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.
I had a pleasant surprise this afternoon: Edward Boyd of Zonitics wrote me in regard to the red state/blue state post immediately below. Trying to end the two-U.S.-senator-per-state allocation would be especially difficult to achieve, he noted, because the Constitution’s Article V (explaining the amendment process) gives each state veto power in regard to changing its own number of U.S. senators. I had no idea of that stipulation.
The article says that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” That’s an indication of how strongly the representatives of small states looked on the issue during the original constitutional debates.
My thanks to the insightful and mysterious Mr. Boyd.
Here is the lead editorial in today's World-Herald:
Residents of the Bush "red states" had best beware.
Three years ago, they were verbally ripped for giving George W. Bush what critics insisted on viewing as an unfair electoral-vote advantage. That margin allowed him to trump Al Gore's popular-vote majority, provided by urbanized "blue states." In recent months, red-state-bashing has enjoyed a resurgence, spurred by what appears to be ferocious blue-state resentment of last year's $182 billion farm bill.
National newspapers and TV networks are sending reporters onto the high plains, searching for tales of woe. A range of opinionmeisters has even taken up the cry that the very settlement of the Great Plains was a historic "mistake." Blue-state enthusiasts are crunching numbers in remarkable variety -- electoral-vote allocations, state-by-state distribution of federal tax dollars, population represented per federal officeholder -- to find yet one more dart to hurl in the direction of red-state residents.
A key example: Low-population, GOP-leaning states such as Nebraska and other Plains states get two electoral votes each for their two seats in the U.S. Senate. Such an arrangement, critics claim, amounts to a slap in the face to heavily urban, Democratic-friendly states with far larger populations.
Fair enough. But, of course, this country might well have failed to reach agreement on a federal Constitution had it not been for the crucial compromise that protected the interests of small states by giving each of them two seats in the Senate. If blue-staters want to propose a constitutional amendment to end that arrangement, they're welcome to try. The likelihood of passage seems minuscule.
In fact, before critics leap to dismiss small-state protections as anachronistic and irrelevant in the 21st century, they should consider how things are handled in the 15-member European Union. There, voting power is weighted to give small states considerably more clout than their populations alone would warrant. Otherwise, the EU would lack the consensus needed to function.
Moreover, political scientist Jacob T. Levy of the University of Chicago notes that the Electoral College's "over-rewarding" to rural (red state) constituencies is largely counterbalanced by an advantage given to urban (blue state) ones. "The Electoral College over-rewards Democrats for their urban majorities in states such as New York," he writes, "and denies Republicans any benefit from their large rural votes in such places."
Nebraska's capital is named after a great American who promoted sectional reconciliation and fellowship. That ideal is still worthy of reverence. We urge those eager for a red-state/blue-state dustup to direct their energies toward more constructive pursuits.
Colin Powell hit the ground running after the State of the Union Address this week, doing interviews with five different European TV networks (from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain). From his interview with French television:
Q: How much time are you ready to give to the inspectors?
Powell: It's not how much time for the inspectors. People keep saying give the inspectors more time. More time to do what? Search in the dark? More time to be deceived by Saddam Hussein? That's not the right question.
The right question is: How much more time do we give Saddam Hussein? If he were to come out this afternoon and say, "I'm now going to tell the truth, here's where the biological weapons are, here are where the chemical rounds are, here is the rest of my nuclear program, here are the documents, here are all the people you want to interview," if he were to do that, then how much time the inspectors need almost doesn't make any difference. Give them as much time as they say they need to verify that they have destroyed all this material.
But the problem is he is not doing that. He continues to deceive. He continues to deny.
Q: The policy of the German Government is contradictory to what you've just said and to the American position. Do you feel this is a difference of opinion among friends that happens, or is it more serious?
Powell: It's a very strong difference of opinion between and among friends. Germany is a friend of the United States. As you may know, I began my military career in Germany. I've lived in Germany. I think I know Germany, and I have the warmest feelings toward Germany and the German people. But we have an honest disagreement on this issue. ...
Till another time: I'd intended to post tonight on the West's water woes, but I'm nodding off at the keyboard, so I will have to postpone. Four new posts on a variety of topics are immediately below, however.
Gary Moulton, a history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has labored for 20 years in overseeing the editing and production of the only complete multi-volume set of journals by the Lewis and Clark expedition. Moulton, much-praised for his work on the project, not only meticulously edited the journal entries but also developed an extensive index and oversaw a team of consultants who provided annotations on botany, zoology, astronomy, archaeology, linguists and medicine. Such detail explained the full context of the journal entries.
The University of Nebraska Press is the publisher. (UNP is the nation’s second-largest state university press, in terms of annual titles produced, behind only the University of California Press.) UNP, in a collaborative effort, is going to put the journals online, beginning in February with several hundred pages.
The first volume of the new edition, Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was published in 1983. The maps were published first so that they could be used as a resource and reference tool for succeeding volumes. Not all of the 129 historic maps in the Atlas came directly from the hand of Clark, the principal mapmaker, but all were closely associated with the expedition and most of them were Clark’s handiwork. Being my first foray into expedition materials, I was amazed at the beauty, elegance, and precision of Clark’s cartography. With no apparent training, working with crude and often unreliable instruments, and using dead reckoning for distances, one stands in awe of his draftsmanship. Clark’s maps are models of cartographic excellence.
South Carolina native Hastings Wyman, who has written the Southern Political Reporter since the late 1970s, spoke from the heart in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post:
Later, from 1967 through 1972, I served as legislative assistant to Sen. Thurmond. In 1970, I took a six-month leave of absence to manage the South Carolina gubernatorial campaign of Republican congressman Albert Watson. I was still a segregationist, comfortable with the racial politics of both Thurmond and Watson. Only months before the campaign started, Watson gave an anti-school integration speech in the small town of Lamar. Several days later, segregationists turned over a school bus bringing black children to Lamar's formerly white school.
Today, I cringe when I think of that campaign, not so much because of anything I remember Watson saying -- he had plenty of company in Deep South politics at that time -- but because I remember what I did. The campaign, with my knowledge and participation, stressed opposition to school integration and to "the bloc vote," i.e., black voters who voted heavily Democratic. The race issue was the major focus of the campaign, one we used in television spots and more graphically in leaflets mailed
anonymously to white voters in precincts that George Wallace had carried in the 1968 presidential election. Despite our best efforts, moderate Democrat John C. West won. ...
Over time, like the region that I come from and still write about, I have changed. But it didn't happen all at once, like being saved at a revival and becoming a born-again Christian. The old beliefs got eroded, usually after I got to know African Americans. ...
Most Southern whites, like those in the rest of the country, have changed their racial views substantially over the years. However, the amount of transition is relative, and some of our best friends, as it were, still harbor, if not hostility toward African Americans, then insensitivity to their understandable concerns. ...
Moreover, white Southerners seldom shun people who would be personae non gratae in the rest of the country. In my home state, for example, many people have a very negative reaction to the views -- religious and political -- of Bob Jones University, but they don't reject a candidate who makes a speech there. BJU is just part of the state's political landscape.
This leaves many of us, especially those who no longer live down South but maintain close ties with family and friends there, trying to straddle a gap between the two worlds. We have one foot in our new and better understanding of humanity, one that leads us to more enlightened attitudes on racially charged political issues and -- perhaps more importantly -- lets us know and be friends with people across racial lines. The other foot, however, is still in Dixie, enjoying the warmth and friendship of family and friends, and indeed, the identity of being a Southerner. It is a conflict we live with, sometimes well, sometimes not so well.
Deborah Orin, a columnist writing in the New York Post, quotes an unnamed Democratic strategist as offering this advice: “If you support Bush on Iraq and he wins, you gain zip. If you support him and he loses, you lose along with him. But if you oppose him and things go bad, you stand to be a big winner.” (via The Note)
Sleazy. Orin’s characterization of it: “breathtaking and revolting.”
Meanwhile, a piece in today's Washington Post talked about how Democrats are arguing, more legitimately, that the sharpness of the White House attacks on Sen. Mary Landrieu in last fall's Louisiana Senate contest, despite her record of centrist support for Bush on a number of measures, shows that the administration will give the back of its hand to Democrats no matter how they vote.
By the way: Orin writes, “It's a tradition that politics stops when America goes to war and everyone gets behind the troops.” Not exactly. Republican members didn’t meekly follow in lock-step behind Harry Truman’s decisions and strategy during the Korean War.
And I remember an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly years ago that talked about how, regardless of the stops-at-the-water’s-edge stereotype, Lyndon Johnson and other congressional Democrats were quite tart in their public assessments of Eisenhower’s foreign policy in the late ’50s. Sure, the political divisions over Cold War policy were considerably less than in the post-Vietnam era. But it’s mistaken to imagine that diehard partisans in the “golden age” of foreign policy bipartisanship didn’t stoop now and then to shameless political opportunism.
In addition to the insightful Donald Sensing post on Islam that Glenn Reynolds linked to, One Hand Clapping also has a post that underscored the decentralized nature of most Protestant denominations -- including the freedom to criticize one's denominational leaders. (My own religious affiliations, by the way, are mainline Protestant. I'm a member of the United Church of Christ and am also close to the Disciples of Christ.)
Don's post is slugged “This Methodist bishop does not speak for me.” In it, Don, a United Methodist minister, writes:
According to a local TV news story, United Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert will appear in an anti-Iraq-war TV ad campaign. The ad says that an American attack on Iraq would "violate God's law."
He says Iraq hasn't wronged the United States and that would war would only create more terrorists.
The commercial is expected to be broadcast beginning Friday to New York and Washington viewers of the CNN and Fox cable news networks. ...
As a United Methodist, I want to explain a couple of things:
Bishop Talbert does not speak for the United Methodist Church; by our denomination's polity, he cannot speak for the denomination. Only the General Conference may issue statements of denominational positions. It meets only every four years, with the next meeting in 2004.
The bishop recently went to Iraq (December, as I recall), where he let Saddam spin him like a top. He saw only what Saddam wanted him to see, he spoke only to the people Saddam wanted, he heard only what Saddam intended. ...
As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing.
Just a quick note. It's been mentioned by Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan (among others) today, but here is the full text of the letter from several European leaders expressing support for the United States in the current effort against Iraq. Quite encouraging:
By Jose Maria Aznar, Jose-Manuel Durao Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, Peter Medgyessy, Leszek Miller and Anders Fogh Rasmussen
The real bond between the U.S. and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law. These values crossed the Atlantic with those who sailed from Europe to help create the United States of America. Today they are under greater threat than ever.
The attacks of Sept. 11 showed just how far terrorists -- the enemies of our common values -- are prepared to go to destroy them. Those outrages were an attack on all of us. In standing firm in defense of these principles, the governments and people of the U.S. and Europe have amply demonstrated the strength of their convictions. Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom.
We in Europe have a relationship with the U.S. which has stood the test of time. Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the U.S. we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The transatlantic relationship must not become a casualty of the current Iraqi regime's persistent attempts to threaten world security.
In today's world, more than ever before, it is vital that we preserve that unity and cohesion. We know that success in the day-to-day battle against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction demands unwavering determination and firm international cohesion on the part of all countries for whom freedom is precious.
The Iraqi regime and its weapons of mass destruction represent a clear threat to world security. This danger has been explicitly recognized by the U.N. All of us are bound by Security Council Resolution 1441, which was adopted unanimously. We Europeans have since reiterated our backing for Resolution 1441, our wish to pursue the U.N. route, and our support for the Security Council at the Prague NATO Summit and the Copenhagen European Council.
In doing so, we sent a clear, firm and unequivocal message that we would rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. We must remain united in insisting that his regime be disarmed. The solidarity, cohesion and determination of the international community are our best hope of achieving this peacefully. Our strength lies in unity.
The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is a threat of incalculable consequences. It is one at which all of us should feel concerned. Resolution 1441 is Saddam Hussein's last chance to disarm using peaceful means. The opportunity to avoid greater confrontation rests with him. Sadly this week the U.N. weapons inspectors have confirmed that his long-established pattern of deception, denial and non-compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions is continuing.
Europe has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. Indeed, they are the first victims of Iraq's current brutal regime. Our goal is to safeguard world peace and security by ensuring that this regime gives up its weapons of mass destruction. Our governments have a common responsibility to face this threat. Failure to do so would be nothing less than negligent to our own citizens and to the wider world.
The U.N. Charter charges the Security Council with the task of preserving international peace and security. To do so, the Security Council must maintain its credibility by ensuring full compliance with its resolutions. We cannot allow a dictator to systematically violate those resolutions. If they are not complied with, the Security Council will lose its credibility and world peace will suffer as a result. We are confident that the Security Council will face up to its responsibilities.
Messrs. Aznar, Durao Barroso, Berlusconi, Blair, Medgyessy, Miller and Fogh Rasmussen are, respectively, the prime ministers of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.K., Hungary, Poland and Denmark. Mr. Havel is the Czech president.
The blog Amiland provides a very useful window on aspects of German politics and foreign policy. I appreciate Amiland's link to my post below about the Dilacerator's analysis on Germany's state elections.
By the way: A set of fresh posts will await visitors here on Friday morning (well, it will be morning in the U.S. time zones, anyway).
The United States is forcing al-Qaida to act before the terrorists are ready to do so, Austin Bay argues in an insightful and encouraging new column:
Strategy is always about applying one's own strength to an opponent's weakness. Al Qaeda's historical pattern is to wait patiently, for years if necessary, and carefully prepare a terror operation until it's certain of success. ...
Since the loss of its Afghan base, Al Qaeda has experienced extraordinary pressure. Time to plan is squeezed. The United States has used diplomacy, police work, better intel and military presence to exert the pressure. ...
The massive American build-up around Iraq serves as a baited trap that Al Qaeda cannot ignore. Failure to react to the pending American attack would demonstrate Al Qaeda's impotence. For the sake of their own reputation (as well as any notion of divine sanction), Al Qaeda's cadres must show CNN and Al Jazeera they are still capable of dramatic endeavor.
This ain't theory. Al Qaeda's leaders and fighters know it, and the rats are coming out of their alleys. In Afghanistan, several hundred Al Qaeda fighters in the Pakistani border region have gone on the offensive. They specifically link their attacks to America's pending assault on Baghdad. ...
Al Qaeda's offensive thrust in Afghanistan produces open targets for the 82nd Airborne Division. Moving and communicating terror cells are terror cells more vulnerable to police detection. Moreover, the terrorists are no longer operating on their time line, but on America's time line. ...
But the big blow to Al Qaeda will be the loss of Baghdad. Baghdad is a counter-terror intelligence trove. Saddam's fall will loosen knowledgeable tongues. Al Qaeda will have fewer alleys to inhabit.
But the big loss will be access to Saddam's WMD. A WMD spectacular is the kind of operation that can reverse Al Qaeda's international propaganda decline.
That ain't theory, either. Al Qaeda's leaders know it, which is why they seek nukes and nerve gas. It's why American strategists who know Al Qaeda know the axis of evil must be utterly broken.
This week I began a series of posts about water issues in the West. I’d intended to run several water-related posts today, but instead I’m going to parcel those out, since I have so many new posts here today anyway.
Rick Henderson, an editorial writer with the Las Vegas Review-Journal who formerly worked at Reason magazine, sent me some sharply argued observations on the water issue. (Rick, who runs The Deregulator blog, is, like myself, a grad of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)
Rick writes:
My gut feeling is that the Law of the River may have to be completely revamped; otherwise, the Southwest may face unprecedented restrictions on population growth and new business development.
The current situation makes it nearly impossible to use market forces to alleviate water shortages, as seen in California's Imperial Valley, where farmers have first claim on seven-eighths of the water Southern California gets from the Colorado River. As a result, the Imperial Valley can raise water-intensive crops in the desert, and there's no incentive to sell water at premium prices to residents of San Diego, Orange County, and L.A. The IID [Imperial Irrigation District] is now trying to prevent Gale Norton from enforcing the Law of the River by refusing to agree to a water pact (which requires California to live within its allocation within 15 years), even though the deal would have given the area money to subsidize the construction of modern irrigation infrastructure.
The Imperial Valley could have continued raising the same types of crops while using a lot less water. Didn't matter; the farmers refuse to give up a drop of water.
The coastal areas of California are in the process of starting up (and heavily subsidizing) desalination plants, which have gotten more efficient over the years, but continue to costs twice as much to produce water as the water districts now charge their customers. [The issue is examined, Rick says, in this editorial from his paper.]
Current law also makes it nearly impossible for "surplus" water to be shipped across state lines. Residential users in Phoenix or Las Vegas might be willing to bid a pretty penny for Imperial Valley water, but that may not be allowed by the existing legal structure.
Clearly, if market forces were allowed to function, they would disrupt agriculture in Central and Southern California (not to mention Arizona, where cotton and alfalfa are grown in the desert). But water would flow to those who are willing to pay for it, and some of the most wasteful and environmentally harmful agricultural practices on the planet would have to stop.
Rick also addressed the issue in a blog post in December:
The problem is that 70 years of welfare via farm subsidies has led to stasis, giving many farm-state residents incentives to remain dependent on agricultural welfare and maintain an otherwise-unsustainable lifestyle.
Farm welfare of another type could cause havoc in the Southwest, where a handful of farmers in the Imperial Valley of California are basically holding the residents of at least three states hostage. Farmers get water for next to nothing from the Colorado River and use it to grow cotton in the desert, among other things. Monday, farm reps deep-sixed an agreement which would have given the residents of Southern California, Southern Nevada and Arizona reliable water sources for several decades ... all because ag interests insist on keeping Stalinist-style farm policy alive.
