26 December 2003: Not without pangs of guilt, I took the day off and wrote nothing for Portico today. I didn't even have the good manners to say so! Instead, I waited a week to write this final entry for 2003.
19 December 2003: Last week, I distinguished a pair of prepositional approaches to freedom; I contrasted the freedom to develop social change with the freedom from government interference in one's affairs. I could, however, just as easily switched the affiliations of to and from. Libertarians amid the conservative fold value the freedom to realize their visions and ambitions, while progressive stewards of the body politic require a government that will assure society's freedom from the undesirable side-effects (environmental pollution has become the most prominent of these, but it was not always so) of libertarian self-realization. Such is the ambiguity of freedom that it can signify totally contradictory things. One man's freedom is another's oppression. This is why the word gives me the willies, and I scowl warily whenever it comes up. Beneath the prepositional flip-flopping, though, I think something really definite can be established. There are people who see themselves as independent operators, and people who see themselves as members of society. I don't think that it's possible to belong to both of these groups. The real question is whether a government can be conceived that will suit both crowds.
There's another question, of course: does everyone fall into one group or the other? I suspect not. Most people don't give the question much thought. It's possible, after all, to see yourself as both as self-reliant and socially-conscious, as many - perhaps most - people do. The moment of decision arrives only when you have to put one of these characteristics ahead of the other, and it is a moment that does not arise in everyday life. But it is the fundamental decision that every participant in a democracy must make, and not to make it is to shirk a fundamental responsibility. Politically active people know where they stand as a matter of course, but as the whole point of representative democracy is to spare most citizens most of the burdens of political activity (the obligations, first, to familiarize yourself with candidates and issues, and, second, to vote as you see fit, are the non-delegable exceptions), there is nothing in the democratic setup that forces the person in the street to do likewise. This is the Achilles heel of democracy: it cannot enforce itself. Democracies are always up for ratification. It is always possible for voters to vote democracy out, as voters in polities as diverse as Weimar Germany and contemporary Algeria have shown. The next-worst thing is not to vote at all, and if neglecting or refusing to vote is an anti-democratic gesture (and I believe that it is), then too many Americans today have given up on the Land of the Free. The irony of democracy is that it depends upon self-starters for the common good. Adding insult to irony, the common good does not depend upon democracy; benevolent autocrats have from time to time done a better job of maintaining it. If only they did it more often and more reliably, there would be no need for the bother of democracy.
Economist Virginia Postrel has caused a stir with her latest book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, by praising, among many other wonders of modern commerce, the broad availability of many different styles and prices of toilet-bowl brushes. It is certainly very difficult to avoid the conclusion that a society armed with strong opinions about articles of domestic utility and yet misinformed (at least until very recently) about Saddam Hussein's involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 2001 needs to rethink its priorities. On this afternoon's Leonard Lopate Show, Jeanine Garofalo wondered why it is that Americans don't seem to care about knowing anything. It would appear that they have been persuaded that how they feel about something is the same as what they know about it. (The strength of the conservative insurgency may have its roots in a dawning suspicion that having a feeling about, say, poverty or homelessness is perfectly compatible with total ignorance of the matter.) Upping the ante of personal responsibility considerably, Bob Herbert, in his column in today's Times, surmised that Americans are the best-informed people in history, but also the most distanced: they've hit on the knack for not knowing unpleasant things. That's true, perhaps, for readers of the Times - one must develop a carapace of some sort if the daily perusal of that newspaper is not to induce despair - but from my own experience of other people I gather that most simply aren't paying enough attention to be informed. I'm with Ms Garofalo: knowledge isn't cool.
Of course it isn't. Cool is possibly the most elusive sensation ever known, and, like Diana Vreeland's conception of allure, it largely a matter of refusal. Knowledge is above all a matter of accumulation. If cool is a particular kind of discrimination, it still requires objects among which to discriminate; if it's true that all the knowledge in the world won't make you cool, it's also true that you can't be cool if you don't know anything. Cool people who happen to know a lot are generally more esteemed than people whose cool depends on dumb luck. But it remains sadly true that knowledge alone is never going to make anyone sexy.
And democracy is never going to make anyone responsible. It's up to each one of us to make the most of this freedom from coercion by setting aside the freedom to know, and do, nothing.
12 December 2003: For some reason or another, the urgency with which Administration ideologues launched the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq has lately acquired the itchy insistence (for me, at least) of a genuine mystery. When Pentagon officials speak of bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq, what, I wonder, what does this signify? Do the terms 'democracy' and 'freedom' have the same meanings for them that they have for me? I'm fairly convinced that they don't, because what I understand of these abstractions could never justify the military occupation of another country. But that's just me. The older I get, the more deeply I'm impressed by the novelty of democracy as a realized political philosophy: there's so much still to be learned.
For example, it's not generally understood that the last century's totalitarian nightmares were all democratic in origin. The Bolshevik regime in Russia and the fascist regimes of Western Europe offer posterity a catalogue of inclinations that people in democracies ought to resist. But I suspect that neonconservative thinkers don't share this view, because for them, I gather, 'democracy' and 'freedom' are expressions of an individualism that's wholly foreign to the turbulence of mass movements. (Perhaps it's simply not possible to imagine mass movements if you're accustomed to the unpopulated expanses of Idaho and Wyoming.) I sense a profound difference in what might be called the charge of these ideas, 'democracy' and 'freedom.' For me, democracy and freedom are empowering agents that enable people to do things - to develop society together. For conservatives, they seem to be restraints on powers that might limit individual autonomy. It's the difference between freedom to and freedom from.
The freedom-from strain of democratic philosophy, moreover, rests on an unspoken homogeneity. Its foundation appears to be personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and in the pursuit of individual redemption believers are all, paradoxically, alike. The individualism that city dwellers celebrate couldn't be more different. It actively encourages striking divergences in personal style, outlook, and even morality. Conservatives call this 'relativism,' not 'individualism.' Conservative individualism is the right to behave just like everybody else in one's acquaintance, without the interference of government programs that seek to improve the lot of people one doesn't know. Because they're motivated by shared traditions, conservatives don't really see the need for government. Freedom-to individualists look to government to keep chaos at bay. I cannot conceive of democracy without government, but this is exactly what the conservative ideal is coming to look like.
The goal of personal salvation, which for most people involves posthumous existence in a decidely post-social paradise, is often at odds with the humanist goal of improving mankind. I have to say that, given the choice between eternal bliss and contributing to the welfare of the people who live after me, I would unhesitatingly choose the latter. Not because I'm especially generous or high-minded, but simply because the dream of heaven has always, from my earliest Sundays at Mass, contemplating a stained-glass window of the Crucifixion, reeked of selfishness, even greediness. How remarkable of Christianity to sanctify such self-absorption! The good Christian is, of course, commanded to put others first, but always with the final and utterly unaltruistic reward in mind. "Jesus loves me, that I know" - and that's, apparently, all that matters.
Even the word 'humanity' means different things. To me, it denotes a species that evolves over time like any other, and one, moreover, that there's no reason to regard as the last word. Like an evolving species, it adapts ever more completely to its environment - it gets better - while at the same time risking the extinction that will swiftly follow too severe a change in that environment. What distinguishes humanity from other kinds of life is a degree of self-awareness that permits informed choice: humanity can get better deliberately. (It can also wreck its environment.) This is certainly not the traditional, conservative view of humanity, according to which mankind is fixed in its fallen nature, forever dependent on divine love and forgiveness even if it has been weaned somewhat of the need for divine intervention.
Something tells me that I'm never really going to be able to understand the mystery of neoconservative motivation. My wiring simply won't allow it.
5 December 2003: Click here.
28 November 2003: Greetings from Paris. For the first time in my life, I found myself outside the United States on Thanksgiving Day. Not to worry. Thanks to the pull of an excellent concierge, we secured a table at one of the top restaurants, where, what d'you know, a guest at a nearby table asked for roast turkey and got it, even though he was one of a party of two, and, more to the point, turkey was not on the menu. The carving of the bird attracted everyone's incredulous attention. Word quickly spread that the diner was not American.
More remarkably, Kathleen and I have noted that our attempts to speak French have not been rebuffed by salespeople and waiters who, formerly, would have preferred to continue in English, as a prophylactic against the sullying of their native tongue by folks whose command of agreements isn't everything it ought to be. Everyone has been very nice, and we our disclosure as New Yorkers hasn't elicited so much as a raised eyebrow. When I think of our friends (Midwesterners, for most part) who have given up Bordeaux in protest against French 'intransigence' about Iraq, I blush even more deeply than I did before this visit. A very attractive women who sells fine umbrellas and walking sticks on the Boulevard Saint Germain enthused about the prospects of opening a branch in Manhattan, and the wiry garçon at our favorite brasserie told us that he's looking forward to visiting New York as soon as his children are older.
This vacation's having followed a busy time for both of us, we haven't been out every moment soaking up all the possibilities, and I regret that, but such are the limitations of middle age. We've reached the age at which anything but a trip to a spa (something I couldn't endure) requires a preliminary resting-up, something wasn't possible this month. I had a long list of things to see and do, and now I've got to keep it from becoming a long list of disappointments. Merely being in Paris is the point, even if we've spent all but an hour two within a triangle described by the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue de la Paix, and the Avenue de l'Opéra. Who knows, though, what today will bring?
Back soon.
21 November 2003: A correspondent forwarded a manifesto that has been making the Internet rounds. I've been pondering its core, which follows:
IMMIGRANTS, NOT AMERICANS, MUST ADAPT. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Americans. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled when the "politically correct" crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others.
I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to America. Our population is almost entirely made up of descendants of immigrants. However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some born here, need to understand. This idea of America being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Americans, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over centuries of struggles, trials, and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom.
We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language!
"In God We Trust" is our national motto. This is not some Christian, right wing, political slogan. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture.
If Stars and Stripes offend you, or you don't like Uncle Sam, then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don't care how you did things where you came from. This is OUR COUNTRY, our land, and our lifestyle. Our First Amendment gives every! citizen the right to express his opinion and we will allow you every opportunity to do so. But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about our flag, our pledge, our national motto, or our way of life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great American freedom, THE RIGHT TO LEAVE.
This outburst seems aimed not at immigrants but rather at (a) cosmopolitan liberals ("apparently some born here") and (b) residents - Latino residents in particular - who persist in breaking the age-old pattern of producing purely Anglophone offspring within three generations. There have always been enclaves of Americans (citizens or not) who don't speak fluent, or any, English; visit one of New York's Chinatowns for immersion in what is still a fairly exotic culture. I think it unlikely, however, that the writer had Chinatown in mind. Asians as a group have been more reluctant than most immigrants to vaunt their origins, and in any case Asian-speaking neighborhoods are extremely compact. This it not true of Latino culture in America. Perhaps the writer lives in Miami, Los Angeles, San Antonio - or New York. In New York, Spanish is only one of many language barriers that one comes up against. Forget enclaves! Janitors and taxi drivers may hail from Central Europe or India, and dealing with those that do can present real, if not very serious, inconveniences.
Strip away the manifesto's intemperance and the insults, and an important proposition emerges: a nation is not a miscellany of divergent individuals but a people with fundamental things in common. That's the national ideal generally; the American model adds an appealing call to self-improvement. We try hard to practice the civic virtues that keep freedom from degenerating into chaos, and we congratulate ourselves for welcoming steady workers who want to live among us. Sadly, though, we don't seem to have a national lifestyle. I'm not sure that we ever did, but we certainly don't now. Poll after poll and election after election reveal a population that's evenly split between outlooks that, if not necessarily opposed, see things differently. That's why it's important to have fundamental things in common. These have become difficult to discern, not because they're not there but because they're obscured by anger and frustration.
