICT
In detailing how Hussein tormented his people--and thus mocked the UN Security
Council order that he stop--the White House assessments were accurate. Few if
any war opponents have challenged this argument, or suggested that an unmolested
Hussein would have eased his repression.
Iraqis liberated
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE SAID
President Bush and his surrogates broached a peculiar notion: that the Arab
world was ready to embrace representative government. History said
otherwise--and it wasn't as if the Arab street was clamoring for Iraq to show
the way.
WHAT WE KNOW TODAY
The most succinct evaluation comes from Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.): "Every
time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam Hussein was
overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and
hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them."
THE VERDICT
The White House was correct in predicting that long subjugated Iraqis would
embrace democracy. And while Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites have major differences to
reconcile, a year's worth of predictions that Sunni disaffection could doom
self-rule have, so far, proven wrong.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a
peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading
search engine -- a request that underscores the potential for online databases
to become tools for government surveillance.
Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena
first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this
week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested
records.
The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine
during an unspecified single week -- a breakdown that could conceivably span
tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected
Web addresses from various Google databases.
In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them
Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its
effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the
U.S. Supreme Court.
Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine behind
Google, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government
subpoena.
Although the government says it isn't seeking any data that ties personal
information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy
concerns, experts said. Those worries have been magnified by recent revelations
that the White House authorized eavesdropping on civilian communications after
the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.
"Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many
people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother," said
Thomas Burke, a San Francisco attorney who has handled several prominent cases
involving privacy issues.
"Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much
you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about
this, too."
The content of search request sometimes contain information about the person
making the query.
For instance, it's not unusual for search requests to include names, medical
profiles or Social Security information, said Pam Dixon, executive director for
the World Privacy Forum.
"This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search
engines for some time," Dixon said. "Google should be commended for fighting
this."
Every other search engine served similar subpoenas by the Bush administration
has complied so far, according to court documents. The cooperating search
engines weren't identified.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo stressed that it didn't reveal any personal
information. "We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy," Yahoo
spokeswoman Mary Osako said Thursday. "In our opinion, this is not a privacy
issue."
Microsoft Corp. MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even
received a similar subpoena. "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials
worldwide to assist them when requested," the company said in a statement.
As the Internet's dominant search engine, Google has built up a valuable
storehouse of information that "makes it a very attractive target for law
enforcement," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy
Information Center.
The Department of Justice argues that Google's cooperation is essential in its
effort to simulate how people navigate the Web.
In a separate case in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration is trying to prove
that Internet filters don't do an adequate job of preventing children from
accessing online pornography and other objectionable destinations.
Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google "would assist the government in
its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, (and) to estimate
how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their
searches," the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday
Google -- whose motto when it went public in 2004 was "do no evil" -- contends
that submitting to the subpoena would represent a betrayal to its users, even if
all personal information is stripped from the search terms sought by the
government.
"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal
information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that
Google can accept," company attorney Ashok Ramani wrote in a letter included in
the government's filing.
Complying with the subpoena also wound threaten to expose some of Google's
"crown-jewel trade secrets," Ramani wrote. Google is particularly concerned that
the information could be used to deduce the size of its index and how many
computers it uses to crunch the requests.
"This information would be highly valuable to competitors or miscreants seeking
to harm Google's business," Ramani wrote.
Dixon is hoping Google's battle with the government reminds people to be careful
how they interact with search engines.
"When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what
you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions," she said.
Confused about new drug benefit, pharmacists and administrators stick
patients with the bill
By Judith Graham, Tribune staff reporter. The Associated Press contributed to
this report
March 15, 2006
Frank Cartalino, a transplant patient, was distraught. No one could tell him why
his pharmacy had suddenly billed him $500 for the drugs he needs to stay alive.
An Illinois program had covered the expense for years. Now, Cartalino had a
letter saying the program had changed and he needed to get the medications
through a Medicare drug plan. But the plan was refusing to pay the bill.
Cartalino called Medicare's national hot line repeatedly. He called an insurance
company working with the Illinois program. He called Humana Inc., his Medicare
drug plan. He called drug companies, begging to get on their financial
assistance programs. No one, it seemed, was able to help.
Then, Cartalino, 42, who lives on a fixed income, undergoes dialysis three times
a week, and takes drugs that prevent his body from rejecting a double organ
transplant, called the Chicago Tribune.
Days of research revealed the root of his problem: Staff members working with
pharmacies, insurance plans and government agencies don't really understand how
Medicare's new drug benefit coordinates with other parts of the vast health
program. And thousands of patients with organ transplants and other illnesses
are getting caught in the middle.
On Tuesday, President Bush defended the prescription drug benefit as a good deal
for seniors and taxpayers. But he acknowledged that the program had been plagued
by problems in its early days.
"Anytime Washington passes a new law, sometimes the transition period can be
interesting," the president said.
Interesting isn't the word senior citizen advocates use to describe it.
"It's an enormous mess. ... a real nightmare," said Jeanne Finberg, an attorney
at the National Senior Citizens Law Center.
The risk, of course, is that patients won't get needed medications because of
mix-ups or, like Cartalino, they'll end up paying for expensive drugs out of
limited personal funds.
The government recognizes this is a serious matter, and officials have been busy
clarifying policies and consulting with medical providers, pharmacists, drug
plans and advocates, said Dr. Jeffrey Kelman, chief medical officer for
Medicare's Center for Beneficiary Choices. It has been a learning experience, he
said.
That's something of an understatement. It took more than a dozen phone calls for
the Tribune to sort through the mind-numbing complexities of Medicare and figure
out where things had gone wrong for Cartalino, who lives in southwest suburban
Worth.
This is the issue: Two parts of Medicare, known in bureaucratese as Part B and
Part D, now cover drugs. But there's no simple way to describe which program
covers what drugs for which patients. As a result, some pharmacists and many
customer service representatives are getting Part B and Part D mixed up.
Part B covers a limited number of medications administered primarily in doctors'
offices and nursing homes. Part D covers a much broader universe of medications,
including those most people take for common medical conditions. If Part B picks
up the bill for a medication, Part D coverage isn't supposed to pay, to prevent
double billing.
In practice, the way the Medicare programs interact is anything but
straightforward, Kelman said.
Take methitrexate, a drug that can be used to treat transplant patients as well
as patients with cancer or rheumatoid arthritis. Part B will pay for the
medication for transplant and cancer patients, but not for people with
arthritis. That falls to Part D.
Another example: Part B will pay for albuterol, a medication taken by people
with asthma, when it's administered by nebulizer, a machine that sprays medicine
into the mouth, in a person's home. But if a senior citizen with asthma gets
albuterol through a nebulizer in a nursing home, the medication is covered by
Part D. And if albuterol comes in a hand-held unit, it's also a Part D benefit.
There's more: If a patient gets a transplant while on Medicare, like Cartalino
did, Part B will pay for anti-rejection medication. But if a patient wasn't on
Medicare at the time, Part D will pay for the drugs.
That's part of what tripped up Cartalino and the many people who tried to answer
his questions this year. But there were other factors.
The Illinois Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, ICHIP, sent out misleading
material to Cartalino and about 1,000 other disabled Medicare patients in
October and December.
ICHIP is a program for state residents who can't get health insurance through
traditional channels because of pre-existing medical conditions. For people like
Cartalino who have Medicare, ICHIP pays for medical charges that Medicare
doesn't cover in full.
Because of changes in Medicare, ICHIP informed members that it would stop paying
for all prescription drugs. The letters urged people to sign up with a new
Medicare drug plan so they would still get some help with medication expenses.
Nowhere did the ICHIP letters mention that the program would still pay for a
limited set of drugs under Medicare Part B. (Medicare pays 80 percent of the
cost of these drugs; ICHIP had been paying the remaining 20 percent.) That was
explained but not highlighted in ICHIP's annual explanation of benefits.
That's the equivalent of asking someone to read the fine print buried on a drug
label--no one does it.
When Cartalino got ICHIP's letter, he went shopping for a Medicare drug plan.
After careful research, he decided on a Humana plan that promised to supply the
medications, Prograf and Rapamune, which together cost nearly $2,500 a month.
But when it came time to fill his anti-rejection prescriptions, Cartalino
learned that the Humana plan wouldn't authorize payment because the drugs were
deemed a Part B, not a Part D, benefit.
Cartalino, a former printer who lives alone on a fixed monthly income of $2,000,
scrambled to find almost $500--the monthly amount ICHIP had been paying
previously for the medications. Then he began working the phones, but no one
could answer his questions.
Poor training of customer service representatives at every level appears to be a
real problem. Each time Cartalino called, he reached people who didn't
understand his situation or who didn't know how to help him.
A Tribune reporter encountered the same difficulties. Medicare, drug plan, and
ICHIP officials all say they've worked hard on training customer service staff.
With the intervention of Robert Herskovitz, a Chicago Medicare official,
Cartalino finally learned that ICHIP would cover his transplant drugs after all.
It had been in the policy all along, though materials didn't make that clear.
The good news in all this is that Medicare's new drug benefit, Part D, fills an
important gap for seniors who have had transplants but no way previously of
paying for drugs for conditions such as high cholesterol or hypertension.
Cartalino is now getting his anti-rejection medications without any problem
after weeks of getting the runaround.
"Thank God," he said. "Without this help, I just couldn't have made it."
ONLINE Download our "Navigating Medicare" series at chicagotribune.com/
medicarehelp
jegraham@tribune.com
WASHINGTON -- A disturbing number of high school students and adults are
reporting early signs of hearing loss, and hearing experts think they know the
culprits: iPods and similar portable devices that allow people to funnel loud
sounds into their ears for hours on end.
More research is needed to conclusively establish the link between the cords
dangling from millions of ears and hearing difficulties. But scientists suspect
the increasing prevalence of the devices is contributing to the rising number of
people reporting some form of hearing loss.
Fears and debates about loud music have been around since the dawn of rock 'n'
roll, of course, from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, Black Sabbath to Nirvana.
But the leaps in technology that are allowing commuters on a bus or kids walking
to high school to feel like they're at a deafening concert are also channeling
ever higher volumes of music more directly, and longer, onto eardrums.
Hearing experts who called a news conference here Tuesday to voice their fears
didn't use the words "crisis" or "epidemic," but it was clear they were worried
about the results of a survey conducted last month by the polling firm Zogby
International.
Survey worries experts
Twenty-eight percent of high school students questioned said they had to turn up
the volume on a TV or radio to hear it better, for example, and 29 percent of
the teenagers said they often found themselves saying, "What?" and "Huh?" during
normal conversation.
Though that may sound like ordinary behavior for some teenagers, audiologists
are taking it seriously, especially because the adult percentages weren't much
lower.
"The results should give pause to anyone who's concerned about the nation's
hearing health," said Alex Johnson, president of the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association, based in Rockville, Md. The survey was
conducted for the group.
"While the cause of the symptoms was not identified, the polling showed that
people are listening louder and longer--habits made easier by strides in
listening technology, but ones that may also contribute to hearing damage," said
Johnson, chairman of the audiology and speech-language pathology department at
Wayne State University.
The polling results and warnings mirror concerns voiced by other hearing experts
in recent years. These experts estimate that more than 28 million Americans have
some hearing loss, a figure that some think will reach 80 million in 25 years as
Baby Boomers age.
Johnson and others suggested that consumers take precautions, including parents
monitoring the volume of the music as well as how long their children listen to
it.
The experts also recommended consumers buy the often pricey headphones that
block out external sounds like subway or airplane noise, the idea being that
consumers then wouldn't need to crank up the volume to overcome background
noise.
And they suggested that manufacturers limit the volume on their products. Dean
Garstecki, a communication sciences and medical professor at Northwestern
University, said, "I think companies who produce these products have an
obligation to limit the output of the devices to a level that does not cause
hearing loss." He noted that hearing-aid makers do as much in order to prevent
causing additional hearing loss.
Government limits
If manufacturers of the portable devices do not act voluntarily, Garstecki
suggested the U.S. government could follow the French example. France set a
100-decibel limit on iPods and other devices, but there is no such limit in the
U.S. Apple Computer Inc., iPod's manufacturer, temporarily removed the devices
from French stores to update the software to meet the legal restriction,
according to a lawsuit filed against Apple by a Louisiana man who claimed an
iPod damaged his hearing.
Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said he had no comment on the Zogby poll,
conducted Feb. 20-22.
The two lawmakers who appeared at Tuesday's news conference--Reps. Edward Markey
(D-Mass.) and Mike Ferguson (R-N.J.)--did not seem intent on a legislative fix.
Seeming to wax nostalgic, Ferguson said, "Listening to music that annoys parents
at incredibly high volumes is a rite of passage for kids of any generation."
But he put much of the onus on parents. "As parents, we talk to our kids about
looking both ways before crossing the street," he said. "We talk to our kids
about not talking to strangers. We also need to talk with them about the
lifelong damage that could be caused by misusing personal music devices."
Markey said he plans to work with Ferguson to press the industry and the
National Institutes of Health for more research on the role portable media
devices play in hearing loss and solutions.
The experts also warned that no one should take hearing loss lightly, that it
can have major consequences, even when it is seemingly only minimal and
particularly when it occurs in children.
Anne Marie Tharpe, a hearing and speech sciences professor at Vanderbilt
University, said research indicated children with such deficits were "failing in
school at a rate of 10 times their peers.
"My point is that minimal hearing loss is not inconsequential for these
children," she said.
By the time puberty is over in the middle to late teens, when adult height and
full reproductive capacity have been achieved, the body is at its peak--the
strongest, swiftest and healthiest it will ever be.
But the brain lags behind, laboring to adapt to the most complex society that
has existed.
This mismatch--between a fully grown body and an immature brain that is trying
to cope with emotions, sexual urges, poor judgment, thrill seeking and risk
taking--is a key factor making motor vehicle accidents the No. 1 cause of death
among adolescents and young adults, followed by murder and suicide.
Using powerful new imaging technology to look inside the brain, scientists are
beginning to unravel the biology behind this critical period of development.
They are finding that an adolescent's brain undergoes a previously unsuspected
biological makeover--a massive growth of synaptic connections between brain
cells.
This spectacular surge kicks off an extensive renovation of the brain that is
not complete until the mid-20s. Scientists say the resulting learning curve,
when teens struggle to shed childish thoughts for adult ones, is why adolescence
is such a prolonged and perilous journey for so many.
It helps explain not only why teens are more prone to crash a car than at any
other time of life, but why they are more likely to engage in risky sex, drug
abuse or delinquency. Although teens often can think as logically as an adult,
the process can be easily derailed by flaring emotions or other distractions.
"The reason that kids take chances when they drive is not because they're
ignorant," said Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg. "It's because
other things undermine their better judgment."
The synaptic growth spurt that occurs in puberty is similar to the ones that
occur after birth, when the brain first begins to learn. The early exposure to
the outside world enables the brain to connect to the body, developing its
capacity for processing sound, sight, smell, touch and taste, and to make sense
of them.
Learning occurs only after excess synapses not stimulated by experience are
eliminated, much like the pieces of marble that have to be chipped away to
create a work of art.
Now scientists have found that a second wave of growth and pruning occurs in
adolescence. Synapses that are not incorporated into neural networks for memory,
decision-making and emotional control are eliminated to make way for a leaner,
more efficient brain.
This late blossoming of synapses, it is thought, provides the brain with a new
capacity for learning and allows the brain to make the transition from childhood
to adulthood.
For frazzled parents, the findings may provide new understanding and patience as
their teens navigate this increasingly rough passage. Science is finally
beginning to see what's going on in the teen mind.
"We're able to actually visualize what the changes are that are happening in the
brain and how the brain is adapting to its environment and changing to help it
deal with all these challenges that are happening during adolescence," said Dr.
Sanjiv Kumra of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.
The discovery of the adolescent brain's synaptic blooming and pruning was first
made in 1999 by a National Institute of Mental Health research team headed by
Jay N. Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the institution's child psychiatry
branch.
Puberty normally begins between the ages of 9 and 13 in girls and 10 and 16 in
boys. Giedd's team found that synaptic growth reaches its peak in girls at about
11 years of age in girls and in boys at 14--a discovery that may provide a
biological basis for why girls start maturing sooner than boys both physically
and mentally.
After the growth peaks, the whittling away of unused synapses begins. This is
also when the fibers connecting brain cells are wrapped in a thicker coat of
myelin insulation to enhance their communication.
The changes in the brain are tied up with the changes associated with puberty,
which prepares the body for sexual maturity. "Adolescence is a time where the
most important function is really preparing you for mating," Kumra said. "All
these brain changes are happening to prepare the organism to be able to carry
out that central and important function."
Long after puberty is over, however, the brain is still developing--a process
lasting into the mid-20s, researchers say.
"The notion that the brain wasn't done, was still under construction so late,
was pretty surprising because by 18 you can vote, get married and go to war,"
Giedd said.
But the more Giedd thought about it, the more it made sense. The long period of
maturation, he says, has made it easier for the brains of modern humans to adapt
to an increasingly complex society.
"The same brain that was used in the past for hunting and gathering berries now
programs a computer," he said. "The key to all of that is having the plasticity
built into the brain."
But this long period of brain development also has a significant downside when
teens get behind the wheel of a car.
Brain scientists like to joke that car rental companies must have the best
neuroscientists because they won't let a person rent a car until age 25. But the
real reason is clear to any actuary: Every year between 5,000 and 6,000
teenagers are killed in motor vehicle accidents and 300,000 are injured.
Teen crashes are not just caused by showing off, substance abuse, aggression,
thrill seeking or speeding, although they play a role, said Giedd.
Recent research suggests that an important culprit is the immaturity of the
teenage brain and its lack of multitasking skills--especially in boys. The last
part of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex, Giedd said, which may not
fully develop until the mid-20s.
That's important, he explained, because this part of the brain controls
decision-making, judgment and impulse control, all of which are involved in
multitasking, or processing more than one thing at a time.
"The more multitasking that you do--talking on a cell phone, adjusting the
volume of a stereo, talking to people in the car--the more trouble you're asking
for," Giedd said. "And it fits into the sex differences: Women are better at
multitasking than males at every age and they have a strikingly lower rate of
car accidents."
Most teens multitask behind the wheel, a recent survey by the Allstate
Foundation found. Sixty-five percent say they look at things other than the
road, 56 percent make and answer phone calls, 44 percent say they drive with
friends in the car and 47 percent find passengers sometimes distracting.
Researchers say the time it now takes for the brain to reach adulthood may help
explain why modern adolescence lasts far longer than in traditional societies,
where the time between going through puberty and becoming a breadwinner is two
to four years.
True adulthood arrives not with sexual or physical maturity but with taking on a
social role and being responsible for one's own actions, said pediatric
psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Dahl of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
"If your adult task is to gather food, have babies or kill an animal with a
spear, the interval between puberty and adulthood is much shorter," Dahl said.
"Whereas if what you want to do requires finishing high school, four years of
college and going to graduate school, it's going to take the brain a lot
longer."
The National Institute of Mental Health team's newest discovery shows that the
longer the brain takes to mature, the smarter it becomes.
"The later the peak [in synaptic growth and pruning] the higher the IQ, which is
good news for late bloomers," Giedd said. "If you have the brain being more
responsive to the environment for longer, then these changes can make it better
suited to deal with the environment."
Adolescence has now become so extended that it runs to about age 25, experts
say. "What sits in the middle of this stretched-out adolescence are incredible
increases in behavioral and emotional health problems, and brain changes that
take a long time and lots of practice to acquire necessary skills," Dahl said.
The brain's facility for early learning is remarkable: It's as good at reasoning
by age 16 as it is in adulthood, Steinberg said. "So then the question is:
`Well, if kids are as smart as adults, why do they do such dumb things?'" said
Steinberg, who presented new findings this month at the Society for Research on
Adolescence meeting.
"We think the reason doesn't have to do with their basic intelligence. It has to
do with ways in which emotional and social factors impair their judgment. This
means that it takes longer than we probably thought for people to develop mature
impulse control."
His study, which looked at 950 people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds
between the ages of 10 and 30 in five countries, found that while reasoning
powers mature early, things like impulse control, thinking of future
consequences to behavior and resisting peer pressure take much longer. In fact,
they slowly mature through the 20s, Steinberg said.
In a simulated driving study, Steinberg found that when teens were in the room
by themselves their driving skills were the same as adults'. But when they tried
to perform the same driving tasks with two friends in the room, the number of
chances they took doubled. The presence of friends did not affect the driving of
the adults.
Adolescence, Dahl said, is a time when passions can hijack the brain's ability
to make decisions and control behavior, with potentially deadly results.
For some youngsters living in impoverished conditions, this is a particularly
dangerous time. They reach adult body size but are being led by a brain that
clings to childish impulses and passions--and might see nothing worthwhile in
the future.
"The system is precarious, tipping on one side toward strong emotions and drives
and on the other side not yet supported well enough by self-control," Dahl said.
"There's an important role for parents, coaches, teachers, other responsible
adults and social systems to help support kids so that they can take some risks,
do some experimenting, develop some ability for self-control, but not spiral
into those terrible outcomes--death, disability, addictions, reckless sex, HIV
and all the other problems that are so rampant in adolescence."
Given what science has learned about the developing adolescent brain, Jay N.
Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health says parents and society might
consider the following steps to reduce the risk of teen driving accidents:
- "Graduated licensing where first you prove yourself safe for a certain amount
of time, then you go to the next level."
- "Limiting multitasking, especially in the early stages of learning to drive.
Being aware that talking on the cell phone and doing other things are risky for
adults too, but multiplied for teens."
- Raising the age for a driver's license. "If you look at other countries where
they start driving later, they drive safer."
By Jimmy Greenfield and David Haugh Tribune staff reporters Published March 28,
2006
Until a few weeks ago, Paul Marszalek's
MySpace.com page had photos of him and his friends partying, dancing and
drinking alcohol.
Not anymore.
Marszalek, 18, a UIC freshman, deleted his MySpace Web page after becoming
nervous that law firms where he was applying for internships might see the
photos.
"You never know who's looking at it," he said.
Marszalek isn't being paranoid.
What you post online could catch up with you.
High schools, colleges and businesses have begun to use social networking
sites such as MySpace, Xanga and Facebook to keep tabs on students and
employees.
"Some of these [postings] are incredibly incriminating," said Steve Jones, a
UIC communications professor who studies the Internet. "I wouldn't be
surprised if 20 years from now somebody who's running for an office has to
answer a lot of questions to what they had on MySpace 20 years ago."
Some consequences are more immediate, especially for college athletes who are
in the public eye more than their fellow students.
Last May, Louisiana State kicked two swimmers off the team after school
officials found out the pair had posted derogatory comments about their
coaches. At Arizona, several female athletes discontinued their Facebook
accounts after one of them feared she was being stalked by someone who learned
personal details from the site.
Last December, Colorado banned the use of Facebook in the student-athletes'
academic lab computers after a football player and cross-country runner were
caught sending racially insensitive threats to another runner.
Athletic directors concerned
Many college students have abandoned MySpace for Facebook to post their party
pictures. One reason is Facebook, which has close to 5 million users,
according to Nielsen/NetRatings, requires a university e-mail address for
access.
The site has become the cyberspace version of a college singles bar, allowing
users to communicate by exchanging photos occasionally suggestive or obscene
in nature, letters and personal information. The result is alarmingly open and
unfettered access into aspects of campus life previously left to the
imagination of parents and administrators.
But many students don't realize that alumni--who may include police or
prospective employers--can get a university e-mail address at some schools and
start snooping around Facebook, Jones said.
After sifting uncomfortably through online profiles at Facebook last fall,
Loyola University athletic director John Planek decided he had to do something
to protect the image of his school and the safety of its student-athletes.
Planek threatened to take away the scholarships of Loyola athletes who did not
remove their profiles rather than expose them to gamblers, agents,
cyber-stalkers and embarrassment.
"I've gotten the `Planek is an idiot' stuff, but when their moms and dads drop
their student-athletes off on our campus, I'm the dad here, and it's my job to
look out for them," Planek said unapologetically. "I can't control the whole
Internet, but I can do my part."
Monday morning, for example, George Mason basketball player Lamar Butler
picked up 100 new names on his "friends" list in about an hour for a total of
1,128. As popular as Butler had become, George Mason might have to win the
NCAA title to catch up to Illinois star Dee Brown, who stopped accepting
online friends when the number had reached 2,000, according to school
officials.
"How many of the friends on an athlete's list are ne'er-do-wells?" Planek
asked.
Planek has found support around the country from other athletic directors.
Florida State officials gave the school's athletes 10 days last December to
shut down their Facebook accounts--or else. Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw
used a blanket e-mail to remind his 400 student-athletes that they were
"always in the public eye."
The trend
toward curbing the computer habits of college students, even scholarship
athletes bound by a behavioral code, makes some civil libertarians uneasy.
Representatives from Facebook.com did not reply to e-mail requests for an
interview, but the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union
questioned how far a university or its athletic department should go to control
its image.
Said Edwin C. Yohnka, director of communications for the ACLU of Illinois, "The
notion that this sort of [free] expression gets tamped down at a university when
students are ready to explore who they are is a real concern."
Patrolling Internet
Of course, there could be bigger issues for students than just getting busted in
a photo with a beer in their hand.
"If you don't want it to be my business, then don't post it," Barrington police
officer James McNamee said.
McNamee, who specializes in Internet safety, said it's his job to keep tabs on
anybody posting possibly incriminating information on MySpace. It's very easy to
do so, he said.
He just goes to the "browse" section, types in criteria for age and gender, then
searches for anything suspicious in a 5-mile radius using Barrington's zip code
as a guide. MySpace doesn't require entering a city or ZIP code in your profile,
but McNamee has found that many users do.
"Everything pops up," he said. "We'll look at the pictures and the names. We'll
punch up on their site and see what we get."
McNamee has found sexually explicit pictures and personal diaries. He recently
came across photos some high school students had posted of themselves painting
graffiti on the school. He declined to say what discipline the students faced,
because they were juveniles.
"They basically posted a confession online," he said.
McNamee compares police officers searching MySpace to driving around in a patrol
car looking for suspicious activity, and he dismisses any suggestion it's an
invasion of privacy.
"Are you saying we shouldn't patrol it?" he said. "There's too much stuff out
there."
Other worries
And then there's that future job market to consider.
"In the future, if Google buys Facebook, who's to say they're not going to make
all Facebook content searchable?" UIC's Jones said.
Job recruiters say students' lack of discretion online will catch up to them in
their professional lives. A 2005 study conducted by executive job-search agency
ExecuNet found that 75 percent of recruiters already use Web searching as part
of the applicant screening process, according to a Columbia News Service report.
More than a quarter of these same recruiters say they have eliminated candidates
based on information they found online.
"I hope that students get a wake-up call," Steven Rothberg, who runs the largest
national employment Web site for recent university graduates,
CollegeRecruiter.com, told the Columbia News Service. "I think of social
networking sites much like a tattoo: It seems like a great idea at the time, but
you have to live with it the rest of your life."
By Jason George
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 27, 2006
Sowing fields surrounded by subdivisions, James Culver is well aware that the
world around his Plainfield farm has changed.
From a sleepy stagecoach stop when his family settled there in 1834 to the
fastest growing city in Illinois today, Plainfield has long since traded
tractors for tract housing. Its population nearly tripled from 1990 to 2000,
and doubled again since then, according to census estimates released last
week.
But Culver, a self-labeled 75-year-old country boy who still cherishes his
copy of the 1906 Sears and Roebuck catalog, is not just a man out of step with
this century. He was out of step with the last one too.
In 1975, a Tribune article declared him to be among the last of a dying
breed--farmers who work their fields with draft horses, the massive beasts
that once pulled everything from plows to streetcars.
Thirty-one years later, Chicagoland farm bureau officials say that Culver is
no longer one of the last. He is the last.
Even though he appears stronger than the average man a third his age, Culver
fears that this year could be his last in the fields, following triple bypass
surgery in 2005. Last week he headed back into the hospital to fix an arterial
blockage in his right leg.
Although he has leased much of his land to other farmers who employ heavy
machinery, Culver has continued to work his hayfields, which feed his four
Belgian mares.
"It didn't used to be that hard," he said one day recently, as he struggled to
remove the heavy horse tack from the only females in his life: Ruby, Dora,
Connie and Jane.
"I want to keep them if I can take care of them," he said. "I've never been
without my horses."
Living without horses also would have been unimaginable to Culver's
great-great-grandfather Daniel Culver, who moved to Plainfield, then known as
Walker's Grove, in 1834. Horses literally pulled Chicago through the 19th
Century, and draft horses made up the majority of them.
"They are too fond of the heavy draft breeds, almost wholly neglecting the
lighter and finer grades of stock," an 1872 Tribune article said of farmers at
the time.
Ollie Ziegler, the historian for the Belgian Draft Horse Corporation of
America, said the preference was a matter of necessity.
"Back in those days that was the only source of strong farm power," he said.
As the century turned, steam and gasoline-powered tractors and cars began
filling the horses' roles in both the city and the countryside.
"1952 and 1953 were the lowest numbers of registration of any draft horse,"
Ziegler said, adding that most registration gains since then can be attributed
to their increasing popularity as show and exhibition horses.
"I saw the last of them leave the farms and go to the killer plants."
On the Culver farm, though, draft horses were more than a means to an end.
Until this winter, Culver always made sure to feed the horses before he
prepared his own breakfast. Now he waits until the helpful daylight shines on
the farm before heading out to the barn.
"I'm out here alone," said the lifelong bachelor.
Although Culver never married--"I guess I was too busy," he jokes--he is not
without regular, potential suitors: real estate agents.
"I get a lot of that, you bet," he chuckled.
Culver and his sister, who lives in Lockport, own about 240 acres in the
Plainfield area, which several in-town agents estimated is valued at $20
million, give or take a few million.
But turning the fields into home sites and enjoying a poolside retirement is not
in the future for a man who wears work boots held together by tape and
determination. The land, simply put, has never been--nor will it ever be--for
sale as long as Culver's alive.
"It's been in the family too long," he said.
"I don't need it, and I don't want it," he said of the potential millions. "And
once you spend it you never get it back."
After feeding his horses, Culver fits them with their collars, bellybands and
cruppers to ready them for the fields. He has worked in this barn since he was a
boy, and its walls feature several scrawls of "James" from when he was learning
to write his name.
A Farmers Mutual calendar marks the date as December 1977.
Culver ends most days as the sun sets, sitting in his living room either reading
or watching television. "It's getting really hard to find something I like," he
said.
Next to his recliner are photo albums of horses he's owned over the years,
gospel 45s and arthritis balm.
Often he'll pop a tape into the VCR that shows him plowing fields of wheat,
which was filmed so that schoolchildren could learn about history. It shows a
scene that looks no different from what drivers who pass Culver's farm see
everyday.
"Time and time again I've been told I couldn't make a living, but I've never
worked a day in town myself," he said, seated next to a stitched pillow that
read: "Life without horses ... I don't think so!"
Just before I left Oxford for the Tiv in West Africa, conversation turned to
the season at Stratford. "You Americans," said a friend, "often have difficulty
with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily
misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular."
I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over;
at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always
be clear--everywhere--although some details of custom might have to be explained
and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes. To end an
argument we could not conclude, my friend gave me a copy of Hamlet to study in
the African bush: it would, he hoped, lift my mind above its primitive
surroundings, and possibly I might, by prolonged meditation, achieve the grace
of correct interpretation.
It was my second field trip to that African tribe, and I thought myself ready
to live in one of its remote sections--an area difficult to cross even on foot.
I eventually settled on the hillock of a very knowledgeable old man, the head of
a homestead of some hundred and forty people, all of whom were either his close
relatives or their wives and children. Like the other elders of the vicinity,
the old man spent most of his time performing ceremonies seldom seen these days
in the more accessible parts of the tribe. I was delighted. Soon there would be
three months of enforced isolation and leisure, between the harvest that takes
place just before the rising of the swamps and the clearing of new farms when
the water goes down. Then, I thought, they would have even more time to perform
ceremonies and explain them to me.
I was quite mistaken. Most of the ceremonies demanded the presence of elders
from several homesteads. As the swamps rose, the old men found it too difficult
to walk from one homestead to the next, and the ceremonies gradually ceased. As
the swamps rose even higher, all activities but one came to an end. The women
brewed beer from maize and millet. Men, women, and children sat on their
hillocks and drank it.
People began to drink at dawn. By midmorning the whole homestead was singing,
dancing, and drumming. When it rained, people had to sit inside their huts:
there they drank and sang or they drank and told stories. In any case, by noon
or before, I either had to join the party or retire to my own hut and my books.
"One does not discuss serious matters when there is beer. Come, drink with us."
Since I lacked their capacity for the thick native beer, I spent more and more
time with Hamlet. Before the end of the second month, grace descended on me. I
was quite sure that Hamlet had only one possible interpretation, and that one
universally obvious.
Early every morning, in the hope of having some serious talk before the beer
party, I used to call on the old man at his reception hut--a circle of posts
supporting a thatched roof above a low mud wall to keep out wind and rain. One
day I crawled through the low doorway and found most of the men of the homestead
sitting huddled in their ragged cloths on stools, low plank beds, and reclining
chairs, warming themselves against the chill of the rain around a smoky fire. In
the center were three pots of beer. The party had started.
The old man greeted me cordially. "Sit down and drink." I accepted a large
calabash full of beer, poured some into a small drinking gourd, and tossed it
down. Then I poured some more into the same gourd for the man second in
seniority to my host before I handed my calabash over to a young man for further
distribution. Important people shouldn't ladle beer themselves.
"It is better like this," the old man said, looking at me approvingly and
plucking at the thatch that had caught in my hair. "You should sit and drink
with us more often. Your servants tell me that when you are not with us, you sit
inside your hut looking at a paper."
The old man was acquainted with four kinds of "papers": tax receipts, bride
price receipts, court fee receipts, and letters. The messenger who brought him
letters from the chief used them mainly as a badge of office, for he always knew
what was in them and told the old man. Personal letters for the few who had
relatives in the government or mission stations were kept until someone went to
a large market where there was a letter writer and reader. Since my arrival,
letters were brought to me to be read. A few men also brought me bride price
receipls, privately, with requests to change the figures to a higher sum. I
found moral arguments were of no avail, since in laws are fair game, and the
technical hazards of forgery difficult to explain to an illiterate people. I did
not wish them to think me silly enough to look at any such papers for days on
end, and I hastily explained that my "paper" was one of the "things of long ago"
of my country.
"Ah," said the old man.''Tell us."
I protested that I was not a storyteller. Storytelling is a skilled art among
them; their standards are high, and the audiences critical--and vocal in their
criticism. I protested in vain. This morning they wanted to hear a story while
they drank. They threatened to tell me no more stories until I told them one of
mine. Finally, the old man promised that no one would criticize my style "for we
know you are struggling with our language." "But," put in one of the elders,
"you must explain what we do not understand, as we do when we tell you our
stories." Realizing that here was my chance to prove Hamlet universally
intelligible, I agreed.
The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men
filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the
pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the
proper style, "Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One
night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief,
when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them."
"Why was he no longer their chief?"
"He was dead," I explained. "That is why they were troubled and afraid when
they saw him."
"Impossible," began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor,
who interrupted, "Of course it wasn't the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a
witch. Go on."
Slightly shaken, I continued. "One of these three was a man who knew
things"--the closest translation of scholar, but unfortunately it also meant
witch. The second elder looked triumphantly at the first. "So he spoke to the
dead chief saying, 'Tell us what we must do so you may rest in your grave,' but
the dead chief did not answer. He vanished, and they could see him no more. Then
the man who knew things--his name was Horatio--said this event was the affair of
the dead chief's son, Hamlet."
There was a general shaking of heads round the circle. "Had the dead chief no
living brothers? Or was this son the chief?"
"No," I replied. "That is, he had one living brother who became the chief
when the elder brother died."
The old men muttered: such omens were matters for chiefs and elders, not for
youngsters; no good could come of going behind a chief's back; clearly Horatio
was not a man who knew things.
"Yes, he was," I insisted, shooing a chicken away from my beer. "In our
country the son is next to the father. The dead chief's younger brother had
become the great chief. He had also married his elder brother's widow only about
a month after the funeral."
"He did well," the old man beamed and announced to the others, "I told you
that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like
us. In our country also," he added to me, "the younger brother marries the elder
brother's widow and becomes the father of his children. Now, if your uncle, who
married your widowed mother, is your father's full brother, then he will be a
real father to you. Did Hamlet's father and uncle have one mother?"
His question barely penetrated my mind; I was too upset and thrown too far
off balance by having one of the most important elements of Hamlet knocked
straight out of the picture. Rather uncertainly I said that I thought they had
the same mother, but I wasn't sure--the story didn't say. The old man told me
severely that these genealogical details made all the difference and that when I
got home I must ask the elders about it. He shouted out the door to one of his
younger wives to bring his goatskin bag.
Determined to save what I could of the mother motif, I took a deep breath and
began again. "The son Hamlet was very sad because his mother had married again
so quickly. There was no need for her to do so, and it is our custom for a widow
not to go to her next husband until she has mourned for two years."
"Two years is too long," objected the wife, who had appeared with the old
man's battered goatskin bag. "Who will hoe your farms for you while you have no
husband?"
"Hamlet," I retorted without thinking, "was old enough to hoe his mother's
farms himself. There was no need for her to remarry." No one looked convinced. I
gave up. "His mother and the great chief told Hamlet not to be sad, for the
great chief himself would be a father to Hamlet.
Furthermore, Hamlet would be the next chief: therefore he must stay to learn
the things of a chief. Hamlet agreed to remain, and all the rest went off to
drink beer."
While I paused, perplexed at how to render Hamlet's disgusted soliloquy to an
audience convinced that Claudius and Gertrude had behaved in the best possible
manner, one of the younger men asked me who had married the other wives of the
dead chief.
"He had no other wives," I told him.
"But a chief must have many wives! How else can he brew beer and prepare food
for all his guests?"
I said firmly that in our country even chiefs had only one wife, that they
had servants to do their work, and that they paid them from tax money.
It was better, they returned, for a chief to have many wives and sons who
would help him hoe his farms and feed his people; then everyone loved the chief
who gave much and took nothing--taxes were a bad thing.
I agreed with the last comment, but for the rest fell back on their favorite
way of fobbing off my questions: "That is the way it is done, so that is how we
do it."
I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite
right to marry his brother's widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew
they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, "That night
Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief
again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead
father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet's dead father spoke."
"Omens can't talk!" The old man was emphatic.
"Hamlet's dead father wasn't an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but
he was not." My audience looked as confused as I sounded. "It was Hamlet's dead
father. It was a thing we call a 'ghost.'" I had to use the English word, for
unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn't believe in the
survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.
"What is a 'ghost?' An omen?"
"No, a 'ghost' is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and
people can hear him and see him but not touch him."
They objected. "One can touch zombis."
"No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and
eat. No one else made Hamlet's dead father walk. He did it himself."
"Dead men can't walk," protested my audience as one man.
I was quite willing to compromise. "A 'ghost' is the dead man's shadow."
But again they objected. "Dead men cast no shadows."
"They do in my country," I snapped.
The old man quelled the babble of disbelief that arose immediately and told
me with that insincere, but courteous, agreement one extends to the fancies of
the young, ignorant, and superstitious, "No doubt in your country the dead can
also walk without being zombis." From the depths of his bag he produced a
withered fragment of kola nut, bit off one end to show it wasn't poisoned, and
handed me the rest as a peace offering.
"Anyhow," I resumed, "Hamlet's dead father said that his own brother, the one
who became chief, had poisoned him. He wanted Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet
believed this in his heart, for he did not like his father's brother." I took
another swallow of beer. "In the country of the great chief, living in the same
homestead, for it was a very large one, was an important elder who was often
with the chief to advise and help him. His name was Polonius. Hamlet was
courting his daughter but her father and her brother . . . [I cast hastily about
for some tribal analogy] warned her not to let Hamlet visit her when she was
alone on her farm, for he would be a great chief and so could not marry her."
"Why not?" asked the wife, who had settled down on the edge of the old man's
chair. He frowned at her for asking stupid questions and growled, "They lived in
the same homestead."
"That was not the reason," I informed them. "Polonius was a stranger who
lived in the homestead because he helped the chief, not because he was a
relative."
"Then why couldn't Hamlet marry her?"
"He could have," I explained, "but Polonius didn't think he would. After all,
Hamlet was a man of great importance who ought to marry a chief's daughter, for
in his country a man could have only one wife. Polonius was afraid that if
Hamlet made love to his daughter, then no one else would give a high price for
her."
"That might be true," remarked one of the shrewder elders, "but a chief's son
would give his mistress's father enough presents and patronage to more than make
up the difference. Polonius sounds like a fool to me."
"Many people think he was," I agreed. "Meanwhile Polonius sent his son
Laertes off to Paris to learn the things of that country, for it was the
homestead of a very great chief indeed. Because he was afraid that Laertes might
waste a lot of money on beer and women and gambling, or get into trouble by
fighting, he sent one of his servants to Paris secretly, to spy out what Laertes
was doing. One day Hamlet came upon Polonius's daughter Ophelia. He behaved so
oddly he frightened her. Indeed" --I was fumbling for words to express the
dubious quality of Hamlet's madness ''the chief and many others had also noticed
that when Hamlet talked one could understand the words but not what they meant.
Many people thought that he had become mad." My audience suddenly became much
more attentive. "The great chief wanted to know what was wrong with Hamlet, so
he sent for two of Hamlet's age mates [school friends would have taken long
explanation] to talk to Hamlet and find out what troubled his heart. Hamlet,
seeing that they had been bribed by the chief to betray him, told them nothing.
Polonius, however, insisted that Hamlet was mad because he had been forbidden to
see Ophelia, whom he loved."
"Why," inquired a bewildered voice, "should anyone bewitch Hamlet on that
account?"
"Bewitch him?''
"Yes, only witchcraft can make anyone mad, unless, of course, one sees the
beings that lurk in the forest."
I stopped being a storyteller, took out my notebook and demanded to be told
more about these two causes of madness. Even while they spoke and I jotted
notes, I tried to calculate the effect of this new factor on the plot. Hamlet
had not been exposed to the beings that lurk in the forest. Only his relatives
in the male line could bewitch him. Barring relatives, not mentioned by
Shakespeare, it had to be Claudius who was attempting, to harm him. And, of
course, it was.
For the moment I staved off questions by saying that the great chief also
refused to believe that Hamlet was mad for the love of Ophelia and nothing else.
"He was sure that something much more important was troubling Hamlet heart."
"Now Hamlet's age mates," I continued, "had brought with them a famous
storyteller. Hamlet decided to have this man tell the chief and all his
homestead a story about a man who had poisoned his brother because he desired
his brother's wife and wished to be chief himself. Hamlet was sure the great
chief could not hear the story without making a sign if he was indeed guilty,
and then he would discover whether his dead father had told him the truth.''
The old man interrupted, with deep cunning, "Why should a father lie to his
son?" he asked.
I hedged: "Hamlet wasn't sure that it really was his dead father." It was
impossible to say anything, in that language, about devil inspired visions.
"You mean," he said, "it actually was an omen, and he knew witches sometimes
send false ones. Hamlet was a fool not to go to one skilled in reading omens and
divining the truth in the first place. A man-who sees the truth could have told
him how his father died, if he really had been poisoned, and if there was
witchcraft in it; then Hamlet could have called the elders to settle the
matter."
The shrewd elder ventured to disagree. "Because his father's brother was a
great chief, one who sees the truth might therefore have been afraid to tell it.
I think it was for that reason that a friend of Hamlet's father--a witch and an
elder--sent an omen so his friend's son would know. Was the omen true?"
"Yes," l said, abandoning ghosts and the devil; a witch sent omen it would
have to be. "It was true, for when the storyteller was telling his tale before
all the homestead, the great chief rose in fear. Afraid that Hamlet knew his
secret he planned to have him killed."
The stage set of the next bit presented some difficulties of translation. I
began cautiously. "The great chief told Hamlet's mother to find out from her son
what he knew. But because a woman's children are always first in her heart, he
had the important elder Polonius hide behind a cloth that hung against the wall
of Hamlet's mother's sleeping hut. Hamlet started to scold his mother for what
she had done."
