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Self-assured but self-questioning.
History, U.S. regionalism, foreign policy, politics, life. Geitner Simmons is an editorial writer with the Omaha World-Herald. This weblog expresses his personal views only. He is also a Midwesterner, a Southerner, a husband, a father, a son. And always a student.
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Tuesday, September 17
Lessons from earlier arms inspections in Iraq I've previously written about an article by Charles Duelfer, a former top official with the U.N. inspection operation in Iraq. He draws lessons from the previous inspection efforts in Iraq and sounds a pessimistic note. In rereading the article today, I found several additional passages that deserve quoting here:
Here are Duelfer's recommendations:
Duefler gives a new inspection regime low odds of success, however; in fact, he says ultimate failure is inevitable. At a minimum, his recommendations, based on practical experience in dealing with the Iraqi regime, ought to be incorporated into the ground rules for a new inspection effort, if one is approved by the Security Council. UPDATE: Donald Sensing has a sharply conceived post on the whole topic. He even points to an interview with Duelfer today on Fox News. Monday, September 16
A foreign policy lightning bolt A cold has snuck up on me and really zapped me today. So, I’ll just excerpt a few quotes (not that I necessarily endorse all the ideas expressed) by commentators in the current issue of The National Interest, a foreign policy journal I strongly recommend, and then turn in for the night:
Everybody likes Mr. Spock Good heavens -- I watch an old episode of Star Trek, have some laughs about it with my kids, and post some silliness about the Vulcan salute, Clint Howard and tranya at my blog. The next thing I know, Glenn Reynolds takes an interest in it, every third Trek fan in blogdom follows the link to my site, and my little post winds up on Blogdex. (It's listed under No. 103 as "What Being Jewish Means to Me - Leonard Nimoy.") I shouldn't feel too proud of myself, though. After all, my post isn't being discussed here at all. UPDATE: Gary Farber, who runs the level-headed Amygdala blog, responds. The guy knows his Trek. National security vs. personal security Very interesting post at Donald Sensing's site in which he deals with an assortment of things relating to antiwar arguments and complaints against Western materialism. What a mix -- Howard Zinn and George Monbiot, but also James Lileks and Orrin Judd. I have some thoughts of my own to share on the subject, but I'll need to wait until tonight to post them. MY TAKE ON THE SUBJECT: One point raised in the post is whether poor people in developing countries are happy with a modest life or whether they aspire to a higher, more modern standard of living. I won't presume to generalize about what the views of the poor are. But the discussion does remind me of a section in a book by historian Edward Ayers about how many Southerners in the late 1800s enthusiastically embraced a more varied diet, minor luxuries and labor-saving devices. Ayers writes:
Posts since Friday For those who haven't seen the site since then, new posts cover territory including counterfactual history, myth-making, Star Trek, tornadoes and "the best thing Bill Clinton ever did." Rewinding the course of Southern history What if the first crucial civil rights decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950s had focused not on school desegregation but on equal voting rights for blacks? Had black Southerners been given real political clout a decade before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, would Southern governmental authorities have been compelled to end Jim Crow years earlier than they actually did? That is the thesis of an e-mail Roger Sweeny recently sent me. Here is how he set up his idea:
It’s a fascinating reconfiguration. Still, as I understand things, an early championing of the one man, one vote principle by the Supreme Court probably wouldn’t have provided a powerful enough tool to accomplish the task that Roger has described. Had a Reynolds v. Sims-style ruling come down in 1954, it would have had enormous impact on redistricting, of course, but it probably wouldn’t have meant the end of widespread voter discrimination against blacks. The Supreme Court, after all, had already struck down the Southern white primary in 1944 and reaffirmed that principle in a related case from Texas in 1953. Yet, as Roger said, Southern blacks still faced tremendous obstacles at the ballot box. In other words, ending Jim Crow voter discrimination in the South probably would have required not an earlier form of one man, one vote but of South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the monumental 1966 ruling that said the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was within constitutional bounds in assigning wide-ranging federal power to finally end the political permutations of Jim Crow. It’s hard to see how even the Warren court of the mid-1950s would have gone so far as to assert such an unprecedented assertion of federal prerogatives during the Eisenhower years, especially if specific legislation hadn’t been passed to that effect. And it’s more doubtful still to imagine that the Congress of the 1950s would have passed the Voting Rights Act 10 years early, given the clout and determination of Southern Democratic conservatives in opposing such moves. Roger’s scenario is inventive and provocative. And perhaps my powers of imagination, or understanding of the law, are insufficient. But as I see it, forceful federal intervention was still the only way, realistically, to bring about the end of Jim Crow voter discrimination. The tools just weren’t available to reach that goal any other way. UPDATE: John Rosenberg, an insightful student of Southern history, takes up a related counterfactual tangent on civil rights history at his site, Discriminations. The irony he points out is terrific, worthy of C. Vann Woodward himself. BY THE WAY: Another counterfactual scenario, involving British history, was explored in detail here in August: What if Britain had adopted a Thatcherite economic policy in the 1940s instead of embracing the modern welfare state? Sunday, September 15
Memory and myth Andrew Sullivan’s essay to mark 9/11 began with a description of the wobbliness of human memory:
Yes. His description reminded me of how the fading of memory can open the way to myth-making. Specifically, it reminded me of a passage in “Conquest,” Robert Hughes’ riveting popular history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, about how the god Quetzalcoatl may have once been a real man, but whose story had been bent, then distorted, then gradually transcended -- “a figure perhaps half historical,” Hughes wrote, “half god”:
The Wizard of Oz meets Kirk This weekend turned out, unexpectedly, to be Star Trek-centric in our household. I was looking through a Star Trek commemorative magazine with my kids (ages 6 and 8) and found that Leonard Nimoy says Mr. Spock’s Vulcan salute had its origins in Nimoy’s own Jewish heritage. I looked and found this reference online (sorry, I could get only a cached version):
My kids saw their first Star Trek episode today. I rented “The Corbomite Maneuver,” in which Balak (little Clint Howard -- “We must drink. This is tranya.”) brought a bit of the Wizard of Oz to the Trek universe. (I tried to find "The Trouble With Tribbles" but was unsuccessful, but I thought this was a pretty good backup choice.) Too scary for the kids, what with the famous grim-faced alien? I decided it wasn’t. The kids had a grand time. At dinner, eating on the patio in the back yard after the kids had seen the episode, my 6-year-old daughter and I threw back our heads in imitation of Balak’s laugh. It just doesn’t get any better than that. Mighty Ireland I noted not long ago that U.S. companies invest more in Ireland than in China. A new TechCentralStation article provides a useful examination of the Irish economy. (I saw this in a post at Lynne Kiesling's blog The Knowledge Problem). From the article:
The article also points out the threat to the Irish economy from the insistence by Eurocrats on "tax harmonization" within the EU:
The tax harmonization issue is also a concern for the United States. The topic will be explored here soon. BY THE WAY: I intend to post Sunday night on that counterfactual scenario involving Southern history I mentioned the other day. Saturday, September 14
The best thing Bill Clinton ever did When Bill Clinton supporters describe what they consider the big accomplishments of his administration, the list usually includes things such as his budget policy, Treasury leadership under Robert Rubin, the declaration of public lands in the West as national monuments protected from development, and peace efforts that led to the Camp David offer to Arafat in July 2000. (I don’t view all those as unalloyed successes, but my intent here is to raise a different point.) I have yet to see such a recitation include a laudable policy move that was long overdue by the federal government and immensely helpful in a practical way. The policy action: the administration’s 1995 guidelines on how public schools should accommodate religion without stepping beyond proper constitutional boundaries. Before the issuance of the guidelines, which were updated in 1998, the list of horror stories was quite long about how public school teachers and administrators had made bone-headed decisions that needlessly stigmatized children who had sought to include their religious beliefs in some form at their school, even if it was something as innocent as making Jesus the topic of a paper or bringing a Bible to school. I’ll never forget a Time magazine article from the early ’90s that examined a string of such mishandled school situations. And it doesn’t take much anyway for religious conservatives to depict themselves as martyrs whenever such controversies arise. The Clinton guidelines, issued by the Department of Education under Secretary Dick Riley, didn’t -- and couldn’t -- end the controversies completely, but they did go far to calm the waters and advance common sense. Indulge me to cite two short excerpts from the guidelines:
As I said: common sense. It’s telling that many teachers and administrators lacked the sound judgment to implement policies along those lines anyway, without federal guidance. The education guidelines, by the way, were precisely the sort of thing that one would expect from former Southern Democratic governors such as Clinton and Riley. Southern Democrats who succeed in statewide races generally construct a winning coalition by looking for the political center and building support across as wide a swath of the electorate as possible. The Clinton education guidelines, in that sense, had a pronounced Southern Democratic flavor to them. Clinton, as governor, used to spend part of each summer attending revivals hosted by Arkansas evangelicals, according to an old Washington Post series, probably by David Maraniss, I remember from the early '90s. Clinton, a Southern Baptist, probably had a fair understanding of the evangelical subculture. He certainly got the attention of evangelicals (though not necessarily in a positive way) when he chose to call his policy agenda in the early '90s a "New Covenant." Land of the Big Cities Quick, answer this question: Which state has the most cities on the list of the 10 most populous cities in the United States, according to the 2000 Census? Pause. Pause. Pause. The answer is Texas. Its top-10 cities are Houston (No. 4), Dallas (No. 8) and San Antonio (No. 9). I noticed that fact in one of my 8-year-old son’s reference books last night. It struck me as a surprise, even though I knew that Texas has moved past New York in the 2000 Census to become the state second-highest in population after California. Three California cities do make the list if you count the top 11: Los Angeles (No. 2), San Diego (No. 7) and San Jose (No. 11). A list of the top 50 cities, in terms of population, is here. UPDATE: Dan Hobby writes in regard to U.S. metro areas: "Interestingly, if you take the top 48 Metro areas (those with populations over 1,000,000), you find the state with the most is Florida (5), followed by Texas & California with four. New York and Ohio have three." He provides a link to metro area rankings by population. Also, David Hogberg weighs in with his perspective as an Iowan. Wind To live in the Great Plains is to become acquainted with the palpable threat from tornadoes. The novelist Louise Erdrich (pronounced “AIR-drik”), a North Dakotan whose writings explore Native American themes, offered an unforgettable description of a tornado in her 1998 novel “The Beet Queen”:
Who says the written word can’t match Hollywood special effects? Barnes & Noble, incidentally, provides an excellent online overview of Erdrich’s work. Friday, September 13
OK, a quick note on my blogroll I intend to add to my blogroll soon. There are some great sites out there, and I have been remiss in not adding some particular ones to my links section. I intend, incidentally, to add some left-learning blogs. Since I preach about how we're all Americans regardless of ideology and party, I think it's incumbent on me, as a blogger in the center-right vein on economic and foreign policy issues, to note that the blogosphere contains liberal-oriented sites worthy of respect and attention. Right now, I'm planning on bunching them right in with the right-wing blogs, since, frankly, I disagree on a lot of points anyway with some of the staunchly conservative writers I link to. I plan to post again sometime Saturday night. Thursday, September 12
Blogus interruptus I probably won't have a chance to post anything new here until sometime over the weekend. When blogging does resume, one item I intend to talk about is a fascinating counterfactual scenario involving Southern history in the 1950s and '60s suggested by Roger Sweeny. Nuances It's been pointed out to me that not everyone on the political left supports the type of student rampage that forestalled Netanhayu's speech this week, contrary to my contention in a post below. It's a fair point. Wednesday, September 11
