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.
The director is setting his sights on portraying the life of Alexander the Great. Stone, who folded and mutilated historical fact in "JFK," says he intends to portray Alexander, dead at 33, as the victim of a conspiracy among his generals. This time, Stone may have better historical footing for such speculation.
Several Hollywood types have expressed interest in the Alexander story. Mel Gibson is planning on a doing a 10-part series on him for HBO. Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott each displayed an interest in mounting a film version of the conqueror's life, but turned to other projects.
Buz Luhrmann, director of "Moulin Rouge," is planning his own Alexander biopic, with Leonardo DiCaprio possibly in the starring role. Luhrman, not surprisingly, evidently intends to direct lots of attention to Alexander's bisexual appetites.
An article in The Guardian put it this way: "at last the time seems to have come for the first bisexual action hero -- with Alexander hopping, in one script, from the bed of his boyhood friend and lover Hephaestion, to that of the Queen of the Amazons and onward through a host of eunuchs and catamites."
Other info from the article:
More than 2 300 years on, the very name Alexander still sends a shudder down the spine of Iranians and central Asians weaned on tales of his cruelty, while barely a decade ago Greece almost went to war with its newly independent neighbour, the Republic of Macedonia, over its use of his star on its flag. ...
Typically Luhrmann's Alexander will not be short on flamboyance, despite being based on the Italian historian Valerio Manfredi's trilogy of novels about the all-conquering hero.
After taking three male lovers, and diverting himself with the odd eunuch, he will be shown putting politics before pleasure to do his duty with the single-breasted queen of the Amazons, according to scriptwriter Ted Tally. Leonardo DiCaprio is in the process of signing on the dotted line to play him. But as in war, nothing can be taken for granted.
Luhrmann was to start shooting the $150m saga in Morocco in the early spring, having persuaded King Mohammed VI to lend him 5 000 soldiers and 1 000 horses for his battle scenes, but filming has been put back to the autumn.
In a bold flanking move, Vietnam veteran Stone, who has admired Alexander since his days as a GI, has stepped into the breach.
Only a month ago his own project seem to be dead in the water, but now he is back with the Irish actor Colin Farrell in Bucephalus's saddle, and a big studio budget. Stone hopes to start shooting in Morocco in June, having abandoned his first choice of locations in India. Neither he nor Luhrmann would be drawn on whether there was room for two big Alexander films.
While Luhrmann and Tally's script is believed to stick closely to Manfredi's take on Alexander as the great expander of Greek and thus western cultural influence, Stone's take is more heretical, as one would expect from the man who made JFK. It also gives full play to the whirl of conspiracy theories that surrounded Alexander's life and death.
Pointedly, Stone believes Alexander was probably poisoned by his own generals, fearful of his increasing megalomania and cruelty.
"I was intrigued to discover that his famous father, Philip II, had been assassinated under mysterious circumstances," Stone said. "Alexander, not far from his side that day, was immediately suspect. The assassin himself was quickly slain, and the murder remains an enigma. In Alexander's own untimely death at 33 we have again strong evidence of a conspiracy of family clans. Did he die of fever or from poisoned wine? I choose to believe the latter." ...
But the race for who will be first is only half the battle. The other, with Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia at each others' throats over the right to use the word Macedonian, is about the much more thorny question of who the real Alexander was. Was he a Greek, or was he an ancestor of the Slav-speaking people of the former Yugoslavia and northern Greece who now call themselves Macedonians?
Some Greek nationalists have already protested at the mention of Alexander's supposed homosexuality, describing it as a "disgrace" and a "slur on Greece" -- although the ancient Hellenes had a more relaxed view of these things. Stone has blamed the Greek government for orchestrating the outrage, and its culture minister, Evangelos Venizelos, has withdrawn support from the project. But he has stopped short of condemning it outright. Faced with protests from opposition MPs, he said: "We cannot censor Hollywood. I don't know what I can do."
The Macedonians are also worried about how the film will portray their hero. While they seem more relaxed about his sexual preferences, activists have bombarded studios with letters and emails pointing out that Alexander was not a Greek but a Macedonian, who spoke a different language and who was regarded by the ancient Greeks as different. ...
Of the multitude of failed attempts to bring Alexander and his exploits to the screen, the most unlikely had William Shatner -- aka Captain Kirk from Star Trek -- leading the Macedonian phalanx across Asia. ...
Hey, here's a great idea: Stone should find a role for Shatner in the new movie. During breaks between filming, Shatner could even entertain the '60s-fixated Stone with renditions of a Shatner classic: "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
Al Jazeera plans to open an English-language Web site in early 2003 and begin English-language news programming by satellite and cable late next year.
The Christian Science Monitor provides details here.
Meanwhile, an online report from South Africa quotes Joanne Tucker, managing editor of Al Jazeera's English-language Web site, as saying the channel new TV coverage "will be original news in English tailored to a Western audience."
The SA Broadcasting Corporation, a South African TV network, is considering dropping its CNN broadcasts in favor of the English-language Al Jazeera coverage.
Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter to is casually tossing around the term "treason" in referring to liberals' stances on foreign policy, both during the Cold War and in today's age of catastrophic terrorism. Her claim is precisely the kind of nonsense that ought to be branded and criticized for what it is: cheap partisan opportunism.
Foreign policy dunderheadedness, naivete, misplaced idealism, even contempt for the policy of a sitting administration -- none of those equates to treason, a matter of the greatest seriousness.
Meanwhile, Atrios, in a mirror image of Coulter's shtick, tried to float nasty aspersions against conservatives the other day, implying that they're racists for opposing parts of the Democratic agenda that are far removed from civil rights issues. (Coulter has no shame in casually raising questions about the patriotism of her ideological foes; it's the same for Atrios, except he's impugning people's claims to have rejected racism. She wants to distort the concept of treason; he seeks the same for the notion of racism. And both are doing so merely to gain a political advantage.)
Take a look at the NAACP scorecard, and you'll see that it indeed has little to do with what might be considered "traditional" civil rights issues (i.e. voting rights). ... If a politician supports vouchers and thus loses points on the NAACP's scorecard, does that make him or her anti-civil rights? To put it another way: It's no longer fair to call a Republican who scores poorly on the NAACP report card "anti-civil rights." It's more accurate to call them, simply, a Republican.
So, when we warned of a potential overstretch, what we had in mind was the Democrats' habit of casting every opponent of the NAACP's agenda as an opponent of civil rights -- which we think is wrong because the NAACP's agenda has expanded to consist largely of issues on which liberals and conservatives have always disagreed, and it's unfair to tar conservatives generally as "racist" or anti-civil rights for their positions on those issues. Some of our correspondents have argued that the Democrats should take any advantage they can get -- the Christian Coalition, they say, routinely mau-maued Democrats on flag-burning, so why shouldn't we mau-mau Republicans on Head Start funding? We say: That didn't make the Christian Coalition right, either.
That is a fair-minded approach. It's not what the hard-line, cheap-shot-adoring partisans like to hear, but it was a welcome dose of maturity and truth. Congratulations, Tapped.
Brink Lindsey doesn't use his blog to toot his own horn about what he's up to at the Cato Institute, but it needs to be pointed out that he has been doing heavy analysis in recent months in revealing the flawed -- in fact, arbitrary -- methodology that the U.S. government often uses for calculating antidumping penalties. The latest Cato study on the topic, co-authored by Brink and proposing reforms of U.S. antidumping policy, just came out; it's here. Serious stuff. No wonder he hasn't had a lot of time for blogging.
Many foreign policy academicians who specialize in regional studies yield to a familiar temptation: When frictions and problems arise between the United States and a foreign country, they blame Americe first.
By their description, an ignorant, bullying Uncle Sam constantly misinterprets reality, leading to alienation and sometimes to crises. Had U.S. policy makers only possessed the keen understanding that the academic specialists have of the foreign country’s culture and dynamics, it’s claimed, all would be well.
Such academicians too often become apologists for faulty reasoning, if not egregious behavior, by foreign governments.
This isn’t to say that U.S. foreign policy isn’t open to legitimate criticism. The point is that analysts from the university and activist worlds too often view matters from a radically skewed perspective: that of the narrow subculture of their specialist community.
Consider this essay about the current crisis with North Korea. Leon Sigal, with a wide-ranging career in government, academics, journalism and the State Department, says North Korea’s actions should be interpreted as nothing more than a cry for help:
North Korea is no Iraq. It wants to improve relations with the United States and says it is ready to give up its nuclear, missile, and other weapons programs in return. ...
To achieve its aims, Washington has to understand that Pyongyang is seeking an end to its hostile relationship with the United States. When Washington fails to reciprocate, Pyongyang retaliates by breaking its pledges in a desperate effort to get Washington to cooperate. ...
In halting Pyongyang's plutonium program [in 1994], Washington got what it most wanted up front, but it did not live up to its end of the bargain. When Republicans won control of Congress in elections just a week later, unilateralists in the Republican Party denounced the deal as appeasement. Unwilling to challenge Congress, the Clinton administration shrank from implementation. ...
Above all, North Korea wanted President Clinton to come to Pyongyang to seal the missile deal and place his imprimatur on the October 12 pledge, thereby consummating North Korea's ten-year campaign to end enmity with the United States. ...
The stunning revelation confirmed the worst suspicions of some, that North Korea had intended to dupe the United States all along by substituting a covert nuclear program for the one it allowed to be frozen. That contention does not seem plausible. ...
Two other interpretations seem more tenable. One is that after 1997 the North began hedging against U.S. failure to live up to the Agreed Framework, but is now prepared to trade in that hedge. Another is that it is playing tit-for-tat to induce the United States to end enmity. ...
Either way, Pyongyang keeps signaling its desire for a deal with Washington -- and not just on nuclear and missile issues. ...
No one denies that North Korea is going to extreme lengths to secure its ultimate aim: a nonaggression agreement with the United States. But Sigal would absolve North Korea of all responsibility for its egregious actions. By his analysis, the Pyongyang regime hasn’t been engaged in a reckless effort to develop and spread weapons of mass destruction; it has merely been pursuing a high-minded “ten-year campaign to end enmity with the United States.” North Korea’s violation of its written pledges to the U.S. government isn’t anything to get upset over; it should instead be seen as “a desperate effort to get Washington to cooperate.”
I’m not arguing that the proper response is for the United States to start dropping bombs north of the Korean DMZ. On the contrary, given the limited options available to the United States, diplomacy -- including contacts with the North Korean government itself -- should be an essential part of the U.S. response.
But the attempt to put all the blame on the United States for the current crisis is way too facile. Such an effort demonstrates, yet again, how erudition has little value unless it is coupled with sound judgment.
By the way: North Korean ruler Kim Jong Il has placed his country in such awful circumstances in part because he suffers from what could be termed the Michael Jackson syndrome.
Jackson, the pitiful self-described “King of Pop,” luxuriates in preposterous behavior because no one in his entourage has the integrity to explain reality to him so he will operate within sensible limits. Freed of the constraints that apply to normal people, he engages in an ever-growing list of disturbing indulgences.
The same applies for North Korea’s pampered, self-deceived dictator. The coterie of sycophants and Machiavellians surrounding him only encourage his paranoia and recklessness. The results are utterly harmful -- to East Asia, to the United States, to North Korea itself.
One reason it doesn’t make sense to attempt to erect a tariff wall to protect domestic steel producers is that the resulting barriers raise costs significantly for U.S. steel users -- which account for a far larger portion of the national economy.
I recently read an article in which Aaron Schavey of the Heritage Foundation, citing numbers from the Cato Institute, underlined that point with a vivid illustration:
... the major steel-using U.S. industries, such as transportation, construction, and fabricated metal, employ 40 times the number of workers employed in steel-producing industries.
Interesting post by Rick Henderson at The Deregulator about race and politics in Nevada: Although few blacks live in Nevada, the state has the highest percentage of black legislators. Check out his entire post, but here is an excerpt:
... none of Nevada's black lawmakers hail from majority African-American districts, and three of the seven reside in districts in which less than 5 percent of their constituents are black.
I mentioned the other day that James J. Kilpatrick, who ferociously defended segregationism in Virginia as editorial page editor of the Richmond News Leader during the 1950s, had a recent essay in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled "My journey from racism." I didn't take time previously to excerpt any of his essay; here are a few highlights from the piece:
In 1960 or thereabouts, two black reporters came from out of town -- from New York, or Boston, or somewhere in the North -- to report on Richmond's reaction to the changes wrought by Brown v. Board of Education. They were attractive fellows, about my age, obviously well-educated.
Late in the afternoon we had a delightful conversation in my office. If they had been white, I would have invited them to our home for drinks and dinner. A number of such curious correspondents, all of them white, had enjoyed our hospitality. I could not bring myself to offer an invitation. That night I slept miserably. I was ashamed. ...
My late wife and I reared three sons without a racist bone in their bodies. One granddaughter went to her senior prom hand in hand with her black escort; she is happily married today to a Moroccan Muslim. Another granddaughter is happily married to a former captain in the Mexican Air Force. A third granddaughter is dating a Buddhist. ...
Lincoln returns to Richmond; slavery reparations in NYC
Some short takes:
Political pedigree: A bit of trivia remembered from my old political reporting days in North Carolina: Cass Ballenger, the N.C. congressman who said in an interview that he had had “segregationist feelings” about Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, is a descendant of Lewis Cass, a U.S. senator from Michigan who ran as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1848 on a popular sovereignty platform as far as slavery expansion, losing to Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. Cass Ballenger, incidentally, has long been involved in humanitarian projects in Central America; according to this AP article, he “has been a target of the Council of Conservative Citizens -- the heir to the segregationist White Citizens Councils -- for not seeking to stop the flow of Latin American immigrants to his district.”
Father and son: A life-size statue of Abraham Lincoln with his youngest son, Tad, will be unveiled in Richmond, Va., the capital of the old Confederacy, in April. Virginia will become the first state of the former Confederacy to publicly display a statue honoring Lincoln, who visited Richmond in April 1865 just after its fall to Union forces and 10 days before his assassination. (It is possible that one of my Confederate ancestors, captured near Petersburg, may have been among the Rebel POWs whom Lincoln saw during his brief stay in Richmond.) The statue will be on a National Park Service site beside the former location of the Confederacy’s well-known Tredegar Iron Works, a crucial munitions supplier. Curiously, a key backer of the project is a black professor at American University -- a noted Civil War scholar who supports Confederate heritage groups. The theme of the statue is reconciliation; a stone backdrop will display the words “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” A description of the statue’s design, and a photo of Lincoln and his son Tad, are found here. (A pop quiz for non-Nebraskans: Name the capital of Nebraska.)
Slavery and NYC: Supporters of slavery reparations are asking the New York City Council to amend the city’s contracting law to require that companies doing business with the city document whether they had any involvement with or profits from slavery. Here is the barbed description of the measure from an article in City Journal:
Here’s what the bill really is — a Christmas present to Johnnie Cochran, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, and the billionaire tort lawyers who are now playing the reparations racket for all it is worth. Cochran, Ogletree, and Holocaust reparations lawyer Michael Hausfeld plan to file billions of dollars worth of lawsuits against corporations and governments for their alleged involvement in slavery. The City Council, in an effusion of holiday spirit, wants to make businesses provide Cochran and Ogletree with the historical research that the lawyers will then use to sue them.
Didn’t New York’s mayor of the Civil War era have Copperhead leanings? I’m not going to take time to look it up tonight, but my memory is that because of his less-than-enthusiastic support for Lincoln’s war policy, the mayor toyed briefly with the idea to turn NYC into some sort of independent city-state that would stand aside from the sectional fray.
Political staggering in Maryland: Democratic political leaders in Maryland, stung by the defeat of their party’s gubernatorial nominee by Republican Robert Ehrlich, have received a “wake-up call” to appeal to moderate voters, this article says. The piece notes: “They are reaching right in hopes of hanging on to the loyalty of farmers, factory workers, Baltimore suburbanites and others who broke party ranks to back Ehrlich.”
Atta in a truck: Charles Schumer has introduced legislation intended to reduce the chances that trucks will be used as instruments of terrorism. “Trucks bring in 2,000 loads of hazardous materials a day, and no background checks are required for the drivers -- even after 9/11,” this New York Post article says, citing Schumer.
Update: Gary Farber of Amygdala, who lives in Boulder, e-mails some thoughts on Colorado's consideration of college vouchers:
The key lines in the article you quoted are these: "1992 change to the Colorado state constitution limits the growth of government spending from one year to the next. Overall state spending cannot increase faster than the previous years expenses after inflation and population growth are factored in. Tuition revenue is included in the limit."