There was a shocked murmur from everyone. A man should never scold his
mother.
"She called out in fear, and Polonius moved behind the cloth. Shouting, 'A
rat!' Hamlet took his machete and slashed through the cloth." I paused for
dramatic effect. "He had killed Polonius!"
The old men looked at each other in supreme disgust. "That Polonius truly was
a fool and a man who knew nothing! What child would not know enough to shout,
'It's me!'" With a pang, I remembered that these people are ardent hunters,
always armed with bow, arrow, and machete; at the first rustle in the grass an
arrow is aimed and ready, and the hunter shouts "Game!" If no human voice
answers immediately, the arrow speeds on its way. Like a good hunter Hamlet had
shouted, "A rat!"
I rushed in to save Polonius's reputation. "Polonius did speak. Hamlet heard
him. But he thought it was the chief and wished to kill him to avenge his
father. He had meant to kill him earlier that evening...." I broke down, unable
to describe to these pagans, who had no belief in individual afterlife, the
difference between dying at one's prayers and dying "unhousell'd, disappointed,
unaneled."
This time I had shocked my audience seriously. "For a man to raise his hand
against his father's brother and the one who has become his father--that is a
terrible thing The elders ought to let such a man be bewitched."
I nibbled at my kola nut in some perplexity, then pointed out that after all
the man had killed Hamlet's father.
"No," pronounced the old man, speaking less to me than to the young men
sitting behind the elders. "If your father's brother has killed your killer, you
must appeal to your father's age mates; they may avenge him. No man may use
violence against his senior relatives." Another thought struck him. "But if his
father's brother had indeed been wicked enough to bewitch Hamlet and make him
mad that would be a good story indeed, for it would be his fault that Hamlet,
being mad, no longer had any sense and thus was ready to kill his father's
brother."
There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it
no longer seemed quite the same story to me. As I thought over the coming
complications of plot and motive, I lost courage and decided to skim over
dangerous ground quickly.
"The great chief," I went on, "was not sorry that Hamlet had killed Polonius.
It gave him a reason to send Hamlet away, with his two treacherous age mates,
with letters to a chief of a far country, saying that Hamlet should be killed.
But Hamlet changed the writing on their papers, so that the chief killed his age
mates instead." I encountered a reproachful glare from one of the men whom I had
told undetectable forgery was not merely immoral but beyond human skill. I
looked the other way.
"Before Hamlet could return, Laertes came back for his father's funeral. The
great chief told him Hamlet had killed Polonius. Laertes swore to kill Hamlet
because of this, and because his sister Ophelia, hearing her father had been
killed by the man she loved, went mad and drowned in the river."
"Have you already forgotten what we told you?" The old man was reproachful.
"One cannot take vengeance on a madman; Hamlet killed Polonius in his madness.
As for the girl, she not only went mad, she was drowned Only witches can make
people drown. Water itself can't hurt anything. It is merely something one
drinks and bathes in."
I began to get cross. "If you don't like the story, I'll stop."
The old m;man made soothing noises and himself poured me some more beer. "You
tell the story well, and we are listening. But it is clear that the elders of
your country have never told you what the story really means. No, don't
interrupt! We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or
your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there
are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work. We told
you it was the great chief who wished to kill Hamlet, and now your own words
have proved us right. Who were Ophelia's male relatives?"
"There were only her father and her brother." Hamlet was clearly out of my
hands.
"There must have been many more; this also you must ask of your elders when
you get back to your country. From what you tell us, since Polonius was dead, it
must have been Laertes who killed Ophelia, although I do not see the reason for
it."
We had emptied one pot of beer, and the old men argued the point with
slightly tipsy interest. Finally one of them demanded of me, "What did the
servant of Polonius say on his return?"
With difficulty I recollected Reynaldo and his mission. "I don't think he did
return before Polonius was killed."
"Listen," said the elder, "and I will tell you how it was and how your story
will go, then you may tell me if I am right. Polonius knew his son would get
into trouble, and so he did. He had many fines to pay for fighting, and debts
from gambling. But he had only two ways of getting money quickly. One was to
marry off his sister at once, but it is difficult to find a man who will marry a
woman desired by the son of a chief. For if the chief's heir commits adultery
with your wife, what can you do? Only a fool calls a case against a man who will
someday be his judge. Therefore Laertes had to take the second way: he killed
his sister by witchcraft, drowning her so he could secretly sell her body to the
witches."
I raised an objection. "They found her body and buried it. Indeed Laertes
jumped into the grave to see his sister once more--so, you see, the body was
truly there. Hamlet, who had just come back, jumped in after him."
"What did I tell you?" The elder appealed to the others. "Laertes was up to
no good with his sister's body. Hamlet prevented him, because the chief's heir,
like a chief, does not wish any other man to grow rich and powerful. Laertes
would be angry, because he would have killed his sister without benefit to
himself. In our country he would try to kill Hamlet for that reason. Is this not
what happened?"
"More or less," I admitted. "When the great chief found Hamlet was still
alive, he encouraged Laertes to try to kill Hamlet and arranged a fight with
machetes between them. In the fight both the young men were wounded to death.
Hamlet's mother drank the poisoned beer that the chief meant for Hamlet in case
he won the fight. When he saw his mother die of poison, Hamlet, dying, managed
to kill his father's brother with his machete."
"You see, I was right!" exclaimed the elder.
''That was a very good story," added the old man, "and you told it with very
few mistakes. There was just one more error, at the very end. The poison
Hamlet's mother drank was obviously meant for the survivor of the fight,
whichever it was. If Laertes had won, the great chief would have poisoned him,
for no one would know that he arranged Hamlet's death. Then, too, he need not
fear Laertes' witchcraft; it takes a strong heart to kill one's only sister by
witchcraft.
"Sometime," concluded the old man, gathering his ragged toga about him, "you
must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will
instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land
your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those
who know things and who have taught you wisdom."
WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Representative Rahm
Emanuel (D-IL) released the following statement as delivered on the House floor
during the debate on H.Res.861:
“Mr. Speaker, since day one of the war in Iraq, Democrats have
provided the President with everything he asked for, yet Republicans have denied
the President the one thing he needed: oversight.
“In a post 9-11 world, the American people need the vigilance and
patriotic determination of every Member of Congress to demand answers to the
questions their constituents are asking.
“Instead, the Republican Congress sat and watched the
Administration make mistake, after mistake, after mistake.
“And don’t listen to just one member of Congress.
“Consider the words of a Three Star General Greg Newbold, Top
Operations Officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
“After a scathing critique of Secretary Rumsfeld, he says:
‘The Bush Administration and senior military officials are not
alone in their culpability. Members of Congress . . . defaulted in fulfilling
their constitutional responsibility for oversight.’
“General Anthony Zinni, former Commander of the U.S. Central
Command – in the Middle East:
‘We are paying the price for the lack of credible planning, or
the lack of a plan. Ten years of planning were thrown away.’
“Major General Batiste, who Commanded 22,000 soldiers on the
ground in Iraq:
‘Rumsfeld and his team turned what should have been a deliberate
victory in Iraq into a prolonged challenge.’
“8 generals have raised serious questions concerning secretary
Rumsfeld’s leadership. I dunno, Maybe the Pentagon suffers from the soft bigotry
of low expectations and social promotion as a policy.
“Maybe these Generals weren’t just qualified.
“Or maybe, just maybe, they had to speak up because the
Republican Congress was silent.
“This Congress has adopted an approach of see no evil, hear no
evil, speak no evil with abandon.
“America was told this would be a quick war and it turned into a
long war, this Congress walked away from its oversight responsibility.
“America was told 130,000 troops would be enough, but more were
clearly necessary, this Congress, the Republican Congress, walked away from its
oversight responsibility.
“America was told this would be a conventional war, it turned
into an insurgency, this Congress walked away from its oversight responsibility.
“America was told oil would pay for reconstruction, and the
taxpayers were left with a $480 billion tab, this Congress walked away from its
oversight responsibility.
“America was told this we would be greeted as liberators, but
have become and treated like occupiers, this Congress walked away from its
oversight responsibility.
“And, when Don Rumsfeld, a man who expressed contempt for the
idea of nation-building, was assigned the responsibility of rebuilding Iraq and
mismanaged the war against the insurgency, this Congress, the Republican
Congress, walked away from its oversight responsibility.
“Mr. Speaker, the Republicans want to portray the greatest
foreign policy challenge of a generation as simply the choice between more of
the same or a new direction and we Democrats welcome that.
“The debate today is about whether the American people want to
stay the course with an administration and a Congress that has walked away from
its obligations or pursue a real strategy for success in the war on terror.
“2,500 brave Americans -- male and female -- have given their
lives trying to stabilize Iraq.
“Last month was one of the bloodiest in Iraq.
“According to Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, attacks against civilians
increased 80 percent since November 2005.
“We cannot achieve the end of victory and continue to sit and
watch, stand pat, stay put, status quo and that is the Republican policy.
“Democrats are determined to take the fight to the enemy.
“In the words of President John Kennedy: ‘we shall pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order
to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’
“Democrats will never put American service members in harms way
without a plan, and without support.
“For that, you need the sit and watch complacency of a Republican
Congress.”
Vietnam had Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong on the street; the
Oklahoma City bombing had a fireman holding a dying child in his arms; Abu
Ghraib had the hooded torture victim standing on a box.
And today, the Israeli-Hezbollah war has Qana--the Lebanese village where
Israeli rockets killed civilians, including 16 children (down from the
initially reported 27).
Or did they?
The blogosphere has been buzzing the past several days about doctored
photographs, faked footage and even the possibility that Qana was manipulated,
if not orchestrated, by Hezbollah.
True or false? That seems increasingly to be a question for news consumers,
who have to be detectives as they digest the day's headlines and photo
captions.
In the past week, for instance, at least two photos shot in Lebanon and
distributed by Reuters were determined to have been doctored. Best known of
the two is an image showing black smoke plumes allegedly caused by an Israeli
strike on south Beirut.
The photo, snapped and enhanced by Lebanese freelance photographer Adnan Hajj,
was altered to make damage from the strike seem much worse than it was, as
revealed by blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com).
Subsequently, Reuters ended its relationship with Hajj and shut down his photo
archive of more than 900 images. The news agency acknowledged that at least
one other Hajj photo had been doctored to show three flares dropping from an
Israeli jet instead of just one.
These distortions may not rise to the level of wholesale deceit, but they are
intentionally misleading and prejudicial toward Israel at a time when the
stakes are lethal.
Yet another Hajj photo series under close scrutiny from bloggers concerns a
bombed-out bridge in southern Lebanon, though it's hard to tell exactly where.
Two clearly different bridges are both labeled Qasmiya Bridge near Tyre, an
honest enough mistake. In several frames taken at one of the bridges, however,
an overturned car appears to have been perhaps digitally moved to produce a
more compelling image.
These photos can be viewed at Power Line (powerlineblog.com), where three
attorneys keep close tabs on the various war fronts. These are the same
fellows responsible for sizing up the fonts on the "inaccurate-but-true"
documents Dan Rather presented as detailing George W. Bush's military history.
Power Line's treatment of the bridge photos is fair and open-minded--it's
asking rather than asserting whether something might not be quite right in
Tyre. Meanwhile, others are questioning whether the Qana tragedy might have
been staged by Hezbollah
Thus are conspiracy theories born. When the media fail to carefully police
their own, others will. And in that dead space between a forged document--or a
faked photograph--and the "gotcha" reflex among bloggers are lost trust and
moral confusion.
How can people make honest judgments about events--whether the war on terror,
the war in Iraq or Israel's response to Hezbollah--if they can't rely on news
from the front?
Equally troubling is that these images have the power to sway public opinion
and to alter the course of history. After pictures of the Qana children were
flashed around the world, for instance, public outrage was directed at Israel,
prompting Israeli officials to declare a 48-hour cease-fire. The emotional
power of imagery can't be underestimated, nor can its manipulative power be
ignored.
In yet another series of photographs being closely reviewed for staging,
British blogger Dr. Richard North of EU Referendum (eureferendum.blogspot.com)
has raised questions about Qana based on photos and frames captured from
video.
He identifies two men--"Mr. White T-Shirt" and "Mr. Green Helmet"--who seem to
be calculating their actions--and their emotions--for the cameras. Away from
cameras, they're dispassionate, even bored-looking bystanders to the rubble
and death. Closer to photographers, they seem to emote as if on cue.
It's by no means conclusive that the men's emotions are necessarily
manufactured, but as presented by North, they can be viewed as false. Does
that make the pictures inaccurate? Unfair? Misleading? North, at least, seems
to conclude that the men are more likely Hezbollah apparatchiks than mere
civilians wracked by grief.
These few examples remind us that the digital media age is a curse and a
blessing. We have access to more information than imaginable even a decade
ago, and yet we seem to have less reliable truth than ever.
The iconic image for these times may well be the humble Underwood
typewriter--symbol of simpler times when a thousand words could paint a good
enough picture.
----------
Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist. E-mail: kparker@kparker.com
On
the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to
those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical
development—not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as
because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to
break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the
traditional media—usually known, when this argument is made, as “gatekeepers” or
“the priesthood”—have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. “Millions of
Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can
do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the
profession,” Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who
operates one of the leading blogs,
Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, “An Army of Davids: How
Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government
and Other Goliaths.”
The rhetoric about
Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only
because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely
available online and didn’t use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political
opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is
information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean
newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at
Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on
search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made
on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don’t
have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by
the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in
the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a
form of journalism. That would add up to more than four million newly minted
journalists just among the ranks of American bloggers. If you add everyone
abroad, and everyone who practices other forms of Web journalism, the profession
must have increased in size a thousandfold over the last decade.
As the Pew study makes
clear, most bloggers see themselves as engaging only in personal expression;
they don’t inspire the biggest claims currently being made for Internet
journalism. The category that inspires the most soaring rhetoric about
supplanting traditional news organizations is “citizen journalism,” meaning
sites that publish contributions of people who don’t have jobs with news
organizations but are performing a similar function.
Citizen journalists are
supposedly inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where
they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than
we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and
preening that journalists often display. Hong Eun-taek, the editor-in-chief of
perhaps the biggest citizen-journalism site,
Oh My News, which is based in Seoul and has a staff of editors managing
about forty thousand volunteer contributors, has posted a brief manifesto, which
says, “Traditional means of news gathering and dissemination are quickly falling
behind the new paradigm. . . . We believe news is something that is made not
only by a George W. Bush or a Bill Gates but, more importantly, by people who
are all allowed to think together. The news is a form of collective thinking. It
is the ideas and minds of the people that are changing the world, when they are
heard.”
That’s the catechism,
but what has citizen journalism actually brought us? It’s a difficult question,
in part because many of the truest believers are very good at making life
unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering. Thus far, no “traditional
journalist” has been silly enough to own up to and defend the idea of belonging
to an élite from which ordinary citizens are barred. But sometimes one will
unwittingly toss a chunk of red meat to the new-media visionaries by appearing
not to accord the Internet revolution the full measure of respect it deserves—as
John Markoff, a technology reporter for the Times,
did in 2003 in an interview with
Online Journalism Review. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran editor, publisher,
and columnist, and, starting in September, a professor at the City University of
New York’s new journalism school, posted the interview on his blog,
BuzzMachine, with his own post-facto reactions added, so that it reads, in
part, this way:
MARKOFF:
I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be
good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to
replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario. JARVIS:
Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever. Can you
parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to speak sense? How do
new standards “destroy” old standards? Something won’t become a “standard”
unless it is accepted by someone in power—the publishers or the audiences. This
isn’t a game of PacMan. MARKOFF:
The other possibility right now—it sometimes seems we have a world full of
bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what
the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is
anything more than CB radio. JARVIS:
The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s clear that
Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there. Hey, fool, that’s your audience
talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are,
after all, spending your living writing for them.
If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the marketplace
cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking
audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.
To
live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both
conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the
journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to
improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism
migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities,
especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as
different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.
Societies create
structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information,
and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only
on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural,
and economic developments. An interesting new book about this came out last year
in Britain under the daunting title “Representation and Misrepresentation in
Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture.” It is set in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and although its author, Mark
Knights, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, does not make explicit
comparisons to the present, it seems obvious that such comparisons are on his
mind.
The “new media” of
later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by
the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship
and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created
audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is
Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but it was one of
dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds,
including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and
The British Apollo. The most famous of the
pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including
Thomas Sprat, the author of “A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid
Conspiracy Against the Late King” (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of “The
Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing” (1704). These voices entered a public
conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official
positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of
their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far
smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.
As media, Knights
points out, both pamphlets and periodicals were radically transformative in
their capabilities. Pamphlets were a mass medium with a short lead time—cheap,
transportable, and easily accessible to people of all classes and political
inclinations. They were, as Knights puts it, “capable of assuming different
forms (letters, dialogues, essays, refutations, vindications, and so on)” and,
he adds, were “ideally suited to making a public statement at a particular
moment.” Periodicals were, by the standards of the day, “a sort of interactive
entertainment,” because of the invention of letters to the editor and because
publications were constantly responding to their readers and to one another.
Then as now, the new
media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical
style. Knights writes, “Polemical print . . . challenged conventional notions of
how rhetoric worked and was a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and
satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of
the conventions of anonymity.” But one of Knights’s most useful observations is
that this was a self-limiting phenomenon. Each side in what Knights understands,
properly, as the media front in a merciless political struggle between Whigs and
Tories soon began accusing the other of trafficking in lies, distortions,
conspiracy theories, and special pleading, and presenting itself as the avatar
of the public interest, civil discourse, and epistemologically derived truth.
Knights sees this genteeler style of expression as just another political
tactic, but it nonetheless drove print publication toward a more reasoned, less
inflamed rhetorical stance, which went along with a partial settling down of
British politics from hot war between the parties to cold. (Full-dress British
newspapers, like the Times and the
Guardian, did not emerge until the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, well into this calmer period and long after
Knights ends his story.) At least in part, Internet journalism will surely
repeat the cycle, and will begin to differentiate itself tonally, by trying to
sound responsible and trustworthy in the hope of building a larger, possibly
paying audience.
American journalism
began, roughly speaking, on the later Stuart Britain model; during Colonial
times it was dominated by fiery political speechmakers, like Thomas Paine. All
those uplifting statements by the Founders about freedom of the press were
almost certainly produced with pamphleteers in mind. When, in the early
nineteenth century, political parties and fast cylinder printing presses
developed, American journalism became mainly a branch of the party system, with
very little pretense to neutral authority or ownership of the facts.
A related development
was the sensational penny press, which served the big cities, whose populations
were swollen with immigrants from rural America and abroad. It produced powerful
local newspapers, but it’s hard to think of them as fitting the priesthood
model. William Randolph Hearst’s New York papers, the leading examples, were
flamboyant, populist, opinionated, and thoroughly disreputable. They influenced
politics, but that is different from saying, as Glenn Reynolds says of the
Hearst papers, that they “set the agenda for public discussion.” Most of the
formal means of generating information that are familiar in America
today—objective journalism is only one; others are modern academic research,
professional licensing, and think tanks—were created, in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, explicitly to counter the populist inclinations of
various institutions, one of which was the big media.
In fact, what the
prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting
against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of
phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon,
mainly a straw man. Even after the Second World War, some American cities still
had several furiously battling papers, on the model of “The Front Page.” There
were always small political magazines of all persuasions, and books written in
the spirit of the old pamphlets, and, later in the twentieth century,
alternative weeklies and dissenting journalists like I. F. Stone. When
journalism was at its most blandly authoritative—probably in the period when the
three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper
monopoly was beginning to become the rule—so were American politics and culture,
and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the
tone of national life rather than vice versa.
Every
new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism
is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations;
Web-only magazines like
Slate and
Salon; sites like
Daily Kos and
NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as
influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance,
Arts & Letters Daily and
Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate
material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together,
function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an
open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big
media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an
individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We
can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the
blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes,
and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the
level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the
old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.
The most fervent
believers in the transforming potential of Internet journalism are operating not
only on faith in its achievements, even if they lie mainly in the future, but on
a certainty that the old media, in selecting what to publish and broadcast, make
horrible and, even worse, ignobly motivated mistakes. They are politically
biased, or they are ignoring or suppressing important stories, or they are out
of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, or they are merely passive
transmitters of official utterances. The more that traditional journalism
appears to be an old-fashioned captive press, the more providential the Internet
looks.
Jay Rosen, a professor
of journalism at New York University who was the leading champion of “civic
journalism” even before there was an Internet, wrote in the Washington
Post in June that he started his blog,
PressThink, because “I was tired of passing my ideas through editors who
forced me to observe the silences they kept as professional journalists. The day
after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I suggested on my blog that at
least some news organizations should consider themselves the opposition to the
White House. Only by going into opposition, I argued, could the press really
tell the story of the Bush administration’s vast expansion of executive power.
That notion simply hadn’t been discussed in mainstream newsrooms, which had
always been able to limit debate about what is and isn’t the job of the
journalist. But now that amateurs had joined pros in the press zone, newsrooms
couldn’t afford not to debate their practices.”
In PressThink, Rosen
now has the forum that he didn’t before; and last week he announced the launch
of a new venture, called NewAssignment.Net, in which a “smart mob” of donors
would pay journalists to pursue “stories the regular news media doesn’t do,
can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.” The key to the idea, in Rosen’s
mind, is to give “people formerly known as the audience” the assigning power
previously reserved for editors. “NewAssignment.Net would be a case of
journalism without the media,” he wrote on PressThink. “That’s the beauty part.”
Even before the advent
of NewAssignment.Net, and even for people who don’t blog, there is a lot more
opportunity to talk back to news organizations than there used to be. In their
Internet versions, most traditional news organizations make their reporters
available to answer readers’ questions and, often, permit readers to post their
own material. Being able to see this as the advent of true democracy in what had
been a media oligarchy makes it much easier to argue that Internet journalism
has already achieved great things.
Still: Is the Internet
a mere safety valve, a salon des refusés, or does it
actually produce original information beyond the realm of opinion and comment?
It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in
support of its achievements: bloggers took down the 2004 “60 Minutes” report on
President Bush’s National Guard service and, with it, Dan Rather’s career;
bloggers put Trent Lott’s remarks in apparent praise of the Jim Crow era front
and center, and thereby deposed him as Senate majority leader.
The best original
Internet journalism happens more often by accident, when smart and curious
people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden
disaster. Any time that big news happens unexpectedly, or in remote and
dangerous places, there is more raw information available right away on the
Internet than through established news organizations. The most memorable
photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway
riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get
there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information
when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an
especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at
such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they
were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: the citizen portions of
the Web sites of local news organizations were, for a crucial day or two, one of
the best places to get information about how to drive out of the city. But, over
time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city
came from reporters, not citizens.
Eyewitness accounts and
information-sharing during sudden disasters are welcome, even if they don’t
provide a complete report of what is going on in a particular situation. And
that is what citizen journalism is supposed to do: keep up with public affairs,
especially locally, year in and year out, even when there’s no disaster. Citizen
journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a
great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or
better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the
imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can
learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one
reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not
to think, This is what all the fuss is about?
Oh My News seems to
attract far more readers than any other citizen-journalism site—about six
hundred thousand daily by its own count. One day in June, readers of the
English-language edition found this lead story: “Printable Robots: Advances in
Inkjet Technology Forecast Robotic Origami,” by Gregory Daigle. It begins:
From the diminutive ASIMO
from Honda to the colossus in the animated film Iron
Giant,
kids around the world know that robots are cool yet complex machines. Advances
in robotics, fuel plans from NASA that read like science fiction movie scripts. Back on Earth, what can we expect over the next few years in
robot technology for the consumer? Reprogram your Roomba? Boring. Hack your Aibo robot dog? Been there. Print your own robot? Whoa!
On the same day,
Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, the nom de Web of Debbie Galant, who lives in
a suburban town in New Jersey and is one of the most esteemed “hyperlocal
bloggers” in the country, led with a picture from her recent vacation in the
Berkshires. The next item was “Hazing Goes Loony Tunes,” and here it is in its
entirety:
Word on the sidewalk is
that Glen Ridge officialdom pretty much defeated the class of 2007 in the annual
senior-on-freshman hazing ritual yesterday by making the rising seniors stay
after school for several minutes in order to give freshmen a head start to run
home. We have reports that seniors in cars, once released from school, searched
for slow-moving freshman prey, while Glen Ridge police officers in cars closely
tracked any cars decorated with class of 2007 regalia. Of course, if any
freshman got pummelled with mayonnaise, we want to know about it.
What is generally
considered to be the most complete local citizen-journalism site in the United
States, the
Northwest Voice, in Bakersfield, California (which also has a print version
and is owned by the big daily paper in town), led with a story called “A Boost
for Business Women,” which began:
So long, Corporate World.Hello, business ownership—family time, and happiness.At least, that’s how Northwest resident Jennifer Meadors
feels after the former commercial banking professional started her own business
for Arbonne International, a skin care company, about eight months ago. So far,
it’s been successful, professionally and personally.
Another much praised
citizen-journalism site is
Backfence.com, headquartered in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Last month,
it sponsored a contest to pick the two best citizen-journalism stories; the
prize was a free trip to a conference held by Oh My News, in Seoul. One winner
was Liz Milner, of Reston, Virginia, for a story that began this way:
Among the many definitions
of “hero” given in The American Heritage Dictionary is “A person noted for
special achievement in a particular field.” Reston is a community of creative
people, so it seems only right that our heroes should be paragons of creativity.
Therefore, I’m nominating Reston musician and freelance writer, Ralph Lee Smith
for the post of “Local Hero, Creative Category.”
Through his performances, recordings, writings teaching and
museum exhibitions, this 78-year-old Reston resident has helped bring new life
to an art form that had been on the verge of extinction—the art of playing the
mountain dulcimer. He has helped to popularize the repertoire for this
instrument so that now mountain music is everywhere—even in slick Hollywood
films.
In other words, the
content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read
a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the
store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective
challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take
up. Often the most journalistically impressive material on one of the
“hyperlocal” citizen-journalism sites has links to professional journalism, as
in the Northwest Voice, or Chi-Town Daily News, where much of the material is
written by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism,
who are in training to take up full-time jobs in news organizations. At the
highest level of journalistic achievement, the reporting that revealed the
civil-liberties encroachments of the war on terror, which has upset the Bush
Administration, has come from old-fashioned big-city newspapers and television
networks, not Internet journalists; day by day, most independent accounts of
world events have come from the same traditional sources. Even at its best and
most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one
that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be
unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized
audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns. David Weinberger, another
advocate of new-media journalism, has summarized the situation with a witty play
on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational
category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where
important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent
questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general
audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. It probably started in the
United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the Founders wrote the
First Amendment. It has spread—and it continues to spread—around the world. It
is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent
source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds
obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or
gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the
work.
The Internet is not
unfriendly to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever
invented. A few places, like the site on Yahoo! operated by Kevin Sites,
consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than
repurposed, feeling. To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we
hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of
presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by
people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.
Journalism is not in a
period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet’s cheerleaders are
practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence. They have got the
rhetorical upper hand; traditional journalists answering their challenges often
sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic. As of now, though, there is not
much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free
journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing.
As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving
reporters there, not stripping them away.
By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie
critic. This review contains material from Wilmington's Screen Gems column
December 29, 2006
"`The Rules of the Game' taught me the rules of the game."
--Robert Altman
There are about a dozen genuine miracles in the history of cinema, and one of
them is Jean Renoir's supreme 1939 tragi-comedy "The Rules of the Game," opening
Friday in a new, digitally restored 35 mm print at the Music Box Theatre.
"Rules" was not a film immediately embraced. Released on the eve of World War
II, it was at first the worst flop of Renoir's career: savaged by critics and
audiences, cut to shreds and then lost for years. Its reputation was kept alive
by devotees, and when "Rules" was reconstructed and re-released in 1962, it was
instantly hailed as one of the century's greatest films. So it is.
Renoir's masterpiece--whose echoes can be seen in films from Ingmar Bergman's
"Smiles of a Summer Night" to Robert Altman's "Gosford Park"--is a love
roundelay that's also the most complex, astonishingly varied and brilliant of
all ensemble comedy-drama films, a taleof frantically crisscrossing amours, set
to the music of Mozart, Saint-Saens and Chopin, in a form that switches freely
from farce to romance, satire to tragedy.
The movie is set mostly at the French chateau of the wealthy French-Jewish
aristocrat Marquis Robert de La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) at a weekend shooting
party involving his spurned mistress (Mila Parely); his tantalizing Austrian
wife, Christine (Nora Gregor); her over-idealistic aviator lover, Andre Jurieu
(Roland Toutain); and the lover's best buddy, Octave (Renoir himself, playing a
role he intended for his actor brother Pierre).
Meanwhile, in the servants' quarters, a violent triangle simmers and finally
erupts among the marquis' gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot), the local
poacher-turned-manservant Marceau (Julien Carette) and the gamekeeper's saucy
wife--and maid to Christine--Lisette (Paulette Dubost).
For the cinephiles who see it over and over, "Rules" creates a little world unto
itself: the marquis' chateau, in its sunny tree-lined grounds, grand ballroom,
bustling kitchen, packed corridors and creamy boudoirs, filled with the marquis'
cherished mechanical toys and with guests and servants, who are alive and
spontaneous down to the smallest roles. The fact that almost everyone is so
personable, funny and full of life and wit--and so determined to amuse
themselves--lulls us to a degree. The story keeps letting in more and more
moments of sadness, gradually darkening into pathos and tragedy.
"Rules" is about the conflict between artifice and nature, passion and manners.
Love--often adulterous love--preoccupies most of the characters, and tragedy
springs from the promiscuous way the affairs overlap and spill into each other.
Meanwhile, Renoir shows us a transcontinental flight landing, a near-fatal car
crash, a devastating rabbit hunt and a final bacchanalian party full of games,
sports, music hall diversions and a series of illicit affairs.
It all ends tragically because two of the participants--dour Schumacher and
romantically obsessed Jurieu--follow a different set of rules than the ones that
govern almost everyone else; theirs is a more rigid morality, a more possessive
romantic desire. The rule of the aristocrats is subtle and selfish, that of the
servants, theatrical and servile. But Jurieu believes that you marry the woman
you love, even if she is married already, and Schumacher that you shoot
poachers, romantic or otherwise. "Every game has its rules," Renoir once said,
in explanation of his film, "If you break the rules, you lose the game." And the
movie itself is a game, whose structure and rules we grasp more and more as it
winds through delight to chaos to bleak aftermath.
That inclusiveness and that broad emotional and stylistic range have made "Rules
of the Game" one of the most admired of all 20th Century films. "Tout le monde a
ses raisons," ("Everyone has his reasons") is something Renoir says in his
"Rules" role as the sidekick and hanger-on Octave, trying to explain to de La
Chesnaye the sad, "terrible" fact that in any tragedy or conflict, all parties
may truly believe in their own viewpoint. The phrase may be deceptive, since it
suggests that Renoir never chooses sides but envelops the world in a mushy and
all-embracing generosity. This isn't true: Renoir was famously a man of the left
in the '30s, but what is still so extraordinary about his work is the way he can
extend understanding even to those characters with whom he disagrees, sometimes
profoundly.
You can see "Rules of the Game" now in the best version ever since the film's
first, tumultuous release in 1939--and you should. No other film has a final
effect quite like "Rules." One walks away from it drained and exhilarated, after
experiencing a whole world and seemingly every possible emotion in a few swift
golden hours.
- - -
`The Rules of the Game'
(star)(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Jean Renoir; written by Renoir with Carl Koch; photographed by Jean
Bachelet; edited by Marguerite Renoir; production designed by Eugene Lourie, Max
Douy; music by Mozart, Monsigny, Salabert, Saint-Saens, Chopin; produced by
Claude Renoir Sr. In French, with English subtitles. A Janus Films release;
opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:46.
The marquis ............. Marcel Dalio
Christine ............... Nora Gregor
Andre ................... Roland Toutain
Octave .................. Jean Renoir
Lisette ................. Paulette Dubost
Schumacher .............. Gaston Modot
Marceau ................. Julien Carette
Genevieve ............... Mila Parely
No MPAA rating (discussions of adultery and some violence).
I've seen Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" in a campus film society,
at a repertory theater and on laserdisc, and I've even taught it in a film
class -- but now I realize I've never really seen it at all. This magical
and elusive work, which always seems to place second behind "Citizen Kane"
in polls of great films, is so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and
so angry, so innocent and so dangerous, that you can't simply watch it, you
have to absorb it.
But for many years you couldn't even watch it properly. Without going
into detail about how it was butchered after its first release and then
finally restored into a version that was actually longer than the original
running time, let it be admitted that it always looked dim and murky -- even
on the Criterion laserdisc. Prints shown on TV or 16 mm were even worse. Now
comes a new Criterion DVD of the film so clear it sparkles, it dances, and
the famous deep-focus photography allows us to see clearly what all those
characters are doing lurking about in the background. Like Criterion's
restoration of "The Children of Paradise," it is a masterpiece reborn.
The movie takes the superficial form of a country house farce, at which
wives and husbands, lovers and adulterers, masters and servants, sneak down
hallways, pop up in each other's bedrooms and pretend that they are all
proper representatives of a well-ordered society. Robert Altman, who once
said "I learned the rules of the game from 'The Rules of the Game,'" was not
a million miles off from this plot with his "Gosford Park" -- right down to
the murder.
But there is a subterranean level in Renoir's film that was risky and
relevant when it was made and released in 1939. It was clear that Europe was
going to war. In France, left-wing Popular Front members like Renoir were
clashing with Nazi sympathizers. Renoir's portrait of the French ruling
class shows them as silly adulterous twits, with the working classes
emulating them within their more limited means.
His film opens with a great national hero, the aviator Andre Jurieu,
completing a heroic trans-Atlantic solo flight (only 10 years after
Lindbergh) and then whining on the radio because the woman he loves did not
come to the airport to meet him. Worse, the characters in the movie who do
try to play by the rules are a Jewish aristocrat, a cuckolded gamekeeper,
and the embarrassing aviator.
This did not go over well with French audiences on the eve of war. The film
is preceded by a little introduction by jolly, plump Renoir, looking like an
elderly version of the cherub so often painted by his father Auguste. He
recalls that a man set fire to his newspaper at the movie's premiere, trying
to burn the theater down. Audiences streamed out, the reviews were savage,
and the film was a disaster, even before it was banned by the occupying
Nazis. The French like to be funny, but they do not much like to be made fun
of. "We were dancing on a volcano," Renoir says.
After a prologue at the airport and an elegant establishing scene in Paris,
most of the action takes place at La Coliniere, the country estate of Robert
de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) and his wife Christine (Nora Gregor). Among
the guests are Robert's mistress Genevieve (Mila Parely), and the aviator
(Roland Toutain), who is in love with Christine.
During the course of the week, Robert and his gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston
Modot) apprehend a poacher named Marceau (Julien Carette), who is soon
flirting with Christine's very willing maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) -- who
is married to Schumacher. Another ubiquitous guest is the farcical Octave,
played by Renoir himself, who casts himself as a clown to conceal his
insecurity. And there are others -- a retired general, various socialites,
neighbors, a full staff of servants.
On the Criterion disc there is a fascinating conversation, filmed many years
later on the steps of the chateau, between Renoir and the actor Dalio (you
may remember him as the croupier in "Casablanca"). Together they try to
decide whether the story has a center, or a hero. Renoir doubts it has
either. It is about a world, not a plot. True to his nature, he plunged into
the material, improvised as he went along, trusted to instinct. He will
admit to one structural fact: The murder at the end is foreshadowed by the
famous sequence in the middle of the film, where the guests blaze away with
hunting rifles, killing countless birds and rabbits. The death of one rabbit
in particular haunts the film's audiences; its final act is to fold its paws
against its chest.
As for a center, well, it may come during that same hunting scene, when
Christine is studying a squirrel with binoculars and lowers them to
accidentally see her husband Robert kissing his mistress Genevieve. He had
promised his wife the affair was over. And so in a way it was; when we see
them together, they seem to be playing at the intrigue of adultery without
soiling themselves with the sticky parts. This leads Christine, an innocent
soul who believes in true love, to wonder if she should take mercy on the
aviator. Soon after, Marceau is smooching with Lisette and Schumacher is
chasing him around the corridors. It is when the upstairs and downstairs
affairs accidentally mingle that the final tragedy takes place (in true
farcical style, over a case of mistaken identity).
Much has been made of the deep focus in "Citizen Kane" -- the use of
lighting and lenses to allow the audience to observe action in both the
front and back of deep spaces. "The Rules of the Game" is no less virtuoso,
and perhaps inspired Welles. Renoir allows characters to come and go in the
foreground, middle distance and background, sometimes disappearing in the
distance and reappearing in closeup. Attentive viewing shows that all the
actors are acting all of the time, that subplots are advancing in scarcely
noticeable ways in the background while important action takes place closer
to the camera.
All of this comes to a climax in the famous sequence of the house party,
which includes an amateur stage performance put on for the entertainment of
guests and neighbors. This sequence can be viewed time and again, to
appreciate how gracefully Renoir moves from audience to stage to backstage
to rooms and corridors elsewhere in the house, effortlessly advancing half a
dozen courses of action, so that at one point during a moment of foreground
drama a door in the background opens and we see the latest development in
another relationship. "In the years before the Steadicam," says the director
Wim Wenders, "you wonder how a film camera could possibly have been so
weightless."
It is interesting how little actual sexual passion is expressed in the
movie. Schumacher the gamekeeper is eager to exercise his marital duties,
but Lisette cannot stand his touch and prefers for him to stay in the
country while she stays in town as Christine's maid. The aviator's love for
Christine is entirely in his mind. The poacher Marceau would rather chase
Lisette than catch her. Robert and his mistress Genevieve savor the act of
illicit meetings more than anything they might actually do at them.
It is indeed all a game, in which you may have a lover if you respect your
spouse and do not make the mistake of taking romance seriously. The
destinies of the gamekeeper and the aviator come together because they both
labor under the illusion that they are sincere. I said they are two of the
three who play by the rules of the game -- but alas, they are not playing
the same game as the others.
It is Robert (Dalio) who understands the game and the world the best,
perhaps because as a Jew he stands a little outside of it. His passion is
for mechanical wind-up mannequins and musical instruments, and there is a
scene where he unveils his latest prize, an elaborate calliope, and stands
by proudly as it plays a tune while little figures ring bells and chime
notes. With such a device, at least everything works exactly as expected.
Dalio and Renoir discuss this scene in their conversation. Dalio says he was
embarrassed, because it seemed simple to stand proudly beside his toy, yet
they had to reshoot for two days. Yes, says Renoir, because the facial
expression had to be exact -- proud, and a little embarrassed to be so
proud, and delighted, but a little shy to reveal it. The finished shot,
ending with Robert's face, is a study in complexity, and Renoir says it may
be the best shot he ever filmed. It captures the buried theme of the film:
That on the brink of war they know what gives them joy but play at denying
it, while the world around them is closing down joy, play and denial.
SACRAMENTO -- The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. Pundits
declared irony dead after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but five years later,
not only is it alive -- it ruled 2006.
"Given the way the world has gone, we're in more need of irony," says Jerry
Herron, a professor of English and American studies at Wayne State University in
Detroit. "What 9/11 produced was a world where pettifoggery, obfuscation,
half-truths and double dealing are more rampant than ever before."
Irony, the grand dame of the zeitgeist, is pop culture's weapon against
hopelessness, experts say. It's a tool that transfers power to the powerless.
And in a time of a continuing war, citizens jailed without charges, and a
government that knows what we're checking out at the library and searching for
on the Internet, it's a key to understanding what's happening to the world --
with a little humor too.
"The reason irony is more fun than the truth is that it's more fun than the
truth," Herron says. "Jon Stewart is fun to watch because it seems to give the
feeling of being in a club where everyone's smarter than everyone else. And the
whole world seems to be pretty dumb."
Along with raised eyebrows and knowing looks, irony puts us in the know. We
become members of the sorority of sagacity. And it gives us some semblance of
controlling what we're being told, experts say.
But what is irony?
Merriam-Webster says it's using words to mean the opposite of their literal
meaning. But in today's cultural climate, irony is anything said with your
tongue firmly planted in your cheek. It's sarcastic humor with an exaggerated
message.
"At a time when people feel they're being lied to and treated as though they're
too stupid to get it, it lets you regain the claim on your own intelligence,"
Herron says. "I'm going to tell a lie, too, but I'm going to tell it knowingly
and as a joke."
Irony has existed in Western culture ever since there was a Western culture,
says author Ken Kalfus.
"I'm not sure what ironic forms there are in, say, Afghan culture," he says.
"You need a pretty well-developed idea of the individual. . . . Irony is one of
the first things that goes in a dictatorship."
The smug smile of irony bares its teeth when conditions are ripe -- there's
overarching disillusionment with the establishment and the public is trying to
separate fact from fiction.
"You can look historically at times that seem to be caught up in not telling the
truth and irony flourishes," Herron says. "Like in 18th Century England, when
King George was going mad on the throne and the world was falling apart, irony
was a thriving form."
It came to dominate our culture in the 1970s as a way to question authority,
says Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at
the University of Southern California.
"It was a response to things like governmental lying and to the
commercialization and commoditization and corporatization of everything," he
says. "The only appropriate way to react to what was going on was to be a smart
aleck and to say, `Yeah, right,' to any assertion by the powerful. There was
always someone trying to make a sucker out of you."
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Graydon Carter, editor
of Vanity Fair magazine and co-founder of the defunct satirical Spy magazine,
was quoted as saying, "It's the end of the age of irony. Things that were
considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear."
But instead of ushering in an age of sincerity, when people help each other,
join together and believe in a better world, we're more interested than ever in
whether celebrities wear underwear on a regular basis and have no qualms
elbowing that person reaching for the last PlayStation 3 on the shelf.
"Many people, I was probably among them, said irony was dead and in the face of
horrors unimaginable, the only appropriate response was authenticity and realism
-- postmodern winking was no longer appropriate," Kaplan says. "It probably was
about six months that that lasted. Irony is very much alive and well."
It's an era in which comedian Stephen Colbert's ironic roast of President Bush
at a White House correspondents dinner is now legend. And, according to a study
by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, more 18-to-24-year-olds watch
"The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" than read the print edition of a major
newspaper.
"It's become very hard to figure out what is real and what isn't," says stand-up
comic Marc Maron. "By nature of that, there's more irony.
"The idea that O.J. Simpson was about to publish a book about what he would have
done had he killed his wife and her [friend], that should be an ironic joke, but
it's completely real and horrifying."
The lines of reality are so blurred, irony is the only way to formulate some
type of understanding, says Maron, who will be on Comedy Central's "Comedy
Central Presents" Jan. 12.
"That's why fake news is resonating much more with people than the real news,"
he says. "Because when you can exaggerate or be sarcastic or be ironic, the real
message is revealed. Sometimes it takes irony to cut through a lot of the bull."
Plus, it can sometimes drive messages home more efficiently than the truth.
"People don't like honesty. They find it boring or too draining for them to
engage with," Maron says. "If something's put across in a smug or condescending
way, it's got some safety built into it -- you can take it in, laugh at it, and
it assumes you're in on the joke."
Today's irony can run the gamut from a simple wisecrack, knee-jerk and silly, to
something much darker, says John Tomasic, managing editor of the online pop
culture commentary Pop and Politics. But in the process, it can bring people
together, as long as you know you're not immune.
"You use it to mock, but you use it best if you're prepared to be mocked," he
says.
While irony cuts across age groups, ethnicities and gender, it is best
understood by the younger generation, who have known irony their entire lives,
Tomasic says.
"Young people, by and large, are not confused about the rules of the game. They
have grown up with irony. It's their best friend and worst enemy. It's their
playground pal, their video game instructor, their movie script writer," he
says. "Young people are not at all confused, for example, about `The Daily
Show,' a source of bafflement to the serious men and women in the skyboxes of
life."