The bandits reassert themselves Today is an appropriate time to note these three items:
ADDENDUM: Austin Bay has an eloquent piece, titled "America's Vacation is Over," at StrategyPage.com. The piece begins on another topic but skillfully weaves in a 9/11 theme. Extra credit I had a great e-mail today from someone responding to my post about D.W. Griffith and Leni Riefenstahl. I thought I'd forwarded the message to my home e-mail for blogging, but for some reason it didn't make it. So, I'll reconstruct it from memory: "In a college history class one night, the professor showed "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will" as a double feature. Talk about a long night." Tuesday, September 10
Robert Penn Warren, Denmark Vesey I accidentally left out an item by blogger John Rosenberg in my recent roundup of Southern liberal journalist items the other day. His blog, Discriminations, is a terrifically conceived site that, most recently, has examined the contention that historians have ignored evidence that the 1822 Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy was in fact based on trumped-up charges. At any rate, this point from Disciminations was worth noting:
I haven't had time to read the Michael Johnson essay that argues that the Denmark Vesey conspiracy was bogus. I'm torn: I respect the analysis by John Rosenberg that I read at his site, and the William and Mary Quarterly, which published the Johnson article, is first-rate. But I also have enormous respect for one of the historians Johnson criticizes: William Freehling, who stands as one of the historical profession's most insightful scholars of the antebellum South. Freehling has hardly been one who has offered apologetics for slaveowners. On the contrary, his work abounds in pointing out the hypocrisies and flimsy rationales on which the Southern slave system was built. Maybe Johnson is right and Freehling and others did misinterpret the historical documents; at this point, I have no firm view. But it's hard for me to attribute some sort of nefarious motive to Freehling. One thing is certainly true. If Johnson is correct about the Denmark Vesey matter, it would be a real shock -- in one fell swoop, a major event long regarded as seminal in the history of Southern slavery would be removed from the record (or, more specifically, radically reinterpreted). It would be somewhat comparable to discovering that, say, Thomas Jefferson actually had not been involved at all in writing the Declaration of Independence. Do Johnson's charges amount to something bigger than the Bellesiles matter? It depends on your point of view. Both are very big deals within the community of historians. Some black Americans no doubt have a strong interest in how the slavery record is interpreted. As far as the impact on the general public, though, there's no comparison: For most Americans, guns are a lot bigger issue than how scholars should interpret the documentary evidence on an incident in Charleston in 1822. Ted Rall, taking the low road, as usual As you can see here. He really knows how to mark the 9/11 anniversary with the moral sensitivity it deserves, doesn't he? America’s Riefenstahl To study the craft of documentarian Leni Riefenstahl, with her calculated use of cinematic technique to promote fascist ideology, raises a fascinating question: Should a director’s technical brilliance be appreciated even if her political message is reprehensible? With Riefenstahl, the answer seems pretty clear: Yes, it can. But it is hard to fully respect it. The level of imagination and vision she demonstrated in her work can’t be ignored. But neither, of course, can the evil to which she devoted her talents. (The legacy of Riefenstahl, who recently turned 100, is examined in a post below, along with consideration of other documentarians of the World War II era.) The same considerations apply to D.W. Griffith, director of “The Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 ode to Ku Klux Klan values that nonetheless set the basic framework for cinematic technique along many dimensions. (Two worthwhile examinations of the film can be found here and here.) Among the many techniques Griffith pioneered: cross-cut editing between scenes; using camera shots of various lengths; varied camera angles; camera movement including tracking shots; night photography; and a score, to be performed live, written especially for the film. Griffith demonstrated a deep understanding of film tempo. Editing, in other words, was used as a tool to amplify the mood of a sequence. “The Birth of a Nation” was the first film in which that approach was used consistently and effectively. The film was pioneering, too, in its sharp sense of continuity. Regardless of whether the viewer was seeing an extremely long shot or a medium shot during the battle scenes, in every instance the Confederates entered from the left and the Union forces from right. (In that regard, see the post below in regard to a John Huston World War II documentary.) Today, that seems merely a tried-and-true technique. Griffith’s achievement was that he was the first to use it. Film scholars point out that Griffith wasn’t the first to use some of the techniques usually credited to him. But he was the first to use them together in a coherent way, producing a cinematic vision of powerful effect. (The sophistication didn’t extend to some of the special effects. There was a lot of danger on the sets for the battle scenes, since Griffith used real cannons and -- to create certain explosions -- real grenades. Another nugget: John Ford, who would go on to become of the great American directors, was an extra in the film’s Klan ride sequence.) Still, for all its technical brilliance, “The Birth of the Nation” stands as a steadfast and appalling defense of white supremacy. The film is the angry shout of a 19th century mindset in which white Klansmen were cast as noble cavaliers and black citizens as sub-human. One of the subtitles, in fact, uses the term “Aryan” in a racist context. In 1999, the Directors Guild of America, citing the film’s “intolerable racist stereotypes,” renamed its top award, which had been named after Griffith. The reaction to the film in 1915 reveals much about American social and political attitudes of the day. Film critic Richard Schickel provided a fascinating account in his biography of Griffith, "D.W. Griffith: An American Life.” President Woodrow Wilson watched the movie, at the time the longest and most expensive film of the era, in the White House in February 1915 along with members of his staff and Cabinet, the film to be shown there. His much-quoted reaction to the film: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Wilson had known Thomas Dixon, author of the novel and play on which the film was based, years earlier, when Dixon had arranged for Wilson to receive an honorary degree from Wake Forest College in North Carolina. Dixon, who attended the White House screening, persuaded Edward D. White, the Louisiana-born chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to see the movie. White brought along several of his fellow justices. The movie premiered on Feb. 8, 1915, in Los Angeles. The local chapter of the NAACP tried to block the showing of the showing, arguing that the movie would spark racial tensions that could lead to riots. The matinee was blocked, but the evening performance was allowed. An orchestra provided music in a packed 2,500-seat theater. The usherettes were wearing Civil War-era gowns. Schickel described the audience reaction this way: “all recall the audience leaping up, cheering and applauding and stamping their feet, not to be stilled until Griffith made an appearance.” A month later, the film premiered in New York City. The audience, according to a trade paper, included many representatives of the city’s social and literary elite. The response was enthusiastically favorable. So were the reviews in New York newspapers. Schickel writes: “The next day there were lines at the box office and they would continue to form there for weeks, as the initial critical excitement over the film was supported by audience enthusiasm for it.” The New York Times' coverage of the premiere consisted of an un-bylined piece that described some of the atmosphere of the evening's event and talked about the film's successful achievement. It skirted Griffith's racist message -- “a rather pleasantly purist view of the critical function by modern standards,” Schickel writes. "Indeed," he adds, "it is remarkable that so few critics, in their initial responses to the film, even alluded to its portrayals of blacks, its view of the historical incident it purposted to portray accuately -- depite the fact that the NAACP was hauling it into court whenever it opened in major cities, while, of cours, making its opinion of the film known everywhere.” The reviewer for the Hearst-owned Evening Journal gave his New York readers this advice: “First of all, children must be sent to see this masterpiece. Any parent who neglects this advice is committing an educational offense, for no film has evern produced more educational points than Griffith’s latest achievement.” The trade paper Variety lavished praised on the film, even going so far to praise its portrayal of the historical record. It was a picture, the Variety reporter wrote, that “would please all white classes.” The movie continued its run at the New York theater, the Liberty, for some 11 months. Including subsequent runs, Schickel says, it was seen by an estimated 825,000 people in the New York area alone. Not that critical voices weren't sounded. The NAACP, then a fledgling organization, received support from Jane Addams and New York philanthropists Jacob Schiff, Lillian Wald and Dr. Jacques Loeb, as well as from what Schickel termed a “group of prominent white Southerners.” Addams was scathing in her criticism of the film in an interview conducted with the New York Post (a paper that, along with the Evening Journal, would eventually voice strong editorial criticism of the film). The New Republic, which was founded in March 1915 only a month after the movie’s New York premiere, delivered another blow. Francis Hackett, a novelist and playwright, wrote a review in which he blasted Thomas Dixon. Comparing Dixon to a yellow journalist, Hackett wrote: “He is yellow becaues he recklessly distorts Negro crimes, gives them a disproportionate place in life and colors them dishonestly to inflame the ignorant and credulous. And he is especially yellow, and quite disgustingly and contemptibly yellow, because his perversions are cunningly calculated to flatter the white man and provoke hatred and contempt for the Negro.” “The Birth of a Nation,” he added, is “spiritual assassination. It degrades the censors that passed it and the white race that endures it.” New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchell agreed to hear a delegation address him about the film. The delegations included W.E.B. DuBois, who was then editing the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis; Rabbi Stephen Wise, the nation’s leading Reform rabbi; and Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Post. Wise called the film an “inexcusably foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings.” He also stated, “the Negroes in this city have been patient. They have not yet arisen, like the Irish who attacked ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ when they recognized it as caricature and not as characterization.” Mitchell responded by saying that some racist scenes would be cut from the film. The film's opponents found the deletions to be meager and unsatisfactory. The film enjoyed considerable popularity nationwide, although protests were frequently mounted in large cities. The criticisms grew strong enough that Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s chief public relations adviser, advised the president to back away from his inititial praise of the film. Although the NAACP failed in its efforts to block the film, the fight provided what Schickel called an important early "rally point" for the organization. (The controversy also put Booker T. Washington in a difficult position, since he found that he eventually had to abandon the mild reaction he had initially expressed and adopt an outright critical one.) A few notes about Griffith's later career. He followed up "The Birth of a Nation" with an extravagance titled “Intolerance” that again displayed great skill. But the film in no way endorsed racial tolerance. And it lambasted social reformers -- the types who had led the fight in 1915 against "The Birth of a Nation." Griffith made two talking pictures. One, starring Walter Huston and made in 1930, was “Abraham Lincoln.” In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City staged a retrospective exhibition on Griffith's career. Germany has its Leni Riefenstahl; America, its D.W. Griffith. Such awesome artistic genius can be appreciated, but not fully respected. Coming up An item titled "America’s Riefenstahl" will appear here this morning. No new items were posted last night because I worked late at the office. Monday, September 9
Historical linkages I just saw that George Will's column on Sunday touched on the importance of the Spanish-American War (the link to the Will column wasn't working at one point today due to what the Washington Post called "maintenance" at its site):
Some people new to this site might be interested in a previous set of posts here that explored the historical significance of the Spanish-American War. Among the points raised: ):
For a conflict regarded by the public at large as a very minor affair, the Spanish-American War actually had great long-term significance for U.S. foreign policy and nation's military. Foundation Over the weekend I noted Media Minded’s recent post about W.J. Cash, author of a seminal study of Southern history, “The Mind of the South.” Cash’s introduction to the 1941 book included a well constructed passage worth quoting:
I'd argue, incidentally, that the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s marked a decisive break in Southern thinking, opening the way to new thinking in several important ways (as if, of course, there were only a single regional "mind" anyway). But that is a topic for another time. Intermittent blogging I substitute for a computer-operator colleague all this week at work. That means I'll have less time for blogging (and less time for answering e-mail in a timely fashion). So, although I intend for a new post or two to appear each day, the overall quantity will probably be less than usual. For anyone who hasn't seen this site since Friday, around 10 items were posted over the weekend. Topics range from the inevitable failure of weapons inspections in Iraq to an examination of Leni Riefenstahl and World War II-era documentaries. Sunday, September 8
Resources for regional studies In recent days I’ve received encouraging e-mail from people who share an interest in U.S. regional studies. One person asked for a recommendation about where to turn for scholarly, but readable, examinations of Great Plains issues. Although there are a variety of choices, I will recommend, and link to, two first-rate journals: for the part of the country where I’m living, Great Plains Quarterly; for Southern studies, Southern Cultures. Each is published by a well-respected institution: the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (the nation’s first center for regional studies), and the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (my undergrad alma mater, I’m proud to say). I know academicians at both institutions, and they are doing marvelous work. Over time, I will expand the focus of this site to directly include U.S. Western studies; indeed, a set of posts here will soon examine the connection between American Western art and the region’s history. I don’t intend for this site to focus exclusively on regional matters. But I do want such material included in the mix, as the very title of this blog indicates. Addressing regional issues was one of the prime motivators for starting this site. I don't envision myself as Walter Lippman. This blog is going to address some headline-related themes, particularly on foreign policy, but a lot of the topics here will simply be examinations of history, regionalism and whatever else strikes me. Incidentally, because of the blog discussion of Southern journalists last week, I have several Southern-related topics in the pipeline, thanks mainly to contacts I’ve made in the wake of that discussion. I intend to space those items out in coming days, so that non-Southerners visiting this blog don’t grow weary of the Dixie-related themes. Movies, war and ideology Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s cinematic propagandist, marked her 100th birthday recently, still unapologetic about her service in the cause of fascism. “Triumph of the Will,” her documentary look at a gargantuan Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, still stands as a landmark demonstration of the power of film, despite its unsavory ideological underpinnings. An op-ed in the Washington Times provided a useful take on Riefenstahl, knocking down the rationalizations she has long offered to excuse her glorification of Hitler. For all the justifiable focus on “Triumph of the Will” as a major documentary achievement, that era produced several other important works. John Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro,” although understandably frowned on by the military brass for the film’s bitterness and use of irony, displayed great craft. Perhaps too much craft, according to one description:
Director George Stevens’ documentary “D-Day to Berlin” is famed for its unique visual quality: footage of American servicemen slogging across Europe in color. (The link I've provided includes a color frame from the film.) I believe the documentary includes scenes from the liberation of Dachau. For all the focus on Riefenstahl as a master documentarian, the skill of a contemporary, British director Humphrey Jennings, was equally impressive, although in a far different way. Whereas Riefenstahl luxuriated in grandiosity by training her camera on massive concentrations of Nazis, Jennings used understatement to reveal the dignity and humanity of individuals. His 1943 documentary “Fires Were Started,” for example, focused on the heroism of firemen during a 24-hour period during the London Blitz. A poem Jennings wrote conveyed the sense of otherworldliness that descended on London during the German attacks:
After the events of a year ago this week, many New Yorkers would probably have an interest in seeing the film. Mr. Friedman’s Diary Thomas Friedman has a new book out that compiles his columns from before and after 9/11. The book also includes what he calls a 9/11 diary in which he offers additional thoughts. Two excerpts from the diary:
People with an interest in the blog world have read many variations of these points over the past year. But they are so fundamental that it pays to revisit them. Especially this week. Saturday, September 7
More on race and redistricting Several people e-mailed to say that my post about race-based redistricting failed to mention that J.C. Watts is elected from a majority-white district in Oklahoma. True enough. I didn't mean for my list to be comprehensive, but I should have thought of Watts. I pulled some info together quickly looking at the Georgia and N.C., two states that landed in big court cases in the '90s over their congressional redistricting maps. And a North Carolina friend wrote to say that a focus on race still underlies the intent of the creation of some political districts even when they aren’t majority-black:
I hadn’t thought about it in that sense. His argument is logical, isn't it? Appreciation Various members of the blogosphere have been generous of late with comments and links in regard to this site. My appreciation. My thanks, too, for the e-mails people have sent. The cross-pollination of ideas, and expanding the dialogue, is a terrific aspect of the blogosphere. This site has a handful of purposes: standing up for certain principles on occasion; exploring history and U.S. regionalism; having fun with language; making the point that the person running this blog isn’t a disembodied pontificating head, like some ranting online Wizard of Oz, but an actual human being with feelings, idiosyncrasies and hopes. Mainly, though, this site is about my holding up some non-earthshaking but curious nugget of information and shouting into the cyber-crowd, “Hey, look at this! Isn’t it interesting?” Understanding the Great Plains A Nebraskan whom I greatly respect -- a good and wise friend -- sent me a well-composed e-mail responding to my recent post on Nicholas Kristof’s column about Great Plains settlement. His thoughts (all the geographical and highway references relate to Nebraska):
None of those sensible considerations made it into the Kristof column, of course. Friday, September 6
Economic progress in Mexico Scott Rubush, seconding a point made here, shares an anecdote to underscore the importance of strengthening the Mexican economy. Thursday, September 5
Historical Item 1: ‘Forgotten alternatives’ in Southern race relations No time for lengthy analytical posts tonight. But I will mention two historical items I hope some will find of interest. I noted in a post this week that South Carolina newspaper owner Francis W. Dawson had spoken out strongly in the 1880s against white supremacy. Roger Sweeny, in a thoughtful e-mail, responded that race relations in the post-Reconstruction South were far more fluid than my post indicated. He’s right. I'm a student of that history too, but my post didn't note the complexity that Roger's message rightly described. The historian C. Vann Woodward cited all sorts of intriguing vignettes from the actual historical record in the post-Reconstruction period to show that hard-line segregation did not take immediate hold in the South. In his book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Woodward recounted the experience of T. McCants Stewart, a black newspaperman from Boston, during a trip he made to his native South Carolina in 1885. Stewart reported that he had been allowed to ride with white passengers on the train south from Washington, D.C.. In a saloon in Petersburg, Va., he entered a saloon “bold as a lion,” he wrote, and took a seat with white people. “The whites at the table appeared not to notice my presence,” he wrote. “Thus far I had found travelling more pleasant ... than in some parts of New England.” Woodward presented many other examples. In Mississippi in the same period, he wrote, it was socially acceptable in many communities for blacks and whites to be buried in the same cemetery. He quoted an 1886 editorial from the Richmond Dispatch which praised the fact that blacks were legally allowed to serve on juries, attend political conventions and introduce bills in the Legislature. This fluidity in race relations, Woodward argued, created “forgotten alternatives” by which the South had at least a reasonable chance to forge a different, more positive set of race relations over time, avoiding the horrors and tumult of the Jim Crow period. The period of flux ended dramatically across the South in the 1890s, when the segregation of train cars and streetcars became common, widespread disenfranchisement of black residents was attempted, and the incidence of lynching began a stunning upward surge. Woodward’s emphasis on “forgotten alternatives” has long struck me as overly sunny, however. Even Woodward acknowledged upfront that “the evidence of race conflict and violence, brutality and exploitation in this very period is overwhelming.” A vivid example of white hostility toward blacks was demonstrated in the 1888 elections in North Carolina. Democrats, reacting to Republican wins two years earlier, the rise of a politically active Farmers Alliance, and a large black vote, mounted a stridently racist campaign against black citizens. One Democratic newspaper thundered: “The question is whether white men or negroes shall control the state.” Another Democratic-supporting paper sought to undermine the chances of two white Republican legislative candidates by describing them as “politically black.” “The intense antiblack emotions aroused by the 1888 campaign did not fade quickly after the election,” historian Eric Anderson wrote in his detailed study of North Carolina’s majority-black Second Congressional District, which lasted from 1872 to 1901. “In the aftermath of the 1888 election, North Carolina politics would operate under ground rules far different from those of the decade following 1876” (when federal troops were withdrawn from the South). Perhaps the fairest way to describe the post-Reconstruction era is simply to say it was a time of remarkable contradictions and complexities. People can find just about whatever they want to look for in its intriguing historical record. Historical Item 2: An early Buffalo Commons An e-mail from Chris Anderson noted that Nicholas Kristof’s analysis about the depopulation of parts of the rural Great Plains paralleled that of Rutgers professors Frank and Deborah Popper. That husband-and-wife team caused an emotional eruption in Nebraska and neighboring states in the late 1980s by saying much of the Great Plains could be put to more appropriate use by using it as a gigantic game preserve. A Buffalo Commons, they termed it. The controversy that quickly arose over the Buffalo Commons proposal triggered a remarkable invasion of the region by Eastern reporters who parachuted onto the plains in search of tales of woe about struggling farmers and once-proud schoolhouses that were down to serving only a handful of children. The scribes found plenty of bad news to write about, stirring up a backlash among plains dwellers who argued, rightly, that only part of the larger story was being told. (The same shortcoming, I argue, with Kristof’s column.) More will be said here in the future about the Buffalo Commons idea. For now, here is a historical side note: The Poppers weren't the first to think of such a thing. A few years before the Civil War, a federal treaty established a literal buffalo commons in a large section of the northern Plains. The Blackfoot Treaty of 1855 designated a swath of western Montana as a neutral zone, according to an article that University of Montana history professor William E. Farr wrote last year for the Great Plains Quarterly (an invaluable journal, incidentally, for anyone interested in this part of the country.) In the allotted area, plains tribes including the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Sioux and the Crow were granted rights to hunt buffalo. The treaty had an interesting twist: It also opened the buffalo commons to tribes from the Columbia River drainage on the western side of the Continental Divide. Some members of those tribes had traditionally traveled to the area for hunting purposes, the same as tribes from the eastern side of the Divide. The journals of Lewis and Clark, written half a century before the Blackfoot Treaty, provided ample evidence, Farr says, of how de facto buffalo commons were created "where rival tribal entities and bands hunted, clashed, allied, socialized and traded on the Upper Missouri and Yellowstone drainages." See -- it’s an interesting region with an interesting history. Trying to understand the ‘rim of the world’
