Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog

The moral race to the bottom

2012-01-20T10:10:00.002-05:00

Morally bankrupt ideologies go through three stages before reaching their full offensive maturity in our political culture.

What begin as recognized evils become justifiable or necessary evils before at last transmuting into positive virtues that brook no argument.
Thus, in the early decades of the republic, slavery was widely acknowledged as a corrupting evil and an affront to the principles of individual rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence; this was recognized by none more clearly than prominent slaveholders themselves (Washington, Jefferson). By the 1850s the defenders of slavery were braying that slavery was a divinely ordered institution and the bulwark of liberty itself ("the association of the white and black races in the relation of master and slave is the appointed order of God, as set forth in the Bible, and constitutes the best social condition of both races, and the only principle of true republicanism," declared a Southern clergyman in a widely circulated pamphlet published in 1851).

Likewise, there was no controversy for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries about the fact that large numbers of guns in the hands of urban saloon denizens, rowdies, wife beaters, and other assorted petty criminals and half-wits was a dangerous condition for civilized society. The NRA gun nuts evolved from saying "yes, but . . ." whenever a gun outrage or mass murder took place to their current uncompromising and sweeping assertion that guns are a positive good everywhere under every circumstance.

Accompanying this evolution to virtue is a portrayal of one's opponents as the true evil; abolitionists were cast as defying God's will and as moral hypocrites, even the mildest gun regulation proponents (those who dare to suggest that a license be required to carry a concealed weapon, or who want to keep schools and bars gun-free zones) are today denounced as un-American and enemies of liberty.

The best way to maintain a morally reprehensible position, it turns out, is with absolute moral certainty.

So it used to be that even ardent defenders of capitalism admitted routinely that it has costs and takes a human toll; and, moreover, that not all ways of making money were good for society.

Good Republican Theodore Roosevelt spoke passionately about the evils of great concentration of wealth in a republican society and the economic toll taken by financial maneuvering and machinations that produce private gain with no corresponding public good. Even the most Darwinian turn-of-the-20th-century capitalist recognized that progress leaves a trail of destruction along the way, in jobs lost with the advent of new technology and innovation, in lives displaced, in savings destroyed.

To listen to the Latest GOP Frontrunners, apparently the defenders of capitalism have now completed the evolution to smug certainty. This was most despicably displayed by Newt's not very subtle race-baiting to a cheering white Southern audience in South Carolina the other day, in which he explained that the reason poor people are out of work and on food stamps is not because the economy went into a tailspin as a result of financial speculation in the loan industry, but because they lack a work ethic and proper respect for the wonders of capitalism. Capitalism can do no wrong today in GOPland.

Romney's defense of his great business success at Bain Capital—which made hundreds of millions for him and his fellow takeover artists by stripping assets and firing people—has followed similar lines; to criticize him for what even Rick Perry aptly termed "vulture capitalism," Romney angrily retorted, was to attack "free enterprise" itself.

Of course so much of the GOP hot air about "job creators" is really referring to the worst aspects of competitive capitalism; what is being labeled as job "creation" in such measures as lowering tax rates on capital gains and dividends, providing tax breaks for offshoring assets, undermining the National Labor Relations Board's power, racing to break unions and pass "right to work" laws, and doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in state money and tax breaks to lure industries is not creating jobs at all, nor fostering innovation that benefits the greater good, but merely stealing jobs from one state to another (along with a race to the bottom in worker protection and decent wages), encouraging financial maneuvers and the merging and acquiring of companies that eliminate jobs and competition, and diverting wages to profits.

I've quoted Herbert Hoover before, but it's worth repeating what he once said: "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned greedy."

War of 1812 in paper (how quaint)

2012-01-17T08:02:00.000-05:00

The paperback edition of my book Perilous Fight, about the of War of 1812 at sea, is being released today.

“A rousing story . . . Budiansky writes with sure and vivid command.”

—Evan Thomas, Washington Post

More . . .

You're fired!

2012-01-10T10:47:00.000-05:00

Energized with their newfound enthusiasm for class warfare (you can always tell an amateur), the Republican candidates were making much of Romney's "gaffe" yesterday in which, speaking of the supposed need for more competition in health insurance, he displayed his solidarity with the working classes by saying, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

You know something really strange is going on when Ron Paul is out there denouncing capitalists who take money from the middle class to enrich themselves.

But what left me marveling was not Romney's cluelessly echoing the very charges against his performance at Bain Capital, but rather his obliviousness to the fact that any firing that goes on in the health insurance business is done by the insurance companies, not consumers. After all, everyone wants to fire their health insurance company, usually while listening to the same Kenny G number for the 132nd time on hold waiting to have someone in Bombay swear they have no record of their claim. That's hardly the point when the insurers hold all the cards.

About a century ago the human race woke up to the fact that insurance is not a business like selling fruitcakes, notions, or drygoods. For one thing, the consumer is buying a pig in a very large poke when he takes out a life or casualty or other policy, paying up front for a benefit he may see only much later if at all. It's a situation absolutely made to order for those who dream of Ponzi schemes. For another, there is a huge disparity in information on the part of buyers and sellers: insurance companies employ rafts of actuaries to figure out how to make a profit; consumers simply have little basis for knowing what a fair price is. Thus in the late 19th and early 20th century, every state began tightly regulating insurers to make sure they did not flim-flam the customers, that they were held to standards of performance, and that they maintained adequate capital reserves to pay off claims that came due.

Any sentient mortal who has ever dealt with a health insurance company, or even more, who has had to buy his own heath insurance as a self-employed person, knows how ludicrous Romney's fairy tale about competition and consumer choice is in this distinctly un-free-market. The whole raison d'etre of the federal health care law was, lest we forget, that the free market has been an utter failure when insurers could turn you down for any reason or no reason; could reject you for having a preexisting condition; could raise your premiums by breathtaking amounts once they had you signed up; could drop you for getting sick; could drag out processing your claims for months or years; could arbitrarily choose not to cover certain needed procedures or conditions.

Buying a health policy outside of a group is more like applying tor a commission as a nuclear sub commander than hiring a guy to rake your leaves: comparison shopping has been virtually impossible; you have had to submit one application at a time, just to find out what whether you could get coverage and what the real price would actually be. And the companies (still) are masters of muddying the waters with extraordinarily complex pseudo-choices that simply obscure how much you're actually going to end up paying in the end and which make any true comparison shopping impossible, with endless variations on deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, and optional coverage. (But they all have VERY nice colorful photographs on their web sites and brochures depicting attractive people being healthy.)

Even on an individual consumer level, even those who can afford health coverage don't have a prayer in this game.

But of course, the far greater market failure in health insurance is that insurers, left to their own devices and free competition, find that the way to maximize profits is simple: only sell policies to people who don't get sick.

This does not work very well as a system of improving the nation's health, containing health care costs, or encouraging preventive care.

You can be a historian, too

2011-12-18T15:21:00.000-05:00

Professor Gingrich was at it again last week flashing his Official Historian's Membership Badge, this time to explain why President Historian Gingrich, "just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR," would "take on the judiciary."

Before examining the professor's historical analogies, could I point out that unlike, say, being a chemist, physician, lawyer, engineer, accountant, plumber, tree surgeon, piano tuner, or barber, being a "historian" means absolutely nothing in terms of professional qualifications or special expertise?

The leading GOP candidate keeps brandishing the title "historian" as if this uniquely qualifies him to hold forth with authority about the American political system. ("I would suggest to you actually, as a historian, I may understand this better than lawyers," he told reporters last week in reference to his pronouncement of the invalidity of two hundred years of legal precedent establishing the power of courts to consider the constitutionality of laws.)

Well, as someone who has slung history with the best of them, I can reveal a little secret: anyone who can read can be a historian. In fact, the more you read, the better a historian you can be. Which is where Professor Gingrich runs into trouble.

Gingrich, who explained that he was outraged by activist liberal elitist judges imposing their secular values on America (and more generally by "lawyers" who have come "to think that they can dictate to the rest of us"), declared that as president he would simply ignore Supreme Court decisions he didn't like, abolish Federal appeals courts whose "anti-American" judges ruled in ways he didn't like, and encourage Congress to subpoena judges to explain their decisions.

He claimed that Lincoln had similarly "just ignored" the Dred Scott decision, when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation; he said that Jefferson had similarly abolished Federal circuit courts whose judges he opposed; and he asserted that Jackson and FDR had also taken stances against what he declared to be the spurious doctrine of "judicial supremacy"—that the courts can pass judgment on the constitutionality of presidential actions or acts of Congress.

He insisted that the Supreme Court's 2008 decision on detainees at Guantanamo could be declared "null and void" by the president "because it infringes on my duties as commander in chief to protect the country."

He wrapped up his case by invoking those infallible and all-seeing guides, the Founding Fathers, who he said "were very distrustful of judges, saw them as an elite instrument of government designed to oppress people. And, as a result, consciously made the judicial branch the third branch and the weakest branch."

Gingrich's buffoonery is easy to mock (I know, I've tried); but at a certain point it becomes frightening enough that it's worth taking seriously. So forgive me for a moment if I do.

First, the good professor is wrong on almost every example he cited of presidents' ignoring court decisions.

1. In the 1857 Dred Scott case, the court ruled that a Negro slave, or descendant of a slave, could never be a citizen of the United States, and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories since slaves were property whose owners could not be deprived thereof without violating the protection of property rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

Lincoln and others who opposed the expansion of slavery certainly did believe the case was wrongly decided. But as president Lincoln did not take any action to oppose the decision. In fact, Lincoln's entire career was one marked by a respect for the law bordering on reverence. The Emancipation Proclamation, far from being an instance of flouting the law, was testament to Lincoln's belief that no matter how just or right the cause he had to proceed within a constitutional framework. Indeed, the proclamation did nothing to grant rights of citizenship to slaves freed; it implicitly embraced the legalistic argument that slaves were property, as had the court in Dred Scott; and the very reason Lincoln insisted that he could only order the emancipation of slaves in areas of the country in a state of actual rebellion was based on their legal status as property and thus as contraband of war.

The proclamation did not alter by one iota the law in the states that had remained in the Union, or even in the areas of rebel states then under Union control (Lincoln even countermanded a military order by Union general John Frémont in Missouri freeing slaves there, on the grounds that it exceeded legal authority). "Can it be pretended that it is any longer a government of Constitution and laws, wherein a General, or a President, may make permament rules of property by proclamation?" Lincoln said.

It was not by a president's "simply ignoring" a Supreme Court order that the issue of the legal rights and status of African Americans was ultimately resolved: recognizing that neither the president nor Congress had the power to ignore the law, Congress did what the Founding Fathers intended in such cases and amended the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, as the court later recognized, was what reversed the effect of Dred Scott and granted full citizenship to freed slaves.

And by the way, Lincoln (at least as a political point) took the Dred Scott decision and its implications seriously enough that it was the crux of his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 in the race for the United States Senate seat in Illinois; it was Douglas who tried to fudge the matter by suggesting that the court's finding was not really a binding legal decision, Lincoln who took the view that it was, that it would of necessity be enforced, and that its clear legal implications (eliminating the right of any state to outlaw slavery) proved his point that the nation could not ultimately survive half slave and half free.