The "Taxpayer Bill of Rights," known as TABOR here, basically is, among other cheery things, making the university system, well, not go broke, but forcing it to lay people off left and right, and cut programs. It's a straitjacket that can't be gotten out of, save by this workaround of declaring the entire university system an "enterprise" system, which then gives it a get-out-of-TABOR-free card. But then the state can't give the University system any money. Thus, the "innovative" idea of tuition vouchers.
There's simply no other, apparently, choice. Either the U gets run into the ground, shutting down more and more programs as inflation, and increased numbers of enrollees, cause costs to grow while income must remain flat, or they put a flat lid on enrollment -- hard to do in a state with a rapidly growing population -- or they go this route. Because breaking TABOR, that is, revising it, can't be done, since that would, you know, Raise Taxes. And this is, aside from a few pockets such as Boulder and Aspen, a pretty Republican state.
So this isn't a case of "hey, let's think of an innovative policy" in a vacuum. This is a case of "we're screwed, is there any way to think outside the box to try to get unscrewed" innovative policy.
More on college vouchers: Linda Seebach, editorialist and columnist with the Rocky Mountain News, points to a recent editorial in her Denver-based paper on the voucher topic. Among the observations:
... The unintended result [of past state budget policy -- GS] has been an upside-down pricing structure. The state's flagship university, the University of Colorado at Boulder, charges less than comparable universities in other states. ... raising tuition even for out-of-state students to competitive levels forces cuts elsewhere in the state budget whenever there's a TABOR surplus.
On the other hand, the state's community colleges, often the gateway to higher education, are less affordable than other states'. That's one reason Colorado ranks so low, nationally, in the proportion of its high school graduates who continue their education.
The panel proposes giving each Colorado citizen who graduates from high school here a voucher, on the order of $4,000 a year, that can be used to pay for tuition, up to 140 credit hours. ...
Given the radically differing claims on that topic by Democrats and Republicans (not to mention National Review and The American Prospect), it would be nice to have an objective look at what's been going on up there, wouldn't it? This article from the Argus Leader (of Sioux Falls, S.D.) fits the bill pretty well. A worthwhile piece.
It doesn't settle things completely, but it does set out the basic issues in a fair-minded way, shorn of the embellishments and distortions peddled by the political partisans (although they get their chance to sound off).
A post here recently cited an Economist article that talked about how anti-globalization activists are, as I put it, “trying to block the creation of factories in rural Mexico, arguing that the traditional farm economy needs to be preserved in its entirety.” Roger Sweeny writes that the activists’ vision is based on a faulty understanding of economics.
Creating a broadly prosperous economy requires basing it on more than agriculture alone, Roger says.
He writes:
There's no getting around the arithmetic, though you can play with it. If you begin with a state of semi-starvation, farmers can increase production (“become more productive“) and everyone is better off. But there are limits to how much people can eat. Farmers can diversify into new and better foods, so that eaters are getting “more bang for the calorie.” Again, there are limits.
As a simple matter of arithmetic, another way to make way for other things is to have farmers’ income that is lower than average. In such a situation, there would also be a signal that many farmers should look for other lines of work. This was exactly what happened -- very dramatically -- in the USA in the 1880s and 1890s, and in the 1920s. It continues -- more quietly -- to this day.
If population growth ends, it might be possible to preserve Mexico's “traditional farm economy.” But it would mean preserving a way of life that is physically unpleasant, that has little variety or modern conveniences (or medicine!), that most people looking from the outside in would consider poverty -- and that many people on the inside looking out leave when they have a chance. (And, of course, in a traditional farm economy, population growth will not end. From an early age, children are an economic “asset,” doing farm work, the more of them the better. But when parents work in a factory or office, children are an economic drain and the birth rate plummets. This is one reason for the “demographic transition” all industrializing countries go through.)
I remember in American history that some people were surprised by the fact that when most of the nation were farmers, there were no “farm programs.” For all the lionization of the farmer as the backbone of the country, “farm programs” weren't a big thing until farmers were a minority. And even though there are relatively fewer farmers all the time, the “farm programs” remain.
But “farm programs” largely involve transfers from non-farmers to farmers. The more non-farmers there are and the richer they are, the more there is to transfer. When most everyone is a farmer, farm programs would pretty much have to be transfers from one group of farmers to another, and where's the fun in that?
By the way: Here is a bit of Nebraska demographic trivia. Most Mexicans now coming to Nebraska, either legally or illegally, are coming from urban areas in Mexico, not rural ones.
She makes me laugh. My friend Madeleine Begun Kane, that is, writer of politically barbed song parodies. Here is her latest, directed at Bill Frist and sung to the tune of "Frosty The Snowman":
Fristy the surgeon
Was elected on the phone.
With a White House boost got the Leader post.
Will he throw Trent Lott a bone?
Fristy the surgeon
Made a mint from HCA.
Rarely casts his vote for the common folk.
Wants to be the Prez some day.
There always is some magic
When Karl Rove lays out his trap.
He's guaranteed to get his way.
Makes no difference what the flap. ...
Fristy the surgeon
Has a lot of dough it's true.
He's a drug co.'s dream and makes health cos. beam.
Votes a lot like you know who. ...
Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Watch the heart man go.
Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Running the Hill for Rove
H.D.S. Greenway, a columnist for the Boston Globe, writes about the Christmas Truce of 1914, when Allied and Axis soldiers took a respite and shared a moment of Christmas Eve fraternity. The whole piece is worth reading, but one graf stood for me:
In the French sector, Victor Granier of the Paris Opera sang ''Oh, Holy Night,'' and further down the line Walter Kirchoff of the Berlin Opera serenaded the French. It is said that the Muslim Algerians, under French command, were somewhat baffled at the lit trees but that the Garhwal Rifles from India were reminded of their own Hindu Diwali festival of lights.
My best wishes to all who have visited this little corner of the blogosphere. A safe and happy holiday season to you all.
James J. Kilpatrick (known to many baby boomers as a once-prominent fixture on the old Point-Counterpoint feature on "60 Minutes") spent much of the 1950s propounding elaborate faux-constitutional arguments which he claimed the state of Virginia could use to block desegregation of its public schools. Kilpatrick, the then-editorial page editor of the Richmond News Leader, was dubbed the "father of interposition," referring to the constitutional theory he touted to buttress the continuance of white supremacy.
Last weekend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured an essay by the 82-year-old Kilpatrick titled "My journey from racism." He described what led to his eventual, though belated, rejection of segregationist thinking. Well worth reading.
UPI columnist James C. Bennett gives voice to sound thinking in his latest essay. Jim writes:
Including several types of conservatives and many libertarians, this broad movement seeks to act upon the last century's advances in understanding human society and action. This thought, particularly that based on the work of thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper, is profoundly anti-Utopian.
It understands there are inherent limits to the ability of government or political action to create the perfect human society, or bring happiness to people, beyond very specific actions to remove particular causes of unhappiness. Rather than offering a perfect blueprint for society, as Marxism claimed to do, this thought offers rules of thumb suggested by a better understanding of society.
One of the fundamental insights offered by this analysis is the limits of action by large, centralized bureaucracies, and the need for decentralization in strong civil societies. This in turn leads to a renewed appreciation of the original design of the American Constitution
and the federalist framework the Founders chose for it. These brilliant insights had lain under-appreciated during the last century's Marxist domination of social thought. ...
Genuine decentralism, or in the American context, genuine federalism, is not the defense of petty tyrannies against wider ones. It is the defense of civil society on all levels, of the state against the Federal, the community against the state, the group against the community, and the individual against the group. There are a variety of tools that may be used in this, and sometimes the power of the wider entity must be used to balance a smaller tyranny. Like many useful tools, such power must be used only with great caution, but sometimes it must be used never the less. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were written to provide such uses, and such cautions.
Exactly. A resort to federal power can be justified in some cases, but that authority should be exercised with prudence and discretion, with an eye toward maintaining the proper overall balance between the various spheres of authority Jim describes.
I've read two very worthwhile analyses today of the North Korean nuclear situations: a Washington Post piece that talks about the broader considerations of the nuclear proliferation issue, and a long piece by proliferation specialist Henry Sokolski.
The Post article explains, among other things, about how it is considerably easier to hide uranium enrichment activities than nuclear facilities that produce plutonium:
Strikingly, both North Korea and Iran managed to fool Western spy satellites by apparently choosing uranium as their fissile material. European technology for enriching uranium for bombs has spread globally in recent years. The technology requires less production space and thus is easier to conceal, weapons experts and intelligence officials say.
"With plutonium you have big production reactors and lots of signs and signals that give you away," said Rose Gottemoeller, formerly deputy undersecretary for defense nuclear non-proliferation in the Department of Energy and now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It is possible to build a uranium plant without giving off any signals to the outside world."
In addition, both countries appear to be benefiting from relationships with other countries that possess nuclear know-how and are increasingly willing to share it, weapons experts said.
Sokolski's piece provides a fine overview both of the background and of the options available to the United States. "By 2008," he writes, "Pyongyang's uranium enrichment program alone might enable it to produce as many as 30 bombs."
He spells out the potential for an arms race in Northeast Asia, saying that not only South Korea but Japan might consider joining the nuclear club. China might then boost its number of nuclear missiles, he says.
The United States, he says, should approach North Korea's neighbors about using their economic clout and diplomatic pressure on the regime in Pyongyang.
Speaking of Korea, I enjoyed an answer Donald Rumsfeld gave this week during a Pentagon briefing:
Q: Is our rhetoric in any way responsible for pushing them to the point where they feel like they have -- the only option that they have is to pull these restrictions off and start going down a road again of building nuclear weapons?
Rumsfeld: That's an interesting question. One of those, like, "Stop me before I kill again"? (Laughter.) That type of thing? I mean, really, their actions are result of decisions by the leadership of the country. The leadership of the country is currently repressing its people, starving its people, has large numbers of its people in concentration camps, driving people to try to leave the country through China and other methods, starving these people. ...
It is a government that has made a whole host of decisions that have nothing to do with us. ... If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark.
It is a tragedy what's being done in that country. And the suggestion that it is a result of rhetoric from outside I think is -- misses the point.
Incidentally, Rumsfeld said in that press conference that the United States will consider closing some of its overseas military bases as well as stateside ones in the next round of base closings.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the threat from North Korea isn't just from nuclear weapons. In August, Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in a speech in Seoul that North Korea has "an active program" of chemical weapons as well as "one of the most robust bioweapons programs on Earth."
I simply don't understand how Bill Bennett can write 2,000 words about the mote of one white woman who can't get into her top choice of university while utterly ignoring the beam of racism that destroys millions of black lives to this day. Of course affirmative action is unfair to some whites. But given the continuing existence of racism in America, the lack of affirmative action is unfair to blacks. So which unfairness do you pick?
There is no perfect solution, but anyone who believes that affirmative action is wrong is morally obligated to acknowledge that racism still exists and to explain what they would replace affirmative action with. But Bill Bennett doesn't. For a guy who has practically made an industry out of lecturing America about virtue, he seems to have precious little appreciation of what true virtue is.
Gary Farber of Amygdala (congratulations on his recent links from InstaPundit and Atrios) writes me that he has a different take on the affirmative action discussion than John Rosenberg, whom Gary says is committing the “False Mirror Fallacy”:
Certainly the debate about the pros versus cons of using consideration of “race” to attempt to make up for past racism is an entirely valid discussion, and a topic which I have both mildly complicated opinions about, and which aren't set in stone. But it’s always false to imply or state that conditions are identical for a majority and a minority and that each must be considered as if they were in identical circumstances, or that acts from one have equal consequences as the other, because all that’s demonstrably, in many cases, false.
For instance, of course “black” people can be racist to “white” people, and many are, just as many “whites” are to “blacks.” But the cumulative effect of a majority, powerful, ruling, class discriminating against a weak, poor, minority, brings an entirely different level of harm than vice versa. Yes?
So whether “liberal racial preferences” are wise policy or not is an entirely valid discussion, but that they “are different because they are meant to include and not exclude” seems indisputable to me. Actually, it’s not that they are “meant to include and not exclude” that per se makes them significantly different, but that, yes, a preference for a minority is obvious different than a preference for a majority, and has a differing, non-equal, consequence. Again, that doesn't mean that either is necessarily good policy, at least, certainly, universally.
Oh, and this line you quoted from a good friend: “here are few black people being discriminated against ....” That astonished me, and, I'm sorry, I find it hard to believe your friend has a couple of dozen, or even a dozen, “black” friends, who have told him this. This is simply not congruent with the testimony of any given 19 out of 20 “black” people I've ever spoken with on the topic, nor in the least congruent with my own observations of how “black” people are often treated, or how many “white” people unconsciously go out of their way to carefully identify who is “black” and “white.”
Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping, who is a Methodist minister in addition to being a retired Army officer, links to a recent post of mine and analyzes points raised in Norman Podhoretz's new book about the Old Testament prophets.
Among Don's observations:
I agree with his point, but I disagree that this is news. In my seminary and personal studies I never heard or concluded that the prophets of the Jewish scriptures were predicting Christianity or the Church. There were substantial prophecies of a Messiah, but Christians and Jews have not agreed on what or who exactly was being prophesied, and neither have modern scholars.
Don explains scriptural interpretation with the same clarity and precision he brings to his analyses of military affairs. Impressive.
The frequent mention of Trent Lott and the Council of Conservative Citizens led me to see what historian Numan V. Bartley had to say, in his book “The New South: 1945-1980,” about the formation in the 1950s of the white citizens councils, the forerunners of the CCC. He wrote:
By the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, the councils had become a formidable force. Organizers had their greatest success in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. ... At the peak, Citizens’ Councils and allied bodies enrolled as many as a quarter million white southerners.
... An FBI investigation caused J. Edgar Hoover to wax enthusiastic: “The membership of these organizations reflects bankers, lawyers, doctors, state legislators and industrialists. In short, their membership includes some of the leading citizens of the South.” Recruiters for the councils spoke before the Rotary, Lions, Civitans, and Kiwanis, and the councils’ officers worked closely with such patriotic groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion. The councils rejected violence, presented their movement as a “responsible” alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, and attempted to attract a “respectable” membership. ...
Council leaders and other massive-resistance spokesmen harangued ceaselessly about the dangers of “intermarriage,” “miscegenation,” and “mongrelization.” ...
The Citizens’ Council systematically attempted to suppress dissent at home. [W.J. Cash, in his book “The Mind of the South,” had termed such a long-time Southern habit “the savage ideal.” -- GS] They employed economic intimidation as a form of suasion when African Americans supported desegregation, voted, or otherwise forgot their place. A council leader in Alabama was blunt: “We intend to make it difficult, if not impossible, for a Negro who advocates desegregation to fine and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.”
Bartley’s well-done account (part of LSU Press’s landmark multi-volume history of the South) notes many other interesting if sobering aspects of developments in the ’50s:
The ultimately unsuccessful efforts by populist Governors Earl Long of Louisiana and “Big Jim” Folsom of Alabama to distance themselves from the race issue. (After his first election, to indicate his appreciation for black support, Folsom held a well-attended inaugural ball for blacks.)
The FBI’s ludicrous claims, touted by some Southern politicians, that racial frictions were in large measure being stirred up by communist homosexuals.
The surprising fact that, prior to the volcanic clash over desegregation at Little Rock’s Central High School, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had been known not for defending segregation (he had tried to avoid the race issue) but for economic development initiatives and good-government reforms. When he eventually found that he would have to take side, Faubus decided to use state power on the side of segregation. (The opposite, incidentally, of events in Tennessee, where one governor used state police and National Guard troops to ensure desegregation at a high school in the east Tennessee town of Clinton.)
Lieberman is raring to jump into the presidential contest, according to a story in the New Haven Register this week:
There is a new edge to Joe Lieberman's voice, a barely constrained exhilaration.
Just four days after Al Gore announced he will not run for president in 2004, Connecticut's junior senator was sounding like a fairly confident presidential candidate Thursday, even though he's yet to formally announce his intentions.
"It's feasible and plausible that I can win (the presidency)," Lieberman said in an interview. "Am I as prepared as anyone could be to hold this awesome job? I think the answer is yes."
Lieberman, of New Haven, has been saying for months that he'll "probably" run, and he insisted this week that he won't make a final announcement until early January. But with every sentence, his future plans seem more like a foregone conclusion.