A great deal of this anger and frustration swirls around issues of religion. I think it's fair to say that Americans have never fully reconciled their religiosity, remarkable in the developed world, to the ideal of toleration that seems so central to American freedom. Freedom means not just the right to practice one's own religion (within limits that proscribe, say, polygamy, or human sacrifice) but the right not to have to practice anybody else's. The writer says that we are all Christian in America, but this isn't true, not at all. Have American Jews done the right thing by not speaking out against school prayer or the official recognition of Christmas? I happen to think that they have, but their acquiescence may have given their Christian countrymen the idea that Christianity is a sort of all-purpose, universal faith, of which all the more specific denominations are sects. If this were true, then nobody could complain about crosses in courtrooms or school prayer. I'm not sure that it isn't true, by the way. American Christianity, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, is an extremely vague, and utterly personal, affair; it may be misleading to speak of it as a religion - something that groups of people have in common - in the first place. The God in which we trust is an adaptable deity.
An interesting and comprehensive page on the US Treasury Web site sets out the history of 'In God we Trust.' Although it appeared on coins during the Civil War, it did not become the national motto - there was no national motto - until 1956, two years after Congress (under pressure from the Knights of Columbus) inserted 'under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance. Ever since, cultural conservatives have been putting Scripture to tendentious use, forging minor scraps of Mosaic and Pauline legalism into quasi-Constitutional amendments - latterly in the name of 'family values.' As far as I'm concerned, the 50s were the most paranoid years of the American Century, but I suspect that for the writer of this declaration they were a golden age, followed by nothing but downhill decay. That's another point on which we don't see eye to eye. After all, it was in the 50s that African-Americans decided that anything less than first-class status was unacceptable.
The writer is careful not to mention African-Americans, or their struggle for full civil rights, but of course it was that struggle that threw the door open to coming out as different. I don't think that many people foresaw that this would happen. Rather, it was expected that, once they were granted full entree into the mainstream of American life, African-Americans would drop the 'African' part. Given the deformations of history, however, that wasn't possible, and liberals quickly concluded that most African-Americans - and, later, members of other groups - needed more than a bundle of rights. The idea that the guarantee of civil rights requires the leveling of structural disadvantages has been antagonistic (to say the least) to conservatives ever since; it explains their nimble shift from "Separate but Equal" to "Colorblind."
Structural disadvantages are prejudices, built up on both sides of an inequality rooted in differences of skin color, gender, or (more controversially, since this, many conservatives believe, is elective) sexual orientation - prejudices that, thanks to the failure of imagination, harden into presumptions. The idea that women belong in the home is a fine example of such a presumption: we have still not eliminated the consequent structural disadvantages that all women face in the pursuit of happiness. It's not very different from slavery, when you think about it: birth determines everything. Nobody in a free society ought to have to battle such presumptions. The elimination of structural disadvantages, by the way, does not imply the elimination of personal advantages.
As for the right to leave the United States, it's a sad fact that the United States remains one of the few countries that welcomes and absorbs foreigners. Americans don't, in any case, have much of a choice about going elsewhere. Given the philosophy of the current Attorney General, however, it's not inconceivable that the nations of Western Europe might recognize dissident Americans as political refugees.
14 November 2003: About a month ago, it occurred to me that my anxieties about the future of the United States had distracted me from attending to problems closer to home, and I decided to stop thinking so much about politics. The funny thing was that my interest in politics has never been very keen. I familiarize myself with issues and candidates whenever an election loomed, and I'm sure to vote - and that's that until the next election cycle. The whole point of representative government, after all, is to choose other people to oversee the government's work. Politics - the rough business of sitting down with the proponents of opposing views and thrashing out the compromises that keep things running - is their problem, not mine.
This new regime of not thinking about politics lasted about a day. It didn't end because I'd somehow become a political junkie, unable to stay out of touch with the latest campaign developments. It ended because the problem American politics today, I saw, is that truly political behavior has been abandoned. That's what I've been worrying about ever since the Republicans nominated George W. Bush. No, for longer than that. Since the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Longer? Since Reagan?
Even when I agree with their policies, I'm wary of Republicans. Since the party's foundation in the 1850s, it has always stood for principles, and always resisted compromise. There is something nobly single-minded about even the most narrowly pro-business Republican presidents. Democrats, in contrast, are prone to practices inconsistent with their preaching. Democrats are always ready to strike a deal, behind closed doors if possible. Democrats like politics. Remember, it was the Democrats who held the nation together, in the decades before the Civil War, by compromising on slavery. That would seem to give compromise a bad name.
But in a country as large and diverse as ours, compromise is the only alternative to paralysis. I suspect that Grover Norquist, the anti-taxation leader of Americans for Tax Reform, would agree: he's all for paralysis. "Starve the beast" is his motto. Active, deep-pocketed government, in his view, can do nothing but harm. (Domestically, anyway; and there's still plenty of room for a passive government that, slavishly protective of property rights, clears away any and all obstacles from the path of 'free enterprise.') Most of us, however, regard the government as the only reliable provider of some public services, such as roads and public safety, and as the only reliable guarantor of many others, such as drug safety and justice. Most Americans believe in public schools, or at least rely on them for the education of their children. Most Americans expect government to keep the res publica - the public good - in good shape. This costs money, and money - from taxation to appropriation - entails compromise.
The tragedy of slavery should not blind us to the necessity of compromise, which is simply a manifestation of respect for people of different views. It's hard for those who are dazzled by the virtue of their own convictions to show such respect, because in their blindness they lack the imagination, the sympathy, and the adroitness to put themselves in someone else's shoes. In George W. Bush, his cabinet, and the neoconservative advisers responsible for our invasion of Iraq, I see the most dazzled, disrespectful crowd ever to attain national power. What makes me anxious isn't their politics but their utter lack of interest in politics. While the Congressional leaders of the two parties scream at one another (and the Democratic hopefuls self-destructively do the same), and while journalists report every polarizing comment, politics is missing in action. When politics-as-usual returns to Washington, then I'll stop thinking about it.
7 November 2003: The Labor Department reported today that employment increased by 126,0o0 jobs in October. They were mostly service-sector jobs; better-paying manufacturing jobs continued their downward trend, although at a slower rate. This is very good news for the Bush administration. It's good news for everybody, except perhaps the Democratic presidential candidates. But it's not very good news. It's more of the no-news-is-good-news variety: it's not bad news. For a change, all the bad news is coming from Iraq. Another helicopter was shot down earlier today, over Tikrit.
Oops, I forgot - that partial-birth abortion legislation that President Bush enacted the other day. It may never have the force of law in the courts, but that's far from certain, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Unconstitutional vagueness and a failure to take the mother's health into account may prove to be the legislation's fatal flaws. But as prospective news goes, it's not really good news. So the law is struck down by 'the courts.' What this means that everyone will dig in deeper; maybe there will be another round of terrorist acts aimed at abortion clinics.
Abortion looks a lot like slavery to me: it's an issue that might require violence to settle. How else to get round the definitional polarization? Is abortion murder? Is a fetus sufficiently human to be murdered? Even if it is, do considerations of the mother's situation outweigh fetal rights? This last question doesn't come up often enough; it doesn't seem to occur to pro-life advocates. A long line of 'cannibal' cases establishes the proposition that it's never all right to murder one person to improve another's chances of surviving a catastrophe, but of course these cases have nothing to do with the law, such as it is, of war. War is an exception. Should the mother of an unwanted child be another? (We might also ask: is a pregnant woman a mother? even though this question is likely to be answered by the first two above.)
Those of us who ask do so, I believe, because human reproduction remains an awfully uneven business. Men have nothing but fun, and they have almost all of it, too. Women face serious inconvenience and not inconsiderable risk - and that's only up to the moment of birth. After that, most women still face years and years of drudgery, which is all right by some of them by but by no means all. Until we can arrange matters so that women are not disproportionally burdened by the birth and raising of children, and until we can guarantee the safety of wives who become pregnant under circumstances that trumpet adultery, it seems only right to give women the right to abort pregnancies. Public experience since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 shows that abortion is an unhappy, sometimes awfully unhappy business. Nobody wants one. But war is hell, too. Just as patriotism excuses - urges - the use of violence against enemies, it's difficult for pro-choice advocates to believe that the life of a grown woman is not more important than that of a fetus.
Did I suggest, a minute ago, that the Civil War settled the issue of slavery? Pardon me; I meant no such thing. The real end of slavery did not even begin until the Voting and Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and it is probably still too soon to say that American blacks enjoy the rights and privileges of their white countrymen. Wars settle only one kind of conflict - the occupation of territory by hostile outsiders - and our Civil War did just the reverse, guaranteeing that blacks would be made to pay for the bitterness of the lost Confederate cause. One fine day, I believe, Americans will stop regarding the Civil War as a nightmare with a happy ending, and see it as a nightmare plain and simple. I pray that the vindication of abortion rights will never excuse a similar disaster.
Halloween 2003: The November issue of Harper's contains an essay by noted author and Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott, entitled "Junk Politics," and it has rung a bell that I didn't know was there. I usually respond to the things that I read in magazines in one of three ways: by disagreeing outright, by agreeing with fundamental positions but contesting the reasoning, or by agreeing wholeheartedly and savoring the writer's way of putting things that I already believe. Mr DeMott's piece elicited a fourth, and very rare response: recognizing that the author has built on ideas that I'm already familiar with to reach an idea than in some important way is entirely new.
It helps, I suppose, that "Junk Politics" is not an easy read. Whether the author regards the current political scene with anger or contempt it is hard to tell, but it's clear that the essay is a denunciation, not an dispassionate analysis. Sparkling with intelligence, its connections are not always immediately cogent, and Mr DeMott's compressed style takes some patience to unpack. I was troubled by the failure to mention the Great Awakenings that have disturbed American society since colonial times; for much of what Mr DeMott laments could be taken as evidence of yet another one of these religious outbreaks. I say that these defects help to keep "Junk Politics" in mind, however, because they make an insight-laden piece hard to pigeonhole.
The implicit message of junk politics, Mr DeMott writes,
is that leadership's chief concern should be with setting an upbeat tone and demonstrating a sensitive response to hardship, rather than with honing in on injustice, spelling out practical correctives, arguing for the correctives in public forums, working for their ultimate enactment.
What "Junk Politics" adds to this familiar complaint is the claim that everyone is complicit. Not only the leaders of both political parties, but everyone who wants to press a claim for public attention. As Mr DeMott points out, societies are transformed by powerful metaphors, and the ruling metaphor today is that we're all the same. The price of American celebrity is a confession, however disingenuous, to private weaknesses and personal tragedies - and an accompanying implication (sometimes made explicit) that the confessor is no better than anyone in the audience. If true, these confessions would subvert themselves, for the people who make them are, after all, famous, exceptional for something. If they have, indeed, suffered tribulations common to the general public, then their achievements must be all the more remarkable. We are not all the same. Some people are very lucky.
And some people are very unfortunate. Mr DeMott identifies as one element of junk politics the denial of change - "'changelessness meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." The notion that we're all the same is designed to muffle the obligation that the very lucky might otherwise feel, if confronted by the spike of their own advantage, to do something to help the unfortunate. Far more comfortable to teach yourself the lie that, having started out on a level playing field, you've achieved success by dint of hard work - as if mere hard work, however necessary, ever sufficed to produce success. Far more convenient to look upon the poor as self-destructive people who lack your own good habits.