2. On Jackson, Gingrich apparently believes the long-debunked chestnut about Jackson refusing to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in favor of the Cherokee Indians in their suit against the state of Georgia, which was seeking to dispossess the tribe of its lands. In fact, the court's complex decision in that case did not impose any duties upon the president or federal government requiring action at all. (The case involved a Georgia law that tried to prevent northern missionaries from visiting and assisting the tribe in their legal case: the court ordered a missionary who had been arrested under the law to be freed. The famous words Jackson were said to have uttered, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" are actually fictitious, a later historian's paraphrase. What the president actually observed, in a private letter, was "the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate." Even that proved wrong: Georgia did obey the court's order, ultimately.) Of course, even if Gingrich had the facts right the conclusion he is attempting to draw is appalling. Is he really suggesting that it would have been a good thing for a president to ignore a Supreme Court ruling defending the rights of a peaceable Indian tribe not to have its land stolen from it and to be driven to a reservation halfway across the country??

3. If by his reference to FDR, Gingrich referred to Roosevelt's misbegotten plan to add additional justices to outvote the Supreme Court majority that had overturned key New Deal legislation, boy is that a rotten example, too. The move was a political debacle for FDR, who quickly backed down. Yes, he thought the court was wrong, and was willing to challenge them. Did he "simply ignore" any of the court's decisions, or even hint he had the power as president not to obey the law? Never.

4. The Jefferson incident is a particular favorite of Gingrich's, which he constantly invokes as a precedent for his proposal to get rid of the Ninth Circuit court, which he dislikes because it is full of those elitist liberal judges who try to enforce things like the First Amendment. But it too is an odd precedent for him to try to invoke. If there is a real lesson from the battle over federal judiciary in 1801 and 1802 it was exactly the dangers of injecting partisan politics into the judiciary.

The new Federal circuit courts had been created by the lame duck Federalist-controlled Congress just three weeks before the end of its session in 1801; President Adams, just before leaving the White House, quickly filled the new positions with his political allies. It was, as historian Gordon Wood notes, a rather blatant attempt by the Federalists to keep hold of power they had lost in the presidential and congressional elections.

The new Democratic-Republican Congress promptly abolished the courts, pure political payback. But even many Republicans grew uneasy about the assault on the independence of the judiciary after a highly partisan impeachment action was brought against a strongly Federalist justice, Samuel Chase.

This one, too, is a perfect illustration of the simplemindedness of the Gingrich method of history. You can find some precedent for almost anything. What's worth asking is whether it was a good precedent. In fact, this was the only time in U.S. history that Congress revoked the tenure of sitting Federal judges. Most historians of constitutional law would agree it was a very bad precedent—and has been recognized as such for the two hundred years since.

Gingrich's claims that the FF's were "very distrustful of judges" is another cartoonish travesty of history. The colonists were certainly distrustful of courts and saw those ermine-robed representatives of the crown as an instrument of elitist repression. But a revolution in attitudes had taken place in the 1780s, in the decade following the Declaration of Independence, and as the direct result of the incompetence, excess democracy, and feckless legislating of the state legislatures—which abrogated contracts to pay off special interests, passed and rescinded laws in rapid succession, and sowed legal chaos and confusion.

By the time of the constitutional convention, as Wood notes, "a remarkable transformation" in attitudes had taken place; the delegates had no difficulty in readily agreeing to an independent Federal judiciary that would be insulated from political influence by having guaranteed salaries and lifetime tenure.

I think we might all agree that George Washington was a founding father. Here's what he thought: that the independent administration of justice by the courts was "the strongest cement of good government."

Finally, as for judicial review: It's true that Jefferson and Madison to their dying day thought that the courts had no power to declare a law unconstitutional. It's also true that by 1790s most Americans had come to think otherwise.

There were two reasons for this. One was that judicial review was an inevitable consequence of the revolutionary idea of a written constitution. No nation before had ever reduced its fundamental laws to writing. If the Constitution was a document with actual legal meaning, as opposed to simply a vague enunciation of political ideals, then it was inescapable that courts would be faced with situations where laws enacted by legislatures or the common law conflicted with the Constitution.

Despite all the guff from the right these days about "judicial supremacy" and "activist judges," courts still have no power simply to issue pronouncements in the abstract about the validity of legislation or presidential acts; they decide actual controversies that come before them, when one party sues another. For centuries, English jurisprudence had evolved principles of necessity for judges to interpret statutes that were ambiguous, badly worded, or contradicting other statutes: that was nothing new in that at all. The only new question was whether the Constitution was a law judges had to follow in deciding cases. Most Americans would say that's a good thing that they do—otherwise the Constitution would be nothing but ceremonial window-dressing (or "a solemn mockery," as Justice Marshall put it).

The other reason for the broad acceptance of judicial review was that the courts themselves changed their behavior. Judges in the early republic had continued to exercise an often highly political role as they had previously. But the very fact that the courts were evolving into a truly independent third branch with this important function as arbiters of constitutional law made judges far more circumspect; it was their renunciation of overt political activity, their embrace of professionalism and nonpartisanship, that proved pivotal in assuaging public concern over the emerging doctrine of judicial review.

Even an originalist like Mr. Injustice Scalia has not proposed renouncing two centuries of post-Founding Fathers legal precedent and abandoning the power of courts to rule on the constitutionality of legislative and executive acts. (Though, it's worth noting that if anyone is ignoring history it is not those liberal elitist activists but the right wing on the Supreme Court today. One of the key steps the Supreme Court of the early 1800s took to legitimize its role and to emphasize the nonpartisan professionalism of the law was to steer clear of politically charged cases. In the last few weeks the Roberts court announced it would take up three politically explosive cases in an election year: redistricting in Texas, the health care law, and the Arizona immigration law. There was also that little matter of deciding the presidential election in 2000.)

Separating law from politics was a huge historical accomplishment; while needless to say it was far from perfect it made America a beacon to the world for its respect for the rule of law and its adherence to the principle that no man, the president included, is above the law.

(By the way, about this right-wing-bordering-on-fascist view that the president's role as commander-in-chief means he can do whatever he wants in the name of national security: that would really appall the Founding Fathers, who were fearful of the military's despotic potential in the hands of a powerful executive. The Constitution grants to Congress among its enumerated powers the power to set regulations for the army and navy and to decide when, how, and if military force is used. Being commander-in-chief means the military has to obey the president's legal orders: it does not mean the president gets to make up what the law is, any more than the president could be a law unto himself in executing any of his other duties.)

Notably, it was disgust with petty politics, special interests, and partisan maneuvering that helped make the professionalism of the courts and the rule of law possible.

It shows no historical understanding whatsoever to propose that what the judiciary system really needs now is a hefty dose of Mr. Gingrich's politics and partisan pandering.

The cartoon professor

2011-12-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

The ignoramus wing of the Republican Party has for some time now been purveying a caricature of the intellectual as someone who is elitist, arrogant, smugly certain, impractical, and out of touch with the common man if not with reality itself.
In fact, anyone who actually has met (say) a college professor knows that most are earnest, deeply knowledgeable in their field while cautious about the inherent limits of human knowledge, open to differing opinions while instinctively skeptical toward crackpot ideas. Of course there are exceptions but as a rule true scholarship leads to humility, not arrogance, and the recognition that most problems we face as individuals and societies are complex, involve usually difficult and imperfect trade-offs between equally worthy but incompatible goals, and that having one's own ideas challenged is a necessary ordeal on the road to truth. Real intellectuals, as opposed to hucksters, do not sign "Ph.D." after their name.

I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a "genius," but the answer turns out is simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing no-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his doctorate in history; he routinely claims he understands issues more deeply than anyone else; he has made a career of denouncing or (when he had the authority) eliminating professional expertise that might challenge his own certain pronouncements; and he is a veritable fount of crackpot "big" ideas (mining minerals on the moon, protecting the United States from sci-fi doomsday scenarios, and "fundamentally transforming" everything as a first step to doing anything.

Another useful rule of thumb: real geniuses, as opposed to simple egomaniacs, do not generally refer to themselves in the third person.

The dim ages

2011-11-21T08:16:00.000-05:00

I used to think that science education would make people more rational and scientific. Now, in the fullness of age and experience, I can see that all it has done is to offer new arenas for people to apply the same magical thinking, self-serving illogic, and rhetorical fallacies that used to drive the ancient Greek philosophers to despair over the human race, too.

I wish I had a certified check for $10,000 for every New York Times story I've read in the past year involving medicine and health, food and agriculture, or psychology that quoted someone committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Stories about "organic" and "sustainable" agriculture, which always reach a crescendo in this pre-Thanksgiving season, seem to particularly attract unrebutted magical utterances of this nature (such as one the other day featuring yet another bearded guru spouting prodigious volumes of pseudo-scientific claptrap about the wonders of neem oil, herbs, and proprietary concoctions of dung to produce "organic" apples that will make you live forever, experience multiple orgasms, eradicate economic injustice, and save the planet. I exaggerate only slightly.)

Years ago I once remarked to a real scientist how surprising it was how unscientific physicians could be. He was not surprised in the least, observing that "doctors aren't scientists." There was a nice reminder of this the other day in the new study showing that 98 percent of men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer by the widely-used PSA test would have lived just as long, and with a considerably better quality of life, had they never had the diagnosis at all. This is because the overwhelming majority of prostate cancers are slow-growing and the men who have them drop dead of something else first.

The reaction of patient advocacy groups and urologists was I suppose utterly predictable: they simply could not process this evidence. Men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had it treated were convinced that the treatment had "saved their lives." They just could not accept the idea that there was a considerable chance that all they had been through — having multiple physicians stick various pieces of equipment up their asses and plunge needles into their prostates; long courses of radiation treatment or invasive surgery; multiple side effects — had been unnecessary. The urologists for their part went completely nuts, deeply resenting the implication that 98 percent of the surgeries they had performed were a waste.

In fact, it's even dubious that they had saved any lives at all, because the 2 percent of patients with aggressive cancers whose lives were probably saved by having their prostates removed were offset by an almost equivalent number who died during or immediately after surgery. And of the other 96 percent or so who would have lived just as long in blissful ignorance of their slow-growing cancers, a third suffered incontinence or impotence as a result of their unnecessary treatment.

A similar phenomenon was on display in the FDA's decision to withdraw approval of Avastin for breast cancer treatment, based on the simple fact that scientific evidence shows it doesn't work. Again, patients who (a) had been treated with Avastin and (b) were subsequently alive were absolutely convinced that (b) was the direct consequence of (a). Even more depressingly familiar was their insistence that they knew because they were the ones it had happened to, a species of logic that is behind such other dreary human phenomena as superstition, religion, health food stores, magnetic devices to boost your car's gas mileage, and sure-fire systems for picking stocks.

Two cheers (again) for hypocrisy

2011-11-16T09:50:00.000-05:00

You'd think, given the Catholic Church's problems, that Archbishop Timothy Nolan of New York might have chosen a slightly different metaphor when he complained the other day about those sinister (and "well-oiled") forces in American politics that, he said, are seeking to "neuter" religion. You also had to wonder what he was thinking when he commiserated with Penn State in its recent travails (“We know what you’re going through, and you can count on our prayers”), and explained that this just goes to show that sexual abuse of children is one of those things that could happen to anyone.

Why do I have this picture of His Not Yet Eminence asking the guy sitting next to him on a hard wooden bench, "Hey—what're you in for?"