As for analysis on Lieberman’s prospects, the article says:
Selecting Lieberman as their standard bearer in 2004 would give Democrats a candidate who has aligned himself with Bush on several key issues like Iraq and the bulk of the homeland security debate.
Lieberman's answer to that Thursday was, "I am what I am."
And that hints at an election strategy that will focus on independent voters and Democrats who don't normally vote in primaries.
"They're counting on getting other Democrats out to vote, ones that are not traditionally primary voters," said one Capitol Hill strategist close to the issue.
Southern Connecticut State University professor Arthur Paulson said Lieberman won't have the moderate column all to himself. Several other Democrats eyeing the presidency -- including Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Sen. John Edwards, D-S.C. -- would also compete for the moderate vote, he said.
In one poll among New York Democrats, Lieberman enjoyed a strong majority, the article says.
Which raises two questions: If Lieberman runs, will the publisher of the New York Amsterdam, a black weekly newspaper, run a grossly anti-Semitic screed against him, the same way the publisher did in August 2000 after Lieberman’s selection as Al Gore’s running mate? And, unlike 2000, would Democratic leaders and liberal activists come forward in large numbers to denounce such blatant prejudice?
In the wake of the Trent Lott debacle, Republicans are no doubt fired up to leap on the slightest indication that Democrats and liberals are failing to speak out against prejudice within their own ranks.
By the way: What did the Amsterdam News say about Lieberman's selection in 2000?
“It's the money stupid,” wrote publisher Wilbert A. Tatum in an editorial. “The Gore camp went out all over the world to Jews of means: You've got to show me the money. When you do, one of yours will be given the second spot on the ticket.”
This section of a Tony Snow commentary from August 2000 is especially interesting in light of the Lott affair:
Meanwhile, back in New York, the Amsterdam News was running an editorial that accused Gore of selecting Lieberman for the money: “Jews from all over the world ... will be sending bundles of money. ... America is being sold to the highest bidder.”
The very Democrats who blasted George W. Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University turned suddenly silent, afraid to condemn an anti-Semitic screed in a Harlem newspaper.
For an illustration, consider this Newsmax item of Aug. 17, 2000:
California congresswoman Maxine Waters refused to condemn an anti-Semitic attack by a leading black newspaper on Jewish vice presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman, saying she doesn't want to be diverted from more important issues like affirmative action and education vouchers.
“I don't want to cloud my issues right now with any talk about -- any questions about anti-Semitism,” Waters told WLIB-NY radio Thursday morning.
“That's not the issue,” she added. “I think the issues have to do with where are we going and what is good for the black community and where does this Democratic Party stand.”
Waters was asked about an editorial attacking Lieberman that appears in New York City's Amsterdam News for a second time this week, claiming that “Gore and his minions” picked the Connecticut senator for the second spot on the ticket “for the money.”
Given the events involving Lott over the past two weeks, it’s hard to see how Republicans would let Waters and other Democrats get a pass if -- when -- a similar situation arises.
Is Al Sharpton still planning on running for president? If so, in the wake of the Lott controversy, right-wingers will be demanding, understandably, that he be held to account for the Tawana Brawley demagoguery. They'll also insist that Democratic officeholders not be allowed to dodge that part of Sharpton's past. The Lott affair has changed the ritual for such situations, ratcheting up the expectations for scrutiny as well as the level of partisan feverishness.
One more thing: Lieberman, to his great credit, was a Freedom Rider in the '60s. But as a senator he used to vote against affirmative action -- shouldn't that automatically brand him as a racist, if the rhetoric of some liberal commentators in recent days is to be taken seriously?
Update: John Rosenberg explores a variety of tangents on this and related issues at his blog Discriminations. Some examples: here, here and here.
In all the world, there are only 3,500 Gunnison sage grouse. The birds’ habitat has shrunk so that it includes only southwestern Colorado plus parts of Utah. As a result, the grouse is listed as an endangered species.
Yet, the grouse is expected to make a comeback in the near future due to a recent event that humans rightly consider a catastrophe: The Burn Canyon Fire, which was started by a lightning strike and burned 33,000 acres in Colorado last July, has created conditions favorable to the grouse. The state Bureau of Land Management is reseeding with appropriate grasses a 2,100-acre area said to be a fine site for sage grouse habitat.
Out of disaster comes renewal. A familiar story in the West.
To the Christians in the first example and the secularists in the second, Norman Podhoretz says: Not so fast. The prophets have their own message, which deserves to be heard and understood in its own integrity before being appropriated in the service of other agendas, no matter how apparently noble.
... They [the Hebrew prophets] were, he concludes, not chiefly interested in predicting Christianity, or in propagandizing for secular social justice; they were, rather, engaged in a very this-worldly struggle against the particular challenges of idolatry in their own time and place.
Podhoretz's training as a literary critic is evident in the seriousness and sensitivity with which he examines the Biblical texts. His response to those who see the "Immanu-el" passage (Isaiah 7:14) as a prophecy of the virgin birth is a case in point. He notes that the Hebrew uses the word ha-almah, "young woman."
The problem is that the word for virgin in Hebrew is b'tulah, and since that very word appears twice within the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah (and twice more in Chapters 40-66), it seems highly unlikely that the author or editor of 7:14, whoever he may have been, would not have used it here if what he had wanted to say was "virgin."
Similarly, in arguing against the secular messianists who seek to build the peaceable kingdom without reference to God, Podhoretz pays close attention to the Scriptural contexts from which their favorite passages have been ripped. The swords being beaten into plowshares, the lions lying down with lambs, and so on all coexist with the harshest of rebukes to idolaters and the bloodiest analyses of real-life power politics.
The same chapter of Micah that tells us about the nations never learning war again (4:3) also proclaims, a few lines farther down, that God "will make your horn iron and your hoofs bronze; you shall beat in pieces many peoples, and shall devote their gain to the Lord, their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth" (4:13).
Combining the two passages -- as Micah or his editors actually did, by putting them so close together in the first place -- we see a prophetic vision of a world at peace because bloody war has been fought and won on behalf of the Lord. It is a vision of peace through strength ...
He writes that the message of the prophets has not been appropriately "transcended" and universalized in the religious sphere by the Christians, nor in the geopolitical sphere by the secularists; it has, rather, been misunderstood and mangled in both cases. But it would be wrong to view this important work as primarily a polemic against these adversaries.
When I e-mailed a copy of the review to a good friend (a devout Christian), he responded:
That's very interesting.
But it is Jesus Himself who claims the prophecy of Isaiah, so the reviewer isn't going to find much agreement among Christians about the prophetic character of the book:
Luke 4:17
"He was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has annointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.'
"Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them"
'Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.'
As further proof that Jesus knew the implication of what he was saying, the people in the synagogue became very angry and drove him out of town and up to a cliff where they planned to throw him down.
"But he passed through the midst of them and went away."
Dionne, normally a decent-minded liberal, presents an argument today that ought to be beneath him.
Dixiecrats, he correctly points out, supported states’ rights in 1948 as part of their segregationist agenda. Therefore, he claims, a particular taint ought to hang over anyone today who stands up for the prerogatives of state governments against federal activism. The intellectual linkage, he argues, between the Dixiecrats and the boosters of federalism today is damning.
Such a claim is at best illogical and at worst demagogic.
In all the denunciations of Sen. Trent Lott's after-the-fact endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign, almost no one is talking about the principle on which Thurmond based his defense of segregation. The principle was states' rights. ...
It was Goldwater's campaign, of course, that began the era of the Republican South. Post-Goldwater Republicanism swept in millions of States' Rights Democrats, as Thurmond's supporters called themselves, including an ambitious young Mississippian named Trent Lott. Goldwater carried only six states in 1964: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Arizona. The first four of these had been the only states to vote for Thurmond in 1948. Apropos of some of Lott's comments, the overlap did not occur because Goldwater and Thurmond shared some views on national defense. At issue were civil rights -- and states' rights.
... Lott's Republican critics who share his states' rights views on many contemporary matters need to explain why states' rights doctrines that were so wrong as a general proposition in 1948 are right today. If the federal government was right to overturn states' rights in defense of African Americans, why is it wrong now to view states' rights with a degree of suspicion and to continue to see the federal government as a bulwark for individual rights? Even if Lott is hustled off the stage, the question will still haunt his party.
Dionne is peddling a remarkable guilt-by-association argument: Because Dixiecrats sought to promote immoral ends in 1948 by exploiting the constitutional limits on the federal government’s power, conservatives and libertarians today should be considered suspect if they dare take up the defense of federalism.
In this way, Dionne attempts to abruptly shrink the bounds of acceptable debate on federal action. By asserting a damning intellectual bond between Dixiecrat segregationists and present-day defenders of federalism, he tries to transform one of the Rehnquist court’s central achievements -- the reining in of congressional and regulatory overreaching -- into something nefarious and morally unsavory.
Yes, the South Carolina v. Katzenbach decision, which found the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be constitutionally sound, was a laudable action by the Warren court, even though it meant giving approval to federal intervention on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, reviving federal authority to enforce civil rights under the Civil War amendments was long overdue, given the enormity of injustice under the Jim Crow system.
That doesn’t mean, however, that all forms of federal activism can be constitutionally justified. One doesn’t have to support moving the clock back to the 1850s when it comes federal-state relations to realize that years of sloppy constitutional analysis by federal courts allowed Congress and regulators to stretch the commerce and equal protection clauses to ludicrous lengths in order to rationalize excessive federal intervention in many areas of life. The Rehnquist court majority has rightly sought to set needed parameters for such activism.
Reasonable people can disagree on how broad or narrow those parameters should be. Dionne’s playing of the Dixiecrat card, however, tries to forestall debate altogether and leave the activist approach as the only legitimate option, constitutionally and morally.
Such an argument is transparently opportunistic and intellectually irresponsible. To repeat: It ought to be beneath him.
Update: John Rosenberg offers thoughts on my post and on the Dionne column.
On the same point, many on the left (Juan Williams is one example, from comments he made on NPR last weekend) imply that the range of legitimate opinion on specific civil rights legislation is extremely narrow and that to oppose Ted Kennedy’s position on such measures automatically raises a red flag about one’s racial views.
Such a contention rests on faulty logic, however. The range of legitimate opinion on major civil rights bills is considerable.
I'm not saying Lott, in particular, was necessarily motivated by high-minded considerations of law when he voted against various bills. I am saying, though, that it's irresponsible to automatically label anyone as racist merely because he raises objections to particular points in civil rights legislation.
John Rosenberg cites the example of the Civil Rights Act of 1990. With a title like that, only a racist would oppose it, right? Not necessarily, given that Stuart Taylor of The American Lawyer (whom John correctly characterizes as one “not normally thought of as a Lott-like racist”) wrote quite critically of one of the bill’s central provisions at the time:
If enacted and enforced as written, the bill's disparate-impact provisions would create a powerful presumption that any employer with a work force in which minorities were significantly under-represented was guilty of racial discrimination.
The bill would also make the burden of overcoming this presumption so heavy that it could pressure employers surreptitiously to use quotas to improve their statistics -- hiring and promoting racial minority-group members or women, as the case may be, on a preferential basis over equally or better qualified white males. ... [D]isparate-impact rules creating such pressure are strong and socially divisive medicine, and the new bill as written would administer too heavy a dose. [Legal Times, 2/12/1990, p. 21]
To discuss such considerations, in other words, is to raise substantive points of law on which reasonable people ought to be able to disagree without stooping to slurs about each other's integrity.
Kevin Drum may not be a friend to the Republican cause, but his advice at CalPundit is sound in regard to how GOPers should react to Clinton's pronouncements on the Lott affair. As Kevin says, though, Republicans won't be able to heed his warning.
By the way: At the moment, Blogspot permalinks aren't working for anyone tonight, as far as I can see. So, as an alternative you could to the main CalPundit address and scroll down to the post titled "Some free and 100% sincere advice."
Great stuff in The Economist in an article titled “The Brussels consensus: Why subversive thoughts are frowned upon in the would-be capital of Europe”:
American think-tanks revel in sharp ideological conflict and their occupants strive, sometimes too hard, to come up with the next “big idea.” Intellectual life in Brussels is different. An American academic familiar with its think-tanks calls the atmosphere “almost Soviet. It is as if they are afraid to work on something, unless the commission has decided that it should be on the agenda.” ...
Brussels, of course, is not Europe. In EU countries you do encounter real and fundamental debates about the direction of Europe. ...
One commission official comments: “You do get people with funny ideas arriving in Brussels sometimes, but they usually become house-trained pretty quickly.” ...
The tendency to “go native” in Brussels extends well beyond officials and academics. Even the Brussels press corps is a pretty “on message” bunch, as becomes evident when its members venture out of Belgium en masse. On a press trip to Sweden in 2001, the Brussels scribes encountered a beast strange to them, Leif Pagrotsky, a cabinet minister — of a country that is a full EU member, after all — who seemed to be a Eurosceptic and who opposed the idea of Sweden adopting the single European currency. As the dinner conversation became increasingly heated, Mr Pagrotsky had a sudden insight: “I thought I was meeting journalists,” he said, “but it turns out that you are missionaries.”
The power of the Brussels consensus means that the convention on the future of Europe, whose duty it is to rethink the European Union from first principles, is in fact conducting its debate within tight intellectual boundaries.
The article concludes that the Eurocrats’ narrow focus, while understandable from a bureaucratic point of view, will harm the EU’s ability to establish a positive rapport with many Europeans. Exactly right.
By the way: Maybe Sidney Blumenthal is the guiding force behind the site, but I would very surprised if he is the one actually doing the writing. The contrast is too great, it seems to me, between Atrios' snideness and the gracefulness and verve that characterized Blumenthal's writing a decade ago for The New Republic.
James C. Bennett, foreign affairs columnist for UPI, saw my post below on my friend’s counterfactual scenario about the Civil War and wrote me to say the same Southern-victory possibility has long fascinated him, since it reconfigures the chain of events for North and South in so many ways. Jim writes:
Most people writing about it seem to speculate as if America were in a vacuum at the time, which was of course not the case. Any independent CSA (it would no longer be the "South", of course -- Virginia would be the "North" of the CSA, and Florida would be its South) would have, sooner or later, come up against the demographic problems of slavery outlined by Freehling in “Road to Disunion.” These would be particularly aggravated if Virginia had not joined the Confederacy, which would have been the case if the Union had not resisted secession by force. In Rosenberg's case, the entire Upper South would have presumably remained with the Union, which he doesn't seem to take into consideration.
The South Carolinians would be driven to either re-open the slave trade, and come into direct conflict with the Royal Navy, or try to annex Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico from Spain, as additional sources of slaves. The first case would have been a CSA loss; the second they probably could have won. However, it would only have postponed the inevitable, because the Hispano-Caribbean also depended on continued imports of slaves.
We would also be looking at a divided continent with perpetual tensions over navigation of the Mississippi, border disputes in the West, differing Indian policies, etc. etc. In the above case, with the Lower South seceding and trying to continue the slave trade, we might have seen a USA-CSA war as early as 1865, but this time with the Royal Navy assisting the blockade, and Virginians mad as hell with the CSA over interference with Virginians from Wheeling (no West Virginia, remember) being hassled as they try to sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Probable USA commander: Robert E. Lee. He would have actually been a much more successful commander on the Union side; he learned warfare under Winfield Scott in Mexico, whose aggressive, on-the-go style was more appropriate to an invading army than one defending a position in a war of attrition. Prognosis: a shorter war than the factual one. Postwar scenario: possibly a more gradual emancipation, since the USA would have had less pressure for an Emancipation Proclamation.
It makes an interesting mental picture, however: Lee in blue with his part-Virginian, part-Northern staff; HMS Warrior forcing the forts at Mobile with the USS Monitor at its side, ("I say, damn the bloody torpedoes, full speed ahead, lads!") and perhaps a regiment or two of Highlanders with pipers and kilts marching along with the Army of Southern Virginia.
I discussed some further counterfactual tangents (possible political party dynamics in the postwar era, the postwar territorial rivalry between the Union and the Confederacy) with my friend who first raised the Southern-victory scenario. He had a most interesting speculation:
Maybe a Southern victory would have motivated the north to abandon Washington altogether. After all, it was only an overgrown cow town anyhow back then. New Washington would have been built on the banks of the Mississippi, near the point where the states of Missouri, Iowa and Illinois come together!