Most people, of course, are neither very lucky nor very unfortunate. They're average, and Mr DeMott's keenest insight is that junk politics glorifies mediocrity. Now, 'mediocrity' is a very negative word, an insult really. Nonetheless, it necessarily describes the broad mass of the population, the hump atop the bell curve. So, without using the word at all, the people who, by virtue of their leadership position, ought to be demonstrating their distinction, present themselves as just like the voters to whom they appeal for office. One has to wonder why. To the born-again exhilaration that marks all American religious revivals, something new has been added: resentment. I think that this resentment is fueled by a bombardment of lush-life images from the broadcast media, but I don't want to complain yet again about television; I see it whenever I pick up People at the barber shop. Resentment sets an upper limit to the extent of happiness and good fortune that is tolerable in public discourse. Nobody has worked harder to conceal his access to the good things in life than the president.
[W]hen the president speaks up in his g-dropping, gonna-gotta vein, the themes radiate out: bunch of regular guys and gals here, nobody uppity. Across America's length and breadth the same story: good buddy equal parders talking gonna-gotta together, everybody on earth more or less Crawford kin.
It wasn't Mr DeMott's arguments that struck me at first. It was, rather, an example, an offering in evidence. "[W]itness media coverage of the gentrified saturnalia aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Much hostility in newspapers to the repositioning of the ship, the risky landing, the swaggering progress across the deck, the cued cheers - objections that this was a staged, made-for-TV event, lacking authenticity. ... But the theme of the flight-deck drama was sameness not heroic difference, palship not leadership, and the contribution that truly counted was to the broad cause of issue erosion." I remember a great deal of outrage at the rupture of a venerable national tradition: until Mr Bush, no president had ever worn a military uniform while in office. But where I saw an intolerable puffing up, Mr DeMott recognized a genial and very disrespectful Halloween costume. Thanks to his perception, I'm seeing things differently.
27 October 2003: Unlike controversies past and present over torture, poison gas, and land mines, the Boykin affair, set off by General William G. Boykin's derogatory views of Islam - delivered in sermons at religious services - is a matter of words, not weapons. But the toxic effect of words is demonstrably vaster than that of any explosive. What triggers most of today's rifles is a combination of hate speech and jingoistic journalism. Identifying Islam with Satan and asserting that the Almighty is 'bigger' than Allah cannot possibly further the cause of peace.
The Boykin dustup - yet another example, incidentally, the Bush administration's duplicity, preaching peace to the world but currying the favor of Armageddon-minded fundamentalist Christians - divides us into two groups, those who believe that some kinds of behavior are always and everywhere unjustifiable, and those who believe that it's fair to use whatever weapons your enemy uses - indeed, that it's stupid and self-destructive not to do so. Subscribers to the latter theory are prone to see their opponents as impractically principled, but they're wrong to do so, because they're themselves the less pragmatic party. Impassioned by the heat of the moment, they don't learn much either from the past or from the experience of different outlooks.
In a piece published on the Web site of The Daily Journal of Kankakee, Illinois, Fox Broadcasting host Cal Thomas makes the case for the impassionistas. Look at what the prime minister of Malaysia said about Jews running the world! Consider the anti-American animus of the Palestinian Authority! And don't forget that the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden 'started it.' Mr Thomas didn't actually make the third point, but I don't see why he left it out. Whether responding to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or simply seeking a scapegoat for the relatively backward economies of most Arabic and some other Islamic countries, Muslim demagogues have been branding America and Christianity as evil for well over twenty years. Whether inattentive out of arrogance or genuine cluelessness, the United States has done nothing to justify either of the attacks on the World Trade Center. (To say that we should have seen them coming is not the same as to say that we deserved them.) It is difficult to regard the radical Islamic vision with anything but horror.
Mr Thomas may be quite right to observe that the "notion that religion is not at the heart of the hatred directed at America from outside and now inside the country qualifies as extreme denial. Throughout the Muslim world, America is condemned not mainly because of its ideas but because Islamists believe we are infidels opposed to God." But to suggest that this justifies our behaving likewise reminds me of my sister's adolescent wails that 'all the girls' were doing something that she was forbidden to do.
It's my sense of the practical, not a moral position, that convinces me that insults are always and everywhere wrong, and that public figures who insult America's enemies ought to be relieved of their duties. What possible good such insults can accomplish? Insults merely confirm and intensify previously settled convictions, and I doubt very much that even the best-aimed insult can raise flagging morale.
The West has a long history of fighting with God's blessing. It is no coincidence that the last serious religious war in the West was ended by a set of treaties - collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia (1648) - that laid out the doctrine of national sovereignty. Exhausted by more than a century of intermittent warfare sparked both sincerely and opportunistically by religious differences, the statesmen of Europe accepted the very lesson that the Cold War would teach: the only way to win is not to play. The peoples of Europe, unfortunately, had to learn this lesson all over again for themselves when they acceded to the power of kings and cardinals, but they appear to have done so in the wake of the last century's two World Wars. Populated largely by former Europeans who turned their back on (now vanished) European strictures, Americans have flattered themselves upon their tolerance while, thanks to wealth and distance, rarely being obliged to put it to the test. What makes our Iraqi adventure so lamentable is its dismissal of Westphalia's fundamental principle: that it is wrong to invade a nation for the purpose of regime change. For it is almost certain that this war of ours will end up confirming the Westphalian rule.
Personally, I find General Boykin an embarrassment - yet another yahoo to justify the world's contempt for political America. That he holds onto both of his jobs (in the Army and the Defense Department) is inexcusable, and the moralistic organizations that complain that he has been 'unfairly muzzled' ought to be ashamed of themselves. But what bothers me most is that the pulpit is once again a flashpoint.
17 October 2003: Wow. What a surprise! I pay no attention to baseball as a rule. Once in a great while, I take the subway up to Yankee stadium and float my way through a game on a sea of beer. Then I come home, and the next day I couldn't tell you a thing about what I saw. Who won? I don't know. I can't keep track of that sort of thing. The beer has nothing to do with my memory lapses.
But the playoffs this year have been different. I've sat here with a transistor radio, while trying to write a very different sort of piece, listening to the seventh game of the American League playoffs, not because I give a damn but - because I guess I do. This has been such a strangely exciting series that many people, I suspect, have been drawn in against their ordinary inclination. The problem with such latter-day enthusiasm is that its victims aren't prepared for the consequences of their unwonted interest. What I discovered tonight is that I'm a Boston fan.
I didn't know it until the Yankees won, but the signs were there beforehand. Sitting down to write my Friday piece for Portico, I heard a chorus of screams and shouts from the streets, and I had to know what it was about. (I knew it was about baseball.) One of the things that I really love about living in New York, and living where I do (a sort of Greenwich Village for preppies, bar-wise), is the occasional burst of vocal riot. The cries on New Year's Eve, 2000, were thrilling and prolonged. The somewhat briefer shouts last August told me that the blackout was over. This year's World Series (am I allowed to use that term yet?) has been as audible as the jets landing at LaGuardia on a humid day. I've been taken back to football weekends at Notre Dame. But until late tonight, I was coolly indifferent to the outcome.
Before hunkering down to work, I had to place an order with the Vermont Country Store. Never mind for what - although I will confess to ordering, as a lagniappe, a tin of Charles Chips. In the middle of the transaction, the operator at VCS interjected - rather imprudently, I thought - "I can't believe you're not listening to the Yankees game." I suppose I was interrupting. I was on the point of observing that, living in New York, I couldn't watch the game, but I wasn't sure that the old blackout rule still applied. I did, however, look up the Yankee Web site and tune my transistor radio to WCBS, the designated radio carrier. I had already found an ESPN screen that put the score at Boston 5, Yankees 2, but the exuberance down below (which has only just died down) told me that this was no longer the score. When I finally got the radio going, the teams were tied. And they remained tied for three innings.
I believed that I was genuinely indifferent until the Yankees won. The victory made my heart sick. I was reminded of the article in a recent New Yorker about survivors who jump from the Golden Gate bridge: two seconds into flight, and they'd give anything not to be dying. Perhaps if I had cared, Boston would have won. I certainly cared terribly about Boston's losing.
And that's where I'm going to leave this. I've got to get to New Hampshire tomorrow, and can't work out all the implications of this evening's discovery, which, I assure you, has nothing to do with metaphysical musings about the beauty of baseball. I can tell you already that it has a lot to do with an unfairness that even I'm aware of - an unfairness that gives the Yankees eight pitchers and the Red Sox two. The curse stories are amusing, but the colossal financial inequities in the great American game aren't. If the Yankees have the deepest pockets in baseball, why don't sports fans, even in New York, resent them? I was ashamed to hear my neighbors' triumph. Where is populism when you need it?
10 October 2003: Writing in nearly twenty years ago, Neil Postman made an observation about television that went straight to my list of Top Ten Things to Know.
When a television show is in progress, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas.
I wondered why thinking would be boring to watch on television - boring, that is, for someone like me, who's fond of lively discussions that are necessarily full of cogitating pauses. I concluded that watching a discussion in which I cannot not participate is worse than boring, and positively annoying. The onscreen pause reminds me that I'm a passive and quite unnecessary spectator. Televised discussion will follow its course whether I watch it or not. I still haven't figured out quite why this rule doesn't apply to radio, but I don't doubt that it has everything to do with the overpowering force of vision; I don't feel passive when I'm listening to NPR. In any case, I learned from Mr Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985), from which the passage above is taken (pages 90-91), that television would never, and could never, realize its early promise as an educational medium, because everything on television has to be prepared and canned ahead of time. Spontaneity - an essential ingredient of genuine learning - occurs only within the constraints of game-show rules.
Neil Postman died last weekend; with grim irony, news of his death did not reach the public until Wednesday, and his obituary appeared in The New York Times only yesterday. He did not live to see how completely California's gubernatorial recall confirmed his analysis of television, but having thought of him often during the media circus, only to hear of his death in the same newscast that announced the election results means that I will always associate him with what I take to be a baleful development.
Two facts: (1) There have been 32 gubernatorial recalls in California since 1936. Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory was the first instance of a successful recall. May have had something to do with the candidate's celebrity, d'you think? (2) California's broadcasters are notorious for underreporting political news, and with the Terminator and a host of other exotic figures in the running, they weren't necessarily making an exception for this summer's recall campaign when they gave it all-out coverage.
And a consolation: Arnold Schwarzenegger really won the race. He didn't have to. Forty-nine percent of the voters could have chosen to keep Governor Gray Davis, and lost the first part of the recall, while the second part could have been captured with a much lower percentage. But more people voted for Mr Schwarzenegger than voted against the recall (in other words, for Mr Davis). And yet the quality of the consolation is not great. The relatively massive turnout seems to have had more to do with participatory entertainment than with representative democracy. If government has taken on the look and feel of "Survivor," surely this is grounds for anxiety and not celebration.
That the recall was an exercise in participatory entertainment is suggested by many aspects of the contest. Exit polls indicated that most voters had made up their minds about a month ago - and then stopped judging. Mr Schwarzenegger said very little in the way of political speech, and that little was mostly puffery that seasoned critics of California's hamstrung budget found totally unrealistic. But this didn't matter to the voters. They might regret that their man never really 'addressed the issues,' but they voted for him anyway, because he had singlehandedly transformed a cranky recall into one of his own action pictures; in the coming episodes, he will descend on Sacramento and kick ass.
We'll see. He may well kick ass - it's something that California's voters haven't had occasion to address in their plethora of initiatives and referenda. But he may find that the same people who put him in office have made it impossible for him to construct a workable budget.
Requiescat Neil Postman.