Excuse me for mentioning it, but aren't you the guys who are supposed to be above average in moral conduct and the example you set? That expectation usually comes with the territory of instructing others, in the name of God, re their moral duties and failings.

The actual occasion for the archbishop's press conference was a new foray into politics by the Catholic bishops of America, which offered another perfect illustration of the difficulties religious institutions encounter in trying to have it both ways. The bishes, claiming that "religious liberty" is under attack, announced what was basically an escalation of the political activism of the church, complete with a new document urging the faithful to cast their votes only for politicos who support church doctrine on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Religious leaders keep making a fundamental mistake in thinking the way to increase their authority and influence is to roll up their sleeves, dive into the fray, and act like everyone else. As Bertie Wooster might observe, one can either be the appointed vicar of Christ on earth, or a hard-knuckle political boss — not both. It's hard to keep your halo on straight when you're in a rough and tumble political brawl. In fact, the only source of moral authority religious leaders ever had was directly a result of their aloofness from worldly politics. The moment you start playing politics, you're no longer a minister of God (or a scientist, or any other disinterested authority above the fray) — you're, guess what, a politician.

It all reminds me once again of how much we have lost now that our leaders don't even keep up the pretenses any more. I came across a wonderful exposition of this point the other day in one of John Le Carré's (not very good) minor novels, A Small Town in Germany. The speaker is a British diplomat defending precisely the importance of keeping up the appearance of high purpose in British foreign policy:

Haven’t you realized that only appearances matter? . . . What else is there when the underneath is rotten? Break the surface and we sink. . . . I am a hypocrite. I’m a great believer in hypocrisy. It’s the nearest we ever get to virtue. It’s a statement of what we ought to be. Like religion, like art, like the law, like marriage.

Hypocrisy even once in a while shames us into doing the right thing. That's why I so much miss the days when presidents kept political fundraising and strategizing under the table and spoke a lot about lofty principles of democracy, equality, and justice. Of course it was hypocritical, and a lot of it was self-serving. But it also was what allowed this country to do genuinely great things once in a while, things we are apparently far too cynical these days even to contemplate.

If the bishops don't want to become just another special interest group, they might take that to heart. They might even try acting holy, God forbid, rather than simply holier-than-thou.

Lessons from Wossamotta U.

2011-11-10T08:37:00.000-05:00

In one of my favorite Bullwinkle episodes — mind you, this goes back nearly half a century, which reminds us that there is nothing new whatever in the absurdities of college football — the trustees of Wossamotta U. are told the college has only enough money to keep the football team or the professors. "Which should we get rid of, gentlemen?" the president asks. "The professors!" yell the trustees, in chorus.

(Bullwinkle, who has an incredible forward pass, is brought in on a football scholarship; his coursework consists of reading "Dick and Jane at the Seashore.")

The trustee of Penn State, summoning a bit of moral fiber heretofore absent in the college's handling of an eyewitness report that one of its top coaches had been caught buggering a 10-year-old boy in the athletic facility showers nine years ago, did the unheard of when it comes to college sports, and applied the same norms of morality and accountability that apply to everyone else in the known universe.

It was, as I noted the other day, a moral conclusion that a hamster, if not an amoeba, would have had little trouble reaching: that "legendary" head coach Joe Patrno had grossly failed in his duty by not personally notifying the police or even inquiring once about what action had been taken in the matter; and that the president had shown an equal moral midgetry in promptly declaring his "unconditional support" for two other senior administrators who had, on the prima facie evidence released in a grand jury indictment a few days ago, violated the law by not notifying police within 48 hours as required in cases of suspected child abuse.

The accused coach is now charged with sexual abuse of at least seven other boys. His only punishment from the university at the time was that he was no longer allowed to bring little boys onto university property to be buggered: he had to do his child molestation elsewhere, which he apparently did, including on out of town trips to football games.

Such a deep moral calculation on the part of the trustees was still too much for the Penn State students, who last night rioted in the thousands when they heard that legendary head coach Joe Paterno had been fired by the trustees, along with President "Unconditional Support" Spanier. Having fully absorbed the key moral lesson so stirringly offered our country for years by our upstanding Republican leaders (Herman Cain most recently), the students promptly blamed the media for the fact that they were smashing cars, throwing bottles, rocks, and flares at police, and overturning a TV news station van. “Make no mistake," offered one student in another variation on this theme of personal responsibility, "the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

I recall recently reading the results of a survey on moral understanding on the part of college students. Asked to provide an example of a moral dilemma they had personally faced and how they resolved it, none could even properly frame an example (one student, in a typical response, cited her uncertainty about whether she would be able to afford the rent on an apartment she was thinking of taking as an example of a moral conundrum).

So here's a thought for the future of university eduction: how about firing a few assistant football coaches and using the proceeds on a mandatory class for all freshmen on moral philosophy, starting with the idea that just because you yourself want something or personally benefit from something, that does not make it right. This is what developmental psychologists refer to as "Stage 1" moral development, which in the normal course of events appears at around age 5.

All of this, of course, is a reminder that college football, with its multi-million-dollar coaches' salaries, TV contracts, and semi-professional "student" athletes not only has nothing to do with the mission of a university but has eaten many universities alive. The idea that somebody who excels at teaching large guys to run, throw an inflatable bladder, and knock other large guys down has anything to impart to the world at large in terms of learning, moral values, wisdom, or role models is one of the stranger bits of fantasizing justification for universities selling their souls to the entertainment business.

———

What I enjoyed so much about Rick Perry's 53 seconds of silence during the debate last night was not that he had forgotten his own list of The Three Most Evil Federal Bureaucracies he would abolish but that he could not even manage to finesse the point and instead kept struggling to come up with No. 3 as the clock ticked, the spotlights glared, and the beads of sweat formed on the Not So Great Communicator's forehead. Afterwards, Perry tried to joke to reporters that "I may have forgotten about the Energy Department but haven't forgotten my conservative values." Alas for posterity, no one asked him how many conservative values there are, or if he could name them.

Thank god all politics isn't local

2011-11-07T11:54:00.002-05:00

Among the wonderful legacies of segregation days here in the Old South is Virginia's peculiar election schedule, which has us voting for state and local candidates the year before the quadrennial presidential elections.
This was an innovation of the Byrd Machine, which wanted to make voting as hard as possible and thereby keep important decisions — such as who would control the state legislature and county courthouses — out of the hands of the riff-raff who came out for national elections.

So election day is tomorrow, and here in Loudoun County we have the interesting spectacle of the local Republican Party having been so completely purchased by the development industry and the loony right that you can find some of the most acerbic attacks on the Republican candidates coming from a staunchly conservative political website called "Too Conservative."

Among the parade of GOP loonies on the ballot are

a candidate for sheriff who was shot by his girlfriend and was served with a restraining order for domestic abuse ("I was the victim," he explained, adding, "I’m not a womanizer. I tried it, I’m not very good at it")

an incumbent candidate for county board of supervisors who runs a political action group devoted to exposing the "radical homosexual agenda" (last year he revealed that the TSA's body scanners at airports are actually "homosexual porno scanners")

a candidate for state senate who got his start in politics on the county library board crusading against the "pornography" available on the computers in the libraries and upon his election to the general assembly spent most of his time sending plastic fetuses to fellow legislators to protest abortion (he also opposed a spousal rape bill, explaining that a woman in a nightie is asking for it: “I do not know how on earth you can validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape where they are living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth")

the county prosecutor, up for reelection, who cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and nearly ruined the life and career of a well-regarded school assistant principal in a baseless prosecution on a completely fabricated charge of child pornography

a school board candidate whom the same prosecutor declined to file charges against after he was arrested for spousal abuse

We are also proud home to the Republican Party local committee that sent out the tasteful picture of President Obama as a zombie with a bullet hole in his head ("a light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor," an official explained), while another recent member of the local Republican Committee routinely threatens to "beat up" people who disagree with him.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the Byrd Machine.

Ask the ethicist

2011-11-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

Excerpted from a recent online discussion . . .

Dear Ethicist:

I'm a vice president of a major university and one of my top football coaches was recently caught buggering 10-year-old boys in the shower. Should I (a) report it to the university police (who I'm in charge of) or (b) conduct my own "investigation," and just tell the coach he's not allowed to use university property for buggering 10-year-old boys any more? I know that (a) is what the law requires, but it seems to me that (b) would be much simpler, and would avoid the embarrassment of having to find out the names of the victims or speak to their families. Also, isn't requiring the coach to find some other place to carry on his child molestation activity punishment enough? This is one of those difficult ethical dilemmas that I know always stump even the greatest philosophers and thinkers. What would you do in my situation?

Challenged

Dear Ethicist:

If I could jump in here, I'm facing a similar ethical dilemma that might help "Challenged." I'm the president of a major university and I expect my vice president and athletic director will soon be arrested for failing to report to police and child protective services the fact that one of our top football coaches was caught buggering 10-year-old boys in the shower. I have to decide whether to (a) apologize to the victims and demand that the university officials who broke the law will be held fully accountable or (b) declare that I have known the Veep and director for 16 years and that they have my "unconditional support" and "I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former University employee.” I've decided on (b). It's worked well for the Catholic Church.

Loyal Boss

Dear Ethicist:

I'm a top football coach at a major university who was caught buggering 10-year-old boys in the shower. I was recently confronted by the mother of one. Should I have (a) expressed my contrition and readiness to accept responsibility for my actions or (b) said to her, "I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you." I chose (b). I think there's something wrong with people who nurture grudges and can't move on. Do you agree?

To Err is Human

If you have to fight a war . . .

2011-11-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

My letter in the New York Times today about air power:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/modern-air-power.html

Martyrs to the S corporation

2011-11-01T14:28:00.001-04:00

It's a safe bet that no one of ample means has ever doubted they fully deserved every penny of their income. In fact, it's a rule of human nature that the less one is responsible for one's enviable qualities, the prouder one is of them (beauty, distinguished ancestry, innate athletic or mental gifts). All of those upper class twits in Jane Austen novels whose incomes are fixed by nothing but the accident of birth that determined how much land they inherited are absolutely convinced that the size of a man's income is directly proportional to his virtue and merit on earth.

So I suppose it is no surprise at all that the rich of America are no different, and that the many business owners with $1 million+ incomes quoted in yesterday's New York Times look upon their wealth as a mark of virtue that should be rewarded (and not "destroyed" by raising their taxes).

Trying to persuade any that their fortune owes something to fortune (certainly true in the case of those who inherited a family enterprise) or social investments (true of everyone in a society that employs tax dollars to build roads and bridges, educate the workforce, and maintain the rule of law that protects property rights) is a psychological near-impossibilty.

But why we would give these guys a pass on the utter nonsense they tell themselves — and the rest of us — about the factual consequences of the tax structure is another matter entirely. Again and again in recent months, the Republican proponents of flat taxes and other reverse Robin Hood schemes in such favor with the party have asserted with boundless chutzpah that if marginal rates are raised even ever so slightly on the top brackets, the consequences will be "disastrous" for small businesses.

Here is what one said yesterday in the Times:

"If Congress increases the tax rate, we would have to take more cash out of the business to pay taxes — money that we would otherwise reinvest in the company, to buy equipment or to hire more employees.”