Counterfactual: The Confederacy survives, limping toward catastrophe
After reading John Rosenberg’s counterfactual description of Northern secession in the 1860s, a good friend of mine (a serious student of Southern history and culture, with great affection for the region) sent me a lively speculation on what might have followed had the South been able to maintain its independence (a not infrequent topic of historical conjecture, I know).
My friend acknowledges that the scenario here, spun casually from his own musings today, is only one many possibilities. He writes:
... How long would slavery have lasted? (My guess -- no longer than the Great Depression, which would have completely destroyed the Southern economy and caused a “voluntary” liberation of the slaves.)
Texas would have seceded from the South whenever the oil wells changed the economy. The South would have had a lot of trouble staying together politically -- anytime someone didn't like what was going on they would threaten to secede.
Eventually the deep South would have become a police state run by thugs. There would be constant banana republic-style intervention in the South by the U.S.
World War II would have given the U.S. a pretext for invading the South. Some Bilbo would have endorsed Hitler, and when Hitler declared war on the U.S., the country would have invaded the South in the interests of national security. The burning question at the end of WWII would be whether to set up a black republic in the remains of Mississippi and Alabama.
When the U.S. finally got around to invading the South, it would have lasted about as long as the Gulf War. They would have been using cavalry to oppose tanks, just like the Poles in World War II. The invaders would have come into possession of a land in which nearly all the blacks and 60-70 percent of the whites would have been functionally illiterate. To paraphrase Mencken, you couldn't have found a decent toothbrush between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta.
The postwar boom would have driven millions of these impoverished people north, and every Northern city would have its "Little Dixie." Down South, vote-buying and political corruption would have been rampant. In response, a constitutional amendment would be passed in 1947 giving the federal government explicit authority to depose state governments in the “formerly rebellious states,” and this would happen with great frequency. The Southern states would have no electoral votes and their representatives would have only observer status in the House and Senate. The repeal of these restrictions would be the constant object of Southern politicians.
The “Great Society” push of the 1960s would have been to bring the South into the 20th century -- sort of an Appalachian project enacted over the entire South. Finally, in the mid-1970s, Southern states would have the opportunity to “rejoin” the nation by passing, with a two-thirds majority, an equal rights amendment to their state constitution banning discrimination against blacks. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida would immediately pass such amendments, followed a few years later by Georgia, South Carolina and Arkansas.
Alabama would practically have a mini-civil war over the issue, but would finally rejoin the union in 1984. Mississippi would continue to be under martial law.
My friend adds:
I forgot Louisiana. Since I'm making things up, let's say that during World War II the Cajun area declared its independence and became the rear bastion of Charles de Gaulle’s free French. The area remained a source of Anglo-French tension in the postwar era, with the Cajuns even given a symbolic seat in the Franch National Assembly. And who can forget that dramatic moment when De Gaulle shouted, “Vive l'Acadienne libre!” on his visit to New Orleans?
It’s impossible for me to top all that.
I will mention two thoughts:
(1) Without a Northern victory, would there have been a Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its guarantee of equal protection under the law? It’s hard to imagine 20th century constitutional development without that key part of the Constitution.
(2) In terms of economic development alone, the continuance of the Confederacy would have been a long-term disaster for the South. The defeat of Lincoln’s attempt to reunite the country would have emboldened the Southern planter elite -- yet that elite was singularly unsuited for guiding the region’s economic destiny.
The rice planters of coastal South Carolina and the cotton barons of Mississippi often lacked an appreciation for industrialization and the entrepreneurial spirit. Indeed, over the generations many of them had demonstrated far more enthusiasm for the poker table and horse track rather than for the accounting tables and husbandry journals (which is why more than a few Southern estates passed out of the hands of the old elite and into those of the plantation overseers, who possessed a practical knowledge the owners often lacked).
The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a lengthy feature piece this week about the Dixiecrats, drawing on an interview with Kari Frederickson, a historian at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa who wrote a well-received book on the Dixiecrat movement.
In the article by veteran reporter Elizabeth Mullener, Frederickson said that Thurmond didn’t pursue the nomination of the States’ Rights Party (the group’s official name), was considered a moderate within its ranks and quickly severed ties with the group once the presidential contest was decided.
Of course, Thurmond went on to set a filibuster record in 1957 in his effort to derail a civil rights bill. And in attacking Truman in 1948, he had publicly praised the need for racial “purity.”
From the article:
... Alarmed by the increasingly liberal tendencies of the national Democratic party, their traditional home, and by what they saw as its move away from its true mission to preserve states' rights, a group of Southern politicians in the summer of 1948 bucked the party and launched their own. "But let's not kid ourselves: The real spark was race," Frederickson said.
What brought the issue to a head was a speech by Truman before Congress in February devoted solely to civil rights. In it he proposed legislation against lynching, against the poll tax, by which poor voters had been effectively disenfranchised, and in favor of a commission to outlaw discrimination in hiring when federal contracts were involved.
"Truman was motivated by two things," Frederickson said. "First of all, humanity -- it's the right thing to do. And secondly, by politics. He and his advisers have calculated they need black urban votes to win the election in November."
Reaction to the speech was immediate and dramatic. In an already scheduled meeting of Southern governors near Tallahassee a couple of weeks later, there was new talk of a third party. Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, was the voice of moderation in the group. He quelled the revolt and suggested instead that they approach Truman and try to barter.
But Truman would have none of it. He declined even to meet with them.
That was it. The governors decided to go back to their states and feel out the party faithful about staging a revolution.
In May they did just that, in Jackson, Miss., where they established the States' Rights Party. It was a rowdy gathering, full of Confederate flags, various renditions of "Dixie" and rousing denunciations of Truman. ...
Thurmond was one of the primary lashers, delivering a blistering condemnation of Truman's plans:
"Segregation laws are essential to the protection of racial integrity and purity of the white and Negro races alike," he said. "We know that their sudden removal would do great injury to the very people thought to be benefited." ...
Thurmond was a reluctant standard-bearer for the Dixiecrats.
At 46, he was nearly a generation younger than many of them and considered some members to be too extreme for his taste.
"He was the square peg in this movement," Frederickson said. "His record as governor in South Carolina really stamped him as a moderate -- a law-and-order moderate."
During his term, for instance, there was a notorious lynching in a neighboring state and Thurmond called from the beginning for swift and severe punishment of a crime he considered primitive. "For other Dixiecrats, lynching was not a big problem," Frederickson said.
In his own state, Thurmond called for eliminating the poll tax and advocated minimum-wage laws. But he was solidly against a federal mandate for these purposes.
And even on the subject of race he considered himself more enlightened than some of his fellow Dixiecrats.
"He was not a classic race-baiter," she said. [Blogger John Smith had mentioned that point at the very start of the Lott/Dixiecrat flap, with this post.-- GS] "In fact, black South Carolinians received his election as governor with some hope in 1946. He was seen as something promising for the future."
Nevertheless, when the Dixiecrats convened in Birmingham, Thurmond was their choice. At least their second choice.
... Thurmond had not planned to attend and, in fact, showed up halfway through the daylong gathering. But when offered the nomination, he accepted it, much to the surprise of some of his closest advisers.
When the election was over in November, Thurmond didn't waste any time.
"He was gone," Frederickson said. "He distanced himself from those people. He was done with them.
"I don't think he regretted it because he got a lot of national press. And in the political culture of South Carolina, he was seen to be a man of principle.
"But it became the defining element of his political persona -- the lone wolf, the maverick. He maintained that persona throughout his career." ...
The Frederickson interview revealed useful nuances and details. A nice contribution to our understanding.
I think I'll enjoy what new blogger Rick Henderson, a former editor at Reason, will have to say. He already has three things in common with me: He's a UNC-Chapel Hill alum, an editorial writer and a blogger. And he comes recommended by Virginia Postrel -- a big plus.
what if Stephen Douglas's "popular sovereignty" had prevailed; both Kansas and Nebraska had both come into the Union as slave states, with the prospect of future slave states in the west based on the mining industry joining them later; and the fledgling Republican Party, seeing the North becoming a permanent minority, had led a secession movement?
We know (this is not counterfactual) that the midwest states opposed the expansion of slavery in good part because they did not want blacks of any kind, slave or free, in their territory, and passed laws barring the immigration of free blacks.
Lincoln once said that his primary loyalty was to preserving the union, that if he could do that by freeing all the slaves he would do it; if he could save it by freeing none of the slaves he would do that; or if he could save it by freeing some and leaving others enslaved he would also do that. Thus it is interesting to speculate what he would have done if it had been Illinois and the other free states that seceded from the union.
Certainly if he had gone with his state he would have done so firmly in the conviction that he was being true to the principles of the Constitution and was no traitor.
I can’t speak for the mindset in Midwestern and Western states during the 1850s and the Civil War years, but it is true that black suffrage was hardly a popular cause in Western states during Reconstruction.
Congress required that Nebraska’s admittance into statehood in 1867 was contingent on the insertion of an equal suffrage clause into the Nebraska constitution. Nebraska’s legislature was empowered to perform that action, but considerable harrumphing arose among lawmakers critical of the requirement.
Nebraska Republicans, by one historian’s description, “supported the change but with little enthusiasm.”
Nebraska Democrats, as described in various newspaper editorials, complained that they were being coerced by an “unconstitutional usurpation.” They also bridled at what they characterized as an “invasion of the principles of States Rights and a dangerous encroachment upon the traditionary principles of our republican right to local self-government.”
Democratic opposition to suffrage guarantees for black citizens was often outspoken in Plains and Western states in the late 19th century. Republican politicians in those regions by and large straddled the issue, given its lack of popularity.
Observed historian Eugene Berwanger: “Minnesotans alone were to grant equal suffrage of their own volition but not before the question had been submitted to a public vote on three separate occasions. To the other western states and territories black suffrage was to come by direction of the federal government.”
Consider the example of Nevada in the Reconstruction era. Again, Berwanger provides perspective: “While the predominantly Republican Nevada legislature was most ardent in its support congressional Reconstruction and pushed for national reform, its outlook was notably less generous at home. Consistently denying blacks the right to testify against whites, to vote, or to attend the same public schools as white children, its members spurned every attempt at revision of Nevada's anti-Negro laws.”
A few decades later, in 1890, silver-state Republicans from Nevada and Colorado would provide crucial votes to block passage in the Senate of Henry Cabot Lodge’s “force bill,” a sort of precursor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that would have used federal power to curtail the blatant vote fraud and intimidation used to stifle black voting in the South as the Jim Crow system began to take form and reveal its ruthlessness.
Among the things I learned from Newsweek’s cover story about Trent Lott’s experiences growing up:
In the curious political culture of Mississippi, the cheerleading post had a storied past: the legendary John Stennis, Mississippi's longtime senator, had been one at Mississippi State, and Lott's future Senate colleague Thad Cochran cheered at Ole Miss four years before Lott.
Who knew?
The piece also points out that, despite what one might gather from Lott’s political experience, pandering to the neo-Confederates isn’t essential in getting elected in Mississippi these days. “You didn't have to whistle ‘Dixie’ in order to win anymore,” the article says. “Lott's colleague Thad Cochran did not.”
Which reminds me of a Washington Post article from sometime in the ’90s about Mississippi politics. As I recall, the piece said that Mississippi has a tradition of sending one smart U.S. senator to Washington and one bumpkinish one. In recent times, the piece indicated, Cochran was considered in the former category and Lott in the latter.
On a more progressive note, the seat was occupied by Blanche K. Bruce, a Republican, from 1875 to 1881 -- the first black American to serve a full term in the Senate.
On the other hand, for much of the 1930 and ’40s, the seat belonged to Theodore Bilbo, one of the most shameless of the old-style “Dixie Demagogues.”
In Iraq ... where Shia Muslims are 60 percent of the population and have been repressed by a Sunni minority, most of the Shia despise Saddam, and there is a chance to reverse those bad relations. That is the hope of Abdulmajid Al-Khoei, son of a leading ayatollah who died in 1992 after long persecution by the Iraqi regime. The al-Khoei Foundation, a large complex of schools, mosque and community center in North London, carries on the ayatollah's tradition of promoting separation of mosque and state while defending Shia rights and culture.
"No one can give guarantees about post-Saddam Iraq, but we must try to break the misunderstanding'' between the United States and Shia Muslims, al-Khoei told me, as he prepared to hold a meeting of all Shia delegates to the London conference [of Iraqi dissident groups].
The only official Iraqi Shiite organization attending the meeting was the Tehran-based Iraqi exile group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic of Iraq. The name reflects SCIRI's past support for an Islamic state; it now says it supports democracy and risks Tehran's criticism by dealing with the United States. The Islamic Daawa party claims a similar shift and has met with U.S. officials, although the party skipped the conference.
Maybe they tell truth; maybe they want to use and abuse democracy. But U.S. officials need to know more.
... this is the majority community in Iraq, with many clerics who support the al-Khoei tradition and others who claim support for free political life. Most of its leaders insist they are independent of Iran, with whom Iraq fought a bitter war.
They aren't as easy for Americans to relate to as the Westernized liberals. But they offer the United States a chance to develop better relations with a key Muslim community that offsets the harsh Sunni Islamists prevalent in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
This offer the Bush administration can't afford to ignore.
Turks, Germans, Henry Wallace and more Just time to briefly mention a few of the interesting posts or columns I’ve seen of late:
Fine material posted by John Smith of Lincoln Plawg about the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948. From his post:
... at a press conference during his 1948 convention, he was asked about the resemblance between the CPUSA's platform and his own party's.
I'd say that they have a good platform ... He added gratuitously I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs.
Thus, what was wrong with Trent Lott's "time and place" is that it was a society that was, in today's term, "racially conscious." It "took account of race" at every opportunity, to order opportunities. White supremacy was the end, but preferences based on race were the means. Oh, but liberal racial preferences are different because they are meant to include and not exclude? Tell that to Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter.
Many liberals today appear to have forgotten (and the younger ones may never have known) that colorblindness is not an evil scheme dreamed up by a vast, racist, right wing conspiracy to "turn back the clock" and thwart civil rights. It was originated by abolitionists, and associated with liberals until they abandoned it in the late 1960s. Colorblindness was, and is, the incendiary principle that burned down the walls of segregation, and without it there are no civil rights, or at least no civil rights based on the principle of non-discrimination.
UPI foreign affairs columnist Jim Bennett had a great analysis of why Turkey would be better off staying out of the EU. Jim argued for closer trade ties between the U.S. and Turkey and ended the column by observing, “Real friends don't let friends join the European Union.”
I liked, and learned from, what Kevin Drum at CalPundit had to say about collaborative blogs.
And for the most unusual item I’ve seen in a while, Dutch blogger qsi (a likeable and sensible e-mail correspondent, by the way) posts about the oddity of the Dutch Libertarian Party, which runs a Web site that prominently includes a graphic with the Confederate battle flag. The Libertarians apparently sought to praise the Confederacy's belief in limited government. There's a lot to be said for the principle of small government, but it's also true that the radically decentralized nature of the Confederate government short-circuited Jefferson Davis's ability to coordinate the war effort. Several Southern governors, most notably Georgia's Joe Brown, constantly second-guessed Davis's decisions and attempted to block efforts to centralize power in the fashion of Lincoln's government. Such frictions and backbiting clearly undermined the South's war-fighting capability.
By the way: qsi also has interesting stuff about German corporate migration, including the observation that German business leaders are warning (in qsi’s paraphrase) that a “crisis ... is developing [that] is going to eclipse anything Germany has seen since the war.”
I’ve been away from the computer for several days and haven’t had a chance to comment on Columbia University’s rescinding of the Bancroft Prize for Michael Bellesiles and the book “Arming America.”
The Omaha World-Herald, where I work, editorialized in April 2001 that Columbia was “about to display questionable judgment” by awarding the Bancroft Prize to Bellesiles. The editorial called “Arming America” a “polemical work marred by overzealousness“ and “an inappropriate candidate, in short, for one of the history community's highest honors.”
Substantive criticism of Bellesiles’ claims by James Lindgren, Joyce Lee Malcolm and Clayton Cramer, the editorial noted,
haven't stopped a stampede of boosters in the academic, activist and journalistic communities from rushing to heap praise on the book. To diehard critics of American gun culture, Bellesiles' book possesses immense ideological value, because, they say, it debunks the longstanding assumptions that privately owned guns were a vital part of early American life and that the Founders approved the Second Amendment as a mechanism for safeguarding such ownership.