3 October 2003: Click here.
26 September 2003: All week long, I've been fuming at the current state of American journalism - join the club - but what nearly set off an attack of thrombosis occurred yesterday after the Democratic contenders' debate on CNBC. What possible justification can the cable network have had for turning to a right-wing screamer, Chris Matthews, for commentary on the candidates' performance? He quite predictably dismissed the lot as wrong-headed and misguided, shouting down the innocuous anchor; his presence suggested that CNBC didn't expect many Democrats to be watching the debate, and was simply trying to please the angry, conservative audience that it is trying to lure away from Fox. I don't think that I've ever seen anything so scandalous on television - but then, I don't watch it.
But as I say I was already pretty angry myself, having had a hard time digesting the import of two stories in the October 6 issue of The Nation. The first was one of Eric Alterman's columns, this one devoted to the whopper that President Bush has told about his initial reaction to the September 11 attacks. In December, 2001, and January, 2002, the president stated that while he was waiting to enter an elementary school classroom in Florida he saw the impact of the first plane on a nearby television monitor - and thought it was a case of pilot error. But he can't have seen any such thing, since a video of the first plane's impact, taken by a tourist, did not surface until the next day. The 'pilot error' detail is almost weird. No one, of course, thought that the second strike (which of course was captured by live cameras) owed to pilot error, and the president's retrospective fancy reminds me of the 'corroborative detail' that gets K0-Ko and his friends in so much trouble in The Mikado. The misstatement is admittedly not terribly important in itself, but it's a sterling example of the man's reckless way with facts and figures. He doesn't care about them, and he apparently believes that most other people don't, either. Nonetheless, it's journalism's principal job to get things right, and Mr Alterman is right to be dismayed that none of his colleagues has endeavored to set the record straight.
A page or so later, Matt Taibbi filed a report on Gov. Howard Dean's campaign stumping. Mr Taibbi recounts how a reporter from a Florida paper interrupted a discussion that he and the governor were trying to have about Sallie Mae loans to small businesses with the following: "Governor, getting back to substance," he said. "Is it true that you paint your own house?" The piece ends in an epiphany, as Mr Taibbi comes to understand the true purpose of the governor's - or of any candidate's - appearances here and there throughout the country, invariably flanked by a politically correct mix of diverse Americans.
To be full of shit in American politics is a signal to our political press that you are serious, and it was quite obvious that the most transparently meaningless or calculating aspects of Dean's behavior were what most impressed the Sleepless Summer press corps.
This is pretty bad, no? Forget media bias. The problem is rather one of media substance. Who cares if a presidential candidate as such paints his own house? I'll tell you who cares: anyone who's afraid of being bored by more serious issues. Whether or not American journalists themselves have succumbed to this fear, they clearly feel it on behalf of their readers. Marketplace-of-ideas ideology takes it from there.
Ideas are not marketplace commodities. They are not consumer goods, because we don't consume them. On the contrary, ideas consume us. We're the commodities. We're the vessels through which ideas, spreading more or less infectiously throughout a population, manifest themselves and change the world. Our susceptibility to ideas is both uniquely human and dangerously volatile, and the notion than any one idea is as valid as any other is noxious nonsense. Journalists are not the only professionals with a responsibility for discriminating among ideas - for asserting, on the strength of their intelligence and training, that this idea is a good one, and that one not - but they alone manage the day-to-day status of current ideas. A reporter who finds more substance in the painting of one house than in the health of America's small businesses (and in the puzzle of corporate size) has betrayed his calling, and at the very least ought to turn in his word processor for a microphone and a blow drier.
19 September 2003: As expected, General Wesley K. Clark announced this week his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. There is little doubt that the 'draft Clark' movement had everything to do with General Clark's all but superlative military reputation. The commander of NATO peace-keeping forces in Kosovo, the general has been a star ever since he graduated first in his class at West Point. Unlike almost everyone in the Bush administration - especially the so-called 'chicken hawks' - he knows war first hand. Here is a potential candidate, the drafters clearly thought, who can take back the red, white and blue from the Republican radicals. The implication is that a civilian, even a civilian with Senator John Kerry's background, won't be able to stand up to the blasts of neoconservative rhetoric that we can expect in the coming campaign. As a practical matter, I'm inclined to agree. But I worry that General Clark's candidacy may come to be perceived by uncommitted swing voters as a negative force, aimed simply to put a stop to the Bush Revolution. Unless they're positively attracted to a candidate's position, American voters tend to stay at home.
There were already nine contenders in the Democratic field, itself a matter of great worry. Republican strength has always owed its successes to the allegiance with which its supporters rally round the man anointed in the party's sanctum sanctorum; Democrats are naturally divisive. I see a lot of dead wood in the Democratic fold, names that I wish would drop out of the race because it's already crystal-clear that they'll use up political oxygen to no effect. I am not entirely sure that Senator John Edwards is not one of them. Senators Kerry and Joseph I. Lieberman certainly have the required gravitas, but whether this atmospheric ingredient would condense into genuine authority remains unclear. Governor Howard Dean, hitherto the popular favorite, blazed out of nowhere but appears to be headed in the same direction, the victim of runaway success. (We forget, in the automobile age, the terror that 'runaway' used to imply.) Although most committed Democrats seem to like Governor Dean, he has been dismissed as unelectable by many observers, most insistently by The New Republic's Jonathan Chait. (That periodical's objections to the governor must in part be rooted in its support for the war in Iraq, which the governor has always loudly opposed.) Until very recently, Democratic Party dialogue has been polarized between leftists denouncing centrist accommodation, on the one hand, and pragmatists determined to put forward a candidate who can win the election. The movement to draft General Clark was launched by the pragmatists, who without the slightest discomfort liken their man to Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican not beloved of the Democrats of his day. Well and good. In the current political climate, General Clark is probably no less conservative that General Eisenhower was; he wants to preserve and uphold, not destroy, the fabric of 'New Deal' federal government.
The danger is that if and when leftists, liberals, old-fashioned Democrats and (who knows) even Naderites agree that getting George W. Bush out of the White House is their paramount objective, and that General Clark is the man to do it, they will cloud the air with righteous, anti-Republican vituperation. Their support for the general will look worse than pragmatic - opportunistic. Unable sincerely to sing the praises of whatever platform the general cobbles together, committed Democrats will limit themselves to assailing the Bush administration. This could be a disaster for their party, for this country's voters have never let themselves be scolded into putting anyone into the White House.
Concentrating on an electable candidate always risks accentuating the negative. The fact that things are not going as well for the administration as Bush supporters may like is an advantage for the Democrats, certainly, but not perhaps the advantage that it might seem to be. Nothing will take the place of active popular support for its own candidate.
Governor Dean's meteoric career - which he may yet manage to rein in - will doubtless inspire prospective fund-raisers and check-writers to scrutinize General Clark very carefully before rallying behind him. Four issues have emerged so far, in addition to the hardly negligible objection that the general has never run for elective office. First, is the general as thin-skinned as critics (who may simply resent his success) have alleged? Second, again according to his critics, does he have a tendency to say whatever it is that he thinks will get him what he wants? Third, is he hot-headed, as the contretemps that led to his dismissal from NATO command in Kosovo might suggest? And, finally, will the Clintons' support help or hinder him? These matters need to be cleared up right away. When they are, I do hope that General Clark emerges as a man whom Americans will want to elect as their forty-fourth president.
12 September 2003: Click here.
5 September 2003: Last week, I wrote about the miasma of incompetence that appears to have infected American know-how. Two days later, the top-fold article in the Times's Week in Review Section approached the same topic from another angle, this time focusing on brinksmanship, which is the art of getting away with as much as you can. Brinksmanship necessarily involves testing and, inevitably, exceeding limits - for the sheer hell of it. It is one thing to test limits in a crisis, and quite another to manufacture crises by testing limits for no operational reason. The latter is an indiscriminate abuse of social institutions and resources, and it takes no heed of third-party consequences. That's why I prefer to regard 'brinksmanship,' which is meant to sound daring and manly, as a form incompetence. This peculiar stupidity, to the best of our knowledge, is induced by unregulated hormones.
As if show how timely our anxieties - mine and the Times's - were, as if to suggest that they were even more warranted than we might have thought, this week's news disclosed a financial scandal based on the systematic corruption of a trusted operating system. (Needless to say, I'm not talking about a Microsoft product.) For sixty-odd years, the mutual fund industry has kept its nose clean. Perhaps it has been a little stodgy, and often seriously overpriced, but there have been no serious irregularities in its day-to-day operation. Like all financial institutions, it has harnessed computers to honest workers to produce transactional records that could be taken on faith. Until now. Now, as a result of an investigation launched by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer - already well on his way to outdoing Rudy Giuliani as a scourge of Wall Street - the Bank of America and four other mutual fund sponsors have been implicated in a pattern of fraudulently priced trades designed to enrich not only a hedge fund manager happened to be the son of one of America's richest men but the fund sponsors themselves, all to the detriment of 'ordinary' fund investors. I put 'ordinary' in quotes because both New York State law and the federal legislation governing securities transactions outlaw any distinctions between big and small mutual fund investors - or distinctions of any type. No financial product on the market today is more rigorously required to be egalitarian.
Whether or not the Canary Scandal - the hedge fund involved, pet-owners will be interested to note, was called Canary Capital Partners, LLP, a salute to manager's family fortune, which originated in bird seed produced by Hartz Mountain (currently a real estate concern) - becomes really big news depends on what Mr Spitzer turns up in his ongoing investigations. The early word is that the named mutual funds' delinquencies are widespread throughout the mutual industry, but I doubt that the Canary Scandal will get Enron-level coverage, or even the attention lavished on Martha Stewart. The money is not 'big' enough to qualify for the former. If Canary Capital made $40 million in illegal profits, as Mr Spitzer's charge alleged, then this is the amount has to be divided by the number of outstanding shares in the various mutual funds managed by the five named sponsors and allocated further to the other investors owning sales at the same time as the fraudulently-timed ones; I would be very surprised if the average investor's loss amounted to $100. I doubt that that figure will have to be revised upwards no matter how extensive the abuse turns out to be. This isn't to say that the investors don't deserve to be made whole, but rather to suggest that making them whole isn't going to break any banks. (More about banks in a minute.) And as for glamour, forget it. Even the aggrieved will have a hard time figuring out just what their fund sponsors did. And the malefactors are likely to turn out to be both numerous and mid-level.
But the story is alarming in the same way as the blackout story was. Who's minding the store here? The security of the American financial industry rests on the twin pillars of unimpeachable records and full disclosure. Without going into detail, the Canary Scandal depended on some important systems bypasses. It ought to have been impossible to implement these shortcuts, which allowed trades to be dated improperly and for commissions to be waived. Why would a sponsor waive a commission? There would be no good reason at all, except that the Bank of America, and one of the other sponsors, has a lot of different types of business going - namely, its more traditional banking activities. It seems that the Bank was eager to secure the patronage of Leonard Stern, aforementioned member of the club of America's richest men. Waiving commissions didn't take money out of other investors' pockets (or fail to enrich them), but as I say the mutual fund business is absolutely egalitarian, and such discretionary activity on the part of sponsors is illegal. It also violates the SEC's bedrock disclosure rules. As to the improperly dated transactions (and this is the more serious of the two malpractices), the bank exchanged the quid of specially-priced shares for the quo of Leonard Stern's business, a genuine rip-off of other investors.