Had New Deal-era subsidies been allowed to expire years ago, people in these farm communities would have gradually adopted more sensible, productive ways of life and saved consumers a bundle in the process.
Coming soon: The damage and anxiety that the current drought is causing in much of rural Nebraska, plus a variety of historical nuggets on the Western irrigation issue.
After his election last November, Sanford said he might resign his commission should the unit be called up. But he backtracked after he was then accused of seeking the military commission merely to pad his resume for political gain.
My son, a third grader, used a stencil of SpongeBob SquarePants the other day to begin a drawing. The figure in its final form wound up looking nothing like SpongeBob.
I noticed that under the picture he had written what at first seemed to be a nonsensical string of letters: “bobegnopsspongebob.”
He explained: It was a palindrome. (He knows that word.)
Just one more reason I look forward to seeing what the future will bring for that young fellow. A most remarkable mind.
By the way: When I mentioned to my son that I was going to write about his palindrome, his sister, age 6, overheard and asked if I would mention something about her. (She has been home from school for three days with the flu. She looks like a wilted flower.)
Writing something special about her is easy: She understands me in ways that no one else does.
It’s true. One morning last week, I started my day in an unusually down mood. Amid the early-morning hubbub, neither my wife nor my son (nor, for that matter, the three cats) noticed that a thing was off-kilter for me.
My daughter did. As soon as she saw me.
“Why the long face?” she asked.
Those are only four little words, but they speak volumes about her sensibility and character. I look forward to seeing what the future will bring for her, too.
America was attacked by people who took things on planes, so now everyone who takes things on a plane must be restricted, hassled and occasionally embarrassed.
It is a classic case of fighting the last war. And how many terrorists has it exposed? To the best of my knowledge, none. The only case of a passenger-terrorist since 9/11 is the convicted shoe bomber, Richard Reid. He slipped through security because nobody was on the lookout for explosive footwear. And if Reid had instead tried to blow himself up with explosive eyeglasses? In that case, passengers who wear glasses would now have to put them through the X-ray machine -- and screeners still wouldn't be looking for explosive footwear.
I wrote last year that if on 9/11 al-Qaida had destroyed four movie theaters, today we would have to reserve movie tickets in advance and get to the cineplex (with photo ID) two hours early -- while at the airport there would be no armed guards and a box cutter in your carry-on wouldn't raise any eyebrows. We would still be as vulnerable to a hijacking-massacre as we actually were on 9/11 -- but almost no one would be thinking about that, because the "last war'' would have taken a different form.
“The war will be won,” Jeff writes, “only when our enemies' cause lies in ruins. And their cause will lie in ruins when the terror masters are brought down.”
Three Russia-related items from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:
The military command of Russia's ground forces has issued a secret directive to the Russian peacekeeping contingents in Bosnia and Kosova ordering them to curtail their activities and to be prepared to return to Russia, Nezavisimaya gazeta reported on 22 January. ... Moscow currently maintains about 1,000 troops in the Balkans. The article argues that Russia has failed to gain political leverage vis a vis NATO through its deployment in Kosova and that that deployment is pointless because most of the Serbian population of Kosova has left the province. ...
Nationalist politician and State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladimir Zhirinovskii, who heads the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, arrived in Israel on 21 January for his first-ever visit to that country, Russian and international news agencies reported. Zhirinovskii renounced his many notoriously anti-Semitic remarks, saying, "they are in the past, [and] I now think differently." ... He also denied that he has Jewish roots, although the Jerusalem Post on 21 January quoted one of his books in which he writes that his father was an ethnically Polish Jew. It is not clear who invited Zhirinovskii to Israel ...
Speaking to reporters in Moscow on 23 January, Walter Schmoelzing, a representative of the leading European insurance companies operating in Russia, said that as many as half of the 1.5 million cars illegally imported into Russia in recent years were stolen in Europe, mainly in Germany ... However, only a few hundred of the vehicles have been recovered because the stolen cars have been registered in Russia, making it difficult to take them away from their new owners. Schmoelzing said the situation is further complicated by the fact that many state officials, including high-ranking Interior Ministry officers, are using stolen cars.
"Astroturfing" (faux-grassroots letter campaigns) has been a recent topic here. The New York Times has an article today about how newspapers are working to prevent such letters from getting into print.
Is the American West’s system of providing water to its thirsty cities and farms -- to Southern California subdivisions, to Arizona metro areas, to Nebraska soybean fields -- somehow going to muddle through? Or is the current, record-setting drought finally going to push the region’s fragile, enormously stressed system of water allocation into deep crisis?
I can’t offer answers (I’m still learning about the subject), but I have pulled together information on this important topic and will be posting this week on various water-related tangents (although there will also be plenty of posts on other topics, as illustrated by the set of new posts that follow this one). I welcome input on the water topic from anyone stopping by this week.
Consider three quotes:
This American West can best be described as a modern hydraulic society, which is to say, a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting.
-- Donald Worster, historian, 1985
We would be wise to remember every moment that roses also blossomed in Mesopotamia and Syria and Tunis and Ur of Chaldees -- and they are desert wastes now.
-- Bernard De Voto, historian, 1948
During last summer's scorching drought, some metro Denver neighborhoods, including Highlands Ranch, continued to enforce covenants that require heavy watering of lawns to keep them green.
By most reckoning, it's the deepest to sweep the West in more than a century, and some scientists now say it rivals the meanest dry spells of the past 1,400 years. ...
Water levels are well below capacity in every major reservoir system in the West, and many are at record lows. Some of the smallest have dried up, leaving farmers with no water at all. Cities across Colorado were forced to limit or, in some cases, ban outdoor water use. The situation is similar in Utah and Montana, and in Las Vegas last week, officials warned residents to expect strict use restrictions this summer. ...
Arizona recorded its driest water year (October 2001 through September 2002) in history, as did Colorado. Snowpack was nearly nonexistent in many parts of both states. The Colorado River, which draws snow from the high country in Colorado and Wyoming, flowed at barely one-fourth its historic average ...
Soil moisture levels barely registered by late fall, leaving acres of dead or dying trees and shrubs. Ponderosa and piñon pines across Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, weakened by the lack of water, are falling victim to an epic plague of bark beetles, which have killed more than 2 million trees in northern Arizona alone. ...
Agriculture took the hardest hit. Dry farmers, who rely solely on rainfall, abandoned thousands of acres across Utah and Colorado, and crops withered in areas of Arizona. The rangelands turned barren, forcing ranchers to sell cattle at huge losses. ... Nationwide, crop production fell sharply in 2002. Wheat output dropped 14 percent, the cotton harvest fell 11 percent, and corn and soybean production also fell. ...
A "compact" devised by the federal government in the 1920s allocated the water among the seven states of the Colorado River Basin ... For eight decades, six of the states used less than their allocated share, letting California take much more water than it was legally entitled to.
But a combination of rapid growth and repeated drought prompted the upstream states to demand that the compact be enforced. The Clinton administration ordered California to cut its thirst by Jan. 1, 2003.
California's water users refused to meet the deadline, so Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton enforced the Clinton order. She closed the spigots at Hoover Dam on New Year's Day, cutting California's annual share of Colorado River water by about 13 percent, or 260 billion gallons -- enough to supply about a million households for a year. ...
California's water users say they may sue. Los Angeles and San Diego say they will draw from water stored in reservoirs to make up for the diminished flow in their canals. Agricultural users have less stored water and may have to cut production.
... nobody expects the Bush administration's crackdown on California to bring peace to the century-long battle over Colorado River water.
"The big fear is that this is going to produce a series of new water wars," says Jim Lochhead, a Glenwood Springs, Colo., attorney who has represented the state of Colorado in the dispute.
In Colorado, one of Nebraska’s western neighbors, the anxiety over water continues to climb. This recent editorial notes that at the end of December, Colorado reservoirs held 48 percent of capacity and statewide, the snowpack was at 86 percent of normal. Here is a frequently updated roundup of the state’s drought woes, from the (Denver-based) Rocky Mountain News. This Denver Post article describes current peace talks in the state to try to resolve Colorado’s conflicting regional interests when it comes to water use and conservation.
More, later. And don’t hesitate to write me on this.
On Jan. 20 the UK announced that it was to send another 26,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region. As the British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon put it, this commitment "was no ordinary measure." Indeed, while somewhat dwarfed by ongoing American mobilizations, this new deployment is unexpectedly large, and means over a quarter of the British Army will soon be deployed for a possible war with Iraq. Proportionally, this is a larger commitment of British troops than took part in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Moreover, if prolonged it will subject the UK's armed forces to a severe risk of "overstretch," with British troops fulfilling commitments as far a field as Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland, and some 19,000 military personnel currently providing emergency coverage for striking British firefighters.
Even without such commitments, the deployment of such a large proportion of the UK's armed forces to the Persian Gulf in anticipation of potential military action against Iraq is unlikely to be sustainable beyond three or four months, and may well necessitate a larger call up of British reservists than has hitherto been the case.
Are the claims exaggerated? I’ll defer to those with an in-depth understanding of military affairs, but I wanted to point out the piece.
“A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.”
“A glider based on drawings by da Vinci has made its maiden flight from a hillside in Sussex. It is part of a widespread revival of interest in da Vinci’s hundreds of mechanical designs, many of which lay forgotten in libraries for hundreds of years.”
Cronaca links to a debunking of Gavin Menzies' “1421: The Year China Discovered America.”
Have you visited Brink Lindsey's blog lately? He has great stuff about his recent trip to Thailand. Just check out the lead post and keep scrolling down. Brink is not only an economist and a lawyer (didn't I once see in one of his posts that he has a law degree?) but also a fine writer. He serves up some neat vignettes from his trip. One example:
I saw Jean-Claude Van Damme and Lance Bass in the lobby of the Regent. Neither, though, was half as impressive as the anonymous gentleman I saw at poolside. He was African, probably around 60 years old, with large diamond stud earrings and a hearty, booming baritone voice. And he was decked out entirely in pink silk: a pink blouse not unlike the poofy shirt from Seinfeld, pink pants that poofed out in the thighs, and pink silk slippers like those a ballerina wears. Who was he? Does he wear stuff like that all the time? Does he do other colors besides pink? I'll never know, I guess, but unanswered questions are nothing new in Bangkok: The surpassingly, unfathomably strange is run of the mill there.
I won't provide any details about the spaceship temple or the ... well, the very offbeat shrine he describes.
Oh -- I forgot (until seeing the post again at his blog): Brink talks about Hong Kong, too, which he also visited. "OK, Hong Kong's in a rough patch right now," he writes. "But it's still a jewel to be treasured: It's rich, it's free, it's dynamic, it's vibrant. The economy will bounce back when the global economy recovers. There are fears that, over the longer term, Hong Kong will fade as China -- and specifically Shanghai -- continues to rise, but I think these are overblown."
That’s Alabama’s. It’s a grotesquerie, now more than a century old, cynically geared in many ways toward protecting special interests (for example, the timber industry). One result was that local governments were emasculated in order to prevent their encumbering those special interests.
A state commission is about to overhaul the much-criticized document. (I had a URL for a news story, but the Birmingham News has severed the link, so you'll just have to take my word for it or else do a Google search.) One question is whether the constitution should be shortened. (It currently includes some 742 amendments.)
A more important change that appears in the offing: finally giving county governments in Alabama the authority over matters such as zoning, fire and police protection and economic development strategies. If my memory is correct, counties even have to go to the state Legislature for permission to raise local tax rates. (Not that Alabama is alone in having a state legislature that encroaches irresponsibly on local governmental prerogatives.)
In regard to astroturfing (faux-grassroots letter campaigns) by the GOP (about which I recently blogged), Gary Farber of Amygdala notes that he provided the details of the Republican Team Leader campaign nearly a year ago, along with relevant URLs.
Thomas Gower sent me a well-conceived analysis with factors relating to China, Japan and Russia. A Chinese invasion would have stood little chance of success, he writes (in pondering what turned out to a host of counterfactual possibilities):
The Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) demonstrated, pretty conclusively, the almost total failure of the Chinese military at nearly all aspects of modern military combat, and an invasion of distant Australia was likely beyond their capabilities, particularly if you take into account the British policy of leaving minor warships scattered around the globe (eventually altered by Jacky Fisher, but not for another 10-15 years).
In my opinion, a much more plausible Australia not being British scenario deals with Japan in the late 1500's. After roughly a century of civil war, there was a large number of well-trained men who could have formed the basis for mass armies of conquest. In 1592, Japan invaded Korea with great success, seeing rates of advance not too dissimilar to that of the U.S. forces in the break-out from Pusan pocket in 1950, until Chinese forces intervened, and the conflict turned into a bloody stalemate. Jockeying for position at home led to eventual Japanese withdrawal in 1598, but the battle of Sekigahara in 1603 led to the creation of the Tokugawa shogunate and a truly unified Japan.
The opportunity seemed ripe for expansion, but no. Japan turned inward ... Had Japan looked outward, however, the future might have been very different. A second Korean invasion could have happened, but was not likely given the casualties suffered the first time. Russia was, in 1600, a European country, and thus Sakhalin, the Kuriles, even all of Siberia could have become Japanese territory without too much opposition (an 18th century figure whose name I cannot recall suggested much the same, except moving east from Sakhalin to Alaska rather than west to Siberia). Explorers of the lands south of Japan could have found the southwest Pacific island, New Guinea, and a huge, continent-like island sparsely populated by primitive natives, ripe for takeover by (counterfactually) an expansionistic people intent on more land. ...
I deliberately didn't say anything about the Russian invasion of India in the 1890's [as posited in “The Yellow Wave”], but the British had been worried for many years (late 1830's, even) about possible Russian routes to India (Transcaucasus, Oxiana, Afghanistan, Persia, etc.) and had worked to thwart those possibilities ... Even if the Russians had been completely successful, which they weren't, that just raises the larger question of how you get and, more importantly, supply an army that far from European Russia. There were hardly any roads, let alone railroads, and it would have taken a great deal of time to construct some sort of reliable transportation network and establish and stock supply depots. ...
The other possibility, and one that would enable a Chinese invasion of Australia (putting aside for the moment the Chinese inability to do so), is some sort of Russian naval victory over the British forces. The question of where that battle might be fought raises some issues, though. If the battle was fought off the coast of India, how does the fleet get there, and how can they remain on station and operating?
One of the major problems for the 1905 fleet was a dearth of coaling facilities. If I recall correctly, the last place they were able to refuel before defeat at the Battle of Tsushima was Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina (Vietnam), and before that somewhere in Africa.
A Chinese alliance could have opened up coaling stations in southern China (Hainan I., perhaps?), but that's still a long way from India. A battle off India also raises the question of how the Russian fleet got past the British bases in southeast Asia. Singapore was an important British base for a reason, and given a high level of tensions even in the absence of hostilities, it's not difficult to imagine British naval forces shadowing a Russian fleet, and trying to frustrate its intentions.
There's also the matter of when the cats are away, the mice will play. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance wasn't signed until 1902, but a Sino-Russian alliance dual attack on India and Australia might have worked to push that date forward. It's intriguing to imagine what the region's most professional military force might have done against light resistance: conquest of Korea, invasion of Manchuria, conquest of Sakhalin, invasion of Vladivostok.
What effect might a successful Japanese invasion of Siberia have had on the viability of the Czarist regime, particularly if the invasion of India proved disastrous? The Czar might not have fallen, but a more vigorous version of the Stolypin reforms that followed the actual Russo-Japanese War would be a near certainty, even to the point of creating a more limited, perhaps even constitutional, monarchy (Britain in the late 1700's, perhaps?).
Perhaps not likely, even under the circumstances outlined, but it's surely interesting.
One of the oddest inauguration controversies I've heard of: Mark Sanford, the new governor of South Carolina, is catching flak for, of all things, praising Ataturk during Sanford’s inauguration speech this week.
From an account in The State, the newspaper in Columbia, S.C.:
In his State of the State address Wednesday, Sanford presented Ataturk as the reformer.
To Dr. Glenn Moradian of Chapin, Ataturk was responsible for genocide.
Sanford praised Ataturk's transformation of Turkey from a theocratic dynasty to a modernized republic.
He did not mention that Ataturk is reviled by many who believe he was responsible for the systematic killing or forced relocation of millions of Greeks and Armenians, first as a military general and then as the first Turkish ruler.
Sanford "needs to do his history," said Moradian, who is of Armenian heritage. "I'm a Republican, I voted for him, but he needs to do his research. It's absolutely offensive."
Sanford spokesman Will Folks said the governor was "looking for an example of someone who affected a tremendous degree of structural reform to the benefit of his country. ...
The governor should have chosen a different example, said Father Ari Metrakos, pastor of Columbia's Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church.
"I can't imagine that anyone who knew the entire history of the oppression of the Christian people of Asia Minor would hold up Ataturk as someone to be emulated," Metrakos said.
Ataturk was central to a discussion at Metrakos' church in December. A Greek woman named Sano Halo, who survived Ataturk's brutal policies, was honored by the church and by proclamations from the city, the state Senate, and then-Gov. Jim Hodges.
Halo's family and community were forced from their homes in the Pontis region of Turkey by Ataturk's forces in the 1920s. Thousands, including most of Halo's family, died as they were marched across the country. ...
S.C. Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian, who is of Armenian descent, said he was offended by Sanford's speech.