Two not-so-little problems with this fairy tale:

First, all of those complaining about proposals to raise the top personal rate are owners of businesses organized as S corporations under the tax code, whose business profits are treated as personal income. In recent coverage this has often been reported as if it were a penalty imposed upon them by the way small businesses are inherently treated by the tax code. Representative John "How Can I Feed My Family on $200,000 a Year" Fleming (R-La.) made this assertion in bemoaning the "job killing" effects of the top personal income tax rates: "Most small businesses in this country today are taxed at the individual level as Corporation LLC. So whatever is cut out of those earnings is money taken out of capital for reinvestment for creating more jobs and opening up more locations," he said.

But in fact the decision to organize as an S corporation or an LLC is a deliberate choice made by these owners — and made precisely in order to take as much money as they can out of their businesses, at the lowest tax rate. (Anything an owner wants to pay himself out of the profits of a regularly organized C corporation is treated as a dividend, taxed both as a corporate profit at the corporate rate of 35 percent and then at the personal dividend rate of 15 percent; but in an S corporation, all of the profits are treated as regular personal income, taxed now at a top rate of 35 percent.)

The fact is, too, that if personal tax rates were raised above 35 percent, any owner of an S corporation or LLC who truly wanted to reinvest his profits could avoid the new higher personal rate by reorganizing his business as a C corporation, and continue to pay the lower corporate tax rate on 100% of all reinvested profits.

The guys who are crying about the prospect of higher personal rates in fact have no intention of doing that: the only advantage of the S corporation structure is if you want to milk your business for personal gain.

Second, and more important, in either case these are taxes on net profits — i.e., profit after deducting all of those investments made in salaries, equipment, plant, and every other business expense incurred in generating those profits. And every penny of those profits that is reinvested and which goes to pay for business expenses (salaries, equipment, etc) is going to be deductible off next year's taxes, too.

It makes as much sense for business owners to whine that paying taxes leaves them with less to reinvest in their businesses as it would for them to whine that it leaves them less to buy stocks on the stock market or bonds on the bond market. For that matter, it makes as much sense for them to complain about this as it does for any employee who pays taxes to complain that taxes leave him less to invest in stocks or bonds.

That's what taxes do to everyone: What makes you so special?

Paging Mr. Diogenes . . .

2011-10-28T07:45:00.000-04:00

Not to join the anti-Steve Jobs backlash, but isn't one thing we expect of great men greatness?
From the days of the ancient Greeks to about maybe a generation and a half ago, the qualities that inspired admiration were what used to be quaintly called nobility: stoicism, self-sacrifice, philosophical detachment, social duty. I suppose Americans have always adulated success with no questions asked, but the classical view of life rightly demanded much more: any schmuck could rise to the top by being more calculating, manipulative, and ambitious than his fellow man; greatness was the quality of rising to the top without losing one's humanity—or even by virtue of one's noble rejection of the mean road.

The depressing facts about Jobs's meanness, vanity, and narcissism now coming out (such as his practicing staring so that he could intimidate other people) of course reflect our age, too. I remember in my newsmagazine days how one could precisely track the current life-stage of the baby-boom generation in the parade of "trend" cover stories whose basic assumption always seemed to be that no one before had ever (fill in the blank) had sex, raised children, balanced work and family, developed chronic illnesses, taken care of aging parents, experienced menopause, got old, died.

With that same petty and narcissistic fixation that we can control everything in our own personal destiny—and for no other ends than our own betterment—Jobs, we read, first attempted to treat his cancer with mumbo-jumbo fruit juice diets and psychic spiritualism, then by ultrascientifically trying to become his own medical authority, spending $100,000 to have his DNA sequenced, acting altogether as if no one had ever had cancer, or at least such an important cancer, before.

I found myself remembering the story of Einstein's final days on this earth. Hospitalized with a ruptured aneurysm, he refused surgery, explaining, "I want to go when I want. It is in bad taste to prolong life artificially; I have done my share, it is time to go." But then our heroes today are no Einsteins.

When plutocrats dream

2011-10-26T13:13:00.000-04:00

Ever since the modern income tax came into being in America in 1913, plutocrats have dreamed of shifting the tax burden back to the unwashed masses, where they were always convinced it belonged.
In 1914, the first year of the new tax, only 357,000 Americans—those with incomes of over $3,000 a year—were subject to federal income tax. That was about a third of one percent of the nation's population of 99 million; it included 20 percent of stockbrokers and lawyers, 10 percent of manufacturers, 1 percent of merchants, and a quarter of 1 percent of farmers. The top tax rate was 7 percent, not exactly a crippling burden on incomes of $1 million a year.

But to Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, even that was an outrage against the laws of nature. He and most American industrialists and captains of Wall Street thought it was obvious that the burden of taxation should be born by the working class, not the "productive" classes. Industrialists John J. Raskob and Pierre S. du Pont hit on "the brilliant scheme," in historian Robert McElvaine's words, of taking over the Democratic Party in 1928, getting Al Smith the nomination, and committing the party to repeal of Prohibition—and then taxing beer. That, they figured, would allow a 50 percent cut in the income tax while making those slacker workingmen pay their fair share.

The other fond hope of the plutocrats in the 1920s — which they clung to even in the early 1930s, at the height of the Depression — was to institute a national sales tax as a way to provide tax relief for the non-neediest. The sales tax was the "proper" way to raise revenue, explained the chairman of the board of Hudson Motors, Roy Chapin, "since the lower income brackets pay nothing to the maintenance of the National Government."

It used to be merely a figure of speech to say that conservatives wanted to turn back the clock by a century or two. Now it's the literal truth.

In particular, all of the Republican candidates have been doing an astonishingly realistic imitation of a 1920s fat cat with the tax proposals they have offered up. Rick Perry recently complained that it was very disturbing that half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all. His solution, unveiled yesterday, is to replace the current progressive income tax system with a flat tax paid across the board by all income earners — and with no tax at all on capital gains, a change that in itself would mean a cut of $100 billion or so in taxes on the highest incomes.* Herman Cain has been touting an even more sweeping plan to soak the poor with a 9 percent national sales tax.

About the only difference between 1926 and 2011, when it comes to the Republican proponents of such a massive redistribution of taxation to the poor, is that instead of referring to the top income brackets as "the productive classes," they now call them "job creators."

The new window-dressing applied to these old ideas is part and parcel of the big lies that have appallingly become routine these days. (Let me deal with a little lie first: Perry's remark that he's "dismayed" that half of Americans pay no income tax is of course ridiculous. The latest IRS data, from 2008, show 142 million individual returns were filed; 34 million of those had no taxable income at all, and the remaining 17 million filers who paid no tax almost all had incomes of less than $20,000 a year. Perry's idea that those who earn under the poverty line are not doing their fair share would be laughable were it not merely obscene. Those earning under $20,000 by the way claim a grand total of a few percent of the nation's total income. Those with incomes in the top 1 percent claim 60 percent of total income. Finally, and much more important, the fact that the poorest wage earners do not pay income tax does not mean they are not contributing substantially to total federal tax receipts. Even the poorest wage earners pay 8 percent of their income in federal payroll tax, a regressive tax that imposes a disproportionate burden on them; payroll taxes by contrast amount to less than 2 percent of the income of the top 1 percent of wage earners, who derive substantial earnings from unearned income.)

But the big lie is the mantra repeated ad nauseam by the GOPS about tax policy and the "job creators." The idea that taxing corporate profits and the unearned income of capitalists is all that is standing in the way of the economy expanding is one of those Flat Earth beliefs that it is astonishing has gained currency at all. But such apparently is the power of repetition, something that all good propagandists understand.

Perry's version of this is that he wants to eliminate capital gains taxes altogether "to really give incentives to those that are going to risk their capital to create the jobs." The idea that capitalists need tax incentives to invest in a money-making enterprise makes about as much sense as the idea that workers need a tax incentive to take a paying job. (By this logic, we are discouraging job takers by taxing their income.)

One extra twist on this fairy tale advanced by the GOPs recently is that merely by asking for an increase in the top marginal tax rate on millionaires, President Obama has created "uncertainty" that is making capitalists afraid to invest their money; not knowing how much of their profits they will eventually have to fork over to Uncle Sam, they have I guess decided there is no point in even taking it out from under the mattress.

Now, last time I checked, taxes are paid on net profits. If an enterprise is likely to generate a net profit, it will be a good investment regardless of what the tax rate is (assuming it is less than 100 percent, a safe assumption). Consider these two scenarios:

(a) A company is turning away customers because it cannot produce enough of its product to meet demand. The owner calculates if he invests $1 million, he can expand, hire new workers, and sell more products, earning him a net income of an additional $100,000. He has to pay 30 percent tax on that $100,000 profit.

(b) everything as in (a), except that he has to pay a 33 percent tax on his $100,000 profit.

Is there anyone in the universe who believes that in case (a) the owner will make the investment, but that in case (b) he will not, having concluded there is no point because he "lacks the incentive"?

Conversely, is there anyone (let me rephrase that, anyone who inhabits the reality-based universe) who believes that if the owner does not have a demand for his product he will make that investment (and "create jobs") regardless of how low his tax rate is — even if it is zero?

Currently interest rates are at historic lows and companies and banks are sitting on piles of cash. The reason they are not investing it in productive enterprises is not because they are waiting for another $100 billion to fall into their hands: the reason they are not investing it is because nobody out there is buying their stuff.

One other favorite rhetorical gambit of the GOPs is to throw around the fighting words, "class warfare." To understand the logic of this, just follow this simple rule: Proposing a massive transfer of the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class is not class warfare. Pointing out that it is a massive transfer of the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class is class warfare.

I wish more Democrats would follow the lead of a Republican named Theodore Roosevelt, who knew how to handle that red herring argument — and its corollary, which Perry offered up a fine specimen of the other day, as to why we should Be Nice to the Rich: "Americans, I hope, aspire to be wealthy," Perry explained.

TR answered that wealth is in itself a social responsibility, and that there is all the world of difference between wealth that is productively earned and wealth that is simply begotten of itself:

We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. . . .

But, he continued:

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

---

One other small but irritating point: Part of the know-nothingness of the antitax crusaders is to cite scary numbers about how many pages the tax code is; a selling point of the flat taxers is that "you can put it on a postcard," in the words of Governor Perry.

You could also put a fair and highly progressive tax plan on a postcard. The reason the tax code is 66,000 pages or 128,000 pages long or a gazillion pages long is almost entirely due to the complex special interest loopholes passed at the behest of corporate lobbyists year after year. In 1915, a year after the first income tax went into effect, one congressman described how the process worked: "I write a law. You drill a hole in it. I plug the whole. You drill a hole in my plug." It's been going on ever since.

--

A study out today from the Congressional Budget Office documents the rising income inequality in the U.S. and the role that cuts in capital gains taxes and top marginal rates have played in this.

--

*Table 4-3 of this CBO report has data on capital gains tax receipts.

Constitutional bibliolatry

2011-10-24T11:35:00.002-04:00

So once again those experts on American constitutional history, the Republican presidential contenders, have been explaining what the Founding Fathers really intended.
According to Professor Newt Gingrich, the Founders, in creating an independent federal judiciary, actually meant a federal judiciary whose independence only would be guaranteed so long as it issued rulings that Professor Gingich agrees with. When they issue rulings Professor Gingrich disagrees with, they are "rogue courts" that Congress should reign in by cutting their budget, disestablishing their jurisdiction, or (according to those other constitutionals scholars Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann), have their terms limited or salaries reduced.