"Arming America," in other words, is being promoted without apology as a political document intended to buttress the restriction of private gun ownership. Blurbs on the book's back cover illustrate the point. Reads one: "Michael A. Bellesiles is the NRA's worst nightmare."
Columbia University historian Eric Foner and the Bancroft committee only added to their embarrassment last week, incidentally, by attempting to wash their hands of any responsibility. They instead argued that all blame rested with Bellesiles’ publisher.
Said Foner:
The Bancroft judges operate on a basis of trust. We assume a book published by a reputable press has gone through a process where people have checked the facts. Members of prize committees cannot be responsible for that.
Typical academician balderdash. As the editorial above noted, major questions had already been raised by the time the Bancroft committee was making its selection. But the committee dutifully joined in the rush that was on to hold up Bellesiles’ work as a groundbreaking revisionist text that many in the academic and activist communities envisioned as a way to drive a stake through the heart of supposedly retrograde scholarship and political ideology.
It took a while, but the comeuppance for such cheap intellectual opportunism has arrived. How revealing that people such as Foner and the Bancroft committee, even in rescinding the award, are still in denial about important aspects of what took place.
It's been a terrific weekend, with much Christmas-related activity for my family. It's kept me away from blogging, but family comes first. I'll resume Monday night, if not sooner. Thanks to all who have dropped by.
Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign stops in the Jim Crow South
I ran across a terrific passage on that topic last weekend while looking up historical nuggets on Thurmond’s Dixiecrats in the John Egerton book, “Speak Now Against the Day.” Egerton writes:
For the first time, a candidate for president of the United States was going around the Deep South attacking segregation, one-party politics, and the denial of civil rights. Wallace wouldn’t address segregated audiences, or patronize segregated hotels and restaurants. His seven-state Southern tour was like a crusade in enemy territory, and he and his biracial campaign crew of young and dedicated associates got a taste of regional hostility that they would long remember. Southerners associated with the campaign ... had seen it all before. Unseasoned Northerners, though, wondered if they had stepped into a war zone.
“They were terrified,” [Palmer] Weber [of the CIO Political Action Committee] told an interviewer forty years later. “They knew they had been to the edge of hell.” In North Carolina [my native state -- GS] on the first day, Wallace was pummeled with eggs and tomatoes. After witnessing a stabbing and several near-riots, some campaign strategists counseled retreat, but the candidate said no. On they went to Birmingham, where a welcoming party of club-toting whites jeered and heckled the motorcade; police stood by as the mob rocked the candidate’s car and chanted, “Kill Wallace!” [ironic, given the presidential candidacy of an Alabamian Wallace 20 years later -- GS]
Still, when he finally stood before his audience, he told them that “greedy men, the Big Mules ... have ruled the South for generations and kept millions of common people in economic poverty and political bondage.” And the worst of it, he said, was race, “the major obstacle” to Southern progress: Segregation was not only an economic and political and social travesty -- it was a sin, a violation of “the fundamental Christian and democratic principles in our civilization.”
This courageous foray was an inspiration to black voters, Palmer Weber told Thurgood Marshall when the trip was over. The “Negro communities were electrified and tremendously heartened to see one white man with guts willing to take it standing up.”
Wallace’s vote totals in the South were miniscule, however. He “could muster fewer than four thousand votes in any Southern state except Florida, where he got about twelve thousand,” Egerton writes.
Regardless of his flawed and often radical policy views, Wallace has to be respected and commended for his courage in standing up for his beliefs in the face of such abuse and violent intimidation.
My friend and colleague Jeff Koterba, cartoonist for the Omaha World-Herald, drew a most unusual portrait of Saddam Hussein. You can call it up here. (The Saddam portrait should appear; if it doesn't due to an update at the site, you can quickly get the cartoon by clicking 12/10/02 on the "Get Image" box.)
Look at the cartoon upside-down and you'll find something most surprising.
In creating the cartoon, Jeff used a traditional, and effective, optical illusion technique. I know because he and I talked about it beforehand.
By the way: If you like Jeff's cartoon, feel free to e-mail folks a link. I thought he had a terrific idea.
A good friend gives voice to some strong sentiments about liberals:
I feel sorry for them in a way because, despite the fact that they won the culture war, they still don't feel too happy about it. They have abortion and homosexual rights enshrined in law, affirmative action, set-sides and quotas, and they still aren't happy. There are few black people being discriminated against, Title IX or whatever it is makes sure they have a women's soccer team and you can't turn on TV without seeing vast amounts of sexual license paid for by Madison Avenue.
Yet they're still not happy.
The good things they wanted, the bad things they wanted, are nearly all enshrined in law in some way or other despite conservative chipping here and there. And yet they're still not happy.
There must be something puritan behind it all, this feeling that no matter has been done it is not enough. Their glasses are always half-empty. It's hard to find a happy liberal.
I heard this report on National People's Radio about Spanish speakers in the public schools. What a tragedy! There was only one teacher of English as a second language for every 60 children. So I figured, hell, that guy could teach four classes a day and get them all for some time. Yet this was presented as an unmitigated disaster. And I thought about all the immigrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. etc. who didn't have ANY teachers of English as a first, second or third language, and they didn't have anybody in the liberal education establishment crying tears over them, they just went on and lived their lives and their kids go to Harvard.
I think there's a hollow core to liberalism -- something (I should say someone) missing that makes them see everything so pessimistically. I think that's why liberals love the Trent Lott thing and the ’60s race issue so much. They were right, and they won. Since then, they've won a lot but they haven't been nearly as right.
I doubt if the people who support legal abortion enjoy looking at the pictures of the fetuses, their children. I bet many liberal parents are uncomfortable when their kids watch the soft-core porn their values brought to the television screen -- even as they refuse to be "judgmental."
But the 60s! Ah! That was a time for a liberal to be alive! That's why they wax so highly over Lott, because they get to wistfully charge up that hill one more time to do battle with Strom and Lester. But if you wipe the mist off your eyes, the old ghosts disappear and fade. They are galloping after sheets blowing on the clothesline. The moment they curl their hand around a form, it disappears into smoke.
He later sent an addendum:
There was a movement in pre-Revolutionary Russia -- I want to say about 1870 or so, when the liberal intellectuals at the universities made a mass exodus into the countryside to teach the peasants about the reforms they were proposing for the government. It was kinds of like those old stickers you still saw occasionally in college on some door: “Build a student-worker movement.”
But the Russian intelligentsia found out that the peasant thought his spectacles were funny and that it was ridiculous that a man didn't know how to tie up the horses to the plow. They had no respect for them, laughed at them, and listened to none of their enlightened ideas. (Out of that came a contempt for the peasantry that marked later movements).
If you think about Rush Limbaugh's popularity among the "common man" and the reaction of "Reagan Democrats" to modern liberalism, the parallels seem uncanny: In part what makes liberals unhappy is that the people don't love them. Even when the people put up with and internalize their ideas, they still don't love them.
My friend’s last point reminds me of a line in George Will’s latest column. In describing the views of Democratic operative Donna Brazile, he writes:
She blames liberals for conservative dominance of talk radio: "It's beneath liberals to talk to real people about real ssues."
Update: In a message this morning, the same friend included this point:
And while I'm at it, National People's Radio was nice enough to point out the other day that Helms had defended Lott on Strom. They reported it straight but I couldn't help but think how happy they were to report it. Like quoting Mussolini in defense of Hitler!
Look. Every partisan in every party has to learn one thing: Sometimes your people are wrong. To paraphrase an old retort, saying "My party, right or wrong" is like saying "My Kennedy, drunk or sober." Credibility is earned, and standing up and saying "Fie!" now and then reinforces your truthfulness. ...
Internecine sniping at Lott would give comfort to the enemy; you can see Jim Carville steepling fingers like Mr. Burns on "The Simpsons" and muttering "excellent" under his breath.
All true. So? For months we've heard calls for moderate Islamic scholars and mullahs to denounce the excesses of their co-religionists -- well, this is much like that. Not that Lott's comments were anywhere near the ravings that flow from mosques in the Middle East; he didn't call for Thurmondism to sweep the world at swordpoint. But it's the same idea. You can stay silent and hope it'll blow over, or disagree for the sake of your party's soul.
Just because your opponents are making hay over the issue shouldn't keep people of integrity from speaking up.
Exactly right.
He puts his finger on a point that used to loom large for me when I covered politics as a reporter during the '80s and early '90s, including both 1988 national political conventions: No matter how big a horse's ass a candidate would make of himself (or herself), the party stalwarts were always (publicly) full of praise. (And that applies to both major political parties, as far as my own reporting experience.) I fully appreciate the importance of party loyalty in maintaining a strong party system. But there also comes a time when activists and elected officials, as adult, thinking beings, need to speak up against foolishness or outrageousness -- as Lileks says, for the sake of their party's credibility. And in the case of Lott's statements, moral credibility.
Bush's graceful remarks in Philadelphia were intended as an inoculation for the GOP, but it might not take hold as long as Lott continues to hold the Senate leadership position.
For a British blogger, John Smith is one knowledgeable fellow when it comes to American political and social history. Check out the two LBJ anecdotes he provides. In setting up his post, Smith writes: "If Republican Senators want a reminder of the fact that leadership and Senate are not incompatible ..."
By the way: As I mentioned a few days back, Smith's site has provided some fascinating historical context for the Dixiecrat issue.
I posted Tuesday about the rural parts of the Great Plains, prodded by a post from Virginia Postrel. A new anthology of poetry and essays has just come out called “Rural Voices: Literature from Rural Nebraska.” Even though many of the writers are amateurs, the collection succeeds quite well in conveying contemporary rural sensbilities.
One poem is by Marjorie Saiser, a much honored poet who has been widely published. Here is her poem “Going to See the Homeplace”:
This morning the grass is wet, and the wind
is blowing songs through the handles
of the Clorox bottles in the garden.
We climb into the pickup,
going to see the home place,
although, as my father says,
there’s nothing there.
Two miles south of town
I open the gate. A calf watches,
his black and white face
new and stark,
all the edges undefiled.
Until things changed, my father says,
the house was there, west of the trees.
The barn, it was beautiful,
red and white stripes
on the cupola. The spring
inch and a quarter pipe,
cold water day and night
flowing into the barrel,
spilling over the top.
Almost at the gate I remember
to ask where the strawberries were.
I find the clump of trees at
the end of my father’s pointing finger.
Not the first draw, but the second.
Strawberries, he says,
carried out by the dishpanful.
The old place at the far reaches of his finger
rolls down to the river
rolls high and pretty
rolls with his hand.
blows with the wind:
I myself am seeing it, taking
he measure of it with my arms,
as if his grandmother, with my uncalloused hands,
unfurled a farm
like a sheet
into clean cold air.
That poem reminds me of my late father. Whenever I would drive Pop through his home county in western North Carolina, I would see only the office buildings, strip malls and subdivisions. His vision would extend much farther, but back into the past.
Here, he would say, was an old homeplace. Or over there was the old mill. Or the barn. Or the dirt road.
There was where your Mom and I were standing when we got word that they’d bombed Pearl Harbor.
And there, he would say, that was where my grandfather said goodbye to his sister -- she had been on a stool, milking a cow -- as he headed off to the Civil War. I saw Pop point out that spot out many times, and I know just where it is. It’s deep, deep in the woods, off an old dirt road, untouched (as yet) by either bulldozer or pavement.
I can still see Pop, his eyes aglow with memory, showing me where to look for the many parts of our shared past. I could see them every time, just beyond his pointing finger.
I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail this week from conservative friends in regard to the Trent Lott situation. Here is a distillation of what I’ve told several of them in e-mails, in explaining my view:
Lott's words, as reported over the weekend in the Post, undermined the ideal, now broadly accepted regardless of region, that the country did the right thing in the '60s to take forceful action to end Jim Crow practices. That ideal is something to rally around, of course, and my take was that Lott's ill-considered words were incompatible with it. That consensus stands as one of the country's great achievements, considering the long history of racial friction, alienation and discrimination in all parts of the country.
A good friend of mine once told me he regarded himself as a "liberal" on race in 1960s terms, but that the affirmative action zealots and black-victimization crusaders had carried the race issue far from the realm of common sense and moral sanity. And, as John Rosenberg points out, their legal arguments have led to them into some hilarious intellectual cul-de-sacs, where they sound like old-time defenders of states' rights.
But as for what the country should be safeguarding -- the foundational civil rights achievements and ideals of the '60s -- that’s what we should all rally around, regardless of region, race, party or ideology. Lott's words, as reported, departed from that imperative. So, criticism of him was fully warranted.
By the way: The Lott matter has moved into a new phase. Initially, it involved the legitimate criticism of Lott from the right and left. Now, however, the Lott affair has turned into just cheap another partisan/ideological skirmish for the political and blog communities.
Liberals want to use the controversy to undermine the GOP and make claims about how the establishment media aren’t liberal. Conservatives are harrumphing about Jesse Jackson’s predictable exploitation of the issue and how the American left should be called on the carpet for its past failures to criticize old pet causes of the radical left such as the Soviet Union’s communist system.
Yammer, yammer, yammer.
One more thing: I remember in the ’80s when Pat Buchanan said on “Cross Fire” that he had a problem in criticizing the South African government because it would require him to stand together on an issue with Jesse Jackson. (I know Buchanan said that because I made a mental note on it right away, and the memory has never left me.)
Buchanan’s reaction always struck me as wrongheaded. Voicing condemnation of apartheid was the right thing to do, regardless of whether Jesse Jackson was doing the same or not. That doesn’t mean one had to support the entirety of Jackson’s policy prescription about how to deal with the white-majority government in South Africa.
The same principle applies here: Lott was in the wrong, and he deserved criticism. Sure, Maxine Waters, Paul Krugman and many others on their side of the partisan divide are going to work to depict the GOP as a nest of racists, and such opportunism will need to be answered. But on the fundamental question of whether Lott’s comments were out of bounds, the answer absolutely is yes.
I quoted from some listserv posts the other day talking about South Florida. The primary focus was the adoption (or rejection) of English. Also mentioned were some odd thunderstorms in that part of the state.
Floridian Dan Hobby, always a thoughtful e-mail correspondent, sent these observations:
1) Miami was hardly a "ghost town" before the Cubans arrived -- it was the most populous city in Florida (about 300,000 in 1960). The Cuban exiles did tend to fill up some of the older residential neighborhoods from which many homeowners had previously moved to the new suburban developments. Still, in this regard (urban vs. suburban development) the City of Miami's experience was not exceptional. If one looks at the Miami-Dade County, there is even less validity to the "ghost town" statement.
2) It is a mistake to equate “Hispanic” with “Cuban” in today's South Florida. In fact, I've read that Little Havana is today largely populated by people from Central America. From a South Florida perspective (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties), the Cubans are definitely a minority of the total Hispanic population.
3) I'll address the language issue from personal experience. For well over a dozen years I have coached youth soccer teams. During that time I have had scores of Hispanic youths on my teams, and have had the opportunity to meet many, many more. In some cases it is difficult to communicate with the parents (I don't speak Spanish), but every child who has been in this country for even a short amount of time speaks English just fine. And in several cases, Hispanic parents I have known for a decade or so have improved their English skills markedly. This is not to say you won't hear plenty of Spanish (and Portuguese) in South Florida (especially on soccer fields), but the younger Hispanic generation is at least bi-lingual, and in a high percentage of cases probably are equally or more fluent in English than Spanish. Now if I have to speak with one of the kid's grandmothers, that might be a different story.
4) To quote an old Joanie Mitchell song, “There's something lost and something gained, in living everyday.” The Hispanic migration to South Florida has produced many disruptions and resentments (which I think are largely due to the politically-charged anti-Castro hard-line among some the Cuban “exile” community). On the other hand, the Hispanics are overwhelmingly good people who want to see their kids do better than they did, and be a part of American culture. Just as we Southerners still like grits for breakfast and use the term “y'all,” so too are Hispanics tied to their cultural past. But when I bring fifteen young teenagers to a McDonalds after a soccer game, you'd be hard pressed to tell me how the American-born, the Mexican, the Brazilian or the Colombian differ in their behavior (they’re all goof-balls!).
5) On lightning -- there are a lot of summer thunderstorms in South Florida, but even more in Central Florida. Millions of people who attend Disney World, Busch Gardens and the other attractions seem to survive. Obvious precautions should be taken to avoid lightning strikes, but the real danger in the western suburbs is the traffic.