"Ataturk, to the people of Greek and Armenian heritage, was like Hitler was for the Jews," Harpootlian said. "In 'Mein Kampf,' Hitler says the Turks had the right idea with the Armenian Christians, they just weren't efficient with it." ...
The Turkish government denies there was a genocidal slaughter of Greek and Armenian Christians living in Turkey. It was an era of great unrest in the country, as the Ottoman Empire was falling and young Turkish leaders, like Ataturk, were coming to power.
"It is not unusual, but it is a little overreaching for Greeks to criticize Ataturk," said Cem Saydam, a Clemson University graduate and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who is of Turkish descent.
As for Armenians, Saydam said Ataturk was not involved and Turkey denies any claim of genocide. "It was an inter-communal war, which they started," Saydam said of the Armenians.
Turkey believes Armenians living in Turkey joined with invading armies of czarist Russia to battle the government in Istanbul.
Do you suppose Sanford's speech writers have been reading Ataturk fan Glenn Reynolds?
Ivan Eland argues in a new Cato Institute report that the United States should ratchet down its concern about the Chinese military.
“If U.S. policymakers would take a more restrained view of America's vital interests in the region,” he writes, “the measured Chinese military buildup would not appear so threatening. Conversely, U.S. policy may appear threatening to China.”
The United States spends ten times what China does on military needs, and Taiwan’s defenses are strong enough to deter the Chinese, he argues. Restructuring U.S. capabilities toward a focus on East Asia is unnecessary and costly, he says.
I’m not convinced. Sure, economic engagement with the Chinese is in the U.S. interest, but a robust American military capability, complemented by strong alliances in the region, makes sense in the face of the grossly cynical approaches taken by both Beijing and the regime it refuses to restrain in Pyongyang.
Certain names common in ancient Roman times have survived in popularity into the 21st century, Eugene Volokh noted recently. An example is the ancient Marcus, now rendered Mark.
Eugene added:
But when was the last time you met, in America, England, France, Spain, Italy, or wherever else, a Publius? Gnaeus? Sextus? These were common names, some of them names of great Romans (Pompey was a Gnaeus). And yet they're virtually unheard of in modern America. I'm not complaining -- I'm just wondering why some Roman names (many of the nomens, a few of the praenomens) have gotten so popular in Western Europe and America, while others have been completely forgotten. Any theories?
I’ll have to defer to others as to why, in the case of this country, some names were more easily Anglicized than others. Eugene’s post did remind me, though, of a part of Old South history: the frequent naming of slaves after figures from ancient Rome.
Historian Eugene Genovese has noted, however, that the North’s victory brought major changes in this regard: “Very few Caesars, Catos and Pompeys survived the war; the freedmen divested themselves of these names so quickly that one wonders if they had ever used them among themselves in the quarters.”
Studying the naming of slaves opens a window into fascinating, and often disturbing, questions involving psychology and power. Historians have uncovered many examples of how the struggles between master and slave played out along the dimension of names. An example:
When asked to name the cruelest acts committed against him during his time as a slave, William Wells Brown singled out his master’s order that he be stripped of the name, William, given him by his mother.
“I received several very severe whippings for telling people that my name was William,” he later wrote. He was forced to go by Sandford -- a name, he said, “I always hated.”
He eventually escaped. Upon reaching freedom, he reasserted control over his identity by calling himself what his mother had intended.
William Wells Brown would go on to become a doctor, author and abolitionist.
Another story:
James Henry Hammond, an idiosyncratic politician and slaveowner in antebellum South Carolina, once bought a 8-year-old slave named Sam Jones. Hammond abruptly changed the boy's name to Wesley.
Nearly three decades passed. Hammond was nearing death and had waning power over his plantation. Wesley, meanwhile, became a father with the birth of his first son. The name he chose for the baby: Sam Jones.
The debilitated and distracted Hammond lacked the strength to do anything about it. His slave had gained a victory of a very special sort.
There has been some agitation of late about Republican “astroturfing” -- fomenting a letter-writing campaign to newspapers (in this case for the benefit of George W.) using the same text over and over but under the pretense of a supposed grassroots campaign. The blog Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire talked about the pro-Bush astroturfing here and here.
Any Republican operatives indulging in astroturfing deserve criticism. It’s a sleazy and opportunistic ploy.
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that astroturfing is a practice generally restricted to Republicans or conservatives. On the contrary, astroturfing has become a common problem for newspaper editorial pages (alerts of new astroturf outbreaks are a frequent part of an editorial writers listserv I subscribe to), and the guilty parties run the ideological spectrum. It’s one more example of how activists tend to set aside good judgment out of zealotry for their cause.
Interest groups are growing more ambitious in facilitating astroturf, and they’re also refining the technologies that make it possible. Such techniques are often of a piece with the various single-issue mobilizations one increasingly sees in which members of Congress are deluged with e-mails and phone calls before key votes. The astroturf problem, in other words, is likely to only get worse.
Yet the left cannot mount a critique [of Bush's Iraq policy and war preparations] that rises above rock lyrics and name-calling.
Perhaps that is because a serious critique would arise from conservative sensibilities, including respect for the law of unintended consequences (which are usually larger than, and contrary to, intended consequences). And the fact that a government's ability to control events anywhere is severely limited because a community, a nation and the world are like mobiles -- jiggle something here and lots of things are set in motion over there.
Such an appreciation doesn't mean a country's leaders should be locked in paralysis, fearful of taking any action at all. It means major actions should be undertaken with an appreciation for unpleasant surprises -- and that leaders should be prepared to summon up the nimbleness needed to cope with them.
For those who aren't aware: I'm now blogging three times a week, posting new material here for the start of three mornings: Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Tonight I intend to write about water woes in the West as well as an Iraq tangent.
Either tonight or sometime soon I'll post, among other things, on the declining use by Americans of names with classical Roman origins (responding to an interesting Eugene Volokh post); China's military; and a red state/blue state topic.
I linked last month to a City Journal article about how the New York City Council is considering a slavery reparations measure. Jesse Jackson recently pushed the issue hard in a speech in New York, focusing on Wall Street:
At a Diversity Forum panel discussion, Jackson slammed Wall Street for its historical links to the shipping industry and its role in the transportation of African slaves. "Wall Street is built on the backs of African people. It is an African burial ground down here. Wall Street was built on the shipping industry," Jackson said. ...
Jackson kept his focus on New York's financial center to make a point about the need for slave reparations and affirmative action.
"In 1840, there was more Africans enslaved in New York than there was in Charleston South Carolina," he said. "So if we didn't know all our history, then the conclusion [that blacks deserve reparations] might seem unfair."
Jackson compared opposition to slave reparations to denying the holocaust.
Rep. John Conyers also spoke at the same event, the 6th annual Rainbow/Push Wall Street Project fund-raiser:
Conyers, who has been an annual sponsor of a slavery reparations bill in Congress for the past decade, spoke of the necessity for corporate reparations to African-Americans.
"The shipping companies were involved in the transportation of slaves. Might they not have a legal obligation going back 200 years? That is what I think," Conyers told CNSNews.com [Cybercast News Service].
Conyers noted that lawsuits against the insurance industry for its alleged profiting from the slave trade were already proliferating. "No one is waiting for [attorney] Johnnie Cochran. ... People are suing the crap out of them right now," Conyers explained.
Nonetheless, such rhetoric is clearly aimed at softening up opposition in New York and preparing the way for, as City Journal put it, “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.”
(link to the CNS article via e-mail friend Fred Ray)
I haven't had time to check: Has anybody else linked to this LA Weekly piece about Tom Daschle's wife?
Here's the gist:
The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off....
It’s a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway’s national press corps is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator’s presidential withdrawal — even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly’s Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on newsstands. As she observed, “It doesn’t take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle’s professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: ‘Sen. Daschle’s wife lobbyist for nation’s most dangerous airline,’ or ‘majority leader’s wife lobbied to make airlines less safe.’ ”
The Washington Monthly isn't a sleaze-peddling enterprise, so I wouldn't think the story could be dismissed as part of the vast right-wing media conspiracy.
Update: Jim Miller, whose blog generally focuses on political commentary, e-mails to note that he blogged at length on this Daschle tangent last July. Among his observations in the post: "I think it incontrovertible that were First Lady Laura Bush to hold a lobbying job like this, it would be necessary to investigate her actions."
Discussions in the blog world have focused on counterfactual reworkings of history, such as new outcomes of the American Civil War or, in the case of a post here last year, the prospect of the adoption of Thatcherite economic policies in Britain in the 1940s. This week I came across a counterfactual scenario I had never given thought to: a Chinese invasion of Australia in the 1890s.
In Kenneth Mackay’s 1895 admonitory tale, Britain’s attention and military forces are diverted by a Russian attack on India, and Australia is left defenseless. The Russians lead the invasion force, but for readers of the Victorian Age, the real horror is the use of Chinese troops.
Mackay (1859-1935) was an Australian military officer who commanded the 1st Australian Horse Regiment, which he created in 1897.
In the novel, a central event was the visit of Chinese officials to the Australian colonies -- a parallel to an actual, and controversial, visit there by Chinese representatives in 1887. The Chinese government at the time complained about discriminatory laws and practices in Australia against Chinese residents. Those complaints, in turn, triggered expressions of concern from Australian leaders about China’s possible military intentions as well as further Chinese immigration.
Several Australians responded by writing and publishing invasion-fantasy tales. In Mackay’s, the Russians and Chinese form an alliance and attack India and Australia simultaneously.
A curious find for me while perusing the Wesleyan catalog.
It’s not often that I feel compelled to take issue with George Will on matters of history, but this is one of those times.
In a recent column, Will resumed his criticisms of Southern studies scholar William Ferris, who headed the National Endowment for the Humanities under Bill Clinton.
Will wrote:
The 9/11 summons to seriousness ended the nation's 1990s holiday from history, and even the National Endowment for the Humanities has enlisted in the war. Emphasizing that historical illiteracy threatens homeland security -- people cannot defend what they cannot define -- the NEH's chairman, Bruce Cole, is repairing the ravages of the 1990s, when his two immediate predecessors made the NEH frivolous.
Bunk. I don’t doubt that the new NEH director will do just fine, but Will’s depiction of Ferris as concerned only with ephemeral and trivial parts of social history is misleading and does a gross disservice to a serious and energetic scholar.
Ferris, among other scholarly achievements, co-edited the groundbreaking Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. That book demonstrated the value of including parts of cultural and economic history along with the traditional big-picture focus on politics. Several of the major Southern-related posts I’ve put together here over the past six months have drawn in part on material from that invaluable book. A particular example that comes to mind was my post last September on old-time Southern liberal journalists, to which Virginia Postrel generously linked.
In fact, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was a direct inspiration for the ambitious Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, to be published shortly by the University of Nebraska Press (the second-largest state university press in the nation, behind only the University of California Press, in terms of titles published).
And another George Will note: A column of his last week talked about the movie “About Schmidt,” set here in Omaha and across Nebraska. (The movie's director is Alexander Payne, Omaha native.)
The movie, Will said, can take its place along novels by Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald in pointing to the supposed dullness and bland conformity of life in the Midwest. Will added, however, that the themes of regret and emptiness in “About Schmidt” are actually universal ones. Indeed, as he noted, the novel from which the movie is taken was set not on the prairie but on Long Island, to which Schmidt retired from a Manhattan law firm.
My interest in mentioning this, however, really concerns two downtown Omaha buildings. One is the Woodmen Tower, the city’s tallest building for three decades and a central visual focus in the movie. Will observes:
"About Schmidt," the new Jack Nicholson movie, begins with the camera lingering on a flat slab of a spire in Omaha, the Woodmen building, which is replicated in the cake at Schmidt's retirement party that evening. If "party" is applicable to so flat an affair. Flat as champagne that has lost its fizz. Flat as the Midwest landscape through which Schmidt, suddenly widowed, rolls, a depressed Jack Kerouac in a gigantic Winnebago, on the road to Denver to try to forestall yet another disappointment, the marriage of his daughter to a waterbed salesman Schmidt despises.
Funny thing about the Woodmen Tower, though. The plainness of its design earned criticism from the beginning. Yet, at its dedication in 1969, it was regarded -- rightly -- as a symbol of downtown resurgence, leading the way toward other civic improvements including the flowering of the Old Market retail/restaurant complex and the creation of Central (later, Gene Leahy) Mall, a major greenspace.
In parallel fashion, the dedication in downtown Omaha last fall of the impressively designed First National Tower signaled another stage of progress as the city begins a major new phase of development including ambitious riverfront projects and a performing arts center. The First National Tower, with its plaza and ambitious set of wildlife sculptures, has also broken new ground by creating a marvelous new public space downtown. I took my kids there several times last fall and had a blast. The office building stands as the city's tallest building, as the Woodmen Tower now takes on little brother status in the downtown skyline.
She takes standards and spins them into satirical gold. My friend Madeleine Begun Kane, that is. Here is her latest song parody about George W. (to be sung to the tune of "Girl From Ipanema" -- And when he rants, yes, the Dems he bashes go -- well, you'll have to check out her site to find out what the Dems say). And here is her latest comic strip, "Dubya Does College." (Don't read it, Republicans; you will not be amused.)
The magnitude of ag subsidies in last year’s farm bill sparked a backlash from many urbanites. Given that dynamic, one would think members of Congress would tread more carefully on the farm support issue and steer clear of transparent opportunism. But events last week indicated the very opposite.
The Senate Agriculture Committee, under new chairman Thad Cochran of Mississippi, approved a $3 billion drought assistance package that would provide payments not just to plains farmers hurt by the severe drought last year but also to farmers unaffected by the dry weather. (The bill would be paid for through cuts from other programs.)
Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas accurately summed it up this way: “This is not a disaster bill that provides targeted assistance to producers who've suffered crop losses. These are across-the-board direct payments for all farmers. It contains millions of dollars for specialty and Southern crops and producers. Assistance to Kansas producers and High Plains states, where drought has been the most severe, has been cut to provide assistance to producers in other parts of the country that did not have crop losses.”
Livestock producers, who were especially hard hit here in Nebraska, will receive very little help under the measure.
Sure, the bill can be considered a typical product of the Washington political process. And I know many people argue that the feds should provide neither drought aid nor farm support. (Indeed, the Bush administration has formally proposed a thorough revamping of ag subsidies as part of international trade negotiations.)
My point, though, is that the shenanigans seen on the drought aid measure are politically stupid. Although the drought bill will likely pass in order to get a measure of aid to farmers actually harmed by the bad weather, farm-state lawmakers such as Cochran and like-minded lawmakers are risking a big comeuppance over the long term.
By the way: I’ll have more about the West and water later in the week.
John McWhorter, the black academician whose contrarian take on racial issues has gained considerable note, was interviewed in Salon last week. Excerpts:
I'm not pardoning this, but to say that the Republicans hate black people -- it's just op-ed material. What it really means is that Republicans don't think the issue is all that important. ...
Derrick Bell has this thought experiment where, if I'm not mistaken, all the black people are taken out of America by aliens and nobody knows where they are. The issue of the story is, How much would white people really care? Who would want to investigate? That's seen as evidence that racism exists in America. As soon as I heard that story, I thought, OK, so we're in America and instead of black people, all Filipinos are taken out of the United States. How many black people would care? None. Frankly, it wouldn't really change my day. I don't know any Filipino people. You have a love of your own. We can't say that white people should be exempt from that because of the nature of the past.
Salon: No, but the past is always hanging over us. It seemed from the way the media reacted to the Lott scandal, digging through his past and showing photos from his fraternity, that this was a history lesson. There was this sense that Americans aren't all that educated about who their leaders are.
We live in a transitional era. Just a few decades ago, we lived in a segregated society. It would be strange if there were not closet racists in our governing bodies. There are people in our governing bodies who are white and 50 or 60. Why in the world would some of them not be closet racists? It's 2003. It really hasn't been that long. So, it was nice that we were made aware of it. My issue is whether those things affect legislation, and to the extent that they can … Trent Lott as a leader, he has to go.
But the fact is that despite the racist history, the conventional wisdom is changing, and even if it just means you can't say certain things in public, that is progress. The fact is that even in terms of private feelings, the feelings of most of the people representing our government today are different than they would have been 40 years ago. We're not all the way there, but we're close. ...
Salon: I struggle with these comparisons between groups. Isn't it much more complicated? The history of blacks and the history of American immigrant groups -- it's so different. And each group is so different.
No, and I don't mean to cut you off, but I hear that question so much. Latinos are immigrants too. They have the same problems as black people, right down the generations, right into the middle class. What that shows is that it's not about whether you're an immigrant. It's cultural. There are people who for various geopolitical reasons identify doing well in school as inauthentic. In black culture, if you do that you're acting white. In Latino culture, you're acting like the gringos. It's not unfair to compare. Yes, there is such thing as immigrant pluck, but it doesn't even apply to all of the immigrants. With Latinos as well as black people, there's a sense that to be white is to be uptight and to sell out. Not to mention that black people didn't suffer from this until about 35 years ago. There was no such thing as the "acting white" syndrome in 1910. It's a new thing. ...
There is a split identity in black culture today, and I see this daily. There's what you're expected to do in public, and there's what you're expected to do in private. The black undergraduate who hears a professor use the word "niggardly" or hears something an administrator says that could be construed as "racist" and runs out of the classroom crying, I firmly believe, is not genuinely hurt. They have a sense that as good, thinking African-Americans it's their job to blow the whistle on racism in public.