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, author Kalfus began to formulate a novel
in his head based on the media's glorification of each victim.
"Everyone who was killed supposedly was a perfect husband, a perfect wife, a
perfect father or mother. They were all heroes," Kalfus says. "I wanted to see
them as people, not the way they were killed but by the way they lived their
lives. And most probably lived messy lives, like the rest of us."
Kalfus' book, "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.95),
was published in July and is based on a couple who thought the other spouse had
been killed in the terrorist attacks, and both were secretly happy about it.
"Loosely speaking, irony is a method of humor that deflates a cliche or deflates
a particular way of thinking by showing that it's taking itself too seriously,"
he says. "It's just one literary method of making us see the world a little more
clearly in the fog of myths."
Irony never accepts anything at face value. Instead, it delves deeper, looks
further and questions every premise, Kalfus says. And in the process, some form
of the truth is discovered.
"You try to puncture a cliche in a straightforward way, you only dent it,"
Kalfus says. "Irony, by ridiculing the supports for the cliche, can actually
bring it down."
Irony shifts the reins of power -- taking information from the top, altering it,
changing it, and maybe in the process, getting closer to the truth. Like a sword
of disillusionment, irony is a defense mechanism that gives the public some say
in world events that are unfolding.
"What has happened since 9/11 to promote the recidivism of our ironic culture
was the run-up to the war," USC's Kaplan says. "It's hard to see what's going
on, and when you do see what's going on, to not be cynical about the nature of
the world and the nature of power.
"And so making fun of it, using it as the grist for parody, as masters such as
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are doing, seems to be the best way to let the
air out of the balloon of power."
REFUSING TO ALLOW PRESSURE TO SILENCE A CRITICAL VOICE
By Sara Paretsky. Sara Paretsky, creator of the V.I.
Warshawski novels, is the author of the collection of essays "Writing in an Age
of Silence," coming from Verso/Norton this month
April 1, 2007
The night we began our invasion of Iraq -- March 20, 2003 -- I was speaking at
the Toledo public library. The day before, my speakers bureau told me that the
library wanted me to change my proposed remarks; my talk on how the Patriot Act
was affecting writers, readers and libraries was too political. The library
wanted instead the kind of humorous anecdotes that other writers used. With war
imminent, the library felt that a criticism of the Bush administration was an
insult to local families who had relatives in the service.
Days before I spoke, the Dixie Chicks had roused widespread fury by criticizing
the impending war and saying they were "ashamed" that the president came from
their home state, Texas. Mobs destroyed Chicks albums, lead singer Natalie
Maines got death threats, and a Colorado Springs radio station suspended two
disc jockeys for playing the Chicks' music.
I had experienced some of that anger. My 2003 novel "Blacklist," in which my
detective, V.I. Warshawski, encounters the powers the Patriot Act gives the FBI,
prompted readers to send e-mails or post on my Web site telling me I hated
America and loved terrorists. Over and over I read, "I will never pick up one of
her books again." Hard words to see. They shook me up all over again when I went
back to look at them while writing this essay.
Confrontation scares me; when the Toledo library asked my speakers bureau to
help rein me in, I thought seriously about changing my talk. Then I thought of
the times -- too many of them -- that I had caved in to this kind of pressure,
and remembered the sense of degradation I suffered afterward.
When Disney made a movie based on my detective, I caved in to studio pressure
not to talk about my experience with the moviemakers. When editors have cut
scenes from my books that they found offensive, I've let it go without an
argument. The many times as a young adult I let my parents veto any moves away
from their authority still sit uneasy in my gut 40 years later.
The lecture I planned to give in Toledo addressed issues of censorship and
silence. If I let my voice be muffled, could I ever speak in public again?
When I walked into the auditorium, I was shaking so badly that I had to clutch
the lectern throughout my talk. Five hundred people came out in a heavy
rainstorm to hear me, and when I was done, they gave me a standing ovation.
Afterward, many people said the administration campaign to deride and
marginalize all opposition was so effective that they had felt alone and
isolated, as if each was the only person in America to doubt the truth of what
we were being told by the White House.
The Patriot Act gives the Department of Justice power to demand all records from
a library or store on the basis of either a national security letter or a
subpoena. To get a subpoena, the government does not have to show probable cause
to a judge, it merely has to tell a judge that the target of its investigation
"may" have a connection to a terrorist organization.
If you receive such a letter or subpoena, the act says you can go to prison for
up to 5 years for telling anyone about it -- your spouse, your lawyer, your
boss. Two years ago, in fact, four librarians in Windsor, Conn., faced Justice
Department sanctions, including a gag order that carried a threat of
imprisonment, for consulting the library's lawyer when they received a demand to
produce user documents.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI is issuing 30,000 of these letters
each year now, compared with 300 a year before the act was passed. When Post
reporter Barton Gellman interviewed FBI agents to find out how many of these
letters led directly or indirectly to uncovering a terror threat, the answer was
none.
We don't know how many libraries have been served with these letters, because --
like most of us -- librarians fear imprisonment. But a survey conducted by the
University of Illinois' Library Research Center in Champaign, in which libraries
could report anonymously, found that about 11 percent of libraries nationwide
had received subpoenas or national security letters in the act's first year.
The Patriot Act gives the Department of Justice sweeping "sneak-and-peek"
authority, meaning agents can break into our houses when we're away and take our
books, papers and computer files without ever telling us they broke in.
I used that authority as part of a scene in "Blacklist," and that scene, as well
as the ambiguity around the FBI's search for an Egyptian teenager, sparked the
outpouring of fury over my work.
Because my books deal with issues of law, justice and society, in Europe they
have always been considered political. In the United States, it was only when I
wrote explicitly about the Patriot Act that readers felt I was a political
writer. Although "Fire Sale," my next novel, looked at social justice issues on
the South Side of Chicago, readers and reviewers lauded me for returning to what
they saw as my proper function of storyteller and entertainer.
I'm not a fan of propaganda novels, novels written to show four legs are better
than two, or that women deserve to be raped and beaten, or that men are
testosterone-crazed thugs. But I don't know how to divorce myself and my
fictions from the urgent concerns of my life: Who is allowed to speak? Who
listens? Who is silenced?
The more I thought about these questions -- in the wake of the response to
"Blacklist," and in the wake of my experience in Toledo -- I felt the need to go
back into my own life, my own history, to understand why issues of speech and
silence matter so much to me.
Herman Melville talked about the "the silent grass-growing mood" that writers
need in order to write. I think of that as a kind of interiority, a way of
getting as deep inside oneself as possible in order to write in an honest,
authentic voice. That kind of introspection can be painful as well as rewarding,
but it can't take place easily in an atmosphere of fear or in the tumult of the
marketplace. In such an atmosphere it's hard to hear our own voice, to find out
what we really have to say.
I grew up in a tangled nest of outsideness. My father was the first Jew the
University of Kansas hired for a tenured position -- a daring experiment that
left us as the town giraffes, always on display, not treated with hostility, but
as oddities.
As is true for many Jews of my generation, the Holocaust cast a long shadow over
our lives. For my family, as for many, America was a haven, the Bill of Rights
its most valuable treasure. Much of my family was obliterated by a government
that imprisoned and killed its citizens for no reason except their religion, or
their race, or their political beliefs. This history has made me acutely
sensitive to acts by the American government that infringe on our cherished
rights.
In my family I was also a kind of outsider. The only girl among five children, I
was constrained from the age of 9 to give up my own childhood in becoming the
caretaker of my young brothers. My childhood home was run on the lines of the
old-fashioned patriarchy, where what boys did mattered and what girls did was
second-rate.
Because the pervasive segregation codes of the time extended to Jews as well as
to African-Americans, my parents bought a house in the country, which led to my
living a life of intense isolation. My brothers could use the family cars to
come and go as they wished, but I was forbidden to do anything outside the home
except attend school. At home, I looked after the small children and cleaned the
house. When my youngest brother started school, he didn't know I was his sister;
he thought he had two mommies.
Every Saturday, from the time I was 7 until I left my parents' home at 17, I
baked for my father and brothers. My parents were highly educated and highly
literate. But though they borrowed money to send my brothers to expensive
colleges far from home, they sent me to secretarial school and told me that if I
wanted a university education, it would be at my own expense, and in my home
state. So I worked my way through the University of Kansas.
My parents would not permit me to leave Kansas. When I finally found the
strength to leave, I set out for Chicago. In 1968, I started graduate work at
the University of Chicago. My father told me not to be surprised if I failed,
because Chicago was a first-rate school and mine was a second-rate mind. That
criticism, in many different guises, was a constant of my childhood. There are
still days when the words start to sink me, and I lack the energy to rise above
their effects.
When I started graduate school, I could barely speak above a whisper. A good
friend from those years says that when she first met me, she thought she was
going deaf when I spoke.
It was a long, slow journey for me, from the silence of the margins to speech.
Because of my upbringing, I don't think I will ever turn away from questions of
power and powerlessness, in my fiction, or in my lectures. The questions of who
gets to speak, and who listens, are central to how I view the world. These are
the issues I explore in my new collection of essays "Writing in an Age of
Silence." I hope through these essays I can persuade some of the readers who
responded so angrily to "Blacklist" that silence is more dangerous and more
crippling than dissenting from power.
Sara Paretsky, creator of the V.I. Warshawski novels, is the author of the
collection of essays "Writing in an Age of Silence," coming from Verso/Norton
this month.
By Jose Rivera. Jose Rivera is the Oscar-nominated writer
of "The Motorcycle Diaries." "Massacre (Sing to Your Children)" is his second
play with Teatro Vista and the Goodman Theatre. It opens Monday
April 1, 2007
Radiant bombs fell on the sad, unlucky city of Baghdad the cool spring night I
started writing my play "Massacre (Sing to Your Children)."
On CNN, the bombs exploded without sound, so the full measure of the terror they
caused that night was unknowable to the many Americans who, like me,
nevertheless watched appalled and impotent, nauseated and angry.
It amazed me that a nation that finally, on 9/11, felt the full fury and madness
of a massive bombing on its own soil would so utterly fail to be sensitized by
that terrifying violence. Knowing how horrible it was, how could we wish that
horror on other people? Instead, like an angry child, we struck back at the
nearest perceived enemy, completely lacking in compassion, completely unable to
understand that the terror we felt that day would be equaled, then infinitely
magnified, by the terror we were poised to unleash.
That spring night in 2003, I started to write. I felt it was necessary for me to
channel the disgust and anger and sorrow I felt as we launched another
unnecessary war on a distant people too feeble and poor to strike back. I wanted
to capture something from that night of radiant bombs. What is it that really
frightens us? What do we really know, as Americans, about the nature of mass
violence? What do we know about revenge? What is it like to kill?
At the same time, I had been preoccupied with the resurgence of the Bush
Dynasty. We on the (slight) left had, through Bill Clinton, gotten rid of the
first Bush. Suddenly, though, like some kind of appalling lightning, the Bushes
were back. We hadn't gotten rid of the influence of this political family. We
had only temporarily forgotten it, pushed it out of our minds and headlines as
new national preoccupations took over. Happy in our amnesia, we thought it was
over. But that was just an illusion.
I realized that this resurrection of the Bush family was a metaphor for so many
other things we think we've successfully dealt with: AIDS, the environment, race
hatred, class tensions, ignorance on a massive scale, world hunger, the slow
disappearance of water. But we've never solved these things. We've merely fallen
into a periodic and comforting amnesia about them.
These were some of the themes and emotions that collided in my mind to
eventually become my play "Massacre (Sing to Your Children)," which began
previews March 24 at the Goodman Theatre in a co-production with Teatro Vista.
Now, happily, I know enough about theater to know that a good play is not a
political tract, but a living, breathing metaphor acted out in front of an
engaged populace. So, in "Massacre," you're not going to hear political speeches
lamenting Bush and his sick war. (That kind of talk is reserved for essays such
as this.) Instead you'll meet several ordinary citizens of a small town called
Granville, N.H.
One night these seven people get together to kill their neighbor Joe.
For years Joe has been terrorizing this town through random violence, rape,
extortion, destruction of crops, show trials. The play asks: What happens to
people when they are driven to such extremes? When is violence justified? What
do you feel after an act so brutal? How do you go back to your job the next day?
In the course of the long development of this play -- workshops in New York, Los
Angeles and Chicago -- many people have offered their own interpretations of the
character of Joe. He's Bush. He's Saddam. He's God. He's the Devil. He's
America. He's the neo-cons.
The existence of Joe raises questions about the nature of fear, of guilt, of
complicity -- about the potential for evil in all of us. And about the ability
in all of us to redeem ourselves, to make something good out of evil, to save
our friends and neighbors.
To balance things out a bit, let me just say that the play isn't all grim and
theoretical. Blood courses through the veins of this play, and it's not just
Joe's blood -- there's the blood of sexual awakening caused by the liberation of
Granville, the blood of hope, the gallows humor of a group of people who have
gone through hell together. There's music and the poetry of desire. There's that
amazing human talent for regeneration, optimism and rebirth. There is even some
singing and the presence of children.
Why a play about all these preoccupations? Why not a film?
I feel that theater is the place where we can best discuss and examine the
demons and angels of our inner nature. The place where society is examined, put
on trial and tested. Where our values as a community are discussed and
challenged. Where change is not only talked about but demonstrated. What happens
when we act altruistically? When we speak truth to power? What does it look like
when the masks worn by our leaders are taken off?
I love the theater for its communal energy. For its living, electric dialogue
between audience and performer. I love it because it's not lonely. It's not
distant, or in the past. The actors are performing those actions, right now,
right in front of you. And the potential impact of your communion with those
people and those ideas and feelings is staggering. It's enough to make you
change your mind about the world you thought you knew.
I was restless as the bombs fell on Baghdad, and I turned to the theater to help
me understand what happened to the country I loved so much, the country that
began to frighten me with its hubris and cynicism. I didn't want this time to
pass without registering my opposition, without leaving something behind for
future audiences to know what our time in this bloody history felt like.
And that's the cool thing about theater and why it fills me with such hope.
Theater is drenched in dialogue among characters, dialogue between actor and
spectator, and between today and our future -- a future greatly shaped,
influenced and colored by the wars and art we make today.
Jose Rivera is the Oscar-nominated writer of "The Motorcycle Diaries." "Massacre
(Sing to Your Children)" is his second play with Teatro Vista and the Goodman
Theatre. It opens Monday.
By Larry Heinemann. Larry Heinemann is the author of "Close Quarters," "Paco's
Story" -- recipient of the National Book Award -- and the memoir "Black Virgin
Mountain." He is the writer-inresidence a
April 1, 2007
When our war with Iraq began four years ago, I was teaching at Hue University in
central Vietnam on a Fulbright Scholarship.
During the Vietnam War, I was a soldier with the Army and have written two
novels and a memoir about it. I call them my accidental trilogy. I did not
intend to devote my writing career to the war, but sometimes you are given a
story and you simply have to do the best you can with it.
All that winter of 2003, half a world away, I read with increasingly sour
resentment of our president?s intention-- all but shouted with a braggart's
ease--to make war on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. War was coming, and as an
ex-soldier I felt a clear sense of dread settle over me, as it did for a lot of
veterans I know. Surely my government cannot mean to do this, I said to myself.
The stupidity of it is only too clear.
Whatever else we can say about the war, at the very least we can agree that any
enterprise begun with a lie is doomed to fail. Our war in Vietnam began with a
fairy tale about North Vietnamese gunboats attacking two Navy destroyers. In
Iraq, the president flat-out lied to us about Hussein?s weapons of mass
destruction, as well as the man's connivance with the terrorists responsible for
the cowards? attack on the World Trade Center.
Since then there has been much political talk, shouting matches, sandbagging and
blowing smoke about the war. But all of this, then and since, is irrelevant to
ordinary soldiers given the job of fighting the war down where the rubber meets
the road. Trust me, once you strap it on, lock and load, and step off, the
rightness or the wrongness of war becomes irrelevant in the face of the more
urgent, practical matters of grind-it-out soldiers' work. And for soldiers who
may well be on their second or third combat tours, a grind is exactly what the
war has become--screw the politics, the palaver and the propaganda.
As an ex-soldier and a writer, I have to admit that I cannot wait to hear the
story of the war told by my brothers of the blood. What to make of the day-in,
day-out grind for the "boots on the ground" and what I can only describe as the
heart-killing madness?
Let us first make a distinction between the news of the war, history?s roughest
draft, given to us by journalists and reporters who have trouble seeing past
their own noses (it's not their fault, it's the nature of their work), and the
story of the war given to us by ordinary soldiers who breathed it in and sweated
it out and came home with enough of a sense of themselves to sit down and tell
their story.
For them it will be a story so compelling to their spirit and imagination that
it simply will not go away; the story that makes them grind their teeth in their
sleep and makes their hearts sore at the thought of it; the story that informs
their spirit?s sense of right and wrong, their choice of a life's work, their
attitudes and hearts' desires, how they raise their children and how they look
at the world.
The first writing will be a rush of war stories, pure and simple. Body count
stories. These are always the stories quickly done, lavishly praised and as
quickly forgotten. It will be several years after the war that the more
considered writing will emerge, after the writers among them have had a chance
to do their homework. To "set and drank and thank," as my friend Riley would
say. Every generation of soldiers has to find its own language and a way of
telling its story, and that takes time.
And from where will these writers emerge? They will come from the ranks of
ordinary soldiers, the ground pounders, and not the generals, the journalists or
the talking heads. I would bet the ranch on it. The best of the writing has
always come through the plain-spoken language of the common soldier and has
always expressed a simple human truth. This is what I saw, this is what I did
and this is what I had become. The simple validation of a viciously unique and
remarkable time in their lives. The exasperating stupidity of war, never mind
the obscenity of its pornographic violence. The slab-of-meat hopelessness, and
the physical and spiritual exhaustion. The compacted grief that backs up like
the junk in a 4-inch soil pipe all the way to the curb. The lingering aftermath
of vivid sensation?odors, textures and terror, literally body memories. What a
friend of mine calls "the black years." The deeply felt humanity and exquisite
generosity rediscovered only afterward, and you connect yourself, once more and
gratefully, with the rest of the human race.
The story will be bluntly honest in its moral obscenities and street language
barracks' slang, darkly acid in its ironic humor, poignantly shocking in its
ambiguities, angrily bitter in its conclusions, but then the story of war has
always been about the snap-your-head-back downward path to wisdom. And we will
be upbraided, perhaps even shamed, by what the stories tell us about ourselves.
The novels that emerged from WW II were thick and elaborate blockbusters of
realism. The novels that emerged from Vietnam were, strangely enough, ghost
stories (both American and Vietnamese). What form the stories of the war in
Iraq, both American and Iraqi, will take is anybody?s guess.
But I'll tell you one thing. I can't wait to find out what really happened.
If you don't have children, you can't understand how millions of parents are
dealing with Cho Seung Hui, who put a bullet into his own head after killing 32
people, most of them students, at Virginia Tech this week.
Unless you're a parent, you can't know. We think of the dead, also of our own
kids and of a fearful silence. We think of how quiet our own homes would be if
the unspeakable happened, how still those 32 households will remain.
It's not your fault if you don't have kids, if you wanted them but it didn't
work out, if you're young and single, or if you've never wanted children.
There's no crime in it, and many of us have been there, knowing that the
childless are often burdened, expected to cover for the rest of us at work
during the holidays or when something happens with the kids at home.
So I don't want to hurt any feelings. But I'm thinking about moms and dads
reading this today, and only if you're a parent can you comprehend that look we
give each other when Virginia Tech is mentioned.
Before children, you may have thought you cared about kids as much as any parent
could care, until you have your own. Only then do you realize, quietly, without
any speeches, how wrong you've been. Only then does it open and bloom, for your
own kids, for the children of others.
I could be wrong on this as I am wrong on so many things, but that's how it
blossomed for us, with our own sons, born 12 springs ago now after years and
years of trying.
A colleague who earns his living dissecting what others write noted that in the
next few days, there will be much nonsense written about the murders at Virginia
Tech, as writers try to make sense out of what happened, as we reveal ourselves
as foolish graspers.
He's probably correct. I'm a parent, and I'm grasping. That's what parents do at
times like this. The other thing we do is shut down. So when the horrifying news
was breaking on Monday, I tried shutting down.
There is a hill in the large park in our suburb, looking down on the soccer
fields where the traveling teams practice. From there, on that sunny evening
with innocent blood in the news, moms and dads watched their children run. On
the hill, no one spoke of the killings, but you could tell we knew by how we
avoided it.
After soccer practice ended, my boys trudged over, my wife had their baseball
uniforms ready, and they changed in the van to get ready for a Little League
game. The baseball diamonds are on the other side of the big hill, and I stood
in foul territory with the other coaches, with Jerry and Marty, and somebody
mentioned Virginia Tech, but we dropped it without a word and warmed up our
pitchers and hit grounders to the boys.
The other coaches in the other dugout did the same. We focused on a well-played,
low-scoring game, the kids intense, fastballs smacking catcher's mitts, a few of
the boys with Adam's apples beginning to bob in their throats, girls hanging
along the fence watching the boys, adolescence rushing up on us parents.
So in my foolish grasping, I tried to slow time down, to confine it to the
baseball diamond, to these years when we parents fool ourselves into thinking we
can use our will to keep them safe.
Something happens when you have children. Is it chemical? Social? Who knows. The
thing is, you can't stop thinking about them. You touch your wallet with their
photographs inside.
Or, you get that rare night out alone with your wife, or the two of you with
another couple and driving to the restaurant you imagine discussing issues,
ideas, books, film or some play. Though such topics are released between that
first drink and the appetizer, just bring up the kids and look into the eyes of
a mom or dad across the table and you'll see what I mean.
Obviously, not all parents care. The list of abused and battered and ruined
children is always increasing, and most of us avoid it, except for those who
can't, the police and teachers and social workers and judges who deal with the
unspeakable. They deal with broken children every day, in ones and twos and
threes. But now we've got 32 dead, and the shooter, too, and we're forced to
confront it.
Parents aren't saints, and I'm no father of the year. We work through our own
crippling neuroses, though it cripples you even more to see your faults in your
children, wondering how these are visited upon them, whether by blood or
example.
One way we cripple them is by hovering, as Americans become increasingly
risk-averse, thinking we can protect our young by ordering their lives. I do it.
Surely, others see it in themselves. We wonder about the timid American culture
yet to come. Then something like Virginia Tech happens.
That said, most parents do their best. Many of us drive old cars and wear old
shoes and old suits and save for college.
So if you don't have kids and your house is quiet, then it is merely a quiet
house. It's always been that way, comfortably ordered. But if you have kids and
the house is strangely still, your mind isn't still, and what you're thinking
about is this: Are they safe?
And now there are all those households with that stillness pressed upon them.
CONSEQUENCES FROM THE DISASTER WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED WILL PLAGUE THE WORLD
LONG INTO THE FUTURE
by Timothy Garton Ash
Iraq is over. Iraq has not yet begun. These are two conclusions from the
American debate about Iraq.
Iraq is over insofar as the American public has decided that most U.S.
troops should leave. In a Gallup poll earlier this month, 71% favored
“removing all U.S. troops from Iraq by April 1 of next year, except for a
limited number that would be involved in counter-terrorism efforts.” CNN’s
veteran political analyst, Bill Schneider, observes that in the latter years
of the Vietnam War, the American public’s basic attitude could be summarized
as “either win or get out.” He argues that it’s the same with Iraq. Most
Americans have now concluded that the U.S. is not winning. So: Get out.
Because this is a democracy, their elected representatives are following
where the people lead. Although the Democrats did not get the result they
wanted in an all-night marathon on the floor of the Senate, from Tuesday to
Wednesday this week, no one in Washington doubts that this is the way the wind
blows. Publicly, there’s still a sharp split along party lines, but leading
Republicans are already breaking ranks to float their own phased
troop-reduction plans.
President Bush says he’s determined to give the commanding general in Iraq,
David Petraeus, the troop levels he asks for when he reports back in
September, and the White House may hold the line for now against a
Democrat-controlled Congress. Leading Republican contenders for the presidency
are still talking tough. However, the most outspoken protagonist of hanging in
there to win in Iraq, John McCain, has seen his campaign nosedive. Even if the
next president is a hard-line Republican, all the current Washington betting
will be confounded if he does not, at the very least, rapidly reduce the
number of U.S. troops in Iraq. After all, that’s what the American people
plainly say they want.
The American people’s verdict is remarkably sharp on other aspects of the
Iraq debacle. In a poll for CNN, 54% said the United States’ action in Iraq
was not morally justified. In one for CBS, 51% endorsed the assessment -
shared by most of the experts - that U.S. involvement in Iraq was creating
more, not fewer, terrorists hostile to the United States. If once Americans
were blind, they now can see. For all its plenitude of faith, this is a
reality-based nation.
So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the
consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the United States’ own foreign
policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid
U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath,
with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country.
Already, about 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders, and more than 2
million are internally displaced.
Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues
that what its authors call “soft partition” - the peaceful, voluntary transfer
of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and
Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision - would be the lesser
evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and
that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient
numbers to accomplish that thankless job - two implausible assumptions. A
greater evil is more likely.
In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist
Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective
destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant
Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand;
the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between
Sunni and Shiite, “a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed
confessional composition”; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics
from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the
strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the
Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas,
against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a
more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged “Al Qaeda
Central” in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al
Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al
Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators
spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.
Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach
itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The
U.S. government’s own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this
week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats
to the security of the American homeland.
The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that,
after a long period in which the first motto of its military was “no more
Vietnams,” it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but
the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to
achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an
economically and technologically inferior adversary.
Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the
roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic
photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract
its troops.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation
for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that
it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another
victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.
In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones.
We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe
there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the
human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the
catastrophic.
Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I
cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.
The world of cinema mourned the passing of two titans last
week. Ingmar Bergman was 89, Michelangelo Antonioni, 94. Front-page obituaries
celebrated their accomplishments, and the nightly news tossed up 30-second clips
of "The Seventh Seal" (Bengt Ekerot's Death coldly moving his pawn) and
"Blow-Up" to remind us of their greatness.
The two filmmakers almost seemed relevant again.
In truth, they're anything but. The hallowed days of
post-World War II art-house cinema -- that period from the mid-1950s to the late
1970s when people went to the movies expecting metaphysical transcendence to go
with their popcorn -- are long gone, and all the Criterion DVDs in the world
won't bring them back.
I was reminded of this the morning Bergman died, as I put together the Globe
obituary. One of our department interns -- a 20-year-old student who knows her
pop history better than most -- admitted she had never actually seen any of his
movies. After a pause, she confessed she had always confused Ingmar Bergman with
Ingrid Bergman, and what did he actually do?
The next day was worse: She hadn't heard of Antonioni at all.
I relate this not to beat up on the intern -- whose only crime, after all, is
youth -- but to underline that culture moves on, that today's artistic rebel is
tomorrow's old fart, and that the ground beneath cinema's feet has irrevocably
shifted since Bergman and Antonioni were in their prime.
Can "Persona" and "The Passenger" speak to college students today? Of course
they can -- if you can get them to consider the films in the first place. But
why should they when there are so many movies unspooling right under their
noses? There's a new Wes Anderson coming out in the fall and bleeding-edge
videos to watch on YouTube, and that Irish rock musical you still haven't seen,
not to mention the Korean horror flick -- and wait, they've re-edited "Grindhouse"
as two separate films for DVD.
All things an attuned young moviegoer should attend to, and that's the tip of
the iceberg. Yes, Bergman and Antonioni also made movies you had to see to be
culturally conversant -- 40 years ago. The Swede's last major work was "Fanny
and Alexander," in 1982. Antonioni's was "The Passenger," in 1975. I don't think
my intern's parents were out of high school by then.
The more pressing question is one of the past: What place does cinema's back
catalog have for today's filmgoer? What place should it have?
The answer used to be obvious. If you wanted to see an old movie three decades
ago -- and you were lucky enough to live in a big city -- you went to a revival
theater and joined the worshipers at the altar. The art houses played new work,
too, by Bergman and Antonioni and Godard and Bunuel and dozens of other
once-necessary names. They were churches of cinema. No wonder the films were so
serious.
The video revolution killed off the revival houses and the community that went
with them. Ironically, it's far easier to find older movies today -- the DVDs
are right there on Amazon, and the prints are great -- but you have to watch
them on your own. What was once a vibrant communal experience has become a
solitary pursuit. As with so many other things in the 21st Century, movie
history is a Balkanized casualty of an attention-deficit culture.
Also vanished is a sense of higher purpose in filmgoing. You didn't walk out of
"The Seventh Seal" talking about the movie, you came out talking about life. The
great art-house and foreign-language classics of the '50s, '60s and '70s were
good, and they were good for you. But that makes them sound like medicine now,
and who wants that when there's so much tasty fast food available?
Today's must-see directors (the Coen brothers, Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson,
Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and others) get at their truths through whimsy and
trickiness. They know we need the spoonful of sugar, and they're skilled at
amusing us. The ironic detachment that the great post-war directors saw as a
symptom of malaise has become the primary way of doing business.
So if the Globe intern and her hipster friends do get around to checking out
Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," say, or Antonioni's "Blow-Up," the slow pacing
and high seriousness may seem even more foreign than the language. Perhaps
they'll get bored and switch back to "Entourage."
Or perhaps not. Maybe they'll be inspired to dive deeper and rediscover Fellini,
Ozu, the French New Wave, the German renaissance of the '70s -- a cinematic past
with forgotten claims on the present. Maybe they'll recognize these films as the
products of a time when movies weren't afraid to tackle the big questions. Maybe
they'll wonder what we're scared of today.
One morning recently at
a post desert resort in Tucson, Arizona hundreds of the computer industry's
elite huddled in small groups, swapping shop talk, making deals. In one corner,
Michael Kinsley, editor of Microsoft's new on-line magazine, Slate, chatted with
Bernard Vergnes, head of Microsoft's European operations. In another, Jim
Barksdale, president of Netscape, talked sotto voce with Steve Case, chairman of
America Online.
What brought together
the 500 cybernauts was the annual PC Forum, spearheaded by Esther Dyson, a
44-year-old writer, futurist, philanthropist and venture capitalist who has
become one of the most influential figures and certainly the most influential
woman in all the computer world.
How Dyson makes her
living is hard to classify. She is the editor and publisher of the widely
respected newsletter Release 1.0 (and of its Eastern European cousin, named with
the double pun Rel-East). She is chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, an industry-financed civilliberties watchdog group. She runs
EDventure Ventures, an investment fund that plugs Western dollars into Eastern
European technology startups. And she manages this conference, which is to the
computer world something like what the Cannes Festival is to film.
Dyson comes from a
famously brilliant clan. Her father is the physicist and author Freeman Dyson.
Her mother, Verena Huber-Dyson, is a mathematician who graduated from the Swiss
institute where Albert Einstein studied. Her brother, George, is the world's
leading expert on the kayak. At 14, Esther began studying Russian; at 16, she
was at Harvard; at 25, she was reporting for Forbes, and by 30, she was
analyzing technology stocks for Wall Street. In 1982, Ben Rosen, now chairman of
the Compaq Computer Corporation, asked her to help him put out his Rosen
Electronics Letter, a pioneering publication about new technology, which the
following year he sold to Dyson, along with PC Forum. Now, 13 years later,
Release 1.0 circulates to 1,600 computer industry leaders attracted by its
thoughtful inquiries into thorny issues like intellectual property. "What I try
to do," Dyson says, "is find worthy ideas and people and get attention for them.
I meet a lot of people, read a lot of stuff and try to promote new ideas."
Q: Microsoft's
chairman, Bill Gates, is rumored to have once denounced you as a "socialist."
Why? DYSON: There was some misunderstanding. He thought I was going around
saying that intellectual property should be free. Actually, as the Web expands,
the big effect will be that intellectual property is likely to lose a lot of its
market value.
Let me explain. In the
past, there was a relative shortage of creative work. There was a limited amount
of content and people had a limited amount of time, and both were pretty much
matched at current price levels. Now [since the Net became popular], there's
much less cost associated with the distribution of content. If you put a book or
a magazine up, all the costs attributable to paper, printing, inventory, holding
publications in stores go away. The other thing that is happening is that
everybody can get up on the Net, sing their own songs, write their own poetry.
You no longer need a publishing house to get a book published. So economics
would say that since the supply of content is increasing, the costs of
duplication and distribution are diminishing and people have the same amount of
time or less, we are all going to pay less.
The idea of copyright
will still be important because it is the law and it is moral. Second, a content
producer will still want to control the integrity of a work. Even if I get no
royalties, I want to make sure that my work isn't dumbed down and sold under
someone else's name.
Whenever I talk about
this, content producers go nuts. All I'm saying is that you need to figure out
how to be paid for producing content because the business models are going to
change.
Q: If intellectual
property is to have little monetary value, how will writers, artists, composers
make a living? A: They'll get money for performances, readings, for going on
line and interacting with their audiences. The free copies of content are going
to be what you use to establish your fame. Then you go out and milk it. Also, a
lot of creators will get paid by audience gatherers rather than the public.
Content will be sponsored somewhat in the way network television programming is
today.
In this new situation, I
see content as having to stand on its own merits because it is advertising for
something else rather than something that is advertised for. The good writers
will get sponsored. The bad ones, maybe they'll be more useful in some other
line of work. I see this trend manifesting itself in my own life. Like
everyone else, I get lots of free information on the Net. I also get offers to
subscribe to stuff and my attitude often is, "Why should I pay to get more
when I have too much already?" Now, I do pay for really special stuff. I also
pay when I want to support work of a particular creator. Future scenarios on
this are obvious. A consultant will write a book, hand it out for free and
then charge higher fees for his services.
Q: But a consultant
isn't an artist. What will happen to the producers of literature? A: Some of
them will write highly successful works and then go out and make speeches.
Q: What if they are
shy? A: Then they won't make any money.
Q: You are currently
working on a book tentatively titled "Release 2.0: Second Thoughts on the
Digital Revolution." Will you be getting an advance from a publisher or will
you just post the whole thing up on the Net where anyone can take it for free?
A: I certainly want the book to make money. Content may have declining value,
but it hasn't hit zero yet. It may be free on the Net, but people will still
pay for it in a convenient form, which is a book with a cover and photographs.
On the other hand, I do intend to post chunks of it on the Net. Whoever my
publisher is, they'll have to feel comfortable with that, because my purpose
is to get ideas out.
In many ways, I see
the example of how I work as representative of the way things are going for
creators. The newsletter I publish, Release 1.0 -- which costs $595 times
1,600 subscribers -- breaks even. But the PC Forum, which is a kind of
one-time performance each year, generates about $1.5 million in revenue, and
participation is open only to newsletter subscribers. So the money-making part
of my business is really an offshoot of the content production. Also, I do
other things: consulting, speeches, which come to me because of my writing. In
other words, I get paid for my activity rather than my products.
Q: Why is your
conference, the PC Forum, such a motive power in the computer world? A: Why do
we have sexual reproduction? Because you get better offspring when you mix
genes. And this conference is the greatest gene-pool mixer. The critical mass
of the industry comes together and looks at the future. I try to take the core
of the industry and put new viruses into it. I try to provoke people to think,
to meet new ideas and new people. The result is that parts of deals often
start there, trends are previewed. At the 1989 PC Forum, I got Lotus to
announce Notes nine months before it was actually released. That really helped
launch the product and the idea of groupware. Three years ago, we held a
conference called "Content Is Key," with the idea that content and not just
tools moves the world. It didn't single-handedly create the situation where
people are now paying billions for content companies, but it helped the truth
become recognized. I'm always considered a crackpot because I'm early with
ideas. But that's O.K.
Q: Do you use Windows
95? A: No, I use Xywrite for a word processor, Eudora for E-mail and Netscape
as my Internet browser. As for Windows 95, I gave my review copy to my
stepmother and father. There's no compelling reason for me to make the switch
over. My old stuff works. If I were starting over with a new computer, I'd get
it loaded with Windows 95, and I do suppose in the long run, I'll move over to
it. Right now, a switch would be complicated. Besides, it's not that easy to
install, which reminds me of a joke: Why did God need six days to create the
world? Because he had no installed base.
Q: Give me your
prophesies on what the newspaper of the future will look like. A: If you're
looking 20 to 30 years from now, they will probably be printed out on local
printers by whomever wants one. People will still want their news, but a lot
of the traditional newspaper will disappear. With electronic distribution,
there's no real reason for recipes and foreign coverage to be stuck together
in one big wad of paper. Instead, the newspaper of the future will be
customized to a consumer's needs. Stock prices and classifieds will probably
drop off first -- and this should happen in a very few years. After that,
data-intensive items will go -- like local movie listings. These are sections
that are so much more valuable when they can be electronically searched,
filtered and graphed.
It's really stupid to
print out thousands of apartment listings for thousands of people. Just put
them on line and let people select what they want by neighborhood and price
range. As for investments, I want all the stock prices covered and filtered. I
want to be able to call up all the securities that went up 10 percent in the
last two months.
Q: Tell me about
growing up in 1950's Princeton. A: Two of our neighbors were Nobel Prize
winners. A third developed color television. As children, my brother, George,
and I played on the derelict remains of one of the first computers, which was
on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Studies, where my father worked.
Mrs. Hans Bethe [wife of a key architect of the A-bomb] was my godmother.
Edward Teller [father of the H-bomb] came to the house often. I have these
memories of him pouring excessive amounts of chocolate sauce over his ice
cream while declaring, "My doctor says I shouldn't do this, but I never
pretended to be an honorable man."
Q: Were there any
traumas in this idyll? A: When I was 5, my mother ran off with a
mathematician, though my father says I was quite philosophic about it. He
claims I said, "Oh, who needs a mother once the milk is gone."
I had a huge amount
of diverse experiences because my parents were divorced. Two years after my
mother left, my father remarried and we settled into a traditional
two-parent-family situation. My mother moved to Berkeley, where she had
bohemian friends. She had a lover named Goodwin, who was a computer
programmer, and he was our favorite. The second computer I played on was his.
He'd let my brother and me play with his punch cards. We'd tried to read them
based on the codes, which you could figure out.
Incidentally, my
mother taught mathematics at the University of California in Berkeley at the
same time as Ted Kaczynski [under Federal indictment as the Unabomber]. For
all I know, my brother and I ran into him when we played tag in the math
department elevators. I'm fascinated by the Unabomber, whoever it was. No. 1,
he's a maniac. No. 2, he's asking valid questions: is technology bad? On the
other hand, his manifesto is an example of a freelance writer who wasn't very
good, but then, his writings are what got him caught. Interestingly, he could
have put his manifesto on the Internet without going to The New York Times or
The Washington Post. It was broadly distributed on the Internet anyway. I keep
thinking that if he were even remotely plugged in, he could have been spouting
all his stuff on the Net and that might have kept him from getting all bottled
up inside.
Q: Various
legislators have proposed a number of new laws aimed at keeping criminals and
terrorists from using the Net. Will these help? A: They didn't catch the
suspected Unabomber by tapping any lines. As head of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, I am troubled by most of these new laws, ostensibly aimed at
criminals and pornographers but restrictive of everyone's freedom.
There are two
specific items here -- encryption and freedom of speech. Last year, Congress
passed the Communications Decency Act, after very little debate. It was
censorship, pure and simple. Fortunately, last month a Federal appeals court
ruled the law unconstitutional. God bless those judges. They came in knowing
little about the Net, but they opened their minds and said that the Internet
was more like a soapbox than television and much more democratic.
As for encryption,
the Government keeps trying to do what governments naturally do: control
people. They would like to ban encryption [which scrambles and unscrambles
information on computers] to make it easier for law enforcement to listen in
on people. In principle, all they want to do is stop crime. But the fact is
encryption is defensive technology against big government, big business, big
crime. I'd rather have defensive technology than leave the power to snoop in
the hands of people I might not trust. Basically, the intelligence community
wants this.
Q: A couple of years
ago, you visited the C.I.A. headquarters in McLean, Va., and found people
there to be quite uninformed about the new technologies. Were you surprised?
A: Mitch Kapor [founder of Lotus] and John Barlow [a co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation] and I went down there. Barlow said they wanted
to re-engineer and change their act. It was like talking to a bunch of
middle-level managers who knew what the Net was but had no concept of how
decentralizing it was. They said, "Do you think if we put our C.I.A.
information on the Net, people will appreciate us?" We said: "Your content
isn't good enough to survive on the Web. You're the people who didn't
understand what was happening in the Soviet Union."
Q: What did they want
to do -- have a C.I.A. home page? A: Sort of. They were well meaning. But they
had no sense of what they were trying to do. They wanted to be part of the
Internet community and be on line, without having a sense of what that is.
Q: It's no secret
that you're high tech's most obsessive Slavophile. How did Russia and Eastern
Europe become your personal passion? A: I studied Russian at high school and
at home. My father had always taught us Soviets were bad but Russians were
good. So I didn't grow up with the typical American thing of "those Red
commies." Twenty-five years later, I visited Russia for the first time during
perestroika. The minute I landed, I felt this "separated at birth" thing for
the place. It was chaotic. Nothing worked. I wanted to help.
And I think I've been
able to. I get to Russia nearly every month and I do a lot of free consulting,
teaching Russians in high tech how business in the West works. I give talks on
business strategy, try to help people connect with their counterparts in the
West. It's exhilarating work. The companies are not privatized state
industries but start-ups. The people who staff them are not Soviet
apparatchiks but programmers and physicists.
I also have a small
venture capital fund that invests in Eastern European high tech. For years, I
was urging my Silicon Valley friends to invest in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Eventually, several friends raised a million and a half dollars for me to
invest for them. This is a for-profit fund. Its goal is to make a profit by
doing good things.
Q: Has it been an
advantage for you to be female in the mostly male world of high tech? A: I'd
say so. From the beginning, I was noticeable. I also had a psychological
advantage because the thing that happens to most men in this business is that
they start to compare themselves with Bill Gates and they feel inadequate.
Obviously, I never had that problem. Also, in the computer world, I find,
being a woman, you are not so pressed to conform. There's a broader range of
character traits that are acceptable.
Q: Are you sure?
People in the computer business are always buzzing about your private life --
or the fact that you don't seem to have one. Do you think they'd bother if you
were male? A: No. They'd say, "He's a bachelor," and move on. Or if he were
gay, they'd move on even faster. But I feel this comes with the territory.
When I was having this relationship with [the publishing magnate] Bill Ziff,
it was a relief to me when a magazine printed news of it -- once something is
in Business Week, it loses its magic.
Q: What's
your advice for the millions out there who are Internet-phobic? A: If you're
over 40, unless you're looking for a job, you are not going to die as a
failure if you haven't used the Internet. People should not be made to feel
socially inadequate if they are not wired. The important thing to remember is
that this is not a new form of life. It is just a new activity.
I don’t know about you, but while the events of the past
five years haven’t really changed the patterns of my everyday life, they’ve
certainly transformed the way I see the world.
I used to see the world as a landscape of rolling hills. There were different
nations, tribes and societies, but the slopes connecting those groups were
gradual and hospitable. It seemed relatively easy to travel from society to
society, to understand and commune with one another.
Globalization seemed to be driving events, the integration of markets,
communications and people. It seemed to be creating, with fits and starts,
globalized individuals, who had one foot in a particular culture and another
foot in a shared flow of movies, music, products and ideas.
I spent much of the 1990’s (that most deceptive decade) abroad — in
Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. People everywhere seemed to
want the same things: to live in normal societies, to be free, to give their
children better lives.
Now it seems that was an oversimplified view of human nature. It’s
true people everywhere want to satisfy their desires, but they also require
moral systems that will restrain and give shape to their desires. It’s true
people everywhere love their children, but they also require respect and
recognition and they will sacrifice their own lives, and even their children’s
lives, in wars for status. It’s true people everywhere hate oppression, but they
also require identity, and human beings build identities by collectively hating
groups that represent what they are not.
All these other parts of human nature impel people to become tribal.
People form groups to realize their need for status, moral order and identity.
The differences between these groups can be vast and irreconcilable.
Now my mental image of the landscape of humanity is not made up of
rolling hills. It’s filled with chasms, crevices, jagged cliffs and dark
forests. The wildernesses between groups seem stark and perilous.