I don't know why the three fund sponsors who aren't also banks got involved in this scheme - that will come out in time - but it's clear enough why the banks themselves were, and the Canary Scandal is a reminder that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was designed to keep banking and brokerage separate, may have been a mistake, at least insofar as it was replaced by a regulatory vacuum. But behind this public-policy question there is the deeper woe of professional irresponsibility. The fraudulent patterns woven by the sponsors and the hedge-fund manager required the acquiescence if not the active participation of accounting and compliance units. In-house lawyers may have issued unwarranted opinions blessing the scheme, but many among the back-office personnel involved must have had the experience to know that the trades they were being asked to process were 'questionable.' Because the abuses persisted for two years, involving many trades - you don't accumulate $40 million by arbitraging mutual fund shares overnight - they may well have warped the ethical culture of the fund sponsors' operations departments. If these organizations can't be trusted to keep honest and accurate records, then surely a financial dark age is upon us. I don't mean a market in which prices are down, but, much worse, one in which prices don't matter, or can't be determined.
The Wall Street Journal's immediate editorial response to the scandal was to wrap SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson for not having beaten Mr Spitzer to the punch. This could not be more characteristic of the Journal's full-time rooting section for the government-hating conservatives who, among other things, have starved the Commission of the funds required to finance protracted and hostile investigations. The only wonder is how Mr Spitzer funded his.
29 August 2003: This morning's WNYC headlines were grimly related. First, an important Iraqi ayatollah, Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, was blown up in a car bomb explosion in the holy city of Najaf, together with about 90 members of his congregation. 'Old Baathists' were blamed for the assassination, but so was the American failure to restore order in Iraq. The other leading story concerned 2000 pages of transcripts, made by the Port Authority, builder-owner of the World Trade Center, of telephone and radio communications recorded on 11 September 2001. It had taken a FOIA suit by The New York Times to make the transcripts public. I was overcome by the desire to give the rest of the day a pass.
These stories are related, moreover, in several ways. The American adventure in Iraq is a consequence (if hardly a necessary one) of the terrorist attacks two years ago. But the linkage that bothers me is the note of incompetence common to both. The transcripts, not surprisingly, reveal official confusion about how to handle an unforeseen crisis. It would be harsh to expect anyone, prior to that awful day, to have developed a plan for evacuating a densely populated office complex, but the fact remains that a lot of authoritative advice was wrong, and a lot of heroism misguided. Whether we ought to have known what to do, we didn't know. And we don't seem to be doing much better in Iraq. Even assuming that the severe cost constraints imposed by the administration on the occupation were lifted, it's unlikely that we would be able to calm the hornets' nest of old and new grievances that our invasion stirred up. Our presence alone appears to distract many leading Iraqis from buckling down to the hard job of constructing a state on the ruins of Saddam's misrule. It is simply too easy to blame the Americans for everything that goes wrong. And while our soldiers are certainly more loyal and committed than American forces in Viet Nam were, I wonder if they have a significantly clearer idea of why they're there.
Ever since the blackout, I've been thinking a lot about incompetence. American incompetence, of all things. What happened to our can-do efficiency?
But first, a happier story: it appears that NASA engineers, the people who dream up and design spacecraft, will be given a greater, and possibly a controlling, voice in the conduct of missions. Sanguine project managers will have to yield to the professionally scrupulous. This is a story about competence restored, but of course it is also a story about the corrosive effect of staring too hard at bottom lines. (Not that engineers guarantee safety, as posthumous questions about the design of the Twin Towers have suggested.) If everything is business, if everything is either a success or a failure, then competence becomes too expensive, as well as an onerous drag on the risk-loving impulses of chief executives.
If everything is a business, then everyone is running business risks in every aspect of life - an insane stress. The other day, I came across a chilling remark, made, I believe, by the chairman of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve. This gentleman observed that 'no bank failures is too few,' by which he meant that banks aren't taking enough risks. Enough risks for what, and for whom? Is a bank just a business? No, and here's why: a bank serves people who don't necessarily understand banking, and can't be expected to assess the risks that a banker might choose to run. If a bank were just a business, then all of its depositors would have to be bankers, too, or at least capable of not only keeping up with but evaluating bankers as well. Assuming that you're not a banker, are you up to the job? Don't you rather regard bankers as people who specialize in sparing you the obligation to understand banking? Isn't that what you pay them for?
A fortiori as regards electric power and medicine, two of many fields where professional expertise has been insulted by excessive bean counting.
I don't for a minute believe that the supply of truly competent Americans has dwindled. But because doing a good job is not the fastest route to riches, I worry that capable and reliable people will be overlooked in the rush to complete projects and maximize profits. I worry that managers like Alfred Lambert, the father-figure in Jonathan Franzen's novel, The Corrections, will feel like chumps for having been honest and dutiful. And I worry that Americans will fall into the habit of lazily taking someone's word for it that the someone in question knows what he's doing.
22 August 2003: In our neighborhood, the power was restored on Friday at 6:15 PM. The blackout was a long and very tedious ordeal, but I tried to remind myself that it could have been worse. I hadn't been caught in an elevator or on the subway, for example. Kathleen, it's true, had walked all the way uptown from Wall Street, and then climbed umpteen flights to our apartment - without being able to freshen up with a shower afterward. I spent almost all of the twenty-six hours out on our balcony, where at least there was moving air. This had the intended effect of keeping the apartment cool.
By the time I'd cleaned up and put something on the stove for dinner, it was a little too late to sit down to write my now customary Friday piece for the Front Page of Portico. I decided to let it go altogether. Readers might have been curious to know what the blackout was like, but all I can say is that the local skyline, dark under a correspondingly brighter moon (it was almost full), made a strangely uninteresting sight. Fond as I am of history, I have no desire whatsoever to sample life without a full complement of modcons. I would have enjoyed the blackout more if I'd been unconscious.
***
Late last night, surfing the movie channels, I came across JFK, Oliver Stone's take on conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. It was more than a little reminiscent of the Pentagon and backyard-lab scenes in A Beautiful Mind. Once you believe something, you'll find plenty of evidence for your belief, and, the more preposterous the belief, the more evidence you will find. My all-purpose objection to conspiracy theories is that it's just too hard to keep secrets these days. Sooner or later, the itch to go public becomes irresistible. A good deal of the evidence mustered in JFK concerned efforts to keep the conspiracy against Kennedy a secret, and it involved too many people. I would not be deeply surprised if proof of Mr Stone's coup d'état were one day established beyond a reasonable doubt, but I'm not persuaded by a pile of circumstantial evidence, each item of which has to be held up to the light just so.
A conspiracy theory of an entirely different kind has been floated in the current issue of Harper's Magazine (September 2003). Writing about the disgrace of American public education, John Taylor Gatto suggests that, instead of wondering what's wrong with schools, we ought to ask if they're not, after all, doing exactly what they're designed to do. The conspiracy theory here is that American educators have little or no interest in providing students with a genuine education, but are rather preoccupied with turning out mediocrities who can't (or don't want to) think for themselves. Sounds sinister, doesn't it! But this is a conspiracy of the open-secret kind, for the history of public education in the last century, together with a body of 'revolutionary' texts that outlined the modern educator's objectives, are there for anyone to see.
Mr Gatto traces the underpinnings of public schooling back to Prussia, where education was devised to fragment the lower classes and thus hinder mass movements. The American version was developed about a century later, as heavy industry required both pliable workers and mass consumers. Mr Gatto points out that a work entitled Principles of Secondary Education (1918), by Alexander Inglis, was identified by no less magisterial a figure than James Bryant Conant as a key text of the 'revolution' in education that transformed American schools even as education was being made universally compulsory. The first of Inglis's six 'educational' functions is to "establish," in Mr Gatto's words, "fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely." Indeed What I remember about public school is the teachers but not their classes, the discipline of detention, and the plethora of quasi-military rules. Homework was one thinly-disguised punishment (for being young and relatively weak); exams, and especially pop quizzes, were another. It is by no means wild of Mr Gatto to compare the typical American school to a prison. Inglis's other functions concern sorting and grading students - what has come to be called 'tracking.' Contrary to common wisdom, this tracking selects not for grades or academic achievement but for obedience. It does so by judging achievement in terms of obedience. The self-directed student will fare no better than the 'academically challenged.'
Consider the words of Woodrow Wilson (president, at the time, of Princeton University), in an address to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
This depressing program envisions a large electorate that will do as it's told - that will follow the lead of the privileged few. I can't imagine anything less consistent with this country's founding texts - except for the parts concerning slavery. The 'difficult manual tasks' that Wilson saw at the heart of the economy have largely disappeared, or emigrated to Third-World countries, and 'vocational training' has been relegated to correctional facilities, but there can be no doubt that we live in a country divided between a small class of the liberally educated and everybody else, the latter group trained to do nothing at all - and certainly not to think. (Woodrow Wilson seems to become more monstrous with everything that I read about him.)
Does this bifurcated system work? I don't think so. In Mr Gatto's judgment,
Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships, easy credit has removed the for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults.
Happy, that is, up to a point - the point at which voters get carried away with referenda, as Californians have. The essential idiocy of government by referendum is this: there is no requirement that voters square the consequences of the referendum at hand with those of ones already 'enacted.' Swept into law by single-issue passions, referenda make government less effective, not more; the ultimate referendum would undoubtedly abolish government altogether. Only a very dimly-educated electorate could make such a mess of direct democracy, and fail, at the same time, to make more of the virtues of indirect democracy - the representative democracy in which this nation was born.
Mr Gatto's response to the nefarious disaster of our public schools is to urge parents to counteract the infantilizing tendencies of public education. I'm not sure that this would be a sound approach, not least because it would certainly subject many children to ostracism and worse. For my part, I have two recommendations. A nice beginning would be to close all schools of education, for there is no way to teach someone who has never taught how to teach, other than to throw that prospective teacher into a classroom and see what happens. Second, it would probably be enough for public schools to do what they can to emulate the nation's private schools, especially the 'elite' boarding schools of the Northeast. It's not that these schools perform miracles, just that they don't stand in the way of obtaining an education. Of course, I'm not without my own Big Ideas about education.
Education is an experience that's difficult to compare, because with few (and by definition unenlightening) exceptions, the stages of education aren't open to repetition. You can't 'do' high school twice, once in an ordinary public school and once at an elite institution such as Andover. But I can assure you that the most rigorous schooling I ever had was at a private boarding school in New Jersey; it was certainly more demanding than all but the first semester of law school. I wish I'd been able to go to Blair for four years instead of two, because my freshman and sophomore years at a public high school in Westchester Country were a waste. Then as now, Bronxville's was a school district that parents paid a stiff premium to inhabit, and teachers' salaries were at or near the top of the scale. As public high schools go, Bronxville was, and probably still is, a very good one. But it had more in common with scout camp than with Blair. Primarily an organ of socialization, it pitched its academics at or below average, and this would have made life boring for almost everybody if the dramas of adolescent social life, together with extracurricular activities, had not provided absorbing distractions. What kind of person you were meant a great deal more than what sort of work you were capable of. Leaving this atmosphere behind was unbelievably liberating. It also taught me that real education is too urgent and absorbing to be judged on an axis of 'fun' and 'not fun.'
As the politicians never tire of saying, education is a number-one problem in this country. But almost everything that they recommend in the way of reform is false. The disparity in education parallels America's disparity of incomes, but is much more dangerous.
15 August 2003: No entry, thanks to the Great Blackout of 2003. (Well, let's hope it was.)
8 August 2003: Click here.
1 August 2003: The other day, reading Eric Alterman's column in The Nation, I came across yet another rehearsal of some astounding poll results. According to a January survey, 44 percent of those polled appeared to believe that Iraqi citizens participated in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Only 17 percent knew that none of the terrorists was Iraqi. The interesting thing about these figures, as Mr Alterman notes, is that the Iraqi element was new; in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, nobody made a connection between the attackers - who were widely reported as being Egyptian or Saudi - and Iraq. Nor, in the fall of 2001, was any responsibility for the attacks imputed to Saddam Hussein.