It's the same kind of theater that your counterculturally oriented white undergraduates pull. So somebody says "nigger" or somebody draws a picture in some dorm, and a certain 25 black students jump out onto the central plaza and the local media comes and you've always got one or two of them who will cry. They're not cynical; it's not that they're doing it on purpose, but they have a sense that to be intelligent, engaged black people you're supposed to pull this kind of routine. Deep down, most black people know that some of these things will not destroy you, that you can succeed in a world even if it's not perfect. That is the biggest problem today -- the sense that to be authentically black is to cloak the black race in victimhood in public, no matter how well the race is doing. The idea is to keep whites on the hook. In private, this is not the way that black people talk.
The sadder truth is that for many white people, black people are a minority with a sad history, and they'd rather be rid of us completely. The very sad truth is that white people are much more important to black mythology than the other way around. That's not fair, but like many things that aren't fair, it's also true.
Salon: Might that be changing considering how much black culture has influenced white culture? What I find hard to believe is that whites aren't conscious in some ways of how they emulate black people.
Interesting question. Many black people are afraid that we're being co-opted. What they don't understand is how black white people are getting. And it's something that's easy to miss; fish don't know that they're wet. But it's at the point where hybridism is becoming very much the norm. Most people don't think about the fact that the way Britney Spears sings and moves is black.
It's not only in entertainment. You see it in the way people talk. A lot of "ebonics" is now ordinary speech. I don't know how many white girls I've seen calling each other "dude." "Dude" starts with black people and it percolates into white vernacular among men. Now white women are saying, "Dude, let's go get our nails done." It's a black thing. If you look at a silent film, at white people moving in 1903, they don't walk like white people now, they don't nod like white people. All of us are blacker. So what we're really moving towards is a Mariah Carey, Tiger Woods sort of thing. Nowadays, black people do matter more to white people, but in a good way, because black people are in white people and they don't even know it, which is the way it should be.
Which is the way it should be?
Yeah, because we're moving towards getting past race. Al Sharpton wouldn't like that, but we're going to get past it. Getting past it does not mean these communities of wary blacks and wary whites eyeing each other and writing op-eds about each other. ...
... I'm 37. This whole hip-hop culture idea is an outgrowth of a general "bobos in paradise" idea -- to be countercultural and to hate the establishment. I don't love the establishment either, but this hip-hop thing is professional alienation, a recreational indignation. The idea that black identity can be centered on that, especially among the young, strikes me as a pose rather than an action. It feels good to be an underdog and that's what that's about.
The New York Times had a review over the weekend of '“Subversive Southerner,” a biography of Anne Braden, described by the reviewer as “one of the movement's major minor figures: an influence on Martin Luther King Jr., a den mother to the young radicals in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and, thanks to her background in journalism, a talented publicist and propagandist for the movement.”
Especially interesting:
Though more glamorous accounts of the Red Scare tend to focus on Hollywood and the blacklist, it was the Southern variety of anti-Communism that exposed the systemically toxic dangers of curtailing the First Amendment's freedom of speech and of association. Southern segregationists were able to mobilize the might of the federal government behind their savagely undemocratic way of life simply by framing their crusade as one against Reds rather than blacks, as Americanism rather than racism. The genius of redbaiting was that it tarred any liberal impulse as ''communistic'' and by so doing scared off the moderates. ...
However, the main failing of ''Subversive Southerner'' -- unfortunately, it is a central one -- is that [author Catherine] Fosl, who teaches women's studies and humanities at the University of Louisville, declines to discuss the substance of the Bradens' relationship with the Communist Party. Anne herself has steadfastly refused to elaborate on the subject.
During the cold war, that position had a certain nobility and revealed Braden's shrewd understanding of how witch hunts work. But Braden's day has now come. For a biographer not to hold her to her pledge is insupportable.
Yes. As the reviewer says, enough time has passed so that an honest acknowledgement can be calmly made about the involvement in the civil rights movement by individuals with ties to the Communist Party. That doesn’t mean that segregationist critics were correct in dismissing the movement as a mere tool of the Communist Party. Indeed, the civil rights movement performed a crucial redemptive role for the country, and nothing written in any biography will be able to erase that achievement. There is no reason, however, that the complete truth can’t be told.
There will be no fantastic oil bonanza at hand if Saddam Hussein is ousted. After 20 years of war and sanctions, Iraq's oil infrastructure is in disarray. It will take three or more years and $7 billion to $8 billion just to get back to 1980 production levels of 3.5 million barrels per day, according to experts.
Boosting production to 6 million bpd would take $30 billion to $40 billion more in investment -- and many more years. (So much for hopes that the Iraqi oil tap will soon make Saudia Arabia's 8 billion bpd irrelevant).
Moreover, Baghdad doesn't even have the cash to get started. Iraq's annual oil revenues at present are only around $10 billion a year.
Even if we assume that Saddam doesn't torch the oil fields as a parting gesture, that level of income won't begin to meet the country's immediate needs.
There will be huge emergency humanitarian bills after a military conflict. There will be an urgent need to rebuild basic infrastructure, like power grids, roads, and hospitals, which will eat up $25 billion to $100 billion more.
Do the math, and what you get is a huge shortfall. In the next couple of years, international donors will have to pour money into Iraq. ...
U.S. companies might not be in a hurry to invest in an Iraq whose stability will be shaky in the near term. Even if they are eager, they will confront crucial issues of Iraqi nationalism -- and of law.
Iraq, like the rest of the Gulf, has a state-owned oil company. No foreign oil company has operated in Iraq since 1960. Multinationals buy Iraqi oil for refining, but they have no equity share in the oil fields, nor do they get any percentage of oil for services performed.
In a desperate bid for political support, Saddam promised the Russians and the French that he would offer them a chance to develop new oil fields. But if his dictatorship ends, any new oil arrangement will require the passage of new laws by a new, democratically elected parliament. This process will be time-consuming, but -- if the Bush administration really means to support democracy -- it must accept the results. And the results may not be to its liking. ...
Prime case in point: After the Gulf War, American companies expected to be invited to develop new Kuwaiti oil fields. Kuwait's government was willing, but the elected parliament refused. ...
Iraq has many oil experts, inside and outside the country, who can manage the industry. Control should be turned over to them once oil proceeds are weaned from U.N. supervision under the "oil-for-food" program.
An elected Iraqi government may give contracts to U.S. companies or not. But any heavy-handed U.S. pressure is likely to boomerang and confirm the beliefs of those who think the war was only about oil.
Even though, in reality, Iraq's fields are not up for grabs.
Sounds convincing.
By the way: I was surprised to read this week that Baghdad “has a largely Shiite population.” Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of In the National Interest, made that point in an essay (on Cyprus, actually) at NRO. Nick, with whom I’ve exchanged e-mail on occasion, writes:
When his [Saddam’s] regime falls, however, something must take its place. Simply dividing Iraq into three "cantons" -- a Shiite province in the south, a Sunni center, and a Kurdish statelet in the north -- is a recipe for disaster. Not only does such a "solution" fail to consider that populations are not neatly segmented (Baghdad, after all, has a largely Shiite population) and ignore other ethnic minorities dispersed throughout the country, it would preclude any central "Iraqi" identity from developing. This, in turn, would increase the risk of regional strife that would draw in neighboring states.
President Bush this week approved new powers for the U.S. Strategic Command, located at Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha. The change, recommended last year by the Pentagon, significantly enhances the authority of StratCom beyond its traditional role as overseer of strategic nuclear forces.
StratCom, while retaining its strategic nuclear role, will now be in charge of planning and coordination for missile defense. It will have authority over command and control/surveillance matters and cyber-warfare (both defensive and offensive).
Perhaps most interesting, it will oversee what is called Global Strike capabilities, meaning the ability to launch an attack anywhere around the world within 24 hours. Among its related duties, StratCom will oversee research into using conventional, and possibly nuclear, devices to attack deep bunkers.
These changes have been much talked about over the past year among StratCom watchers. It seemed likely that such changes were in the works last year when the Pentagon gave approval for StratCom to take on the duties of the U.S. Space Command, many of whose personnel have relocated to Offutt from Colorado Springs. (In a healthy long-term sign for the Omaha area, aerospace companies have been contacting realtors and school systems here, in apparent preparation for moving personnel here. It’s too early to gauge the economic impact, though.)
This Jan. 8 article from the Omaha World-Herald, where I work, had this interesting tidbit:
The U.S. Strategic Command welcomed a high-level visitor this week who will play a key role as the command is reshaped to counter new threats.
Navy Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, who could be called the military's futurist for joint operations, spent Monday and Tuesday at the command near Bellevue.
Giambastiani's mission is to synchronize the war-fighting capabilities of all the military branches, to foster experimentation and to incubate new concepts to build the military of the 21st century.
Jeff Jacoby asks in his latest column why Democrats and the press look away from Al Sharpton’s record as a race-baiter. He recounts the history:
1987: Sharpton spreads the incendiary Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting heatedly that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is wholly innocent -- the crime never occurred -- but Sharpton taunts him: "If we're lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it." Pagones does sue, and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his unspeakable slander or to apologize for his role in the odious affair.
1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.
1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warns malignantly, "and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy's are spat on and cursed as "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters shout, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulate striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," says Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy's, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.
In the wake of the Trent Lott debacle, it should hardly come as a surprise that Republicans will make every effort to make sure that Sharpton’s record is put before the public, should he enter the Democratic presidential primaries.
"Privately, in his mind, he's perfectly capable of distinguishing between a racial attack and a political attack," notes one liberal political analyst in New York. "His public MO is not only not to make that distinction but to intentionally blur that distinction. That's where his power comes from."
"He's going to hurt everyone," worries one well-known New York Democratic politician. "He can have a principled reason for trying to hurt conservative candidates, but remember the history -- where he goes after liberal candidates also because he can out-liberal them and out-black them."
This week I mentioned some flag-related tangents relating to the new governors in Georgia and South Carolina. A further development: Richard Gephardt came under fire last weekend from some Democrats and NAACP activists after he tried to sidestep taking a position on the flag while campaigning in South Carolina. So, at the start of this week, Gephardt issued a statement in which he said the flag “has no place flying anywhere in any state in this country.”
My friend Fred Ray, who e-mailed me the Gephardt links, says this provides support for his argument that critics of the flag want it banished not just from government property but from private property as well. (As I’ve stated here before, I support the former, but not the latter. In any case, trying to stop anyone from displaying a flag on privately owned land is incompatible with First Amendment protections.)
By the way: The Bush administration has made clear to GOP leaders in the state that it does not want a flag referendum to be on the ballot in Georgia in 2004, when Bush will making his re-election bid.
And: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently conducted a poll on flag sentiment in Georgia. The paper sums up the results this way:
The recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found that 41 percent favor keeping the current flag that Gov. Roy Barnes championed in 2000, 23 percent want to return to the old banner with its dominant Confederate battle emblem, and 28 percent prefer another, undefined alternative. And while voters didn't cite the flag question as their top priority, 67 percent of voters said it was "very important" or "somewhat important" that voters decide it.
Legal barriers could complicate a push for a referendum, however, according to the article.
Incidentally, Zell Miller, the conservative Democratic U.S. senator from Georgia, tried unsuccessfully in the ’90s to remove the Confederate design from the state flag during his time as governor. He approached the issue from a sound perspective: He spoke of the way the flag sparks divisiveness between the races (because of its association not just with slavery but also with opposition to the civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s) and rightly called for a change. But he framed his arguments in terms of affection for his region, not contempt for it. Exactly right.
I strongly recommend the blog Cronaca. It focuses on historical matters such as art history and archaeology, although not exclusively. I've added it to my blogroll (overcoming a bad technical problem in that regard last night).
Two recent items:
"Europe's biggest-ever discovery of Bronze Age weapons and jewellery has been made in Austria."
"The Department of Antiquities on Sunday reported the discovery of an entire ancient Roman city in Beit Ras in the northern Irbid Governorate (in Jordan)."
I also discovered from Cronaca that in India, there is something called sandpit wrestling.
Last week I noted a quote from outgoing Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes indicating his hard feelings about how Republicans had used the Confederate battle flag issue to help oust him in the November election. (Barnes had succeeded in revamping the state flag, reducing the Confederate battle flag design to only a tiny portion of the flag.)
Thomas Nicholson, an e-mail correspondent of mine and a fellow student of Southern history, sent me a message that filled in some details:
Well, I have to argue that the flag did have something to do about Barnes getting elected out of office, but not quite the way Barnes (& a lot of other folks) think it did.
Though an Atlanta dweller, I've got plenty of rural Georgia connections, & I get the sense that it's not so much that the flag got changed, but that Georgians got cheated out of a long noisy fight about it. A lot of Georgians feel like Barnes pulled a fast one on them. The flag issue was definitely on the radar, and lots of folks were ready for a fight.
I get the impression that a lot of people would have been much more satisfied if they had been able to have a long, drawn out fight about it, and then lose, than have it happen like it did. As it was, Barnes managed to get the issue before the legislature & passed faster than a lot of people could react. As pure politics, it was masterful, but it galled a lot of people. Justifiably or not, a lot of white Georgians took it as a tacit admission by Barnes that most of his white constituents couldn't be trusted with the matter, so it had to be, so much as possible, removed from their say-so.
Aside from that, Barnes had gained a reputation form being a bit of a regal governor with a rather fat sense of self-entitlement. That, too, galled people. It's no wonder that he wouldn't understand why Georgians might be angry with him for no other than "backward" reasons like not appreciating diversity, etc. I don't know how powerful the teacher's unions were in doing him in. Ironically, I thought his handling of Georgia's (awful) education system was one the best things about his governorship!
In any case, now Georgia's got a truly awful flag, literally designed-by-committee. I was pulling for the attractive post-civil war flag, which featured the Georgia seal on a blue field occupying the left 1/3 of the flag, the rest occupied by red, then white, the red horizontal stripes.
As if that weren’t enough, Wyeth Ruthven’s listserv provided a transcript of an op-ed by Sen. Fritz Hollings in the Charleston Post and Courier. Hollings lambasted the GOP on the race issue in the wake of the Trent Lott debacle -- no surprise there -- but he provided a fascinating look back at racial controversies in his state going back to the 1940s (while consistently presenting himself in a positive light). Some excerpts:
I was first elected to the S.C. House of Representatives in 1948 when Strom Thurmond ran for president. Racism was rampant. By court order, African-Americans had just been permitted to vote in the all-white Democratic primary, and leading candidates withdrew from the primary rather than have blacks vote for them. To severe criticism, I stayed in. ...
Shocked at such discrimination, I became a champion of the sales tax to equalize black and white schools. But in the Legislature, I could not get senators to join in a House/Senate committee to provide for the equalization, so I chaired a House committee. We wrote a 3 percent sales tax for public schools, and Gov. James F. Byrnes led the fight for its passage. ...
Also during that time, the state constitution forbade women to vote, so I introduced a resolution to repeal that amendment. When I introduced an anti-lynching bill, members staged a walkout from the chamber, but it passed the following year. I proposed a black member for the local school board and at first had the majority of the delegation's support committed. But then a Lutheran minister was proposed in opposition, defeating my candidate and forcing me to vote against my own minister. Later, when I ran for lieutenant governor in 1954, my opponent ran ads, "Hollings is for integration." ...
As governor, I integrated the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and presided over all the sit-ins and marches of Martin Luther King and the NAACP -- all without the loss of life or anyone hurt. I literally broke up and locked up the Ku Klux Klan in my state. ... Forty years ago this month, I calmed the waters leading to the peaceful integration of Clemson University by Harvey Gantt.
I remember right after Martin Luther King was shot, going to the largest black high school in my state. The principal's son, an Annapolis midshipman, made a moving address to the student body and I asked who appointed him to the Naval Academy. He didn't answer. I persisted and finally his father said, "I couldn't get a member of the South Carolina Congressional Delegation to appoint him, so Hubert Humphrey did."
By what about the matter for which Hollings is more frequently criticized: the placing of the Confederate battle flag at the Statehouse in Columbia during his time as governor?
Here’s his response, in the op-ed: “In the 1990s I called for the Confederate flag to be taken down ... . It had been put up by a concurrent resolution by the Legislature without my signature as governor, although when Republicans try to discredit me, they leave that part out.”
Madeleine Begun Kane -- humorist, blogger and friend of this site -- has expanded her comedic efforts (and tweaking of George W.) into the realm of cartoons: here and here. (Caution to Republicans: I accept no responsibility for your elevated blood pressure should you choose to view what Mad has created.)
An e-mail friend, John W. Matthews, is correct in voicing irritation at a claim made by a U.S. activist that "Canada has little incentive to tighten up its immigration system because its own security is not at risk, but the U.S. is at risk." (The quote was from a Wall Street Journal article -- sorry, it requires a subscription -- that examined in the detail the frictions between U.S. and Canadian officials over immigration policy.)
In an e-mail comment tag to the WSJ article, John noted:
Actually, both countries are at risk; and Canada has plenty of incentive to tighten its immigration system.
Terrorists passing through Canada's immigration system may successfully attack their intended target, a nuclear power plant on the American side of the border. But because of wind direction, the major fallout and casualties could be in Canada. And a nuclear suitcase bomb, meant to explode in New York or San Francisco, might accidentally be set off while a terrorist is changing planes at Toronto's Lester Pearson Airport. Thoughtful readers can no doubt think of many other plausible instances in which Canada would be the victim of terrorist attacks, both intended and unintended.