People who live in societies where authority is united — as under
Islam — are really different from people who live in societies where authority
is divided. People in honor societies — where someone will kill his sister
because she has become polluted by rape — are different from people in societies
where people are judged by individual intentions. People who live in societies
where the past dominates the present are different from people who live in
societies where the future dominates the present.
Samuel Huntington once looked at the vast differences between groups
and theorized that humanity is riven into different civilizations. That’s close
but not quite right. Today’s divisions aren’t permanent. Instead, groups are
constantly being formed and revised in a process of Schumpeterian creative
destruction.
Yesterday’s high-tech entrepreneurs look like pikers compared to the
social entrepreneurs of today. Islamist entrepreneurs have quickly built the
world’s most vibrant and destructive movement by combining old teachings,
invented traditions, imagined purities and new technologies. The five most
important people in the Arab world, according to a recent survey, are the
leaders of Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Microsoft’s market conquest is nothing compared to that.
Other and more benign groups are being created as well: Pentecostal
sects, MoveOn.org, Hugo Chávez populists and whatever groups are invisibly
forming among left-behind peasants in India and China.
The chief driver of events right now is not only globalization — the
integration of economies and peoples. It’s also the contest among cultures over
the power of consecration — the power to define what is right and wrong. Rising
hegemons like Iran (and the U.S.) see themselves not only as nations but also as
moral movements.
Since 9/11, the U.S. has had little success in influencing distant
groups. Americans blew the postwar administration of Iraq because they assumed
they were liberating a nation sort of like their own. And yet I can’t seem to
renounce my own group, which is America. It would feel like cultural suicide to
repress the central truths of my society, that all human beings are endowed with
inalienable rights and democracy is the most just and effective form of
government.
The hard lesson of the last five years — that we live in a jagged
world filled with starkly different and contesting groups — makes democracy
promotion more difficult but more necessary. Only democratic habits will prevent
the inevitable clash of the tribes from turning into a war of nuclear
annihilation.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
Alberto Gonzales' sorry tenure in the Bush administration would seem to give
credence to Shakespeare's oft-cited incitement against the legal profession.
The primary responsibility of the attorney general is to uphold the Constitution
and laws of the United States in a fair and evenhanded manner. In failing to
comprehend this responsibility, Gonzales compromised himself, his office, the
Constitution and, ultimately, the president who appointed him.
The responsibility every attorney general owes the
nation is to raise hard legal and constitutional questions whenever a president
is tempted to overreach the limits of his authority. Gonzales, however, chose to
function more like President Bush's personal legal strategist, doing everything
in his power to justify Bush's apparent desire to authorize torture, deny
detainees access to the writ of habeas corpus, order unlawful electronic
surveillance and institute legal proceedings that defy due process of law.
There is no excuse, other than cronyism and personal weakness, for Gonzales'
confusion about his appropriate role and, in point of fact, he and future
officeholders could learn much from the extraordinarily disciplined and
principled actions of some of his predecessors who also served our nation in
perilous times.
After the outbreak of World War II, Atty. Gen. Robert Jackson warned the
nation's prosecutors that "times of fear or hysteria" have often resulted in
cries "for the scalps" of those with dissenting views. He exhorted his U.S.
attorneys to steel themselves to be "dispassionate and courageous" in dealing
with "so-called subversive activities."
After Franklin Roosevelt appointed Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was
succeeded as attorney general by Francis Biddle. On Dec. 15, 1941, Biddle
reminded the nation that in time of war, "hysteria and fear and hate" run high,
and "every man who cares about freedom must fight to protect it for other men"
as well as for himself. Even when Roosevelt pressured his attorney general to
prosecute those who criticized his policies, Biddle resisted. Later, when the
public began to call for the wholesale internment of individuals of Japanese
descent, Biddle furiously opposed such a policy as "ill-advised, unnecessary and
unnecessarily cruel."
In a face-to-face meeting with Roosevelt, Biddle told the president that such a
program could not be justified "as a military measure." Although Roosevelt
overrode Biddle's objections largely for political reasons, he later rightly
observed that the episode had shown "the power of suggestion which a mystic
cliche like 'military necessity' can exercise." He added sadly that the nation
had missed a unique opportunity to "assert the human decencies for which we were
fighting."
In 1971, the public began to learn that the FBI, the CIA, the National Security
Agency and the Army had engaged in a widespread program of investigation and
secret surveillance of Vietnam war protesters in an effort "to expose, disrupt
and otherwise neutralize" the anti-war movement. A congressional committee found
that the government, "operating primarily through secret informants," had
"undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political
beliefs," and that the FBI had "developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence
files" on public officials, journalists, entertainers, professors and ordinary
citizens.
In the face of such revelations, and in his role as attorney general, Edward
Levi created stringent guidelines that reiterated and reaffirmed the rights of
all Americans by clearly and carefully circumscribing the investigative
authority of the FBI. The "Levi guidelines" expressly prohibited the FBI from
investigating, discrediting or disrupting any group or individual on the basis
of protected 1st Amendment activity. These guidelines were rightly hailed as a
major advance in law enforcement and a critical step forward in protecting the
rights of Americans against overzealous and misguided government officials.
Gonzales helped eviscerate the Levi guidelines during the Bush presidency.
Of course, it is not all Gonzales' fault. In truth, he should never have had the
privilege of serving as attorney general. Jackson, Biddle and Levi were men of
great intellectual distinction, integrity and character. Gonzales is not. But
for his long-standing friendship with Bush, he would never have been, and should
never have been, within hailing distance of a position of such responsibility.
He was in over his head.
By failing to protect American values and individual liberties, Gonzales has not
just discredited himself, his office and his profession. He has also compromised
the Constitution.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
It is worth recalling that these words were uttered in "Henry VI" not by a
lawyer's disgruntled client, but by a conspirator in Cade's rebellion who was
plotting to overthrow the rights and liberties of the English people.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
It is men like Robert Jackson, Francis Biddle and Edward Levi who represent the
highest ideals of public service and the true spirit of the legal profession. It
is men like Alberto Gonzales who give the profession a bad name.
Geoffrey R. Stone is a professor of law at the University of Chicago.
Susan Faludi, a
relentless reporter, an unapologetic feminist and a brilliant scourge, begins
her CAT scan of our traumatized psyche with a demurral: “The Terror Dream,” she
says, is about only “one facet” of the American response to the hijacker
bombings of Sept. 11: the cover story and screenplay promptly confabulated by
our government ministers and news media heavies, a “security myth” and a
“national fantasy” starring John Wayne and Dirty Harry as the Last of the
Mohicans. But after escorting us briskly from witch hunts in Puritan New England
to regime change and Manifest Destiny on the Great Plains and lynching bees in
the Old South, from hostage-taking by Barbary pirates to sleeper cells in the
cold war all the way up to a patriarchal White House and a quagmired Iraq, she
concludes with a curse: “There are consequences to living in a dream.” We’ve
sleepwalked into hallucination, regression and psychosis.
As in her best-selling
“Backlash” (1991), which roughed up Robert Bly and Allan Bloom while debunking
news media myths about “the man shortage” and “the infertility epidemic,” as
well as her underappreciated “Stiffed” (1999), which construed the baffled
manhood of laid-off Navy shipyard workers and McDonnell Douglas engineers,
Citadel cadets and Charleston drag queens, porn stars and Promise Keepers, so in
“The Terror Dream” a skeptical Faludi reads everything, second-guesses
everybody, watches too much talking-head TV and emerges from the archives and
the pulp id like an exorcist and a Penthesilea. Sept. 11 may have been as
infamous a day as Pearl Harbor, but “the summons to actual sacrifice never
came,” she writes. “No draft ensued, no Rosie the Riveters were called to duty,
no ration cards issued, no victory gardens planted. ... What we had was a chest
beater in a borrowed flight suit, instructing us to max out our credit cards.”
What we also had, after a
hijacking of the meaning of the event by chicken hawks and theocons, were the
Culture Wars redux. On the one side, all of a sudden contemptible, were grief
counselors, sisterhood, “femocracy” and anything remotely “Oprahesque,” plus
“girlie boys,” “dot-com geeks,” “Alan Alda clones,” “metrosexuals” and what
Jerry Falwell called “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and
the gays and the lesbians,” as well as such uppity critics of American foreign
policy as Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt, Barbara Kingsolver and Naomi Klein, all
of whom were instructed to return immediately to their assigned seats. On the
other, triumphalist shore, making a Rocky/Rambo comeback, were traditional
gender roles and rescue fantasies, traditional medieval torture and the “alpha
male” and “manly man”: Duke in “The Searchers”; Rudy with his “command
presence”; “Rumstud,” the “babe magnet” secretary of defense; and New York
City’s firefighters, “Green Berets in red hats.”
How, Faludi wonders, did
smoking out Osama Bin Laden out in his Tora Bora tunnel somehow morph, on the
home front, into a “sexualized struggle between depleted masculinity and
overbearing womanhood”? Answering this question takes her from ground zero to
the Oval Office, the op-ed page, the Hollywood studio, network television, ’50s
sci-fi, “penny-dreadful” Davy Crockett westerns, the daydreams of James Fenimore
Cooper, the nightmares of Increase Mather, and the captivity narratives of brave
and resourceful pilgrim and pioneer women. Along the way she interviews Jessica
Lynch who was written up first as a heroine of the war in Iraq and then as a
victim, although she was neither. (A useful bookend here might have been the Pat
Tillman story, about a young man who quit pro football to volunteer in Iraq,
only to die from friendly fire that the Pentagon lied about.) She debunks such
wishful news media thinking as the post-9/11 rush to matrimony, “patriotic
pregnancy” and a baby boomlet that never happened (not to mention articles in
this newspaper, less factual than fanciful, about well-educated women opting out
of high-powered careers and deciding to be moms instead). She disinters the true
story of Cynthia Ann Parker, whose abduction at age 9 by Comanches in Texas in
1836 had to be improved upon by Alan Le May’s novel and John Ford’s film version
of “The Searchers,” since Cynthia Ann seems to have ended up preferring her
Comanche husband to her Anglo relatives. (In Le May’s novel Faludi finds the
original “terror dream” — “the fear of a small helpless child, abandoned and
alone in the night ... an awareness of something happening in some unknown
dimension not of the living world.” And she reminds us of indispensable history
books by Richard Slotkin (“Regeneration Through Violence”), John Demos (“The
Unredeemed Captive”) and Mary Beth Norton (“In the Devil’s Snare”).
What we gather from these
books and Faludi’s is that the script America reverted to in the fall of 2001
was the oldest in our literary imagination, our frontier fear that savages
(“dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants”) would seize our defenseless women
while our girlie men were watching Oprah Never mind that 9/11 had nothing to do
with gender politics. If we weren’t invincible, we must have been impotent.
Somehow, like Cynthia Ann’s kidnapping, “an assault on the urban workplace”
(global capitalism’s edifice complex) had to be rewritten as “a threat to the
domestic circle,” and so we willed ourselves “back onto a frontier where
pigtailed damsels clutched rag dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return
them to the home.” Think of the entire nation as a distressed damsel. Think of
Homeland Security as Wyatt Earp. Think of hate radio and Fox News as Sergio
Leone. Think of geopolitics as a video game. Think of “Death Wish,” “High Noon,”
original sin, alien abduction, demonic possession, zombies, vampires, satanic
day-care child molesters and job-stealing immigrant hordes.
There are other ways to
look at 9/11, as anything from Armageddon to coup d’état. And other ways to
account for an America so fearful that we feed the Bill of Rights to our Biggest
Brother. Freud, Marx and Veblen are periscopes and magnifying glasses for oral
fixation, overproduction and forced consumption. Through the green eyes of
ecothink, nuclear winter and silent spring season the dread. Joseph Schumpeter’s
“creative destruction” also comes to skittish mind. We are, besides, insecure
and negligent in our parenthood and our citizenship, caught between a public
sphere (bear garden, hippodrome, killing field) that feels hollow and a private
sphere (sanctuary, holding cell) that feels besieged. We are no longer safe on
the tribal streets, equally weightless in orbit or in cyberspace, tiddlywinks on
the credit grid, lost and yet still stalked, void where prohibited. To the usual
millennial heebie-jeebies, add a subprime mortgage mess and collateralized debt
obligations up the Limpopo without a paddle.
But feminism is Faludi’s
compass and her lens, her furnace and her fuel. Feminism — fierce, supple,
focused, filigreed and chivalrous — has steered her inquiries and sensitized her
apprehensions of a celebrity/media culture and national security state that
honors men more as warriors, actors, cowboys, athletes and killers than for
skilled labor, company loyalty, civic duty, steadfast fatherhood, homesteading,
caretaking and community-building, and that tells women to lie down and shut up.
Feminism, like a trampoline, has made possible this splendid provocation of a
book, levitating to keep company with Hunter Thompson’s fear and loathing,
Leslie Fielder’s love and death and Edmund Wilson’s patriotic gore.
John Leonard, who
reviews books for Harper’s Magazine and television for New York magazine, is
writing a memoir.
Cambridge in autumn. The pathways of
Harvard Yard are strewn with acorns. Sunlight plays on ivy-covered brick. Inside
Emerson Hall, Helen Vendler takes the podium of her popular undergraduate
lecture class, “Poets, Poems, Poetry.” A few late arrivals straggle in, seeking
a rare empty seat. Armed with just a clip-on microphone and an extraordinary
command of the lyric tradition, Vendler quickly runs through “The Grasshopper”
by E. E. Cummings before alighting on the main topic of the day: Keats’s “To
Autumn,” which she introduces simply as “one of the best poems in the English
language."
“Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness,” she reads aloud, her soft, Boston-tinged voice slightly breathy
and filled with emotion. “Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring
with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves
run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with
ripeness to the core.” Over the next hour, Vendler dissects the ode line by
line, explaining how it moves outward from kernels and cores through an ever
wider “sphere of expanding knowledge,” until “small gnats mourn,” “full-grown
lambs bleat,” “hedge-crickets sing,” “the redbreast whistles,” and, in the
poem’s final line, “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” In her reading,
Keats’s autumn, melancholy yet hopeful, has its own muted pleasures and sounds.
“You wouldn’t have noticed the music of autumn if the nightingale were still
singing,” she tells the class.
Vendler, who is 73,
has been teaching since the early ’60s — for the last quarter-century at
Harvard, where she is the A. Kingsley Porter university professor — but the
lecture hall is not her only sphere of influence. She is also the leading
poetry critic in America, the author of major books on Wallace Stevens,
Keats and Shakespeare, and for a generation has been a powerful arbiter of
the contemporary poetry scene. Her authoritative judgments have helped
establish or secure the reputations of Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney and Rita
Dove, among many others. Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school
of one, an impassioned aesthete who pays minute attention to the structures
and words that are a poet’s genetic code. “She is a remarkably agile and
gifted close reader,” the literary scholar Harold Bloom said. “I think there
isn’t anyone in the country who can read syntax in poems as well as she
can.”
For Vendler, syntax is
not a mere technical matter but the order of a poet’s universe, a kind of
secular scripture. Her office — as scholar, critic and teacher — is to serve
Poetry, which she does, with the precision of a chemist and the devotion of
a religious acolyte. Both qualities were in evidence this spring, when
Vendler fiercely criticized a new collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s
uncollected poetry,
“Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,”
assembled by Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, who herself
wields enormous clout in poetry circles. Even as other critics — including
David Orr, in these pages — welcomed the book as an important addition to
the Bishop oeuvre, Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said the volume
“should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’ For Elizabeth Bishop had years
to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to.” It would have been
far better, in Vendler’s view, for Quinn to have published the drafts that
went into Bishop’s published, polished “real poems” rather than “their
maimed and stunted siblings,” adding: “I am told that poets now, fearing an
Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts.”
In October, Vendler
elaborated on the controversy in an interview in her cozy, book-filled
office at Harvard, not mincing words as she accused Quinn both of
undermining Bishop’s legacy and of betraying something sacred, the poet’s
personal trust.
“I would rather have
had the drafts of the finished poems well before you got the rejected stuff
from the trash can,” Vendler said, sitting on a chair facing the window and
a life mask of Keats. “If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts”
— as Kafka and (by legend) Virgil did — “they should,” Vendler insisted. “I
think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have
been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art,” she said
in her quiet, direct manner. “If I had asked somebody to promise to destroy
something of mine and they didn’t do it I would feel it to be a grave
personal betrayal. I wouldn’t care what I had left behind. It could have
been the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ”
That assertion seems
peculiar — even shocking — coming from one who has devoted her life to the
study of literature. But it reflects the intense and sometimes lonely fervor
Vendler brings to her vocation.
She can be harsh about
those she sees as subordinating literature to an ideological agenda. In a
review of David Denby’s “Great Books” (1996), the film critic’s account of
how he returned to college, immersing himself in Columbia’s core curriculum,
Vendler wrote, “Seeing the Columbia course use Dante and Conrad as moral
examples is rather like seeing someone use a piece of embroidery for a
dishrag with no acknowledgment of the difference between hand-woven silk and
a kitchen towel.” In 2001, again in The New Republic, her main venue in
recent years, Vendler took the critic James Fenton to task for his
interpretation of Robert Frost’s 1942 poem “The Gift Outright,” a version of
which was recited by the aging poet at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961.
Fenton, in her view, had imposed a mistaken interpretation on a poem as much
“about marriage as about colonials becoming Americans,” because “his
politics has wrenched him into misreading it.” (Some argued Vendler herself
was misreading the poem by choosing to ignore its subject matter.)
Vendler once wrote
that the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery and James Merrill embraced “the
thankless cultural task of defining how an adult American mind not committed
to any single ideological agenda might exist in a self-respecting and
veracious way in the later 20th century.” That could also apply to her.
Vendler was born Helen
Hennessy in Boston in 1933. Although she was encouraged to read poetry — her
mother, a former schoolteacher, had memorized many poems, and her father
taught Romance languages at a high school — her parents forbade her to
attend the prestigious Boston Latin School for Girls, and later Radcliffe,
because, like many devout Roman Catholics at the time, they accepted the
church’s strong disapproval of secular education. Instead she enrolled in
Boston’s all-female Emmanuel College, hoping to study literature, but
“literature, I discovered with disgust, was taught as a branch of faith and
morals,” she recalled in a 2001 lecture. That experience “inoculated me
forever against adopting any ism as a single lens through which to interpret
literature.”
Vendler switched to
the sciences, and after graduation was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to
study mathematics in Belgium. “I loved math and I loved organic chemistry
because they have structures and I love structures,” she said. But on the
stormy trans-Atlantic voyage, Vendler had a reckoning with herself. “And I
decided, now that I was free, I would do English, because that’s what I had
always wanted to do.” With the Fulbright commission’s blessing, she switched
to literature.
Back in the States,
Vendler enrolled in 12 English courses in a single year at
Boston University so as to qualify
for graduate school at Harvard. In her first week there in 1956, the
chairman of the English department told her, “We don’t want any women here.”
(Years later, he apologized.) Another professor, the renowned Americanist
Perry Miller, considered Vendler his finest student and published one of her
course papers, but denied her admission to his Melville seminar. “The men
come over in my house and they sit around and drink and we talk. I wouldn’t
talk like I wanted to if there was a woman there,” she recalled him
explaining.
Still, she had
supporters, and influences. One was I. A. Richards, a leading figure in the
New Criticism, which emphasized close reading of texts over an author’s
biography or historical situation. Vendler found his Harvard course
electrifying. “Richards would take a single word in a poem and talk about
its origins in Plato and its vicissitudes through Shakespeare and its
reappearance in Shelley,” she recalled. “You would feel each word heavy with
the weight of its associations.” Vendler adopted this method and dedicated
her second book, “On Extended Wings,” a study of Wallace Stevens, to
Richards.
In 1959, Vendler
became the first woman to be offered an instructorship in Harvard’s English
department. But she turned it down to follow her husband, Zeno Vendler, a
philosopher and linguist, to
Cornell. Several years later,
divorced and raising their son alone, she taught at Smith for two years
before taking a job at B.U., where she remained for two decades, for some of
that time a single mother teaching a punishing 10 courses a year. “The only
way I could make my life easier was to give up writing,” she wrote many
years later. “But I knew that to stop writing would be a form of
self-murder.” She kept writing books and reviews, but late at night, after
her son had gone to sleep. “I envied my male colleagues who, in those days,
seemed to have everything done for them by their spouses.” (Her son, David,
is now a lawyer in California.)
In 1981, with several
major books behind her, Vendler at last joined the English department at
Harvard — but kept a part-time affiliation with B.U. for four years until
she was convinced that Harvard took her seriously. “I didn’t want to be some
little token person,” she said. By this time she already wielded
considerable power outside the academy. Her first review — “my work of the
left hand,” as she has called it — was a roundup of contemporary poetry
published in the mid-’60s in the Massachusetts Review. That led to
assignments from The New York Times Book Review, a venue whose prominence
she initially found jarring. “Who was I to occupy people’s Sunday morning
attention?” Vendler wrote in a 1994 essay, a complicated nod to Stevens’s
famous poem “Sunday Morning,” about spiritual longing in a world without
religious faith. Beyond the extra income, Vendler found she liked writing
for a general audience — and excelled at it. “She’s the best since Randall
Jarrell, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” the critic John
Leonard said in a recent interview.
In the early ’70s, as editor of
the Book Review, Leonard was having trouble navigating the insular world of
poetry. Poets “would never tell you if you’d asked them to review their best
friend or worst enemy or ex-lover,” Leonard recalled. “There was always some
agenda, and I could never figure out what it was.” So he hired Vendler to
vet the flood of poetry books, reviewing some herself and suggesting
reviewers for others. All this was done quietly. “We just couldn’t tell
anyone,” Leonard said. “It would put her under enormous pressure.”
But in 1975, when
Harvey Shapiro, himself a poet, succeeded Leonard as editor of the Book
Review, he immediately ended the arrangement. Vendler had become “kind of an
anonymous power,” he said in an interview. “It didn’t seem to me a healthy
arrangement.” Vendler, who says her role at the Book Review “was never a
secret,” thinks the source of dismay was her quarterly poetry roundups. They
“annoyed a lot of people,” she said, especially poets whose work she hadn’t
included. She recalled Shapiro wanting her “to review books by women and to
sequester me in the women niche.” “In truth, I have no memory of this,”
Shapiro said. “If what she said is true, I owe her an apology.”
Beginning in the
mid-’70s, Vendler contributed regularly to The New York Review of Books and
The New Yorker, where in 1978 she became poetry critic at the request of its
editor, William Shawn. As a critic, she has favored the idiosyncratic. In
1982, she criticized the “ventriloquism” of a future
Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, whom
she found “peculiarly at the mercy of influence.” In a joint review in The
New Yorker in 1996, she lauded August Kleinzahler for “his irreverent joy in
the American demotic,” and criticized Mark Doty for his “inert” rhythms and
“plaintive didacticism.”
Although influential,
Vendler’s judgments of contemporary poets are not uncontested. Some have
questioned her championing of Jorie Graham, in whose work Vendler sees
intricacies and trilingual rhythms (Graham was raised speaking English,
French and Italian) where others see opacity. And some have found Vendler’s
tastes too mainstream, though she has always been unpredictable. She was,
for instance, an admirer of
Allen Ginsberg when his literary
status was still uncertain. “The monumental quality of ‘Kaddish’ makes it
one of those poems that, as Wallace Stevens said, take the place of a
mountain,” she has written. The poets she admires share “nothing except
intelligence and originality,” said Stephen Burt, a poetry critic and
professor at Macalester College who studied with Vendler at Harvard in the
early ’90s.
For so prominent a
professor, Vendler is known for being extremely supportive; she supervises
many dissertations and serves as mentor to numerous students. “Maybe in the
end her major achievement will be as a teacher, both in terms of her pupils,
and the books she’s written about canonical figures, teaching people how to
read them,” said the critic and poet Adam Kirsch, who studied with Vendler
as an undergraduate in the mid-’90s. The critic James Wood, who also teaches
at Harvard, recalled once complaining about the demands of parenthood to
Vendler, who told him it would make him a better reader. “There are very few
academics who would ever say something like that, who would ever bother
connecting what they do academically with the arrival of the child,” Wood
said. (Vendler herself has noted the lack of great poetry about motherhood,
though Sylvia Plath, she said, “made a beginning.”)
Today Vendler seldom
reviews poets under 50, since their “frames of reference,” she says, are
alien to her. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when
they were growing up. And that’s fine. It’s as good a resource of imagery as
orchards. Only I’ve seen orchards and I didn’t watch these cartoons,” she
said. “So I don’t feel I’m the best reader for most of the young ones.”
These days Vendler is
more focused on late style. In April, she will deliver the prestigious
Mellon Lectures at the
National Gallery of Art in
Washington. Her topic will be the final books of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia
Plath,
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and
James Merrill, and how each wrestled with what Yeats called “death-in-life
and life-in-death”: writing about life facing impending death, and writing
about death while still immersed in the world. “It used to be easier to deal
with when you had heaven to believe in, when there was another place to go
at the end of your poem,” Vendler said, as the late afternoon sun came
through her office window. Death without heaven “produces more stylistic
problems.” Vendler has recently finished the book on Yeats’s poems that she
first wanted to write as a dissertation, but abandoned, she said, because at
23, “I didn’t have the life experience to penetrate them or resonate with
them.” Life and life’s work, seamlessly intertwined.
It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of
willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out
to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with
considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a
star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every
reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome
it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the
lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal
Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation
Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship
to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent,
introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock
who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this
guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three
semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.
"He was in with the freshman football players, whose major activity was
playing cards and horsing around and talking a lot," his freshman roommate
told the Yale Daily News, not exactly addressing the enigma. "Wasn't gonna
go to college and buckle down" and "I didn't like the East" are two versions
of how Cheney himself failed to address it. As an undergraduate at the
University of Wyoming he interned with the Wyoming State Senate, which was,
in a state dominated by cattle ranchers and oil producers and Union Pacific
management, heavily Republican. This internship appears to have been when
Cheney began identifying himself as a Republican. ("You can't take my vote
for granted," his father would advise him when he first ran for Congress as
a Republican.) He graduated from Wyoming in 1965 and, in the custom of the
Vietnam years, went on to receive a master's degree. He never wrote a
dissertation ("did all the work for my doctorate except the dissertation,"
as if the dissertation were not the point) and so never got the doctorate in
political science for which he then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin.
Still, he persevered, or Lynne Cheney did. When, in 1968, at age
twenty-seven, a no-longer-draft-eligible "academic" with a wife and a child
and no Ph.D. and no clear clamor for his presence, he left Wisconsin for
Washington, he managed to meet the already powerful Donald Rumsfeld about a
fellowship in his House office. Cheney, by his own description and again
failing to address the enigma, "flunked the interview." He retreated back to
the only place at the table, the office of a freshman Republican Wisconsin
congressman, Bill Steiger, for whom Cheney was said to be not a first choice
and whose enthusiasm for increased environmental and workplace protections
did not immediately suggest the Cheney who during his own ten years in
Wyoming's single congressional seat would vote with metronomic regularity
against any legislation tending in either direction.
The potential rewards of Washington appear to have mobilized Cheney as
those of New Haven and Madison had not. Within the year, he was utilizing
Steiger to make another move on Rumsfeld, who had been asked by Richard M.
Nixon to join his new administration as director of the Office of Economic
Opportunity. Cheney, James Mann wrote in Rise of the Vulcans, noticed a note
on Steiger's desk from Rumsfeld, looking for advice and help in his new OEO
job. Cheney spotted an opportunity. Over a weekend, he wrote an unsolicited
memo for Steiger on how to staff and run a federal agency.
Rumsfeld hired Cheney, and, over the next few years, as he moved up in
the Nixon administration, took Cheney with him. Again, in 1974, after the
Nixon resignation, when Rumsfeld was asked to become Gerald Ford's chief of
staff, he made Cheney his deputy.
In Cheney, Rumsfeld had found a right hand who took so little for granted
that he would later, by the account of his daughter Mary, make a three-hour
drive from Casper to Laramie to have coffee with three voters, two of whom
had been in his wedding. In Rumsfeld, who would be described by Henry
Kissinger as "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time
politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse
seamlessly," Cheney had found a model. In the Ford White House, where he and
Rumsfeld were known as "the little Praetorians," Cheney cultivated a control
of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of
"little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" rather than "regular salt
shakers."
Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld contrived to marginalize Nelson Rockefeller
as vice-president and edge him off the 1976 ticket. They convinced Ford that
Kissinger was a political liability who should no longer serve as both
secretary of state and national security adviser. They managed the
replacement of William Colby as CIA chief with George H.W. Bush, a move
interpreted by many as a way of rendering Bush unavailable to be Ford's
running mate in 1976. They managed the replacement of James Schlesinger as
secretary of defense with Rumsfeld himself. Cheney later described his role
in such maneuvers as "the sand in the gears," the person who, for example,
made sure that when Rockefeller was giving a speech the amplifier was turned
down. In 1975, when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, it was Cheney,
then thirty-four, who replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff.
Relationships matter in public life, until they do not. In May, during a
commencement address at Louisiana State University, Cheney mentioned this
long relationship with Rumsfeld by way of delivering the message that
"gratitude, in general, is a good habit to get into":
I think, for example, of the first time I met my friend and colleague Don
Rumsfeld. It was back in the 1960s, when he was a congressman and I was
interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill. Congressman Rumsfeld agreed
to talk to me, but things didn't go all that well.... We didn't click that
day, but a few years later it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work and
offered me a position in the executive branch. Note the modest elision ("it
was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work") of the speaker's own active role in
these events. What Cheney wanted to stress that morning in Baton Rouge was
not his own dogged tracking of the more glamorous Rumsfeld but the paths one
had possibly "not expected to take," the "unexpected turns," the
"opportunities that come suddenly and change one's plans overnight." The
exact intention of these commencement remarks may be unknowable (a
demonstration of loyalty? a warning? to whom? a marker to be called in
later? all of the above?), but it did not seem accidental that they were
delivered during a period when one four-star general, one three-star
general, and four two-star generals were each issuing calls for Donald
Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary of defense. Nor did it seem accidental
that the President and the Vice President were taking equally stubborn and
equally inexplicable lines on the matter of Rumsfeld's and by extension
their own grasp on the war in Iraq. "I hear the voices and I read the front
page and I know the speculation," George W. Bush said in response to a
reporter's question during a Rose Garden event. "But I'm the decider and I
decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the
secretary of defense."
The question of where the President gets the notions known to the nation
as "I'm the decider" and within the White House as "the unitary executive
theory" leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the Vice President
and his office. It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on
the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition
legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the
Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the
National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation
of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of
not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting
them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses
of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief
authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their
behalf.
"Bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressive defending the
nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," the Vice President
advised reporters on a flight to Oman last December. It was the Vice
President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation
banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It
was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that
supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva
Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director
of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for
torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this
characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our
government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal
enemy that has declared war upon us."
Addington, who emerged into government from Georgetown University and
Duke Law School in 1981, the most febrile moment of the Reagan Revolution,
is an instructive study in the focus Cheney favors in the protection of
territory. As secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, Cheney made
Addington his special assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As
vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned to Addington, and
named him, after the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection
with the exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, his
chief of staff. "You're giving away executive power," Addington has been
reported to snap at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a
photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He vets every line of the
federal budget to eradicate any wording that might restrain the President.
He also authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued to free the
President of whatever restrictive intent might have been present in
whichever piece of legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing
statement, as written by Addington, will refer repeatedly to the
"constitutional authority" of "the unitary executive branch," and will often
mention multiple points in a single bill that the President declines to
enforce.
Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office,
the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer
than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight
hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administra-tion.
Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power
are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying
the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more
ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."
One aspect common to accounts of White House life is the way in which
negative events tend to be interpreted as internal staffing failures, errors
on the order of the little dishes of salt with the funny little spoons.
Cheney did not take the lesson he might have taken from being in the White
House at the time Saigon fell, which was that an administration can be
overtaken by events that defeat the ameliorative power of adroit detail
management. He took a more narrow lesson, the one that had to do with the
inability of a White House to pursue victory if Congress "tied its hands."
"It's interesting that [Cheney] became a member of Congress," former
congressman Tom Downey said to Todd Purdum, "because I think he always
thought we were a massive inconvenience to governing." Bruce Fein, who
served in the Meese Justice Department during the Reagan administration,
told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that Cheney's absence of enthusiasm for
checks and balances long predated any argument that this was a "wartime
presidency" and so had special powers.
This preceded 9/11. I'm not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But
the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney
and Addington's political agenda. "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the
powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,"
the Vice President said after one year in office. "We are weaker today as an
institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the
last thirty to thirty-five years." "Watergate—a lot of the things around
Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the '70s, served to erode the authority, I
think, the President needs to be effective," he said to reporters
accompanying him on that December 2005 flight to Oman. Expanding on this
understanding of the separation of powers as a historical misunderstanding,
the Vice President offered this:
If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views
that were filed with the Iran-Contra Committee; the Iran-Contra Report in
about 1987. Nobody has ever read them, but we —part of the argument in
Iran-Contra was whether or not the President had the authority to do what
was done in the Reagan years. And those of us in the minority wrote minority
views, but they were actually authored by a guy working for me, for my
staff, that I think are very good in laying out a robust view of the
President's prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign
policy and national security matters. There are some recognizable Cheney
touches here, resorts to the kind of self-deprecation (as in "I didn't like
the East" and "I flunked the interview") that derives from a temperamental
grandiosity. The "obscure text" that "nobody has ever read" was the
two-hundred-page minority report included in the 1987 Report of the
Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, a volume
printed and widely distributed by the US Government Printing Office. The
unidentified "guy working for me" was Addington, at the time of the
Iran-contra hearings a counsel to the committees but during the events that
led to Iran-contra an assistant general counsel at William Casey's CIA,
where he would have been focused early on locating the legal enablement for
what Theodore Draper, in his study of Iran-contra, A Very Thin Line, called
the "usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group within the
government."
This minority report, which vehemently rejects not only the conclusions
of the majority but even the report's ("supposedly 'factual'") narrative,
does allow that "President Reagan and his staff made mistakes" during the
course of Iran-contra. Yet the broadest mistake, the demented "arms for
hostages" part of the scheme, the part where we deal the HAWK missiles to
Iran through Manucher Ghorbanifar and Robert McFarlane flies to Tehran with
the cake and the Bible and the falsified Irish passports, is strenuously
defended as a "strategic opening," an attempt to "establish a new US
relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture
throughout the Persian Gulf region."
We had heard before, and have heard recently, about "strategic openings,"
"new relationships" that will reorder the Middle East. "Extremists in the
region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad," Cheney told the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 about the benefits that were to
accrue from invading Iraq. "Moderates throughout the region would take
heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in
1991." We had heard before, and have heard recently, that what might appear
to be an administration run amok is actually an administration holding fast
on constitutional principle.
Watergate, Cheney has long maintained, was not a criminal conspiracy but
the result of a power struggle between the legislative and executive
branches. So was the 1973 War Powers Act, which restricted executive
authority to go to war without consulting Congress and which Cheney believed
unconstitutional. So was the attempt to get Cheney to say which energy
executives attended the 2001 meetings of his energy task force. This issue,
both Cheney and Bush explained again and again, had nothing to do with Enron
or the other energy players who might be expecting a seat at the table in
return for their generous funding (just under $50 million) of the 2000
Republican campaign. "The issue that was involved there," Cheney said,
misrepresenting what had been requested, which was not the content of the
conversations but merely the names of those present, "was simply the
question of whether or not a Vice President can sit down and talk with
citizens and gain from them their best advice and counsel on how we might
deal with a particular issue."
The 1987 minority report prefigures much else that has happened since.
There is the acknowledgment of "mistakes" that turn out to be not exactly
the mistakes we might have expected. The "mistake" in this administration's
planning for the Iraq war, for example, derived not from having failed to do
any planning but from arriving "too fast" in Baghdad, thereby losing the
time, this scenario seemed to suggest, during which we had meant to think up
a plan. Similarly, the "mistakes" in Iran-contra, as construed by the
minority report, had followed not from having done the illegal but from
having allowed the illegal to become illegal in the first place. As laid out
by the minority, a principal "mistake" made by the Reagan administration in
Iran-contra was in allowing President Reagan to sign rather than veto the
1984 Boland II Amendment forbidding aid to contra forces: no Boland II, no
illegality. A second "mistake," to the same point, was Reagan's
"less-than-robust defense of his office's constitutional powers, a mistake
he repeated when he acceded too readily and too completely to waive
executive privilege for our Committees' investigation."
The very survival of the executive species, then, was seen by Cheney and
his people as dependent on its brute ability to claim absolute power and
resist all attempts to share it. Given this imperative, the steps to our
current situation had a leaden inevitability: if the executive branch needed
a war to justify its claim to absolute power, then Iraq, Rumsfeld would be
remembered to have said on September 12, 2001, had the targets. If the
executive branch needed a story point to sell its war, then the Vice
President would resurrect the aluminum tubes that not even the US Department
of Energy believed to be meant for a centrifuge: "It's now public that, in
fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire...the kinds of tubes that are
necessary to build a centrifuge." The Vice President would dismiss Joseph
Wilson's report that he had found no yellowcake in Niger: "Did his wife send
him on a junket?"
As for the weapons themselves, the Vice President would deride the
collective judgment of his own intelligence community, which believed,
according to Paul R. Pillar, then the CIA national intelligence officer for
the Near East and South Asia, that any development of a nuclear weapon was
several years away and would be best dealt with—given that the community's
own analysis of the war option projected violent conflict between Sunnis and
Shiites and guerrilla attacks on any occupying power—"through an aggressive
inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place."
"Intelligence," the Vice President would say dismissively in an August 2002
speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "is an uncertain business." The Vice
President would override as irrelevant the facts that Hans Blix and his UN
monitoring team were prepared to resume such inspections and in fact did
resume them, conducting seven hundred inspections of five hundred sites,
finding nothing but stopping only when the war intervened. "Simply stated,
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,"
he would declare in the same speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just
get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over.... A
return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's]
compliance with UN resolutions.
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice
President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech
intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi
intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go
to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence
service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he
would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one
of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi
intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have
reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence
officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would
say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he
would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign.
"I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate. This was dishonest,
a repeated misrepresentation, in the interests of claiming power, so bald
and so systematic that the only instinctive response (Did too!) was that of
the schoolyard. By June 2004, before the debate with Edwards, Cheney had in
fact begun edging away from the Prague story, not exactly disclaiming it but
characterizing it as still unproven, as in, on a Cincinnati TV station,
"That's true. We do not have proof that there was such a connection." It
would be two years later, March 2006, before he found it prudent to issue a
less equivocal, although still shifty, version. "We had one report early on
from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker,
Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague,
Czechoslovakia," he told Tony Snow on Fox News. "And that reporting waxed
and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been
pretty well knocked down at this stage, that that meeting ever took place.
So we've never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow [Saddam
Hussein] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been
forthcoming."
What the Vice President was doing with the intelligence he received has
since been characterized as "cherry-picking," a phrase suggesting that he
selectively used only the more useful of equally valid pieces of
intelligence. This fails to reflect the situation. The White House had been
told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi
intelligence had ever occurred. The International Atomic Energy Agency and
the US Department of Energy had said that the aluminum tubes in question
"were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment. The White House had
been told by the CIA that the British report about Saddam Hussein attempting
to buy yellowcake in Nigeria was doubtful.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the President nonetheless
declared in his 2003 State of the Union address, the "sixteen enormously
overblown words" for which Condoleezza Rice would blame the CIA and for
which George Tenet, outplayed, would take the hit. Nor would the President
stop there: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to
purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons
production."
What the Vice President was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the
intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested
rumor better advanced his narrative line. "Cheney's office claimed to have
sources," Ron Suskind was told by those to whom he spoke for The One Percent
Doctrine.
And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them [at the CIA]. The same
information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been
discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would
reappear, again, in a memo the next week. The Vice President would not then
or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest
on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute
in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members
of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless,"
"dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly
false." "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of
evidence," he is reported by Suskind to have said in the November 2001
briefing during which he articulated the doctrine that if there was "a one
percent chance" of truth in any suspicion or allegation, it must be
considered true. "It's about our response."
To what end the story was being cooked was hard to know. The Vice
President is frequently described as "ideological," or "strongly
conservative," but little in his history suggests the intellectual
commitment implicit in either. He made common cause through the run-up to
Iraq with the neoconservative ideologues who had burrowed into think tanks
during the Clinton years and resurfaced in 2001 in the departments of State
and Defense and the White House itself, but the alliance appeared even then
to be more strategic than felt. The fact that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard
Perle and Elliott Abrams shared with Cheney a wish to go to war in Iraq
could create, in its confluence with September 11, what many came to call a
perfect storm—as if it had blown up out of the blue beyond reach of human
intervention—but the perfect storm did not make Cheney a neocon.
He identifies himself as a conservative, both political and cultural. He
presents himself as can-do, rock-solid even if he is forced to live in
Washington (you know he only does it on our behalf), one politician who can
be trusted not to stray far from whatever unexamined views were current in
the intermountain West during the 1950s and 1960s. He has described a 1969
return visit to the University of Wisconsin, during which he took Bill
Steiger and George H.W. Bush to an SDS rally, as having triggered his
disgust with the Vietnam protest movement. "We were the only guys in the
hall wearing suits that night," he told Nicholas Lemann. As a congressman he
cast votes that reflected the interests of an energy-driven state that has
voted Republican in every presidential election but one since 1952. His
votes in the House during 1988, the last year he served there, gave him an
American Conservative Union rating of 100.
Yet his move to push Nelson Rockefeller off Gerald Ford's 1976 ticket had
seemed based less on philosophical differences than on a perception of
Rockefeller as in the way, in the lights, a star, like Kissinger, who
threatened the power Cheney and Rumsfeld wielded in the Ford White House. In
1976, unlike most who called themselves conservatives, Cheney remained
untempted by Reagan and clung to Ford, his best ticket to ride. Nor did he
initially back Reagan in 1980. Nor, when it has not been in his interest to
do so, has he since taken consistent positions on what would seem to be his
own most hardened policies.
"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose
between 'commercial' interests and other interests that the United States
might have in a particular country or region around the world," he said at
the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period he was CEO of Halliburton,
after he had pursued one war against Iraq and before he would pursue the
second. He was arguing against the imposition by the United States of
unilateral economic sanctions on such countries as Libya and Iran, two
countries, although he did not mention this, in which Halliburton
subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he mention, when he said in
the same speech that he thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the
case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a Halliburton
subsidiary would by the year's end be doing business.
The notion that he takes a consistent view of America's role in the world
nonetheless remains general. The model on which he has preferred to operate
is the cold war, or, to use the words in which he and the President have
repeatedly described the central enterprise of their own administration, the
"different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved
overnight." He has mentioned H. Bradford Westerfield, a political scientist
at Yale and at the time Cheney took his introductory course a self-described
hawk, as someone who influenced his thinking, but Westerfield later told the
Nation correspondent John Nichols that his own hard line had softened by
late 1967 or early 1968, when he came to see that Vietnam "really was
unwinnable" and "the hawkish view was unrealistic."
Cheney, by then positioning himself in Washington, never drew those
conclusions, nor, when he saw Westerfield in the 1990s at a memorial service
for Les Aspin, did he seem to Westerfield interested in discussing them. "He
seems to be determined to go his own way, no matter what facts he is
confronted with," Westerfield told Nichols. "As a veteran of the political
wars," Henry Kissinger later wrote about the years when Saigon was falling
and Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney were running the Ford White House,
Rumsfeld understood far better than I that Watergate and Vietnam were
likely to evoke a conservative backlash and that what looked like a liberal
tide after the election of the McGovernite Congress in fact marked the
radical apogee. Rumsfeld and Cheney, in other words, had transcended what
others might present as facts. They could feel the current. They knew how to
catch the wave and ride it.