One more thought on Miami -- the most significant effect of the Cuban migration is that it undoubtedly prevented the City of Miami from become a black majority municipality.
This is exactly why I love the blogosphere. Thanks, Dan.
By the way: I normally italicize quotes here, but I thought it was easier on the eyes not to put such a large block of text in italics.
There was an amusing contrast between two reactions today to John Snow's selection as treasury secretary -- and to the company he currently heads, railroad giant CSX. (I work in a building directly across the street, incidentally, from Union Pacific Railroad.)
From Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute:
I expect Mr. Snow will particularly understand the importance of an investment-friendly tax code given that firms such as CSX form the backbone of a productive economy with large investments in capital equipment.
Among Wyeth's observations are these regarding Will's comments on James Clyburn, the only black member of the state's congressional delegation:
I don't like this part because it paints Clyburn as a Southern-fried Al Sharpton, with silly notions about yard signs and hustling street money. It strikes me as shades of "Birth of a Nation" carcicatures of Reconstruction era black lawmakers.
That stereotype DOES NOT apply AT ALL to Jim Clyburn.
Jim Clyburn got his start in politics as a racial conciliator. In the last election that openly turned on the issue of segregation, the 1970 governor's race, Clyburn ran the field organization for John West, who then repaid him by making him head of the newly created state analogue to the EEOC. Clyburn spent the next twenty years helping South Carolina business get out of discrimination problems of their own making. Jim Clyburn is NOT Earl Hilliard or Cynthia McKinney. He is a savvy politician who deserves better from a national political reporter.
I linked the other day to a weird Web site called “Blackpeopleloveus.com” and asked whether people thought it was satire or a vehicle for closet racism, as some letters to the site indicated.
I received two messages saying the site is intended for laughs:
It is indeed a satire; the site's authors were guests on WNYC radio's "On the Line" (call-in show with Brian Lehrer) recently. ...
And:
The only mystery here is how anybody could think this site is something besides lighthearted satire. The makers of the site (a brother and sister team who earlier earned notoriety by starting up a very funny rejection hotline: a person who wants to cold-shoulder you directs you to the line and you get your choice of rejection messages) have been interviewed about it and have made their intention pretty clear. I suppose the spectre of "unconscious racism" could be raised, but the site directs most of its (mild) barbs at whites, not at blacks. If unconscious antipathy is present, there isn't a lot of it.
Ag subsidies, depopulation and Great Plains farmers
As Virginia Postrel indicates today, it makes sense for me, as a Nebraska-based blogger, to comment on the NYT's Week in Review article that talked about the striking depopulation in parts of the Great Plains.
I'm no expert on farm policy, but I have lived in the Plains region for three years now (moving from my native North Carolina), and I have these observations:
The gross excesses of this year's farm bill has triggered an understandable reaction from urbanites. The Times' article is one reflection of that dynamic. Rural residents in Nebraska and neighboring states saw a flurry of similarly themed articles from Eastern papers in the 1980s, when it was suggested that large areas of the Great Plains be converted into a "buffalo commons."
To take a small issue first:
Readers might think, from reading the Times article, that Loup County is prime farmland. On the contrary, it's in Nebraska's Sand Hills -- an area quite ill unsuited to stereotypical row crop farming. It is, however, perfectly suited for large-scale ranching. (Only Texas has more beef cattle than Nebraska.)
The conditions in Loup County, in other words, were never conducive in the first place to significant demographic growth.
Nicholas Kristof did a column on the same topic last September, and I wrote an extensive blog essay responding to it. My theme was that parachute journalists such as Kristof tend to paint the Plains region in broad strokes, neglecting to explain nuances (such as the fact that Loup County is in the Sand Hills). A good friend of mine, a native Nebraskan, offered his own thoughts, which I also posted.
As I mentioned, red-state farmers have become a particular target of ire for The New York Times in the wake of the farm bill's excesses. In addition to the Kristof column and the Week in Review article, a recent Times editorial laid all the blame for Mexico's farm problems on subsidies to U.S. farmers. The piece singled out corn farmers in Kansas and Nebraska.
Let me take a moment to examine the Times' approach on that topic.
U.S. ag protectionism unquestionably plays a part in regard to trade with Mexico (although Mexico’s corn subsidies average $150 a ton, compared to $85 in this country). The Nebraska-based newspaper where I work has editorialized against the bloat of this year's farm bill (and against its likely violation of WTO limits on subsidy levels).
At the same time, however, The Economist recently explained in detail how the Mexican farm sector has brought major problems on itself by failing, in many cases, to invest in improvements for irrigation and transportation. “It is the high cost of Mexican farming that makes it so uncompetitive,” the magazine said. (Many Mexican farmers, however, did make needed investments, and Mexico's overall farm exports have risen since the advent of NAFTA.)
The article pointed out the failure of many Mexican hog farmers to control disease. In fact, disease is so widespread for Mexican hogs that only two Mexican states are currently allowed to export pork, and then only to Japan. The U.S. ag sector can't be blamed for that.
The Times editorial mentioned none of those factors. It focused instead only on the U.S.-farmer-as-bad-guy theme.
Anti-globalization activists, The Economist noted, are trying to block the creation of factories in rural Mexico, arguing that the traditional farm economy needs to be preserved in its entirety. But even the Mexican government tacitly agrees that many farmers need to be shifted into better-paying factory jobs -- that's why Mexican negotiators (in contrast to the Canadians) decided a decade ago to agree to the elimination of all tariffs on farm trade with the U.S. by 2008.
Bottom line for me: U.S. ag policy can be legitimately faulted on a range of points. Just beware, please, of resorting to simplistic descriptions of conditions on the Plains.
An op-ed in Monday's Washington Post seems correct in arguing that the economic and political progress in the Kurdish region of Iraq can serve as a model for the rest of that country.
Saddam Hussein's regime tried to isolate the Kurdish north after the no-fly zone was established in 1991. Since 1996, the Iraqi government has done its best to short-circuit economic development projects there funded by the U.N.-coordinated Oil for Food program. But the Kurdish region, with a population of 3.6 million, has made impressive strides in terms of development and the promotion of political dialogue and social pluralism.
From the op-ed, by Barham Salih, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq:
Against these odds, we have revived Iraqi Kurdistan. In 11 years we have rebuilt some 4,000 villages, set up two universities and opened more than 2,700 schools. Protected by U.S. and British air power, we have created an environment of freedom unique in Iraqi history, in which Kurds, Turkomens, Assyrian Christians and Arabs enjoy cultural and political rights.
My home city of Sulaimani alone has more than 130 media outlets, including 13 TV stations and dozens of newspapers -- as well as unrestricted access to the Internet and satellite TV.
Building freedom has not been easy. Conflict between the two major Kurdish parties stalled democratization and cost many innocent lives. ...
The hard task of reconstruction has taught us to forsake the dream of an independent Kurdistan. ... Independence might give us a Kurdish postage stamp, but it would mean a dire future as an isolated, shunned statelet in a landlocked corner of the Middle East.
The disavowal of independence from Iraq seems smart, for the reason he cites, although it wouldn't be surprising if the tumult that would follow a U.S. invasion would spur irredentist calls from some Kurds.
Robin Wright, a veteran foreign policy correspondent who has traveled extensively through the Kurdish area, described the region's economic progress last month in a "New Hour" interview:
One of the things that is so striking about the north, which was devastated when Iraq ruled up until 1991 is the way it's thriving today ... Saddam's intention was to starve the Kurds in the north ... But, in fact, the Kurds began to rebuild and under the protection of U.S. and British warplanes and then the Oil for Food program that was introduced in 1996, Kurds began to convert the north, and it is in many ways a model for what the outside world would like to see in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is ousted. ...
Whether it's a free press -- dozens of different feisty independent newspapers, independent television -- the return of the Kurdish language in the north, the fact that there are a lot of new political parties that have been licensed, there is the beginning of a democracy in the north.
An article from the San Francisco Chronicle from Sept. 3, 2001, provided useful details:
Prosperity has not yet arrived, but it can be said that these northern provinces, which until a decade ago were Iraq's most backward, are much better off under self-rule.
The old currency -- still the dinar -- is now worth more than 100 times its counterpart in Iraq. A university professor earns a minimum of $250 a month; in Baghdad he might earn one-tenth of that.
There are Mercedes-Benzes, even an occasional BMW, on newly paved highways. Hotels are opening, and open-air restaurants flourish beside mountain streams -- patronized mainly by tourists from the ever-expanding Kurdish diaspora, or Iranians who cross the border for a weekend of dancing, drinking and a veil-free environment for women.
A swath of territory the size of Switzerland whose population of 3.6 million outnumbers many U.N. member-states, Kurdistan, while technically remaining part of Iraq, is surreptitiously acquiring the attributes -- functional, political, cultural and economic -- of independence. ...
The article describes ways in which the Iraqi governments attempts to hinder use of Oil for Food money for development projects in the north. Then it adds:
But there is one field in which Hussein's obstructionism hasn't worked -- one in which his own callous refusal to care for his own people is exposed for the world to see.
Hussein has made sick and dying Iraqi children the centerpiece of his anti-sanctions campaign. But they are not dying in Kurdistan in anything like the numbers seen in Iraq.
According to the most recent UNICEF figures, the infant mortality rate in Kurdistan is a high 72 per 1,000. But the figure is 131 per 1,000 in Hussein-controlled territory.
There is only one possible reason for such a remarkable discrepancy: Hussein himself.
The three posts today are all on the same theme: looking at the social prejudices of historical figures. Those posts all flow from a long analysis posted here on Sunday about Trent Lott and the Dixiecrat matter. Other topics since Friday: the debate over conservative domination of the press; South Florida; and a Good Samaritan.
Topics in the pipeline: French economic policy; judging the "racism" of previous generations; morality and foreign policy; a tangent relating to German history in the mid-20th century; a U.N.-related matter; and some leftover Confederate battle flag aspects.
The Lincoln Plawg’s set of posts on the Dixiecrat issue, linked by InstaPundit, vividly provides historical context about how many politicians of the 1940s (FDR, Harry Truman, Claude Pepper, among others) were hardly fervent champions of civil rights in some instances. John Smith ably explains at Plawg that by today’s standards, the parameters for accepted discourse in the 1940s, even in the North, often allowed remarkably harsh statements about minorities and often channeled the policy conversation into narrow limits.
In 1943, for instance, researchers at Fisk University decided to launch a new journal titled A Monthly Summary of Events and Trends in Race Relations. The academicians had been prompted to start the journal by a major urban race riot that year -- not in a Deep South city but in Detroit.
The journal later reported that for a 10-month period in 1943, 242 “major incidents involving Negro-white conflict” had occurred in 47 cities. Forty-six percent of the incidents were in the South, 42 percent in the North and 12 percent in the West.
One issue of the journal referred to what it called “interminority conflicts involving, particularly, Negroes and Poles and Irish Catholics in such Northern cities as Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago and Buffalo.”
From 1943 until the end of 1948, the staff of Race Relations monitored and reported myriad crises, outbreaks, protests, court battles, hostilities and alliances among the races nationwide. ...
Increasingly, Race Relations also covered acts of white resistance. It reported a case of arson in Redwood City, California, that destroyed the home of a black veteran in a white neighborhood, and the more tragic case of a Fantana, California, family who were engulfed in the flames of a similar, racially motivated arson. It included a strike of white schoolchildren in Gary, Indiana, who refused to attend school with blacks, and the massive “sick leaves” mysteriously taken by white restaurant and hotel workers in Cincinnati during the NAACP convention there. And it included an escalating battle over housing in Chicago -- a “restrictive covenant war.”
In his posts, John Smith notes that Alabama Gov. “Big Jim” Folsom, among several Southern political leaders, wasn’t regarded as a race-baiter. That follows from everything I’ve read about him -- not that he was progressive on civil rights, either. When the Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Ala., in July 1948, Folsom, as a Democratic governor, tried to straddle the fence. He made a brief, pro forma appearance at the convention but otherwise made no effort to tie his political fate with that of Thurmond & Co. In contrast, Mississippi’s governor was Thurmond’s Dixiecrat running mate.
In discussing social prejudices in the 1940s, it is relevant to note how anti-Semitism was expressed openly in this country during that time, even in Congress. I talked about that point in a post in October, describing a Terry Gross interview with historian Michael Beschloss:
FDR would be stunned, Beschloss said, if he could come back today and hear that he is now criticized for failing to bomb the concentration camps. At the time, Roosevelt expressed no interest in discussing the plight of Jewish internees. FDR indicated that to focus on the concentration camps, which he had heard of early in the war, would have allowed anti-Semites to accuse the administration of fighting a war for Jewish interests rather than American ones. Anti-Semitism was quite potent and unabashed in some quarters of American society at the time, Beschloss said. Some members of the U.S. Senate delivered remarkably hostile remarks about Jews while speaking on the Senate floor, he said. ...
Even after the war had ended and the full horrors of the concentration camps were revealed, Harry Truman continued to make cutting remarks against Jews in his private written comments. Ironic, of course, given that his administration took the bold step of recognizing Israel at its creation.
Truman, to his credit, desegregated the nation’s armed forces and established a national civil rights commission intended to push the nation toward progress in regard to race relations. At the same time, however, John Smith at The Lincoln Plawg cites a quote by Truman, from his Senate days in the late 1930s, in which he said he didn’t personally support a federal anti-lynching although he would feel politically obligated to vote for it.
In light of that statement, it’s a bit ironic that Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard, goes to such lengths to heap praise on Theodore Roosevelt. TR, after all, didn’t hesitate to express contempt toward non-whites.
The new edition of Cato Policy Report, for example, has an essay that is ferociously hostile to Roosevelt. (It’s over the top, really -- a modern, industrial society is going to need government regulation, and it’s no sin that TR recognized that fact. Of course, he did move steadily to the political left so that by the time of his 1912 presidential campaign, his views had veered into outright radicalism.)
The Cato essay includes several atrocious Roosevelt quotes on the topic of race. To cite only one example: “A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high place; the Negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else.”
Roosevelt, the essay notes, called on white Americans to be “good breeders” to prevent “race suicide.” TR, in line with many elite intellectuals of the day, routinely employed racially chauvinistic language, praising whites as innately superior over other races. The essay quotes historian Diane Paul, who wrote that Roosevelt “probably did more than any other individual to bring the views of academic race theorists to ordinary Americans.”
Such a discussion raises the point about how far one should go in judging past generations by current moral standards. I intend to address that in a post later this week.
W.J. Cash observed in “The Mind of the South” that old-time Southern traditionalists had a “tendency toward unreality.” Their mental “world-construction,” he argued, was “mainly a product of fantasy.” Cash’s point would seem to apply to Trent Lott’s egregious public praise for the Dixiecrat movement of 1948.
I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.
Perhaps Lott felt obligated by some diehard sense of state pride, given that Thurmond’s Dixiecrat running mate in 1948 was a Mississippian -- Fielding Wright, the state’s governor. Perhaps Lott was trying to be polite and in the process forgot to apply the circumspection that politicians normally feel obligated to use when referring back to the checkered political career of Thurmond, a one-time arch-segregationist.
Most likely, though, Lott was tripped up by the long tradition, among certain Southerners in certain eras, of using double-talk, obfuscation and cynicism in excusing certain things: Describing slavery, at the time, as paternalism. Or lynching, in the 1890s, as justice. Apologists rationalized the disenfranchisement of blacks as essential to social order. They touted underfunded blacks-only public schools, with a straight face, as “equal” to those for whites. They justified opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation as an innocuous safeguarding of constitutional principles.
And they held up Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign in 1948 as a mere defense of states’ rights.
Lott's praise for the Dixiecrat movement certainly moves the Republican Senate leader's post a long way from the days of Everett Dirksen, who encouraged his party in 1964 to vote for Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act -- a sterling moment in congressional history. (And a sterling moment for the Supreme Court would come two years later, when its South Carolina vs. Katzenbach decision rejected the states’-rights argument and at long last revivified the federal powers, first enunciated in the Civil War amendments, to enforce the civil rights of all Americans.)
Other birthday pronouncements for Thurmond sidestepped, out of politeness, the unpleasant parts of his career in public life. Lott’s ill-considered statements serve a useful purpose, though, by drawing attention to what the Dixiecrat movement was actually about. (Kudos to blogger Atrios, in particular, for pointing out the naked racism of that crusade.)