Surely our Canadian neighbors realize that, like all civilized people, they are at risk from terrorist attacks. If not, God help them and us.
The article mentions the Canadian arrest of Mohammed Harkat, “an Algerian linked to top al Qaeda leaders.” The piece adds:
Mr. Harkat and a colleague were spotted photographing Canada's Parliament buildings and Supreme Court, according to intelligence officials quoted in the Canadian media, suggesting those sites may have been their targets. And in his recent audio tape, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden mentioned Canada along with the U.S. and other allies as targets of future attacks.
To repeat a phrase I overuse, we need to remain wide awake to the potential risks. That obligation extends to our Canadian neighbors -- for their own sake, too.
The Gospels were changed dramatically. The idea of a divine God becomes a King transcendent of his people. Christ becomes a warrior; John the Baptist a "soothsayer"; the three wise men become warriors and thanes; towns become "hill-forts"; disciples become nobles of Judea. The Lord's Prayer contains secret runes. Christ's teachings become spells. Gone are the notions of apostolic poverty and turn the other cheek.
Characters in the bible acquire noble titles. Christ was landes uuard -- a guardian of the land, and thiodo drohtin -- lord of the peoples. The Virign Mary became adaknosles uuif -- a woman of noble lineage. Herod, boggebo -- giver of rings. St. Peter became a sword theign, suerdthegan. ...
In addition, the setting of the Bible changes. The desert becomes a forest. They sailed the seas of Galilee in a hoh hurnidskip -- a high-horned ship. Baby Jesus is suddenly bedecked in jewels, while the shepards become horse groomers. ...
There’s a lot more, especially another point Chris makes about John the Baptist. And Chris ends his post with a real kicker: the revamped, Saxonized version of the Lord’s Prayer.
By the way: Chris’s observations about the Saxons began as an e-mail he sent me, responding to my recent posts noting the influence of ancient Finnish sagas on J.R.R. Tolkien. (My original post is here, with John Tuttle’s description of the idiosyncrasies of Finnish linguistics here and Fred Ray’s mentioning of more fun Tolkien tangents here at Layman’s Logic.)
Some regular readers may be asking why I’ve posted on Monday night, already breaking my new three-day-a-week blogging schedule I’ve been prattling about of late. The reason is because Andrew Sullivan has generously directed some traffic this way at the start of this week, so I thought I would share a new item that shows how this site routinely focuses on historical topics. Chris's post serves up some great intellectual nuggets, so I thought, why wait?
More cultural adaptions: A good friend writes:
Catholics know about the Huron Carol, composed by missionaries to aid in the conversion of Huron indians:
Words: Jean de Brebeuf, ca. 1643; trans by Jesse Edgar Middleton, 1926
'Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled
That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead;
Before their light the stars grew dim and wondering hunters heard the hymn,
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.
Within a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found;
A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round
But as the hunter braves drew nigh the angel song rang loud and high
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.
He also notes that the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on the Heiland can be found here. The entry describes the Heliand as "the oldest complete work of German literature." One more thing I've learned from blogging.
Uwe Siemon-Netto, religion correspondent for UPI, has written an impassioned and riveting article about Germany in the new issue of The National Interest.
I’ve transcribed much of the article, titled “The Closing of the German Mind,” below. (An online excerpt is found here.) Siemon-Netto uses vivid prose, obviously fueled by his deep personal feelings about the subject. The article provides one more reason why The National Interest provides a significant contribution to the nation’s foreign policy discussion.
Three factors, he says, have received too little attention in explaining the course of recent political trends in Germany:
“The pacifist sentiment rooted in Germany’s modern history.”
“The effect of the 1968 student rebellion and the Left’s ‘Long March through the institutions.’ ”
“A peculiar Germany susceptibility to utopian fancy.”
I don’t normally go to the trouble of transcribing articles at the length I have here (including in the post immediately below, too), but I regarded this article as special (although I disagree with Siemon-Netto on the gay issue). He writes:
... by re-electing Gerhard Schroeder’s “red-green” coalition, German voters have precluded a long overdue modernization of their economy and society. ...
What was truly odd about the election campaign was that the leaders of an economy and society that are widely acknowledged to be stuck in a rut were barely able to discuss any of the serious issues afflicting the country. ...
Germany is nothing if not modern. We have "gay pride parades" like the Americans, bourgeois teens pimp-walking around town in grunge garments like ghetto kids in the United States, and we outdo any American social engineer in sheer folly. We have been known, for example, to send juvenile felons on "therapeutic" adventure trips to New Zealand, accompanied by a social worker, at taxpayers' expense.
Like the Americans, too, we bastardize our language with politically-correct neologisms; we call this Dummdeutsch ("dumb German"). We no longer say "Guten Morgen," but "Hi, Brigitte, wow", not knowing what this signifies; it just sounded good last night on television. Our feminists can out-snarl their American counterparts as well, and we have guitar-strumming pastors blessing same-sex unions and experimenting liturgically with heavy metal clamor in the vain hope of filling their empty churches.
Yet these superficial attributes of modern cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, Germany is parochial. It is because its parochialism is so deep, in fact, that its expressions of cosmopolitan modernism are so over-the-top. ...
Those who now run this not-yet-normal Germany are mostly “graduates” of a student protest movement that, to hear their own chroniclers describe it, rebelled against the stuffiness and authoritarianism of the Adenauer years. Actually, most other Germans remember this era as a pleasant one, filled with optimism and opportunity. ...
The real reasons for the alienation of the German generation of 1968 -- the 68ers as they are called -- has less to do with anything stuffy about the Adenauer era and more to do with what it has in common with youth revolts in other affluent liberal democratic cultures after World War II ... [In a footnote, she adds that youth rebellions in places such as Germany prove that the Vietnam war cannot by itself explain the eruption of the counterculture phenomenon in the ’60s.]
The consequences of their subsequent Long March through the institutions have gone far to define the country ever since. ...
In varying degrees, the universities were collectivized and stripped of their traditions. ... The worst was in the city-state of Bremen, where students demanded full equality with instructors and insisted on collective, rather than individual, examinations. Twenty would produce one joint thesis. It became so bad that local industries would not take interns from that university because they lacked both knowledge and the will to work. ...
Since the early 1970s, they [the 68ers] have from that perch become vigorous culture-brokers and image-makers, running public radio and television and glossy magazines such as Der Stern and Der Spiegel -- all of them with a sharp left-wing bias. Of course, they are to some extent balanced by newspapers such as the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ... But these cannot fully offset the constant barrage of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-traditional innuendoes, sniggers and assertions to which the German television viewers have been subjected for decades ...
From the start, much of German radio and television described air operations over Afghanistan not as surgical intervention but as Vergeltungsschlage, acts of reprisal, or even Flachenbombardements, carpet bombing, terms evoking World War II memories. ...
The now-graying 68ers ceaselessly advertise themselves in German media culture products as the avante-garde generation that advanced democracy in Germany and finally forced the nation to face up to its Nazi past. This myth ... has no basis in fact whatsoever.
... the Americans the 68ers admired were self-hating Americans, whom they saw as the ultra-Atlantic counterpart of self-hating Germans. ... Thus did the German 68ers strive to earn brownie points with U.S. progressives. ...
Germany’s 68ers, some of them anyway, got at least a dim sense that things changed last September 11. Much of the U.S. political counterculture that they admired and imitated turned cautiously patriotic in the face of a clear and present danger, not to speak of an atrocity. But the German 68ers found it very hard to shirk off a lifetime of adulation and vicarious heroism. ...
The 68ers’ Long March has thoroughly altered Germany’s Protestant territorial churches, to which 26.6 million Germans belong, compared with 26.8 million Catholics. Chiefly as a result of the left-wing drift of their church leadership, German Protestants, once in the majority, have now become a minority group. ...
Many Germans today simply cannot reconcile their amazing good fortune -- peace, prosperity, democracy, reunification and Europafication, too -- with the extremely low national self-esteem to which they have been educated and inured. God seems to have blessed them despite themselves, but half a century after the Gotterdammerung most cannot summon the words with which to give thanks ...
By the way: The National Interest posts commentary pieces, not found in the journal, on a weekly basis at a separate site here, slugged "In The National Interest." It’s one more place to go if you’re looking for level-headed analysis.
Siemon-Netto, who was a child during World War II, gives a vivid description of what it was like for German civilians who endured the Allied bombing. He also talks about how shame over the Nazi past spurred many Germans to foolishly turn away from much of the country’s architectural heritage:
A significant segment of Germany’s 82 million citizens -- and here I include myself -- is still traumatized by childhood experiences in air-raid shelters; by the blast of blockbuster bombs detonating around them; by basement walls cracking open, allowing waves of fire and smoke to roll into cellars full of women and children. I remember my family taking an aunt’s ring finger to its grave because this was the only identifiable part of her body found in the rubble of her Leipzig apartment building.
I recall going to school every morning after a bombardment -- if indeed the school building was still standing -- and learning during roll call that Heinz, Ernst, Helmut or Rudi was dead, killed at age seven or eight.
I still have memories of the famine after the war, when we were allowed a mere 700 calories a day in the Soviet zone of occupation, and, worse, the shame that gripped us when we learned of the genocide that our government had committed in our name. It was a shame that made many of us pretend to be something else when we first hitchhiked abroad in the 1950s or 1960s -- Luxembourgers, Dutch, Alsatians or Swiss, for example. ...
These memories ... explain our discomfort with our history ... Walk through Germany’s towns and villages and you see at every step unsightly architectural testimonies to this phenomenon. Once beautiful apartment blocks built after the Franco-Prussian War now resemble grim casernes because the state paid their owners to hack away at the stucco to make them look “modern.” Many medieval towns centers that had survived the air war were razed and replaced by soulless concrete structures. Farmers plastered over the Tudor-style exterior walls of their homes to make them look “contemporary.”
By destroying witnesses to their history and turning “progressive,” postwar Germans had hoped, in effect, to get rid of Hitler. As it turned out, we got rid of much of our history while Hitler’s shadow nevertheless remained.
Update: Dan Hobby, whose e-mails I always enjoy and learn from, has a different take on one topic raised in the essay:
On the question of Germany turning its back on its architectural heritage, I think this is very much overblown. Following the war, Germany (and most European nations) took great pains to rebuild their cities in the "old style." Walking around their historical centers one would never guess that many of the "historical" buildings were little more than piles of rubble after the war.
Regrettable post-war architecture is a phenomenon found throughout North American and Western Europe. Many English cities are the best examples of this, but look at what has been done to many of America's old downtowns. In countless towns across our nation, the historical fabric of older buildings have been covered in stucco or siding, the original windows replaced and architectural details removed to provide a more modern look. Some preservationists call this "facadomy."
Rather than some cultural angst, I would suggest that a growing economy is the greatest threat to historical architecture -- when times are good and look to get even better, there is the cash and incentive to "modernize," either through demolition or architectural restyling. Certainly the opposite is true: Charleston and Savanna were able to save their historical character largely because they were economically depressed for many years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As I told Dan in my reply, I appreciate his point about the awful aluminum false fronts used in countless downtowns to cover wonderful historic facades. I've editorialized on the topic at length several times over the years.
The Missouri River provides Omaha's eastern border. The city has never developed the riverfront as a destination for recreational and other public uses, although civic planners have been talking about a "back to the river" concept for three decades now. Finally, though, that is about to change in a big way. All the pieces have fallen into place for an entirely new look for the city's riverfront, as this article in today's Omaha World-Herald explains.
The city's riverfront will go from being a neglected industrial and warehouse site to a totally revamped area, with impressive corporate campuses setting the northern and southern borders. (At one end is the existing campus for food processor ConAgra, adjacent to a terrific large-scale public park and lagoon created in the '90s. At the other end will be the new campus for polling firm Gallup). In between will be green spaces, a plaza, a marina, the new convention center/arena and nearby hotel, biking and hiking trails, a riverside restaurant and, soaring over it all, a pedestrian bridge.
And not just any bridge. The structure will incorporate sails and curved lines as its aeshetic themes, with an S-shaped walkway leading up the bridge, whose central feature will be white spires reaching 220 feet. At the base of the bridge will be a plaza intended as an important new public space for the city.
None of this is mere pie-in-the-sky. It's all real, nearly all of it is already under construction, and it will all come together in a single package in three years, when the bridge is completed.
Excuse the boosterism, but this development really is something to brag about. An impressive confluence of civic vision and private-sector initiative.
By the way: Here is the bridge design, and here is more on the riverfront plans.
As I mentioned last week, I am now posting three nights a week: Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. That means that people can find fresh material here at the start of the morning on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I'm doing this to give myself a saner schedule (I've been staying up too late ever since I jumped into blogging last June) and to free up time for me to do other things, including serious reading (which, in turn, will provide fodder for new blog posts).
I had to run by work today, and my 6-year-old daughter went with me. I used a computer in a co-worker's office to do some brief pagination work (laying out pages by computer); my daughter, a first grader, spent the time snacking and drawing. At one point, she noticed that my colleague had printed out and posted, on a cork board, a part of an essay. It was an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence.
She decided to try to read it. In doing so, she put her own spin on the text. I listened as she said, in halting fashion,"... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unbelievable Rights."
Austin Bay returned recently from a trip to Southeast Asia in which he studied how radical Islam is making inroads in that region. In his latest Strategypage.com column, he observes, referring to Jemaah Islamiya (JI):
JI uses the terror payola "from Arab sources" to muscle out public and Muslim moderate education programs in Malaysian villages.
It's symptomatic of an intra-Islam religious and cultural conflict. I've heard Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims complain of "the Arabization of our religion." Arabization is a highly nuanced term, but the general drift among the people I interviewed is it represents a movement toward an aggressive anti-Western, anti-secular and, frankly, racially-tinged ideology. Here's the race angle JI preaches: Singapore is a Chinese city, which is why it needs to be smashed by an Islamic uprising.
Austin also writes, responding to Patty Murray’s inanities about Osama bin Laden, about how the Democratic Party needs a new generation of Scoop Jackson-style liberal hawks. It’s an important point.
A lot of Democrats seem to be in denial that their party needs to divert part of its attention away from its pet domestic issues and devote serious attention to security matters; they want things to go back to the comfortable, pre-9/11 environment, when they could focus on prescription drugs and the minimum wage and imply that displaying an interest in defense issues was so retrograde and déclassé. But the country won't be returning to those days. And Democrats need to adjust.
James Pinkerton cites interesting numbers to buttress his point that Bush's tax-cut plan is smart politics. The bottom line, Pinkerton says: Upper-income folks are far more likely to vote than lower-income people:
In the 2000 election, less than half of those citizens making less than $35,000 a year bothered to vote. But about three-fourths of those citizens making more than $75,000 a year cast a ballot.
And a look at the actual number of votes involved makes the politics even plainer. The 39.6 million Americans making less than $35,000 accounted for 19.6 million votes in 2000. But the 33.4 million Americans making more than $75,000 accounted for 25.1 million votes.
Moreover, to the extent that wealth rises with age, the Bush plan's centerpiece -- eliminating the double taxation of dividends, a boon to shareholders -- looks attractive to older Americans, another steady voting bloc. In 2000, 42 percent of Americans under 35 voted, compared to 70 percent of Americans over 55.
To be sure, neither the affluent nor the elderly are monolithically supportive of a tax cut, not even to a tax cut targeted toward them. But a degree of selfinterest will creep into their policy preferences, just as it has with Social Security and Medicare.
Still, the post immediately below indicates the Bush plan could face difficulties in the Senate.
The United States is playing some interesting head games with Iraq’s Sunnis, trying to scare them into turning on Saddam, according to this article at Strategypage.com. The piece also talks about how forcing an enemy to surrender without having to resort to military action has a long history as a respected strategy.
Gary Haubold forwarded the article to me and several other folks today. After reading the piece, I e-mailed him that “if the U.S. is able to topple Saddam without any bloodshed, I imagine that a lot of Bush's critics will cry foul, in the same odd way they argue that there is something supposedly unfair and cowardly about defeating someone by using high-altitude aircraft rather than relying on, say, suicidal bayonet attacks.”
Gary had a cogent take on things, as usual (although I was not prepared for his dark humor in regard to the vignette involving the gas station):
Based on my military and athletic experience, I can't imagine how the best commander on earth could get the Iraqi troops to fight. Why should they?
They lost big last time, this time our equipment is better and theirs is worse, and even last time the grunts on the ground surrendered en masse. One brigade of Iraqi infantry even surrendered to French photographers, for gosh sakes!
The predominantly Sunni Republican Guard led by the Tikrit Mafia may be different -- but maybe not. Some Eastern Philosopher wrote that the outcome of every battle is decided beforehand in the minds of the combatants. I'd add that in nearly every case, nobody knows the outcome beforehand. This case is the exception.
IF there is a war, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. We know it and every single Iraqi soldier knows it. If there is a fight, it'll be over in a week, or less probably.
I myself am looking forward to seeing Saddam get the Mussolini treatment from his own people. Upside down in a run-down old GAS station. Ironic, no?
They each recently ended a hiatus away from blogging.
Stopping by each of their blogs is definitely worthwhile: Edward Boyd (it's a pseudonym, for those of you who don't know) is at Zonitics, David at Cornfield Commentary, and Joe at Winds of Change (note that Winds of Change is at a new URL; I've linked to the correct site in this post).
At Winds of Change, a blog known for first-rate analysis of military matters, Joe says the revamped site will be more of a collaborative endeavor, with contributions from, among others, Muslimpundit (also back from a hiatus).