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently engaged in some parachute journalism into Nebraska ranch country. His trip yielded a column in which he raised several legitimate points about U.S. farm policy. As he said, the recent farm bill was a cynical effort by the two political parties to use tax dollars to buy farm-state votes in the November congressional elections. Kristof was right when he noted that “much of the money goes to the most prosperous farmers,” many of whom will likely use the subsidies to buy more land and thus “accelerate the consolidation of farms that is already depopulating rural areas.” He was right, too, in saying that more needs to be done to promote rural business development, to provide economic diversification. Kristof resorted to needless hyperbole, though, when he called the settlement of the Great Plains “one of America’s greatest mistakes.” The dramatic depopulation of rural counties across the Plains, he argued, is proof that the replacement of the once-expansive ocean of North American prairie grass with monoculture and cattle ranching has amounted, in the end, to mere folly. This week marks my third year of living in Nebraska, a fascinating state with one foot planted in the Midwest and the other in the West, and my experience here has led me to conclusions far different than Kristof’s. Sure, the depopulation in many rural counties across the Dakotas and into Nebraska and Kansas is, frankly, extraordinary. As he says, the old demographic definition of “frontier” population density now applies to a considerable number of counties on the high plains. Kristof carelessly constructed his column, however, so that readers unfamiliar with this part of the country will mistakenly conclude that his description applies to the entirety of the Plains region, from just this side of the Rockies all the way east to the Missouri River. His essay makes it seem as if that entire stretch of territory is essentially a barren waste, a region defined almost solely by absence. In the three years that I’ve traveled this region and studied its history and culture, I’ve found a land considerably different from (and livelier than) what many readers will no doubt assume from Kristof’s column. Yes, rural depopulation is a reality, but it’s a mistake to imagine that the Plains region is a monolith. (It’s also far from uniformly flat.) Many towns and small cities display a strength and spirit that continue to sustain them and ensure their permanence. I’ve met an artist who runs a marvelously conceived art gallery in a small Nebraska town. I’ve interviewed civic leaders in small Nebraska cities who presided over first-class economic development campaigns that have given their communities not only new vitality but also a sparkling public appearance. I’ve become friends with academicians and other thinkers who are passionately interested in the world of ideas and whose insights and intellectual enthusiasms have enriched my life greatly. I can’t keep my car clean in a downtown parking garage in Omaha because of all the dust stirred up by the flurry of construction -- on new corporate headquarters, and on a remarkable variety of new riverfront development. Just last week, the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve released a report that found that “Nebraska's concentration of data- and information-processing services is more than three times the national average.” In the nation as a whole, the percentage of workers employed in high-tech industries is an even 3 percent. In Omaha, it is 5.1 percent. Sure, when outsiders travel out to the rural sections of the Plains, the landscape’s flatness and openness understandably convey a sense of vacancy and strangeness. “A great Sahara,” a train traveler called the plains country in the 19th century. “That purgatory of mileage,” a novelist called it in the 20th. “This is what I imagine Siberia to be like,” a member of the national press corps said of central Nebraska in December 2000 when then-President Clinton visited the area. The reporter apparently was ignorant of the fact that the small city Clinton visited sponsors an international symposium on global issues each year, drawing speakers from around the world. Or that the city is nearing completion of a remarkable city park/recreation complex that would be the envy of communities its size anywhere in the country. Natives of the rural and small-town Plains counties are used to such reactions by outsiders, though. Those residents grow up preferring the openness of flat land. (The novelist Wallace Stegner, a fine observer of Plains sensibilities, referred to such hardy residents of the plains as “the stickers.”) When the novelist Louise Erdrich relocated from North Dakota to New England, for example, the change in topography put her off-kilter. New Hampshire “depleted” her, she wrote, because of “the absence of sky and horizon.” She eventually returned to the plains. Plains residents also develop a sense of humility. “We Kansans,” an English professor from Topeka recently wrote, “joke that our lives are ‘pretty good,’ our state ‘not bad,’ our towns ‘fair to middling.’ ” (William Stafford, whose poem “Passing Remarks” is excerpted above, was well-known for wryness of that sort.) Yes, life on the plains often involves modesty. But that is not the same as being a nullity, which seems to the impression one would glean from Kristof’s depiction of the supposedly all-encompassing emptiness of the region. Chicago, incidentally, is in the midst of a book-club festival in which readers across the city are being encouraged to read the novel “My Antonia,” Willa Cather’s masterpiece, published in 1918, about life on the high plains of southwestern Nebraska. In the book, one reviewer wrote, Cather “glorifies frontier values of independence, hard work, and asceticism, and she implicitly contrasts it to the competition and isolation of modern society.” Kristof writes, correctly, of the need to promote new business development in rural parts of the Plains. One Nebraskan who heartily agrees is Chuck Hassebrook, who heads a nonprofit group, the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Neb., that advocates on behalf of rural areas. But Hassebrook’s take on the region’s history is sharply at variance with Kristof’s claim that white settlement of the Plains was a mistake. Hassebrook, who also serves on the Board of Regents for the state university system, points to the example of Old Jules, the center of Mari Sandoz's biographical novel about pioneer life in northwestern Nebraska. Says Hassebrook: "Mari Sandoz writes in 'Old Jules' about how he dreamed of building communities of home seekers -- refugees from the poverty of feudal Europe -- who would here be free of the oppression of the elite that they had faced in Europe. Here, they would own land and the fruits of their labor." Old Jules, Hassebrook notes, "talked about not just building communities but building communities founded on justice and freedom from oppression. That is something very noble." Many of those communities still survive on the plains. Some will not make it. But others are quite hardy, even amid drought or snowstorms. Or the occasional critic who visits from back East. All deserve respect. Wednesday, September 4
Race, rhetoric and reality Rhetoric: A New York Times editorial of May 2001 made the following claim, in commenting on a federal judicial ruling that allowed some minority voters in New Jersey to be shifted out of majority-black districts into majority-white ones:
Reality:“Racially polarized voting” (a phrase found in many Supreme Court voting rights rulings, beginning in the 1960s) has not, in fact, been as widespread in the NYT editorialists argued. In fact, at least three current African-American members of the U.S. House were elected in 2000 from majority-white districts: Cynthia McKinney and Stanford Bishop Jr. of Georgia and Mel Watt of North Carolina. Those are states where the Jim Crow system was in place as recently as the 1960s. Yet, in the 2000 elections, Watt was re-elected with 65 percent of the vote, McKinney with 60 percent and Bishop with 53 percent. (McKinney, of course, was just defeated in a Democratic primary, but she lost to another black woman.) Additional reality:The WSJ’s Best of the Web this week cites a Washington Post op-ed by David Lublin of American University. Lublin observes (this is the Best of the Web’s paraphrase) that “two other black Democrats in Georgia -- state Sen. David Scott and Champ Walker -- are likely to win election to Congress in November from districts that are less than 45 percent black.” Supporters of race-based redistricting are simply wrong in claiming that black candidates have little chance of winning unless majority-black districts are maintained. With the growing string of victorious black candidates in majority-white districts (and those are Southern districts, incidentally), such rhetoric simply does not stand up in the face of reality. UPDATE: John Tuttle makes a cogent point in an e-mail this morning: "Why do you assume the 'racially polarized voting' applies only to whites not voting for blacks? How many whites are elected in majority-black districts? I saw a study years ago, that black voters were far less likely to cross racial lines in voting than whites. Why isn't that the problem?" Indeed. He points to an important tangent I'd failed to address in focusing on other aspects. His observation relates directly to a central point that Sandra Day O'Connor has emphasized in her Supreme Court rulings on race and redistricting. It is incorrect, she argued, to say that only black elected officials can represent black constituents fairly and effectively (the principle also applies to all other groups), and the redistricting process should move away from encouraging such a fallacious assumption. ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Barone e-mails to voice agreement with my analysis and cite an additional example: "Andrew Young was elected to Congress from a white-majority congressional district in 1972. That's 1972. Thirty years ago. In the Deep South. In a state where most blacks were not able to vote just a few years before." The real story on Eugene Volokh You can find it here. It's a well-done feature article by UPI writer Catherine Seipp -- hey, she's the same writer who did the 1997 Salon piece I quoted in a post below about former LA Times Editor Shelby Coffey. An excerpt from Seipp's mini-profile of UCLA's blogosphere luminary:
The article also makes mention of "an aggressive looking statue of a woman with large breasts." But I don't care to go into that here. The profile confirms that Eugene really is the man of decency and good humor that visitors can detect from his blog (and whose good nature has been displayed in messages he's sent me in our occasional exchanges of e-mail). Congress and trade agreement obligations The majority in Congress displayed remarkable arrogance this year when it approved a farm bill that disregarded a cap on domestic farm assistance under WTO rules. A previous post here examined the issue. Last week, the WTO ruled that a particular tax break the United States extends to U.S. exporters amounts to an illegal trade subsidy. Brink Lindsey struck the right note in a Cato press statement (I would have linked last week to the Cato document, which I received at work by fax, but Cato lagged in getting the material online): "It makes no sense to get trade promotion authority to negotiate new trade deals if we won't live up to the deals we've already signed." As the Cato press release explains, the United States, chided once in regard to the tax break, revamped the tax rules in an effort to skirt the WTO provisions. But last week the WTO said that wasn't good enough and the U.S. was still in violation. European countries can impose up to $4 billion in trade sanctions, the WTO ruled. Brink Lindsey framed the situation this way: "The jig is up. We've been stalling and stringing out this dispute for years, but we've reached the end of the road. We now face a stark and unavoidable choice: reform our tax laws and live up to our WTO obligations, or else fall into a ruinous trade war with Europe." Right. Just as with the farm subsidy issue, Congress needs to wake up to the fact that we can't negotiate trade agreements and then cynically circumvent them for the sake of domestic constituencies. Nick Kristof and depopulation on the Great Plains A post on that topic will appear here, as promised. But it will have to wait until Thursday. Southern liberal journalists, Part I The list of “Southern hyper-libs” at Andrew Sullivan’s blog includes some big names in the media elite: Raines, Moyers, Begala and Carville, among others. It can be fun to grouse about the left-liberal orientation of individual Southern reporters. And Andrew has long offered sound criticisms of the New York Times. But I wouldn’t carry such a line of attack, as one Daily Dish reader did, to the point of formulating an actual thesis of Southern-libs-as-journalistic-infection-agents. The idea seems too pat. It’s a stretch to claim that the New York-to-Boston corridor has been supplanted by the South in producing “vehemently liberal journalistic ideologues” who go on to dominate the media elite. At any rate, Andrew asked for further examples of “Southern hyper-libs,” and I have one. An article in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles last May offered a stinging attack on the Los Angeles Times from a conservative perspective. The author, Joel Kotkin, accused Southern-born Shelby Coffey, the paper’s editor from 1989 to 1997, of pushing the paper far to the left during his tenure:
A 1997 piece in Salon described Coffey, who was much honored by journalistic organizations, as “the quintessential guilty white male: insular, kindhearted, cluelessly patronizing, endlessly infuriating.” The piece added: “And so, during his eight-year tenure, was the Los Angeles Times.” Another observation from the Salon piece, written by Catherine Seipp:
Get it -- Coffey, Southern, “gone with the wind”? As for the Southern-libs theory: If critics are so keen to beat up on Raines or grump about Moyers’ bias, they can find ample opportunity, legitimately, by critiquing the Times’ articles or tuning into PBS on Friday nights. There’s no need to go a step further and reach for some theory about infiltration by nefarious Southern lefties, with the energetic Raines and tired old Moyers in the vanguard. Southern liberal journalists, Part II Andrew Sullivan, quoting an e-mail he received, listed some credible reasons why some Southern reporters might move to the left in order to placate the expectations of today's newsrooms. Here is an additional reason: Liberal journalism in the South has a proud history, for legitimate reasons. In the 1940s and ’50s, it wasn’t the Southern conservative press that called for the overthrow of Jim Crow. It was Southern liberal editors. In doing so, they showed great insight and integrity. While the conservative James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader was formulating legal arguments in the 1950s to justify the white South’s “massive resistance” to school desegregation, left-leaning editors such as Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., and Jonathan Daniels of the News & Observer of Raleigh were prodding their readers to step away from white supremacy and embrace a new vision for the region. Carter (whose son, Hodding Carter III, would be Jimmy Carter’s State Department spokesman in the 1970s), won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize, for example, for a set of editorials that called for racial tolerance. The elder Carter said his views had been shaped by his childhood experiences, which included his coming upon the body of a black man who had been lynched by whites. What was most impressive about the work of Carter, McGill, Daniels and the others was that their writing, while critical of Jim Crow, was nonetheless suffused with affection for the South and its people. These editors weren’t alienated from their fellow citizens. Instead, they encouraged them to lift themselves toward their better selves. (As pointed out in a recent post here, Yiddish writers of 19th century Russia, to their credit, had used a similar approach: They expressed solidarity with their fellow Jews even as they pointed out their failings.) The Southern liberal editors, it is true, did not push for an end to segregation at the speed demanded by Southern blacks in the civil rights movement and their Northern activist supporters. Men such as McGill tended to be moderates who argued that a gradualist course was best, in order to avoid a social explosion due to white resistance. Such a middle-ground approach earned the editors the scorn of white supremacists even as it frustrated the civil rights community. McGill, in his colorful style, acknowledged that “there is schizophrenia” in “running with the hare and dropping back ... to see how the hounds are making out.” The storied history of liberal Southern editors goes back even further into the region’s history. In the 1920s, North Carolina-born Gerald Johnson was the best-known national commentator on Southern politics and culture; he went on to become a leading contributor to The New Republic. A generation earlier, Walter Hines Page, another North Carolinian, had pushed for social change. The same was true of South Carolinian Francis W. Dawson, owner of the Charleston News and Courier. He actually had the courage to challenge his state’s support for white supremacity -- in the 1880s. Given this journalistic tradition, it is little wonder that Southern journalists might be attracted to follow in the footsteps of editors such as McGill, Carter and Daniels. The problem, of course, is that being a liberal in 2002 generally obligates one to carry outlandish ideological baggage that didn’t exist 50 years ago for McGill and other sensible liberals who understood the South’s need for change. UPDATE: Stanton Brown, a Tennessee resident, provided a useful perspective in an e-mail today:
Yes, over the years I have seen evidence of much of what he talks about. Mickey Kaus explores similar territory today at Slate, focusing on the key idea of liberal guilt. (I'm not very critical of Mark Shields, though. I interpreted his remark that Gigot "is not a hater" not as a slur against American conservatives per se but as an understandable reaction to the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Clinton hysteria on the hard right that long predated Lewinsky and the impeachment mess.) Stanton Brown's point about the Manichean viewpoint of Southern liberals is one more example, I would argue, of how the hard left and fervent right resemble each other as far as their hubris and fixation on promoting their sense of moral superiority. Tuesday, September 3
Southern-born liberal journalists; depopulation on the Great Plains Those are two topics to be addressed in posts here tomorrow. The first topic relates to an Andrew Sullivan post today titled "Southern Hyper-Libs"; the second topic, to a Nicholas Kristof column today. On another matter: My thanks to Andrew Sullivan for his generous remarks today in regard to this site. NEA view NEA President Bob Chase has a letter to the editor in today's Omaha World-Herald responding to the George Will column. Here is the text of the letter:
Hey, there's nothing wrong with tolerance I've gotten some mail arguing that my comments against the NEA must mean I want Muslims and Arabs in this country to be stigmatized simply because of their background. Not so. In the first place, as I argued at length just last week, each citizen in this country, regardless of background, should be regarded as fully equal to his or her fellow Americans. In the second place, there is nothing incompatible in arguing that Americans should be wide-awake to the morally repugnant nature of madrasa radicalism, and the threat such radicalism presents to this country, even as Muslim- and Arab-Americans are accorded the full respect they deserve. The Omaha World-Herald addressed that point in an editorial it ran on June 8 of this year (the text is no longer available online):
An appreciation for American principles of egalitarianism can go hand-in-hand with a recognition of the security threat posed to this country by radical Islam. The problem I have with the rhetoric used to defend the NEA's approach is that all the emphasis is placed on the former while downplaying the latter. Monday, September 2
More on the NEA A school superintendent in St. Louis had an op-ed in the Post-Dispatch recently in which he heatedly responded to the George Will column on the NEA lesson plans for Sept. 11. A pretty well-conceived piece. The writer, unlike the curriculum developers quoted in the NYT piece I recently blogged about, had the good sense to offer calm arguments likely to seem credible to the general public. The people quoted in the Times article, in contrast, made the mistake of stooping to mere demagoguery. In fact, it occurred to me over the weekend that the NEA member who accused critics of racism did something particularly interesting: He failed to appreciate that he was sharing with a reporter the kind of nasty ad hominem accusation normally bandied about only in private among like-minded political believers. His statement, in other words, was a liberal counterpoint to Dick Armey’s infamous “Barney Fag” reference to Barney Frank -- it was an example of political dirty joking normally kept out of public view. As for the op-ed in the Post-Dispatch, it still skirted the central issues rightly raised by Will:
It sidesteps them, of course, because to do otherwise would be to risk admitting that in international relations, evil does exist, security interests do have relevance, and the exercise of U.S. military power can indeed be wielded, even in the 21st century, on a massive scale for a legitimate cause. Activists in this country and elsewhere are devoting great energy to trying to deflect the public's understanding away from such truths. That is the larger context in which the NEA lesson plans ought to be considered, precisely as George Will said. A first for this blog My thanks to Glenn Reynolds, Bill Quick and Andrea Harris, whose links to my NEA posts over the weekend helped put this site on the Blogdex index, to my knowledge, for the first time. Sunday, September 1
9/11 and America's classrooms I: The NEA cries racism George Will drew blood the other day with a classic column in which he exposed the softheadedness underlying much of the National Education Association's lesson plans on Sept. 11. The strength of Will’s arguments was demonstrated by the petulant response from Bob Chase, the NEA president, who chose not to rebut any of Will’s specific points but merely stomped his feet rhetorically. A New York Times article talked about the controversy and noted that the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has posted its own recommendations to teachers, with contributions from William Bennett and Victor Davis Hanson, among others. In the Fordham Foundation report, author and education consultant Mary Beth Klee cogently addresses some central points:
Klee is right, of course. But it's no surprise the national teaching establishment is balking. The course she recommends would require it to jettison certain dearly held assumptions. The assumption, for example, that appreciating the arts of war is anachronistic and morally questionable. Or that focusing on something as supposedly crass as U.S. national security interests (as opposed to the dreamy embrace of redistributionism and multilateralism) might actually be justified. The New York Times article revealed a remarkably shabby tactic that Jerald Newberry, an NEA member involved in the project, used in responding to the lesson plans’ critics:
So, critics of the NEA plan are racists. It’s revealing how quickly the NEA’s supposed passion for tolerance can evaporate. Newberry’s response was petty and demagogic, but that from another curriculum developer, Rona Novick, was dispiriting in another way: It was grounded in pure nonsense. Here is the quote from the NYT:
Remarkable. Teachers, she claims, can’t talk about the Islamic hatred and evil that fueled the 9/11 attacks because hatred and evil once manifested themselves, undeniably, in this country through the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. On the contrary, this situation presents teachers with an opportunity to make vital distinctions. American society, students should be told, now openly acknowledges the injustices and horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, powerful legal mechanisms, embedded in the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, have been put in place to prevent their reappearance. America, in other words, has striven mightily, after a civil war in the 19th century and social tumult in the 20th, to move beyond the moral blindness of the past. What a contrast with the madrasa culture of radical Islam. Followers of that mindset readily embrace prejudice and hatred. They casually endorse violence against innocents in the name of their absolutist religious creed. They even cynically attempt to link their own “cause” to a legitimate one (ensuring peace between the Palestinians and Israelis). These are the real nuances that teachers ought to sharing with their students. How revealing that the NEA and like-minded thinkers want to pre-empt such needed discussions in the nation’s classrooms. Saturday, August 31
The Mexican economy: safe from South America's economic turmoil (so far) Succinct, useful piece in The Economist about the successes and challenges of the Mexican economy. (It's a single article, not an entire multi-article special section on Mexico.) An excerpt:
Due to NAFTA, no less than 89 percent of Mexico's exports now head north, to the United States, the article says. Mexico's economy faces structural problems including ill-considered government encouragement of monopolies and a worrisome reliance on oil revenues (providing 35 percent of revenues for the country's federal government). Still, Mexico has made significant strides since the country's dramatic economic slide of the mid-1990s, in terms of economic reform as well as greater political openness. At a time of economic wobbliness in Brazil and outright meltdown in Argentina, Mexico's stability (at least for the moment) provides welcome reassurance. Friday, August 30
Democracy and American history II: Hypocrisy in the slaveholding South I recently posted about how a central component of American democracy, confirmed in the aftermath of the Revolution, was the overturning of hierarchical thinking and the embrace of egalitarianism, at least as an ideal. That change opened the way, among other things, to a burst of commercial and entrepreneurial activity that the colonial system had blocked. Matt Welch was kind enough to link to the post, and a reader comment at his site raised an interesting point: Maybe my thesis was correct, but what about the slavery system in the antebellum South -- didn’t its existence undermine my claim that America was stepping forward toward recognition of individual freedom? It’s a great question. Antebellum South history is a particular interest of mine, and it is absolutely true that America did not advance uniformly toward the recognition of individual liberty. In fact, the apologists for Southern slavery tied themselves into rhetorical and philosophical knots trying to portray slaveholding as compatible with egalitarianism. The slave system stood as one of the great obstacles to the advancement of freedom in this country. Removing it, through war, proved necessary not only to allow racial justice (realized only in the 1960s and afterward) but also to encourage the South’s belated embrace of entrepreneurship and industrialization (an attitudinal change that became widely noticeable in the 1890s). William Freehling explored the contradictions of Southern slaverholders' political rhetoric in his classic historical study, “The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854.” Freehling vividly described the hypocrisy and nonsense that lay behind the rationalizations slaveholders deployed to depict slavery as a morally uplifting institution compatible with democracy. Some slaveholders, however, did not even bother with voicing support for poor whites. The slaveholding elite in coastal South Carolina and eastern Virginia, Freehling notes, tended to be fiercely anti-democratic. (Many states ended onerous property restrictions against officeholding during the early 1800s, for example, but the aristocratic elite in South Carolina insisted on the retention of such measures right into the 1850s.) Freehling described the political thinking of such men this way:
Another useful passage:
In 1830, about 36 percent of Southern whites owned slaves. By 1860, the number was 26 percent. Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, a hot-tempered instructor at the College of William and Mary, stood as one of the leading pro-slavery intellectuals of the antebellum era. His praise for slavery was matched by his contempt for democracy, which he derided as an ill-considered “tyranny of numbers.” In 1836, U.S. Rep. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina delivered a speech on the House floor in which he praised the slave system for producing what he claimed was “the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the Earth.” He strangely tried to sway Northern lawmakers by arguing that abolition of slavery would trigger class war within the white race in all sections of the country, with white aristocrats being targeted by “sans-culottes” proclaiming “equality to all mankind.” Hammond, incidentally, is one of the most curious Southern figures of the era. His life provides a look into many facets of the slave system. To cite only one example: His wife left Hammond (one of the South’s most bombastic apologists for slavery) after she discovered that he had been having sexual liaisons with a female slave as well as her daughter. Once Southern thinkers started down the path of concocting high-flown justifications for slavery and aristocratic elitism, they sometimes found themselves in peculiar intellectual territory indeed. George Fitzhugh, a Virginian, provides a good example. Declaring that “the doctrine of Human Equality is practically impossible,” he went on to estimate that 19 out of every 20 individuals, regardless of race, lacked the ability to care for themselves and therefore “have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves.” His peroration concluded, “Liberty for the few -- slavery, in every form, for the mass.” Along the same lines, Thomas Dew, another instructor at William and Mary, actually claimed that because slavery was so demonstrably superior to wage labor, “at this very moment, in every densely populated country, hundreds would be willing to sell themselves” into bondage “if the laws would permit.” The intellectual rationales behind Southern slavery involved a long line of hypocrisies and self-deceptions. Among the greatest of those was the outrageous claim that a system founded on radical inequality could simultaneously champion individual liberty. That lie fortunately perished in 1865, along with the Confederacy, both gone with the wind. UPDATE: Gary Haubold sent me a thoughtful, well-argued e-mail this morning pointing out that the founders generally were not enthusiastic about encouraging mass democracy and that the North was also guilty of egregious racial injustice. He's absolutely right on both counts. The push toward greater democracy and egalitarianism after the Revolution that I described was mainly spurred by popular demand. The general public, in other words, seized the opening provided by the founders and used it to enlarge the political opportunities available to themselves. The North's racial history during the 19th and early 20th century, examined by such historians as C. Vann Woodward and Leon Litwack, is a topic I intend to post on here sometime. It's fascinating. Thursday, August 29
Singin' and bombin' Humorist Mad Kane is at it again. She's crafted another song parody suitable for the times. Her latest, to be sung to the tune of "New York, New York" from the movie "On The Town," includes these lyrics:
The complete Mad Kane version is here. As I told her today, the first time I read her lyrics, I kept imagining George W. singing them in a sailor suit: weird! (If you haven't seen the movie and wonder about the sailor reference, you can look here.) Misleading claim about the Electoral College In a commentary piece for FindLaw, law professors/brothers Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar argue in favor of term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices. At one point during the back-and-forth between the two brothers, Vikram Amar writes:
Not so fast! As I pointed out at this site on Aug. 1:
And of how American law professors should be wary of overstating their case. UPDATE: Germans, in particular, should beware of criticizing the principles behind the Electoral College, John Tuttle e-mails me. The representative weight allocated to the individual states in Germany's Bundesrat varies, but it doesn't necessarily reflect actual demographic differentials, he notes. And the Bundesrat's 69 members, who represent the interests of the individual states, are not even elected. "This of course is similar to the original plan of the US Constitution," he notes, "where the States named their Senators to represent the States' interests in their Federal Government." ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg offers cogent thoughts on the Electoral College topic. Another kind of Euro-American divergence The Economist's cover story this week is available only to subscribers, but Slate's summary of its thesis, already familiar to students of European affairs, is worth pondering:
I'm having to restrain, once again, my sense of American triumphalism. Rad and ready to defend America Observations from a recent column by the always-thoughtful James Pinkerton about, of all things, the movie "XXX":
His point ties in with the surge of patriotic music, in everything from Springsteen tunes to country music to even, in some cases, rap -- in the wake of 9/11. Lyndon Johnson, opportunist I initially planned for this post to start out something like this: "It is interesting that the U.S. ambassador post to the United Nations hasn't enjoyed a high public profile in this country for two decades. There was a time, in the mid-1960s, when the post was regarded as so important that the president of the United States actually asked a Supreme Court justice, Arthur Goldberg, to resign from the court to accept the ambassador's post." In reading a bit more in detail, however, I found out that Johnson had asked Goldberg to resign -- actually, Johnson pressured him to do so -- not because the ambassador position was so important but because Johnson wanted to give a Supreme Court seat to his old buddy Abe Fortas. Goldberg, who had great reservations about the war in Vietnam, resigned from the ambassador position in 1968. In 1970, he made an ignominious run for governor of New York, losing to Nelson Rockefeller. Goldberg privately lamented that he'd yielded to Johnson's pressure to step down from the high court. Add one more item to the long list of incidents that reveal the depths of LBJ's opportunism and ruthlessness. Southerners and stereotypes I winced today when I saw a report in the Washington Post that CBS plans a reincarnation of the "Beverly Hillbillies" using an Osbournes-like approach: putting real poor-white Southerners into a millionaire mansion in Beverly Hills. So they can be laughed at, of course. I winced because -- well, a Southerner working in Hollywood and quoted anonymously in the Post said it well:
Such a show will signal that there is something uniquely unsophisticated and ignorant about the Southern character. In other words, it would seek to re-enforce a stereotype that a large segment of the American population rightly regards as offensive and elitist. After all, there are millions of people from all corners of the country who would be be culturally disoriented if relocated to a millionaire mansion. I know I would be. Do I come off sounding like just one more ethnocentric whiner, in the fashion of Hispanic activists who grow hysterical at the prospect of televising Speedy Gonzalez? Maybe so, but I can't help how I feel. As I indicated in a recent post, a key American ideal is that we are each equally worthy of respect, regardless of our background. Plans for the show don't make me angry. But they do leave me chagrined. UPDATE: A good friend from North Carolina -- a fellow student of Southern culture and history -- notes something ironic:
He's right about the reaction. The cancellations, as I recall, also included the Red Skelton show. They were part of a CBS strategy to sweep aside a number of long-running shows and lay a new foundation of programming for the '70s. ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Carver posts today at The Ole Miss Conservative that Fox is reportedly dreaming up a cockeyed show of its own -- a new, "reality" version of "Green Acres." YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Carver alerts me to the impassioned essay that Louisiana-born Rod Dreher has in today's NRO about this topic. Wednesday, August 28
Will closer economic ties mean closer diplomatic relations? Japan's trade relationship with China continues to deepen, according to the Nautilus Institute, a foreign policy research group:
U.S.-Japanese relations do seem to be strong these days. Still, another item from the Nautilus Institute isn't very reassuring:
Of course, if anyone could be expected to use impassioned rhetoric, understandably, against nuclear weapons, it would be the mayor of Nagasaki. Excellent author, excellent topic I just read that Edmund S. Morgan, one of the great authorities on early American history, has a new book out on Benjamin Franklin. I know that Morgan has caught flak, justifiably, from conservatives for his anti-individual-rights arguments on Second Amendment issues. But that doesn't erase the fact that Morgan has amply demonstrated his abilities as a gifted historian over the past four decades. I have no doubt that one could gain much from his new book. Term limits for Supreme Court justices? That's the interesting topic of a post at Howard Bashman's ever-interesting legal-issues blog, How Appealing. I haven't had time to check out the opinion essays he cites on the topic, but I intend to. Iran and al Qaida I posted last week on a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report that Iran has provided refuge to al Qaida members. An article in today's Washington Post says the same thing. The first three grafs:
Such actions by Iran are a direct provocation to this country. Sooner or later, they are bound to result in consequences. Sorry, by the way, to use two different spellings ("al Qaida"and "al Qaeda") in the same post. But I use "al Qaida," after the style adopted by my newspaper, while the Post uses "al Qaeda." Tuesday, August 27
A worthy journalistic project Congratulations to The Daily Telegraph: It's starting a series about the erosion of individual freedom in Britain. From the introduction to the series:
It will be fascinating to see where the series leads. A worthy cause, indeed. Monday, August 26
Lileks' achievement First, let’s savor some of the recent language from James Lileks, then I’ll offer an observation about one of the reasons why he’s such a devastatingly effective writer. He writes:
As some of you probably know, Lileks’ writing career predates his blogging career. He’s been writing a syndicated column for a good while now; I used to run it in the ’90s, when I was editorial page editor of a North Carolina newspaper. Lileks was a delight to read back in the Clinton years. He skated merrily from one political episode to another. Wonderful stuff. I thought of Lileks recently in researching the debate over American Western art (a subject about which I’ll post here sometime soon). I read a quote from anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who said one way to refute a line of argument is “to evoke it and thereby make it more and more fully present until it gradually collapses under the weight of its own inconsistencies.” Yes -- that’s precisely what Lileks does so well. He focuses on an ill-conceived political argument (say, the U.S.=Nazis thesis) and then uses wit to point out the many inane ramifications that would flow from it. In that way, he makes the idea he’s ridiculing “more and more fully present” until its wrongheadedness and absurdity are revealed so completely as to be undeniable. Nobody does it better. And we are all blessed by what he accomplishes. Foreign policy and sin Very interesting letter to the editor in the Omaha World-Herald today. It reads:
There is an enormous amount that could be said in response to that line of argument. Let me make only one observation, about international relations. The basis for a sound foreign policy is a sober understanding of the world as it is, with all its moral limitations and dangers, rather than overwrought Wilsonian idealism and dreamy imagingings about how easily the world can be transformed. Start of the week People who haven't visited the site since Friday might be interested in particular in two weekend posts: one about troubling U.S. indifference toward a particular treaty obligation, and another about a new book on the Nazis' Einsatzgruppen. Appreciating the full length of history A history-related column I wrote last March might be of interest. The text is below. Elliott West, whose ideas I discuss here, is, in my opinion, the most skilled writer in the historical profession today. His writing is intellectually engaging, stylistically playful. It doesn’t get any better than that. West talked about the need to conceive of history (in this case, Great Plains history) along its full length, rather than through what he termed a “false divide.” He also pointed out that people driving across soporifically flat plains rarely notice the actual complexity of the landscapes. They could learn much, he says, if they would park and take a serious look at the land before them. The column:
Benefits of blogging David Hogberg recently posted worthwhile observations about how joining the blogging community has helped him in various ways. (He was responding to a provocative post from Eric Olsen of Tres Producers about the “dark side of blogging.”) By the way, Dave has been away from blogging for the past few days -- and I think I know why. Party on, you crazy Iowan. The tourism numbers One little-noticed effect of 9/11: Because of the abrupt drop in tourism to the United States, the U.S. lost its traditional position as the world’s No. 2 travel destination, measured in arrivals. (France holds the No. 1 spot.) Last year, Spain, the long-running No. 3, moved past the U.S. to second place. In terms of tourist revenues received, however, the United States remained No. 1, by far. It earned $72 billion from international tourism last year, a 12 percent drop from 2000 but still way ahead of No. 2 Spain, at $32 billion. From January to August of 2001, international tourist arrivals worldwide were up nearly 3 percent over the same period a year earlier. During the September-to-December period last year, arrivals fell by more than 9 percent compared to the same period in 2000. Here are the rest of top 15 travel destinations, by country, for 2001:
I’d never given much thought to which countries might rank highly in tourist interest, but I was surprised that Russia placed that high; the same in regard to Poland. Notice that the top 15 didn’t include Brazil, Japan or Australia. Incidentally, I read that the World Tourism Organization, which compiled this data, is releasing a report this week at the U.N. poverty conference in Johannesburg. The organization calls for a new emphasis on promoting tourism as a way to boost the economies of poor countries. My initial reaction was to snicker at the suggestion, especially since the organization refers to the idea as “eliminating poverty through sustainable tourism.” But on second thought, the idea seems worth pursuing, not as a panacea but as one more tool in trying to help LDCs -- well, at least those with genuine tourist potential. Cuba, for example, is poor, but it would be poorer still were it not for the country's tourist sector. UPDATE: Statistics on international tourism have little value, a sensible e-mail from reader CK pointed out this morning. It's no wonder that Europeans vacation more in foreign countries compared to Americans, given the basic facts of geography, he notes:
Indeed. I should have given consideration to such points, since in July I had noted similar observations by my friend Craig Brelsford, a Pennsylvania native now living in the Netherlands:
Sunday, August 25
Lester Polfus, one of my heroes He's actually better known by another name; you've probably heard of him. Here are a few of his accomplishments, from an item at Blogcritics:
All right, I'm talking about an American original: Les Paul. Here's the Blogcritics piece; pretty good. (I'm not a guitarist; I'm an (amateur) arranger. In fact, if I ever get an electronic keyboard again, expect to see my blog time suffer a big drop.) On this issue, the EU is right: The U.S. is a hypocrite The farm bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush last May was justifiably criticized on a number of scores. (The Omaha World-Herald, where I work, joined editorially in several of those criticisms.) One badly flawed aspect of the measure didn’t receive as much public attention domestically, but it did overseas. The issue: By passing the bill, the United States thumbed its nose at this country’s international treaty commitments on farm subsidies. In the 1990s, the U.S. government expended great diplomatic energy to convince foreign governments to impose restrictions, through the World Trade Organization, on the specific ways in which farm subsidies are provided. Under that agreement, the WTO places a ceiling on how much individual countries can spend on countercyclical programs, by which farmers receive additional money when prices drop. The current limit for the United States is around $18 billion. It is precisely that type of assistance, through market loan assistance and crop insurance, that Congress deliberately boosted, in defiance of the spirit -- and probably the letter -- of the WTO agreement. Two farm policy analysts at Iowa State University had pointed out in a report in 2001 that new farm support proposals being touted by Congress would violate WTO requirements. But ag-policy leaders in Congress ignored the warnings. Rep. Larry Combest, R-Texas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, in particular has made no secret that he is more than willing to boost subsidy levels regardless of WTO stipulations. U.S. trade and agricultural officials defend the farm bill, but Franz Fischler, the EU commissioner for agricultural policy, had the facts on his side when he blasted the measure last spring. Here is part of what he said:
This isn’t to say that the Europeans and Japanese don’t engage in enormous subsidy efforts of their own. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has long been notorious for its excess. Japan, of course, goes to great lengths to aid its rice farming sector. The EU has been especially clever on the subsidy issue, reconfiguring a growing percentage of its aid payments into certain programs (“green box” programs, in trade jargon) permitted under the WTO requirements. The U.S., meanwhile, has displayed no such forethought. Instead, it has remained bullheaded and upped its spending on “amber box” subsidy programs frowned on by WTO rules -- rules the United States itself had pushed for only a few years ago. This is one more example of how domestic politics can short-circuit American foreign policy. And in the process make the U.S. out to be a hypocrite, to boot. Saturday, August 24
Heart of darkness I have time for a quick item: I just saw that Richard Rhodes has a new book on the Einsatzgruppen -- the infamous squads the Nazis used to target and obliterate Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. Rhodes, of course, has demonstrated his skill in tackling big historical topics. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" won a Pulitzer. From an online description of the book:
A reviewer in the Boston Globe points out:
Rhodes has drawn on new material, using interviews, eyewitness accounts and records from the Nuremburg tribunals. The topic is too harrowing for me to want to read about in detail, but if someone of Rhodes' intellectual caliber thought it worth writing about, I can only imagine the book makes for a powerful reading experience. Friday, August 23
More to come (but not immediately) I intend to post this weekend, though only at night. Right now, the prospects for tonight seem iffy. Topics in the pipeline for sometime soon: the International Criminal Court; critiquing a set of online journal articles that made some accusations linking George W., Israel and Southern history; an aspect of American democracy; and how a debate over American Western art relates to a broader debate over the history of the American West. Unfocused and unpromising In grad school a bit over 20 years ago, I began to better appreciate the enormity of global poverty while studying development issues at Georgetown under an instructor from the World Bank. The problems seemed intractable then; I'm afraid they still do, even though the moral imperative to try to tackle them still remains. The Johannesburg conference, for example, seems destined to be one more multilateral boondoggle in that effort. A piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail today points out some of the problems:
This morning I ran across something I was completely unaware of: At the G-8 summit in 2000, the leaders of the major industrialized countries pledged to cut the number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty in half by 2015. As an abstract goal, of course. I also learned that the death rate from malaria is on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa after a period of decline. It's an example of how progress in some areas of development in LDCs (improvements such as lower infant mortality and higher average span) is undercut by setbacks in other areas. Self-definition Great little item at Nick Denton's blog today about the difference in how Americans and Britons define themselves: "So the difference between the US and the UK boils down to this. American workers think of themselves as middle class; and the English middle class think of themselves as workers." An unequal world Which source should be believed? A statistics-laden, super-wonkish article in The Economist, which argues that global economic inequality is increasing and that the trend needs remedying? Or a new report from the Cato Institute, which says not to worry -- the inequalities have been shrinking quite nicely in recent decades? The analyses are especially relevant right now, since press attention is turning to the World Summit on Sustainable Development the U.N. will hold in Johannesburg next week. I lack the expertise to say which report is correct about the income gap trend. But one thing seems clear: Free markets will always produce a significant income gap between rich and the poor. I well remember an Economist article about 20 years ago which pointed out that fact. It noted that very soon after China began free-market reforms of its agricultural sector in 1979, the first social effect was quite striking: A big income gap appeared within the farm population as the marketplace helped some families to acquire considerable wealth. The goal, then, should not be to fixate on income gaps but to strive to alleviate outright poverty as much as possible. The Economist article, however, directly rejects my thesis:
I’ll grant his point that the well-being of rich countries can be harmed by economic instability in less developed countries. And economic wobbliness in a place like Pakistan could affect U.S. security interests quite directly. But, on his central point, I have to say: If the author believes it is so important to awaken people to the importance of alleviating the income gap, he should have written a genuinely cogent and compelling piece that offered convincing arguments, rather than what he in fact presented: an interminably long lump of jargon and methodological minutiae. Thursday, August 22
The usefulness of compromise A new Time magazine article takes environmental groups to task, rightly, for their hostility to compromise, the strains they needlessly place on their relations with business allies and their refusal to consider market-based remedies. Two excerpts:
The piece also points out how the environmental movement undercuts its effectiveness by hyping exaggerations about ecological damage, with help from a sympathetic national press. Such needless hyperbole opened the door for a sharp-minded critic, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, to write a book that knocked down the overwrought claims. Environmentalists have considerable public support, and in individual cases the scientific arguments, to achieve sensible protections for society. But they will continue to meet frustration as long as they remain knee-jerk critics of capitalism and continue peddling scare stories that ultimately heighten public cynicism about their motives. Counterfactual history: Britain foregoes the postwar welfare state for early Thatcherism Since Glenn Reynolds has been kind enough to trigger an instavalanche at this blog, I'll plug this recent post of mine that might interest some first-time readers. It's a response to some counterfactual speculation about what the ramifications for Britain might have been had it chosen a radically different economic course at the end of World War II. Dissent and patriotism My post this week about Susan Sontag reminded me of something impressive I discovered recently about William Jennings Bryan, the one-time editor of the newspaper where I work and a three-time loser in presidential contests. During the Spanish-American War, Bryan demonstrated something quite important: that it is possible to oppose the foreign policy of one’s government while still expressing a fervent love of country. He spoke out strongly against the U.S. acquisition of territory in the Caribbean and Pacific as a result of the war with Spain. But at the same time, he stressed that his views were grounded in respect for what he called “American tradition, American history and American interests.” Bryan ended one dissenting speech by proclaiming, “To American civilization, all hail!” What a contrast to characters like Sontag and Chomsky, whose sour rhetoric seethes with contempt for their country and many of its popular ideals. Michael Walzer, co-editor of Dissent, summed things up well when he wrote not long after 9/11: “Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed.” Philosopher Richard Rorty addressed the same point when he observed that many holding a left-liberal mindset err by acting as if “you have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one in which you wake up every morning.” For me, the most effective antidote to such elitism and alienation can be found in the mindset of a particular group of artists: the Yiddish writers of the late 19th century. These novelists and short story writers were fully awake to the flaws and idiosyncracies of their people -- the Jews of the Pale of Settlement and Russia proper, living under the pressures of constant oppression. These writers didn’t hesitate to point out the foibles and shortcomings of their fellow Jews. Yet, these artists were by no means alienated from them. On the contrary, they grounded their works in an unwavering love for the Jewish people -- even as they criticized and satirized them. The historian Howard Sachar described the sentiment well in his examination of Sholom Abramovich, the “grandfather” of modern Yiddish literature, who went by the pen name of Mendele Mocher Sforim:
Another example was the intellectual Yiddish writer Isaac Loeb Peretz. Sachar writes:
In short, such writers displayed moral seriousness. They had a keen sense of moral discernment, yet they had the maturity to temper their egoism with openness and generosity toward their fellow citizens for whom the life of the mind had little relevance. Regrettably, such an acknowledgement of complexity, such an instinct for generosity, seem beyond the ability of many in the liberal-left camp to appreciate, let alone embrace, given their political temperament. For them, alienation from the mainstream is a source of pride. More than a century ago, William Jennings Bryan earned respect by combining sincere dissent with sincere patriotism. Yiddish writers earned public affection by infusing their social criticisms with heartfelt expressions of social solidarity. Present-day dissidents can similarly add credibility to their arguments by grounding them in something more substantial than a reflexive contempt for America. They can begin by appreciating that there should be more to life than alienation from one’s fellow citizens. The ideal of "one nation, indivisible" is something to be strived for, rather than sneered at. Saudis, missiles, nukes I posted not long about the Saudi government and a report of its possible interest in nuclear weapons, citing an article in a State Department journal as well as a Pakistani newspaper report. As an addendum, here is a useful link to info, last updated in June 2000, at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. The center provides a chart showing specific ballistic and cruise missile technologies in Saudi possession. The center also provides an overview on Saudi Arabia's capabilities in regard to weapons of mass destruction. Footnotes accompanying the chart say that allegations are so far unsubstantiated about a Saudi scientist’s claim that Saudi Arabia gave $5 billion to Iraq's nuclear program during the 1980s in exchange for a nuclear weapon, and that Saudi Arabia had two undeclared nuclear research reactors. Also in the footnotes (these items are direct quotes):