Cheney leaves no paper trail. He has not always felt the necessity to
discuss what he plans to say in public with the usual offices, including
that of the President. Nor, we learned from Ron Suskind, has he always felt
the necessity, say if the Saudis send information to the President in
preparation for a meeting, to bother sending that information on to Bush.
Only on the evening of September 11, 2001, did it occur to Richard A. Clarke
that in his role as national security coordinator he had briefed Cheney on
terrorism and also Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, but never the
President. Since November 1, 2001, under this administration's Executive
Order 13233, which limits access to all presidential and vice-presidential
papers, Cheney has been the first vice-president in American history
entitled to executive privilege, a claim to co-presidency reinforced in
March 2003 by Executive Order 13292, giving him the same power to classify
information as the president has.
He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that it routinely refuses
to disclose who works there, even for updates to the Federal Directory,
which lists names and contact addresses for government officials. "We just
don't give out that kind of information," an aide told one reporter. "It's
just not something we talk about." When he visits his house in Jackson Hole
and the local paper spots his plane and the anti-missile battery that
accompanies him, the office until recently refused to confirm his presence:
"In the past, they've been kind of weird," the paper's co-editor told The
Washington Post in August. "They'd say, 'His airplane's here and the missile
base is here, but we can't tell you if he's here.'"
His every instinct is to withhold information, hide, let surrogates speak
for him, as he did after the quail-shooting accident on the Armstrong ranch.
His own official spoken remarks so defy syntactical analysis as to suggest
that his only intention in speaking is to further obscure what he thinks.
Possibly the most well-remembered statement he ever made (after "Big-time")
was that he did not serve in the Vietnam War because he had "other
priorities." Bob Woodward, in Plan of Attack, describes an exchange that
took place between Cheney and Colin Powell in September 2002, when Cheney
was determined that the US not ask the UN for the resolution against Iraq
that the Security Council, after much effort by Powell, passed in November:
Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of unilateral action....
He added a new dimension, saying that the international reaction would be so
negative that he would have to close American embassies around the world if
we went to war alone.
That is not the issue, Cheney said. Saddam and the clear threat is the
issue.
Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president thinks, Powell said.
War could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences....
Not the issue, Cheney said.
In other words the Vice President had by then passed that point at which
going to war was "not about our analysis." He had passed that point at which
going to war was not about "finding a preponderance of evidence." At the
point he had reached by September 2002, going to war was not even about the
consequences. Not the issue, he had said. The personality that springs to
mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one
sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his
feet. There was in a June letter from Senator Arlen Specter to Cheney, made
public by Specter, an image that eerily conveyed just that: "I was
surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine,
the action of the Committee without calling me first, or at least calling me
at some point," Specter wrote, referring to actions Cheney had taken to
block his Judiciary Committee from conducting a hearing on NSA surveillance.
"This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican
Senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at
least two occasions enroute from the buffet to my table."
There was a reason, beyond the thrill of their sheer arrogance, why the
words "other priorities" stuck in the national memory. They were first
uttered not in but outside the room in which Cheney's 1989 confirmation
hearings were held, to a Washington Post reporter who asked why the
candidate for secretary of defense had sought the five (four student and one
"hardship") deferments that had prevented him from serving in Vietnam. This
is what the candidate said:
I had other priorities in the '60s than military service. I don't regret
the decisions I made. I complied fully with all the requirements of the
statutes, registered with the draft when I turned 18. Had I been drafted, I
would have been happy to serve. I think those who did in fact serve deserve
to be honored for their service.... Was it a noble cause? Yes, indeed, I
think it was.
The words stuck because they resonated, and still do. They resonated the
same way the words "fixed himself a cocktail back at the house" resonated
when Katharine Armstrong, Cheney's hostess and fill-in (in the vacuum of his
silence) apologist, used them to explain what he had done after the
quail-hunting accident in lieu of either going to the hospital with Harry
Whittington or explaining to the sheriff's office how he had just shot him.
"Fixed himself a cocktail back at the house" suggested the indifference to
assuming responsibility for his own mistakes that had become so noticeable
in his public career. "Ultimately, I am the guy who pulled the trigger and
fired the round that hit Harry," he managed, four days later, to say to Fox
News in a memorable performance of a man accepting responsibility but not
quite. "You can talk about all the other conditions that existed at the
time, but that's the bottom line. It's not Harry's fault. You can't blame
anybody else."
Like "it's not Harry's fault," which implied that you or I or any other
fair observer (for example Katharine Armstrong, characterized by Cheney as
"an acknowledged expert in all of this") might well conclude that it had
been, "other priorities" suggested a familiar character wrinkle, in this
case the same willingness to cloud an actual issue with circular arguments
("I complied fully with all the requirements of the statutes") that would
later be demonstrated by the Vice President's people when they maintained
that the Geneva Conventions need not apply to Afghan detainees because
Afghanistan was a "failed state." What these tortured and in many cases
invented legalities are designed to preclude is any acknowledgment that the
issue at hand, whether it is avoiding military service or authorizing
torture, might have a moral or an ethical or even a self-interested
dimension that merits discussion.
This latter dimension, self-interest, which was the basis for John
McCain's argument that we could not expect others to honor the Geneva
Conventions if we did not do so ourselves, was dismissed by David Addington,
at the time Cheney's legal architect, in the "new paradigm" memo he drafted
in 2002 to go to the President over White House Counsel Alberto R.
Gonzales's signature. "It should be noted that your policy of providing
humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on
like treatment for our soldiers," the memo read, sliding past a key point,
which was that the "new paradigm" differentiated between "enemy detainees"
and "illegal enemy combatants," or "terrorists," a distinction to be
determined by whoever did the detaining.
Moreover, even if GPW [Geneva Convention III Relative to the Treatment of
Prisoners of War] is not applicable, we can still bring war crimes charges
against anyone who mistreats US personnel. Finally, I note that...terrorists
will not follow GPW rules in any event. This is not law. This is casuistry,
the detritus of another perfect storm, the one that occurred when the
deferments of the Vietnam years met the ardor of the Reagan Revolution.
About this matter of priorities. At an October 2005 meeting at Stanford
University of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the historian David
M. Kennedy expressed concern about the absence of political accountability
in a nation where
no American is now obligated to military service, few will ever serve in
uniform, even fewer will actually taste battle—and fewer still of those who
do serve will have ever sat in the classrooms of an elite university like
Stanford.... Americans with no risk whatsoever of exposure to military
service have, in effect, hired some of the least advantaged of their fellow
countrymen to do some of their most dangerous business while the majority
goes on with their own affairs unbloodied and undistracted.
Early in 1995, his tenure as George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense
timed out, Dick Cheney was raising money for a stalled 1996 presidential run
when he was asked, legendarily out of the blue on a fly-fishing trip but in
fact unsurprisingly for someone with government connections in both energy
and defense, to become CEO of Halliburton. In the early summer of 2000,
flying home with his daughter Mary from a hunting trip, Cheney, then five
years into his job at Halliburton, a period for which he had collected $44
million (plus deferments and stock options) and during which the Halliburton
subsidiary Brown & Root had billed the United States $2 billion for services
in Bosnia and Kosovo, told Mary that Joe Allbaugh, the national campaign
manager of Bush's 2000 campaign, had asked him to consider being Bush's
running mate. In July 2000, after conducting a search for another candidate
and detailing the reasons why he himself would be a bad choice ("Knowing my
dad, I'm sure he didn't hold anything back as he laid out the disadvantages
of selecting him as the nominee"), in other words assuring himself carte
blanche, Cheney agreed to join the ticket.
In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the
governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired
Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002,
Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge
while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company,"
according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of
assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities
in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."
This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun. When David
Kennedy spoke at Stanford about the vacuum in political accountability that
could result from waging a war while a majority of Americans went on "with
their own affairs unbloodied and undistracted," he was talking only about
the absence of a draft. He was not talking about the ultimate step, the
temptation to wage the war itself to further private ends, or "business
opportunities," or other priorities. Nor was he talking about the
intermediate step, which was to replace the manpower no longer available by
draft by contracting out "logistical" support to the private sector, in
other words by privatizing the waging of the war. This step, now so well
known as to be a plot point on Law and Order (civilian contract employees in
Iraq fall out among themselves; a death ensues; Sam Waterston sorts it out),
had already been taken. There are now, split among more than 150 private
firms, thousands of such contracts outstanding. Halliburton alone had by
July 2004 contracts worth $11,431,000,000.
Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases and bridges and
prisons. They have done more than handle meals and laundry and
transportation. They train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They
interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two firms, CACI
International (according to its Web site "a world leader in providing timely
solutions to the intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading provider of
comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and
services for National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib,
where almost half of all interrogators and analysts were CACI employees.
They operate free of oversight. They distance the process of interrogation
from the citizens in whose name, or in whose "defense," or to ensure whose
"security," the interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely
solutions."
In his 1991 book A Very Thin Line, Theodore Draper wrote:
The Iran-contra affairs amounted to more than good plans gone wrong or
even bad plans gone wildly wrong. They were symptomatic of a far deeper
disorder in the American body politic. They were made possible by an
interpretation of the Constitu-tion which Poindexter and North thought gave
them a license to carry on their secret operations in the name of the
president, in defiance of the law and without the knowledge of any other
branch of government.... Somehow the highly dubious theory of a presidential
monopoly of foreign policy had filtered down to them and given them a
license to act as if they could substitute themselves for the entire
government.
There remains a further reason why "other priorities" still nags. It
suggests other agendas, undisclosed strategies. We had watched this White
House effect the regulatory changes that would systematically dismantle
consumer and workplace and environmental protections. We had watched this
White House run up the deficits that ensured that the conservative dream of
rolling back government will necessarily take place, because there will be
no money left to pay for it. We had heard the Vice President speak as
recently as January 2004 about our need to recolonize the world, build
bases, "warm bases, bases we can fall in on, on a crisis and have present
the capabilities we need to operate from." "Other priorities" suggests what
the Vice President might have meant when he and the President talked about
the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved
overnight." As a member of the House during the cold war and then as
secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the
Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal
will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the
government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases
the valves. "The first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive in the
Balkans and the last one to wave goodbye is one of our employees," as he put
it during his Halliburton period.
He had also seen up close the political advantage to which such a war
could be put. "And so if there's a backlash pending I think the backlash is
going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take
these steps in order to protect the country," as he put it when asked last
December if his assumption of presidential autonomy might not provoke a
congressional backlash. In the apparently higher interest of consolidating
that political advantage he had made misrepresentations that facilitated a
war that promised to further destabilize the Middle East. He had compromised
both America's image in the world and its image of itself. In 1991,
explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the
Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such
invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq:
Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not
clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia
regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the
Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long
does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign
on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave? By January
2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed
that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led forces," and the
administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by
accusing the doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice President assured
Fox News that the course had been true. "When we look back on this ten years
hence," he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the
cleanup to someone else, "we will have fundamentally changed the course of
history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage
for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the
region."
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle
have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman -
unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under
Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's
preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam
asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking,
arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
We are a long way
from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before
it was over - indeed before it really began - and the president could dress up
like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a
pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished
presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly
on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control,
the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to
history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler,
and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the
1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become
either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a
little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in
this history rummage sale - and perhaps most surprisingly - Bush has become
Harry Truman.
We have lately been
getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think
of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys.
They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the
criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment
will come only in the future, and history will save them.
Ironically, it is
the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost
indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to
trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before,
he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and
religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually
he does this in the broadest - and vaguest - sense: History teaches us … We
know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in
March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it
meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee,
or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to
read his Gibbon.
I am deeply
suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know
George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel - not only
because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he
says it - that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only
then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us
have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the
president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of
the fancy schools he attended - Andover and Yale - and even simply being a
member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not
only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more
successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of
bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to
remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements
they still worked for him.
He is infinitely
more comfortable with the cowboy persona he has adopted, the Texas transplant
who has learned to speak the down-home vernacular. "Country boy," as Johnny
Cash once sang, "I wish I was you, and you were me." Bush's accent, not always
there in public appearances when he was younger, tends to thicken these days,
the final g's consistently dropped so that doing becomes doin', going becomes
goin', and making, makin'. In this lexicon al-Qaeda becomes "the folks" who
did 9/11. Unfortunately, it is not just the speech that got dumbed down - so
also were the ideas at play. The president's world, unlike the one we live in,
is dangerously simple, full of traps, not just for him but, sadly, for us as
well.
When David Frum, a
presidential speechwriter, presented Bush with the phrase "axis of evil," to
characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, it was meant to recall the Axis
powers of World War II. Frum was much praised, for it is a fine phrase,
perfect for Madison Avenue. Of course, the problem is that it doesn't really
track. This new Axis turned out to contain, apparently much to our surprise,
two countries, Iraq and Iran, that were sworn enemies, and if you moved
against Iraq, you ended up de-stabilizing it and involuntarily strengthening
Iran, the far more dangerous country in the region. While "axis of evil" was
intended to serve as a sort of historical banner, embodying the highest moral
vision imaginable, it ended up only helping to weaken us.
Despite his recent
conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do
many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to
geopolitics is a source of strength - almost as if the less he knows about the
issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any
president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete
for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and
complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With
their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A.
and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on
certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but
who in the son's view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a
president's ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in
consultation with a higher authority.
Therefore, when I
hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know
history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly
and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous
of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip
sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked
in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the
desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a
sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty -
take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army,
or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the
mighty American Army.
There was, I
thought, one member of the first President Bush's team who had a real sense of
history, a man of intellectual superiority and enormous common sense.
(Naturally, he did not make it onto the Bush Two team.) That was Brent
Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser. Scowcroft was so
close to the senior Bush that they collaborated on Bush's 1998 presidential
memoir, A World Transformed. Scowcroft struck me as a lineal descendant of
Truman's secretary of state George Catlett Marshall, arguably the most
extraordinary of the postwar architects of American foreign policy. Marshall
was a formidable figure, much praised for his awesome sense of duty and not
enough, I think, for his intellect. If he lacked the self-evident brilliance
of George Kennan (the author of Truman's Communist-containment policy), he had
a remarkable ability to shed light on the present by extrapolating from the
the past.
Like Marshall, I
think, Scowcroft has a sense of history in his bones, even if his are smaller
lessons, learned piece by piece over a longer period of time. His is perhaps a
more pragmatic and less dazzling mind, but he saw all the dangers of the 2003
move into Iraq, argued against the invasion, and for his troubles was
dismissed as chairman of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board.
I. The Truman
Analogy
Recently, Harry
Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has
become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around
Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to
talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line,
Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is
all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a
beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people
around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for
them.
I've been living
with Truman on and off for the last five years, while I was writing a book on
the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [to be published in September by Hyperion],
and I've been thinking a lot about the differences between Truman and Bush and
their respective wars, Korea and Iraq. Yes, like Bush, Truman was embattled,
and, yes, his popularity had plummeted at the end of his presidency, and, yes,
he governed during an increasingly unpopular war. But the similarities end
there.
Even before Truman
sent troops to Korea, in 1950, the national political mood was toxic. The
Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row, and Truman was
under fierce partisan assault from the Republican far right, which felt
marginalized even within its own party. It seized on the dubious issue of
Communist subversion - especially with regard to China - as a way of getting
even. (Knowing how ideological both Bush and Cheney are, it is easy to
envision them as harsh critics of Truman at that moment.)
Truman had inherited
General Douglas MacArthur, "an untouchable," in Dwight Eisenhower's shrewd
estimate, a man who was by then as much myth and legend as he was flesh and
blood. The mastermind of America's victory in the Pacific, MacArthur was
unquestionably talented, but also vainglorious, highly political, and
partisan. Truman had twice invited him to come home from Japan, where, as
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he was supervising the reconstruction,
to meet with him and address a joint session of Congress. Twice MacArthur
turned him down, although a presidential invitation is really an order.
MacArthur was saving his homecoming, it was clear, for a more dramatic moment,
one that might just have been connected to a presidential run. He not only
looked down on Truman personally, he never really accepted the primacy of the
president in the constitutional hierarchy. For a president trying to govern
during an extremely difficult moment in international politics, it was a
monstrous political equation.
Truman had been
forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North
Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea. But MacArthur did
not accept the president's vision of a limited war in Korea, and argued
instead for a larger one with the Chinese. Truman wanted none of that. He
might have been the last American president who did not graduate from college,
but he was quite possibly our best-read modern president. History was always
with him. With MacArthur pushing for a wider war with China, Truman liked to
quote Napoleon, writing about his disastrous Russian adventure: "I beat them
in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."
In time, MacArthur
made an all-out frontal challenge to Truman, criticizing him to the press,
almost daring the president to get rid of him. Knowing that the general had
title to the flag and to the emotions of the country, while he himself merely
had title to the Constitution, Truman nonetheless fired him. It was a grave
constitutional crisis - nothing less than the concept of civilian control of
the military was at stake. If there was an irony to this, it was that
MacArthur and his journalistic boosters, such as Time-magazine owner Henry
Luce, always saw Truman as the little man and MacArthur as the big man. ("MacArthur,"
wrote Time at the moment of the firing, "was the personification of the big
man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.… Truman
was almost a professional little man.") But it was Truman's decision to meet
MacArthur's challenge, even though he surely knew he would be the short-term
loser, that has elevated his presidential stock.
George W. Bush's
relationship with his military commander was precisely the opposite. He dealt
with the ever so malleable General Tommy Franks, a man, Presidential Medal of
Freedom or no, who is still having a difficult time explaining to his peers in
the military how Iraq happened, and how he agreed to so large a military
undertaking with so small a force. It was the president, not the military or
the public, who wanted the Iraq war, and Bush used the extra leverage granted
him by 9/11 to get it. His people skillfully manipulated the intelligence in
order to make the war seem necessary, and they snookered the military on force
levels and the American public on the cost of it all. The key operative in all
this was clearly Vice President Cheney, supremely arrogant, the most skilled
of bureaucrats, seemingly the toughest tough guy of them all, but eventually
revealed as a man who knew nothing of the country he wanted to invade and what
that invasion might provoke.
II. The New
Red-Baiting
If Bush takes his
cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far
right. This can be seen clearly from one of his history lessons, a speech the
president gave on a visit to Riga, Latvia, in May 2005, when, in order to
justify the Iraq intervention, he cited Yalta, the 1945 summit at which
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met. Hailing Latvian freedom, Bush took a
side shot at Roosevelt (and, whether he meant to or not, at Churchill,
supposedly his great hero) and the Yalta accords, which effectively ceded
Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Yalta, he said, "followed in the unjust
tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful
governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.
Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a
continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and
Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
This is some
statement. Yalta is connected first to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (in which
the Western democracies, at their most vulnerable and well behind the curve of
military preparedness, ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler), then, in the same
breath, Bush blends in seamlessly (and sleazily) the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,
the temporary and cynical agreement between the Soviets and Nazis allowing the
Germans to invade Poland and the Soviets to move into the Baltic nations. And
from Molotov-Ribbentrop we jump ahead to Yalta itself, where, Bush implies,
the two great leaders of the West casually sat by and gave away vast parts of
Europe to the Soviet Union.
After some 60 years
Yalta has largely slipped from our political vocabulary, but for a time it was
one of the great buzzwords in American politics, the first shot across the bow
by the Republican right in their long, venomous, immensely destructive assault
upon Roosevelt (albeit posthumously), Truman, and the Democratic Party as soft
on Communism - just as today's White House attacks Democrats and other critics
for being soft on terrorism, less patriotic, defeatists, underminers of the
true strength of our country. Crucial to the right's exploitation of Yalta was
the idea of a tired, sick, and left-leaning Roosevelt having given away too
much and betraying the people of Eastern Europe, who, as a result, had to live
under the brutal Soviet thumb - a distortion of history that resonated greatly
with the many Eastern European ethnic groups in America, whose people,
blue-collar workers, most of them, had voted solidly Democratic.
The right got away
with it, because, of all the fronts in the Second World War, the one least
known in this country - our interest tends to disappear for those battles in
which we did not participate - is ironically the most important: the Eastern
Front, where the battle between the Germans and Russians took place and where,
essentially, the outcome of the war was decided. It began with a classic act
of hubris - Hitler's invasion of Russia, in June 1941, three years before we
landed our troops in Normandy. Some three million German troops were involved
in the attack, and in the early months the penetrations were quick and
decisive. Minsk was quickly taken, the Germans crossed the Dnieper by July 10,
and Smolensk fell shortly after. Some 700,000 men of the Red Army, its
leadership already devastated by the madness of Stalin's purges, were captured
by mid-September 1941. The Russian troops fell back and moved as much of their
industry back east as they could. Then, slowly, the Russian lines stiffened,
and the Germans, their supply lines too far extended, faltered as winter came
on. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in late August
1942. It proved to be the most brutal battle of the war, with as many as two
million combatants on both sides killed and wounded, but in the end the
Russians held the city and captured what remained of the German Army there.
In early 1943, the
Red Army was on the offensive, the Germans in full retreat. By the middle of
1944, the Russians had 120 divisions driving west, some 2.3 million troops
against an increasingly exhausted German Army of 800,000. By mid-July 1944, as
the Allies were still trying to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, the Red
Army was at the old Polish-Russian border. By the time of Yalta, they were
closing in on Berlin. A month earlier, in January 1945, Churchill had
acknowledged the inability of the West to limit the Soviet reach into much of
Eastern and Central Europe. "Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece,
are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it.
There is nothing I can do for Poland either."
Yalta reflected not
a sellout but a fait accompli.
President Bush lives
in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have
just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years
has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a
superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well
ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world
of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand
this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is
that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most
citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is
not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt
the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two
centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a
citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State
Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military)
understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in
those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq -
religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political - created over centuries
of conflict and oppressive rule.
The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War
II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he
made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that
the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until
then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them. And
still, today, our inability to concentrate such "shock and awe" on precisely
whom we would like - causing what is now called collateral killing - creates a
growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we
bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much
killing and destruction to their country. The French fought in Vietnam before
us, and when a French patrol went through a village, the Vietminh would on
occasion kill a single French soldier, knowing that the French in a fury would
retaliate by wiping out half the village - in effect, the Vietminh were
baiting the trap for collateral killing.
III. The Perils
of Empire
You don't hear other
members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much,
either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the
bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and
manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in
understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out
in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was
Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the
draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was
likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern
forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less
in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out
of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic
endeavor, not that he felt at the time - with his five military deferments -
that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard
for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that
matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French,
couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the
largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is
neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We
operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary
knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their
weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into
the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies - the good Iraqi people
the president likes to talk about - appear to be more and more ambivalent
about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to
share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that
brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was
Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light
Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in
the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership
(then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment)
that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire
British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the
most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when
things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with
hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of
power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.
I have my own sense
that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the
immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the
historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around
him - most particularly the vice president - simply misunderstood what the
collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms.
Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the
Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic
political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful
as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we
both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with
the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had
probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the
high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as
advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense
apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on
that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets
dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as
West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.
At the time of the
collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about
how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose
economy never worked, simply had imploded. I was never that comfortable with
the idea that we as a nation had won, or that it was a personal victory for
Ronald Reagan. To the degree that there was credit to be handed out, I thought
it should go to those people in the satellite nations who had never lost faith
in the cause of freedom and had endured year after year in difficult times
under the Soviet thumb. If any Americans deserved credit, I thought it should
be Truman and his advisers - Marshall, Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Chip Bohlen -
all of them harshly attacked at one time or another by the Republican right
for being soft on Communism. (The right tried particularly hard to block
Eisenhower's nomination of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow, in 1953, because he
had been at Yalta.)
After the Soviet
Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our
military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of
threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold
War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part
because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the
checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints
fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to
consider was a warning from those who had gone before us - that there was, at
moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.
David Halberstam
was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the Pulitzer Prize - winning author
of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties. He was killed in a car accident
on April 23.
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the
street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's
improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots
who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made
real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted
through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It
was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided
the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose
to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to
leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our
Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal
citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and
justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage,
or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and
obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were
Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through
protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and
civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the
promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to
continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run
for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we
cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless
we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better
future for our children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the
American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was
raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve
in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a
bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to
some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest
nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of
slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious
daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of
every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as
I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even
possible.
It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a
story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more
than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the
contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.
Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won
commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the
country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a
powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various
stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or
"not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week
before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the
latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black,
but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of
race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is
somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire
of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the
other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use
incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen
the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness
of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend
Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain.
Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and
foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be
considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree
with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have
heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly
disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply
controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out
against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view
of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates
what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view
that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of
stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful
ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive
at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come
together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a
falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating
climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but
rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will
no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why
associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not
join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright
were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the
television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the
caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would
react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than
twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man
who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick
and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who
has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in
the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the
community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless,
ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and
prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first
service at Trinity:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a
forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that
single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside
the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary
black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh,
the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories -
of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that
had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this
bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future
generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once
unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the
stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to
feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with
which we could start to rebuild."
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches
across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the
doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like
other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and
sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and
shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full
the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance,
the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make
up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As
imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith,
officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations
with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or
treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He
contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community
that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more
disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a
woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she
loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black
men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has
uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that
I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply
inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing
would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the
woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some
have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as
harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right
now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his
offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the
negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have
surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this
country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we
have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our
respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges
like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every
American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.
As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it
isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice
in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the
disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly
traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under
the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them,
fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior
education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement
gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence,
from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business
owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were
excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that
black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future
generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black
and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of
today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration
that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the
erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may
have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black
neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular
garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of
violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his
generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a
time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was
systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face
of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many
were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after
them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the
American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately
defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was
passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women
who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without
hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it,
questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental
ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of
humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the
bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front
of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop
or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians,
to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own
failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit
and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger
in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that
the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger
is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from
solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in
our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the
alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is
powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its
roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between
the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most
working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been
particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant
experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've
built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to
see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of
labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping
away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to
be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when
they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that
an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a
good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when
they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow
prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always
expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape
for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped
forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for
their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built
entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate
discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or
reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white
resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class
squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting
practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special
interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish
away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even
racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too
widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for
years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have
never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions
in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a
candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God
and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond
some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to
continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our
past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a
full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means
binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools,
and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman
struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the
immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for
own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our
children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face
challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to
despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own
destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of
self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my
former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of
self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about
racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no
progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible
for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a
coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old --
is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have
seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What
we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can
and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging
that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds
of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of
discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be
addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and
our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our
criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of
opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all
Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my
dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown
and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than
what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would
have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us
be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one
another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds
division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as
we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath
of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's
sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the
election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the
American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most
offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence
that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will
all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about
some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing
will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together
and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools
that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian
children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want
to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those
kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America
are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a
21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled
with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have
the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who
can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent
life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged
to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we
want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who
doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work
for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who
serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud
flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never
should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk
about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and
giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that
this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union
may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can
always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or
cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next
generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change
have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a
story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at
his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who
organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to
organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this
campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went
around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And
because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care.
They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to
do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley
convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more
than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the
cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the
roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help
the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their
parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along
the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare
and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally.
But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks
everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different
stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to
this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And
Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He
does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war.
He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to
everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."
"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition
between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not
enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to
our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many
generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty
one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is
where the perfection begins.
Never in living memory has an election been
more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as
expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so
urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a
Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the
country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the
ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so
there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over
the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the
legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record,
domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered
more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura.
Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville
illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of
embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking
into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help
rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the
economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the
national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next
year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a
precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was
projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a
sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen
into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by
seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the
principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the
relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent
of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week;
for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only
increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends
up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our
physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American
troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still
disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific
regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration
manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then
mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an
expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of
more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths
of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million
men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for
a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope
that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the
Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also
been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has
been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global
environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to
new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful
in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the
Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example
and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other
illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles
and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At
recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the
“end of the American era.”
The election of 2008 is the first in more
than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the
ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky
enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a
nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do
so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary
campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s
Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted
with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush,
who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a
rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation,
sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such
issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and
immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a
patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts.
With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards
and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was
one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas
off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved
remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid
obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration
reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who
had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February
against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself
once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the
C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s
nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only
Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain
has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the
demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming
crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts.
Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for
corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to
the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is
over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a
Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has
come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least,
excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government
regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or
knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the
crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to
suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the
government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary
tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics
and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of
stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its
depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go
budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and
enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term
consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration
of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population,
which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for
greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation
of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the
decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of
jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers
a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce
America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious
goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon
dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities,
would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than
their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over
time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to
auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year
for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in
green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to
require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable
sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and
far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the
nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would
have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the
first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and
he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as
evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed
Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it
expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the
federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of
his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no
impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the
effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be
“insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign
that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
The contrast between the candidates is even
sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise
currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core
conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the
swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel
Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective
appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on
the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will
again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have
hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he
was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer
supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing
abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as
free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given
the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s
safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by
a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years,
certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers
between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on
corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the
Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of
Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several
unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the
support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against
convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny
habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime
of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing
to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial
future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary,
the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before
the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite
occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it,
McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his
Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades
could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of
the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither
candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s
repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based
their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the
realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling
possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these
subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a
word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally
misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan,
on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be
transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of
counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first
Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in
its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for
either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to
work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for
both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal
politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there
is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that
war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to
risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline
“the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear:
that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a
conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war
and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also
diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement.
These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for
his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to
extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the
bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign
affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also
to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations
of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics,
nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security
challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the
United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama
has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these
compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the
legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral
credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as
responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern
Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and
the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part
because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no
less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates,
however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is
clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign
manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a
composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that
this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and
accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly
points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign
mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is
not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even
lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised
advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on
the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is
willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him
eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his
choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been
governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for
Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has
had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic
issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her
ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina
Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future
it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of
any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In
choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and
irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His
tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for
late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience
in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and
complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of
personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are
very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a
compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as
a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by
a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his
character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a
Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what
helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park
and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are
distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans
who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose
him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some
who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like
self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that
seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and
dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as
self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who
mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of
seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who
thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books
are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy
disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the
United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to
that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s
first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995),
that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential
President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a
candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician
this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal
work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of
political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer
Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But
Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental
attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir
not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in
the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional
empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the
world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with
nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count
military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of
tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for
great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has
done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking
experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only
kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation.
Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow,
Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas,
predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his
taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional
law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them
every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of
2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s
intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft.
He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative
proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on
the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline,
organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has
often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent
hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis
has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to
bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself
with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound
respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a
man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in
American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false
one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress,
proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere”
speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at
the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be
central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every
major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of
waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet
of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet
Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and
concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at
once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century
America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its
spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination
of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the
century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but
say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its
dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the
values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity,
international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs
both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader
temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of
our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
n Dec. 1,
1958, a fire consumed Our Lady of the Angels grade school on the West Side of
Chicago, killing 92 children and three nuns.
A wire story from that day captured a fragment of the desperation:
"Max Stachura stood outside the burning building, begging his little boy,
Mark, 9, to jump into his arms. Children were falling all about the father and
he caught or stopped the fall of 12 of them. But little Mark was too
frightened, or he didn't understand his father. Mark didn't jump."
Fifty years later, his mother has the day in focus, and adds a missing detail.
As Mark stood at that second-floor window,
fire to his back, he held a small statue in his hand and waved it proudly
through the black smoke, hoping his father would notice. Mark had won the
statue that day—a figure of an infant Jesus—for being first to answer a quiz
question.
"I guess he was just so proud of that prize," said Mary Stachura, who was at a
department store when the fire broke out. "I don't think he really understood
what was happening."
Few of the children trapped in the school could have grasped the enormity of
the danger they faced, and few of the panicky adults on the ground—parents and
neighbors and firefighters—had time to reflect. They acted, grabbing ladders
of all lengths from garages, reaching through broken windows to haul small,
waterlogged bodies from the flames.
Max Stachura watched as other children pushed his son back, away from the
window and into the flames. The boy was later identified by a homework sheet
crumpled in his pocket.
Max rarely spoke of that day. He died of a heart attack at 52.
"He was much too young," said Mary, now 85 and living in a retirement home in
Bartlett. "That fire. It changed everything."
The Our Lady of the Angels fire remains one of the worst tragedies in Chicago
history, a ghastly few hours on a cold, sunny afternoon that shattered
families and knocked a hopeful, growing community forever off its path.
The cause of the fire was never officially determined, and no one was held
accountable. Some parents who lost a child—or children—found ways to blame
each other and wound up divorced. Others sold their tidy two-flats and moved
away, hastening the flight of the middle class from the city's West Side.
"It seems as though people just couldn't get far enough away," said Jill
Grannan, a curator at the Chicago History Museum. "That school and that parish
is one that had a lot of people. . . . There was such a boom, and then people
really just had to leave.
"I don't think the community ever really came back."
Few in the neighborhood now would recall the blaze. But for parents and
firefighters, journalists and now-grown schoolchildren, the memories remain
etched in intricate detail.
Steve Lasker, then a photographer for The Chicago American newspaper, was
driving along Grand Avenue, heading to his newsroom after an assignment in
Elmwood Park.
He heard a call come over a radio tuned to the police frequency: "They're
jumping out the windows!"
A fire engine cut in front of him, and he quickly turned to follow. He parked
and headed toward the smoke, stopping abruptly when he saw the school on Avers
Avenue in flames.
"I froze for a few seconds, or maybe it was minutes, I don't know, I couldn't
tell," said Lasker, now 78. "Oh my God, there's still kids in there. Mayhem
was going on, and they started pulling kids out of there left and right."
From atop a firetruck, Lasker shot one of the most iconic photos of the day.
It showed a helmeted firefighter, his face drawn in sorrow, carrying the wet,
lifeless body of 10-year-old John Jajkowski Jr. from the building.
Lasker, then the father of a 6-month-old girl, felt his stomach churn as he
watched the rescue through the lens of his camera. The cold wind froze tracks
of tears on his face. Though many photos were published, 20 years would pass
before he voluntarily showed them to anyone.
"I didn't want to relive it," he said. "To this day I still have dreams about
that horrible scene."
He held close to his family through the years and was, perhaps, overprotective
of his kids: "Tragedy hits home—everybody's home."
Grace Riley never saw the fire, but she faced its aftermath. She was 23 at the
time, an emergency room nurse and a newlywed.
The first ambulance arrived without warning at St. Anne's Hospital that
afternoon, carrying six boys from the 7th and 8th grades, and one 1st-grade
girl. The doctors and nurses didn't know what had happened but immediately set
to work, with Riley caring for the little girl.
"I was cutting her clothes off and I hear her say, 'Oh nurse, my face hurts so
bad.' And I looked up, and her face was totally burned."
As more children were carted in, the acrid smell of burnt flesh became
overwhelming—it sticks with Riley to this day. She helped place bodies of the
dead on the floor so gurneys were available for the living.
"Ambulance by ambulance by ambulance, they just kept coming," Riley said. "It
was just earth-shattering to look into a room and see all those little bodies,
and to see the parents screaming, 'Where is my child? Where is my child?' "
Riley left emergency room nursing shortly after the fire. She couldn't do it
anymore.
Long after wounds healed, after the bodies of the dead were honored in mass
funeral services and schools across Chicago and the nation embraced new
standards for fire safety, the pain lingers.
Ken Leonard was only 9, a 4th grader in Room 210. He wound up on the window
ledge, too afraid to jump, too scared to realize flames were burning the backs
of his legs.
A firefighter on a ladder hoisted him to safety. He spent 10 days in the
hospital with second-degree burns; his two brothers were unharmed.
The three Leonard boys would all go on to serve in Vietnam. Again, they all
made it out alive. Ken wound up a firefighter in Oak Lawn,
rising to chief before he retired in 2001.
Throughout his career, he kept memories of the Our Lady of the Angels fire to
himself, and he still struggles to speak of that day.
"When I first got in the job, I was trying to tell my co-workers the story,
but I just couldn't do it," Leonard said, voice cracking. "I assumed as time
went on, it would get easier. But it never does."
Some say they were able to put the tragedy behind them, though they speak in
an uncertain tone of moving on. Others lament the lack of counseling in the
wake of the tragedy, saying the custom of the time—to bottle up emotions and
go on living—never allowed them to come to terms with their feelings.
And some still search for answers.
Robert Chiappetta, who survived the fire but lost his sister Joan Anne, has
spent 15 years obsessively researching a book about what happened. Though no
investigation found fault with the church, which ran the school, or with city
fire inspectors, Chiappetta believes there was a widespread cover-up.
"They had created a firetrap in there," he said, surrounded by court documents
at his kitchen table in Elmwood Park. "People will see this was the crime of
the century."
Chiappetta's parents, after searching hospitals the night of the fire, found
his sister's body near midnight in the Cook County morgue. She could be
identified only by a gold chain around her neck, one her uncle had brought her
from Italy.
In the weeks after the fire, after Mary and Max Stachura had buried their son,
a nun from the school explained the statue Mark had been waving at his father.
She gave Mary a similar one as a keepsake. Mary still has that statue. It's
kept in a trunk in her apartment—like memories of that day, it's always
nearby, just not in plain sight.
Sitting recently with her younger son, John, who was in a building at the
school that didn't burn, Mary showed a cherished, sepia-toned class picture of
Mark. She still has the shirt and tie he wore in the picture.
"I told John that when I die, bury that shirt and that tie with me," she said.
"My little boy will always be with me."
Death's shadow frequently sends literary reputation into critical eclipse.
Not so the Nobel laureate
Samuel Beckett, who has
seemed to rise further in our esteem with every year that has passed since his
death in 1989 at age 83. Of the great Modernists, in fact, it's Beckett who
continues to speak most directly and freshly to our own experience of the
world—and that includes his great friend and literary mentor,
James Joyce, though saying so
feels curiously like apostasy.
Now we have the most surprising addition of all to the Beckett canon, "The
Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1: 1929-1940," the first of four projected
volumes selected from the author's astonishing, astonishingly vast
correspondence. This is an extraordinary work of scholarship on the part of
its main editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. So far, more
than 15,000 Beckett letters have come to light; the taciturn youth who became
an artist of studied silences turns out to have been an inveterate letter
writer—and, what's more, a fine one, which can't be said for many authors.
Just to complicate things, Beckett had what one manuscript specialist
described to the editors as "the worst handwriting of any 20th Century author"
and composed his letters not only in English but also in French and German.
Finally, there are restrictions Beckett set up before his death, limiting the
selection to letters bearing on his work. Thus nothing, for example, of his
fraught relationship with Joyce's mad daughter, Lucia, whose unrequited
affection for Beckett ultimately cast a chill over his relationship with her
parents. In 1937, Beckett writes of spending 15 hours laboring over the
pre-publication proofs of "Finnegans Wake" for Joyce. The perennially strapped
Joyce paid Beckett just 250 French francs but threw in one of his old
overcoats and five used ties. "I did not refuse," Beckett writes. "It is so
much simpler to be hurt than to hurt."
Beckett also forbade the editors any commentary, and they
have—perhaps—overcompensated with "contextual" notes that sometimes are
helpful and, sometimes, simply become a rather creaky documentary apparatus.
That's a quibble that does not rise to the level of criticism, though. What
Fehsenfeld and Overbeck have produced is a revelatory triumph.
The correspondent who frequently signs himself "Sam" emerges from these
letters a full human being, by turns arrogant and kindly, depressed and
determined. Most of all there is a profound seriousness of purpose, a
drive—despite the writer's frequent disparaging comments about his
lassitude—to read seriously, listen to music and look at paintings in a
serious, systematic way. Two things emerge from this process: One is a
wonderful and, often surprisingly, convincing independence of judgment. (Who
would have guessed that the playwright responsible for "Krapp's Last Tape" was
enthralled with
Jane Austen?); the other is a
truly deep learning—languages, art, philosophy, literature—and contempt for
pedantry.
The latter takes on a decided edge when it intersects Beckett's wickedly
biting sense of humor. One of his last acts before abandoning what promised to
be a dazzling academic career at Trinity was to deliver a lecture to Dublin's
Modern Language Society on an avant-garde French poet and his school, both of
which Beckett had invented. He particularly enjoyed the subsequent discussion
in which members referred to their own familiarity with the imaginary poet and
his circle.
As James Knowlson points out in his Beckett biography "Damned to Fame"—and it
makes a useful companion to read alongside these letters—Beckett abandoned
Trinity first of all, because he felt a corrosive contempt for its students
and a distaste for his colleagues' culture: "Scholarly wit and sarcasm sounded
all too often like exhibitionism, bitchiness and character assassination."
Moreover, Beckett would write, "How can one write here, when every day
vulgarizes one's hostility and turns anger into irritation and petulance?"
In these reactions and in Beckett's letters from the period, we glimpse the
beginning of a profound transformation in which, as Knowlson says, "the
arrogant, disturbed, narcissistic young man ... evolved into someone who was
noted later for his extraordinary kindness, courtesy, concern, generosity and
almost saintly 'good works.' " (Beckett donated his cash award for the 1969
Nobel Prize to charity and struggling writers.)
The years covered by these letters also are the ones in which Beckett would
lay the intellectual and experiential foundations for the great leap into the
new that his writing would make in the 1940s. Writing to his great friend,
poet and art historian Tom McGreevy, in fall 1932, he says: "I'm in mourning
for the integrity ... I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud,
the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the
wind."
In this letter to German editor and translator Axel Kaun, we catch an
intimation of what is to come: "It is indeed getting more and more difficult
for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me
like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things [or
the nothingness] lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have
become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of
a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some
circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently
abused. ... Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road
long ago abandoned by music and painting?"
Here the stage is set for what Beckett would later call "the siege in the
room," the four years from 1946 to 1950, when he worked in solitude, abandoned
English composition for French and stripped his work of every ornament and
stylistic device to become the writer we now esteem. It marked his fundamental
departure out of the shadow of Joyce. If those years also produced an inner
chronicle of revealing correspondence, then the second volume in this series
will be valuable, indeed.
'The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1: 1929-1940' edited
by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
WE don’t like our evil to be banal.
Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the
psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or,
as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national
phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,”
the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were
instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved
their parents and were popular among their classmates.
On Tuesday, it
will be five years since Americans first confronted
the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to
cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture,
surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb
scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only
those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who
dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous,
sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other
grunts
who were held accountable while the
top command got a pass.
We’ve learned
much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark
Danner
recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations,
one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004,
the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and
appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how
they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified
four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were
already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still
shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a
premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was
carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that
psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting
pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources
like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any
terrorist attacks.
The newly
released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by
barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and
Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of
Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, Michigan and
Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like
Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.
Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a
Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He
currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals.
As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of
the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation
“techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a
confinement box.”
Still, it’s
not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo
worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does
add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to
the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the
kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent
us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.
Bybee’s memo
was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some
four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as
he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al
Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in
his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his
capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking
Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight
booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.”
Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed
clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time
Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable
contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But,
as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may
have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already
learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of
Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan,
wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation
methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure
phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as
Bybee gave the green light, torture followed:
Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to
another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no
significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda
functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo
invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’
equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”
We don’t know
if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could
have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if
Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome
crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration
interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative
explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to
the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees
released last week.
The report
found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to
interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002,
told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part
of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and
Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at
the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and
more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other
words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America
but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it
wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm
elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and
subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which
the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White
House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8,
2002, Cheney would make his
infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and
the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only
9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
But there were
no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have
been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who
would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.
Last week
Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form,
dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as
the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received
unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe
Lieberman included.
Levin also
emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White
House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,”
Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were
desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”
Five years
after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government
methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must
contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if
criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an
unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,”
torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful
Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al
Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of
the Bush White House’s illegality.