By the way: In this review, Dave -- David Hogberg -- had something most interesting to say about a Super Soaker.
A post (slugged "Inside Politics") at RealClearPolitics knocks down several of Charles Schumer's overheated claims about Charles Pickering; the ABA angle is especially interesting:
On the Senate side, Charles Schumer is vowing to filibuster Judge Pickering's nomination because:
"To renominate Judge Pickering, who has not built a distinguished record and is probably best known for intervening on behalf of a convicted cross-burner, shows unfortunately that Richard Nixon's Southern strategy is still alive and well in the White House."
Schumer's statement may have set a new low for deceitfulness. How else to characterize the Senator describing a judge who was given a "well-qualified" rating by the ABA as not having a distinguished record? How else to explain why Schumer smears the judge as a racist -- even though he knows full well that Pickering put his life at risk by testifying against the KKK in the 1960's?
This is the same strategy the Dems have pursued with Pickering all along, but Schumer obviously feels the Lott affair has strengthened his hand in playing the race card and taking the precedent-setting step of publicly threatening a filibuster over an appeals court nomination.
By the way: I greatly appreciate that RealClear Politics includes this site on its blogroll. That has sent a considerable amount of traffic this way, for which I'm grateful.
Critics of Bush are making some curious arguments.
First, here are some observations from E.J. Dionne’s latest column:
You have to hand it to President Bush and his judge-pickers.
They understand the power of the judiciary to shape American political life for years to come. They brazenly use their executive authority to fill the courts with their allies. Then they attack, attack and attack again when opposition senators dare invoke their own constitutional power to slow a juggernaut whose purpose is to remake the world according the specifications of Justice Antonin Scalia. ...
Politically, the renominations were shrewd. By sending Pickering up again, Bush signaled to his Southern backers that he was willing to stand up for a Mississippian against Senate liberals, despite Lott's defenestration. And the energy the Pickering and Owen battles will soak up may allow other ideological nominees to slip through.
The real issue here involves not the personal characteristics of nominees -- there are plenty of smart conservatives on Bush's list -- but a political struggle to create an increasingly activist conservative bench.
“They realized that if they took over the one unelected part of the government, they could govern for a generation,” says Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat. ...
Such suspicions of partisanship in the judiciary are corrosive because, unfortunately, they are now plausible.
Judicial appointments are not like patronage jobs in the Commerce Department. Judges sit for life. A president who says he wants a more decorous process won't get it if he refuses to acknowledge that the road to de-politicizing the judiciary will be paved by consultation on appointments. Playing partisan politics and calling it high principle won't work anymore.
Along the same line, Bruce Ackerman, a law professor had an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, arguing that it wouldn’t be right for any Republican justices to resign on the current Supreme Court in order for Bush to name their successor. The Ackerman op-ed, incidentally, was titled “Politics Has No Business on the Bench”:
I can see the late justice [John Harlan] shaking his head sadly at the news that Republican members of the court are considering their retirement now that the Senate is in their party's hands by the margin of 51 to 49. I urge them to think again. ...
"Statesmanship'' for the justices, paradoxically, requires the opposite course. They should stay in office until George W. Bush can prove that he can win an election without their assistance.
The Supreme Court's decision in the case of Bush vs. Gore has thrown the Constitution into a condition of disequilibrium.
Generally speaking, presidents pick justices, not the other way around. But at the moment, Bush is in the White House by the grace of five justices of the Supreme Court. They should not try to ensure the continuation of their 5-4 majority by enabling their designate as president to place another hard-line Republican onto the bench.
Please.
Ackerman’s argument is an honest one, but the huge Republican win (huge in the sense that the GOP gained all-important control of both houses of Congress) fully validated Bush’s legitimacy. Bush’s barnstorming, after all, was a critical factor in boosting Republican turnout last year.
As for Dionne, I don’t claim that any party has a monopoly on virtue; it’s hardly beyond the pale to think that legitimate criticisms can be made of an unwise mixing of courts and politics by Republicans, as Dionne charges in the rest of his column. Of course, in his discussion of undue partisanship and the courts, Dionne makes no mention of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s grossly dubious ruling that sidestepped both common sense and common decency and gave a green light for Frank Lautenberg to jump into the state’s U.S. Senate race at the last minute on the flimsiest of rationalizations.
Critics of Bush are bewailing the moves toward naming conservatives on the federal courts, but if the issue is so important, they should have redoubled their efforts last year to try to ensure that Democrats would maintain control of the Senate. As things turned out, Bush outworked them and Karl Rove outsmarted them, and now the GOP, and conservatives, are fully entitled to enjoy the benefits that political success provides.
This doesn’t mean that liberals should refrain from fighting any court nominee who raises concern for them. (Hey, it’s Schumer himself who made it explicit that he thinks nominees should be opposed merely on the basis of ideology, regardless of their intellectual qualifications.) The point is that the votes on the nominees need to proceed. Bush will win some and lose some, and that’s fine. Just let the process move forward and the votes on appointments be made.
I don’t agree with the stands taken by every hard-line conservative nominee, but it’s silly for Dionne and like-minded commentators to act as if the views of those nominees are beyond the pale. The realm of legitimate legal philosophy in this country is quite broad. Liberals just don’t like that the other side is winning (and that their side lost on the main electoral outcome last year).
The Supreme Court, by the way, hasn’t invalidated federal regulatory power at every turn in recent years, despite what one might gather from the court's critics. Yes, in some high-profile cases, the justices have reined in federal authority, but in other instances they have upheld such powers, which is just as it should be: The court is making proper distinctions. But the court majority, to its credit, has performed an invaluble service by saying it is no longer acceptable for Congress and federal regulators to act as if the commerce and equal protection clauses are infinitely elastic, justifying ever-more ambitious rationalizations for the expansion of federal power. There are limits to such action. Bush’s critics describe that trend as calamitous. But it is merely a sensible, overdue correction to past congressional and judicial excess. In sum, a welcome restoration of balance.
Beyond Tolkien: even more signs of Finnish influence
I mentioned last week how J.R.R. Tolkien was influenced by the Kalevala, a group of ancient Finnish sagas.
On that topic, my e-mail buddy Fred Ray writes from North Carollina:
Okay, one more thing on the Kalevala. Longfellow used it as a model for Hiawatha. Since he was writing an epic poem about native America, he wanted something that sounded non-European, and found it in the distinctive rhyming scheme of the Kalevala, which was just then being translated. Good article here.
For a musical version listen to Sibelius' haunting Swan of Tuonela. (Opus 22)
By the way: I've had a lot of posts on the Confederate flag. Fred, a student of Civil War history, sent me another e-mail in which he provided a link to an especially interesting flag -- of a very different Confederacy (I knew of that Confederacy; never knew about its flag): here.
Grew up in Ohio and Pennsylvania but live in Silicon Valley now.
The NYT article is generally correct to the extent anything in the NYT is correct; always look for the hidden agenda.
I am surprised as much as 18% of the Bay Area residents could afford to buy their own home. Even down 25%, house prices are still astronomical. We bought our house in 1994 and even given the 25% drop, it could fall another 60% from here and I would still have a taxable gain. In the Prime neighborhood of Palo Alto, empty land goes for $8 million an acre (down from 12 in the craziest week). Lots are usually worth less with a house on them because it has to be torn down to make way for the new one. Land is generally sold in 7,500 to 15,000 sq ft lots. The per square foot price can easily go UP for larger lots because it is so hard to get a lot bigger than 1/4 acre. The bottom line is that there is a fixed amount of land in a place with one of the few good public school districts. So the price goes up and stays there. We are still having multiple offers on "reasonably priced" houses under $1.5 million.
But don't ask about the commercial market. I sublet a building in October 2000 for $4.25/sq ft/month. In January 2001 I could not find
anyone to look at the same building next door at a rent of $1.10 per month. I don't know of any market that has ever collapsed so completely so out of the blue.
Bad as things are, they will get better again, just don't ask me when or why. But it is always good when Southern Californians say it may never happen. Bay Area people wrote off SoCal the same way in the early 90's. Worse than Chicago and Southern Illinois.
The 70's 80's down turn, mainly 80's and early 90's due to the end of the cold war, in aerospace was focused on Southern California where the industry was primarily located. But now they're rosey again.
The wine industry is also facing hard times as some segment of agriculture always is.
Bottom line...It's a big state. Something is always going to hell somewhere; something is always out of control somewhere. It's been that way since Mr. Sutter made his discovery in 1848.
The real dirty secret nobody here discusses is the Big One. No one is prepared. The devastation will make 9/11 look puny. That will really hurt the state's ability to attract the new blood that constantly revitalizes it. But Gray Davis is Governor again so I figure we're safe for four more years, God wouldn't beset Davis and the Big One at the same time, even to Pharaoh.
I got a terrific e-mail today that provided needed context and filled in some gaps from the reporting in a New York Times article I quoted from Monday concerning economic conditions in Silicon Valley. The e-mail had useful observations about the housing market, office space conditions and whether the gap really is that wide between economic conditions in Southern California and those in Silicon Valley:
Interesting comments on the NYT article on Silicon Valley, where I've lived and worked as an engineer and business manager since 1980. I didn't read the article, but I can easily agree that there's a serious slump here, even if I hadn't read a newspaper for two years. You are correct, however, that California has had these kinds of problems for a long time and there isn't really anything new going on. Silicon Valley long escaped many problems because there was a lot of Sand Hill Road venture capital looking for a place to grow. That hasn't been true for the last year and a half or so.
I can't challenge any of the figures used by the article, though they seem jointly bent to bolster a preconceived conclusion. For example, I find it difficult to believe that only 18% of residents can afford to buy here, unless perhaps you include the outlying population of Santa Clara County who probably don't want to move into Silicon Valley proper. The median price also seems suspect. A quick reference from last August's SJ Mercury News has it as $436,000, which seems about right. If prices have been dropping, a $540,000 median is hard to believe. It is certainly very difficult for a first-timer to buy a home here, but there is no lack of buyers for sanely priced homes and I know of no home in my area that has lost value in the six years I've lived here. If there are 25% drops in prices, they are certainly in the ridiculously overpriced McMansions that dot the hillsides.
And as far as excess office space, I have to believe that a close examination will show that part of the growth in vacant square footage is because we've never stopped building new office space, even when there were no companies looking to move in. It's amazing how many small companies here have large, mostly empty buildings. There are many buildings and complexes built years ago that have never had their first tenant, and still the commercial and industrial construction continues.
There isn't as much difference between southern CA and the Valley as the article seems to imply and there are a lot of jobs available here, though granted an insufficient number to accommodate the current number of unemployed. It is true that companies tend to look elsewhere more these days than they did in the past, but that is more a function of state regulations and taxes than any woes specific to Silicon Valley.
California's economy has many problems that don't have a lot to do with Silicon Valley's high-tech slump. Most companies who leave do so because of the relatively anti-business climate -- I've been in a lot of those meetings. This is still, and probably always will be, a good place to live and work, but other areas are much more attractive to businesses trying to manage a budget. Our glory days may be over, but I wouldn't doubt that a lot of places wish they had our problems.
If there is a single, largest thing that is going to hold back California's economic recovery, it's the deficit. I wonder if the NYT will critically examine the 40 billion dollar turn-around accomplished by Gray Davis.
Roy Barnes, the outgoing governor of Georgia, had some pungent remarks about the Confederate flag the other day in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Barnes was defeated last November in part because Republicans tapped into resentment among rural Georgians toward Barnes' successful push to revamp Georgia's state flag, reducing the Confederate battle flag design to only a tiny portion of the flag.)
It doesn't matter that angry teachers want their share of the credit for his defeat. Barnes will walk out of the Capitol believing that he was done in by the Confederate battle emblem.
"You can't look at the numbers and deny that," he said. "The flag is tied up in race. Everybody knows that. Race is a particularly volatile issue, particularly in the South. The flag has become a symbol of everything that many Southerners don't like about what's happened to the South. It's become urbanized. It's become diverse."
Barnes is mystified by the flaggers' refusal to let him depart in peace. "I mean, they won," he said.
The bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition is going to bring re-enactors and private boaters traveling up the Missouri River this year. But as an editorial in the Omaha World-Herald explained this week, the Missouri as it exists today is far different from the waterway known to Lewis and Clark. And that could mean complications if not hardships for boaters who don't plan ahead:
... Re-enactors, who will begin in Virginia and trace the voyage's route, will find other problems.
Among them: the Missouri River. It has been dammed, channeled and otherwise manipulated for flood control and navigation. It is marred by sandbars, dikes and other hazards. The river in many places is now narrower, swifter and more dangerous for small boats than it was 200 years ago.
Thus it is more dangerous for the re-enactors and for the privately owned boats -- perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands -- that will accompany them on portions of their journey. Motorized boats will find the going tough; canoeists may find it impossible in places. (Lewis and Clark couldn't have made it against today's current.) ...
Logistics are a problem. There are relatively few places on the river to gas up. Docking space is scarce. In some of the narrower reaches, boats may have to jockey for space. Local communities will have to handle emergencies and protect riverside historic sites.
But the onslaught is coming, ready or not. Perhaps the Missouri will cooperate. If not, local communities along the route should be ready to help.
Modern American culture is geared in a growing number of ways toward an acceleration in tempo -- in the editing of movies and TV shows, in interactions with businesses, in conversational speech. That’s the thesis of a worthwhile op-ed in the Washington Post by Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University (where I got a master’s degree in international relations 20 years ago this spring).
Excerpts:
This is one more way that the gap between old and young is widening as fast as the frequently noted gap between rich and poor. My father is frustrated not only by fast-paced commentator talk but also by countless other ways technology has made the world harder to navigate. When he makes a phone call to a business, he rarely encounters people he can ask to slow down, speak louder or explain what they said. ...
The creator [of the TV show “Gilmore Girls”], Amy Sherman-Palladino, told the Wall Street Journal recently that zippiness is the motivation for many aspects of "Gilmore Girls:'' no close-ups (they slow things down); frequent shots of characters talking as they walk from place to place; and scenes shot over and over to shave a few seconds off the already dizzying pace. Screenwriters traditionally figure a page of dialogue to a minute on air; Sherman-Palladino figures 20 to 25 seconds a page. ...
This is an attitude I've encountered myself, especially among fellow natives of New York City. For example, when I was studying linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, another graduate student from New York remarked about one of our professors, a Midwesterner, "The problem with him is that he isn't very bright!''
I didn't agree with her evaluation -- and neither, incidentally, did the many linguists around the world who regarded him with respect verging on awe -- but it wasn't until I wrote my doctoral dissertation on conversational style that I figured out exactly why she would draw this conclusion. In the talk-focused culture of intellectual New Yorkers, intelligence is demonstrated by fast-paced repartee. Quick talk is taken as evidence of quick thinking, which is synonymous with smart thinking. So our professor's habit of pausing before speaking, and then speaking slowly, did not impress her (as it would a fellow Midwesterner or a rural New Englander) as deliberative and thoughtful. It appeared to her as a sign of dull wit.
Before you think bad thoughts about us native New Yorkers, let me tell you what else I learned in my research: All over the world, speakers from some geographic regions tend to speak more slowly than those from others. And in every country that has been studied, people from the slower-speaking regions are stereotyped as stupid. This pattern was uncovered by Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, who had reason to be interested because Finns are thought to be slow and dull by neighboring Swedes.
Whoa, I think I just set a blogosphere record: Three posts on Finnish linguistics in less than a week! (This post, plus this one and this one.) You’re welcome.
A realistic approach to foreign policy sometimes requires choosing between unattractive alternatives and not bellyaching about it. In fact, this relates to one of my central complaints about the foreign policy idealists whose views I frequently deride here: They act as if unpleasant choices can almost always be neatly sidestepped. One reason that's important to them is because otherwise they would be unable to pursue one of their main pastimes: patting themselves on the back for their supposed moral superiority. That fixation with maintaining purity of purpose is common to most policy activists, regardless of party or ideology. The real world, of course, often involves compromise and complication.
In that regard, analyst Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute wrote a policy brief this week in which he swallowed hard and argued that the United States should accept an especially terrible choice for Northeast Asia: acquiescence in the embrace of nuclear weapons by South Korea and Japan. That, Carpenter argued, is the best option among the many unattractive ones available to the United States for containing North Korea.
Such an approach would carry unacceptably high risks, however. And Carpenter's recommendation should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, because it conveniently allows him to argue for what he's been advocating for years: withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and compelling the South Koreans and Japanese to take responsibility for their own defense.
That's an unwise approach. Sure, South Korea and Japan should be encouraged to pick up even more of the security tab. But abandonment of a solid U.S. commitment to those countries would be foolish, given the rough characters found in their neighborhood.
Next week I shift here to a reduced blogging schedule for the foreseeable future: I'll post three nights a week -- Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. That means that people will be able to read fresh material here at the start of the day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I'm making the change for several reasons. First, under the current schedule, I'm staying up too late (I don't start posting until around 10 p.m.). Second, I need to free up a portion of my time for other things, not least the opportunity to do some serious reading.
Although the volume of posts here will drop (meaning a likely decline in readership, unfortunately), the new schedule should make for better posts, because I'll be less tired when I write (I hope), will be able to work at a less hurried pace, and, through new reading, will be encountering new topics to write about.
I'll reserve the right to post at any time as I see fit, of course.