Online links are provided by the center for many of the footnoted items. It might be a good time for some fresh investigative reporting on this matter, given the gravity of recent developments on the terrorism front and in Israel. Wednesday, August 21
Pentagon leaks and the military culture Donald Sensing, who served three years as a public affairs officer at the Pentagon (and who consistently demonstrates sound judgment at his weblog), offers some fascinating thoughts today about leaks and the military establishment. As I tell him not infrequently in e-mails, I continue to learn from his blog. Sontag, again Susan Sontag fired a barb at the Bush administration during a recent appearance at Lincoln Center after the performance of several Iranian plays, according to this piece from City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute. (I ran across that info this morning, but a Google search shows that the blog Media Minded actually posted on this on Aug. 13.) City Journal reports:
I thought I'd read some comments from Sontag last fall that she had backtracked a smidgen from her initial anti-American snarkiness in the wake of the attacks. At any rate, her comments indicate that the antiwar left has regained its confidence, a point I elaborated on in a recent post. UPDATE: Michael Tinkler, of Cranky Professor blogger fame, passes on these useful observations:
A great vacation, Martin? I’ve been tardy in welcoming back Martin Devon from his vacation in the Caribbean. You know him -- he’s the blogger Patio Pundit, for pete sake! He's also been an important source of encouragement for me in regard to this weblog. Looks he picked a wonderful place to spend some time. (Scroll down just a bit to see the picture of the bay.) I also learned from Martin's site that, as he said, the “great character actor” Jeff Corey has died. (I well remember the episode of "Babylon 5" Martin mentions.) Lost ideals I looked back in a recent post at the Atlee government’s creation of Britain’s modern welfare state in the late 1940s. Here are a few points from a recent critique of Britain’s National Health Service in an essay done for Civitas, a British think tank:
The writer argues that several countries in continental Europe have come far closer to achieving the NHS ideals. (No mention of the U.S., though.) Nothing sacred I just saw that Scott Rubush posted some good points in regard to my recent reference to the musical selections for the Voyager probes. Scott mentions, among other things, Cuban music. That prompts me to heap praise on a particular Cuban group -- the marvelous big band Irakere. At one point just over a decade ago, the band included especially impressive members such as trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, both of whom subsequently left for the United States. I have to disagree with the Irakere discographer I’ve linked to as far as his claim that D’Rivera’s soprano sax solo in “Misa Negra” (Black Mass) is “forced.” On the contrary, I’ve always found that solo to be nothing short of remarkable. It’s exuberant, masterful and merrily glides right across the musical palette, in a few short minutes, from Mozart to blues to Charlie Parker-style handsprings. I will never forget my reaction when I first heard it. A continuing inspiration. Tuesday, August 20
Another problem for international trade: meddlesome state attorneys general I did some poking around Tech Central Station’s European Web site today and ran across several items of interest. One was a short but pungent essay by Richard Miniter, formerly of the Wall Street Journal Europe and now a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think tank. He writes:
This reminds me of a well-done Cato Institute study that examined the legal excesses by state attorneys general. (In fact, I've had a copy of the report in my materials here at home for a while now, in order to quote a few items at this blog sometime.) The report mentions several strategies for reining in attorneys general. One such strategy, however, deserves continued opposition: a bill introduced by Sen. Mitch McConnell that would use federal power to restrict the parameters for attorneys general. Sorry, senator, but that kind of casual encroachment on state prerogatives ought to be opposed by anyone with a healthy respect for federalism, even if the legislation is for an ultimately worthy cause. Protest language I just ran across an interesting NYT piece from last Saturday about how African immigrants are using linguistic contortions, in the form of slang known as Verlan, as a way to express their alienation from mainstream French society. In the same way that rap crossed cultural and racial boundaries in this country, Verlan had done the same in France:
As noted in the post below about the historical use of mendacity as a defensive tool, people who feel weighed down by injustice will often search for creative ways to register their protest. A counterfactual Britain: A road not taken -- the adoption of Thatcherism in the 1940s Could Britain have maintained international clout and domestic economic vigor after World War II had it pursued a rigorous free-market approach? Specifically, had the country refrained from adopting the extravagant Labor Party agenda of the late 1940s (far-ranging industrial nationalizations; broad, stepped-up government interventionism; socialized medicine), could Britain have found a viable alternative path? Ignore the historical reality (Clement Atlee's resounding political victory for the Laborites in 1945) and imagine that the Conservatives had won instead and then demonstrated imagination and resolution on the economic front. By laying a different postwar foundation, could they have set Britain on a different long-term course? In such an alternate universe, could Britain have avoided the painful “sick man of Europe” experience that brought it to a bleak precipice in the winter of 1979, when economic stagnation, labor turmoil and political mismanagement combined to reveal the country as enfeebled and rudderless? Martin Hutchinson, business and economics editor for United Press International, offers two counterfactual essays (Part 1 is here and Part 2, here) in which a hypothetical Britain indeed embraced a free-market path -- and reaped wondrous benefits as a result. Hutchinson sets up a fascinating set of imagined events -- not just in economics but also in foreign policy and domestic politics. Among the economic highlights of this alternate Britain:
There’s much more -- imaginative scenarios involving India (actually, there is no India in this alternate universe), postwar Poland, the Jewish-Palestinian matter, Iran and South Africa. After my first reading of Hutchinson’s columns, I reacted churlishly. He resolved so many knotty diplomatic and economic problems so neatly -- and with perfect hindsight. Preposterous! On reflection, I was more charitable. If you’re going to dream up counterfactual history, you may as well make it fun and provocative. You know -- the whole, parallel-universe, evil bearded Spock kind of thing. Even with such allowances, however, Hutchinson’s key point -- that Britons could have summoned the political will to embrace Thatcherism four decades early -- defies the actual historical circumstances in the extreme. The chances that Britain would have embraced a free-market revolution in the 1940s, at the very time government interventionism and planning were enjoying tremendous support in Britain and much of the Western world, were so remote the scenario really can’t be taken seriously. Churchill indeed campaigned hard in 1945 against interventionist policies and welfarism. He used hard-edged rhetoric in radio appearances to link Labor-style socialism with Hitlerian totalitarianism. He made the choice clear. The British people listened and made up their minds -- and rejected Churchill’s domestic vision in spectacular fashion. The Conservatives came out of that election with 189 seats in Parliament. The Liberals were down to 12. The total number of Labor-controlled seats: 393. Even the votes of British troops, exasperated over various grievances, went heavily against the Conservatives that year, scholars say. Popular support for heavy government involvement in the private economy had been gathering momentum in Britain since the late 1930s, when even the young Conservative Harold MacMillan was writing essays in favor of partial nationalization. (In the 1980s -- the actual 1980s -- the aged MacMillan would grump in the House of Lords about Thatcher’s economic policies, wearily chastising the government’s privatization efforts as ill-considered -- “selling the silverware,” he called it. Hutchinson’s inside-out version of history opens up a startlingly different political course for MacMillan, by the way.) It was little wonder the British people became amenable to government activism. The government itself, going back into the ’30s, had repeatedly signaled that it was willing to tolerate interventionism. The government had encouraged a domestic steel cartel and a semi-monopoly in the road hauling business, nationalized coal royalties and brought the currency policy of the Bank of England under government control. A key encapsulation of interventionist thought came to public attention in December 1940, with the publication of the Beveridge Report. It made a forceful call for social insurance. The document received great applause not just from the usual left-leaning intellectuals but also from the mainstream press and the general public. The Times of London said that the report’s “central proposals must surely be accepted as the basis of government action.” The Economist called the report “one of the most remarkable state documents ever drafted” and said its propositions could help “set right what is so plainly wrong.” (When Churchill’s coalition government succeeded in blocking approval of the Beveridge Report in February 1943, The Economist fulminated that the government had precipitated nothing less than “a crisis of free government and democracy.”) The leaders of the Anglican Church consistently pushed the ideals of the social insurance mentality throughout the 1940s. The unprecedented wartime experience, of course, only acclimated the British public further to values of social leveling and government activism. Tax rates on upper-income Britons were sky-high. One historian understandably concluded that “most Englishmen took it for granted that this war would bring fundamental social and economic change.” Churchill’s own government itself (a coalition entity, to be sure) routinely indicated that its adherence to free-market thinking was quite malleable. The last Address from the Throne before the 1945 election came in November 1944. Among its (albeit vague) recommendations: a comprehensive health service, an enlarged system of social insurance, compensation for industrial injuries, family allowances, government intervention on housing policy, and “maintenance of employment.” The bottom line: Hutchinson’s musings rest on correct conclusions about Britain’s wide-ranging failures in judgment on the economic front. Yes, the elite failed the country. But the failure of vision was hardly confined to the narrow circle of politicians, government mandarins, public policy intellectuals and journalists. The failure extended to the assumptions of the British people themselves -- understandable assumptions given the circumstances of the 1940s, but in many cases unrealistic and unworkable ones over the long haul. Hutchinson’s creation of an Ur-Thatcherite economic order in the era before television is a marvelous pipe dream. But it is only that and nothing more. Monday, August 19
Mendacity as a weapon The use of deceit as a tool against foes and oppressors is a theme that crops up throughout history. Last May, I put together a column on that topic for my newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, stringing together examples from various times and places. The text isn't online any longer, but I thought I would post it here. The column mentions two of my favorite historians: journalist Michael Barone and the academician William Freehling, who is a brilliant writer on top of being one of the foremost scholars of the factors leading to the American Civil War. The column:
Iran and al-Qaeda From the latest Iran report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (I was unable to link directly to the report, but here is the main URL for RFE/RL):
Iran's religious obscurantists and Revolutionary Guard firebrands are playing a dangerous game. They're not only strangling economic opportunities for their countrymen but are foolishly alienating the U.S. government, with the potential for dire consequences. AN IMPORTANT LITTLE WAR: Students of military history who are arriving here today via InstaPundit might be interested in this bit of historical analysis I posted here on July 4. I talked about a military conflict that seems a mere footnote to most Americans today but which actually had great long-term importance for the United States in a variety of ways. Mighty Ireland I believe I'm mentioned before that the Democratic Leadership Council (actually, a DLC affiliate called the Progressive Policy Institute) issues a consistently useful and often provocative item called its Trade Fact of the Week. A recent example: U.S. manufacturers have invested more in Ireland than they have in China and Hong Kong combined. Some details and analysis. Problems with Kyoto I ran out of time last night working up an analysis reacting to some counterfactual ruminations about British history I'd recently read. I'll complete and post my thoughts tonight. At any rate, here are some familiar but still useful points about the Kyoto accord, raised by Martin Walker in an analysis for UPI:
He also conveys a good sense of the magnitude of harm from the forest fires in Indonesia as well as the "Asian brown cloud." A legitimate, complicated issue. Unfortunately, NGOs and other do-gooders are trying to use honest concerns over pollution as a way to trample roughshod over national economic sovereignty -- though only that of the major industrialized nations, not that of LDCs or the in-betweens such as China and India. |