Levin suggests
— and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the
Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders,
perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already
have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can
recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale
betrayal of American values.
President
Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is
bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than
Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House,
Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t
need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we
must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s
commitment to the rule of law.
It had
been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets
have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions
makers.
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we
have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now
demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got
out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I
believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not
necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other
word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and
conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid
style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for
other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any
figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of
the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary
relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly
disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less
normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style
has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a
sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has
more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or
falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political
psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and
recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with
movements of suspicious discontent.
Here is
Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the
United States:
How can we
account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this
government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of
a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture
in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally
exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all
honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts
contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to
incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions
would serve the country’s interest.
Now turn
back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the
Populist party:
As early
as 1865-66
a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and
America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people
quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting
zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of
statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international
gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the
financial and commercial independence of the country.
Next, a
Texas newspaper article of 1855:
…It is a
notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very
moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political,
civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that
corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive
head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently
sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect
of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the
United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators;
reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and
State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out
the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United
States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of
their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…
These
quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States
one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and
anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the
United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many
alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who
constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a
munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in
the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy
today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try
to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these
movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history
in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
Illuminism and Masonry
I
begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some
quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive
activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general
reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the
response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy,
to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by
Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its
teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment
rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century
Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately
to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism
appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.
Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in
Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a
Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in
the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its
author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a
somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been
inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on
the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but
when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of
Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The
association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of
rooting out all religious establishments,
and overturning all the existing governments of europe.” It had become
“one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it
he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it
as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the
cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its
members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that
“blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a
stench bomb—a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”
These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a
minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah
Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply
divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having
read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by
Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His
warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about
the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy
Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July
discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he
held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits
of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the
country were swarming with them.
The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and
extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be
no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the
outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was
confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view,
the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United
States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural
egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson
was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity
for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the
Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.
The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but
also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great
many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It
attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy
with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it.
Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts
who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.
As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy
against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to
treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been
conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of
loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state
governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was
argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own
obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death.
So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other,
more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.
Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of
distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the
order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs,
juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives.
The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and
proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment
when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic
assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing
business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.
Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of
Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and
absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed.
Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a
bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that
Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous
institution that ever was imposed on man.…It may truly be said to be
hell’s master piece.”
The Jesuit Threat
Fear
of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic
plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a
different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism,
and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in
American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the
paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss
out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans
to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular
Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play.
But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential
anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.
Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the ?American
way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One,
Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from
the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse.
“A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in
operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by
our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse
found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country.
She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing
something here.…She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she
has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular
supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of
Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.
“It is an
ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,
that
Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible
disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to
disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he
discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the
western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing
masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players,
and similar practitioners.
Lyman
Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the
possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states.
Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great
West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a
life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done
quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was
sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,”
multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling
taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced
hand upon the helm of our power.”
****************
The Paranoid Style in Action
The John
Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United
Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox
Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…
The July
issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche of mail ought to
convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines
was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A
United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its
planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)
Birch
official John Rousselot said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country
promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist
conspiracy.”
—San
Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964
****************
Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the
anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with
sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,*
the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the
confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and
monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United
States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one
Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The
author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal
after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate
and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior
that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and
horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of
convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might
ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to
be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been
somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her
head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a
pickpocket.
Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party
politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American
Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more
suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an
international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the
banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed
to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to
exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a
nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and
extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.
Why They Feel Dispossessed
If,
after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take
the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important
differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those
earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were
still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a
still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put
it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their
kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final
destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten
away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been
gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national
security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as
their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but
major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their
predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds
conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The
villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid
predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid
style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal
description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the
anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal
delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the
monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like
Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like
Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter
and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged
conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast
theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with
realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The
theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the
events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War.
Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a
museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one
can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are
open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who
reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States
has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to
survive at all.
The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to
three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over
more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to
undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the
federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many
right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax:
The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the
income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so
infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading
up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently
selling out American national interests.
Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as
in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus
of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common
effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long
indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the
Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form.
McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American
interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the
formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every
American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either
accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s
interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the
Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did
not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,”
the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on
a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer,
Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller
but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch
proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our
government”—note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a
full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at
every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their
closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States
in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they
have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the
Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”
Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that
is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote
some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist
agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of
Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between
Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was
“actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower
himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer
famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—a
conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so
extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any
reasonable doubt.”
Emulating the Enemy
The
paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics
in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of
human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly
lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety
of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to
set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951.
“Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is
the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy
before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a
militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and
compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is
always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is
not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is
thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally
eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to
which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to
the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not
even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of
frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of
powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his
awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of
amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.
Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast
mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his
limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or
tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises,
starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then
enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s
interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken
as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.
Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of
power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for
influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction
(the Catholic confessional).
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the
projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self
are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the
paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.
Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same
flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly
vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy.
The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation
through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological
war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.*
Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express
their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls
forth.
On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his
lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for
fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to
project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological
concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to
a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers
reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the
delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.
Renegades and Pedants
A
special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy
cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of
ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their
revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the
runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the
avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part,
the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with
secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman
who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final
verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a
skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that
attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between
good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the
renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong
side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.
A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of
its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the
contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with
factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to
prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course,
there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be
in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts
from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully
and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this
“evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of
entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the
profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have
little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate
evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There
was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society
composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose
some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was
also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and
freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a
homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security
allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable
decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.
The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the
paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not
scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism,
contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible
assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of
bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade
of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes
the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has
startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity
of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of
Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the
Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and
illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.
The Double Sufferer
The
paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an
international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the
eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent
psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a
style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of
oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of
ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the
adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections
of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility
whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable
prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”
This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the
conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in
this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly
affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions,
certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical
catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic
energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass
movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious
conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of
this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the
central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a
confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally
irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political
processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the
representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very
unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political
process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions,
they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and
malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this
through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A
distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about
history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely
this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special
resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but
circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten
him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer,
since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by
his fantasies as well.
†Richard
Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia
University. His latest book, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay
is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in
November 1963.
*
Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed
to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a
royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to
the scorching rays of the sun.”
*
In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a
statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a
village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “ In the Goldwater
campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as
consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,”
writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy
the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.
The 19th century American writer
Henry Adams said the descent of American presidents from
George Washington to
Ulysses S. Grant was enough to discredit the theory of evolution. The same
could be said of the pantheon of conservative political heroes, which in the
last half-century has gone from Barry Goldwater and
Ronald Reagan to
Sarah Palin. That refutation may be agreeable to Palin, who doesn't put much
stock in Darwin anyway.
You can confirm all this by looking at what the three wrote. Goldwater, the 1964
Republican presidential nominee, made his reputation four years earlier with an
eloquent and intellectually coherent volume, "The Conscience of a Conservative,"
which laid out a blueprint for the policies he favored.
Reagan likewise made the thinking person's case for conservatism. Between 1975
and 1979, after he had finished two terms as governor of
California, he did some 1,000 radio commentaries, most of which he wrote
himself. They were later collected in "Reagan, In His Own Hand," which provides
the texts of his handwritten manuscripts and proves that, far from being the
"amiable dunce" of liberal mythology, he thought hard and clearly about the
issues of his time.
Palin? Her new memoir, "Going Rogue," fills up 413 pages, but it has less policy
heft than a student council speech. Where Reagan dived into the murk of arms
control and Goldwater fathomed federal farm programs, Palin skims over the
surface of a puddle.
Amid all the tales of savoring the aromas at the state fair and having her
wardrobe vetted by snotty campaign staffers, she sets aside space to lay out her
vision of what it means to be a "Commonsense Conservative." It takes up all of
11 pages and leans heavily on prefabricated lines like "I am a conservative
because I deal with the world as it is" and "If you want real job growth, cut
capital gains taxes."
But the priorities of "Going Rogue" are striking poses and attitudes, not making
actual arguments about the proper role of government. The book is meant to
create an image, or maybe a brand -- folksy but shrewd, tough but feminine,
noble but beset by weaklings and traitors, ever-smiling unless you awaken her
inner "Mama Grizzly Bear" by scrutinizing her loved ones. No one could be more
pleased with her than she is with herself. Reading the book is like watching
Palin preen in front of a mirror for hours as she tirelessly compliments herself
for courage, gumption, devotion to family and maverick independence.
Who needs policy? In her world -- and the world of legions of conservatives who
revere her -- the persona is the policy. Palin is beloved because she's
(supposedly) just like ordinary people, which (supposedly) gives her a profound
understanding of their needs.
That attitude used to be associated with the left, which claimed to speak for
the ordinary folks who get shafted by the system. Logic and evidence about
policy, to many liberals, were less important than empathy and good intentions.
Now it's conservatives who think we should be guided by our guts, not our
brains.
Palin is the embodiment of this approach, never imagining that knowledge and
reflection might be of more value than instinct. When Oprah asked if she had
felt any doubts about her readiness to be vice president -- which requires the
readiness to be president -- Palin replied breezily, "No, no -- I didn't blink.
I felt quite confident in my abilities, in my executive experience, knowing that
this is an executive administrative job." (The audience tittered.)
Contrast that with Reagan, who after learning of his victory on election night
1980 told his supporters, "There's never been a more humbling moment in my
life." Palin doesn't do humble.
You could almost forget that for well over a year,
Republicans have ridiculed
Barack Obama as lighter than a souffle, an inexperienced upstart who owes
everything to arrogant presumption and a carefully crafted image. But Obama
wrote a 375-page book, "The Audacity of Hope," that shows a solid, and
occasionally tedious, grasp of issues.
It is hard to imagine Palin (as opposed to a ghostwriter) producing anything
comparable. Almost as hard as it is to imagine that modern conservatives would
expect it.
Dec 21, 2009 Chicago Tribune -- It seems inevitable and permanent now, as much a
fixture in the American mind as McDonald's or Time magazine.
But YouTube, it is easy to forget, did not exist when the current decade opened.
It didn't exist in 2001 or 2002. There was no YouTube in 2003 or 2004, either.
Not until "Me at the zoo," a video of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front
of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, was posted in April 2005, was there, really,
a YouTube.
Yet despite being around for fewer than half of the last 10 years, the
video-sharing service is the decade's most influential popular-culture force on
the Internet.
From Karim talking about the length of the elephants' trunks in the
still-available 19-second clip, it has spearheaded the widespread availability
of video on the Web, everything from golf's Masters tournament, live, to
brand-new episodes of popular sitcoms such as "30 Rock" in the same week they
aired on TV. These developments, of course, threaten traditional and
long-standing delivery systems.
YouTube became the clearinghouse for the short, shared, "viral" videos that were
key to making Internet culture into mainstream culture, and started to play a
role in politics, especially in the 2008 presidential campaign.
It developed as a kind of chaotic library, a go-to reference resource for people
seeking video of musical artists, old cigarette commercials or the latest news
sensation.
And it has championed the decade's DIY aesthetic: Skip the professionals, was
YouTube's implicit message. Shoot your own video. Upload it here, fast and easy.
And in the end, it doesn't matter so much if your backyard trampoline-stunt
footage (ouch!) isn't great art; what matters is the validation it seems to get
by being hosted on an external site.
With YouTube, if you wanted your friends to watch what you made, you didn't have
to drag them into your living room and plug the camcorder into the TV. You just
sent them a link, and they watched it at the same Web site that also has
professional material by TV stars. The site echoed similar revolutions happening
in writing, as blogs came to prominence, and in photography, where people shared
photos on sites including Flickr. But with YouTube, it was even more so, because
the bar to getting videos shown in public had been higher.
Professional creators of content tried to fight YouTube for a while, policing
their copyrights zealously and seeking takedowns whenever possible. But
eventually, they decided they'd rather switch than fight. Deals were struck, and
the providers who didn't form their own YouTube channels to show highlights (as
CBS, for one, does) offered the equivalent of YouTube clips and much more on
their own sites or on professional aggregators, led by iTunes, from Apple, by
Netflix, the DVD-by-mail service increasingly serving films as video streams,
and by Hulu, a project of General Electric Co. (NBC), News Corp. (Fox) and,
later, Disney (ABC).
YouTube created the expectation among consumers that video would be available
online, on-demand, freed of the boundaries of network schedule or DVD.
It got so big, so fast that Google was moved to buy the service for $1.65
billion in late 2006, an admission that Google's own stab at a video-upload
site, Google Videos, had lost.
It was quite a climb for the service that began with a founder at the zoo. Karim,
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had met while working at PayPal, the Web-based
money-transfer service. Chen was a graduate of the Illinois Mathematics and
Science Academy, in the western suburb of Aurora, and, like Karim, had studied
computer science at the University of Illinois.
But even as YouTube has become a ubiquitous brand, virtually the synonym for
Web-based video, it hasn't yet proved that it can translate its traffic -- it is
ranked among the top 5 Web sites -- into revenue. The site has struggled to
integrate advertising in a manner that won't alienate customers, who value it
for instant accessibility and the lack of clutter.
And indeed, Hulu, which might be termed a professional version of YouTube, has
announced that it will, next year, begin charging its users.
But the battle of getting people to pay for content on the Web -- or of getting
content to pay for itself via ads -- is a, and possibly the, question for the
next decade.
To be
“philosophical” about something, in common parlance, is to face it calmly,
without irrational anxiety. And the paradigm of a thing to be philosophical
about is death. Here Socrates is held to be the model. Sentenced to die by an
Athenian court on the charge of impiety, he serenely drank the fatal cup of
hemlock. Death, he told his friends, might be annihilation, in which case it is
like a long, dreamless slumber; or it might be a migration of the soul from one
place to another. Either way, it is nothing to be feared.
From "The Book of Dead Philosophers"
Cicero
said that to philosophize is to learn how to die — a pithy statement, but a
misleading one. There is more to philosophizing than that. Broadly speaking,
philosophy has three concerns: how the world hangs together, how our beliefs can
be justified, and how to live. Arguably, learning how to die fits under the
third of these. If you wanted to get rhetorically elastic about it, you might
even say that by learning how to die we learn how to live.
That
thought is more or less the inspiration behind Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead
Philosophers (Vintage, paper, $15.95). What defines bourgeois life in the West
today is our pervasive dread of death — so claims Critchley, a philosophy
professor at the
New School in New York. (He wrote this book,
he tells us more than once, on a hill overlooking Los Angeles — which, because
of “its peculiar terror of annihilation,” is “surely a candidate city for the
world capital of death.”) As long as we are afraid of death, Critchley thinks,
we cannot really be happy. And one way to overcome this fear is by looking to
the example of philosophers. “I want to defend the ideal of the philosophical
death,” Critchley writes.
So he
takes us on a breezy and often entertaining tour through the history of
philosophy, looking at how 190 or so philosophers from ancient times to the
present lived and died. Not all of the deaths recounted are as edifying as
Socrates’. Plato, for example, may have died of a lice infestation. The
Enlightenment thinker La Mettrie seemed to have expired after eating a quantity
of truffle pâté. Several deaths are precipitated by collisions: Montaigne’s
brother was killed by a tennis ball; Rousseau died of cerebral bleeding,
possibly as a result of being knocked down by a galloping Great Dane; and Roland
Barthes was blindsided by a dry-cleaning truck. The American pragmatist John
Dewey, who lived into his 90s, came to the most banal end of all: he broke his
hip and then succumbed to pneumonia.
Critchley
has a mischievous sense of humor, and he certainly does not shrink from the
embodied nature of his subjects. There is arch merrymaking over beans
(Pythagoras and Empedocles proscribed them) and flatulence (Metrocles became
suicidally distraught over a bean-related gaseous indiscretion during a lecture
rehearsal). We are told of Marx’s genital carbuncles, Nietzsche’s syphilitic
coprophagy and Freud’s cancerous cheek growth, so malodorous that it repelled
his favorite dog, a chow. There are Woody Allenish moments, as when the moribund
Democritus “ordered many hot loaves of bread to be brought to his house. By
applying these to his nostrils he somehow managed to postpone his death.” And
there are last words, the best of which belong to Heinrich Heine: “God will
pardon me. It’s his métier.”
How are we
to cultivate the wisdom necessary to confront death? It’s hard to find a
consistent message here. Montaigne trained for the end by keeping death
“continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth.” Spinoza
went to the contrary extreme, declaring, “A free man thinks least of all of
death.” Dying philosophically means dying cheerfully — that is what one would
presume from the examples cited in this book. The beau ideal is David Hume, who,
when asked whether the thought of annihilation terrified him, calmly replied,
“Not the least.”
The idea
that death is not such a bad thing may be liberating, but is it true? Ancient
philosophers tended to think so, and Critchley (along with Hume) finds their
attitude congenial. He writes, “The philosopher looks death in the face and has
the strength to say that it is nothing.”
There are
three classic arguments, all derived from Epicurus and his follower Lucretius,
that it is irrational to fear death. If death is annihilation, the first one
goes, then there are no nasty post-death experiences to worry about. As Epicurus
put it, where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. The second says it
does not matter whether you die young or old, for in either case you’ll be dead
for an eternity. The third points out that your nonexistence after your death is
merely the mirror image of your nonexistence before your birth. Why should you
be any more disturbed by the one than by the other? These arguments are invoked
in Critchley’s book, but their logic goes unexamined. Unfortunately, all three
are pretty lousy. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his 1970 essay
“Death,” showed what was wrong with the first. Just because you don’t experience
something as nasty, or indeed experience it at all, doesn’t mean it’s not bad
for you. Suppose, Nagel says, an intelligent person has a brain injury that
reduces him to the mental condition of a contented baby. Certainly this would be
a grave misfortune for the person. Then is not the same true for death, where
the loss is still more severe?
The second
argument is just as poor. It implies that John Keats’s demise at 25 was no more
unfortunate than Tolstoy’s at 82, since both will be dead for an eternity
anyway. The odd thing about this argument, as the (dead) English philosopher
Bernard Williams noticed, is that it contradicts the first one. True, the amount
of time you’re around to enjoy the goods of life doesn’t mathematically reduce
the eternity of your death. But the amount of time you’re dead matters only if
there’s something undesirable about being dead.
The third
argument, that your posthumous nonexistence is no more to be feared than your
prenatal nonexistence, also fails. As Nagel observed, there is an important
asymmetry between the two abysses that temporally flank your life. The time
after you die is time of which your death deprives you. You might have lived
longer. But you could not possibly have existed in the time before your birth.
Had you been conceived earlier than you actually were, you would have had a
different genetic identity. In other words, you would not be you.
Cultivating indifference to death is not only philosophically unsound. It can be
morally dangerous. If my own death is nothing, then why get worked up over the
deaths of others? The barrenness of the Epicurean attitude — enjoy life from
moment to moment and don’t worry about death — is epitomized by George
Santayana, one of Critchley’s exemplary dead philosophers. After resigning from
Harvard, Santayana lived in Rome, where he was discovered by American soldiers
after the liberation of Italy in 1944. Asked his opinion of the war by a
journalist from Life magazine, Santayana fatuously replied, “I know nothing; I
live in the Eternal.”
Contrast
the example of Miguel de Unamuno, a 20th-century Spaniard inexplicably omitted
by Critchley. No one had a greater terror of death than Unamuno, who wrote that
“as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for
even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself.” In
1936, at the risk of being lynched by a Falangist mob, Unamuno publicly faced
down the pro-Franco thug Millán Astray. Placed under house arrest, Unamuno died
10 weeks later. Aptly, the Falangist battle cry Unamuno found most repellent was
“Viva la Muerte!” — long live death.
Why is the Republican Party now represented by red, when
conservative parties in all other places -- and even the United States, in the
past -- were represented with blue? Ben Zimmer
suggests (via
The Language Log) "Democrats may have wanted to appropriate the positive
connotations of blue (as in true-blue)" but I wonder whether it isn't deeper
than that. Because I recall over the years studies saying that teams that wear
red
win more
frequently. Perhaps Republicans have deliberately chosen red in order to
generate a subconscious association of themselves as winners.
That's speculation, but the association between political
advertising and psychological preference is not. A recent Fast Company post
describes the use of what they call "political neuromarketing" during the
campaign. It's not really neuro marketing as it has nothing to do with neural
connections. Rather, they "measure everything including the story line, level of
the language, images, music. Using critical point analysis, [they] identify
specifics that may drive voters away or attract them. The techniques are
non-invasive, and include measuring muscle, skin and pupil response."
The success of such techniques obviously has its implications
in political theory, but is also relevant in learning theory. The
general principle that "the brain reveals more than spoken answers to
questions" tells us that knowledge, beliefs, and other mental states are much
more fine-grained than our more traditional analyses suggest. Understanding that
learning -- and persuasion -- is not simply "words in -- words out" is the first
step toward developing a more comprehensive theory of cognition and a more
effective understanding of learning and instruction.
A recent
paper from a group of leading neuroscientists outlines the understanding of
learning beginning to take form. The survey paper brings together the results of
dozens of studies of learning and cognition. The authors write, "Neuroscientists
are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how
shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning." In some
cases, this understanding is very detailed, such as our understanding of the
function of layers of neurons in the
visual cortex. In other cases, our understanding is beginning to cover a
broad range of psychological phenomena, such as those involved in
language learning.
It is tempting to use the analogy of a computer in an effort
to understand human learning. That's why we
see sentences like "the brain is a machine with limited resources for
processing the enormous quantity of information received by the senses." But we
should not even be talking about learning in such terms. As neuro-linguists will
tell you "the brain does not store precise memories in specific locations.
Instead, the brain reaches decisions through the dynamic interaction of diverse
areas operating in functional neural circuits." The way we store, process, and
represent information in the mind is completely different from the way it is
done in a computer.
This is important because it tells us that learning is not
simply, or even primarily, a process of decoding linguistic expressions. We can
arrive at reasonable sounding generalizations about reading as
decoding -- that we need to know that letters represent sounds, say, or that
words have meanings -- but these generalizations do not lead us toward an
understanding of language learning, they lead us away from it, as they are based
on the supposition that cognition consists of word-like and meaning-like
structures, which are applied to sounds and symbols, and refer to states of
affairs in the world. But this just isn't so.
What we are in fact responding to as learners, especially at
a young age, are patterns of perception presented to us from the environment.
Children use frequency distributions, covariation and transitional
probabilities to associate spoken words with phenomena. Learning, especially in
the young, is imitative rather than analytical. Goals and objectives are
inferred from patterns of related phenomena, not a propositional awareness of
another's mental state. Phenomena are not experienced and understood in
isolation, but in context and mediated by environment, social interaction, and
previous experience.
It's a bit of an overgeneralization, but we can get at many
of the issues here by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge: one that is
personal, internal to ourselves, and is, shall we say, 'knowledge-in-the-brain',
and the other that is public or social, external to ourselves, and is, shall we
say, 'knowledge-in-the-world'. Of course there are more than just two kinds of
knowledge, but that is a discussion that can wait until later. The point here is
to establish that there is more than one type of knowledge; if we can establish
that, the rest can follow.
The distinction of these two types of knowledge refers to the
nature of the knowledge itself, not the reality that the knowledge (putatively)
describes. It is tempting to say that what we have here are two distinct
representational systems, and if that works for you that's fine. But I believe
the knowledge itself is the representational system, and so if we have
two distinct representational systems, we have two kinds of knowledge. But let's
not bog down on issues of ontology and metaphysics.
These two types of knowledge are well-established in science
and philosophy. One of the more well-recognized versions of this distinction is
articulated by Michael Polanyi (and echoed by knowledge management specialists
everywhere). Public, social or external knowledge is what we might call
'explicit' knowledge, while Polanyi called the personal or internal type of
knowledge
"tacit" knowledge. This distinction has been characterized several ways. One
way is to describe tacit knowledge as 'knowing how' while explicit knowledge is
'knowing that'. Another way is to distinguish between knowledge we can express
and knowledge we cannot express. Tacit knowledge,
argues Polanyi, is ineffable. It cannot be described. "We can know more than
we can tell."
What's important about this distinction is that it creates a
pretty clear dividing line between what we learn and what we express. The one is
very different from the other. Expressions of knowledge are essentially the
production of social artifacts -- what some would call "stigmergy"
-- in order to coordinate activities with other people in the world. The results
of this coordination constitute the rules of grammar, the laws of nature, etc.,
"the patterns of categories contain, theories, methods, feelings, values and
skills which can be used in a fashion that the tradition judges are valid."
These are phenomena, which can be learned, but the knowledge they express is
expressed externally to the self.
What we learn, even when we learn from texts and
documents, is distinct from the knowledge expressed in the texts themselves.
Polanyi
writes, "when I receive Information by reading a letter and when I ponder
the message of the letter I am subsidiarily aware not only of its text, but also
of all the past occasions by which I have come to understand the words of the
text, and the whole range of this subsidiary awareness is presented focally in
terms of the message. This message or meaning on which attention is now focused
is not something tangible; it is the conception evoked by the text." The text
says one thing, but when we read, we think of (and learn about) whatever is (in
ourselves) evoked by the text.
When we learn, we do not merely assimilate; we do not simply
undertake a mechanical process of decoding meaning from printed or spoken text.
"Our knowledge of the things denoted by words will have been largely acquired by
experience in the same way as animals come to know things, while the words will
have acquired their meaning by previously designating such experience, either
when uttered by others in our presence or when used by ourselves." This
knowledge is not merely subsymbolic, it is distinct from the knowledge
contained in the symbols. A doctor's knowledge of medicine is distinct from his
or her knowledge of the words describing medicine. "While the correct use of
medical terms cannot be achieved in itself, without the knowledge of medicine a
great deal of medicine can be remembered even after on has forgotten the use of
medical terms."
Tacit knowledge is learned using the visual cortex, cerebral
cortex, and the rest of the neural network that constitutes our brain and
nervous system. Knowledge, seen from this perspective, is not words and
sentences or even pictures and icons, but sets of connections, layered over and
over on each other, a fine mesh, a deep tapestry incredibly richer and more
complex than any abstraction such as spoken language could express. As Nonaka
and von Krogh
summarize, "tacit knowledge is acquired with little or no direct
instruction, it is procedural, and above all, practically useful." And while
"locked away in people's neural networks," tacit knowledge expresses itself in
our actions, our responses, and our expressions.
As Ryle said, "[T]o believe that the ice is thin is to be unhesitant in
telling oneself and others that it is thin, in acquiescing in other people's
assertions to that effect, in objecting to statements to the contrary, in
drawing consequences from the original proposition and so forth. But it is also
to be prone to skate warily, to shudder, to dwell in imagination on possible
disasters, and to warn other skaters. It is not only a propensity to make
certain theoretical moves, but to make certain executive and imaginative moves,
as well as to have certain feelings."
This is an ability we share with animals, including some
(like some primates) who can learn primitive languages, and others, like birds
and cats (who cannot). And as Jeffrey Klugman
recently wrote in Time, animals can learn a wide range of things
once thought unique to humans. We've known for some time that animals can use
tools, and have evidence of vocabulary and language in primates. But animals can
also plan, work cooperatively, count numbers, have emotions, have empathy for
others, and have a sense of self. And while humans may have specialized
mechaisms for some functions (such as
Broca's area for language) the mechanisms that produce this knowledge are
low-level; for example, in problem-solving, "While the specialized cells in each
section of mammalian basal ganglia do equally specialized work, the
undifferentiated ones in birds' brains multitask, doing all those jobs at once."
Two different types of knowledge. Two different sets of
skills. If we want people to socialize, to conform, to follow rules, we'll focus
on the repetition of the symbols and codes that constitute explicit knowledge,
to have them become expert in what Wittgenstein called "language
games," the public performance of language. But if we want people to
learn, then we need to focus on the subsymbolic, the concepts, skills,
procedures and other bits of tacit knowledge that underlie, and give rise to,
the social conventions. We cannot simply learn the words. "A great deal of
medicine can be remembered even after one has forgotten the use of medical
terms."
Or, to put the same point more bluntly, we can teach to
support learning, or we can teach to support the production of social artifacts.
We can teach the subject, or we can teach superficial behaviours. And as
Tom Hoffman notes, those who have deeper knowledge, a greater base of
expertise, will tend to produce "deep learning" in a discipline, while the less
experience teachers will "teach to the test." And though students of the less
experienced teachers had better test scores, students who learned from more
experienced instructors performed better in subsequent courses. Hoffman cites
scientific evidence but the same thing was said, many years earlier, by
John Holt, who observed that in a traditional classroom, children learn to
play the system, "to manipulate teachers to gain clues about what the
teacher really wants. Through the teacher's body language, facial expressions
and other clues, they learn what might be the right answer. They mumble,
straddle the answer, get the teacher to answer their own question, and take wild
guesses while waiting to see what happens."
If we really want to know what students learn, we need to
take into account a much wider range of phenomena than how they behave in
response to the production of artifacts. Perhaps it's a bit much to measure
their pupil dilation, eye gaze, brain activity, blinking, breathing and body
temperature, as
neuromarketers do. But it shouldn't be too much to expect to be able to map
their social and search activity in a learning community,
as Google does.
And when we teach, we may not need to take into account
everything about the message, the way a
political campaign might. We may not, as political consultant
Darryl Howard does, "measure everything including the story line, level of
the language, images, music." But we should understand, as educators, that
learning is much more than mere presentation of facts, that students
are learning from everything that goes on around them, and that even if
we are not teaching this way, someone -- with perhaps less honorable
motives -- is doing it.
One
evening near Christmas in 1955, my grandfather, former
President Harry S. Truman, came home to find my grandmother, Bess, sitting
in front of a roaring fire, tossing in bundles of letters she'd written to him.
"Bess," he
said, stopping her. "What are you doing? Think of history."
"Oh, I
have," she said, and tossed in another bundle.
As a
result of the conflagration, the Truman Presidential Library in Independence,
Mo., which has 1,316 letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother, has only
184 of the 1,300 or so she wrote to him. They were found, shortly before her
death in 1982, stuffed into the backs of drawers and between the pages of books.
Ten of the
letters were put on limited display at the Truman Library in 1998. The rest have
never before been made public. I have collected them in a book, "Dear Harry,
Love Bess," pairing each with a letter of my grandfather's to her.
Because
the few escaped the flames, we know that at 10:20 p.m. on the evening of July
16, 1923, my 38-year-old grandmother was in bed, lonely and unprotected, waging
war on the local insect population.
"There was
a big black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it
myself," she wrote indignantly.
That
morning, my grandfather had taken off for the summer encampment of the
Missouri National Guard, something he did annually. In fact, most of their
letters from 1923 to 1933 were written back and forth between Independence and
places like Fort Leavenworth, Fort Riley, and Camp Ripley.
Grandpa,
who from 1922 to 1934 was a county administrator (they called them judges) under
constant stress, viewed these encampments as vacations. My grandmother was more
interested in the results of his annual physical.
In 1923,
when he reported he'd stood a perfect physical exam, all she wanted to know was
what the camp doctor said about his tonsils.
"Bet he
didn't even look at them," she grumbled.
And she
didn't want him recreating too boldly. In 1925, when Grandpa wrote that the camp
pool was so cold "Minnesota
lakes have nothing on it," her reply contained a tersely worded postscript: "Be
careful of the pool — don't try any deep water swimming, please!"
Worried as
she was about him, she had her own health woes. In 1923, it was a trio of
infected teeth, the worst of which took her dentist more than an hour to
extract.
"He was as
worn out as I was," she wrote. "But it (the tooth) isn't bothering me much now.
He had to give me so many hypodermics, my head feels funny."
Grandpa,
needless to say, was horrified, fuming that he surely felt "like busting a
dentist I know of."
In the
summer of 1925, she twisted her ankle. She doesn't say how, but I like to think
that my mother, who was then about 18 months old, had something to do with it.
She certainly made writing difficult.
"She is
pulling and slapping me and is on my back at present (I'm sitting on the floor)
so if you can read this scrawl you are doing pretty well," my grandmother wrote,
or tried to write. "I can't write any more — she is yanking the paper out of my
hands now."
But these
trials were nothing compared to trying to get Grandpa to let her cut her hair
short, as was the style in the mid-1920s. He liked the long, "golden curls"
she'd worn since age 5, when he'd first laid eyes on her. She, on the other
hand, felt they made her "conspicuous." They had a face-to-face about it before
he left for camp in 1925 then continued the fracas through the mail for two
weeks.
"Come on,
be a sport," she cajoled near the end. "Ask all the married men in camp about
their wives' heads and I'll bet anything I have there isn't one under 60 who has
long hair."
Grandpa
finally relented, saying, "I've never been right sure you weren't kidding me
anyway. You usually do as you like about things, and that's what I want you to
do."
Fights
were rare. She was more likely to tease him. When he reported that the camp
showers were several blocks away, she wrote back: "Don't you want your bath
slippers? I should think you'd need them traveling down the street to your bath
every morning."
The
impishness extended to her neighbors the Swifts. When they rose at 5 a.m. to
leave on vacation, she watched them, because, she wrote, "I wouldn't have missed
seeing Mrs. Swift in knickers for a hundred dollars."
Mostly,
though, she and Grandpa worked hard at the simple act of communicating. They
wrote as often as twice a day. If one of them missed a letter, the excuse was
either very detailed … or, in her case, interesting.
"It was so
blazing hot last night I didn't have the nerve to keep on enough clothes so I
could have a light long enough to write a letter."
But they
rarely missed a chance to express their love for one another.
"Lots and
lots of love and please keep on loving me as hard as ever," she wrote in July
1925. "You know I just feel as if a large part of me has been gone for the last
10 days."
Clifton
Truman Daniel, the author of "Dear Harry, Love Bess," is director of public
relations at Harry S. Truman College.
I remembet the first time the concept of another world entered my mind. It
was during a walk with my father in our garden in Sri Lanka. He pointed to the
Moon and told me that people had walked on it. I was astonished: Suddenly that
bright light became a place that one could visit.
Schoolchildren may feel a similar sense of wonder when they see pictures of a
Martian landscape or Saturn’s rings. And soon their views of alien worlds may
not be confined to the planets in our own solar system.
After millenniums of musings and a century of failed attempts,
astronomers first detected an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a normal star
other than the Sun, in 1995. Now they are finding hundreds of such worlds each
year. Last month, NASA announced that
1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a
space satellite. Six of the planets that Kepler found circle one star, and the
orbits of five of them would fit within that of Mercury, the closest planet to
our Sun.
By timing the passages of these five planets across their sun’s visage —
which provides confirmation of their planetary nature — we can witness their
graceful dance with one another, choreographed by gravity. These discoveries
remind us that nature is often richer and more wondrous than our imagination.
The diversity of alien worlds has surprised us and challenged our preconceptions
many times over.
It is quite a change from merely 20 years ago, when we knew for sure of just
one planetary system: ours. The pace of discovery, supported by new instruments
and missions and innovative strategies by planet seekers, has been astounding.
What’s more, from measurements of their masses and sizes, we can infer what
some of these worlds are made of: gases, ice or rocks. Astronomers have been
able to take the temperature of planets around other stars, first with
telescopes in space but more recently with ground-based instruments, as my
collaborators and I have done.
Two and a half years ago, we even managed to capture
the first direct pictures of alien worlds. There is something about a photo
of an alien planet — even if it only appears as a faint dot next to a bright,
overexposed star — that makes it “real.” Given that stars shine like floodlights
next to the planetary embers huddled around them, success required painstaking
efforts and clever innovations. One essential tool is adaptive optics
technology, which, in effect, takes the twinkle out of the stars, thus providing
sharper images from telescopes on the ground than would otherwise be possible.
At the crux of this grand pursuit is one basic question: Is our warm, wet,
rocky world, teeming with life, the exception or the norm? It is an important
question for every one of us, not just for scientists. It seems absurd, if not
arrogant, to think that ours is the only life-bearing world in the galaxy, given
hundreds of billions of other suns, the apparent ubiquity of planets, and the
cosmic abundance of life’s ingredients. It may be that life is fairly common,
but that “intelligent” life is rare.
Of course, the vast majority of the extra-solar worlds discovered to date are
quite unlike our own: many are gas giants, and some are boiling hot while others
endure everlasting chills. Just a handful are close in size to our planet, and
only a few of those may be rocky like the Earth, rather than gaseous like
Jupiter or icy like Neptune.
But within the next few years, astronomers expect to find dozens of alien
earths that are roughly the size of our planet. Some of them will likely be in
the so-called habitable zone, where the temperatures are just right for liquid
water. The discovery of “Earth twins,” with conditions similar to what we find
here, will inevitably bring questions about alien life to the forefront.
Detecting signs of life elsewhere will not be easy, but it may well occur in
my lifetime, if not during the next decade. Given the daunting distances between
the stars, the real-life version will almost certainly be a lot less sensational
than the movies depicting alien invasions or crash-landing spaceships.
The evidence may be circumstantial at first — say, spectral bar codes of
interesting molecules like oxygen, ozone, methane and water — and leave room for
alternative interpretations. It may take years of additional data-gathering, and
perhaps the construction of new telescopes, to satisfy our doubts. Besides, we
won’t know whether such “biosignatures” are an indication of slime or
civilization. Most people will likely move on to other, more immediate concerns
of life here on Earth while scientists get down to work.
If, on the other hand, an alien radio signal were to be detected, that would
constitute a more clear-cut and exciting moment. Even if the contents of the
message remained elusive for decades, we would know that there was someone
“intelligent” at the other end. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence
with radio telescopes has come of age recently,
50 years after the first feeble attempt. The construction of the
Allen Telescope Array on an arid plateau in northern California greatly
expands the number of star systems from which astronomers could detect signals.
However it arrives, the first definitive evidence of life elsewhere will mark
a turning point in our intellectual history, perhaps only rivaled by
Copernicus’s heliocentric theory or Darwin’s theory of evolution. If life can
spring up on two planets independently, why not on a thousand or even a billion
others? The ramifications of finding out for sure that ours isn’t the only
inhabited world are likely to be felt, over time, in many areas of human thought
and endeavor — from biology and philosophy to religion and art.
Some people worry that discovering life elsewhere, especially if it turns out
to be in possession of incredible technology, will make us feel small and
insignificant. They seem concerned that it will constitute a horrific blow to
our collective ego.
I happen to be an optimist. It may take decades after the initial indications
of alien life for scientists to gather enough evidence to be certain or to
decipher a signal of artificial origin. The full ramifications of the discovery
may not be felt for generations, giving us plenty of time to get used to the
presence of our galactic neighbors. Besides, knowing that we are not alone just
might be the kick in the pants we need to grow up as a species.
Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University
of Toronto, is the author of “Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets
and Life Beyond Our Solar System.”
A
generation of young Americans slammed the door Monday on the great big boogeyman
of their childhoods with an epic woot-woot and rounds and rounds of “U.S.A.!”
At the
news of
Osama bin Laden’s death, thousands of people
— most of them college-age and in requisite flip-floppy collegiate gear —
whipped up a raucous celebration right outside the White House gates that was
one part Mardi Gras and two parts Bon Jovi concert.
There were
cigars, a few beers, a lacrosse-stick-turned-flagpole waved by a kid who just
climbed a statue, joining others aloft in trees and atop lampposts. Well past
midnight, cars zipped up and down the streets of downtown Washington with women
standing up through sunroofs waving ginormous American flags and guys blowing
vuvuzelas, spring break style.
It felt a
little crazy, a bit much. Almost vulgar.
Because
meanwhile, across the river, at the Pentagon, in the ghostly quiet of lights at
the Sept. 11 memorial, a military veteran silently wept.
And many
others cried, too, sickened by the death toll, the enormity of almost 10 years
of fear, death and terror.
The death
of bin Laden will be a grief-tinged, complicated event for many Americans. I
immediately saw the mixed reactions of my peers on Twitter and Facebook. Folks
who lost close friends or family in the Sept. 11 attacks orchestrated by bin
Laden or the war on error that followed had a rush of new emotions and raw pain
at the news of even more bloodshed.
Is it
over? Everything better now that they got him? Not really.
When I saw
that folks were celebrating in the streets at the news of bin Laden’s death, my
first reaction was a cringe. Remember how we all felt watching videos of Muslims
dancing in celebration on Sept. 11, 2001?
Are we
simply creating star-spangled recruitment tapes for a new generation of
terrorists killing in the name of their new martyr?
So a
jacket went over my pajamas, shoes went on my feet and off I went to see the
macabre jubilee downtown.
One of the
first people I met was Mohsen Farshneshani, who was fist-pumping in a U.S.A.
chant amid a huge crush of college kids.
“When 9/11
happened, I was in fourth grade. It changed everything,” said Farshneshani, a
19-year-old freshman at the University of Maryland. “The way people treated me,
my family, the mean things everyone began saying to us.”
A Muslim
who grew up in Olney, Farshneshani watched his religion get hijacked by the man
he often blamed it all on: bin Laden.
He
remembers a “perfect” life in third grade, when he had non-Muslim friends and it
seemed as though no one cared that he practiced a different faith.
After bin
Laden’s attacks, there was a seismic shift. The kids still willing to come on
play dates were suddenly accompanied by their parents. At his birthday party, he
watched parents sneak around the house, poking their heads into different rooms,
looking, presumably, for those suspicious signs of terrorist activity the
government — via highway signs and billboards — repeatedly asked us all to
report.
So in the
wee hours of Monday morning, with the biggest boogeyman of his young life gone,
Farshneshani felt like everything might change.
“This is a
new opportunity for Muslims, and a great victory,” Farshneshani said.
He’s part
of a color-coded terror alert generation, the kids who open their backpacks at
museums and libraries and take off their shoes at airports without being asked
because that’s what you do, right?
Their
daily news has been body counts and deployments. Their Halloween candy goes to
soldiers; their fundraisers are for injured veterans. They are the ones who saw,
way earlier than any child should, their parents cry and freak and crumble on
that day in September 2001.
For Sarah
Powers, 19, the specter of Osama bin Laden as ultimate bad guy was there for her
entire young life.
“I
remember sitting in the classroom, watching the TV that day, 9/11, and how
scared everyone was,” said Powers, a freshman at George Mason University. “We
grew up with war. That’s most of what we know, being in a country that’s at war.
To be here tonight, when they got him. Wow.”
Yes, they
deserve a night of wow, a confetti-in-the-streets moment of victory, a V-Day.
Because
after this, it’s probably going to stay very, very complicated.
In
October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the
pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the
economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that
there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as
“average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.
In fact,
they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest.
And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter;
tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of
time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1
percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put
together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each
passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their
hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost
exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The
analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for
this state of affairs: plutonomy.
In a
plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and
largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice
before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case,
the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global
integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial
innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those
previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around,
they wouldn’t keep on climbing. “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms
of its entrepreneur-plutocrats,” the report said. The “great complexity” of a
global economy in rapid transformation would be “exploited best by the rich and
educated” of our time.
Kapur and
his co-authors were wrong in some of their specific predictions about the
plutonomy’s ramifications—they argued, for instance, that since spending was
dominated by the rich, and since the rich had very healthy balance sheets, the
odds of a stock-market downturn were slight, despite the rising indebtedness of
the “average” U.S. consumer. And their division of America into only two classes
is ultimately too simple. Nonetheless, their overall characterization of the
economy remains resonant. According to Gallup, from May 2009 to May 2011, daily
consumer spending rose by 16 percent among Americans earning more than $90,000 a
year; among all other Americans, spending was completely flat. The consumer
recovery, such as it is, appears to be driven by the affluent, not by the
masses. Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are
putting the recession behind them. The rest of America is stuck in neutral or
reverse.
Income
inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it
didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available,
it widened a little. The top 1 percent of earners did see their incomes drop
more than those of other Americans in 2008. But that fall was due almost
entirely to the stock-market crash, and with it a 50 percent reduction in
realized capital gains. Excluding capital gains, top earners saw their share of
national income rise even in 2008. And in any case, the stock market has since
rallied. Corporate profits have marched smartly upward, quarter after quarter,
since the beginning of 2009.