Where did this disturbing ignorance come from? Certainly the anything-but-straight-talking Administration must take credit for sowing seeds of misinformation in the course of drumming up support for the invasion of Iraq. But the medium in which the seeds sprouted was undoubtedly television news. It wasn't necessary for newscasters to make false statements. Simply repeating the Administration's anti-Saddam propaganda would have been enough to lead many viewers to make the faulty connection. This wouldn't work in print. Reading requires an engagement with text that easily exposes nonsense for what it is - that's why innuendo and unsupported allegation are confined to gossip columns, and banished altogether from serious newspapers. Serious newspapers treasure their reputations for balanced reporting, fully aware that readers will be able to spot bias when they see it. Television, in contrast, requires so little of its viewers that many, if not most, find it difficult to give the screen their undivided attention. I've no idea how many people under sixty listen attentively to the late news the way my parents did thirty years ago, but I suspect that not many do, especially in this age of multitasking. And I believe that most people who get their news from television do so as if by eavesdropping, catching a word here or there and not giving much thought to what they hear - not, that is, until the pollsters ring up.
Reading a newspaper is a lot more difficult than taking in a television newscast, and it takes a very great deal longer. It seems unlikely that there will ever be a time when most people read a good newspaper every day, or that there ever was such a time. Were people better informed before television? No. But they were more aware of their ignorance and uncertainty. Television's darkest power is its knack for fooling viewers into believing that watching a sixty-minute show makes them experts, and that sitting through a round-table discussion to which they can't contribute is a substitute for thought. Television has to flatter its viewers, if only to make up for the tedium of the passivity that it requires.
Television can be hugely entertaining, and there can be no doubt of its importance in spreading the idea that in matters of importance there is not much difference between men and women, or between blacks and whites, or really between any two similarly intelligent and imaginative people. But it rarely tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Flattened onto the screen's two dimensions, the complexity of the truth becomes confusing and boring complication. The networks are often faulted these days for cutting back on their news budgets, but I think that nothing would be more heroic than for television executives to acknowledge that their medium is no good at all doing news, and so put to an end their wretchedly misleading simulacrum.
25 July 2003: Click here.
18 July 2003: A little knowledge, the saying ought to go, springs eternal. A week or so ago, the Times ran an article about the radically small number of genes on the Y-chromosome. Because this chromosome cannot swap genes during mating, it has been losing them instead, or so the theory goes. The news was that the chromosome has nevertheless developed a way of repairing itself, but this wasn't exactly news you could use. Much more interesting was the flutter of speculation about the Incredible Shrinking Y-Chromosome. Ignoring the crux of the story altogether, wiseacres and ADD sufferers indulged in a flutter of speculation about the eventual extinction of the masculine of the species. Maureen Dowd, the Times's resident wiseacre, weighed with a sarcastic column that, had a man been writing about women, would never have been published in the Grey Lady's pages. The following Monday, the paper published five Letters to the Editor on the subject, headed 'Y Power: Men Are Here to Stay.' It would be funny if it weren't such a sad waste of time.
My favorite letter, so to speak, was sent in by one Rick Reiss of Temecula, California. (I must say that it's heartening to know that the Times is read across the land; indeed, none of the five letters on 'Y Power' came from the New York Metropolitan Area.) Mr. Reiss wished to remind the Editors that "There are still plenty of us regular guys who like to drive trucks and eat steak. We're not going away." Then he wound up: "After eight years of a feminized presidency, most of our society welcomes the resurgence of regular guys who carry on in our battles against terrorists."
Is that what the Right hated about Bill Clinton? That the fatal attraction that he appeared to exert over every woman who crossed his path made him a softie? There have always been two rather contradictory ways of evaluating masculine success: by counting a man's sexual conquests or by appraising his indifference to women. Men who are indifferent to women - and this indifference is usually a veiled hostility - don't score very often, and when they do, their approach savors of rape rather than seduction. It seems clear to me that 'regular guys,' as a rule, have hardly any more use for women than gay men do.
Writing in Psychology Today - an article that I came across through Arts & Letters Daily - Hara Marano outlines "The New Sex Scorecard." After reviewing the physiological differences between male and female brains, and the corresponding propensity for men to develop schizophrenia and for women to succumb to depression, Ms Marano ends on a strange note. According to Baltimore psychologist Shirley Glass, Ph.D., the differences between the ways in which men and women approach extramarital affairs is shrinking. "In what may be a shift of epic proportions, sexual infidelity is mutating before our very eyes. Increasingly, men as well as women are forming deep emotional attachments before they even slip into an extramarital bed together. It often happens as they work long hours together in the office."
Isn't that something! When men spend a lot of time with women in some common activity, they begin to act like women - at least insofar as they care about the person they're unfaithful with. This at any rate, might be the inference drawn by Mr Reiss and regular guys of the 'slam, bam, thank you, ma'am' persuasion. To keep your regular guy status in good order, the answer clearly is to hang around as much as possible with other regular guys, driving trucks, eating steaks, and fighting terrorists.
Seriously, I would really like to know what was 'feminized' about the Clinton Administrations. Was it too cautious, perhaps? Bill Clinton knew - as he acknowledged once he was out of office - that the first President Bush had held back from Baghdad, and resisted the impulse to 'get Saddam,' because his agreement with the Saudi Arabian government, allowing American troops to maneuver from Saudi territory, required this restraint. President Clinton certainly hated war, and fought hard to stay out of it - perhaps too hard, as catastrophes in Central Africa and the Balkans might have been avoided or mitigated by forceful American response. In both cases, we would have gone to war to restore peace. That cannot be said of the current Iraq adventure. Iraqis now have the bitter opportunity to compare peace under a tyrant to chaos in an anarchy. I can't say that one is better than the other.
Was it Hillary? Too much input from an uppity First Lady? The former First Lady is a Senator now - albeit from a state whose citizens, if the Times Letters are any indication, are dangerously unconcerned about the fate of the Y-chromosome - and by all accounts she is a free-standing politician who owes little or nothing to her husband's charisma. While no one could have known for sure that Mrs Clinton would eventually win a major election on her own, it seems unfair to pretend that she was just another presidential better half.
I think I had it right the first time. The Clinton Administrations were feminized because so many women wanted to throw themselves into Bill Clinton's arms. Too many girls! Meanwhile, when are all those regular guys going to hunt down Osama and Saddam? Sometimes it seems that the Y-chromosome will run out of genes first.
11 July 2003: Last Tuesday, in the New York Times for 8 July 2003, there appeared on page A4 an item concerning the Lutheran pastor of Tarbaek, a village to the north of Copenhagen. The pastor, Thorkild Grosboll, subscribes to an unorthodox creed. "I do not believe in a physical God, in the afterlife, in the resurrection, in the Virgin Mary. And I believe that Jesus was a nice guy who figured out what man wanted. He embodied what he believed was needed to upgrade the human being." The story, by Lizette Alvarez, does not state that Rev Grosboll has preached this creed from his pulpit, but for acknowledging it to a Danish newspaper reporter he has brought down the wrath of church hierarchy. In these temperate times, ecclesiastical wrath has confined itself to relieving Rev Grosboll of his pastorate - much to the dismay of his parish of 1500 souls. His parish council has urged the bishop, Lise-Lotte Rebel, to reconsider, and a supportive rally has been staged - on a football night, no less. The bishop, temporizing perhaps, has asked Rev Grosboll to 'clarify' his remarks. This demand is unlikely to produce reconciliation. Described by Ms Alvarez as 'a laid-back man in Oxford tweeds who is beloved by his community,' Rev Grosboll explains, "I want the focus to be on the here and now, as a cultural factor. God is not an argument. God is only a question. He is supposed to be a constant stone in the shoe."
Ms Alvarez reports that Rev Grosboll's dismissal has 'set off a tsunami of theological discourse in workplaces, university halls and cafes across Denmark, where religion seldom penetrates the collective consciousness.' Attendance at the state-supported Church, she notes, is no higher than six percent of the population. That figure certain blunts the impact of the bishop's assertion that Rev Grosboll's remarks are "creating doubt and confusion about the church's values." One suspects, indeed, that Tarbaekers are more likely to attend church services than other Danes (not that I know this to be the case) precisely because their pastor has jettisoned the metaphysics that don't seem to have much to do with the pursuit of a Christian life here on earth. Indeed, I've always thought that the pursuit of a celestial afterlife is a dubious ulterior motive for observing Christian precepts. Personal salvation and charity don't really blend; there's a selfishness about wanting to go to heaven that sits ill with Christian altruism.
The Nicene Creed, notoriously, prescribes no ethical tenets. With the exception of the line about Jesus's death ('crucifixus ... passus et sepultus est' - 'he was crucified ... suffered and was buried'), it is a list of metaphysical propositions about the unseen and the yet-to-come. For a millennium and a half, the profession of this creed, not the implementation of Jesus's teaching, has been required of all Roman Catholics, and of some Protestant Christians as well. One wonders why. The short answer is that Early Christianity was, to put it mildly, multifaceted, a chaotic Babel of competing ideas about the nature of God, Jesus, and the human soul. The problem of evil vexed many minds and inspired many inconsistent ideas about Creation. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Emperor understandably desired an end of this cacophony, and so a Church Council at Nicea was charged with formulating core Christian beliefs - about metaphysical matters.
But why now? Why, when there is so much for a Christian to concern himself with here below, does it matter what he thinks of what lies beyond? Whether or not you believe in the doctrine of the Trinity can have no bearing on fulfilling Christ's fundamental rule - treat your neighbor as you would be treated. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke may be searched in vain for Nicene precepts. Why, then, is it important, or even interesting, to be clear about whether or not the Holy Spirit 'proceeds from the father and the son'? Here's my hunch: Christianity - Christ's teaching - is not really a religion.
From the beginnings of recorded history, people - at least the people on this side of the Himalayas - have turned to religion to answer such questions as "How did the world come about?" and "What happens after death?" These are not moral questions, but rather the kind of question that most educated Westerners today expect science to answer - even if they still ask these specific questions of religion. The decidedly pre-Christian doctrine of the immortal soul (it's pagan Greek, not Hebrew) is an answer to the ultimate religious question, which is "What does it all mean? What's the point of existence?" Catholics and Protestants alike are asked to believe that the point of existence is to praise the Lord God and to pray for salvation - that is, redemption from the imperfections of material existence.
But not everyone is riveted by these questions. I daresay few people are, at least most of the time. Most of the time, we find ourselves in a busy, complicated world, in which frustrations abound, pleasures are chancy, and choices are difficult. Affection and dislike propel us toward and away from the people around us with a force that willpower rarely overcomes, while dreams of a happier future tend to make us too impatient with the present to take sensible and disciplined steps toward our goals. The teachings of Jesus are full of wisdom, some of it obvious, some obscure, and much of it difficult, concerning the difficulties of navigating a steady course through the riotous panorama of engagement with the world. A preoccupation with the meaning of life, in contrast, seems solipsistic in a particularly adolescent way, and the imposition of a peculiar set of answers to 'ultimate' questions on everyone in the neighborhood is downright monstrous.