Of course, the Constitution, that perfect enshrinement of every earthly wisdom, forbids Congress to reduce judicial salaries and provides for lifetime tenure of judges, but never mind. It's the principle that counts. And the principle is that the rule of law, the separation of powers, equal protection, due process, and other things you might have thought were the basis of ordered liberty, in fact apply only until judges start ruling in ways you don't like.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it continues to be a source of a certain wonder to me that (a) the Founding Fathers are viewed by the Tea Partyniks et al. (and their favorite paid speaker, Justice Scalia) as the last word on all controversies of our day and (b) that they are viewed as a uniform chorus all singing the same tune of limited government and dismay over federal "overreaching" as those guys wearing the tricorn hats and brandishing their pocket copies of the Sacred Word running around today.

At the risk of really stating the obvious, the creators of the Constitution recognized themselves that times change, and thus provided a mechanism for their creation to be amended. It's remarkable that some fundamentalist GOPs have been denouncing the income tax, the Fourteenth Amendment, and other constitutional changes on the grounds that the Founding Fathers would be "appalled" by such developments. Of course the Founding Fathers also enshrined in the Constitution the protection of slavery, the right of slave owners to recover runaway slaves, and the astonishingly anti-democratic provision to give slaveowners as much as 1.75 or so votes for every voter in the northern states by including 3/5 of the obviously nonvoting slave population in apportioning representation in Congress and the Electoral College. I think most people would agree it's a good thing that later generations eventually showed themselves wiser and more moral than the Founders on that little matter of holding their fellow human beings in chattel slavery and constitutionally protecting the political hegemony of slave power.

But my real point is that even if we do mean to appeal to the authority of original intent of the Founders as a useful arbiter of what goes today, there was a sizable body of opinion among some of the most influential and wisest of those men that is almost the diametrical opposite of the claims Gingrich et al. are advancing. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and James Madison all favored a very strong federal judiciary precisely because they wanted to see the power of the states weakened. They and their fellow Federalists argued that as with all general courts in the English-American tradition, English common law ran through the U.S. federal courts; they believed that in time the federal courts would in fact supplant the state courts in the administration of justice. They certainly believed that the federal courts had concurrent jurisdiction in common law crimes with the state courts. Hamilton wanted the federal court districts deliberately drawn not to follow state lines to emphasize the national character of the federal courts. They all believed that the state courts were corrupt, inept, amateurish, untrustworthy, politically malleable, and inconsistent.

The reason they favored lifetime tenure and insulation of the judiciary from the electorate was precisely because they saw the dangers of politicizing the judiciary and making it a creature of the political passions of the moment — forces fundamentally antipathetic to the rule of law. Many of the states in a wave of populist democracy following the Revolution instituted elections for every post including judgeships. It was no coincidence that the framers of the Constitution chose a completely different tack, and prescribed the appointment of judges and protected their independence with lifetime tenure. It is thus doubly ironic that the GOP history buffs should be denouncing the federal courts for defying popular sentiment, for being "unelected" judges, for being "elitists" (my favorite idiotic expression: I don't know about you, but I kind of like the idea of judges who have gone to good schools and studied hard).

It is one of those almost childishly simple lessons of morality that the framers all understood, that a system of government built on true liberty and the rule of law requires respect for the process even when the result is one we may from time to time disagree with. The populist, know-nothing rabble-rousing espoused by Gingrich in particular to vilify and incite contempt for the federal judiciary is exactly the sort of political gutter tactics that the Framers, whom he pretends to revere, had the greatest contempt for and fear of. If they want to show that they really respect the accomplishments of the Founders, they need to stop brandishing the Constitution as a rhetorical applause line, and read the damn thing.

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Having just emerged from several months of writing another book in the hopes of paying the light bill, I am once again peeking above the parapet and wondering if it's not better to go back to cowering. But I will try to post from time to time once again on this blog as my uncontainable irritation moves me.

I have made one change, however: no more comments! You got something you think is worth saying, get your own blog.

Spin from on high

2011-07-30T09:54:00.000-04:00

One of the more depressing as opposed to simply infuriating aspects of the current debt debacle is the self-righteousness of self-delusion that has suffused those congressional guardians of fiscal rectitude who have been entertaining us with their impression of the Italian parliament on a particularly bad day.

In the good old days, good old fashioned American political hypocrisy at least took on an air of humorous theatricality; there was at least a wink now and then to reassure us that the emanators of hot air recognized their performance for what it was, an act expected of them, and that they didn't really believe all that stuff they were saying.

(No one, admittedly, went quite as far in this direction as Earl Long, the governor of Louisiana in the 1950s, who in the course of his campaign had liberally dispensed promises left and right. When he failed to deliver on one of his many promises — he had assured a crowd of farmers in St. Tammany Parish that if elected he would see to it that their main road was paved and widened — an irate delegation from the community arrived and demanded to see the governor. A nervous aide who had tried to hold them off finally got hold of Long, explained the situation, and pleaded with him to see the men, but the governor refused. "Well what should I tell them? After all, you did promise them the road, governor," the aide protested. "Tell 'em I lied!" shouted Long back.)

Don't expect humorous self-awareness from the current crowd of Joan of Arcs infesting the national Republican party. Having redefined "fiscal responsibility" as refusing to pay obligations one has already incurred, the Republicans long ago left the world where words and principles bear any passing relation to one another. (They gave up math earlier this year, too, repealing the former congressional rule that limited expansion of the deficit by requiring all new spending to be paid for; the new Republican rule declares that tax cuts do not add to deficits. Similarly, the current Republican formula that insists upon equating the amount the current debt limit is to be raised — again, to avoid defaulting on already-incurred obligations — with the amount that future spending is to be cut over the following 10 years — and why 10 as opposed to say, 11.74527? — is apparently based on the concept that both of these figures are numbers. By contrast, the concept that by endangering the United States' bond rating their action will add hundreds of billions of dollars to future interest costs is so far in the realm of higher mathematics that it has never been part of the GOP's discussion.)

But to return to humorless self-righteousness. Tearful Speaker John Boehner — who has the unique ability to appear lachrymose even on the printed page — after spending weeks pretending to negotiate with the White House on a compromise when he never had the votes even to deliver on his own non-compromise, declared last night in an opinion column in the conservative National Review that the White House was negotiating in "bad faith," the proof which was that all Obama could do, he said, was "criticize" him.

And, after months of generating a totally manufactured crisis, Boehner sanctimoniously pleaded that we now "end this crisis" — by which he meant the Senate and the President accede to the maximal demands (including that reliable stand-by of American cranks from time immemorial, a Constitutional amendment) insisted upon by the right-wing fringe of his party; i.e., the guys who generated this totally manufactured crisis.

The fringe, meanwhile, was oozing humorless self-righteousness to a degree that apparently alarmed even Boehner and his hateful minion Rep. Eric Cantor (another candidate for Gene Weingarten's shanda far der goyim award): members of the South Carolina GOP delegation filed out of Cantor's arm-twisting session on Thursday and into a room off the Capitol Rotunda for a prayer session, where God promptly informed them that He favored abrogating one's debts and passing a Constitutional balanced-budget amendment as well. ("I think divine inspiration already happened," explained Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). "I was a 'lean no' and now I'm a 'no'" on Boehner's bill.)

(By the way, I'm still waiting for a politician to emerge from a consultation with God and announce that God had disagreed with his preexisting belief, had talked him out of it, and he had therefore changed his position. Now that would be faith worth crediting . . .)

For anyone who still desires to remain in touch with a semblance of reality, by the way, here is the most succinct depiction of the national debt and the contributors thereto I have yet seen:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/28/us/charting-the-american-debt-crisis.html?ref=politics#panel/how-the-debt-accumulated

The real history of voter fraud

2011-06-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

African American voters who arrived at the courthouse of Monroe County, Mississippi, to cast their ballots in the state elections of 1875 were met by three remarkably well-equipped companies of armed white men guarding the polls. There was a cavalry unit of 100 men; an infantry company of about 60 brandishing needle guns and revolvers; and even an artillery unit of 50 men, sporting brand-new army-style pistols—and a 24-pound cannon.

The captain of the guerrilla force addressed the 300 African American men who were waiting to vote: "Not one of you shall cast your vote here today." He said that unless they dispersed within three minutes, he would open fire with the cannon and shoot down every one of them. They left.

It was a scene repeated throughout the state. African Americans and pro-civil rights white Republicans in Yazoo County, Mississippi, had polled a two-thousand vote majority just two years earlier; in 1875 they lost by a vote of 4,044 to 7.

For the next two decades, white supremacists across the South retained power through a relentless campaign of violence, fraud, and intimidation to suppress the black vote.

One of the first acts of the forces of white reaction upon regaining control of the Southern state governments was to enact a series of increasing bureaucratic hurdles to voter registration with the unabashed aim of institutionalizing the fraud that brought them into power. Registration offices and polling places in heavily black areas were closed; voters were required to re-register at difficult times of the year in unannounced locations; voters who failed to show up to register at the right time in the right place would be permanently stricken off the rolls.

This campaign of voter suppression would culminate in state constitutional conventions called by all of the Southern states in the 1890s and early 1900s with the explicit aim of permanently restricting voting rights. As one delegate to the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention openly declared:

“Sir, it is no secret that there has not been a full vote and a fair count in Mississippi since 1875, that we have been preserving the ascendancy to the white people by revolutionary methods. In other words we have been stuffing ballot boxes, committing perjury, and here and there in the state carrying the elections by fraud and violence."

Or, as another white Mississippian explained, “The old men of the present generation can’t afford to die and leave their children with shotguns in their hands, a lie in their mouths and perjury on their souls, in order to defeat the negroes. The constitution can be made so this will not be necessary.”

The new voting and registration requirements basically eliminated the black vote in the South, a situation that would remain unchanged until the 1960s and the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. (In my adopted fair state of Virginia, black voter registration fell from about 100,000 to 10,000 following the adoption of the 1902 state constitution. To get around the difficulty of getting African Americans voters to agree to disfranchise themselves, the Virginia constitutional convention simply ignored the requirement that the new constitution be ratified by a popular vote, and declared the constitution adopted.)

The fondly cherished bogeyman of today's Republicans of "voter fraud" in the form of individuals impersonating others at the polls has essentially zero basis in history or reality: On the contrary, the real history of voter fraud is the use of legal or quasi-legal mechanisms to intimidate, restrict, and suppress legitimate voting by those who threatened the conservative elite's lock on power.

Current Republican attempts to justify the curtailment of early voting, the imposition of new ID requirements at the polls, and other restrictions in the name of discouraging fraud are especially ironic. These restrictions are in fact a perpetuation of exactly the same species of legalized fraud and voter intimidation that characterized one of the most shameful chapters of American democracy.

You can read more about the institutionalized fraud, intimidation, and violence that carried the elections in the post-Reconstruction South in my book The Bloody Shirt.

One condition for moral war: success

2011-04-26T09:22:00.000-04:00

I believe it was during the Kennedy administration when one of the President's more militarily knowledgeable aides grew tired of his interventionist-minded colleagues always glibly proposing that "a battalion" be dispatched here or there to deal with this or that international crisis, and began challenging the armchair generals with the simple, slightly obnoxious, but entirely fair question, "Do you know what a battalion is?"
(In case you ever find yourself in the Oval Office advising the President on the use of military force, just remember this answer: "Sir. A battalion is the smallest tactical unit capable of independent operations, consisting of approximately 500 to 1,200 soldiers or Marines, commanded typically by a lieutenant colonel and possessing its own headquarters staff including intelligence, operations, and logistics. Sir.")