Even in
the financial sector, high earners have come back strong. In 2009, the country’s
top 25 hedge-fund managers earned $25 billion among them—more than they had made
in 2007, before the crash. And while the crisis may have begun with mass layoffs
on Wall Street, the financial industry has remained well shielded compared with
other sectors; from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2010,
finance shed 8 percent of its jobs, compared with 27 percent in construction and
17 percent in manufacturing. Throughout the recession, the unemployment rate in
finance and insurance has been substantially below that of the nation overall.
It’s hard
to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of
people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat
nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon
Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both
primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of
this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by
contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the
national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school
diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a
professional degree.
Housing
crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas
like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring
middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional
class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient
cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in
comparison. And indeed, because the stock market has rebounded while housing
values have not, the middle class as a whole has seen more of its wealth erased
than the rich, who hold more-diverse portfolios. A 2010 Pew study showed that
the typical middle-class family had lost 23 percent of its wealth since the
recession began, versus just 12 percent in the upper class.
The ease
with which the rich and well educated have shrugged off the recession shouldn’t
be surprising; strong winds have been at their backs for many years. The
recession, meanwhile, has restrained wage growth and enabled faster
restructuring and offshoring, leaving many corporations with lower production
costs and higher profits—and their executives with higher pay.
Anthony
Atkinson, an economist at Oxford University, has studied how several recent
financial crises affected income distribution—and found that in their wake, the
rich have usually strengthened their economic position. Atkinson examined the
financial crises that swept Asia in the 1990s as well as those that afflicted
several Nordic countries in the same decade. In most cases, he says, the middle
class suffered depressed income for a long time after the crisis, while the top
1 percent were able to protect themselves—using their cash reserves to buy up
assets very cheaply once the market crashed, and emerging from crisis with a
significantly higher share of assets and income than they’d had before. “I think
we’ve seen the same thing, to some extent, in the United States” since the 2008
crash, he told me. “Mr. Buffet has been investing.”
“The rich
seem to be on the road to recovery,” says Emmanuel Saez, an economist at
Berkeley, while those in the middle, especially those who’ve lost their jobs,
“might be permanently hit.” Coming out of the deep recession of the early 1980s,
Saez notes, “you saw an increase in inequality … as the rich bounced back, and
unionized labor never again found jobs that paid as well as the ones they’d had.
And now I fear we’re going to see the same phenomenon, but more dramatic.”
Middle-paying jobs in the U.S., in which some workers have been overpaid
relative to the cost of labor overseas or technological substitution, “are being
wiped out. And what will be left is a hard and a pure market,” with the many
paid less than before, and the few paid even better—a plutonomy strengthened in
the crucible of the post-crash years.
The
Culling of the Middle Class
One of the
most salient features of severe downturns is that they tend to accelerate deep
economic shifts that are already under way. Declining industries and companies
fail, spurring workers and capital toward rising sectors; declining cities
shrink faster, leaving blight; workers whose roles have been partly usurped by
technology are pushed out en masse and never asked to return. Some economists
have argued that in one sense, periods like these do nations a service by
clearing the way for new innovation, more-efficient production, and faster
growth. Whether or not that’s true, they typically allow us to see, with rare
and brutal clarity, where society is heading—and what sorts of people and places
it is leaving behind.
Arguably,
the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of
generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners
and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class. Median incomes
declined outright from 1999 to 2009. For most of the aughts, that trend was
masked by the housing bubble, which allowed working-class and middle-class
families to raise their standard of living despite income stagnation or downward
job mobility. But that fig leaf has since blown away. And the recession has
pressed hard on the broad center of American society.
“The Great
Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the trend toward
employment polarization” in the United States, wrote the MIT economist David
Autor in a 2010 white paper. Job losses have been “far more severe in
middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill,
white-collar jobs or in low-skill service occupations.” Indeed, from 2007
through 2009, total employment in professional, managerial, and highly skilled
technical positions was essentially unchanged. Jobs in low-skill service
occupations such as food preparation, personal care, and house cleaning were
also fairly stable. Overwhelmingly, the recession has destroyed the jobs in
between. Almost one of every 12 white-collar jobs in sales, administrative
support, and nonmanagerial office work vanished in the first two years of the
recession; one of every six blue-collar jobs in production, craft, repair, and
machine operation did the same.
Autor
isolates the winnowing of middle-skill, middle-class jobs as one of several
labor-market developments that are profoundly reshaping U.S. society. The others
are rising pay at the top, falling wages for the less educated, and “lagging
labor market gains for males.” “All,” he writes, “predate the Great Recession.
But the available data suggest that the Great Recession has reinforced these
trends.”
For more
than 30 years, the American economy has been in the midst of a sea change,
shifting from industry to services and information, and integrating itself far
more tightly into a single, global market for goods, labor, and capital. To some
degree, this transformation has felt disruptive all along. But the pace of the
change has quickened since the turn of the millennium, and even more so since
the crash. Companies have figured out how to harness exponential increases in
computing power better and faster. Global supply chains, meanwhile, have grown
both tighter and more supple since the late 1990s—the result of improving
information technology and of freer trade—making routine work easier to
relocate. And of course China, India, and other developing countries have fully
emerged as economic powerhouses, capable of producing large volumes of
high-value goods and services.
Some parts
of America’s transformation may now be nearing completion. For decades,
manufacturing has become continually less important to the economy, as other
business sectors have grown. But the popular narrative—rapid decline in the
1970s and ’80s, followed by slow erosion thereafter—isn’t quite right, at least
as far as employment goes. In fact, the total number of people employed in
industry remained quite stable from the late 1960s through about 2000, at
roughly 17 million to 19 million. To be sure, manufacturing wasn’t providing
many new jobs for a growing population, but for decades, rising output
essentially offset the impact of labor-saving technology and offshoring.
But since
2000, U.S. manufacturing has shed about a third of its jobs. Some of that
decline reflects losses to China. Still, industry isn’t about to vanish from
America, any more than agriculture did as the number of farm workers plummeted
during the 20th century. As of 2010, the United States was the second-largest
manufacturer in the world, and the No. 3 agricultural nation. But agriculture is
now so mechanized that only about 2 percent of American workers make a living as
farmers. American manufacturing looks to be heading down the same path.
Meanwhile,
another phase of the economy’s transformation—one more squarely involving the
white-collar workforce—is really just beginning. “The thing about information
technology,” Autor told me, “is that it’s extremely broadly applicable, it’s
getting cheaper all the time, and we’re getting better and better at it.”
Computer software can now do boilerplate legal work, for instance, and make a
first pass at reading X-rays and other medical scans. Likewise, thanks to
technology, we can now easily have those scans read and interpreted by
professionals half a world away.
In 2007,
the economist Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve,
estimated that between 22 and 29 percent of all jobs in the United States had
the potential to be moved overseas within the next couple of decades. With the
recession, the offshoring of jobs only seems to have gained steam. The financial
crisis of 2008 was global, but job losses hit America especially hard. According
to the International Monetary Fund, one of every four jobs lost worldwide was
lost in the United States. And while unemployment remains high in America, it
has come back down to (or below) pre-recession levels in countries like China
and Brazil.
Anxiety
Creeps Upward
Over time,
both trade and technology have increased the number of low-cost substitutes for
American workers with only moderate cognitive or manual skills—people who
perform routine tasks such as product assembly, process monitoring, record
keeping, basic information brokering, simple software coding, and so on. As
machines and low-paid foreign workers have taken on these functions, the skills
associated with them have become less valuable, and workers lacking higher
education have suffered.
For the
most part, these same forces have been a boon, so far, to Americans who have a
good education and exceptional creative talents or analytic skills. Information
technology has complemented the work of people who do complex research,
sophisticated analysis, high-end deal-making, and many forms of design and
artistic creation, rather than replacing that work. And global integration has
meant wider markets for new American products and high-value services—and higher
incomes for the people who create or provide them.
The return
on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income
stratification. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution
has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s
income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains
have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of
national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. Nearly 2
million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them
only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the
super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a
natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are
creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that’s not
even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the
political influence that great wealth brings.
Recently,
as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people
to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the
United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and
post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral
[degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time,
including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done
so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing
beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good,
the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial
or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized,
hard-to-find skills.”
College
graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and
trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of
college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value
of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the
causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage
loss that it used to be.”
Without
doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, on
a relative basis, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high.
But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree
have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts, incomes for college graduates
barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a
sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing badly,” says
Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on
inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”
America’s
classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away
from everyone else. Below it, suspended, sits what might be thought of as the
professional middle class—unexceptional college graduates for whom the arrow of
fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and
postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so.
The professional middle class has grown anxious since the crash, and not without
reason. Yet these anxieties should not distract us from a second, more
important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and
everyone else.
If you
live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or
Washington, D.C., it is easy to forget that nationwide, even among people ages
25 to 34, college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And
it is easy to forget that a family income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you
in the 80th income percentile nationally. The true center of American society
has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to
get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as
manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this
vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward.
The Bottom
70 Percent
The
troubles of the nonprofessional middle class are inseparable from the economic
troubles of men. Consistently, men without higher education have been the
biggest losers in the economy’s long transformation (according to Michael
Greenstone, an economist at MIT, real median wages of men have fallen by 32
percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have washed
out of the workforce altogether). And the struggles of men have amplified the
many problems—not just economic, but social and cultural—facing the country
today.
Just as
the housing bubble papered over the troubles of the middle class, it also hid,
for a time, the declining prospects of many men. According to the Harvard
economist Lawrence Katz, since the mid-1980s, the labor market has been placing
a higher premium on creative, analytic, and interpersonal skills, and the wages
of men without a college degree have been under particular pressure. “And I
think this downturn exacerbates” the problem, Katz told me. During the aughts,
construction provided an outlet for the young men who would have gone into
manufacturing a generation ago. Men without higher education “didn’t do as badly
as you might have expected, on long-run trends, because of the housing bubble.”
But it’s hard to imagine another such construction boom coming to their rescue.
One of the
great puzzles of the past 30 years has been the way that men, as a group, have
responded to the declining market for blue-collar jobs. Opportunities have
expanded for college graduates over that span, and for nongraduates, jobs have
proliferated within the service sector (at wages ranging from rock-bottom to
middling). Yet in the main, men have pursued neither higher education nor
service jobs. The proportion of young men with a bachelor’s degree today is
about the same as it was in 1980. And as the sociologists Maria Charles and
David Grusky noted in their 2004 book, Occupational Ghettos, while men
and women now mix more easily on different rungs of the career ladder, many
industries and occupations have remained astonishingly segregated, with men
continuing to seek work in a dwindling number of manual jobs, and women
“crowding into nonmanual occupations that, on average, confer more pay and
prestige.”
As
recently as 2001, U.S. manufacturing still employed about as many people as did
health and educational services combined (roughly 16 million). But since then,
those latter, female-dominated sectors have added about 4 million jobs, while
manufacturing has lost about the same number. Men made no inroads into health
care or education during the aughts; in 2009, they held only about one in four
jobs in those rising sectors, just as they had at the beginning of the decade.
They did, however, consolidate their hold on manufacturing—those dwindling jobs,
along with jobs in construction, transportation, and utilities, were more
heavily dominated by men in 2009 than they’d been nine years earlier.
“I’m
deeply concerned” about the prospects of less-skilled men, says Bruce Weinberg,
an economist at Ohio State. In 1967, 97 percent of 30-to-50-year-old American
men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were.
Declining male employment is not unique to the United States. It’s been
happening in almost all rich nations, as they’ve put the industrial age behind
them. Weinberg’s research has shown that in occupations in which “people skills”
are becoming more important, jobs are skewing toward women. And that category is
large indeed. In his working paper “People People,” Weinberg and two co-authors
found that interpersonal skills typically become more highly valued in
occupations in which computer use is prevalent and growing, and in which
teamwork is important. Both computer use and teamwork are becoming ever more
central to the American workplace, of course; the restructuring that accompanied
the Great Recession has only hastened that trend.
Needless
to say, a great many men have excellent people skills, just as a great many men
do well in school. As a group, men still make more money than women, in part due
to lingering discrimination. And many of the differences we observe between the
genders may be the result of culture rather than genetics. All of that
notwithstanding, a meaningful number of men have struggled badly as the economy
has evolved, and have shown few signs of successful adaptation. Men’s
difficulties are hardly evident in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But they’re
hard to miss in foundering blue-collar and low-end service communities across
the country. It is in these less affluent places that gender roles, family
dynamics, and community character are changing in the wake of the crash.
A Cultural
Separation
In the
March 2010 issue of this magazine,
I discussed the wide-ranging social
consequences of male economic problems, once they become chronic. Women tend not
to marry (or stay married to) jobless or economically insecure men—though they
do have children with them. And those children usually struggle when, as
typically happens, their parents separate and their lives are unsettled. The
Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has connected the loss of
manufacturing jobs from inner cities in the 1970s—and the resulting economic
struggles of inner-city men—to many of the social ills that cropped up
afterward. Those social ills eventually became self-reinforcing, passing from
one generation to the next. In less privileged parts of the country, a larger,
predominantly male underclass may now be forming, and with it, more-widespread
cultural problems.
What I
didn’t emphasize in that story is the extent to which these sorts of social
problems—the kind that can trap families and communities in a cycle of disarray
and disappointment—have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class. In a
national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist
W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school
diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have
begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,”
which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now
“increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by
financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”
“The speed
of change,” wrote Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of
moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating less than 10 years into
their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish
high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the 2000s,
the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates
in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. Between 2006 and
2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside
marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among
college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.
The same
pattern—families of middle-class nonprofessionals now resembling those of
high-school dropouts more than those of college graduates—emerges with norm
after norm: the percentage of 14-year-old girls living with both their mother
and father; the percentage of adolescents wanting to attend college “very much”;
the percentage of adolescents who say they’d be embarrassed if they got (or got
someone) pregnant; the percentage of never-married young adults using birth
control all the time.
One
stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in
blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans
who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then,
attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated
Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is
participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are
more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic
ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as
seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become
less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40
years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed
between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.
The
interplay of economic and cultural forces is complex, and changes in cultural
norms cannot be ascribed exclusively to the economy. Wilcox has tried to
statistically parse the causes of the changes he has documented, concluding that
about a third of the class-based changes in marriage patterns, for instance, are
directly attributable to wage stagnation, increased job insecurity, or bouts of
unemployment; the rest he attributes to changes in civic and religious
participation and broader changes in attitudes among the middle class.
In fact,
all of these variables seem to reinforce each other. Nonetheless, some of the
most significant cultural changes within the middle class have accelerated in
the past decade, as the prospects of the nonprofessional middle class have
dimmed. The number of couples who live together but are not married, for
instance, has been rising briskly since the 1970s, but it really took off in the
aughts—nearly doubling, from 3.8 million to 6.7 million, from 2000 to 2009. From
2009 to 2010, that number jumped by nearly a million more. In six out of 10 of
the newly cohabitating couples, at least one person was not working, a much
higher proportion than in the past.
Ultimately, the evolution of the meritocracy itself appears to be at least
partly responsible for the growing cultural gulf between highly educated
Americans and the rest of society. As the journalist Bill Bishop showed in his
2008 book, The Big Sort, American communities have become ever more
finely sorted by affluence and educational attainment over the past 30 years,
and this sorting has in turn reinforced the divergence in the personal habits
and lifestyle of Americans who lack a college degree from those of Americans who
have one. In highly educated communities, families are largely intact,
educational ideals strong, and good role models abundant. None of those things
is a given anymore in communities where college-degree attainment is low. The
natural leaders of such communities—the meritocratic winners who do well in
school, go off to selective colleges, and get their degrees—generally leave them
for good in their early 20s.
In their
2009 book, Creating an Opportunity Society, Ron Haskins and Isabel
Sawhill write that while most Americans believe that opportunity is widespread
in the United States, and that success is primarily a matter of individual
intelligence and skill, the reality is more complicated. In recent decades,
people born into the middle class have indeed moved up and down the class ladder
readily. Near the turn of the millennium, for instance, middle-aged people who’d
been born to middle-class parents had widely varied incomes. But class was
stickier among those born to parents who were either rich or poor. Thirty-nine
percent of children born to parents in the top fifth of earners stayed in that
same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 percent of those whose parents were in the
bottom fifth remained there themselves. Only 6 percent reached the top fifth:
rags-to-riches stories were extremely rare.
A thinner
middle class, in itself, means fewer stepping stones available to people born
into low-income families. If the economic and cultural trends under way continue
unabated, class mobility will likely decrease in the future, and class divides
may eventually grow beyond our ability to bridge them.
What is
most worrying is that all of the most powerful forces pushing on the
nonprofessional middle class—economic and cultural—seem to be pushing in the
same direction. We cannot know the future, and over time, some of these forces
may dissipate of their own accord. Further advances in technology may be less
punishing to middle-skill workers than recent advances have been; men may adapt
better to a post-industrial economy, as the alternative to doing so becomes more
stark; nonprofessional families may find a new stability as they accommodate
themselves to changing norms of work, income, and parental roles. Yet such
changes are unlikely to occur overnight, if they happen at all. Momentum alone
suggests years of trouble for the middle class.
Changing
the Path of the American Economy
True
recovery from the Great Recession is not simply a matter of jolting the economy
back onto its former path; it’s about changing the path. No single action or
policy prescription can fix the varied problems facing the middle class today,
but through a combination of approaches—some aimed at increasing the growth rate
of the economy itself, and some at ensuring that more people are able to benefit
from that growth—we can ameliorate them. Many of the deepest economic trends
that the recession has highlighted and temporarily sped up will take decades to
fully play out. We can adapt, but we have to start now.
The rest
of this article suggests how we might do so. The measures that I propose are not
comprehensive, nor are they without drawbacks. But they are emblematic of the
types of proposals we will need to weigh in the coming years, and of the nature
of the national conversation we need to have. That conversation must begin with
a reassessment of how globalization is affecting American society, and of what
it will take for the U.S. to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
In 2010,
the McKinsey Global Institute released a report detailing just how mighty
America’s multinational companies are—and how essential they have become to the
U.S. economy. Multinationals headquartered in the U.S. employed 19 percent of
all private-sector workers in 2007, earned 25 percent of gross private-sector
profits, and paid out 25 percent of all private-sector wages. They also
accounted for nearly three-quarters of the nation’s private-sector R&D spending.
Since 1990, they’ve been responsible for 31 percent of the growth in real GDP.
Yet for
all their outsize presence, multinationals have been puny as engines of job
creation. Over the past 20 years, they have accounted for 41 percent of all
gains in U.S. labor productivity—but just 11 percent of private-sector job
gains. And in the latter half of that period, the picture grew uglier: according
to the economist Martin Sullivan, from 1999 through 2008, U.S. multinationals
actually shrank their domestic workforce by about 1.9 million people, while
increasing foreign employment by about 2.4 million.
The heavy
footprint of multinational companies is merely one sign of how inseparable the
U.S. economy has become from the larger global economy—and these figures neatly
illustrate two larger points. First, we can’t wish away globalization or turn
our backs on trade; to try to do so would be crippling and impoverishing. And
second, although American prosperity is tied to globalization, something has
nonetheless gone wrong with the way America’s economy has evolved in response to
increasingly dense global connections.
Particularly since the 1970s, the United States has placed its bets on
continuous innovation, accepting the rapid transfer of production to other
countries as soon as goods mature and their manufacture becomes routine, all
with the idea that the creation of even newer products and services at home will
more than make up for that outflow. At times, this strategy has paid off big.
Rapid innovation in the 1990s allowed the economy to grow quickly and create
good, new jobs up and down the ladder to replace those that were becoming
obsolete or moving overseas, and enabled strong income growth for most
Americans. Yet in recent years, that process has broken down.
One
reason, writes the economist Michael Mandel, is that America no longer enjoys
the economic fruits of its innovations for as long as it used to. Knowledge,
R&D, and business know-how depreciate more quickly now than they did even 15
years ago, because global communication is faster, connections are more
seamless, and human capital is more broadly diffused than in the past.
As a
result, domestic production booms have ended sooner than they used to.
IT-hardware production, for instance, which in 1999 the Bureau of Labor
Statistics projected would create about 155,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the
following decade, actually shrank by nearly 500,000 jobs in that time. Jobs in
data processing also fell, presumably as a result of both offshoring and
technological advance. Because innovations now depreciate faster, we need more
of them than we used to in order to sustain the same rate of economic growth.
Yet in the
aughts, as an array of prominent economists and entrepreneurs have recently
pointed out, the rate of big innovations actually slowed considerably; with the
housing bubble fueling easy growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice.
This slowdown may have been merely the result of bad luck—big breakthroughs of
the sort that create whole categories of products or services are difficult to
predict, and long droughts are not unknown. Overregulation in certain areas may
also have played a role. The economist Tyler Cowen, in his recent book, The
Great Stagnation, argues that the scientific frontier itself—or at least
that portion of it leading to commercial innovation—has been moving outward more
slowly, and requiring ever more resources to do so, for many decades.
Process
innovation has been quite rapid in recent years. U.S. multinationals and other
companies are very good at continually improving their operational efficiency by
investing in information technology, restructuring operations, and shifting work
around the globe. Some of these activities benefit some U.S. workers, by making
the jobs that stay in the country more productive. But absent big breakthroughs
that lead to new products or services—and given the vast reserves of low-wage
but increasingly educated labor in China, India, and elsewhere—rising
operational efficiency hasn’t been a recipe for strong growth in either jobs or
wages in the United States.
America
has huge advantages as an innovator. Places like Silicon Valley, North
Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the Massachusetts high-tech corridor are
difficult to replicate, and the United States has many of them. Foreign students
still flock here, and foreign engineers and scientists who get their doctorates
here have been staying on for longer and longer over the past 15 years. When you
compare apples to apples, the United States still leads the world, handily, in
the number of skilled engineers, scientists, and business professionals in
residence.
But we
need to better harness those advantages to speed the pace of innovation, in part
by putting a much higher national priority on investment—rather than
consumption—in the coming years. That means, among other things, substantially
raising and broadening both national and private investment in basic scientific
progress and in later-stage R&D—through a combination of more federal investment
in scientific research, perhaps bigger tax breaks for private R&D spending, and
a much lower corporate tax rate (and a simpler corporate tax code) overall.
Edmund
Phelps and Leo Tilman, professors at Columbia University, have proposed the
creation of a National Innovation Bank that would invest in, or lend to,
innovative start-ups—bringing more money to bear than venture-capital funds
could, and at a lower cost of capital, which would promote more investment and
enable the funding of somewhat riskier ventures. The broader idea behind such a
bank is that because innovation carries so many ambient benefits—from job
creation to the experience gained by even failed entrepreneurs and the people
around them—we should be willing to fund it more liberally as a society than
private actors would individually.
Removing
bureaucratic obstacles to innovation is as important as pushing more public
funds toward it. As Wall Street has amply demonstrated, not every industry was
overregulated in the aughts. Nonetheless, the decade did see the accretion of a
number of regulatory measures that may have chilled the investment climate (the
Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reforms and a proliferation of costly security
regulations following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security are
two prominent examples).
Regulatory
balance is always difficult in practice, but Michael Mandel has suggested a
useful rule of thumb: where new and emerging industries are concerned—industries
that are at the forefront of the economy and could provide big bursts of
growth—our bias should be toward light regulation, allowing creative
experimentation and encouraging fast growth. The rapid expansion of the Internet
in the 1990s is a good example of the benefit that can come from a light
regulatory hand early in an industry’s development; green technology, wireless
platforms, and social-networking technologies are perhaps worthy of similar
treatment today.
Any
serious effort to accelerate innovation would mean taking many other actions as
well—from redoubling our commitment to improving U.S. schools, to letting in a
much larger number of creative, highly skilled immigrants each year. Few such
measures will be without costs or drawbacks. Among other problems, a mandate of
light regulation on high-potential industries requires the government to “pick
winners.” Tilting government spending toward investment and innovation probably
means tilting it away from defense and programs aimed at senior citizens. And
because the benefits of innovation diffuse more quickly now, the return on
national investment in scientific research and commercial innovation may be
lower than it was in previous decades. Despite these drawbacks and trade-offs,
the alternative to heavier investment and a higher priority on national
innovation is dismal to contemplate.
As we
strive toward faster innovation, we also need to keep the production of new,
high-value goods within American borders for a longer period of time.
Protectionist measures are generally self-defeating, and while vigilance against
the theft of intellectual property and strong sanctions when such theft is
discovered are sensible, they are unlikely to alter the basic trends of
technological and knowledge diffusion. (Much of that diffusion is entirely
legal, and the long history of industrialization and globalization suggests that
attempts to halt it will fail.) What can really matter is a fair exchange rate.
Throughout much of the aughts and continuing to the present day, China, in
particular, has taken extraordinary measures to keep its currency undervalued
relative to the dollar, and this has harmed U.S. industry. We must press China
on currency realignment, putting sanctions on the table if necessary.
Given some
of the workforce trends of the past decade, doubling down on technology,
innovation, and globalization may seem wrongheaded. And indeed, this strategy is
no cure-all. But without a vibrant, innovative economy, all other prospects dim.
For the professional middle class in particular, an uptick in innovation and a
return to faster economic growth would solve many problems, and likely reignite
income growth. While technology is eating into the work that some college
graduates do, their general skills show little sign of losing value. Recent
analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, for instance, indicates that demand
for college grads by American businesses is likely to grow quickly over the next
decade even if the economy grows very slowly; rapid economic growth would cause
demand for college grads to far exceed supply.
Still,
even in boom times, many more people than we would care to acknowledge won’t
have the education, skills, or abilities to prosper in a pure and globalized
market, shaped by enormous labor reserves in China, India, and other developing
countries. Over the next decade or more, even if national economic growth is
strong, what we do to help and support moderately educated Americans may well
determine whether the United States remains a middle-class country.
A Cultural
Separation
In the
March 2010 issue of this magazine,
I discussed the wide-ranging social
consequences of male economic problems, once they become chronic. Women tend not
to marry (or stay married to) jobless or economically insecure men—though they
do have children with them. And those children usually struggle when, as
typically happens, their parents separate and their lives are unsettled. The
Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has connected the loss of
manufacturing jobs from inner cities in the 1970s—and the resulting economic
struggles of inner-city men—to many of the social ills that cropped up
afterward. Those social ills eventually became self-reinforcing, passing from
one generation to the next. In less privileged parts of the country, a larger,
predominantly male underclass may now be forming, and with it, more-widespread
cultural problems.
What I
didn’t emphasize in that story is the extent to which these sorts of social
problems—the kind that can trap families and communities in a cycle of disarray
and disappointment—have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class. In a
national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist
W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school
diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have
begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,”
which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now
“increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by
financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”
“The speed
of change,” wrote Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of
moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating less than 10 years into
their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish
high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the 2000s,
the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates
in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. Between 2006 and
2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside
marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among
college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.
The same
pattern—families of middle-class nonprofessionals now resembling those of
high-school dropouts more than those of college graduates—emerges with norm
after norm: the percentage of 14-year-old girls living with both their mother
and father; the percentage of adolescents wanting to attend college “very much”;
the percentage of adolescents who say they’d be embarrassed if they got (or got
someone) pregnant; the percentage of never-married young adults using birth
control all the time.
One
stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in
blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans
who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then,
attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated
Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is
participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are
more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic
ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as
seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become
less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40
years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed
between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.
The
interplay of economic and cultural forces is complex, and changes in cultural
norms cannot be ascribed exclusively to the economy. Wilcox has tried to
statistically parse the causes of the changes he has documented, concluding that
about a third of the class-based changes in marriage patterns, for instance, are
directly attributable to wage stagnation, increased job insecurity, or bouts of
unemployment; the rest he attributes to changes in civic and religious
participation and broader changes in attitudes among the middle class.
In fact,
all of these variables seem to reinforce each other. Nonetheless, some of the
most significant cultural changes within the middle class have accelerated in
the past decade, as the prospects of the nonprofessional middle class have
dimmed. The number of couples who live together but are not married, for
instance, has been rising briskly since the 1970s, but it really took off in the
aughts—nearly doubling, from 3.8 million to 6.7 million, from 2000 to 2009. From
2009 to 2010, that number jumped by nearly a million more. In six out of 10 of
the newly cohabitating couples, at least one person was not working, a much
higher proportion than in the past.
Ultimately, the evolution of the meritocracy itself appears to be at least
partly responsible for the growing cultural gulf between highly educated
Americans and the rest of society. As the journalist Bill Bishop showed in his
2008 book, The Big Sort, American communities have become ever more
finely sorted by affluence and educational attainment over the past 30 years,
and this sorting has in turn reinforced the divergence in the personal habits
and lifestyle of Americans who lack a college degree from those of Americans who
have one. In highly educated communities, families are largely intact,
educational ideals strong, and good role models abundant. None of those things
is a given anymore in communities where college-degree attainment is low. The
natural leaders of such communities—the meritocratic winners who do well in
school, go off to selective colleges, and get their degrees—generally leave them
for good in their early 20s.
In their
2009 book, Creating an Opportunity Society, Ron Haskins and Isabel
Sawhill write that while most Americans believe that opportunity is widespread
in the United States, and that success is primarily a matter of individual
intelligence and skill, the reality is more complicated. In recent decades,
people born into the middle class have indeed moved up and down the class ladder
readily. Near the turn of the millennium, for instance, middle-aged people who’d
been born to middle-class parents had widely varied incomes. But class was
stickier among those born to parents who were either rich or poor. Thirty-nine
percent of children born to parents in the top fifth of earners stayed in that
same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 percent of those whose parents were in the
bottom fifth remained there themselves. Only 6 percent reached the top fifth:
rags-to-riches stories were extremely rare.
A thinner
middle class, in itself, means fewer stepping stones available to people born
into low-income families. If the economic and cultural trends under way continue
unabated, class mobility will likely decrease in the future, and class divides
may eventually grow beyond our ability to bridge them.
What is
most worrying is that all of the most powerful forces pushing on the
nonprofessional middle class—economic and cultural—seem to be pushing in the
same direction. We cannot know the future, and over time, some of these forces
may dissipate of their own accord. Further advances in technology may be less
punishing to middle-skill workers than recent advances have been; men may adapt
better to a post-industrial economy, as the alternative to doing so becomes more
stark; nonprofessional families may find a new stability as they accommodate
themselves to changing norms of work, income, and parental roles. Yet such
changes are unlikely to occur overnight, if they happen at all. Momentum alone
suggests years of trouble for the middle class.
Changing
the Path of the American Economy
True
recovery from the Great Recession is not simply a matter of jolting the economy
back onto its former path; it’s about changing the path. No single action or
policy prescription can fix the varied problems facing the middle class today,
but through a combination of approaches—some aimed at increasing the growth rate
of the economy itself, and some at ensuring that more people are able to benefit
from that growth—we can ameliorate them. Many of the deepest economic trends
that the recession has highlighted and temporarily sped up will take decades to
fully play out. We can adapt, but we have to start now.
The rest
of this article suggests how we might do so. The measures that I propose are not
comprehensive, nor are they without drawbacks. But they are emblematic of the
types of proposals we will need to weigh in the coming years, and of the nature
of the national conversation we need to have. That conversation must begin with
a reassessment of how globalization is affecting American society, and of what
it will take for the U.S. to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
In 2010,
the McKinsey Global Institute released a report detailing just how mighty
America’s multinational companies are—and how essential they have become to the
U.S. economy. Multinationals headquartered in the U.S. employed 19 percent of
all private-sector workers in 2007, earned 25 percent of gross private-sector
profits, and paid out 25 percent of all private-sector wages. They also
accounted for nearly three-quarters of the nation’s private-sector R&D spending.
Since 1990, they’ve been responsible for 31 percent of the growth in real GDP.
Yet for
all their outsize presence, multinationals have been puny as engines of job
creation. Over the past 20 years, they have accounted for 41 percent of all
gains in U.S. labor productivity—but just 11 percent of private-sector job
gains. And in the latter half of that period, the picture grew uglier: according
to the economist Martin Sullivan, from 1999 through 2008, U.S. multinationals
actually shrank their domestic workforce by about 1.9 million people, while
increasing foreign employment by about 2.4 million.
The heavy
footprint of multinational companies is merely one sign of how inseparable the
U.S. economy has become from the larger global economy—and these figures neatly
illustrate two larger points. First, we can’t wish away globalization or turn
our backs on trade; to try to do so would be crippling and impoverishing. And
second, although American prosperity is tied to globalization, something has
nonetheless gone wrong with the way America’s economy has evolved in response to
increasingly dense global connections.
Particularly since the 1970s, the United States has placed its bets on
continuous innovation, accepting the rapid transfer of production to other
countries as soon as goods mature and their manufacture becomes routine, all
with the idea that the creation of even newer products and services at home will
more than make up for that outflow. At times, this strategy has paid off big.
Rapid innovation in the 1990s allowed the economy to grow quickly and create
good, new jobs up and down the ladder to replace those that were becoming
obsolete or moving overseas, and enabled strong income growth for most
Americans. Yet in recent years, that process has broken down.
One
reason, writes the economist Michael Mandel, is that America no longer enjoys
the economic fruits of its innovations for as long as it used to. Knowledge,
R&D, and business know-how depreciate more quickly now than they did even 15
years ago, because global communication is faster, connections are more
seamless, and human capital is more broadly diffused than in the past.
As a
result, domestic production booms have ended sooner than they used to.
IT-hardware production, for instance, which in 1999 the Bureau of Labor
Statistics projected would create about 155,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the
following decade, actually shrank by nearly 500,000 jobs in that time. Jobs in
data processing also fell, presumably as a result of both offshoring and
technological advance. Because innovations now depreciate faster, we need more
of them than we used to in order to sustain the same rate of economic growth.
Yet in the
aughts, as an array of prominent economists and entrepreneurs have recently
pointed out, the rate of big innovations actually slowed considerably; with the
housing bubble fueling easy growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice.
This slowdown may have been merely the result of bad luck—big breakthroughs of
the sort that create whole categories of products or services are difficult to
predict, and long droughts are not unknown. Overregulation in certain areas may
also have played a role. The economist Tyler Cowen, in his recent book, The
Great Stagnation, argues that the scientific frontier itself—or at least
that portion of it leading to commercial innovation—has been moving outward more
slowly, and requiring ever more resources to do so, for many decades.
Process
innovation has been quite rapid in recent years. U.S. multinationals and other
companies are very good at continually improving their operational efficiency by
investing in information technology, restructuring operations, and shifting work
around the globe. Some of these activities benefit some U.S. workers, by making
the jobs that stay in the country more productive. But absent big breakthroughs
that lead to new products or services—and given the vast reserves of low-wage
but increasingly educated labor in China, India, and elsewhere—rising
operational efficiency hasn’t been a recipe for strong growth in either jobs or
wages in the United States.
America
has huge advantages as an innovator. Places like Silicon Valley, North
Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the Massachusetts high-tech corridor are
difficult to replicate, and the United States has many of them. Foreign students
still flock here, and foreign engineers and scientists who get their doctorates
here have been staying on for longer and longer over the past 15 years. When you
compare apples to apples, the United States still leads the world, handily, in
the number of skilled engineers, scientists, and business professionals in
residence.
But we
need to better harness those advantages to speed the pace of innovation, in part
by putting a much higher national priority on investment—rather than
consumption—in the coming years. That means, among other things, substantially
raising and broadening both national and private investment in basic scientific
progress and in later-stage R&D—through a combination of more federal investment
in scientific research, perhaps bigger tax breaks for private R&D spending, and
a much lower corporate tax rate (and a simpler corporate tax code) overall.
Edmund
Phelps and Leo Tilman, professors at Columbia University, have proposed the
creation of a National Innovation Bank that would invest in, or lend to,
innovative start-ups—bringing more money to bear than venture-capital funds
could, and at a lower cost of capital, which would promote more investment and
enable the funding of somewhat riskier ventures. The broader idea behind such a
bank is that because innovation carries so many ambient benefits—from job
creation to the experience gained by even failed entrepreneurs and the people
around them—we should be willing to fund it more liberally as a society than
private actors would individually.
Removing
bureaucratic obstacles to innovation is as important as pushing more public
funds toward it. As Wall Street has amply demonstrated, not every industry was
overregulated in the aughts. Nonetheless, the decade did see the accretion of a
number of regulatory measures that may have chilled the investment climate (the
Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reforms and a proliferation of costly security
regulations following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security are
two prominent examples).
Regulatory
balance is always difficult in practice, but Michael Mandel has suggested a
useful rule of thumb: where new and emerging industries are concerned—industries
that are at the forefront of the economy and could provide big bursts of
growth—our bias should be toward light regulation, allowing creative
experimentation and encouraging fast growth. The rapid expansion of the Internet
in the 1990s is a good example of the benefit that can come from a light
regulatory hand early in an industry’s development; green technology, wireless
platforms, and social-networking technologies are perhaps worthy of similar
treatment today.
Any
serious effort to accelerate innovation would mean taking many other actions as
well—from redoubling our commitment to improving U.S. schools, to letting in a
much larger number of creative, highly skilled immigrants each year. Few such
measures will be without costs or drawbacks. Among other problems, a mandate of
light regulation on high-potential industries requires the government to “pick
winners.” Tilting government spending toward investment and innovation probably
means tilting it away from defense and programs aimed at senior citizens. And
because the benefits of innovation diffuse more quickly now, the return on
national investment in scientific research and commercial innovation may be
lower than it was in previous decades. Despite these drawbacks and trade-offs,
the alternative to heavier investment and a higher priority on national
innovation is dismal to contemplate.
As we
strive toward faster innovation, we also need to keep the production of new,
high-value goods within American borders for a longer period of time.
Protectionist measures are generally self-defeating, and while vigilance against
the theft of intellectual property and strong sanctions when such theft is
discovered are sensible, they are unlikely to alter the basic trends of
technological and knowledge diffusion. (Much of that diffusion is entirely
legal, and the long history of industrialization and globalization suggests that
attempts to halt it will fail.) What can really matter is a fair exchange rate.
Throughout much of the aughts and continuing to the present day, China, in
particular, has taken extraordinary measures to keep its currency undervalued
relative to the dollar, and this has harmed U.S. industry. We must press China
on currency realignment, putting sanctions on the table if necessary.
Given some
of the workforce trends of the past decade, doubling down on technology,
innovation, and globalization may seem wrongheaded. And indeed, this strategy is
no cure-all. But without a vibrant, innovative economy, all other prospects dim.
For the professional middle class in particular, an uptick in innovation and a
return to faster economic growth would solve many problems, and likely reignite
income growth. While technology is eating into the work that some college
graduates do, their general skills show little sign of losing value. Recent
analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, for instance, indicates that demand
for college grads by American businesses is likely to grow quickly over the next
decade even if the economy grows very slowly; rapid economic growth would cause
demand for college grads to far exceed supply.
Still,
even in boom times, many more people than we would care to acknowledge won’t
have the education, skills, or abilities to prosper in a pure and globalized
market, shaped by enormous labor reserves in China, India, and other developing
countries. Over the next decade or more, even if national economic growth is
strong, what we do to help and support moderately educated Americans may well
determine whether the United States remains a middle-class country.
As the ongoing occupation of Wall Street by hundreds of
protesters enters its third week — and as protests spread to other cities
such as
Boston and
Los Angeles — demonstrators have endorsed a new slogan:
“We are the 99 percent.” This slogan refers an economic struggle between 99
percent of Americans and the richest one percent of Americans, who are
increasingly accumulating a greater share of the national wealth to the
detriment of the middle class.
It may shock you exactly how wealthy this top 1 percent
of Americans is. ThinkProgress has assembled five facts about this class of
super-rich Americans:
1. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40
Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth: As Nobel Laureate
Joseph Stiglitz points out, the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40
percent of the nation’s wealth. Sociologist William Domhoff
illustrates this wealth disparity using 2007 figures where the top 1 percent
owned 42 percent of the country’s financial wealth (total net worth minus the
value of one’s home). How much does the bottom 80 percent own? Only 7 percent:
As Stiglitz notes, this disparity is much worse than it
was in the past, as just 25 years ago the top 1 percent
owned 33 percent of national wealth.
2. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24
Percent Of National Income: While the richest 1 percent of Americans
take home almost a quarter of national income today, in 1976
they took home just 9 percent — meaning their share of the national income
pool has nearly tripled in roughly three decades.
3. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of
The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds: The Institute for Policy
Studies
illustrates this massive disparity in financial investment ownership, noting
that the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only .5 percent of these
investments:
4. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5
Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt:
Using 2007 figures, sociologist William Domhoff
points out that the top 1 percent have 5 percent of the nation’s personal
debt while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of total debt:
5. The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The
Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s: Not only are
the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans taking home a tremendous portion of the
national income, but their share of this income is greater than at any other
time since the Great Depression, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
illustrates in this chart using 2007 data:
As Professor Elizabeth Warren has explained, “there is
nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody…Part of the
underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the
next kid who comes along.” More and more often, that is not occurring, giving
the protesters ample reason to take to the streets.
Michael Cannell is the author of the forthcoming book “The Limit: Life
and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit.”
FIFTY years ago, Phil Hill became the first American to win theFormula
Oneworld championship. It
was a jaw-dropping achievement for a driver who began as a lowly mechanic in
Santa Monica, Calif. More impressive still, Hill won racing’s highest laurel
at a time when European motor sports killed about a third of its drivers. In
the days before seat belts and roll bars, race-car drivers were crushed,
burned and beheaded with unnerving regularity.
A half-century later, those fiery deaths seem like ancient atrocities. Our
risk-averse culture abides no such carnage. Drivers now wear flameproof
coveralls and ride in seemingly impregnable steel cages. More than a decade
passes between Grand Prix deaths.
In fact, we all benefit from the modern-day fixation on safety. Ours is a
world of encyclopedic warning labels and four-wheel stability control guided
by gyroscopic sensors. Even warfare is increasingly waged with computer
viruses, drones and other remote gadgetry.
There is no cause to sentimentalize the days before seat belts or
passenger-side air bags, and car racing’s popularity has hardly suffered
from the arrival of safety features — though what was once a raw sport of
nerves is now largely a technology contest. For some, that seems reason for
regret.
One wonders if we live less fully by marginalizing physical courage, both in
our own lives and in the sports we follow. Do we deprive ourselves of some
Nietzschean invigoration, not to mention the tingling pleasures of
precariousness, by relegating risk to the realm of video games?
There may indeed be a downside to the cocoon of security. Why else would we
continue to court risk in outdoor adventure and sports? Professional
football and other mainstream sports have laudably taken steps to minimize
the dangers of concussions and other injuries, but the rising cult of
extreme sports and the hairy shenanigans of the “Jackass” franchise come to
mind as examples of a grass-roots culture that romances risk in defiance of
conventional thinking. We might decry recklessness, but we respond with
swells of emotion to spectacular air-show crashes, not to mention adventure
tales like “The Perfect Storm” and “Into Thin Air.” We hate risk, except
when we love it.
The drivers of the 1950s entertained no such conflict. They had a tolerance
for bloodshed that seems unfathomable to us now. They crashed so routinely
that the two-time world champion Alberto Ascari deliberately spurned his
children to spare their feelings. “I don’t want them to get too fond of me,”
he said. “One of these days I may not come back and they will suffer less if
I have kept them a bit at arm’s length.” Sure enough, in 1955 Ascari flipped
his Ferrari and died during a practice lap in Monza, Italy.
The British drivers in particular carried themselves with the forbearance of
Spitfire pilots. In interviews, they voiced familiar platitudes about peril
concentrating one’s mind on the here and now. “The very uncertainty sharpens
the appetite,” said Colin Chapman, a driver who founded Lotus, the British
race-car manufacturer. “The danger makes the value of life all the more
appreciable.”
Hill was a voice of dissent. He broke with the stoic code by talking
candidly, and volubly, about the foolishness of driving at 170 m.p.h. with
no safety features aside from hay bales. Tetchy and high-strung, he paced
the pits chain-smoking and wiping and re-wiping his goggles. One reporter
called him “Hamlet in goggles and gloves.”