A few years ago, retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong published an important book called Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (HarperCollins, 1998). I could open the book anywhere and find a passage with a bearing on the foregoing, but the following is acutely germane - and if I had Bishop Rebel's email address, I'd forward it to her:
Anger has always marked the religious establishment. This is why so many Christian leaders historically have justified such things as the stifling of debate with ex cathedra pronouncements, the persecution of dissenters, the excommunication of nonconformists, the execution of heretics, and the engagement in religious wars. This is also why anger is always just beneath the surface of organized religion in almost every one of its Western manifestations. The preaching of evangelists is marked by finger pointing and face-contorting expressions of hostility while they talk about the wrath of God. Anger lies underneath the glee expressed by the preachers of Christian history when they assign unbelievers to hell. Anger is the reason why many religious people act as if they will not enjoy the bliss of heaven if they are not simultaneously allowed to view those not so fortunate writhing before their eyes in the fires of hell. Anger is the reason why the Church throughout its history has kept writing creed after creed to clarify just who is in and who is out of this religious enterprise so that religious people would know who their enemies were and could act appropriately against them.
It may well be that all we really need to know about God is that He is a stone in our shoes, a constant reminder that we could do better. Meanwhile, I hope that the Times will follow the continuing story of Rev Grossboll and the parishioners of Tarbaek, Denmark.
le quatre juillet, 2003: Responding to my dismay, in last week's Front Page, on the matter of the President's popularity, a reader wrote, somewhat but not entirely tongue in cheek, "Spoken like a True Ivy League Snob." And I had to laugh, Double Domer that I am. It's the President who's the Ivy Leaguer. I have no reason to believe that the President is a snob - although I'd probably be happier with him if he were. I'm too old and, I hope, too wise to deny that I'm a snob, in some way or other - it's hard to be sure that absolutely none of one's reasonable discriminations grade off into unthinking prejudice. But an Ivy League Snob, I'm afraid, I cannot be.
I'll tell you what I'm a snob about: news. I've been reading A. N. Wilson's really terrific new book (pardon the triteness, but the book is really terrific, and today is a national holiday), The Victorians (Norton, 2003), and just yesterday, in a chapter entitled "The Fourth Estate - Gordon of Khartoum - The Maiden Tribute of Babylon," I came across a passage that beautifully sums up everything that I despise about mass journalism today, and why. Here it is:
No visitant from another age who landed in the midst of our twenty-first century culture would begin to make sense of our popular journalism - prurient, self-righteous, spiteful and pompous - unless they were able to trace its origins to the chiefly North Country traditions of the nineteenth-century Noncomformists. Dickens had ridiculed the Puritan conscience in such grotesques as Mr Chadband (Bleak House). What happened in the following generation was that a fervour, a craving for the emotional excitement of the prayer-meeting and the conversion experience, was awkwardly translated into secular spheres. As has been well said, 'in an epoch of varied achievements, scientific, literary and commercial, the elect of God related themselves to mundane reality almost exclusively through their aptitude for money-making; balancing this imperfect contact with a complex epoch of self-complacency.'
What's different now, here in America, is that the elect of God - and Americans have an irritating conviction that they're that - relate themselves to mundane reality through self-improvement, and they enlist God as a coach. "What would Jesus do?" - that loathsome trivialization. But the prurience, the self-righteousness, the spite and the pomposity, these are on full-dress display every minute on Fox News, and, with worrying frequency, on the other news outlets as well. The prurience, of course, fueled the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which in a sensible world would have received hardly any airtime at all, and so deprived Mr Starr and his backers of the oxygen that their pyromania required. The self-righteousness empowers blowhards like Bill O'Reilly to bully his guests. The spite is evident in the obviously resentful fury generated by France's objection to our Iraqi adventure - a resentment that forgets that saying "If it weren't for us, they'd all be speaking German," obligates you to remember that if weren't for them, we'd be toasting the Queen. And the pomposity! Everything about the visuals of television news is pompous, from set design to animation. Television news replaces the imperial parades of centuries past with imperial connectivity, a grandiose and patently sham claim to be in the know. What's patently sham about this claim is that no one on television is going to serve up a single news item without seasoning it to suit what Mr Wilson calls "the new journalism, a monster machine whose twin-turbo was fuelled by sensationalism and moralism."
Of this now all too familiar journalism, Mr Wilson writes, "It was based on a threefold alliance between an eagerly opinionated public, a political class anxious to test and ride these opinions like surfers waiting for the next roller to bear them crashing to shore, and the conduit that brought these two together, the solicitors or procurers known and journalists." We can thank this alliance for the ersatz democracy that we've got to live with until the public outgrows its weakness for ignorant and uncritical opinions. For until it does, the political class will be unable to lead it, and the journalists will have no reason not to coddle it.
In a fit of pique, I ordered a slew of Johnny Hallyday CDs from Amazon in France, and when my guests arrive for tonight's pre-fireworks feast of fried chicken and ribs, we'll be listening to pop music with a French accent. And we'll be drinking Champagne, too, when we toast, I hope not too optimistically, a less sensational future for this great nation.
27 June 2003: Whether or not the Bush Administration will find itself in political hot water because it misled the country into war on specious claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction remains somewhere between uncertain and unlikely, and the outcome will probably not be affected by whatever happens to Tony Blair, whose water is certainly uncomfortably warm right now. But I can't follow the WMD brouhaha very seriously, anyway, because I don't doubt for a minute that senior Administration officials (including the President) believed the faulty intelligence that they had pressured into existence. They were reckless, no doubt, but, worse, they appear to have been incompetent. Few things are more terrifying than the thought of an incompetent Administration at the helm of the world's superpower.
Aside from racking up tax cuts for wealthy individuals, the Bush Administration has accomplished exactly nothing. The ongoing war on terrorism has failed to bag both of its principal targets, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has been restored to civil peace. Indeed, it's unclear whether matters are getting better or worse in Iraq. While American and British troops helplessly stand by (there aren't nearly enough of them to police the country), Iraq sinks into generalized lawlessness and widespread vendetta. Meanwhile, at home, the Administration has done little to restore pre-9/11 feelings of safety; it has certainly starved the Homeland Security forces of meaningful resources. And all the other domestic indicators, bearing on the health of the economy, the health of the environment, and the contribution to both of our deranged levels of fuel consumption, are down and falling further.
Why then are the President and his team so popular? This is the mystery that bothers me the most, because what all the answers have in common is the irrationality of the American voter. For my part, George W. Bush has never been anything more than a cheerleader. I'll grant that he's a very good one, but a cheerleader is hardly a political leader. Cheerleaders inspire crowds not with bold and novel propositions but rather with clichés and well-worn gestures: Repeat after me, and you'll feel that you belong to the crowd. Cheerleaders want to make you feel good about the game, and a nation as habituated to televised sports as ours is makes an easy mark for canny manipulation. And it is probably his very mediocrity - laminated, of course, by privilege - that enables the President to pitch his appeal so perfectly. Not that Americans are such fools that they take the man to be somebody just like them. On the contrary. It's agreeable, perhaps, to know that even the son of a President can be so broadly undistinguished.
The first issue that any democracy must address is the political health of its electorate, for in a democracy everything depends on the voters' choices. All the campaign financing in the world cannot overcome the will of the majority, and implicit in the campaign-finance reform movement lies a conviction that American voters are too easily manipulated by advertising. Ideally, all that advertising would be ineffective, because voters would know enough about how to further their own interests to make reasonable, independent evaluations of the candidates. But a nation whose educated professional class by and large fell for the 'new economy' bubble can't be expected to take very good care of itself.
Nobody else, however, is going to take care of you. Certainly not the Cheerleader in Chief.
20 June 2003: Tackling the syllabus for a summer symposium that I'll be attending the week after next at Notre Dame, my alma mater, I finally made my way through St. Augustine's Confessions. This is a very embarrassing admission, because of course I ought to have read the Confessions when I was an undergraduate - I'm certain it was on the Great Books syllabus somewhere, and Great Books was my major - and for the matter of that I ought to have read it even earlier, for it was one of the very first books that I ever bought for myself. Who knows what I expected as a fourteen year-old, but in the event I was put off by the opening prayers, and probably never made it past the second page.
This time round, I found Confessions no less unsympathetic, and reading it was unusually effortful. Afraid that I would never get through it if I put it aside, I plowed through the first nine of the Confession's thirteen books in one day. These nine constitute an autobiography of sorts, up to the author's early middle age, and focus on the difficulties that Augustine had in coming round to accepting the Catholic Church. He was always a Christian, having been raised by a Catholic mother and a father who was baptized on his deathbed, but the Christians of the late fourth century were a contentious lot, and in his youth Augustine was drawn to the Manichean sect. The followers of Mani, a Mesopotamian writer of the previous century, believed, among other things, that matter was evil, the creation of a Prince of Darkness almost as powerful as the God of Light. Although they rejected the Hebrew Bible entirely and regarded most of the New Testament with suspicion, Manicheans did claim to be Christian, and one strain or another of Manichean thinking has managed to infect sizeable groups of Christians throughout European history, most notably among the Albigensians of the early thirteenth century. As a philosophy, however, the Manichean outlook never displayed much internal rigor, and it's no surprise that Augustine came to find it unsatisfactory. Trained as a rhetor (a teacher of oratory, antiquity's central professional skill), Augustine was naturally exposed to the more systematic thinking of Cicero and the Greeks whom Cicero admired, and at some point, he undertook the study of Plotinus, the great third-century Neoplatonist. The fruit of this study would be the classical reconstitution of Christian thought that determined the course of Western philosophy for well over a thousand years.
Curiously, the Confessions don't tell us several key details of this pilgrim's process. Augustine does not, for example, discuss his attraction to the Manicheans, but rather presents himself almost as if he had been brought up in the sect, which he clearly wasn't. Nor does he mention Plotinus, or any other Neoplatonic thinker. These lapses seem disingenuous to me, although the first can be explained as an aspect of the the book's polemical purposes - as a new bishop, Augustine had to defend himself against the objections of local Catholics who remembered his youthful commitments not only to the Manicheans but to 'worldly' success as a celebrated teacher. The second, however, is simply the suppression of an inconvenient fact. For although Plotinus clearly provided Augustine with an extremely sophisticated, internally consistent understanding of spirit, matter, creation, and even of God Himself, Plotinus himself was not a Christian. Therefore he could not serve Augustine as an authority for the project that the latter had undertaken even before his conversion to Catholicism. This project, as I say, was the application of Platonic ideas to Judeo-Christian faith. Augustine was hardly the first thinker to try to join these two so disparate traditions; at the very start of Christianity we find St Paul infusing his reading of Christ's life and mission with unmistakably Greek thinking. And it was this yoking of the Greek to Christ's story that made Christianity respectable to educated elites. But Augustine transformed the yoke into a graft.
How he came to do so is a story conspicuously absent from the Confessions. What we have instead is a prolonged postponement, as Augustine grapples, in book after book, with his two reservations about Catholicism. The first, and more famous, is chastity. By his own account a highly-sexed man, Augustine lived rather virtuously in quasi-marital fidelity with a concubine - a woman of considerably inferior social status - for fourteen years. When he sent her away, it wasn't for high-minded reasons but rather for worldly ones: if he was to advance in the world, he would have to marry a rich girl of his own class or better. In the short period between the end of this relationship and his conversion, Augustine resorted to prostitutes, uttering the famous prayer, "Lord, make me chaste - but not yet." (He was then in his thirties.) Curiously, it was the prospect of marriage - delayed because his intended was underage - that seems to have nudged Augustine toward the sexual renunciation that already distinguished the Catholic hierarchy. (And was there ever a question that, as a Catholic, Augustine would not belong to the hierarchy?) Augustine's second issue with Catholicism was the problem of evil. How to account for the presence of evil in a world created by a supremely good God has probably vexed more people than any other theological problem. The Manicheans 'solved' it, as we have seen, by compromising the omnipotence of God and attributing evil to a Prince of Darkness. For the young Augustine, evil was a substance, a thing, the creation of which was hardto explain. The stroke of genius that allowed Augustine to come round to the Catholic view was to recast evil as a an insubstantial falling away from the goodness of God, a turning in the wrong direction. Thus God did not create evil, but, in allowing his human creatures free will, He made evil possible. (It should be noted that Augustine did not regard natural disasters as evil.)