These days the equivalent bit of glibbery is to propose a no-fly zone or drone strikes. A month ago at the start of the Libyan intervention I noted the fatal attraction of large military powers to the magical belief that a mere show of force will overawe an adversary, sparing the necessity of actually fighting and winning a real war.

It was ever thus; the technologies change but the delusion remains. I might take grim satisfaction in the accuracy of my pessimistic prediction but for the fact it did not require much insight to foresee the ensuing stalemate. What is astonishing is that anyone could have thought otherwise.

Part of what has gotten us into this mess, though, is not just strategic naivete of this venerable kind but a tactical naivete of the kind that President Kennedy's frustrated aide observed. Much ink has been spilled about the moral calculus of intervention, focusing almost exclusively on the justice and urgency of the cause and not at all upon equally important questions that those who know about war know are a sine qua non for the use of military force. Two of these questions stand out above all: Is it likely to succeed? And is it likely to do more good than harm?

These are practical military questions, but they are also very deeply moral ones, because people who know anything about war know that it is always, in some sense, a disaster. War at best means killing innocent people, tearing down the stability and economy of a society, brutalizing and desensitizing a generation of decent men, women, and children, flooding a country with unsecured weapons, and unleashing unpredictable political tidal waves.

And so a war fought with little chance of prevailing can well be a greater moral evil than sitting on one's hands in the face of evil. And a war, successful or not, that does not at least offer the reasonable prospect of making things better can be a greater moral evil than not fighting a war at all. The use of military force is — or ought to be — a last resort precisely because its consequences are so terrible and the forces it unleashes so uncertain. (Never mind the billions, or trillions, of dollars that even victory costs, or the loss of deterrence that is the terrible added cost of failure.)

It is a close question whether — in the short run, at least — our intervention in Libya is likely to do more good than harm. But I don't think it's close at all that it is extremely unlikely to succeed with the force we are willing and able to commit. That is a completely valid moral and practical consideration that deserved far more consideration than it got.

A just war is not merely a war fought in a good cause against a terrible tyrant; there are an infinity of good causes and no shortage of terrible tyrants. A just war is one that can justify the destruction it sows, and the enduring responsibility it entails.

It's only bad when they do it

2011-04-18T09:39:00.001-04:00

Ever since the patron saint of fiscal conservatism Ronald Reagan and his minion George H. W. Bush tripled the national debt, from $1 trillion to $3 trillion, the GOP has made intellectual flexibility a hallmark of its rhetoric on the subject. A zen-like serenity about the deficit and the debt settles over the party whenever a Republican occupies the White House, to be instantly replaced with hysteria the instant a Democrat is inaugurated.
"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney asserted as Bush II was presiding over the largest increase in the Federal debt in history (another $5 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion). Amazing what a difference an election makes.

But the point is not just to draw some innocent pleasure from Republican hypocrisy: the point is that how we got to this juncture tells us what policies are fiscally sustainable, and what ones aren't. The GOP has been remarkably effective in advancing the narrative that the debt is the product of "big spending" Democratic programs; therefore big-spending Democratic programs (Medicare, Social Security, health care) and for that matter little-spending Democratic programs (IRS enforcement, public radio, family planning services, clean air regulation) are what must be cut.

Almost no one seems to be able to remember that Bill Clinton's policies of modest spending restraints; adjustments to Social Security benefits; modest increases in the top marginal tax rates; and elimination of the regressive cap on income subject to the Medicare tax gave us the first budget surpluses in decades, and placed the country on a path to pay off the entire debt by 2015.

At the same time, Congress adopted policies requiring that any measures which increased the deficit had to be offset by policies that made up for that loss, either by cutting spending elsewhere or by raising revenues. During the Clinton Administration the national debt increased by a grand total of $0.07 trillion.

W's $2 trillion in tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest, plus $2 trillion in "off-budget" expenses for a couple of wars, plus an unfunded prescription-drug add-on to Medicare, plus a $700 billion Wall Street bailout, threw any remaining semblance of fiscal responsibility out the window:

As did the newly elected Republican House of Representatives this year, which — concluding that it was simpler merely to suspend the laws of physics than to politically reconcile their screaming rhetorical denunciations of the debt with their single-minded determination to reduce tax rates on the rich — simply declared that tax cuts no longer need to be offset by any spending cuts or revenue increases elsewhere in the budget.

As has been noted by many, Paul Ryan's highly serious intellectually hefty GOP budget plan to solve the nation-threatening catastrophic disaster of the debt consists mostly of adding $4 trillion more to the national debt, in the form of new tax cuts for the wealthiest (along with eliminating Medicare — apparently not a violation of the GOP's Pledge to America last fall, since that only said they were against reducing Medicare).

Meanwhile, in our great Commonwealth of Virginia, it turns out that not only are we under the beneficent care of the Tax Fairy but the Road Fairy as well: billions in new road construction, advocated mostly by the development industry, have our Republican governor's enthusiastic support, even as he slashes away at health care for children and university funding in the name of fiscal rectitude and necessity.

Like terrorists impatient for an outrage they can blame on the government who set off a bomb in a marketplace themselves, the GOP — having been frustrated by the Democrats' refusal for decades to conform to their bogeyman caricatures of them — have at last resorted to creating the bogeyman themselves. It says much of the single-minded decades-long efforts of GOP strategists to spin a mythological narrative that they can dress this Debt Monster of their own making in Democratic clothes, and get away with it.

The very real world of Patrick O'Brian

2011-04-08T10:43:00.004-04:00

[an earlier version of this post was deleted through a technical error and so I have had to perform that dreariest of authorial tasks -- attempting to reconstruct from memory something already written . . . apologies for the duplication]

Stephen Budiansky

Leesburg, Va.

Surveying the dreary and wretched state of our politics each morning, I am frequently reminded of the wise words of my friend Lew Lord from Mississippi, who at times like these would announce, "I can't decide whether to shoot myself or go bowling."

One of the undeniable appeals of writing history, military history especially, and military history of a long ago era most of all, is escapism. I should hasten to say that by "escapism" I don't mean romanticism, or the mythologizing of the past.
For the fact is that those distant times really were in many ways strange and intriguing places, and traveling into the worlds of the men and women of centuries past is a journey into a place full of wonder, at times inspiring, at times horrifying and terrifying, at times just profoundly alien to our own habits of mind and assumptions. Not just their material world but their stoicism, sense of honor, and the compass of their moral horizon were profoundly different from our own, sometimes for ill and sometimes for good. As I note in the Prologue to my new book Perilous Fight, about the War of 1812 at sea:

Some of the nostalgia about the war was honestly come by: the world of sailing ships and sea battles would just a few generations later seem as remote and about as real as the knights of the Round Table. The historian Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, mused in his 1907 autobiography whether the “American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900” in the world he was born into, in the education he received, and in the habits of mind he was inculcated with. Like the year 1854, the year 1812 was barely beyond the medieval in its technologies and its rhythms of life, in its lingering feudal codes of personal and family honor. Nine-tenths of the seven million Americans alive in 1812 lived on farms, rising with the sun and going to bed with dusk, using tools unchanged for a thousand years; the rest lived in a few small cities of ten or twenty or thirty thousand hugging the Atlantic coast.
By the turn of the twentieth century literally everything had changed. One can read the memoirs and letters of soldiers and seamen from World War II or even World War I and instantly know these men: they were our fathers and grandfathers; they looked on the world much as we do; their jokes may be corny but are never incomprehensible; the mechanized, ordered warfare they fought is awful but familiar. The men of the War of 1812 can seem at times to be from another world entirely. The archaic tools with which they waged war are almost the least of it; their assumptions, their motives, their ways of thinking take work to get our minds around. The officers who commanded America’s fledgling navy of 1812 really did fight duels over tiny aspersions to honor, things we would literally laugh at today; they really did in the midst of war engage in the most astonishing acts of chivalry toward their foes; they really did endure suffering of an unspeakable blackness with a stoicism that can seem superhuman to a modern sensibility.
They also squabbled over money and promotions, lied and schemed, fornicated and drank, stabbed each other in the back when it suited them, and wrote very bad poetry. One of the enduring reasons to study war is that it shines a light on humanity hidden in ordinary times; it lays bare what is so often successfully hidden.

One of the particular joys in researching this book was to encounter the real-life manifestations of the characters, situations, and ethos of the wonderful Patrick O'Brian novels set in this same era and upon the same stage of war at sea. It was wonderful to sit in the library of the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich outside of London, and read the letters of the captain of HMS Shannon to his wife — I suspect these were in fact models O'Brian drew upon in his letters of Jack Aubrey to Sophie. The most amazing one was written shortly after the Shannon's defeat and capture of the American frigate Chesapeake; still seriously wounded, her captain wrote home full of plans for what they should do with the several thousand pounds of prize money he anticipated for his victory ("we must make a flower garden and a greenhouse").

O'Brian was a master of characterization and dialogue and detail, as well as of a slightly eccentric but often wholly original style — with its unannounced temporal transitions and a narrative voice imbued with the staccato abruptness of a ship's log — and all of this in part explains the preternatural addictiveness of his novels. But most of all, I think, is the way he so completely reconstructs the moral world of this time, and simply presents it without explanation; it is up to us the reader to figure out what this world is about that he has suddenly found himself immersed within: one in which honor, stoicism, and glory loom far larger than our own.

(In this regard I am somewhat ridiculously reminded of the time I was traveling in Europe for a study I was working on for the US Congress on NATO conventional defense options. Four of us were in Brussels for three or four nights, and each evening we would repair to our respective rooms in the hotel and we each would find ourselves watching the only thing available in English on TV — which happened to be the interminable BBC coverage of the snooker championships. It was absurd of course, all the more so since none of us knew anything or really cared anything about snooker; but we found ourselves absorbed watching for hours on end, and then having lengthy and impassioned debates each morning at breakfast as we tried to deduce, ab initio, the complex rules of the game simply from our observations.)

In the War of 1812 there was plenty of brutality (the sheer butchery of naval warfare, in the hand-to-hand combat of boarding actions above all) and cruelty (the treatment of many American prisoners, notably, a little-written-about part of the war that I devote a chapter to in my book); but there were acts of chivalry as well that seem breathtaking to our modern sensibilities. It is tempting to dismiss them as romance but for the fact that they are well-attested, and far too frequent to be dismissed.