Hill’s Ferrari teammate and rival for the 1961 championship, Count Wolfgang
von Trips, voiced the opposite view: he believed that racing fulfilled an
inborn need for physical tests. If drivers died in pursuit of the flag, so
be it. In his opinion, the fight ennobled the spirit and strengthened a new
generation of leaders to face the challenges of the nuclear age. Racing, he
said, was “beautiful and necessary.” Von Trips somersaulted off the track
and died in the penultimate Grand Prix of the 1961 season, the same race in
which Hill clinched the championship.
We might relegate the back-and-forth debate waged by Hill and von Trips to
history, but it bears on our current preoccupation with safety, and the
backlash against it. Von Trips contended that facing danger fortifies our
inner life, a sentiment that may hold as true today as it did when the two
men dueled in racing’s bloodiest seasons. “Only those who do not move do not
die,” the French driver Jean Behra said in 1957. “But are they not already
dead?”
Life, I found myself thinking as a
line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed
a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the
University of California, Berkeley
,
is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men,
except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look
severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved
hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the
movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.
The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the
Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing
that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to
stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November
night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray
granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in
the basement, the campus police department.
It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off
the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American
universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and
self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent
undergraduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There
is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr.
Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at
heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”
Earlier that day a colleague
had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down
the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I
didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when
we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I
hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and
how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was
trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to
protect the students.
Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed
their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of
military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy
clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the
first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real
cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were
about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was
speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and
explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when
one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and
knocked her down.
Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30
years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to
see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking
people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned.
Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years
earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the
property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule
that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature
to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s
going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.”
But it took far fewer than 50 years.
My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over
her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the
cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began
to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to
see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly
shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they
assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same
indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their
ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their
spines.
None of the police officers invited us
to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d
wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what
was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.”
I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just
knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had
pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled
them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their
heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs
twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their
truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get
people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and
reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their
way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again
immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no
one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was
surging as much as mine.
My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day
and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of
mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t
slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a
kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me
hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave
much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a
poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste
Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair
when she presented herself for arrest.
I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in
California is under great stress and the State Legislature is
paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they
don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at
Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like
$16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started
inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.
“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs,
and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to
the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the
greatest systems of public education in the world.
The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled
the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one
from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat
poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in
force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would
be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and
the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward
sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air
was full of balloons,
helium balloons
to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite
string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost
lyrical, occupying the air.
“‘Why are there beings at all
instead of nothing?’.... we must avoid emphasizing any particular,
individual being, not even focusing on the human being. For what is
this being, after all! Let us consider the Earth in the dark immensity
of space in the universe. We can compare it to a tiny grain of sand;
more than a kilometer of emptiness extends between it and the next
grain of its size; on the surface of this tiny grain of sand lives a
stupified swarm of supposedly clever animals, climbing all over each
other, who for a brief moment have invented knowledge. And what is a
human lifespan amidst millions of years? Barely a move on the second
hand, a breath.” —Martin Heidegger,
Introduction to Metaphysics
“Then the Lord spoke to Job out of
the storm. He said: ‘Who is this that obscures my plans with words
without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and
you shall answer me.” Job 38:1-3
A mother points at the sky and tells her child, “That’s where God
lives.” The camera pauses briefly on the top floor of the house and on
the moon just above it in the cosmic distance. The heavens are quiet
and dark, offering no trace of the Supreme Being who purportedly calls
them home. The mother speaks with conviction, with faith, but in this
quiet, fleeting moment, she and her child seem to be alone in the
universe, planted on their small piece of earth.
Terrence Malick’s divisive Palme d’Or winner
The Tree of Life—mesmerizing,
rhapsodic, infuriating, breathtaking, thrilling, sometimes silly,
often moving, and always challenging—consists of what feels like
hundreds of moments like these, mini-vignettes of great intimacy and
grand ambition, some interrogating the meaning of life, the universe,
and everything, some ostensibly reaffirming spiritual beliefs that
have been passed down in evolving forms by theologians and
philosophers across millennia. These scenes are fragments, glimpses,
suggestions of suggestions of big thoughts and big questions, filtered
through the perspective of one man, Jack (Sean Penn), who looks back
from a point of ambiguous crisis on both his own childhood and his
place in the grand cosmic order. But before it gets to the business of
this exhilarating and confounding spiritual journey,
The Tree of Life begins with a
death.
A woman (Jessica Chastain) answers a knock at her door. She accepts
a telegram that informs her that her son has died (at the age of 19,
we later discover). We never learn the circumstances surrounding the
death, but it serves as the existential and emotional trauma, the
rupture, that sets The Tree of Life
in motion. The dead man is Jack’s younger brother. Malick shows us the
mother and father (Brad Pitt), each processing their agonizing grief,
then flashes forward to the present to the middle-aged Jack, now
apparently a successful architect. Whether Jack’s spiritual crisis is
a direct consequence of his brother’s death or not, Malick implies a
connection between his present state and this shattering event long
past. The death of a young person has an arbitrariness to it that can
shake those touched by it irrevocably; it’s a reminder that we’re not
promised anything in this life, even existence.
From his obtuse depiction of Jack’s existential torment, Malick
makes his way back to the very beginning of the universe, then takes
us through the age of the dinosaurs, to Jack’s birth and childhood,
all the way up to his adolescence. As this synopsis should make clear,
The Tree of Life is, indeed,
narrative cinema (and its story is apparently largely
autobiographical), but the movie demonstrates scant interest in
traditional filmic storytelling. Malick has pushed his narrative
approach to its most extreme point. He weaves into and out of scenes
or, rather, moments, building not storylines but movements. The camera
is never where you expect it to be and almost constantly in motion
(the steadicam- and handheld-heavy cinematography by the great
Emmanuel Lubezki, achieved with natural lighting, is nothing short of
astonishing). Scenes end abruptly with unexpected fades. The music,
including Alexandre Desplat’s original score and an array of classical
and operatic pieces, propels us forward, and, in fact, the movie has
an almost musical quality in its rhythm and pacing. As narrative
cinema, The Tree of Life can be
seen as an experiment in radical subjectivity: Malick doesn’t just
show us Jack’s point-of-view; he immerses us within his conflict of
spirit—through his kaleidoscopic and elliptical depiction of Jack’s
early life, Malick retraces the moments of Jack’s spiritual and moral
“becoming.” Psychology and incident are peripheral to this project,
and to criticize Malick for his opaque characterizations and his
disinterest in narrative cause-and-effect—as some already have—is to
quite miss the point of the form and object of Malick’s filmmaking:
though the comparison is something of a reach, it’s akin to lobbing
the same criticisms at Faulkner or Joyce.
It’s no surprise that a movie this ambitious and this difficult has
been met, its Cannes victory notwithstanding, with varying degrees of
praise and hostility, but I am surprised by how quick many have been
(particularly those who fall somewhere in the middle) to complain that
the film is “flawed” or “imperfect.” Let’s set aside the question of
what constitutes a “perfect film”—as if some such a Platonic ideal
existed. An assertion of The Tree of
Life’s “flaws” insinuates that Malick’s project isn’t worthwhile
(fine, if you wish) or that The Tree of
Life somehow falls short at what it sets out to do. This dubious
latter argument, however, fails after we more rigorously and
thoroughly investigate the philosophy underlying Malick’s filmmaking.
*****
One needn’t read the Book of Job or Heidegger or St. Thomas Aquinas
or Thomas à Kempis to “get” The Tree of
Life—movies can and should be taken on their own terms, and this
one is a singular, immersive, and fully gratifying aesthetic
experience for anyone open to it. But there is no doubt that Malick’s
movie engages, explicitly and directly, with philosophical and
theological questions raised by these sources, and that the rich
intellectual tradition on which he draws for this film merits some
consideration. The movie has already been rejected as “hollow,”
“kitsch,” “simplistic,” and “confused, amorphous, cosmic,
furry-headed” by critics who find it somehow philosophically
inadequate, but these charges aren’t supported with evidence that the
critics in question have taken Malick’s ideas seriously enough even to
reject them: Malick brings a command of centuries of thought to the
table and in some corners has been met with curt dismissal.
The movie begins with a passage from Job: “Where were you when I
laid the foundations of the Earth?” The quote sets up the celestial
creation story to follow, but few have remarked on its broader
context. The Book of Job occupies a unique position in the study of
theodicy—the question of why, if God is good, evil should exist in the
world. Job endures all kinds of earthly torment, and when he finally
confronts his maker, his God, embodied as a wind storm, denies him the
right to question His authority. Instead, God asserts that Job, in his
ignorance as a mere human, has no ground on which to ask what he asks,
to seek meaning in his suffering. It’s one of the more harrowing
moments in all of the Judeo-Christian scriptures: God argues that we,
as humans, will always live in ignorance of why bad things happen to
us in this life.
Given its highly religious overtones and the clear reference to
scripture at the movie’s outset, it may initially seem curious that
The Tree of Life doesn’t factor
God into its depiction of the creation—but given its indebtedness to
Job and Malick’s particular expertise in Heidegger, the Big
Bang-to-dinosaur sequence makes a bit more sense. Martin Heidegger,
whom Malick translated as a young philosopher, advanced a metaphysics
that rejected over 2,000 years of philosophical thought. For the
German scholar, the study of “Being” required, among other things, a
deferral of theology (faith, in Heidegger’s view, made the question of
why “Beings” exist too easy, and, therefore, effectively negated the
value of philosophy altogether). The God of
The Tree of Life, if He exists, is
passive, indifferent. He leaves us—with our finite and limited
understanding—to make sense of the violent and chaotic world He has
created. A dinosaur rests with a gaping, perhaps mortal wound. Why?
Another dinosaur places his foot on the head of potential prey, then
decides to move on. Why? An asteroid plummets onto the Earth, killing
most of its creatures. Why? A 19-year-old man dies, leaving his family
to mourn the loss. Why? This “why” question may be the most essential
in all of human thought, and if Malick is too ambitious for evoking
it, I’m not sure what we otherwise expect art to ask.
Jack’s mother draws a distinction between the “way of nature” and
the “way of grace.” The dichotomy is central to the history of
Christian theology—one finds it in St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,
and the monk Thomas à Kempis, though Malick’s version appears to be
most indebted to the latter—and it instantiates a different attitude
towards metaphysics than that espoused by Heidegger. Jack’s mother
begins with an assumption of faith, with a belief that human “nature”
is somehow perfectible through “grace,” that we can put aside the
difficulties, setbacks, and violence that are natural to us and
somehow live as models of a divine ideal. Many have assumed that she
is merely a stand-in for Malick. The filmmaker has clearly created a
character who attempts to reconcile one of the great philosophical
quandaries of Western thought. One critic has even gone so far as to
dismiss Malick’s presentation of this millennial struggle between
nature and grace as “intellectual nonsense.” Regardless of the
worthiness of this theological debate, I am not convinced that Malick
follows Jack’s mother in asserting a fundamental conflict between
nature and grace. In The Tree of Life,
Jack seems, finally, to live, and to lose himself, within a
contradiction: he seeks grace, even though he realizes that we are all
doomed, naturally, to suffer—to live and to die without ever knowing
what the point of it all is. In the meantime, we have beautiful,
thrilling, and difficult movies like this to remind us how important
it is to seek answers to unanswerable questions, to look for solutions
to unsolvable problems, to make sense of this sad, frustrating, and
altogether wonderful life we all live.
Despite his multiple influences, it’s clear, from his film’s
opening citation, that Malick’s central reference is Job. This is
confirmed by what seems to be the longest extended piece of dialogue
in the film, a sermon delivered by a preacher about a passage from the
book to a congregation that includes Jack’s family. He reminds his
listeners that none of them is immune from suffering, that each of
them will one day face death. Certainly, I know less than Malick does
about Job, Heidegger, and Thomas à Kempis, but in this moment, despite
my comparative ignorance, his movie made perfect sense to me.
The Tree of Life ends with an
adult Jack walking with his mother, father, and countless others on a
beach. They contemplate the seemingly infinite sea, even as they are
aware of their own limits, the finitude of the shore. There is the
known, and there is the unknown. It is the purpose of art to explore
both, to put them in dialogue. I don’t think
The Tree of Life ends with
answers. Rather, it mines contradictions—between nature and grace, God
and man, being and not being, the infinite and the mortal—and it ends
by saying that we are all Job, both required and doomed to contemplate
what it means to be and what that
means for how we should live.
SOLITUDE is out of
fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to
an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and
achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work
in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people
skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem
with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more
creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And
the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often
introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to
exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and
individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
One explanation for these findings is that
introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst
to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed,
introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the
tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and
sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting
quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking
glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his
head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William
Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange
seas of Thought, alone.”)
Solitude has long been associated with
creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work
is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is
the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings
profound insights back to the community.
Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by
charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process.
Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a
profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr.
Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial
figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard,
Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal
computer.
Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes
the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly
computer. This seems a distant dream — most computers are still the
size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a
simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer
Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called
the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work
on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he
unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak
wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to
co-found Apple Computer.
The story of Apple’s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr.
Wozniak wouldn’t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred
spirits of Homebrew. And he’d never have started Apple without Mr.
Jobs.
But it’s also a story of solo spirit. If you
look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of
creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all
by himself.
Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak
offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are
like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In
fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone
.... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take.
That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken
our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who
has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked
an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another
real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers
now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices,
in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades,
the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300
square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in
2010.
Our schools have also been transformed by
the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly
arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even
subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee
projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City,
students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless
every member of the group had the very same question.
The New Groupthink also shapes some of our
most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature
extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity,
from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers
to join in. They also emphasize a theatrical style of worship — loving
Jesus out loud, for all the congregation to see. “Often the role of a
pastor seems closer to that of church cruise director than to the
traditional roles of spiritual friend and counselor,” said Adam
McHugh, an evangelical pastor and author of “Introverts in the
Church.”
SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun,
stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and
build trust.
But it’s one thing to associate with a group
in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle;
it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls
conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of
co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile,
insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high
blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work
is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to
finish it.
Many introverts seem to know this
instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone
Entertainment, a video game development company in Emeryville, Calif.,
initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game
developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. “It was one
big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could
see each other,” recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. “We
switched over to cubicles and were worried about it — you’d think in a
creative environment that people would hate that. But it turns out
they prefer having nooks and crannies they can hide away in and just
be away from everybody.”
Privacy also makes us productive. In a
fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom
DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer
programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same
companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an
enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished
programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience
or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom
from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best
performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with
only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the
worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were
often interrupted needlessly.
Solitude can even help us learn. According
to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson,
the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most
demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is
alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the
part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be
the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one
generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”
Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one
of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of
a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed
that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace
brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative
results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote.
“One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56
ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more
blankets.”
But decades of research show that
individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality
and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size
increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people
must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational
psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated
people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or
efficiency is the highest priority.”
The reasons brainstorming fails are
instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend
to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic
others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to
peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found
that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the
amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of
rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”
The one important exception to this dismal
record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform
individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of
the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the
Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust
called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,”
and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be
alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.
MY point is not that man is an island. Life
is meaningless without love, trust and friendship.
And I’m not suggesting that we abolish
teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic
work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals.
(Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate
universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems
we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex
than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders
if we can possibly hope to solve them.
But even if the problems are different,
human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory
impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and
autonomy.
To harness the energy that fuels both these
drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more
nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should
encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to
disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be
alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also
to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must
recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and
privacy to do their best work.
Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he
designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because
HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and
2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could
socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was
how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the
ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly
dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into
his cubicle to get the real work done.
Susan Cain is the author
of the forthcoming book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World
That Can’t Stop Talking.”
David
Macias has five personal electronic devices: a laptop, smartphone,
e-reader and not one but two iPods — one for his car, one for workouts
at the gym.
"I have trouble sleeping sometimes," the 19-year-old college freshman
said while taking a break from watching a movie on his laptop in the
College Of DuPage cafeteria. Macias said he sleeps with his cellphone,
which wakes him when he receives a text.
"It's crazy," said Macias, of Aurora. "I've got to turn it off."
Macias and others his age and younger are a growing concern because of
their "hyperconnectivity." The word describes the constant connection
to electronic devices as practiced by many of the so-called
millennials, the generation born from 1981 to 2000 who came of age in
the new millennium.
But a Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday shows that 55
percent of Internet experts and scholars believe that electronically
connected youth "will be nimble analysts and decision makers" who
benefit from the practice. Slightly more than 40 percent of those same
experts had the opposite perception, contending that hyperconnected
young people cannot retain information, are too distracted, and lack
"deep-thinking capabilities" and "face-to-face social skills."
Of course, both sides are hedging their predictions, saying that a
combination of the scenarios is a more likely outcome.
Which is how Macias sees it.
"It could be positive because life becomes easier," Macias said, "but
negative because it makes you do less work."
The survey, taken Aug. 28 through Oct. 31, asked 1,021 "technology
stakeholders and critics" to chose one of two scenarios for the year
2020 — generally positive or generally negative outcomes from
hyperconnectivity. Respondents were asked to explain their choices.
Some of the highlights:
— Optimists say data will be retrieved almost effortlessly for young
and old.
— Pessimists argue that entertainment will trump knowledge and
education; that the "compulsive nature of modern media" is similar to
substance addiction.
— Optimists contend that widespread connectivity has produced "supertaskers"
capable of handling several complicated tasks well.
— Pessimists believe that multitasking actually decreases productivity
and that "shallow choices," impatience,
sleep deprivation and "stagnation
in innovation" could be common outcomes of a hyperconnected future.
"Each side is right to a certain extent," said co-author Janna Quitney
Anderson, an associate professor of communications and director of the
Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in Elon, N.C.
"We hope that the optimists end up being more right than the
pessimists."
Suze Weinstein would count herself among the optimists.
Weinstein, 23, from Naperville, owns a smartphone, e-reader, laptop
and
iPod. She had a second iPod until
it was stolen. At home, she exercises with the direction of her
Nintendo Wii and plays video games
on an
Xbox.
"I'm a big believer," Weinstein said before entering class at College
of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, where she's studying in the medical assistant
program. "I'm connected all the time."
Weinstein estimated that 60 percent of her connected time is spent
texting or talking on the cellphone to communicate with employees —
one of her three jobs is manager of a jewelry store — friends or
family. Another 30 percent of her time is spent on
Facebook and Twitter, again mostly
related to her jobs, she said.
And 10 percent of
her time on electronic devices is "personal, chitchatting with
friends" or shopping online, Weinstein added.
Her electronic connections help her keep up with old friends, said
Weinstein, who has moved eight times.
Whether it's good for
the brain "depends on how long you're staring at the computer,"
Weinstein said. "If you're playing six hours of video games, that's
ridiculous."
Children definitely can benefit from electronic connectedness, said
Weinstein, who is working as a nanny to 3-, 4- and 5-year-old girls.
The children have access to the e-world, which has taught the
3-year-old how to add, point out colors and patterns, and solve
problems, she said. The child also knows her ABCs, Weinstein said, and
can speak a few words of Spanish.
For people Weinstein's age, she said, hyperconnectivity allows them
easily to access and act on news and information from across the
world. As an example, Weinstein noted how quickly resources arrived in
Haiti after the catastrophic
earthquake in 2010.
At least two respondents in the survey shared Weinstein's perspective.
Frank Odasz, a consultant from Dillon, Mont., saidthe digital
tools are accelerating intelligence, which should lead to a dramatic
increase in "expansive thinking and public problem solving."
Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications
services at
Harvard University, said the
technological evolution has taken young people "out of the business of
memorizing facts and rules, and into the business of applying those
facts and rules to complex problems."
But one anonymous respondent to the survey noted that accelerated
intelligence might yield hyperconnected millennials who would be
"missing the sheer joy of play, of conversation, or quiet,
contemplative moments."
Weinstein's friend Brittany Hyman was raised with strict limits on her
screen time and she said she appreciates it today.
Hyman, 21, of West Chicago, ditched her Facebook page about two weeks
ago. She joked that she "was spending too much useless time not
getting updates."
And even though she bought a laptop and iPod about six months ago, she
declines to use an e-reader she received for Christmas. Hyman said
people who spend too much time staring at screens miss "so many other
things you could be doing" and could hurt their social skills.
Hyperconnectivity "definitely helps in terms of sharing information
farther and faster than you normally would," she said. "But for the
most part, if you can't keep it under control, then it controls you."
Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial
crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He
showed us how Goldman Sachs, that "great vampire squid", played a
central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other
big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the
American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes
that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and
how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't
prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in
his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long
Con That is Breaking America, due out from Spiegel & Grau on November
2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped
country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters
at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated
sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.
In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in
the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something
called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that
swims around the world in search of things to buy.
Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of
the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash
repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues
generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the
central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to
accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency,
most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge
long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund
on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty
times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major
regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF
is.
My buddy was a young guy who'd come up working on the derivatives desk
of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few
years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the
Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend
their oil billions.
Aside from the hot weather, it wasn't such a bad gig. But on one of
his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work
had gotten a little, well, weird.
"I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were
trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had
a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had
for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."
I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"
He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you
know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you
know about this?"
As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through,
only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just
like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking
meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi
Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.
There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A
stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville,
Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a
whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either
already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or
more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks
at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget
year.
America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the
buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil
bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other
investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline
over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their
excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar
Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's
SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered
by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his
business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up
by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the
right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays
what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of
the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes
increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And
since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to
the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall.
Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle
East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states
who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost
frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the
country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.
When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of
your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road
that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of
thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains
— when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight
off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on
in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new
stage in your societal development.
You know how you used to have a job, and a house, and a car, and a
wife and a family, and there was food in the fridge — and now you're
six months into a drug habit and you're carrying toasters and TVs out
the front door every morning just to raise the cash to make it through
that day? That's where we are. While a lot of this book is about how
American banks used bubble schemes to strip the last meat off the
bones of America's postwar golden years, the cruelest joke is that
American banks now don't even have the buying power needed to finish
the job of stripping the country completely clean.
For that last stage we have to look overseas, to more cash-rich
countries we now literally have to beg to take our national monuments
off our hands at huge discounts, just so that our states don't fall
one by one in a domino rush of defaults and bankruptcies. In other
words, we're being colonized — of course it's happening in a clever
way, with very careful paperwork, so we have the option of pretending
that it's not actually happening, right up until the bitter end.
Let's go back in time, to the early seventies. It's 1973, and Richard
Nixon's White House makes the fateful decision to resupply the
Israelis with military equipment during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
This pisses off most of the oil-producing Arab states, and as a
result, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC
— a cartel that at the time included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE,
Libya, Iraq, and Iran, among others — decided to make a move.
For the second time in six years, they instituted an embargo of oil to
the United States, and eventually to any country that supported
Israel. The embargo included not only bans of exports to the targeted
countries, but an overall cut in oil production.
The effect of the 1973 oil embargo was dramatic. OPEC effectively
quadrupled prices in a very short period of time, from around three
dollars a barrel in October 1973 (the beginning of the boycott) to
more than twelve dollars by early 1974. The United States was in the
middle of its own stock market disaster at the time, caused in part by
the dissolution of the Bretton Woods agreement (the core of which was
Nixon's decision to abandon the gold standard, an interesting story in
its own right). In retrospect we ought to have known we were in
trouble earlier that year because on January 7, 1973, then–private
economist Alan Greenspan told the New York Times, "It is very rare
that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can be now." Four days
later, on January 11, the stock market crash of 1973–74 began. Over
the course of the next two years or so, the NYSE would lose about 45
percent of its value.
So we're in this bad spot anyway, in the middle of a long period of
decline, when on October 6 Egypt and Syria launch an attack on the
territories Israel had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. The attack
takes place on the Yom Kippur holiday and the war would become known
as the Yom Kippur War.
Six days later, on October 12, Nixon institutes Operation Nickel
Grass, a series of airlifts of weapons and other supplies into Israel.
This naturally pisses off the Arab nations, which retort with the
start of the oil embargo on October 17.
Oil prices skyrocketed, and without making a judgment about who was
right or wrong in the Yom Kippur War, it's important to point out that
it only took about two months from the start of the embargo for Nixon
and Kissinger to go from bluster and escalation to almost-total
surrender.
On January 18, 1974, Kissinger negotiated an Israeli withdrawal from
parts of the Sinai. By May, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Golan
Heights.
This is from the U.S. State Department's own write-up of the episode:
Implementation of the embargo, and the changing nature of oil
contracts, set off an upward spiral in oil prices that had global
implications. The price of oil per barrel doubled, then quadrupled,
leading to increased costs for consumers world-wide and to the
potential for budgetary collapse in less stable economies . . . The
United States, which faced growing oil consumption and dwindling
domestic reserves and was more reliant on imported oil than ever
before, had to negotiate an end to the embargo from a weaker
international position. To complicate the situation, Arab oil
producers had linked an end to the embargo to successful U.S. efforts
to create peace in the Middle East.
Hilariously, the OPEC states didn't drop the prices back to old levels
after the American surrender in the Yom Kippur episode, but just kept
them flat at a now escalated price. Prices skyrocketed again during
the Carter administration and the turmoil of the deposition of the
shah of Iran, leading to the infamous "energy crisis" with its long
gas lines that some of us are old enough to remember very well.
Then, after that period, the United States and the Arab world
negotiated an uneasy détente that left oil prices at a relatively
steady rate for most of the next twenty-five years or so.
So now it's 2004. The United States and George W. Bush have just done
an interesting thing, going off the map to launch a lunatic invasion
of Iraq in a move that destabilizes the entire region, again pissing
off pretty much all the oil-rich Arab nationalist regimes in the
Middle East, including the Saudi despots — although, on the other
hand, fuck them.
The price of oil pushes above forty dollars a barrel that year and
begins a steep ascent. It's also around then that the phenomenon of
the sovereign wealth fund began to evolve rapidly. According to the
Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute:
Since 2005, at least 17 sovereign wealth funds have been created. As
other countries grow their currency reserves, they will seek greater
returns. Their growth has also been skyrocketed by rising commodity
prices, especially oil and gas, especially between the years
2003–2008.
Dr. Gal Luft, director of a think tank called the Institute for the
Analysis of Global Security, would later testify before the House
Foreign Affairs Committee about the rise of the SWFs. This is what he
told the committee on May 21, 2008:
The rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWF) as new power brokers in the
world economy should not be looked at as a singular phenomenon but
rather as part of what can be defined a new economic world order. This
new order has been enabled by several megatrends which operate in a
self-reinforcing manner, among them the meteoric rise of developing
Asia, accelerated globalization, the rapid flow of information and the
sharp increase in the price of oil by a delta of over $100 per barrel
in just six years which has enabled Russia and OPEC members to
accumulate unprecedented wealth and elevate themselves to the position
of supreme economic powers. Oil-rich countries of OPEC and Russia have
more than quadrupled their revenues, raking some $1.2 trillion in
revenues last year alone. At $125 a barrel oil they are expected to
earn close to $2 trillion in 2008.
In fact, oil would go up to $149 that summer. Luft went on:
SWF are pouring billions into hedge funds, private equity funds, real
estate, natural resources and other nodes of the West's economy. No
one knows precisely how much money is held by SWFs but it is estimated
that they currently own $3.5 trillion in assets, and within one decade
they could balloon to $10–15 trillion, equivalent to America's gross
domestic product.
Luft's analysis would square with a paper written by the San Francisco
branch of the Federal Reserve Bank in 2007, which concluded that
"analysts put current sovereign wealth fund assets in the range of
$1.5 to 2.5 trillion. This amount is projected to grow sevenfold to
$15 trillion in the next ten years, an amount larger than the current
global stock of foreign reserves of about $5 trillion."
The San Francisco paper noted that most SWFs avoid anything like full
disclosure, and there is little information available about what they
may have invested in. One source I know who works at a Middle Eastern
SWF explains that this is very much part of their investment strategy.
"They don't want publicity," he says. "They just want to make the
money. That's one reason why you almost always see them buying
minority stakes, as majority stakes would cause some countries to make
issue of foreign ownership of investments. Sometimes it's multiple
SWFs buying minority stakes in the same investment. But it's always
thirty percent, twenty-five percent, and so on."
We've seen how banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley helped
engineer an artificial run-up in commodity prices, among other things
by pushing big institutional investors like pension funds into the
commodities market. Because of this lack of transparency, we can't
know exactly how much the SWFs also participated in this bubble by
pouring their own money into energy commodities through hedge funds
and other avenues.
The CFTC's own analysis in 2008 put the amount of SWF money in
commodity index investing at 9 percent overall, but was careful to
note that none of them appeared to be Arab-based funds. The oddly
specific insistence in the report that all the SWF money is "Western"
and not Arab is particularly amusing because it wasn't like the
question of Arab ownership was even mentioned in the report — this was
just the Bush administration enthusiastically volunteering that info
on its own.
Adam White, director of research at White Knight Research and Trading,
says not to put too much stock in the CFTC analysis, however.
"I am doubting that result because I think it would be easy for an SWF
to set up another company, say in Switzerland, or work through a
broker or fund of funds and therefore not have a swap on directly with
a bank but through an intermediary," he says. "I think that the banks
in complying with the CFTC request followed the letter of the law and
not the spirit of the law."
He goes on: "So if a sovereign wealth fund has an investment in a
hedge fund — which they have a bunch — and that hedge fund was then
invested in commodities, I expect that a bank would report that as a
hedge fund to the CFTC and not a sovereign wealth fund. And their
argument would be, 'How can we know who the hedge fund's investors
are?' — even if they know darn well.
"I think that this is very much a national security issue because the
Arab states might be pumping up oil prices and siphoning off huge
amounts of money from our economy," he adds. "A rogue state like Iran
or Venezuela could use their petrodollars to keep us weak
economically."
We know some things about what happened between the start of the Iraq
war and 2008 in the commodities market. We know the amount of
speculative money in commodities exploded, that between 2003 and 2008
the amount of money in commodities overall went from $13 billion to
$317 billion, and that because virtually all investment in commodities
is long investment, that nearly twenty-five-fold increase necessarily
drove oil prices up around the world, putting great gobs of money into
the coffers of the SWFs.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with oil-producing Arab states
accumulating money, particularly money from the production of oil, a
resource that naturally belongs to those countries and ought rightly
to contribute to those states' prosperity. But for a variety of
reasons the United States's relationship to many Arab countries is
complicated and at times hostile, and the phenomenon of the wealth
funds of these states buying up American infrastructure is something
that should probably not happen in secret.
But more to the point, the origin of these SWFs is not even relevant,
necessarily. What is relevant is that these funds are foreign and that
thanks to a remarkable series of events in the middle part of the last
decade, they rapidly became owners of big chunks of American
infrastructure. This is a process of a country systematically
divesting itself of bits and pieces of its own sovereignty, and it's
taking place without really anyone noticing it happening — often not
even the people asked to vote formally on the issue.
What was that process?
The explosion of energy prices — thanks to a bubble that Western banks
and perhaps some foreign SWFs had a big hand in creating — led to
Americans everywhere feeling increased financial strain. Tax revenue
went down in virtually every state in the country. In fact, the
correlation between the rising prices from the commodities bubble and
declining tax revenues is remarkable.
According to the Rockefeller Institute, which tracks state revenue
collection, the rate of growth for state taxes hit its lowest point in
five years in the first quarter of 2008, which is when oil began its
surge from around $75 to $149 a barrel.
In the second quarter the institute reported continued slowdowns, and
in the third quarter, the quarter in which oil reached that high of
$149, overall tax growth was more or less flat, at 0.1 percent, the
lowest rate since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001–2.
Obviously the collapse of the housing market around that time was a
major factor in all of this, but surging energy prices impacting the
entire economy — forcing business and consumer spending alike to
retract — also had to be crucial.
Around this time, state and municipal executives began putting their
infrastructure assets up to lease — essentially for sale, since the
proposed leases in some cases were seventy-five years or longer. And
in virtually every case that I've been able to find, the local
legislature was never informed who the true owners of these leases
were. Probably the best example of this is the notorious Chicago
parking meter deal, a deal that would have been a hideous betrayal
even without the foreign ownership angle. It was a blitzkrieg rip-off
that would provide the blueprint for increasingly broke-ass America to
carry lots of these prized toasters to the proverbial pawnshop.
"I was in my office on a Monday," says Rey Colon, an alderman from
Chicago's Thirty-fifth Ward, "when I got a call that there was going
to be a special meeting of the Finance Committee. I didn't know what
it was about."
It was December 1, 2008. That morning would be the first time that the
Chicago City Council would be formally notified that Mayor Richard
Daley had struck a deal with Morgan Stanley to lease all of Chicago's
parking meters for seventy-five years. The final amount of the bid was
$1,156,500,000, a lump sum to be paid to the city of Chicago for
seventy-five years' worth of parking meter revenue.
Finance Committee chairman Ed Burke had the job of informing the other
aldermen about the timetable of the deal. Early that morning he called
for a special meeting of the Finance Committee that Wednesday, to
discuss the deal. That afternoon the mayor's office submitted
paperwork calling for a meeting of the whole City Council the day
after the Finance Committee meeting, on December 4, "for the sole
purpose" of approving the agreement.
"I mean, they told us about this on a Monday, and it's like we had to
vote on a Wednesday or a Thursday," says Colon.
"We basically had three days to consider the deal," says fellow
alderman Leslie Hairston.
On that Tuesday, December 2, Daley held a press conference and said
the deal was happening "just at the right time" because the city was
in a budget crunch and needed to pay for social services.
He then gave them the details: he had arranged a lease deal with
Morgan Stanley, which put together a consortium of investors which in
turn put a newly created company called Chicago Parking Meters LLC in
charge of the city's meters. There was no mention of who the investors
were or who the other bidders might have been.
The next day the Finance Committee met to review the deal, and ten
minutes into the meeting some aldermen began to protest that they
hadn't even seen copies of the agreement. Copies were hastily made of
a very short document giving almost nothing in the way of detail.
"It was like an eight-page paper," says Colon.
The Chicago Reader's write-up of the meeting describes the commotion
that followed:
"We're rushing through this," says Alderman Robert Fioretti. "Why?"
"We've been working on this for the better part of a year, so we
haven't been hasty," [city chief financial officer Paul] Volpe
insists.
"You had a year, but you're giving us two days," says Alderman Ike
Carothers.
To help aldermen understand some of the terms, Jim McDonald, a lawyer
for the city, reads some legalese from the proposed agreement.
[Alderman Billy] Ocasio bellows: "What does that all mean?"
The aldermen are told by CFO Volpe that the reason the deal has to be
rushed is that a sudden change in interest rates could cost the city
later on, which makes one wonder about Volpe's qualifications for the
CFO job — this was in the wake of the financial crash, and interest
rates were at rock bottom, meaning the city stood only to lose money
by hurrying. Higher interest rates would have allowed them to use the
interest on the lump payment to fill their budget gaps, rather than
the principal of the payment itself.
"I hear that excuse a lot whenever the mayor wants to pass something
fast," says Colon. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll take that risk."
Again, the council at this time has no idea who's actually behind the
deal. "We were never informed," says Hairston. "Not even later."
Nonetheless, the measure ended up passing 40–5, with Hairston and
Colon being among the votes against. I contacted virtually all of the
aldermen who voted yes on the deal, and none of them would speak with
me.
Mayor Daley, who had already signed similar lease deals for the
Chicago Skyway and a series of city-owned parking garages, had been
working on this deal for more than a year. He approached a series of
investment banks and companies and invited them to submit bids on
seventy-five years' worth of revenue on the city's 36,000 parking
meters. Morgan Stanley was one of those companies.
Here's where it gets interesting. What Morgan Stanley has to do from
there is two things. One, it has to raise a shitload of money. And
two, it has to find a public face for those investors, a "management
company" that will be presented to the public as the lessee in the
deal.
Part one of that process involved the bank's Infrastructure group
going on a road tour to ask people with lots of cash to pony up. It
was these guys from Morgan's Infrastructure desk who took their
presentation to the Middle East and pitched Chicago's parking meters
to a room full of bankers and analysts in Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi
Investment Authority, who ultimately agreed to purchase a large stake.
Here's how they pulled off the paperwork in this deal. It's really
brilliant.
At the time the deal was voted on in December 2008, an "Abu Dhabi
entity," according to the mayor's office, had just a 6 percent stake
in the deal. Spokesman Peter Scales of the Chicago mayor's office has
declined to date to identify which entity that was, but by sifting
through the disclosure documents, we can find a few possibilities,
including a group called Cavendish Limited that is headquartered in
Abu Dhabi.
Apart from that, most of the investors in the parking meter deal at
the time it was voted on look like they were either American or from
nations with relatively uncomplicated relationships with America. The
Teacher Retirement System of Texas had a significant stake in one of
the Morgan Stanley funds at the time of the sale, as did the Victorian
Funds Management Corporation of Australia and Morgan Stanley itself. A
Mitsubishi fund called Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group also had a
stake. There were a variety of other German and Australian investors.
All of these companies together put up the $1.2 billion or so to win
the bid, and once they secured the deal, they created Chicago Parking
Meters LLC, a new entity, which in turn hired an existing parking
management company called LAZ to run the meter system in place of
cityrun parking police. The press stories about the deal invariably
reported only that the city of Chicago had leased its parking meters
to some combination of Morgan Stanley, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, and
LAZ. A Chicago Sun-Times piece at the time read:
Under questioning from Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke
(14th), top mayoral aides acknowledged that the partnership that
includes Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and LAZ Parking
recently formed a limited liability corporation in Delaware, but never
bothered to register in Illinois.
But two months after the deal, in February 2009, the ownership
structure completely changed. According to Scales in the mayor's press
office:
In this case, after the Morgan Stanley investor group's $1.15 billion
bid was accepted and approved by the City in December 2008, Morgan
Stanley sought new investors to provide additional capital and reduce
their investment exposure — again, not an unusual move.
So, while a group of several Morgan Stanley infrastructure funds owned
100% of Chicago Parking Meters, LLC in December 2008, by February
2009, they had located a minority investor — Deeside Investments, Inc.
— to accept 49.9% ownership. Tannadice Investments, a subsidiary of
the government-owned Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, owns a 49.9%
interest in Deeside.
So basically Morgan Stanley found a bunch of investors, including
themselves, to put up over a billion dollars in December 2008; a big
chunk of those investors then bailed out to make way in February 2009
for this Deeside Investments, which was 49.9 percent owned by Abu
Dhabi and 50.1 percent owned by a company called Redoma SARL, about
which nothing was known except that it had an address in Luxembourg.
Scales added that after this bait and switch, the original 6 percent
Abu Dhabi "entity" reduced its stake by roughly half after Tannadice
got involved. According to my math, that still makes Abu Dhabi– based
investors at least 30 percent owners of Chicago's parking meters. God
knows who the other real owners are.
Now comes the really fun part — how crappy the deal was for other
reasons.
To start with something simple, it changed some basic traditions of
local Chicago politics. Aldermen who used to have the power to close
streets for fairs and festivals or change meter schedules now cannot —
or if they do, they have to compensate Chicago Parking Meters LLC for
its loss of revenue.
So, for example, when the new ownership told Alderman Scott Waguespack
that it wanted to change the meter schedule from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Monday through Saturday to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, the
alderman balked and said he'd rather keep the old schedule, at least
for 270 of his meters. Chicago Parking Meters then informed him that
if he wanted to do that, he would have to pay the company $608,000
over three years.
The bigger problem was that Chicago sold out way too cheap. Daley and
Co. got roughly $1.2 billion for seventy-five years' worth of revenue
from 36,000 parking meters. But by hook or crook various aldermen
began to find out that Daley had vastly undervalued the meter revenue.
When Waguespack did the math on that $608,000 he was going to be
charged, he discovered that the company valued the meters at about 39¢
an hour, which for 36,000 meters works out to $66 million a year, or
about $5 billion over the life of the contract.
"When it comes to finding a figure for the citizens of Chicago, they
say the meters are worth $1.16 billion," Waguespack said shortly after
the deal. "But when it comes to finding a figure to cover Morgan
Stanley, they say they're worth, what, $5 billion? Who are they
looking out for, the residents or Morgan Stanley?"
The city inspector at the time, David Hoffman, subsequently did a
study of the meter deal and concluded that Daley sold the meters for
at least $974 million too little. "The city failed to make a
calculation of what the value of the parking meter system was to the
city," Hoffman said.
What's even worse is this — if they really needed the up-front cash,
why sell the meters at all? Why not just issue a bond to borrow money
against future revenue collection, so that the city can maintain
possession of the rights to park on its own streets?
"There's no reason they had to do it this way," says Clint Krislov,
who's suing the city and the state on the grounds that the deal is
unconstitutional.
When they asked why the city didn't just do a bond issue, some of the
aldermen say they never got an answer.
"You'd have to ask the mayor that," says Colon.
But the most obnoxious part of the deal is that the city is now forced
to cede control of their streets to a virtually unaccountable private
and at least partially foreign-owned company. Written into the
original deal were drastic price increases. In Hairston's and Colon's
neighborhoods, meter rates went from 25¢ an hour to $1.00 an hour the
first year, and to $1.20 an hour the year after that. And again, the
city has no power to close streets, remove or move meters, or really
do anything without asking the permission of Chicago Parking Meters
LLC.
Colon, whose neighborhood had an arts festival last year, will
probably avoid festivals in the future that involve street closings.
"It's just something that's going to be hard from now on," he says.
In the first year of the deal, Alderman Hairston went to a dinner on
Wacker Drive near the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower, renamed after
a London-based insurer), parked her car, and pressed the "max" button
on a meter, indicating she wanted to stay until the end of that
night's meter period. She got a bill for $32.50, as Chicago Parking
Meters LLC charged her for parking overnight.
"There are so many problems — I've had so many problems with them,"
says Hairston. "It tells you you've got eight minutes left, you get
back in seven, and it charges you for the extra hour. Or you don't get
a receipt. It's crazy."
But to me, the absolute best detail in this whole deal is the end of
holidays. No more free parking on Sunday. No more free parking on
Christmas or Easter. And even in Illinois, no free parking on days
celebrating, let's say, a certain local hero.
"Not even on Lincoln's birthday," laughs Krislov.
"Not even on Lincoln's birthday," sighs Colon.
Wanna take Lincoln's birthday off? Sorry, America — fuck you, pay me!
And here's the last very funny detail in this whole business. It was
the grand plan of CFO Volpe to patch the budget hole with the interest
earned on that big pile of cash. But interest rates stayed in the
tank, and so the city was forced to raid the actual principal. In a
few years, the money will probably be gone.
"We did have a big hole in the budget," admits Colon. "But this didn't
fix the problem. We might still have the same hole next year, and then
where will the money come from?"
Bizarrely, a month and a half or so after this deal was done, a
gloating Mayor Daley decided to offer some advice to the newly
inaugurated President Obama, also an Illinois native. He told Obama he
needed to "think outside the box" to solve the country's revenue
problems.
"If they start leasing public assets — every city, every county, every
state, and the federal government — you would not have to raise any
taxes whatsoever," he says. "You would have more infrastructure money
that way than any other way in the nation."
And America is taking Daley's advice. At this writing Nashville and
Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as
is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just
announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways,
airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can
think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale,
to bidders unknown, around the world.
When I told Pennsylvania state representative Joseph Markosek that
someone had been pitching the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Middle Eastern
investors, he laughed.
"No kidding," he said. "That's interesting."
Markosek was one of the leading figures in killing Governor Ed
Rendell's deal to sell off the turnpike, but even he didn't know who
the buyers were going to be. He knew that Morgan Stanley was involved,
but that was about it. Mostly he just thought it was a bad idea on
general principle. "It would have been a bad deal for Pennsylvania,"
says Markosek. "There's a lot of speculation that the governor would
have just taken that lump sum and used it to balance the budget this
year, because he has a significant problem with the budget this year.
But that would have left us with seventy-four more years on the
lease."
The reason these lease deals happen is the same reason the investment
banks made bad investments in mortgage-backed crap that was sure to
blow up later, but provided big bonuses today — because the
politicians making these deals, the Rendells and Daleys, are going to
be long gone into retirement by the time the real bill comes due.