The Dixiecrat movement began to come together in 1948 when segregationist-minded dissidents walked out of the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia. A leader of the walkout was “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner whose fascistic tactics in attacking civil rights demonstrators would shock the nation in the 1960s.
Birmingham, in fact, was the site of the Dixiecrat’s convention, held in July 1948. A scattering of delegates attended from several non-Southern states, including Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.
Thurmond, as the movement's presidential nominee, easily adopted the time-honored double-speak of Southern white supremacy. As described by John Egerton in his book “Speak Now Against the Day,” Thurmond’s strategy
was, first, to raise the specter of a black invasion of the South’s lily-white temples of segregation -- churches, schools, theaters, swimming pools, bedrooms -- and then, denying racial motivation, to “defend as a matter of principle” what he described as a federal assault on states’ rights.
In his acceptance speech, Thurmond, who was governor of South Carolina at the time, repeated his crowd-pleasing line that there were “not enough troops in the army” to force desegregation down the throats of the white South. To reporters, he would say over and over again that he wasn’t preoccupied with white supremacy -- what really worried him were the dangers of “police state tactics ... a federal gestapo ... ”
Meanwhile, [vice presidential nominee] Fielding Wright, a true believer in white supremacy, would be free to carry heavier weapons, and to fire them at will.
The night that Thurmond’s nomination was approved by the convention, a group of revelers in Birmingham produced a stuffed dummy, labeled it Harry Truman, put a noose around its neck and conducted a mock lynching. Someone attached a scrawled message to its coat: “TRUMAN KILLED BY CIVIL-RIGHT.”
Thurmond’s pretense that Dixiecratism was devoid of racist sentiment was hard to square with the South Carolinian’s own stated racism. The national press noted, for instance, an incident involving Thurmond and William H. Hastie, appointed by Truman as governor of the Virgin Islands.
Thurmond invited Hastie for a visit to the Governor’s Mansion in Columbia, and Hastie responded appreciatively, extending an invitation for Thurmond to visit the Virgin Islands.
But when Thurmond learned that Hastie was black, matters abruptly soured.
“I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro,” Thurmond thundered. “Of course, it would have been ridiculous to invite him.”
How refreshing: No double-talk, just the ugly truth.
An online bulletin board included a discussion Friday night on the subject, “Florida vs. New York,” meaning which was the most desirable place to live. A lot of the comments focused on the nature of South Florida. I can’t vouch for one writer’s claims, but I found them interesting:
Miami was a ghost town when the Cubans arrived in the 60's. ... the kids went to school in english and a natural bi-lingualness developed. (There was a similar but smaller movement in Union City and West New York, two towns in northeast NJ). Most immigrated Cubans knew or learned english.
Since SoFla it is a bi-lingual area, it caters to many spanish-speaking tourists as Los Angeles does. It attract new immigrants, because they can at least get by while learning english. These people work at all the hotels everyone visits in Miami. They all want to learn english and most do.
English is still the prevalent language and public school is completely in english besides elective spanish class. People who do not speak english only get dead-end jobs. You have to learn english.
There is no dissolution of the English language in SoFla, simply there are many bi-lingual people. ...
There are many, many english only speakers who live and work in South Florida.
Another writer offered a dissent:
Sadly this is no longer true. The immigrants in the 1960s wanted to learn English. The Mariel immigrants just don't care.
By the way: The second writer made this meteorological observation:
The other problem with Miami (especially in the western suburbs) is that almost every day severe thunderstorms develop over the Everglades and stay around for hours making it very unsafe to go from work-car, car-shopping, car-house, work-bus, bus-shopping, bus-house, etc. Compared to northern storms, lightning usually fills the sky just about constantly giving no safe time to quick scoot outside.
I don't claim that this anecdote proves anything cosmic about people as far as class or race. But it's a true story, and it happened early this afternoon.
I went to a mall here in central Omaha to pick up a Christmas present. The parking lots, not surprisingly, were packed. I had park far away. When I finally got to the crosswalk, I waited and waited for cars to let me cross. (Maybe I should have tried to assert the pedestrian right-of-way, but I wasn't eager to step out in front of cars that were showing no indication of slowing down.)
Finally, a car stopped to let me cross. The vehicle was a scruffy old car with three middle-aged black people in it. I gave a wave of thanks, which was reciprocated by the driver. I couldn't help noticing that the Good Samaritan's car was quite a contrast to the parade of shiny SUVs and minivans that had failed to let me cross.
Strom Thurmond isn't the only U.S. senator from South Carolina to enjoy an extraordinary longevity in Congress. In 1944, Sen. Ellison "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina died after serving in the U.S. Senate since 1909. At the time of his death, he had served longer in that body that any prior member.
Here are the top dozen members for longevity in the Senate, with length of service for current members as of last January:
One of my most vivid memories from living in Washington, D.C., in the early '80s was the morning I was walking north along the street that runs in front of the Supreme Court building, on my way to one of the congressional office buildings. I happened to look down to see an elderly, fragile man in a suit being pushed in a wheelchair, coming in my direction. My eyes met his, and, in that fleeting moment, the old fellow gave off a sense of deep weariness and eroding physical strength. It was John Stennis.
There's a twist, though: My impression wasn't entirely correct. Stennis retained enough strength to win re-election in 1982. He served out that full term, retiring in 1989. He died in 1995. That was more than a decade since I'd seen him on that sidewalk in downtown D.C.
It was widely reported this week that the Pew survey of global opinion indicated deep strains of opposition abroad to the Bush administration’s foreign policy. The poll results from Canada weren’t as bad, though they did indicate that Canadians retain a wariness about U.S. influence in their country. From a Globe and Mail article:
Most Canadians, 72 per cent, have a favourable attitude toward the United States, with 24 percent saying their opinion is very favourable and 48 per cent saying it's somewhat favourable. Only 27 percent have an unfavourable opinion.
Sixty-eight per cent of Canadians support the U.S.-led war on terrorism, while 27 per cent oppose it.
The influence of the United States in the world is less favourably regarded. More than two-thirds of Canadians, 68 per cent, say American policies increase the gap between rich and poor. Only 37 percent say it's good that American ideas are spreading to Canada, with 54 percent saying it's a bad thing. However, 77 per cent like American music, movies and television.
I don't know if it's been mentioned at other sites, but the blog world's least favorite current movie, Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," has won the best documentary award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. The National Board of Review is made up of teachers, writers, actors and movie production workers.
If you fly an American flag, it should be at half-staff on Saturday, to salute those who died at Pearl Harbor, according to a presidential proclamation. Our household added a flag pole and flag several months ago. It's become a nice part of our lives.
Richard N. Haass, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (who headed Middle East policymaking in the first Bush White House) gave a speech this week titled “Towards Greater Democracy in the Muslim World.” He framed things in a good news/bad news format. Some of what he told the Council on Foreign Relations:
In Morocco this past September, citizens voted in the freest, fairest, and most transparent elections in the country s history, creating a diverse new parliament.
In October, Bahrainis cast votes for the first time in thirty years to elect a parliament. It was also the first time women ran for national office. Just last week, Oman’s Sultan Qaboos announced that he is extending the vote for the Consultative Shura Council to all his country s adult citizens. Earlier this year, Qatar announced a new constitution in anticipation of upcoming parliamentary elections. Yemen now boasts not only a multiparty system and an elected parliament but also directly elected municipal officials and, since 1999, a directly elected president. ...
Elsewhere, we see many elements of democracy in Muslim-majority states like Malaysia and Indonesia. We hear inspiring Muslim voices advocating pluralism and democracy, from Mohamed Talbi in Tunisia to Nurcholish Madjid, half a world away in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. These are just a few examples of the democratic ferment taking place elsewhere in the Muslim world, from Albania to Djibouti, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone. These debates are nowhere close to being resolved ... But that should not obscure how much progress is being made.
Forty percent of Muslims live as minorities in countries such as India, France and South Africa, Haass noted.
The bad news Haass described is pretty familiar in the blog world. He wasn’t sparing in describing the democracy gap in the Arab-Muslim world:
... despite these encouraging signs, we must recognize that there is, in fact, a freedom deficit in many parts of the Muslim world, and in the Arab world in particular.
Adrian Karatnycky, Freedom House s president, documents in that organization’s 2001-2002 Survey of Freedom, "a dramatic gap between the levels of freedom and democracy in the Islamic countries particularly in their Arabic core and in the rest of the world."
The democracy gap between the Muslim world and the rest of the world is huge. Only one out of four countries with Muslim majorities have democratically elected governments.
Moreover, the gap between Muslim countries and the rest of the world is widening. Over the past twenty years, democracy and freedom expanded in countries in Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia. In contrast, the Muslim world is still struggling. Indeed, by Freedom House’s standards, the number of "free" countries around the world increased by nearly three dozen over the past twenty years, but not one of them was a Muslim majority state.
John Rosenberg, at his blog Discriminations, has fun tweaking the Washington Post (here and here), saying the paper’s argument on affirmative action -- well, I’m cite his own phrasing:
In an editorial today asking the Supremes to avoid "a heavy-handed imposition by judges" and "to leave Michigan's program alone," the Washington Post urged the Court to defer to "the political arena" to deal with the propriety of racial preferences.
There was an odd sense of deja vu about this editorial, sounding as it did so much like the advice the Richmond and Montgomery papers gave the Court as it considered Brown v. Board of Education.
John also mischievously takes the text of the Southern Manifesto (a 1956 statement of principle against federally mandated school desegregation signed by a large group of Southern members of Congress) and substitutes "racial preferences" or "diversity" for "segregation" or related terms.
By the way: One of the signers of the manifesto was a then-Democratic senator named Strom Thurmond. Among the others: Sam Ervin and J. William Fulbright.
I was a bit surprised to see that another signer was Sen. W. Kerr Scott, a populist-minded farmer who had outwitted Democratic Party barons in North Carolina to win that state’s gubernatorial election in 1948. In 1949, Scott stunned political observers by naming liberal Frank Porter Graham (president of the University of North Carolina, who had served on Harry Truman’s civil rights commission) to fill a U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of the incumbent.
Graham was an enormously dedicated and decent-minded public servant, although his views often tended toward dreamy idealism. He was ousted in the 1950 Democratic primary, in which the topic of race relations was a key factor. He later served as a U.N. mediator between India and Pakistan in regard to Kashmir. After he had left service with the U.N., Graham said he was sure the problem could have been resolved had the two sides only agreed to carry out his plan for reconciliation. He found it hard to believe that sweet reason would be so forcefully rebuffed.
The site is in English and by all appearances offers a serious-minded examination of some of the general’s campaigns.
And don’t forget the guestbook, with notes from France, England and the American South (or, as one Alabama sorehead churlishly put it in his message, “an occupied, conquered nation formerly known as the Confederate States of America.”)
And what language is that one message in -- Greek?
It should also be remembered that "rednecks", in the narrower sense of lowland Southern whites, and "hillbillies", again in the narrower sense of Appalachian/Ozark populations of primarily Scots-Irish (or to use Fischer's more accurate term, "British Borderers"), have often been on opposite sides of the fence. The interesting and impressive maps and discussions in Fischer's “Albion's Seed,” Kevin Phillips' “The Cousins' Wars,” and Freehling's “The South vs. The South” all demonstrate that the highland areas have often taken the opposite stand from the lowland South on political issues, including secession in 1861.
It's also wrong to equate the Scots-Irish population with Southerners per se; that population group extends well into Pennsylvania and even into parts of New York State. Western Pennsylvania, where I grew up, has a very strong Scots-Irish component in the countryside. When I went to Belfast a lot of the family names on signs, etc. were very familiar from my childhood.
Of course, one thing that unites hillbillies and rednecks is having urbanites from the Northeast look down on them. They see eye-to-eye on rejecting that.
Just as people viewing the world “from the comfort of suburban Tennessee” no doubt bridle at Euro-snobbery directed at them.
An odd phrase in the speech leaped out at me: “destruction machine.”
Clinton used it to characterize the conservative activists, commentators, politicians and reporters who, by his description, gang up relentlessly on Democratic leaders. It’s an updated version of Hillary Clinton’s reference to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” From his speech:
We cannot wilt in the face of higher negative ratings for our leaders. They have a destruction machine, we don't. Somebody has got to lead the Democrats in the House, in the Senate and in running for president, and the rest of us have got to stand up for them and stand with them when they're subject to these attacks.
Republicans, Clinton said, “have an increasingly right-wing and bellicose conservative press,” while “we (Democrats) have an increasingly docile establishment press, to be fair, partly because of the enormous trauma of September 11th and its aftermath.”
I’m not one for fanatical, Limbaugh-like deconstructions of every little turn of phrase used by Democrats, but Clinton did say that Democrats have the establishment media, meaning, as I interpret it, that Democrats generally have them on their side. I suppose it could be said he meant that Democrats “have” the establishment press as the last hope for objective reporting. But the parallel construction in the sentence indicated he meant the GOP has one media faction on its side and the Democratic Party has another on its.
Some may carp that I'm only piling on as far as the blog world's Germanophobic rhetoric, but it should be pointed out that Schroeder's government is announcing significant defense cuts this week. The Times of London sums them up as "big cuts in spending on key arms projects."
German criticism of U.S. military muscle and "unilateralism" is hard to take when German officials are unapologetically shortchanging their own country's military capabilities. The same goes for German complaints about the yawning gap between their country's military capability and that of the United States.
As the Times article points out, the German government's decision directly undercuts a recent pledge by NATO officials to reduce that technology gap.
Former White House aide John DiIulio has apologized for his comments in Esquire in which he blasted the Bush administration, which he said is being run by political opportunists he derided as “Mayberry Machiavellis.” Andrew Sullivan posted some thoughts on the matter Tuesday.
I grew up about a three hours’ drive southwest of the North Carolina town that served as the inspiration for Mayberry. A good friend of mine (who grew up about four hours to the southwest of the Ur-Mayberry) sent me a wonderful e-mail this week, inspired by DiIulio’s colorful phrase:
Mayberry Machiavelli!!
What a delicious title. I wish that such an episode had been made. Who would have been the Machiavelli -- Barney? Goober? Maybe Howard Sprague?
Floyd: Ohhh, I hadn't thought of that, Andy.
Andy: Yeah, I know, Floyd. It kind of threw me for a loop, too.
Floyd: He's a real Machiavelli, isn't he?
Andy: Well, I don't know if I'd --
Floyd: A real Machiavelli, Andy. And right here in Mayberry.
Barney: Aw, cut it out, Floyd. I didn't hear him sing a note!
Andy: What?
Barney: You know. The opera singer. I heard him on the radio once in Mount Pilot. (sings) "Sa-an-ta-a Lu-u chee- ee- a!"
Andy: I don't think that's who he's talking about, Barney.
Floyd (musing): Mayberry Machiavelli! It has kind of a ring to it, doesn't
it, Andy.
I suppose I could try to explain to Andrew Sullivan who Floyd and Barney are, but I'd probably only confuse him.
Update: In regard to the DiIulio matter itself, Esquire is disputing claims in DiIulio's apology by releasing a long letter he sent to interviewer Ron Suskind in October.
One of several e-mail acquaintances I’ve been especially pleased to make since starting this blog has been Chris Scott, a grad student in public history in South Carolina. Chris, who blogs at The Insecure Egotist in between exams, was spurred by my posts about “rednecks” to note two related terms from Southern cultural history: “hillbilly” and “Toby”:
In my research on Snuffy Jenkins, a Carolina banjo player and "hillbilly" musician, I've found that the term "Hillbilly" created ambivalent reactions. Some hated it, but others thought that it was just fine, a perfect moniker/nickname for themselves. These people embraced the rural aspects of their native southern culture in direct opposition to perceived threats from the Northern cities.
Encroaching national phenonomenon threatened their regional distinctiveness. As a result, some took what was otherwise a threat and embraced it as the embodiment of what was laudable and superior in their culture to the dominant trends. Although we are seventy-to-eighty years removed from this specific phenomenon, I imagine certain amounts of this same argument still resonate across the South, or any regionally distinctive population for that matter, and also for those who use the term “redneck” in a nonbelligerent manner.
In another historical parallel, a popular figure in early twentieth century entertainment was the Toby, a red-headed, freckle faced traveling show character that hated sin, loved mother, home, and heaven, and was natively bright, if uneducated. He was so loved by rural audiences that a whole sub-genre of Toby theatre grew out of the traveling show medium.
