Regions of Mind |
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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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Monday, September 30
More on ambassadors I posted over the weekend about a listserv discussion about how foreign governments didn't begin to post ambassadors in Washington, D.C., until the very late 19th century. Holly Gallagher sent in an e-mail that warrants an update on the topic. She wrote:
As I told her in my response, it is a pleasure to be able to correspond with someone about a scholar as esteemed as Garrett Mattingly. Another reason to be grateful for the blogosphere. More on politics and poetry Over the weekend I posted about a 1991 Salon article that talked about the lack of a poet at George W. Bush's inauguration and quoted several poets who depicted Republicans as Philistines. I mentioned that the Omaha World-Herald had run an editorial on the topic. My memory was faulty when I said in the post that Teddy Roosevelt had received praise for poetry he had written; rather, TR had critiqued the work of a Gilded Age poet in a letter to his son Kermit. Here is the editorial, from Jan. 25, 2001:
Sunday, September 29
Demographic advantage for Dems? My brain is way too tired tonight to compose any coherent essays of my own. I’d hoped to blog a response to a way-off-base Slate piece by Michael Kinsley, but that will have to wait. I will, however, pass along a few links and quotes relating to the new book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The new issue of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council, features a series of articles on the book’s thesis, which is that the rise of an “ideopolis” -- communities oriented toward the high-tech economy -- will soon provide Democrats with a national majority. From an article by Judis and Teixeira:
The always provocative David Brooks of The Weekly Standard has a demographics-related article in the DLC magazine. He makes fascinating points about 21st century surburbs, whose residents, he argues, tend to hold politically mixed views apart from the stereotypical “red state/blue state” dichotomy. He also points to some surprising characteristics of the new suburbs:
Another article in the DLC magazine is by Marshall Wittmann of the Hudson Institute. He argues that non-demographic factors could play a major role:
I haven’t followed the demographic debate between Republicans and Democrats closely. The analysis from Judis and Teixeira seems reasonable. But those offering a different interpretation, such as Brooks as well as the redoubtable Michael Barone, have a track record for sound thinking. My gut feeling is that while two-party competition generally will remain strong, the country is, on balance, trending long-term toward the Democrats in terms of support for government activism and an alienation from social conservatism. There are plenty of additional tangents to mention on this topic, but that discussion will have to wait. Judicial nominations and editorial judgments Editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post today make for an interesting contrast. The Times strongly urges the Senate to reject law professor Michael McConnell for a federal judgeship. The Post, which endorsed McConnell’s nomination several days ago, has an editorial urging confirmation of another conservative nominee, Miguel Estrada. The editorials indicate that the Post is willing to embrace pragmatism from time to time while the Times remains insistent on manning the ideological barricades no matter what. From the New York Times editorial on McConnell:
The Washington Post didn’t mince words in its editorial, either about the weakness of the case against Estrada’s nomination or the use of identity politics in regard to it:
The Times is sticking up for philosophical principles it considers fundamental. That’s a legitimate approach. But it ultimately means that judicial nominations should be nothing more than raw contests between ideological camps. Sure, that seems to be exactly what many, if not most, members of Congress would prefer. More appealing to me, though, is the independent-mindedness of the Washington Post editorials. Newspapers deserve respect when they attempt to look at an issue beyond knee-jerk considerations of party and ideology. If that were only the mindset in Congress when it comes to judicial nominations. A special week My blogging volume for the next week will drop because our family will have a special house guest -- my primary role model in life, no less -- who's flying in from half a continent away. No, it's not Glenn Reynolds. It's my mom. And she is terrific, I assure you. When the ambassadors began to arrive An interesting little discussion thread in the H-DIPLO listserv talked last week about how European powers didn't begin sending ambassadors to Washington, D.C., until late in the 19th century. Here are two of the posts:
Another post:
What terrorists devote their minds to Maybe the topic has already been discussed in the blogosphere, but this information from a recent Mona Charen column was particularly unsettling:
More insight, sadly, into the nature of terrorism. Friday, September 27
The pot wars I'm subbing at present for a colleague here at work who handles our op-ed material. In sorting through the syndicated columns, I've found several items worth noting here at the blog. I have time right now to mention one. Froma Harrop, a columnist who displays a lively writing style at the Providence Journal, had fun recently looking at the drug wars. From her column:
Norfolk The cold-blooded murder of five people during a bank robbery in Norfolk, Neb., is, of course, the lead news item here in Nebraska. I heard a news reader on NPR this morning mispronounce the name of the Nebraska city. The error is understandable, since the correct pronunciation here in Nebraska is idiosyncratic: "NOR-fork." Yes, that's "fork." That's because the community's original residents had planned to call it North Fork, but the 19th century postal service misunderstood and incorrectly named it Norfolk. Folks in the community adopted that spelling but not the pronunication that would go with it. Incidentally, the suspects were arrested in the Nebraska city of O'Neill. It was founded as an Irish community by John J. O'Neill, who had served a prison term in Canada for participating in the Fenian "invasion" in that country. The murder trial or trials for the Norfolk supects will be interesting in regard to capital-punishment aspects. Nebraska is the only state that still uses the electric chair for executions; Alabama switched, I believe, to lethal injection recently. (Only a handful of people are on death row here.) Nebraska is also one of the states whose death-sentence procedures were thrown into question a few months ago when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only juries, rather than judges, are to sentence offenders to death. Thursday, September 26
Distinctions It's good to see that The New Republic has started a blog. It would be good if the site would venture outside the woefully familiar issues of Beltway politics. It would be refreshing, too, if it would draw on a variety of source materials rather than turning by rote to the national papers for fodder. At any rate, a post about a Bill Keller profile of Paul Wolfowitz offered a worthwhile observation:
Yes, that's a useful way of analyzing the debate. BY THE WAY: A piece in Slate on an Iraq/terrorism tangent really riled me this week. If anyone's interested, I intend to post on it this weekend. (No time right now for composing an extended essay.) The topic involves considerations of evil, American intellectuals, multilateralism and a lot of other things. Wednesday, September 25
Understanding the Germans Martin Devon sometimes uses well-crafted vignettes to underscore his points at Patio Pundit. Here is a great example from the past week, as he drew on personal experience in writing about the Germans:
There's a lot more, and worthwhile too. (Both sides of my family, incidentally are German. My mother's family were Rhinelanders who arrived here in the late 1700s. They followed a common migration pattern for the era: first Philadelphia, then eventually southward along the Great Wagon Road. For my ancestors, home became the North Carolina Piedmont.) Intermittent blogging Extra duties at work will keep me away from the keyboard until the weekend. I intend to post an item about a terrific Marvin Devon post at Patio Pundit, but other than that, I may not be able to post much for a few days. Hey, sign me up Gotta plug Eugene Volokh one more time. He wrote this week that he wants "centrist/libertarian/free-market/sensibly-pro-war public-issue blogging to succeed." You're talking my language, Eugene. A worthy cause, indeed. Stock gains as a social entitlement? Robert Samuelson is such a truth-teller on economic matters. His latest column has many great points about the spread of the stock investment habit by middle-class Americans and what the ramifications may be for the political system:
I wish he were wrong, given my own stock investments. But, as unusual, he’s stating facts that policy makers would do well to acknowledge. Gun ownership and noncitizens The Omaha City Council revised the city's gun ordinance on Tuesday. The council voted to forbid gun ownership by noncitizens. Our paper ran a well-conceived op-ed by Eugene Volokh last Saturday arguing that such a prohibition is unconstitutional. The council decided to go ahead with that provision, however. ADDENDUM: In reading Eugene's blog over lunch, I noticed that he had used a post to expand on his thoughts from his op-ed. Origins In composing my ramble the other day on the red state/blue state topic, I forgot to mention that I got the idea for the post after reading an item at the new blog The Insecure Egotist, which mentioned the original Tapped commentary on the issue. The number of interesting blogs out there is fascinating. Unfortunately, since I joined the blogger ranks I've had far less time to check out my favorite sites, let alone new ones, as I did in the old days. Advantage: Dems? Speaking of the red state/blue state thing, a recent column by Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe noted a new book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority,'' by John Judis of The New Republic and and Ruy Teixeira of the Century Foundation. Oliphant summarizes the book's thesis this way:
That's a very rich subject. Generally, I'm wary of predictions of partisan triumphalism one way or another, but I'd have to look at the authors' specific arguments before making a judgment. At any rate, John Judis has long demonstrated his fair-mindedness at The New Republic. I see from the book link above that the book has received comment from, among others, The Weekly Standard and Joshua Micah Marshall. No time to hunt for links, though. Sensitive times An item from the current issue of The American Enterprise, published by the American Enterprise Institute:
Letters My appreciation to all who sent in letters on the red state/blue state topic. Many were thoughtful, and several of the longer ones were simply remarkable as far as the care with which they were composed. It was heartening to see so many people write in to say, in such articulate fashion, how they appreciate the country's regional diversity (while recognizing the foibles of Americans everywhere). I learned many things from the correspondence. Among them: Official, DMV-sanctioned NASCAR "race plates" are available to residents of New York. Not available, though, in Massachusetts. Monday, September 23
Why red-state residents are resentful Tapped took aim last week at what it termed the “Guilty Coastal Cityslicker Elitist problem.” I’ll cite part of the Tapped post, then offer some reaction:
Sure, Brooks as well some folks on the right and some regional chauvinists get too rhapsodic about red-state values. President Bush has unwisely contributed to the problem, gushing to red-state audiences that they represent a noble “heartland” of higher virtue. In reality, no one region of the country has a monopoly on virtue. We’re all Americans, and as such we each ought to exist on the same plane of mutual respect. The American Revolution, after all, led to an overthrow of the old colonial system in which a social hierarchy had been rigidly enforced. The promise of the new republic was that each American would be regarded in an egalitarian spirit as fully deserving of respect and the opportunity for economic advancement. That principle should still hold in the 21st century, despite the frictions between the blue-state and red-state camps. If it helps, though, I’ll be happy to cite three principal reasons for red-state resentment against displays of arrogance from some blue staters: Yet, if the conversation turns to a consideration of the red states and rural America, many of these same coastal urbanites abandon their tolerant talk with remarkable suddenness. Then, it curiously becomes quite acceptable to look down on red state residents, if not to make fun of them unapologetically. I’m reminded of a Los Angeles resident whom Nick Denton quoted in an essay he did about the red state/blue state split:
Such a sentiment is incompatible with one of this country’s foundational principles. If you are a citizen, then you should be regarded as fully American as any other citizen, regardless of one's race, gender, politics or sexual orientation -- or region. This isn’t, or shouldn't be, a caste society based on one's geographical location. But a lot of people, in the blue-state region as well as the red-state camp, certainly act as if they would like it to be. A good friend of mine in Omaha plays in a big band. His band once played in the Windows on the World restaurant that was at the top of one of the World Trade Center towers. My friend had a grand time performing there, a true highlight of his musical career. One of the curious things he noticed, though, was how so many of the New Yorkers he talked to seemed to have so little geographical understanding of the country. He used a vivid phrase to explain the situation: “Anything west of Pennsylvania was really fuzzy.” Sure, many red staters are woefully ignorant of blue-state realities. But it’s urbanites who are the ones who stress their cosmopolitanism. Shouldn’t their curiosity extend to the full extent of the country? This is America, and what people chose to do for their personal pleasure is for them to define. Of course, this principle runs in both directions: Blue-state cosmopolitans can cite it to counter the finger-wagging accusations from middle-America moralists. In any case, some blue staters will argue that something like country music just cries out for derision. Perhaps so, but doesn’t the same hold true for the club scene in New York or LA? Or how about the fashion industry? Or the McMansions phenomenon? NASCAR, incidentally, is so popular nationwide that, although its popularity is rooted in red-state America, it holds races in blue-state locales such as New York and California. (As the New York Times expressed it two years ago: “NASCAR is now part of American culture. Of the 21 race tracks in the Winston Cup Series, the top races, only nine are in the Southeast.”) The bottom line in the red state/blue state flap is really very simple: Neither region should claim moral superiority. The two regions (which each feature fascinating diversity anyway) both contribute significantly to the nation, no matter how petty the sniping between them. Generosity of spirit I just said above that no region of the country has a monopoly on virtue, and I meant it. But I have to mention two items in the news that reflected favorably on Nebraska. First, officials at Penn State have sent a letter apologizing to University of Nebraska-Lincoln fans for the rudeness displayed by some Penn State fans during the recent football game between the two schools. The incident reminded me of something special that Nebraska football fans do at home games in Lincoln. A special section in the stadium is designated for Nebraska fans to stand and applaud the visiting team as they exit the field at the end of the game. I don’t know if that thing is thing is done anywhere else, but when I was first told about it upon moving here three years ago, I found it pretty classy. I still do. Second, Bob Greene’s recent resignation from the Chicago Tribune was felt strongly in a particular Nebraska city, North Platte. Greene has a new book out about the North Platte Canteen, where residents of the Nebraska town were tireless during World War II in greeting and entertaining U.S. soldiers who stopped briefly as they headed west on troop trains to the Pacific Coast. On the weekend when Greene resigned from the Tribune, he was scheduled to be in North Platte for events honoring the memory of the Canteen. He wrote a letter that was read at a banquet in North Platte that Saturday night. Here is an excerpt:
Sunday, September 22
Yes, that Warren and Bill Great item from the Saturday column by Mike Kelly, a terrific Omaha World-Herald columnist:
Warren Buffett's Omaha house, incidentally, is far from a mega-mansion -- it's pretty modest for a wealthy person, let alone for someone of Buffett's jaw-dropping financial resources. Buffett doesn't go in for extravagant displays of wealth. Gorat's steakhouse, incidentally, isn't far from my house. The restaurant is an old-line, old-fashioned Omaha steak place -- by no means a palace. All of which reminds me of something unexpected my 8-year-old son asked me today. He and his 6-year-old sister were getting into our van after picking up a few things at the grocery store when he looked at a small sports car beside our car and asked, "Is that a symbol-of-wealth car?" I told him no, it was a pretty plain little car. I asked where he got that term about "symbol of wealth." Said he saw it in a book. Terrorist attacks and the red state/blue state thing Max Sawicky is pretty good at coming up with ways to tweak us foreign policy hawks. (Max's stauchly left-leaning blog is on my blogroll, incidentally -- he has a great site.) In talking about the possible uses that terrorists might put weapons of mass destruction to use, Max cheekily writes:
Max's point about the "front line" is correct, of course, in the sense that the death and destruction visited on, say, New York, from a terrorist catastrophic device would obviously weigh directly on the residents of Gotham. But in another sense, Max is off-point, since an attack that devastated the nation's largest city and financial center would have calamitous ripple effects in every corner of the nation. A quote that I've mentioned here before from the Southern studies scholar John Shelton Reed is relevant on this point. Writing in The American Enterprise (the journal of the American Enterprise Institute), John wrote that the 9/11 attack on New York was no more an attack on Gotham alone than a comparable attack on Mount Rushmore would have been an attack only on South Dakota. In other words, we really are all in this together. That principle ought to be one to inspire and sustain us. It's only human that politically interested people become polarized over time along predictable partisan and ideological (and regional) lines. But it's too bad to see such divisions extend to the fight against terrorism. Sacagawea, traitor That's the blunt characterization of her by Tim Giago, a Lakota Sioux editor who writes a weekly syndicated column. Here is Giago's take on Lewis and Clark as well as Sacagawea, from his latest column:
BY THE WAY: Lewis and Clark began their journey by heading north up the Missouri River, a waterway which borders present-day Omaha on the east. The Missouri, some may be surprised to learn, is actually the longest river in the United States. The Mississippi is No. 1 by far, however, when it comes to flow and drainage area. Saturday, September 21
The object of my jealousy I was walking to my car at the end of a workday recently when an odd thought occurred to me. For some reason, I remembered one of the biggest disappointments from my childhood: the TV show "Lost in Space." Even though I was only an elementary-age child when the show aired in the mid-1960s, I remember how I had such high hopes for the series. Indeed, the show in its early episodes (at least as I remembered it) had considerable portions of straightforward adventure. But the show soon decayed into a string of preposterous storylines involving that insufferable Dr. Smith and ludicrous guest villains. Irritating, too, was the series' incessant focus on that silly Robot ("Danger, Will Robinson!") and, yes, young Will Robinson. For some reason, in the '60s I was insanely jealous of Billy Mumy, the child actor who played Will Robinson. I can't quite put my finger on why. But the feeling was there. Thirty years later, when he appeared as Lennier on "Babylon 5," my hostility toward him had, of course, vanished. I thought he actually did a pretty good job in B5. (Now that was a terrific sci-fi show, at least in its original, syndicated incarnation.) Making room for conservative views I posted the other day about a John Leo column that talked about the difficult time many conservatives have in making their voice heard in the university community. David Hogberg, writing at his Cornfield Commentary blog, says a regent with the University of Iowa system, to his credit, raised the same issue in a discussion about the selection criteria the University of Iowa should use in choosing its next president. “We talk about gender and ethnicity, but we're boycotting a whole wide range of ideas, particularly conservative ideas,” said the regent, Clarkson Kelly. There's more on the topic in Dave's original post. Look who had an op-ed in my newspaper It was an honor that the op-ed page at the Omaha World-Herald, where I work, today had a column written especially for us by none other than Eugene Volokh. Eugene e-mailed me the column several days ago; he argued that the Omaha City Council will be stepping outside the law if it denies non-citizens the right to own firearms, which is one part of a proposed revamping of local gun restrictions here in Omaha. Eugene wrote:
The City Council, I understand, is scheduled to vote on the gun measure on Tuesday. Eugene, by the way, was quite professional in working with me to solve a technical problem late in the week so the World-Herald would be able to publish his op-ed today. Thursday, September 19
The scandal of communist studies I’m nodding off at my keyboard (still haven’t recovered completely from the stomach bug), so I’ll note some points raised by Martin Malia in a terrific piece in The National Interest titled “Judging Nazism and Communism,” then sign off. Malia argues with passion that a stark contrast separates Western academics’ study of Nazism compared to that of communism. Scholars of Nazism (with the exception of apologists such as David Irving) squarely acknowledge the criminality and brutality of Hitler’s regime and ideology. Many professors of communist studies, whom by Malia’s description ironically characterize themselves as “revisionists,” shy away from making such harsh judgments and, in fact, cling to rationalizations that recently opened Kremlin archives have inexorably begun to discredit. From the article (I’m not putting the excerpts in the order they appear):
The journal also features an excerpt from the Martin Amis book “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million,” in which Amis says it is generally accepted “that if Stalin had lived a year longer his anti-Semitic pogrom would have led to a second catastrophe for Jewry in the mid-1950s.” Presidents and their vacations Philip Terzian writes historically informed columns for the Providence Journal in which he often uses understatement to present well-considered arguments. In a recent column, he calmly offered some telling observations:
As I said, understated, but he makes his point strongly. Rap and antebellum Southern culture I got a ton of e-mail on that topic today, responding to my post below about rap culture. I have included several of the comments and links in some updates to the post. Wednesday, September 18
Low ebb Blogging may be nonexistent here tonight. I've been battling what has turned out to be a mild stomach bug. I apparently got hold of some bad tranya over the weekend. They remember The Weekly Standard article isn't available online (available for free, that is), but this blurb about it from Slate is interesting:
Quotas for conservatives? What is the partisan affiliation of faculty at highly ranked U.S. universities? John Leo, citing numbers from the American Enterprise Institute, provides some answers. He also touches on a range of familiar culture-war issues involving the academic community. One graf especially worth noting:
He's right, of course. UPDATE: A sharp-minded e-mail correspondent of mine takes a differing view, writing:
Antiwar, with a smile Harrumphing in favor of a strong foreign policy is part of the norm at this site, but I have nothing but good things to say about humorist Madeleine Begun Kane, despite her insistent tweaking of Bush. Her wit and good humor are disarming. Race, rap and journalism -- and the Old South Leonard Pitts Jr., a sensible and always interesting columnist for the Miami Herald, examines the controversy that has erupted over a recent two-part Los Angeles Times series on the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. The background, as summed up by Pitts:
Impresario Russell Simmons has stepped forward to blast the LA Times series, as has journalist Kevin Powell (who was among the cast in the first edition of MTV’s “The Real World”). The Times series “represents the worst form of sensationalized journalism.” Powell wrote. Pitts, however, strikes a different note. While saying that he won’t make a judgment on who committed the killing of Shakur, Pitts underlines a larger issue:
I can only echo what Pitts has said, while adding one historical note. Rap, per se, is rooted in genuine sentiments of the inner city. For many people, it has tremendous cultural resonance. That ought to be respected. But, as Pitts says, many rappers have taken the guns-“hos”-and-platinum thing way too far. In fact, the resemblance between the rap culture’s emphasis on hyper-sensitivity to imagined slights, and the hair-trigger resort to violence in the face of “disrespect,” bears an uncanny resemblance to the values system of the antebellum Southern aristocracy, with its support of dueling and fixation on defending one’s “honor.” The hubris and violent excess displayed in the brawls of today’s rappers are quite similar in spirit to that shown by South Carolinian Preston Brooks in 1856 when he used a cane to bludgeon abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber. UPDATE: Wow, I can't believe the volume of e-mail this post has generated. Timothy Sandefur writes:
Another e-mail offered these observations:
Clayton Cramer, whose blog is here, points to an article in his book "Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform" (Praeger Press, 1999). (The book and other Cramer historical studies are described here.) The article's provocative first sentence: "Most people are surprised when I tell them that the South led the nation in the development of gun control laws." ANOTHER UPDATE: Thomas Sowell, I'm informed in an e-mail, touched on this general topic in a Dec. 4, 1995, article in Forbes. Sowell wrote:
The always thoughtful Gary Haubold offers these points:
AND ANOTHER UPDATE: In regard to dueling in early America, Clayton Cramer e-mails this info:
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. |