One of my favorite such stories was the experience of an American privateer captain who was captured by a British captain who could have been Captain Jack Aubrey himself. Besides an extraordinary story of adventure and escape, it was a glimpse of this world where personal honor and chivalry was a tangible moral force. Here's the excerpt of my book where I relate his adventure:

George Coggeshall, for his return voyage, took command of “a fine Baltimore built vessel . . . a remarkably fast sailer,” the letter-of-marque schooner Leo, lying in L’Orient harbor. For three weeks he skillfully dodged British men-of-war in the Bay of Biscay while taking several prizes, and then one afternoon there came racing across their weather quarter a prize to put all others to shame, an English packet just out of Lisbon, bound for England, almost certainly carrying a huge quantity of specie. Just as they were on a course to intercept within a pistol shot the schooner gave a violent lurch, and the foremast snapped in two places.
The only hope now was to get into Lisbon, a neutral port, before the next morning; the seas were teeming with British warships. The Leo’s crew worked for an hour clearing away the wreckage and rigging a jury foremast and by four o’clock in the afternoon they were making seven knots.
But with dawn and the Rock of Lisbon in sight the wind died. All day they swept and towed, and just as their hopes had risen again—four miles from land, the Lisbon pilot already aboard—Coggeshall saw coming out, on the ebb tide of the Tagus and a light land breeze, a 38-gun British frigate. In a matter of minutes they were under her guns, and prisoners of war.
The frigate was the Granicus and her captain, W. F. Wise, far removed from the growing brutalities of the American war, was of the old and chivalrous school; Coggeshall was given his own stateroom and was invited almost every day to dine with the captain, who was all manners and kindness, praised the seamanship and ingenuity of American sailors and shipbuilders, and more than once urged him, “Don’t be depressed by captivity, but strive to forget that you are a prisoner, and imagine that you are only a passenger.” At Gibraltar the crew was immediately shipped off to England and Coggeshall and his lieutenants were to follow in a few days, once they had given the required depositions to the admiralty court: the governor of Gibraltar had received positive orders that every American prisoner brought in was to be forwarded to Dartmoor, without exception, and the officers were not to be paroled, despite Wise’s urging that they be treated civilly, all the more so since the Leo had voluntarily released some thirty British prisoners they had taken. “I said but little on this subject,” Coggeshall said afterward, “but from that moment resolved to make my escape upon the first opportunity.”
It seemed an even more impossible proposition than escaping from a prison hulk in the Medway, for Gibraltar was itself a citadel, with a guarded gate leading to the landside. The first day Captain Wise said he was prepared to let Coggeshall and his officers attend the court proceedings without a guard if they pledged their parole not to attempt to escape. Coggeshall did so, and used the chance afforded by their stroll back to conduct an hour’s reconnaissance.
The next morning they were to return to the court, and Coggeshall arose, put all the money he had, about a hundred gold twenty-five franc pieces, in his belt, and slipped a few keepsakes in his pocket.
“Well, Coggeshall, I understand you and your officers are required at the Admiralty Office at 10 o’clock,” Wise greeted him, “and if you and your officers will again pledge your honor, as you did yesterday, you may go on shore without a guard.”
Coggeshall gave him a careful look and replied, “Captain Wise, I am surprised that you think it possible for any one to escape from Gibraltar.”
Wise, pleasantly but firmly, said, “Come, come it won’t do, you must either pledge your word and honor that neither you nor your officers will attempt to make your escape, or I shall be compelled to send a guard with you.”
“You had better send a guard, sir.”
And so a lieutenant, with a sergeant and four marines, conducted the Americans to the office. While Coggeshall and one of his lieutenants were waiting in the courtroom for their turn to be examined the lieutenant walked casually to the door, then urgently beckoned him over; the British lieutenant was not in sight. Coggeshall then cheerfully asked the sergeant if he would like to go up the street to the wine shop at the corner for a glass of wine with them while they waited. The sergeant thought it was an excellent idea, and leaving the rest of the marines accompanied the two Americans up the street. The wine shop had entrances on each street; Coggeshall and the lieutenant went in one door, and while the sergeant waited there Coggeshall slipped out the other after whispering to the lieutenant to follow and meet him two blocks over.
Coggeshall removed the eagle insignia from his cockade, and with that gone his blue coat, black stock, and black cockade “had, on the whole, very much the appearance of an English naval officer.” He waited with growing apprehension at the corner he had named, but the lieutenant did not appear. “I had now fairly committed myself, and found I did not have a moment to spare,” and so he set off with what he hoped was an attitude of “the most perfect composure and consummate impudence” towards the sentinel guarding the Land Port Gate. Fixing the guard with a stern glare, he strode on, received a respectful salute, and in a moment was outside the walls of Gibraltar. He went down to the mole where a crowd of boatmen were all too eager to row him out to his ship; he chose one, hopped in, and as they got into the bay the oarsmen asked, “Captain, which is your vessel?” Coggeshall was at a loss for a moment, but seeing a Norwegian flag flying from one he decided that the Norwegians were probably more trustworthy than most people and jabbed a finger toward it.
He decided that his best chance was to tell the truth, and he could scarcely finish his story before the Norwegian captain grasped his hand, said he had been a prisoner in England and would do anything to help him, in two minutes flat had him fitted out in a pea jacket, fur cap, and pipe like any Norwegian seaman. The captain then gave him dinner, and said he needed to go ashore for a few hours to arrange things.
The Norwegian returned “pleased and delighted”: the whole town was in a state of pandemonium over the escape of the captain of the American privateer. The lieutenant of the frigate had been arrested. The next night a gang of smugglers came alongside silently in a long fast-rowing boat and “certainly, a more desperate, villainous-looking set was never seen.” But the Norwegian captain had arranged everything; he did business with them all the time, selling them gin and other odds and ends; and the smugglers said they would be all too happy to take the “captains’ brother” to Algeciras, nearby in Spain.

The water was smooth, the night dark, and the ten miles’ passage was a matter of two hours’ steady rowing. A lantern was shown for a minute, then covered; an answering signal winked from the shore; and then they were on land crunching their way up a winding track, and at about three in the morning they entered a small cabin, one room with a mat hanging in the middle as a partition; this was where the chief of the smugglers lived with his wife and two small children, and for three days the family took him in warmly and kindly. Venturing out cautiously to see if there was an American consul in the town, Coggeshall was able to find his way to an initially disbelieving diplomat, but once he had doffed his fur cap and pea jacket and “looked somewhat more like an American” he was able to tell his story, and the consul—Horatio Sprague, who had been consul in Gibraltar before the war began—immediately invited him to stay with him and help him on his way.

After waiting ten days in hopes of hearing news from his two lieutenants, he hired a guide and mule and dressed as a peasant to avoid the brigands traveled over zigzagging mountain footpaths to Cadiz, where he arrived two weeks later, just before sundown, the sun’s final rays lighting the church steeples and the mountains beyond them in burst of gold. He made his way to Lisbon on a coasting schooner, then to New York on a filthy and vermin-infested Portuguese brig, finally arriving home in May 1815 to learn that the war was over, and peace restored.

Does limited war ever work?

2011-03-22T10:32:00.001-04:00

The entire history of air power was written the very first time that a bomb was dropped out of an airplane in warfare.

The occasion was a small colonial war between Italy and Turkey, the date was 1911, and the place, curiously enough, was Libya.
On November 1 an Italian pilot took off from the desert, flew over the Turkish lines, and dropped four small bombs — grenades, really, weighing about five pounds apiece that the pilot had to yank a pin out of with his teeth before lobbing them from the cockpit. The next day Italian newspapers declared the triumph of this new mode of warfare:

AVIATOR LT. GAVOTTI

THROWS BOMB ON ENEMY CAMP

TERRORIZED TURKS SCATTER UPON

UNEXPECTED CELESTIAL ASSAULT

It was a ridiculous exaggeration, of course, and the Turks for their part rather more cannily announced that the Italian air assault had hit a hospital.

The revolution in precision guidance over the last three decades has vastly increased the tactical effectiveness of air-launched weapons while minimizing the danger that civilians nearby (or even not so nearby) will be killed or injured; on Sunday, American B-2 bombers, probably flying at 40,000 feet, precisely destroyed hardened military aircraft hangars at Sirte airport in Libya while leaving the adjacent civilian terminal and runways literally untouched. It is now the merest routine for bombers and unmanned missiles and drones to destroy targets even in the midst of cities without inflicting one-thousandth the number of civilian casualties that were once accepted without batting an eye in World War II; it is now routine for fighter jets to launch a single weapon and destroy a tank on the ground below with near certainty, a feat that in World War II took an average of 3,500 bombs dropped per tank successfully hit. Ironically, the very effectiveness of modern air power has dispelled most of the mystique it once held; now that air power can actually do what was from the start hyperbolically claimed for it, the whole business seems even rather ho-hum. (I examine this history in my 2004 book Air Power, which unlike most of my other previous work is available not only from fine second-hand bookstores everywhere but is actually still in print in paperback, and as an ebook.)

The myth we have yet to get over, however, is the larger one within which the increasingly frequent resort to air power operates — that conviction of statesmen in empires from ancient Rome to 19th century Britain to modern America that limited war waged by the mighty will overawe the weak into political submission with comparatively little cost, involvement, or trouble.

The trouble is not just that the weak always have tactical recourses that can indefinitely delay total defeat and sap the resolve of the mightiest; the real trouble is the simple fact that limited war is predicated on an enemy's crying uncle at some point far short of annihilation (an end point that requires military commitment of an entirely different kind; see, for example, the Soviet offensive against Germany in World War II). It depends on transforming military means to political ends that the military force employed is almost inevitably ill-matched toward attaining.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the more limited the political goals, the more conceivable it is that an enemy will capitulate in the face of limited military pressure. In America's wars against the Barbary powers of North Africa in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the aims were distinctly limited, as well as clearly defined: no regime change, no cession of territory, no occupation; but rather a political agreement on the part of the Barbary states to end their state policy of preying on American merchant ships in the Mediterranean. Seizing warships and bombarding harbors was a straightforward exercise of military power well-suited to this objective, and by 1815 the rulers of Tripoli and Algiers had come to terms.

The closest modern example we have is NATO's assault against Serbia to pressure Slobodan Milosevic to halt his offensive in Kosovo. Again the aim was distinctly circumscribed — Milosevic when he finally did capitulate was at least convinced he would remain in power and keep his riches — and it is not even clear whether air strikes against Serbian targets were the decisive factor, or whether it was only the increasingly menacing possibility of a NATO ground invasion and withdrawal of Russian diplomatic support for Serbia that finally tipped the scales. (Air Force officials I have talked to about this always get that maddening "if you knew what I knew" look in their eyes — or, what really makes me want to resort to violence, and I'm a peaceable man, they trot out that hoary line, "I could tell you . . . but then I'd have to shoot you" — and hint that we know from listening in on Milosevic's phone calls that he began to get really worried when we started targeting factories owned by his cronies. But the jury is still out on this.)

In some ways we were extraordinarily lucky in the case of Serbia, because the limited military means employed in the air campaign — striking almost completely symbolic targets such as the ruling Socialist Party headquarters along with almost a random grab-bag of civilian infrastructure in Serbia proper such as bridges and power plants — were so disconnected from the political ends being sought. And that goes to the heart of the issue: There is an undercurrent throughout the history of empires dealing with troublesome uprisings or recalcitrant small foes of believing that the mere showing of resolve will be sufficient. I was especially struck by this when delving into the War of 1812, when the shoe was on the other foot; again and again you could almost see the British lords of the admiralty and commanders on the North American station saying in frustration, after one of their small raids on the Chesapeake or after burning some little American town, "We're the mightiest sea power on earth — why can't you people understand that?" The British in 1812 were keenly aware of the impossibility of carrying out any prolonged occupation of American territory, but up until the end were convinced that the right show of force would make the Americans see the folly of their ways in taking on a power that outnumbered them 100 to 1 in men, ships, naval guns, and other resources, and capitulate to British terms. Yet as General Wellington finally counseled the British government, there was in fact no place to hit America that would be so painful as to force her to surrender. In the end the British admitted their military impotence and dropped every single one of their political conditions; the war ended with a complete return to the political status quo ante. And this was a case where the terms demanded by the superpower of their upstart foe even at their peak were remarkably limited; for most of the conflict Britain wanted little more than a face-saving way to end the fight. American accession to even the most rigorous British terms would never have meant "regime change," loss of sovereignty, or political self-annihilation. When your true goal is coercing a dictator to abandon his vast power and vaster stolen wealth, the stakes are ever so much higher.