To these rural audiences, he represented their culture in caricature in response to the same encroaching threats to their regional culture. And by regional culture I do not simply mean the Confederate flag or racism, but a particular brand of religiousness, a folk heritage, and an economic way of life that the industrial revolution was swiftly changing (after a relatively stable, and long, period of time when the south was predominantly agricultural).
Good stuff.
Anyone interested in further exploring such aspects of Southern culture will find a terrific resource here, affiliated with my undergraduate alma mater.
The two made clear their differing perspectives in a transcript at FrontPage magazine.com. (The transcript is of a symposium discussion in Prague from October. The Trilateral Commission sponsored the event.)
Patten fervently made the case for multilateralism. And he bluntly criticized neoconservatives and U.S. “unilateralism.”
Perle’s point-by-point rebuttal of claims by Patten makes for a good read. After Patten said that Europeans are striving to be an ally but also to serve as a “counterweight” to American power, Perle responded that such an approach hardly seemed evidence of a European desire to be an ally of the United States.
Among Perle’s other comments:
Chris Patten said “We must work through the United Nations.” I'm very troubled at the idea that the United Nations is the solely legitimizing institution when it comes to the use of force.
Why the United Nations? Is the United Nations better able to confirm legitimacy than, say, a coalition of liberal democracies? Does the addition of members of the UN, like China for example, or Syria, add legitimacy to what otherwise might be the collective policy of countries that share our values? I don't think so. It is a dangerous trend to consider that the United Nations, a weak institution at best, an institution that includes a very large number of nasty regimes, is somehow better able to confirm legitimacy than institutions like the European Union or NATO.
Chris puts a great deal of stock in containment and the rule-book. To be sure, there are situations in which containment is an entirely appropriate policy. And we all wish there was a rule-book that was adhered to by everyone. But there are those who break the rules, we know that, and containment is not always effective. ...
And by the way, it might be worth some time looking back at the history and results of the Arms Control agreements of the Cold War. We now know that the Soviet Union had 50,000 nuclear weapons, 20,000 more than we ever knew. They hid far more weapons than were ever subject to limitation in the course of those negotiations. ...
When we talk about unilateralism, let's remember German unilateralism. How else should one interpret Chancellor Schroeder's position that not only would Germany not participate, but even if the United Nations conducted an operation against Iraq, Germany wouldn't participate in that? Is that not unilateralism? What about French unilateralism?
There's plenty of unilateralism in the world. No one much likes it and it's a tragedy if the United States, in defending itself and in defending the common values of all of us, is driven to acting alone, or nearly alone.
Perle also made a useful distinction between multilateralism and "globalism." The latter he characterized pejoratively, saying it was the agenda of the Clinton administration and remains the guiding star strategically for the pro-ICC, pro-Kyoto band of diplomats and activists.
... most Europeans, still don't get the post-9/11 world. They did not experience the transformative moment that so profoundly changed America. And, absent an attack on their own soil, they're not likely to share America's fundamentally altered notion of national security any time soon.
Most Europeans, and Germans in particular, still see the world through a pre-9/11 lens. ...
Americans perceive themselves to be at war. Germans see the war as something that may still come, and they want to avoid it at almost any cost. "To us, war means Dresden," one Greens Party politician told me. (He was born long after the firebombing of Dresden.) In Germany, that trumps any further discussion. ...
It's important to remember that Germans, like most Europeans, have no worldwide foreign policy. They have some global aspirations, such as permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council, but they have no global vision. Instead, they have interests, they have relationships, and they have a strong notion of process — of how nations should ideally relate to one another (mainly through international institutions). But they have little developed sense of power and its uses ...
One way to know that Germans still don't get 9/11 is that they often couch their opposition to firm action in Iraq in terms that are more anti-Bush than anti-American. During a long string of conversations in Berlin at election time, my interlocutors always veered quickly from Iraq into a string of Bush administration decisions that they hate: rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, last year's new steel tariffs. ...
But what does any of this have to do with going to war against Saddam Hussein? The answer is nothing. Yet the Germans seem unable to distinguish between objectionable environmental and trade policies and desirable security policies. They bundle them all together, and seem to give them equal weight. ...
In Berlin, I often asked Germans how they would feel about Iraq if the president were named Clinton or Gore, and had supported Kyoto and the ICC, but still had the same Iraq policy as Bush. Almost all said: "Oh, that would be different." They've confused the messenger with the message; their problem is Bush, when it should be Saddam Hussein.
Despite their preoccupation with Bush, it is nonetheless true that there's latent anti-Americanism in the German body politic. Its most explicit form is the reflexive rejection by the left of certain American values, economic realities, and lifestyle preferences — which they derisively label "American conditions," now a negative political code word in Germany. ...
Such misperceptions are driving a wedge between the United States and its friends in Europe. Our relationships with them are fundamentally shifting, and will probably never be quite the same again.
His description seems right on the mark. European naivete and prejudices continue to present huge complications for a realistic U.S. diplomacy.
Over the long term, though, the United States is going to need allies. The current America-as-hegemon environment isn’t likely to last; even the seemingly intractable Cold War conflict eventually evaporated. In coming decades, other centers of power will arise in the world. Sure, the United States is likely to remain the dominant power, and thankfully so. But over time it would hardly be a surprise if we saw slippage in our ability to convince or coerce other governments. And we could well face problems in exercising our sovereignty to use military force, given the way some NGOs and diplomats are working to reshape international law.
Range's article ends by saying it might take an attack of catastrophic terrorism on European soil before the Germans and other Continentals awaken to the geopolitical reality. Unfortunately, he's probably right about that too. And even then, many would probably find a way to put the blame on U.S. foreign policy.
Boy, this is a disconcerting question, even coming from an American. Any Canadian can tell you immediately what province Canada’s rednecks are in. The word may actually be more common in this country than it is in the U.S.; there is at least some kind of cultural stigma attached to hatred of the American South, but very little, in Canada, attached to hatred of the blue-eyed sheiks.
Of course, this use of the word "redneck" is really slightly inappropriate, since it's their affluence Albertans are resented for, not their poverty. Here's an entire two-part radio documentary on Canada's rednecks.
I got the link to the radio documentary to work once. But in subsequent checks I found that the CBC kept redirecting me to another URL.
Cosh also links to an article that talks about the promotional use of the term “redneck” in Alberta:
... the Globe and Mail [in July 1994] ran on its front page the bemused headline "Albertans proud to stick out their red necks." Since then, countless Alberta businesses have flocked to pitch products to a ready-made niche market. A Calgary stockbroker recorded "The Red Neck Song" in 1995, perhaps while wearing Edmonton-made Redneck Jeans. An Edmonton air traffic controller opened two Rednecks Haircut Emporiums for guys who "hate the smell of hairspray and perm solution." The Regency Hotel in Edmonton opened up a red-meat-laden Redneck Buffet. Now comes what may be the best marketing fit of all: redneck beer. ...
In 1999, Canadian commentator Judy Rebick used the term “redneck” as an epithet to insult Preston Manning, then-leader of the Progressive Conservatives. In an essay titled “The real Preston stood up,” Rebick wrote: “The United Alternative is dead. Long live bigotry and intolerance, Preston Manning seemed to be saying in his very long response to the Throne Speech. The real Preston Manning finally stood up. ... Manning demonstrated what the Progressive Conservative leadership has always known. Underneath that civil reserve lies a good old-fashioned Alberta redneck. As has been widely reported, Manning returned to what the media is calling "core Reform values." Anti-immigration, anti-Charter of Rights and Freedoms, anti-gay and lesbian families, and, most surprising, a call for ‘defining the rights of the unborn.’ ”
A Calgary resident responded to her column this way:
Preston Manning knows how to read us "redneck" (out here many of us treat that as the compliment I'm sure it is) Westerners. ...
As far as Western intolerance is concerned, Central and Eastern Canada are going to have to get used to the fact that the fastest growing, most politically active and financially strong area of Canada will no longer tolerate things as they are. We created a party that became the official opposition within 10 years. We will not rest until it is in power.
Another Calgary resident was pointed in rebuking Rebick’s use of “redneck”:
... Second, shame on you, especially as you are sooo tolerant and have been granted a national medium for your thoughts, for perpetuating a myth and a stereotype regarding the political beliefs of Albertans. It is an extremely cheap and lazy way to discount any ideas, good or bad, which come out of the mouth of someone that happens to live in my province.
Rebick eventually felt compelled to try to mend fences. In a message addressed to her readers, she wrote:
Obviously some people in Alberta were offended by my calling Preston Manning an Alberta redneck.
I did not intend to suggest that everyone in Alberta is a redneck. If someone called me a Toronto pinko, I wouldn't think that they meant that everyone in Toronto is a pinko.
I know lots of progressive people in Alberta, where I have spent a lot of time over the years. I also know that a number of people in Alberta wear the title "redneck' with pride. I even saw bumper stickers all over the University of Calgary saying "redneck and proud of it."
We've got our share of rednecks in Ontario too. It's not an issue of what province they come from. It's the politics I object to.
When I first expressed puzzlement last week at the use of “redneck” in the Canadian context, I had no idea about the term’s familiar use north of the border. It feels good to have my ignorance reduced, even if by only a smidgen, given its overall magnitude.
And: In a post below, I note that a good friend is chiding me for being too flippant in using the term “redneck,” given its frequent use as a slur against blue-collar Southerners. He has a point. I’ve been casual in using the term here and loosened up even further after reading the Colby Cosh post.
I linked the other day to an article about how anti-technology radical Jeremy Rifkin and biologist Stuart Newman are hoping to block human cloning by trying to get a patent for a “chimera,” a part-animal/part-human monstrosity. Roger Sweeny did some digging and e-mailed me additional info for which I'm grateful. Roger writes:
The patent that Rifkin and Newman filed for was not for a chimera itself but for 3 techniques that might be able to be used to form a chimera. Actually, I think the application is for these 3 techniques when they are used to form a human chimera (which, however, they have not been used for). There is undoubtedly some technical patent law here. A patent can be granted only for something that is "new, useful, and non-obvious." Existing things can be combined in "new, useful, and non-obvious ways" and still be patentable, but just what the standards are is something I don't know. I gather from some of the things I read that these are all existing techniques, and the Patent and Trademark Office said they did not meet the standards of novelty.
The patent application was rejected in 1999. What's going on now must be part of the appeals process.
Another reason given for rejecting the patent was that it would involve patenting humans, and the PTO has a policy against that.
“Regarding whether you can patent something you haven't actually done yet,” Roger writes, “the answer seems to be ‘maybe.’ ” From a link Roger provided to a June 1998 article in AgBiotechNet:
In many countries, for example the UK and Germany, the creation of chimaeric embryos containing human cells is already banned. In countries where it is not expressly prohibited, a combination of scientific difficulties and ethical reluctance has constrained researchers from conducting such research. Rifkin and Newman have exploited the fact that, in the United States, where no such law exists, a patent application need not be based on an actual experiment, but can be based merely on the description of a hypothetical experiment, provided the patent office can be persuaded of its credibility.
According to Pat Coyne, one of Washington-based lawyers that filed the patent, there is no need to have actually carried out the experiment, providing the idea meets the standard criteria for patentability. ... If the patent application is rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Rifkin and Stewart are committed to take their claim through the full legal appeals process, including if necessary to the Supreme Court, in order to generate a detailed debate on the extent to which human life is patentable. Rejection by the court would also have important implications for any other patent application on techniques in the same field. ...
Charles Van Horn, a Washington attorney who until 1988 directed the patent office's biotechnology examining group, said unusual applications like Newman's are traditionally held to a high standard of proof of feasibility. So Newman may not get very far without actually making some human chimaeras. ... The process of dealing with initial comments from the US Patent Office, and if necessary contesting legal decisions through various stages, is likely to take several years. During this time, as a patent applicant, Rifkin will have the legal standing to comment on similar applications made by others. Given this prospect, many in the biotechnology industry are viewing the application and the publicity campaign it is intended to stimulate as frivolous and irritating at best, and potentially disruptive at worst.
Roger also pointed out a detailed examination of the issue in Policy Review as well as a recent essay on the subject by Charles Colson.
Thirteen female teachers from Afghanistan just left the Omaha area after visiting schools and other sites here for five weeks. A chart in the Omaha World-Herald, where I work, compared some of the conditions between schools here and schools in Afghanistan. None of the information will be surprising, but I wanted to mention it anyway:
Classrooms:
Nebraska: Climate-controlled with desks for teachers and students.
Afghanistan: Some classes meet in tents or buildings without roofs; teachers lack desks, tables, chairs.
Technology:
Nebraska: Computers in classrooms and many students’ homes. Video networks link rural classrooms to teachers in foreign languages and other specialty classes.
Afghanistan: Few computers in country.
Teacher pay:
Nebraska: Average salary, $36,236.
Afghanistan: In rural provinces, some teachers have worked up to six months without pay.
Class size:
Nebraska: Statewide student-teacher ratio: 13.7.
Afghanistan: Classes commonly have more than 60 students.
Lunch:
Nebraska: Schools serves lunch and sometimes breakfast, subsidized for poor students.
Afghanistan: Schools don’t serve lunch.
A good friend, and a dedicated student of Southern history and culture, sent me an e-mail today:
Personally, I think that the word "redneck" is offensive because it is an insult hurled at people because of their social class, educational level, etc etc. in a way that would be absolutely forbidden if it were directed at any other class of people in America. The fact that some people like to refer to themselves as such doesn't change my argument one iota. Some black people call themselves you know what.
I would encourage you to ban the word from your conversation and thought. None of the people you refer to by this term had the advantages that you enjoyed growing up. Can you honestly say you would have turned out better in their shoes? I once read a very nice essay on the subject saying that poor white people were the only group in America that it was socially permissible to hate. I looked for it on the Internet but couldn't find it. So I wrote this instead, and sorry it sounds so preachy.
As I told my friend in my response, I am well aware that the word is often used hurtfully and with precisely the type of condescension he described. So, on the one hand, it can be insensitive to casually toss about a term like "redneck" at a blog (especially at a site like this that carps about slurs against people because of the region they hail from). On the other hand, the "redneck" posts at this site began on a legitimate point. A Canadian professor attempted to slur foreign policy "realists" by saying they were displaying "red neckism." There was nothing untoward in my exploring that, not least since, in my ignorance, I'd never heard the topic mentioned before in the Canadian context.
By the way: I discovered over the weekend that the use of "redneck" as a slur during political debate sparked an outcry in Canada several years back. I intend to post on that late tonight.
A well-written e-mail I quoted below, about the ubiquity of rednecks across U.S. regions, mentioned the word "whiggers" (a term I'd never heard before), saying it was equivalent to "white trash." Archie Waugh e-mailed me today saying that whiggers are not white trash, however, but instead are "white, usually middle-class, youths who emulate black 'gangsta' types. "
Other points made by Archie Waugh:
Ever see the Quentin Tarentino movie "True Romance"? Gary Oldman played the scariest "whigger" ever in that one. On a more humorous note, check out this webpage, a very clever spoof of the whigger phenomenon.
Great stuff. This is exactly why I started a blog site.
Not only have I been ignorant about "whiggers"; I have also been ignorant about Canadian rednecks. I got some interesting info on that topic over the weekend but my schedule was so scrambled I had no time to post on it or hardly anything else. I intend to post the Canadian redneck info tonight.
From an e-mail today sounding a different reaction in regard to the talk radio debate:
I have to say that in regard to talk radio, I feel like I'm in Wonderland. I don't think Daschle's comments regarding Rush Limbaugh were politically astute, but he hardly went out on a limb in making them.
Where I take issue with Limbaugh is in his assertions that "liberals" have no greater agenda other than the accumulation of power and the control of people's lives. The few times I have listened to him he has said words to the effect -- these people don't think like you and I do. His commentary is laced with insinuations that "liberals" have little or no love of their nations and its traditions; that they mock common American values; that they are, in fact, engaged in an insidious plot to undermine American freedoms.
Now the nature of politics is that we disagree on policies and lawmaking, but I find it distasteful to encourage people to view those with whom they might disagree as evil people.
I have had the opportunity to meet with a fair number of politicians and, whether they be liberal or conservative, by and large I have found they base their actions on what they believe is in the best interests of their constituencies, as they see it. (I will leave aside the influence of lobbyists in creating special interest legislation, since both sides are guilt of this).
The saving grace is that like so many others before him, Limbaugh, too, will fade away. And, of course, there will someone else to take his place.