This change doesn't mean I've soured at all on blogging in general. On the contrary, I've been quite pleased with my blog experience and am grateful for much that has happened, especially the many e-mail acquaintances I've been privileged to make. But, as with so much in life, reasonable balances need to be struck. This one is overdue.
By the way: Due to commitments unrelated to what I've just mentioned, I may not get a chance to post here on Wednesday and Thursday nights this week.
In a recent post, I raised the prospect of what the economic and psychological ramifications would be if a dirty bomb were exploded on Wall Street. David Thompson wrote me to observe that a horrific bomb attack did take place there -- on Sept. 16, 1920.
I knew about the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago, but I had no idea about the Wall Street attack he mentioned. I suppose the incident was discussed at some point in the wake of 9/11, but I missed it.
Here is how an article in American Heritage described the carnage:
... just after noon on September 16, 1920, a horse cart filled with dynamite and sash weights had exploded in front of the Assay Office, near the intersection of Wall and Broad, killing 30 people instantly and injuring about 300 others. (Eventually, some 40 would die.) The lunch hour had barely begun, and many of the victims were messengers crossing the street or clerks hit by shattered glass as they ate at their desks. The hundreds of pounds of sash weights acted like shrapnel.
When Americans in 1920 heard of the carnage on Wall Street, many believed they had encountered a type of violence never before seen. There had been bomb explosions before -- at Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886, at the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 -- but they had been part of specific labor disputes, party to specific protests. The blast on Wall Street, by contrast, seemed to be purely symbolic, designed to kill as many innocent people as possible in an assault on American power.
"There was no objective except general terrorism," wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. ...
Responsibility for the blast, however, was never determined. For the authorities and for the American public, failure to find the perpetrators was a major embarrassment. But it was also a triumph. In the midst of the post-World War I Red Scare, when anarchists and communists were routinely deprived of their civil rights, the Wall Street investigation did not, against all odds, produce a scapegoat.
The blast did, however, result in serious consequences for American democracy. Fear of further violence boosted nativist campaigns for immigration restriction, which discriminated against groups -- Italians, Russians, Jews -- suspected of harboring radical ideas.
The explosion also solidified national support behind Wall Street, transforming the daily routine of finance into an act of defiance and patriotic affirmation. Critics of the country's economic system were denounced for supporting violence and terror, and debate over Wall Street's power grew noticeably more muted. It was in such silences, rather than in shouting, that the attack had its most profound national effect.
Wall Street itself, eager to minimize fears of a stock market crash, swiftly returned to "business as usual." The New York Stock Exchange opened at its normal time on the next day, September 17, and the market continued the previous day's upward climb. By September 20, the New York Commercial could report that "There is unmistakably a better feeling in Wall Street than there has been for some time." The violence was dismissed as the work of crazed revolutionists.
A dirty bomb attack on Wall Street today would no doubt produce a similar eruption of patriotic feeling. But, regrettably, such an attack would make it impossible for New York or the U.S. economic system to return swiftly to “business as usual.”
The African National Congress held its national conference last month with some 3,500 delegates in attendance -- and in a hall named after D.F. Malan, a central figure in South Africa’s old apartheid regime. The idea was to underscore how South Africa has progressed to the point that the ANC can even hold its major annual gathering in a former stronghold of white supremacist sentiment.
I took a look at what some of the South African press coverage. Interesting:
The ANC leadership devotes great energy to insisting that party activists toe the line. Rumbles of dissent are heard from what, by South African standards, amount to the ANC’s “right wing” and, especially, its “left wing” as exemplified by the labor movement. But the power to affect policy generally remains with ANC supporters who stick to the party line.
The party conference proceedings were punctuated by a moment of unexpected poignancy: South African President Thabo Mbeki was embarrassed when Nelson Mandela entered the hall near the end of Mbeki’s big speech. Mandela’s entrance produced an eruption of affection and enthusiasm from the audience, in stark contrast to the tepid response to Mbeki’s address.
Southern Africa has had a horrid experience with liberation movements that to came to power amid waves of euphoria and optimism, only to then turn against the very people they liberated.
The people of Angola will tell you how the MPLA, once one of the world’s most celebrated left-wing movements, today closely resembles the Sicilian Mafia. The people of Zimbabwe will tell of the pillage, rape and human rights violations conducted by Zanu-PF, a party which only two decades ago was a beacon of hope for many Africans.
... the stifling of ideological diversity in the ranks of the ANC has been a noticeable trend in recent years. Since the government’s decision to adopt the growth, employment and redistribution policy, there has been an increasing intolerance of alternative [that is, leftist -- GS] economic views. ...
But intolerance being the contagious disease that it is, it has moved to other areas. The debilitating fight over the causes of Aids and the treatment of the disease, the stubbornness over our approach to Zimbabwe and the not-so-subtle protection afforded to some public figures who breach ethics are by-products of this tolerance of intolerance.
... the tendency is to herd South Africans into modal thinking — telling them that there can be only one solution to a particular problem and divergence from that is tantamount to dissent. ...
From a column by think tank scholar John Matshikiza:
The fact that the African National Congress’s 51st National Congress was being held in the Huguenot heartland of Stellenbosch, and in the DF Malan Memorial Centre in particular, has been held up as a sign of the vigorous transformation that has swept through South Africa in the past 10 years. ...
The [Mbeki] speech was long and uneventful, until former president Nelson Mandela, having been delayed by bad weather in Umtata, tried to sneak unobtrusively into the hall after the president had been talking for almost two hours.
Trying to sneak Mandela unnoticed into anywhere is like trying to sneak an aircraft carrier into the line-up for the Henley Regatta. The crowd broke ranks and started singing in praise of Madiba, obliging Mbeki to break his speech until the pandemonium had died down.
Observations from another columnist, Richard Calland:
But the moment — the possibility — [for Mbeki to make his big, concluding point] was stolen, eclipsed by Mandela’s regally shuffled journey to a seat at the front of the stage. It was pure theatre, more Ibsen than French farce, as the timing was, in the words of one very senior ANC official afterwards, “absolutely disastrous, a protocol nightmare”.
On the one hand, the speech of a president should not be interrupted in such a manner by anyone. By anyone. But Mandela is not, of course, anyone. ...
The warmth of his greeting was telling — and for Mbeki inevitably and, surely, hurtfully so. He was entitled to be hurt and furious. Advised as he should have been of the proximity of the end of the speech, Mandela should have recognised the effect that his entrance would have and ordered his chauffeur to drive around the block. ...
After his speech had drifted quietly to a close, Mbeki brooked no ululation of his own, milked no applause, but in an act of contrasting utter simplicity, took his seat and fiddled with his now redundant speaking notes, as behind him NEC members jostled to embrace Mandela. No one approached him; it was as if he was not there. Even the three big screens above the crowd focused on Mandela, as if it was he who had just completed the president’s political report.
I have rarely seen such a painful scene of loneliness played out so publicly in politics. In emblematic fashion, it captured so much of the essence of Mbeki’s leadership style: the cold and detached intellect, the serious, calculating demeanour and the unapproachably aloof personality.
I’ve long been furious at Mbeki’s eccentric approach to AIDS policy and his inexcusable refusal to take a hard line against Robert Mugabe’s atrocities in neighboring Zimbabwe. But my anger has been tempered -- a bit, for the moment -- by that image of Mbeki before the ANC throng, unloved and even ignored -- “it was as if he was not there.” What a pitiful figure.
The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history.
They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.
Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. ...
Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.)
We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" -- the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. -- that appears without a single date. ...
This New York Times article vividly described what it termed a bifurcated economy in California, with growth in Southern California but big problems in the Bay area.
The piece makes it sound as if California hasn’t had serious economic challenges like this for a very long time. Is that correct? I thought the California economy, despite its diversification, had hit plenty of rough patches in the ’70s and ’80s due, for one thing, to vagaries in the aerospace industry.
At any rate, the article says that In the Bay Area, only 18 percent of residents can afford to buy a house, given the sky-high home prices and the downturn in the overall economy. (I knew housing prices there were astronomical, but I didn't know it was quite on that scale.)
From the article:
Southern California, particularly the counties south and east of Los Angeles, is faring relatively well, with unemployment below the national average, personal income growth outpacing the nation and military contractors riding a wave of Pentagon and domestic security spending. The film industry set box-office records last year, and consumers took advantage of low interest rates to invest in new homes and automobiles.
But the San Francisco Bay Area remains mired in a technology slump, with skilled and formerly wealthy workers fleeing to find jobs elsewhere and analysts worried that it could be years before the next new thing revitalizes Silicon Valley.
"It's like two separate countries," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo bank.
"For the time being," he said, "California will lag the U.S. economy, primarily because it's being dragged down by the Bay Area."
Viewed as a whole, California, which accounts for roughly one-seventh of the nation's total output, reflects the wobbly national economic picture. ...
The brightest spot in the state economy is the ring of fast-growing counties around Los Angeles where Mr. Pineda lives -- San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego. ...
But in Silicon Valley the news is bleak.
The technology industries in the Bay Area continue to shed jobs, with employment falling by 87,000 people last year. An estimated 40,000 people have left Silicon Valley in the past year in search of work elsewhere. Unemployment in precincts once seen as a model of the new, technological future, has jumped from less than 2 percent in 2000 to nearly 7 percent at the end of this year. In some areas, it is much worse. ...
Housing prices have fallen, in some cases by as much as 25 percent over the past two years, but the median home price in the Bay Area is still $540,000. That leaves housing unaffordable to all but about 18 percent of residents. By contrast, 43 percent of working families in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties can afford an average home there, which costs less than $200,000.
Another measure of the Bay Area's distress is the acres of empty office space. In early 2000, at the height of the technology boom, the vacancy rate was less than 2 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Today, the figure is approaching 20 percent. ...
No one knows when -- or if -- the turnaround will begin. "The Bay Area is waiting patiently for that tech bounce-back that may never come," said Edward Leamer, director of the Anderson Forecast at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It has priced itself out of virtually any other economic function."
I've posted about how ancient Finnish poetry had a major effect on J.R.R. Tolkien's literary imagination. John Tuttle followed up by sending me fun information about the oddities of Finnish linguistics. Now Fred Ray, a North Carolina e-mail friend, provides a link to more Tolkien tangents at the blog Layman's Logic. Want to see a picture of the original twin towers that inspired Tolkien? Layman's Logic has pictures, and lots more.
Would a withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from South Korea be a useful way to increase our leverage over North Korea? Donald Sensing cogently argues "no" in this well-conceived post. Don writes:
The presumption that US forces in S. Korea are "hostage" to the North is ridiculous, as I explained here. [That link takes you not only to a terrific account by Don of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, complete with Winston Churchill, Kitchener, and the Dervishes, but also to a detailed analysis of why North Korea does not have overwhelming military superiority over U.S. and South Korean forces to the south. -- GS] Furthermore, a US withdrawal of forces from the peninsula decreases our freedom of action in case of war, not increases it. Strategists know that gaining a land foothold is one of the most difficult things to do in war. We have one now; to put ourselves in the position of having to gain it again if war comes make no sense.
Removing troops from the South, even with the South's full agreement, would not mean that we could do whatever we wanted if war came, without regard to its effects on the South. We cannot turn our backs on 50+ years of history now and tell the South to heck with them (maybe some time down the road, but not now). David apparently assumes that with US boots on the ground now, the South has veto authority over US military action in a potential war. But they don't. There is is very comprehensive system for combined arms operations in place if war comes. Contingencies have already been thought through and plans of action for them approved all around. But that would all be trashed if we withdrew.
Withdrawing forces from the South would increase the chance of aggressive war by the North. No matter what reasons we offered or threats we made, the North would view a withdrawal as weakness on America's part, and a certain signal that a gaping rift has opened between the US and S. Korea. It would not matter what the "real" story was, N. Korea would think we are abandoning the South and that therefore the North has a free hand. There is nothing that would embolden the North toward war more than withdrawing US troops now.
As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing (and check out the variety of topics Don explores at his blog).
It would be hard to exaggerate the moral idiocy of the California GOP official who circulated part of an essay that said the country would have been better off had the South won the Civil War, because “the real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won.”
Such an argument is an amazing insult to the achievements of the early Republican Party, which, to its credit, was responsible for the Civil War constitutional amendments that attempted to push the country toward the goal of equal justice under the law regardless of race. The philosophy that underlay those amendments represents one of the most commendable developments in American thought.
Bill Back, the California GOP official who circulated the anti-Reconstruction essay, is at best ignorant -- of his own party’s history, no less! -- and at worst a fool.
After all, by the 1890s the white South had made clear what its vision was for the races.
White Southerners had taken action, both in the private sphere and in the realm of state law, to ensure that in their region, the notion of equal justice under the law guaranteed by the Civil War constitutional amendments had been eviscerated. Reconstruction ideals of racial harmony were dead, extinguished by the growing Southern white enthusiasm for lynching, Jim Crow segregation, audacious electoral fraud and, ultimately, outright disenfranchisement.
The blame for those horrors doesn’t lie with the Republicans who had sought to ensure racial justice in the aftermath of the war. It rests with the calculated decisions of the white South of the Jim Crow era -- and with its great facilitator, the U.S. Supreme Court. The court had interpreted the Civil War amendments so narrowly that the federal government was unable to intervene to stop racial discrimination anywhere in the country. (The North was by no means free of racial injustice, as historian Leon Litwack’s invaluable scholarship has demonstrated.) The court also gave its approval to segregationist practices by issuing its infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson decision.
I say this, incidentally, as a native Southerner with at least two relatives, from each side of my family, who fought for the Confederacy. I say it, too, as someone who had two relatives -- again, one from each side of my family -- who were charged in federal court in North Carolina in the 1870s for intimidating a black man from trying to vote for a Republican congressional candidate.
By the way: The criticisms that GOP official Back quoted in the essay (found in its entirety here) echo the language used by California Democrats in the 1860s to lambaste Republican policies for Reconstruction.
Democratic editors in California derided three Republican-backed civil rights measures approved by Congress in 1867, calling them “mad,” “loathsome” and “repulsive.” Congress should have seen, one Democratic editor argued, that such measures would “crush beneath the iron heel of naked power every principle of right and freedom” for which American Revolution had been fought.
U.S. Sen. Eugene Casserly, a California Democrat who served from 1869 to 1873, spoke out fervently against enfranchising blacks, whom, he argued, were “incapable of suffrage because of their ignorance.”
Henry Haight, a Democrat who held the California governorship from 1867 to 1871, stood out as one of the most outspoken critics of congressional Reconstruction policies. He continued to voice his opposition, said historian Eugene H. Berwanger, “long after many Democrats had turned their attention to other issues.” The Reconstruction acts, Haight said, were “a violation of the fundamental principles of the Constitution and of liberty.” Haight’s impassioned words, Berwanger concluded, “made him the anti-black, states’ rights spokesman for the West.”
In contrast, Leland Stanford, who served in the early 1860s as California’s first Republican governor, supported black suffrage after the Civil War. In 1867, he wrote that the conflict was an “incomplete revolution” and that he looked forward to the time “not very far distant when every citizen will be considered and admitted to have equally one with another the right to a voice in the government.”
In the description of historian Berwanger, Stanford
was especially anxious for blacks in the South to be enfranchised: in his view the “conquered people” there would continue to be defiant, and only the black vote, combined with the loyal white vote, would offset latent feelings of rebellion.
This is the California history that Bill Back’s ill-considered e-mailing ignored and the proud Republican legacy it inexcusably trashed.
Rick Henderson, of the blog The Deregulator, makes a sound point about John Edwards' presidential chances:
... Edwards made his millions suing insurance companies in medical malpractice cases, and the medmal mess is a major story in a lot of places -- what with the potential doctors' strike in West Virginia, the malpractice meltdown in Pennsylvania, and even the exodus of OB/GYNs from my home state of Nevada. Trial lawyers who drive physicians out of business and make it difficult for pregnant women to deliver babies are not exactly high on the popularity food chain these days, so Edwards' biography could be used against him ... particularly if the GOP makes tort reform an issue in this session of Congress.
Rick links to a useful analysis of Edwards by John Hood, a sharp-minded free-enterprise think tanker in North Carolina. (Rick and John Hood both have connections to Virginia Postrel.)
As someone who editorialized about North Carolina politics for years and who had a legnthy interview with Edwards during his successful (and impressive) Senate run in 1998, I'd say the key to Edwards' political fortunes is his public persona. It's what I call the Boy Scout persona: dear, sweet John -- of course we can trust him!
In that sense, Edwards reminds me of Oliver North. In the summer of '87, the national press and a lot of Washington politicians piled on North (rightly, in my view) for helping run a covert foreign policy operation without the slightest public accountability -- but it was all for naught. At the much-awaited investigative committee hearings, North used his God-and-country-good-soldier persona as an impenetrable shield against the nitpicking by Inouye and all the others.
Same thing with Edwards. His persona is his shield: Dear, sweet John as an opportunistic, sleazy lawyer? No way -- he's a decent-minded fellow just standing up for people's rights for redress. It's the American way.
That's what the defense of him will be. Let him get in front of a camera or work a small roomful of voters, and the guy can work miracles.
I'm not saying that will be enough to win him the Democratic nomination. But star power can carry a political figure a long way, if the conditions are right. (Yes, George W. is very popular now, but much can happen between now and November 2004, especially since neither party enjoys an insurmountable advantage over the other as far as the Electoral College.)