Now, as everybody knows, the old Hebrew God had not scrupled to inflict evils on the badly-behaved. The Jahweh of Pentateuch is, like the gods of the pagan pantheons, capable of caprice and vengefulness, and He is well-armed with plagues and thunderbolts. But such a Creator was wholly unacceptable to a cultured mind such as Augustine's, as, indeed, He was rejected outright by the Manicheans. From the time of Plato until the twilight of antiquity, intellectuals of every stripe seem to have shared an overriding obsession with the ideal, and Augustine was no exception. Idealism regards the created, material world, obviously imperfect, as a dim reflection of the perfect world of the spirit, and as for the world of the spirit, far from being gauzily mystical, idealism articulates it as a system of clearly interlocking parts that fit together with the finality of a jigsaw puzzle. To the educated minds of antiquity, spirit and light were almost identical - as, indeed, the famous proem of the Gospel of John reminds us. Augustine's great pretense was to find a basis for such a system within the confines of Scripture - and without reference to pagans such as Plato and Plotinus.
A corollary of this kind of systemization is, inevitably, orthodoxy. If the world reflects inherently consistent ideals, then the intelligent people in it must share a consistent understanding of its nature. Heterodoxy is anathema because it introduces confusion. How is one to choose from conflicting explanations? This is an urgent question when knowledge for its own sake is prized - and knowledge has probably never been so widely prized for its own sake as it was in the Hellenistic and early Christian worlds. Indeed, we can use the word gnosis ('knowing') to describe the philosophical objective of most schools of thought, Christian and pagan alike, current during the three centuries on either side of Christ. Given the axiom (framed most memorably by Aristotle) that the man who knows what is right will do what is right, knowing what was right assumed an importance that it's hard for us to imagine. Throughout his episcopate, Augustine never ceased engaging in battles against this sect and that in the name of orthodoxy, and at one point he crossed a fatal line and called in Imperial troops to quiet dissent. Thus began centuries of religious intolerance in the West.
By chance, I encountered a book this week that promises - I've hardly begun it - to counter not only Augustine's understanding of faith and reason but that of the various churches that have built upon it as well. Elaine Pagels's Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003) explores the body of scriptural writings that were dismissed from the canon (in about 180) and that would have been lost altogether had a collection of them not been stashed in a pot at a town now known as Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, to be discovered only in 1945. Among the works in the Nag Hammadi library is a Gospel of Thomas. That's Thomas as in 'Doubting Thomas,' the story of whose 'conversion,' told in the Gospel of John, may well be a political lie, designed to disparage Thomas's followers. Ms Pagels writes,
I was amazed when I went back to the Gospel of John after reading Thomas, for Thomas and John clearly draw upon similar language and images, and both, apparently, begin with similar 'secret teaching.' But John takes this teaching to mean something so different from Thomas that I wondered whether John could have written his gospel to refute what Thomas teaches. For months I investigated this possibility and explored the work of other scholars who also have compared these sources, and I was finally convinced that this is what happened.58
The problem, for us, is not how to decide which gospel is closer to the truth of Jesus's life and mission, but rather to learn that no such decision is really necessary. It is an imposition of the past, of the obsession with ideal uniformity that, viewed dispassionately, calls into question the entire project of classical philosophy - a project that Augustine almost single-handedly renewed under Catholic auspices. The problem, for us, is to learn to apply our hard-earned trust in religious toleration, supposedly a cornerstone of this country's foundation, to the religious precincts in which Jesus, but not His church, would have welcomed it.
13 June 2003: A friend wrote the other day with kind words about the link at the bottom of this page that will take you to former Front Pages, and then suggested that I caption each one with a subject heading or a set of key words. Would this be helpful? I'm inclined to think not. What, for example, was last week's Front Page all about? Queen Elizabeth? Hereditary monarchy? Diligent public service? I suppose it was about all of those things, but what interests me most in looking over the piece now is this statement: "I often wonder if the American dislike and distrust of public institutions isn't connected in some way to the absence of royalty, for without some ceremonial personage it is impossible to put a face on government." How would I shoehorn that into a caption?
I'm flattered that anyone would take the trouble to read superseded material. But I expect that anyone who would take the trouble isn't in much of a hurry. And what I am trying to get away from here is the kind of argument that can be reduced to a topic sentence. Look around (on the Web, at any rate), and all you see is argument about everything. Some arguments are better than others, but I doubt that many are really persuasive, for in today's polarized climate, readers greet congenial arguments with warmth and dismiss unsympathetic ones as nonsense, and logic, the armature of argument, has nothing to do with either response. I suppose we all feel a bit hectored, too, by a preponderance of arguments against. In a New Statesman essay linked to Arts & Letters Daily, Timothy Garton Ash writes, "Why define yourself by who you are against, rather than by what you are for?" Mr Garton Ash gently scolds his fellow Europeans for trying to define themselves as not American. Ironically, defining yourself by what you're not is thought by many European critics to be the besetting sin of Americans in general. It's not an unreasonable conclusion, given all the nonsense about Old Europe and 'freedom fries,' but responding to American provincialism by adopting what amounts to European provincialism gets no one anywhere. And besides, it's a case of what Freud called 'the narcissism of small differences.' Americans and Europeans overall probably have more in common than New Yorkers and Texans in particular.
The narcissism of small differences is an optical illusion that magnifies shibboleths into grounds for war, but of course there are some differences that are truly difficult to bridge, and arguments about them are usually very unhelpful. The role of women in society is a troublesome issue today because women in the West no longer abide by strictures that used to be nearly universal. To say that traditionally-minded men feel 'threatened' by women's freedom is a serious understatement. History counsels that the breach will probably be closed by the simple passage of time, as ever fewer men grow up with the traditionalist mindset. The question is whether many lives will be lost in fruitless struggles until then. Can Islam - or Judaism or Roman Catholicism, for the matter of that - truly accommodate gender equality? It's more likely that the fait accompli of gender equality will refashion the views of these faiths. As people see for themselves that gender equality does not - can not - lead to gender identity, they'll be more willing to abandon the privilege that, say, reserves the priesthood unto men. But in order to see this for themselves, they will first have to abandon the purely artificial, 'traditional' differentiations that signal difference for the sake of difference. Which comes first? Neither, so long as everyone is arguing.
What interests me is making connections, not distinctions. Distinctions are too easy. After all, no two things are exactly alike, if only because no two things occupy the same space. The art of making connections is really the art of assessing the gravity of distinctions and then reducing them to coordinates in the vast network of existence. (Again, resemblance is not identity: even a clone of you is not you - a fact that lots of people seem to have trouble grasping). This is tricky work, and I don't think it's wrong to hold that every generation must make its own connections. For the most part, happily, we can ratify connections made in the past, but the difficult work of reordering connections that have been interrupted by change over time is vital. And it's likely to be contentious, if only because the people we call conservative prefer to ignore change while the people we call progressive tend to wish that change were greater. The world will not know real peace until these two groups accept themselves as somewhat blinkered and their opposition as equally human. I don't despair.
6 June 2003: This past week saw the fiftieth anniversary of the coronation of Elizabeth II, the only one, so far, to have been televised. The Queen has reigned longer than all but three of her predecessors, and if she remains on the throne for another fourteen years she'll beat the record, set by her great-great-grandmother, Victoria. Is there more to this than a statistic?
Elizabeth has been a model monarch, dutifully opening hospitals and swimming baths and greeting delegations of every kind of respectable British association. She is a genuine public servant. Her private life, apparently given over whenever possible to her beloved dogs and horses, idealizes the pursuit of simple things. She is said to be genuinely kind, a reputation that it would be difficult to sham in her fishbowl circumstances. She's an all-round good girl, and whatever people think of the House of Windsor or of the institution of the monarchy, there is no question that Elizabeth's personality has kept the idea of royalty viable in the United Kingdom
That's, of course, the problem with monarchy, at least as it is practiced today. What if Elizabeth's younger sister, Margaret, had been the older girl? It's not hard to imagine the tarnish that that unhappily willful woman would have brought upon the crown long since; what's hard to imagine is the survival of the institution. Hereditary monarchy, in which succession is determined by the accident of birth order, will only work today if the right kind of person nabs the slot. Elizabeth is the right kind of person, but is her eldest son? Are any of her sons? Assuming that she outlives them, which she may well do, given her own mother's longevity, what kind of king might Prince William make? What if he has inherited some of his mother's willfulness? Come to think of it, there doesn't seem to be anyone remotely like Elizabeth in her own extended family.
Two hundred years ago, when poor George III was passing in and out of madness, the sovereign was a sacred person, still invested with the aura of divinity that seems to have accompanied kingship from earliest times. In Western Europe, there was always something a little self-conscious about this exaltation, partly because the Pope had a much better claim to it and partly because it took such a very long time for barbarian chieftains such as Clovis (c. 500) to attain the splendid majesty and political (as distinct from military) clout of a St. Louis (c. 1250). And between St. Louis and Louis XIV (c. 1675), the prestige of monarchy sank to some very swampy levels. Nevertheless, the ruler remained the strongest link between God and the body politic. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the link to God had all but evaporated, and rulers, beginning in Britain, found a new footing for such authority as they retained. With the expansion of suffrage, and the consequent instability of governments, the monarch emerged as a figure above the fray, an embodiment of permanent values unaffected by trends and issues. This imposed an entirely new responsibility on rulers, and the rulers who couldn't rise to the occasion were ousted or worse. Nor, as the example of Nicolas II suggests, was good behavior enough; a ruler must also demonstrate common sense. You would think that the Queen would not be the only member of her family to understand this.
I hope she's not. Even to people who are not her 'subjects' - the use of which term could hardly be more anachronistic - the Queen represents an extraordinarily attractive theory of government. Unencumbered by political alliances and free from legislative and bureaucratic obligations, she is free, if that is the word, to stand on her feet all day long impersonating the State to multitudes of ordinary people. I often wonder if the American dislike and distrust of public institutions isn't connected in some way to the absence of royalty, for without some ceremonial personage it is impossible to put a face on government. Yes, the Queen gets to live in some big palaces (she has lived in Buckingham Palace longer than any other royal, Victoria included), and she certainly gets to wear a lot of magnificent jewelry. But crowns and palaces are hard to begrudge individuals who don't seem to be keen on them. Elizabeth Windsor would rather be outside, wearing a headscarf on horseback. But she carries herself like the woman most people think she ought to be, and in doing so she makes everyday celebrity look like utterly trivial tinsel. She has certainly earned my admiration. I only wish she weren't quite so exceptional.
30 May 2003: The cloning of a mule was reported in today's Times, suggesting that related animals, such as thoroughbreds, might be next. This news will raise another dust storm of deaf debate about bioethics. Those who feel that genetic intervention diminishes the natural will demand that further cloning be halted. It's a good time to try to see the world from their perspective.
It is traditionally known as the dualist view, because it divides existence into two distinct natures, the spiritual and the material, arranged on three levels, with human life, partaking somehow of both natures, occupying the one in the middle. There are at least as many different understandings of spiritual nature as there are religions, but the differences needn't concern us here, because the role of spirit is invariably to enrich human life, which