By the way: Before I took the leap into blogging, I sent John Ellis some thoughts about Edwards last May; Ellis posted at his blog. Among my observations:
The campaign he ran in 1998 against the incumbent, Lauch Faircloth, was quite impressive. I've watched Democrats lose U.S. Senate seats in North Carolina for decades (with the exception of Terry Sanford's win in 1986), and the Republican advantage in such contests has usually be pronounced. It's not that Republicans win by large percentages; it's that the political demographics, time after time, have made it difficult for Democrats to amass enough support to put them over the top. Conservative Democratic voters in rural eastern North Carolina are critical. Edwards, to his credit, carried eastern North Carolina and even picked up significant numbers in GOP-leaning urban areas in the west, in places like Charlotte and Greensboro (the part of the state that I'm from). ...
There has been no real "populist" strain in North Carolina Democratic politics. The most prominent liberal "populist" was a forceful Democratic governor named Kerr Scott, a farmer elected in the late 1940s on a pave-the-rural-roads platform. Scott filled a vacancy in a U.S. Senate seat by nominating Frank Graham, the legendary liberal president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (my undergrad alma mater) who had served on Harry Truman's Civil Rights Commission.
By the way II: Edwards' voting record in the 107th Congress was a smidgen to the left of moderate liberal Diane Feinstein. He scored a 38 on this 102-point ideological scale referred to by Matt Yglesias. For comparison, Russ Feingold scored a 1; John Kerry, 27; Joe Lieberman, 32; Feinstein, 41; Evan Bayh, 43; John Breaux, 49.
I posted the other day about how J.R.R. Tolkien's fascination with the Finnish language had had a major impact on the "Lord of the Rings."
I was delighted to hear from John Tuttle, a thoughtful e-mail correspondent, who once took an intensive course in Finnish and was struck by several features of the Finns' approach to linguistic construction:
Here's some of the features of the Finnish language:
No future tense.
No "he" or "she"; it's all "it."
No prepositions.
16 different cases instead of prepositions.
They do it all with endings.
All words accented on the first syllable (to make it easier to swallow those endings).
Very little use of foreign words, eg, "telephone" is something like "puuhola."
talo = house
talon = into house
talonette = above the house
talonesse = around the house
talonilltaa = inside the house
talonilltalenti = dative form of around the house
(If memory serves, "talo" is house, but the rest of the endings were made up as an example.) Try saying the last one with the stress on the first syllable.
The Finns insisted Finnish was easy to learn, even little children spoke Finnish -- in Finland.
Great stuff. Here is a Web site, in English, that adds a few details in regard to the quirks of the Finnish language.
One historical figure I've known precious little about is Benedict Arnold. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor provides helpful context:
... The story of Benedict Arnold lends itself to classic drama. He might have been the hero of the Revolution, exhibiting immense courage and leadership in an essential victory at Saratoga, N.Y., in 1777, which kept the Revolution alive. But after becoming embittered by what he saw as shabby treatment from Congress, he later turned traitor, almost managing to hand over a key fort -- and even Washington himself -- to the British. ...
"Basically, every American who in 1775 revolted against the British was committing treason. Arnold just did it twice. He said, 'Well, I think I've made a mistake,' " says James Kirby Martin, professor of history at the University of Houston and author of "Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered."
No "United States" existed in 1780, Professor Martin points out, only an armed struggle to break with Britain, a desire that was supported by a minority of the colonists. Most either were neutral or remained loyal to the crown.
Arnold was a fearless warrior (he was severely wounded in battle twice) and a self-made man who supported the cause of freedom financially as well as on the battlefield. The mystery of why he became a traitor is what makes him so fascinating, Martin says. His marriage to a young woman from a prominent loyalist family is often cited as a cause.
But Martin and others see that as vastly oversimplifying. As a "gentleman" of the 18th century, Arnold also resented being passed over for promotions for political reasons. He rankled at being accused of war profiteering. And he eventually resented even his mentor, Washington, for failing to fully take his side against his accusers.
"Arnold had a problem with arbitrary power," Martin says, whether it was the king of England or the American Congress. "He saw how much he had contributed to the cause and how little so many others were contributing to the cause. And he slowly became embittered. You can trace this in his correspondence." ...
Ironically, as the TV movie points out, Washington was able to use Arnold's treason as a rallying cry for the flagging cause of freedom, which turned decisively the next year at Yorktown, Va. Arnold spent the last two decades of his life exiled in Britain, ignored there and reviled at home.
In the end, the contrast between Arnold and Washington is stark, says William Mastrosimone, who wrote the script for "A Question of Honor" after 20 years of research. "When Washington encountered a problem, he asked himself, 'What is good for the country?' When Arnold encountered a problem, it's 'What is good for me?'
"The comparison of those two personalities shows the difference between what we would like to think of as the American spirit -- Washington -- while Arnold is the American spirit gone wrong."
Can people using marijuana under a doctor’s prescription in states that allow such use be prosecuted for pot possession while traveling through states that don’t allow the medical use of marijuana?
That is the basic situation of a California man who was recently charged in Arkansas. According to this article:
James B. Smith, 37, who lives near San Juan, Calif., was stopped by a sheriff's department deputy on Interstate 40 near Ozark on Dec. 23 for careless driving.
During a search of Smith's van, the deputy found one-and-a-half pounds of marijuana, drug paraphernalia and $1,500 in cash.
After the marijuana was found, Smith said he showed the deputy a certificate given to him by Dr. Marion "Mollie" Fry, co-director of the California Medical Research Center in El Dorado County, Calif., showing the marijuana had been recommended to him because of his chronic back pain. ...
"I have a medical prescription that allows me to have up to two pounds in California," he said, adding that his $1,500 in cash and some flakes of gold he had collected while panning for gold in the Sierra Mountains also were confiscated.
A Los Angeles Times essay on architectural history in California noted this prescient forecast:
... A little more than half a century later, in 1911, the Harvard philosopher George Santayana told a Berkeley audience that he saw emerging in California a new sort of American inspired by "your forest and your sierras" whose "nonhuman beauty and peace ... stir the subhuman depths and the superhuman possibilities of your own spirit."
California was a place, Santayana mused, where open-minded Americans might follow the lead of his colleague William James and give "a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks and impostors."
A member of a history-related listserv I belong to pointed out that Albert Gore Sr. had voted in the U.S. Senate against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That observation sparked a heated reply from a Tennessean. I thought it was worth quoting here:
I have noticed this criticism of Al Gore Sr. from several conservative pundits, often in the context of a veiled slap at Al Gore Jr., who had not yet withdrawn from the 2004 race when the Trent Lott brouhaha first surfaced. It is important to note, however, that Al Gore Sr.'s record on civil rights was more progressive than the great majority of Southern politicians of his day. As James Neal of Middle Tennessee State University writes in his entry on Gore Sr. in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture:
In the mid-1950s, [Al Gore, Sr.] was one of two senators (the other was Estes Kefauver) from states of the old Confederacy to refuse to sign the "Southern Manifesto" to oppose racial integration as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. His consistent support for voting rights bills was in keeping with his views on the right of franchise in a democratic society. Gore also supported the early civil rights bills that set goals and policies but took later legal mechanisms to ensure compliance. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 possessed significant enforcement and compliance measures, but Gore questioned whether the bill embraced excessive federal involvement and enforcement. He perceived the legislation as a “sledgehammer” approach to solving serious racial inequities.
To take only one of Gore's votes on civil rights and then try to lump him with Strom Thurmond and other race baiters is to ignore Al Gore Sr.'s record on Civil Rights. As older Tennesseans know, Gore Sr.’s liberal attitudes on race and his opposition to the Viet Nam War would ultimately cost him his Senate seat in 1970 to Republican Bill Brock, who had warmly embraced Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to ensure his victory.
Those who want to lump Democrats in with Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott will have to look elsewhere than Al Gore Sr.
J.R.R. Tolkien drew inspiration for the “Lord of the Rings” from a collection of ancient Finnish songs and poems, or runes. The sagas form a series called the Kalevala.
In a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955, Tolkien described the impact that the Kalevala had had on him: “It was like discovering a complete wine cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavor never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me ... and my ‘own language’ -- or series of invented languages -- became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.”
The runes have survived across the generations entirely through an oral tradition, in a Finnish dialect called Viena Karelia. Today, one last rune-singer remains. Jussi Houvinen is part of an artistic succession extending back deep into his country's past, to a primeval time when Finns' knowledge of their recorded history gives way to myth.
“It's an amazing thing to be in the presence of a man singing even a snippet of the poem,” says anthropologist Wade Davis. “Even if you don't speak Finnish, it's profoundly moving just to listen to it, just the cadence of the sounds.”
The Kalevala, it’s true, has been recorded in written form over the past century. But when Houvinen dies, an oral tradition will end with him.
From a column by Myriam Marquez of the Orlando Sentinel:
Maybe terrorists with ties to the Middle East, who operate out of the border where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, have given Bush the wake-up call of the century.
The State Department's new counter-terror chief, Cofer Black, visited the tri-border area, where some 20,000 Arab immigrants live, this month to work on a plan with those countries to crack down on Hezbollah guerrillas. Yes, it seems that Hezbollah has a large-scale fund-raising operation in our own hemisphere.
The world gets smaller and more volatile. A U.S. military sweep of an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan found a map of the tri-border South American region. Connect the dots. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, backed by Libya and Syria, has been causing havoc in Israel for years. Money the Hezbollah guerrillas in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay raise also helps the Palestinian Hamas. Both are groups that use terrorism to advance their causes. ...
Like the United States, Israel, Turkey and India all have a strong sense of national identity rooted in a secular ideology despite ethnic and religious diversity. Moreover, they are all located in turbulent neighborhoods, making them important bridgeheads for American engagement. With robust militaries, these states are capable of decisively affecting the outcomes of potential conflicts in the Middle East and in Central and South Asia. Unlike the states comprising the "Axis of Evil," not only do strong ties already exist within the emerging "Axis of Democracy," but these relations are deepening in light of geostrategic imperatives.
Not very likely as a formal institution, but his analysis raises many valid points involving common strategic interests.
No Cajun on the prison menu: Ex-Governor Edwin Edwards behind bars
Edwin Edwards, the flamboyant ex-governor of Louisiana now serving a 10-year sentence for extortion, has written two colorful letters describing what life is like behind bars in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas.
“I just obey and try to endure endless hours of boredom,” the 74-year-old Edwards wrote in a letter quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Prison, he said, is a place “run by silly meaningless rules, the purpose of which I cannot understand.”
Edwards, who started serving his sentence in October, provided more detail in a second letter, quoted at length in the paper. From the Times-Picayune article:
Prison life for Edwin Edwards goes by “one boring hour after the other,” with “horrible food,” a “TV monopolized by people who want to watch wrestling and soaps” and fellow inmates who “drag themselves through life like forgotten spirits,” the former governor writes in a letter to friends. ...
He describes a prison “ringed by a 14-foot fence with razor wire,” “small” cells with “two iron beds with a two-foot space between them” and a bathroom with “no doors on the shower stalls or commode compartments.” ...
On an average day, Edwards writes, he gets up “between 6:30 to 7 a.m.” to “make coffee in the microwave located in the TV room. I then shave, brush my teeth and dress for the day” in a uniform that consists of “khaki shirts and khaki pants.”
... Of prison fare, he elaborates: “Coming from Louisiana, the food anywhere would be less than desirable, but here it is just horrible. ...”
The guards in Fort Worth “do not wear guns -- they are courteous and careful not to establish any relationship -- strictly business but helpful where possible within the rules,” he wrote. “Inmates are friendly and helpful although many cannot speak English. There is no violence and total discipline!”
His fellow prisoners, Edwards wrote, act like lifeless souls “shuffling off toward the River Styx.” He adds: “They are not enthusiastic, not reluctant, indignant or fatalistic. They seem to be without form. They do not grin, laugh, cry or complain. They are just here for no purpose except to satisfy a vengeful society which is multiplying the causes which brought us here without a compensating effect of making a safer or better society.” ...
The former governor was convicted in May 2000 with his son Stephen Edwards and three other men of extorting payoffs in exchange for his help in acquiring state riverboat casino licenses. ...
Mail to the former governor should be addressed: Edwin W. Edwards #03128-095, FMC Fort Worth, 3150 Horton Road, Fort Worth, TX 76119-5996.
Man, the guy was entertaining (albeit incompetent) as a governor, entertaining as a defendant and now entertaining even as an inmate.
Living in a Tri-State region makes the border effect particularly vivid. The best place to observe the border effect is at or near the first state line freeway interchange.
What to find in Kentucky just over the bridge: liquor stores, cheap cigarettes, pornography. What to find in Indiana: cheap gas and casino gambling. What to find in Ohio: not much.
Difference in regulation and taxes between the states creates the border effect. The greater the difference, or the more onerous the regulation, the more obvious the border effect. ...
State tax-incentive programs are usually targeted at competitive imbalances between one or more states. Here again, the border effect is evident in the Cincinnati metro area. The Newport Aquarium, long planned for Cincinnati's riverfront, went to the Kentucky city largely because of Kentucky's tourism tax credit. Ohio tax incentives are anecdotally easier to get here than in some other Ohio metro areas: all a company has to do is threaten to move to Kentucky, and the threat is usually taken seriously. ...
Border effects also help keep states honest with regard to onerous regulations or taxes. ... We saw that earlier this year in Ohio when the cigarette-tax increase was dropped to a more moderate $0.31 from the originally-proposed $0.51. Fear of "retail leakage" was the main factor in that decision. ...
It adds up to more choice for a regular person, and it helps keep the minders-of-our-business from going too far.
Chris' point about the power of interstate competition in regard to taxes reminds me: I need to do a post on the similar power of tax competition between countries. Pretty interesting topic.
By the way: In another post, Chris links to an article in The American Enterprise decrying the aesthetic failure of modern “anti-social architecture”:
Unfortunately, the spirit of the ’60s is returning in building design; the tragedy of architectural arrogance is now being replayed as farce. Across North America, a rash of anti-social architecture is erupting. Public participation in design decision-making has blocked some of the worst ideas, but alienating buildings are rising in significant numbers. ...
The question is why universities, which historically have aspired to be centers of enlightenment, are now such suckers for architecture bristling with covert or overt hostility. Michael Marrus, dean of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies, defends Graduate House and its architects by explaining that “like the university itself, architecture should be about ideas and experimentation.” “From an architectural and urbanistic point of view,” he claims, “Graduate House is an intensely contemporary and progressive work.”
This begs the question of what sort of “experiment” Morphosis and other avant-garde architects are conducting. A genuine experiment is a carefully structured event or process designed to uncover truth and falsity, success and failure, in the process adding to civilization’s store of useful knowledge. Graduate House is nothing of the sort. It is an aesthetic dare of a rather adolescent sort. And if the building turns out to be a depressing blot on the city, it’s not the architect who pays. The price is paid by the occupants, neighbors, and public; they are the unlucky guinea pigs sacrificed for art-world pretensions.
A terrific piece, well worth reading in full. (The link to the article worked for me earlier today, but at the moment it's on the blink.)
Donald Sensing has been a generous source of encouragement for this blog; in a recent post, he kindly noted my similar efforts for him at a crucial point in his blog career. Don's blog has always been at the top of my permalinks and will remain so (unless my precocious young son ever gets into blogging sometime, which isn't out of the realm of possibility). His blog, One Hand Clapping, has a new URL, here, as Glenn Reynolds noted this week, and is rightly receiving ever-greater attention and popularity.
Don, who knows a thing or two about ancient military history, also linked to my recent post about Alexander the Great and voiced some of his own thoughts about the Macedonian.
Foreign direct investment (to build new factories and buy corporate assets) last year totaled $12.7 billion in Sweden -- only a smidgen lower than the $13.6 billion invested in the entire Muslim world.
Sweden’s population is 9 million. That of the Muslim world is 1.2 billion.
The numbers are from the DLC-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute as part of its latest, and always enlightening, “Trade Fact of the Week,” circulated by e-mail. From the PPI e-mail:
... About 70 percent of all world investment usually goes to developed countries, with the United States typically attracting the most of all.
Especially striking is how little direct investment flows to the Muslim world. In 2001, according to the most recent report from the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), FDI flows to the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference -- whose total population is 1.3 billion -- amounted to $13.6 billion. This figure, about 2 percent of the total $735 billion in world FDI, is only slightly more than the FDI flows to small European economies like Sweden, Ireland or Finland. FDI in the Muslim world is not only low but falling; in 1985, for example, the Muslim world had about 5 percent of all world FDI.
This decline (which has been matched in trade) has occurred at a period of rapid population growth. Since 1980, the world's Muslim population has grown by about 500 million. That population has also become much more urban. In effect, the Muslim world has become much larger, much more isolated, and, at least relatively speaking, poorer than it was twenty years ago.
One entry in the Trade Fact series several months ago noted that the protectionism and statist policies embraced by most Muslim countries provide strong disincentives for foreign companies to invest there.
Now there's a name I've missed seeing for too long: Edward Boyd.
Zonitics was one of the first blogs in 2001 that I started to follow seriously. It's terrific to see the pseudonymous Mr. Boyd -- the "mysterious blogger in Arizona," as Ken Layne described him -- back in action.
Perhaps Mr. Boyd and I can resume our e-mail discussion on the Spanish-American War sometime, as well as continue our mutual admiration society for David Hogberg, currently on hiatus from Cornfield Commentary so he can complete his disseratation.
By the way: It will be teriffic when not only Dave Hogberg resumes regular blogging but when, I hope, Joe Katzman of Winds of Change does too.