The fatuousness of the armchair critics who are now denouncing the Obama administration for not initiating military action against Libya sooner (John McCain the other day said, “Obviously, if we had taken this step a couple of weeks ago, a no-fly zone would probably have been enough") is perhaps the only thing more flimsy than the political-military calculation that has led us to fire off a few hundred million dollars' worth of ordnance from a safe distance with the declared goal of creating a no-fly zone (which is an operational means, not even a strategic, much less a political, end) and protecting the civilian population (something that no use of military force is less well-suited to than air power; see, for example, the Kurds and southern Shiites in Iraq after Gulf War I).

A sine qua non for the effective use of military force is to define at the outset what you aim to accomplish by it. Saying that its purpose is to establish a no-fly zone is about like saying your purpose in going to war is to fire bullets. But the magical thinking of superpowers in this arena always does confuse means and ends.

Prognosticators are a dime a dozen even when something as serious as war is going on, in part because no one ever seems to be held accountable for the wrong things they say. But amid the avalanche of punditry of the past week one prediction unfortunately struck me as the most likely to prove correct. This was the Hollywood tough-guy cliche uttered by Qaddafi's No. 2 son the other day:

"You're making a big mistake."

Red in tooth, claw, and ink

2011-03-14T08:53:00.000-04:00

As much as I try to shake my animal past, it still seems to follow me around. The Wall Street Journal asked me to review a new book about the purportedly "moral" lives of animals; you can read the entire resulting fulminations here, which includes a list of a few of my favorite books about animals and their behavior.

Here's the lede (as we say in the journalism biz):

Animal-rights campaigners have long sought to narrow the distance between humans and animals by showcasing appealing stories of humanlike behavior, emotions and mental processes in other species. People love apes that punch buttons on computer screens, elephants that paint pictures and parrots in possession of formidable vocabularies. These are staples not just of the animal-rights literature but of popular animal writing in general.

Nothing tugs at the anthropomorphic heartstrings, though, more strongly than accounts of compassion or altruism in the animal world. A spate of books by authors such as Steven M. Wise, Jeffrey Masson, Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal accordingly offer up examples of animals acting not just intelligently but virtuously. Dolphins lovingly tend sick comrades, elephants grieve over the death of relatives, and apes stage daring rescues of people, injured birds or other beings in distress. continue reading

Glib Historical Analogies Department

2011-03-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

Nobody of course beats Professor Newt Gingrich when it comes to slinging the glib historical analogy. The other day, while making his pre-pre-pre-presidential-candidacy announcement, Gingrich declared that 2012 will be a historical turning point of momentous proportions without parallels in American history — save for two other occasions when the nation faced a great crisis, and a great leader came forth in its moment of need.

These, Newt says, were 1932 (when FDR was elected) and 1860 (when Abraham Lincoln was).

To those who are now scratching their heads trying to discover any similarity between Newt Gingrich's life, career, values, ideologies, and positions and those of FDR or Lincoln, let me save you the trouble: You are over-analyzing the matter. The point is that if 2012 is 1932, then Newt is FDR. QED.

Newt also has been peddling his newfound salvation as a convert to Catholicism (good thing he got those first two messy divorces out of the way before completing the process) by pushing a "documentary" film about Pope John Paul II he and his wife made. With his newfound expertise on the subject, Newt recently declared to an audience at a screening of his film at a Catholic school in Ohio that “to a surprising degree, we are in a situation similar to Poland’s" under communism. Just as in Poland, Newt explained, "in America, religious belief is being challenged by a cultural elite trying to create a secularized America, in which God is driven out of public life.”

It certainly is surprising, since under Poland's communist regime the state in the 1950s assumed legal authority over all religious organizations, imprisoned 8 bishops and 1,000 priests, raided convents, and sought to destroy the church altogether. Though in fact by 1981, when John Paul visited Poland, the embattled communist regime actually turned to the church in an effort to save itself; recognizing the moral authority that the church held over the public, the government asked the church to mediate between the government and the Solidarity labor movement. (And exactly how is the apparatus of a totalitarian state a "cultural elite"? But now I'm over-analyzing. The point is that Newt is either Pope John Paul II, or Lech Walensa, except that Newt opposes labor unions. Or something.)

Events of late in the Arab world have been an especially fertile source of glib historical analogies. Leaving aside Glenn Beck's apocalyptic revelations about a liberal plot for the revival of the Muslim Caliphate, we have been hearing that Egypt is either exactly like Iran in 1979 or Iraq in 2003, that the West is or is not trying to be like Lawrence of Arabia, that Obama is Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush.

Most of this is fairly harmless gassing. But some is pernicious, and potentially worse. Nowhere is this more so than in some recent pronouncements on how we should be dealing with the Somali pirates (who killed four American captives last week), with copious analogies drawn to Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars of the early 19th century . . . the moral of the story usually being that when we finally decided to get tough on the Barbary pirates who were preying upon American merchantmen in the Mediterranean, we were able to put an abrupt end to their depredations.

The most serious defect in this analogy is that the Barbary raiders were state actors, while the Somali pirates have flourished precisely because of the collapse of national authority in Somalia. The Barbary Wars are a key backdrop to the American navy's role in the War of 1812, and when I was researching my book Perilous Fight I delved deeply into the whole story, which ended up in fact comprising about the first one-third of the entire book.

Like many writers I had somewhat casually referred to the "Barbary pirates" in my first draft. But the U.S. Navy's historian at the USS Constitution, Margherita Desy, who had very kindly agreed to read my manuscript, quite rightly called me to account for that phrase — making exacty this crucial point that they were not pirates. The North African states like Tripoli were certainly obnoxious in demanding tribute from countries that wanted to pass through their surrounding waters, and in capturing ships and holding prisoner their crews from nations that refused. But their corsairs flew the flag of the state; they were operating under the authority and power of the local pashas; and Tripoli even formally declared war against the United States at one point to demand additional tribute.

The fact that they were state actors above all meant that putting military pressure on the state was a completely and directly effective solution to the problem. The difficulty America faced was not that it faced a particularly complex social, political, tribal, warlord-ridden, law enforcement situation; the problem was that America had practically no navy at all. "Had we 10 or 12 frigates and sloops in these seas," wrote Captain William Bainbridge despairingly from the Mediterannean, "we should not experience these mortifying degradations."

As soon as the War of 1812 ended, the U.S. Navy set sail at once for the Mediterranean with the first truly powerful force it had ever been able to deploy there, swept up the fleet of the dey of Algiers, and dictated the terms of a complete, and completely effective, peace treaty all within a few months.

By contrast, Somalia has no government to pressure, no government to negotiate with, no government capable of securing the good behavior of the pirates operating from its shores even were a government to exist and to agree to terms. It is a frightfully complex problem with no simple military solutions.

People often bemoan the extraordinarily short historical memory of Americans, but I think that is actually begging the question. I always think of Montaigne's wisecrack about Socrates being told that a certain man had grown no better for his travels: "I very well believe it," Socrates replied, "for he took himself along with him."

Historical lessons are no better than the acuity of the analysis that produces them. For most, alas, history even when it is recognized is little more than a source of magical thinking and wishful thinking, and affirmation of prejudice, of the kind that Newt Gingrich for one is depressingly adept at.

You want "job-killing"?

2011-02-08T08:08:00.000-05:00

Someone who really wanted to "kill jobs" could do no better than to adopt the following program.

First, tax gains on, for example, speculative financial machinations at a lower rate than ordinary income produced by, for example, investing in an actual business and making and selling actual things in the real economy, thereby encouraging those with capital to use it on nonproductive activities.

Second, weaken regulation of speculative nonproductive financial machinations (see above).

Third, adopt a tight-money policy, increasing interest rates and thereby making the borrowing needed to start or expand a business prohibitively expensive. Better yet, tie the currency to the gold standard, thereby plunging the economy into deflation that, while befitting those fortunate enough to be sitting atop piles of accumulated wealth, will bring purchases and investments to a grinding halt.

Fourth, cut government programs that generate immediate spending in the economy for goods and services (e.g., unemployment benefits, infrastructure construction, aid to state governments — all of which produce a boost of about $1.50 or more in GDP per dollar spent) and instead cut corporate and income taxes (which generate 30 cents in GDP gain per dollar spent).

Just a thought.

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A reminder that my talk at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, postponed earlier due to da weather, will take place this Thursday, February 10, at 5:30 p.m.

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All good things must come to an end, and although my six months in the blogosphere have brought me incalculable fame, riches, and platoons of pulchritudinous proteges begging for mentoring from an experienced man wise in the ways of journalism and the world, alas spring beckons on the farm and reality is casting its sinister shadow in the form of a book I'm supposed to be writing.

Please check my author website from time to time where I will continue to post news, events, reviews, and the occasional piece of real journalism.

And sincerely: thanks for reading.

Bipartisan cultism

2011-02-03T15:02:00.001-05:00

In the geography of politics, there is a strange and shadowy place far, far down the narrowing alleys of the left, where one turns a final corner and is suddenly face to face with like-minded wanderers who arrived at the same spot from exactly the opposite direction, via equally tortuous passageways.

The health and nature cults of the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided one venerable meeting ground for the loony right and the loony left; the most famous example being Hitler's vegetarianism and the Third Reich's more general enthusiasm for anti-vivisectionism, animal protection, food and health fadism, and back-to-the-soil nature worship.
(I discuss this in my book Nature's Keepers, available from discerning purveyors of used and remaindered books everywhere).

Lately, though, we've been seeing some like meetings of the minds between health-and-food-nut lefties and paranoid-antigovernment-conspiracy-theory rightists in our very own United States of America. The tea partyniks in Iowa managed to get a plank inserted in their state Republican platform demanding the right to buy and sell unpasteurized milk; a variety of "organic" and "natural" farmers have been regularly spouting tea partyesque slogans about a tyrannical Food and Drug Administration seeking to take away their rights (by insisting they not, for example, sell bacteria-laden food).

And then there was the remarkable coalition of "the evil corporations are poisoning us" left with the "big brother is invading our privacy" right who joined together in the Bay Area in impassioned opposition to the local utility company's attempt to install new electric meters in homes. (The electric meters not only record energy use in real-time — thereby presumably allowing the evil government to know when you're making toast — but also send their data by radio, thereby endangering the health of those sensitive souls who suffer from "electromagnetic hypersensitivity," which causes headaches, fatigue, heart palpitations, and all of the other tiresomely familiar symptoms of anxiety neurosis.)

The anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-intellectual populism that underlies such spirit of bipartisan looniness actually has deep roots in America, but it's been nurtured in latter years by both hucksterism on the right (e.g., Utah senator Orrin Hatch's championing of the quack health supplement industry as a matter of individual freedom, an argument he used to weaken FDA regulation) and academic balderdash on the left (especially the anti-science relativism and the elevation of popular culture that was fashionable amid all of the blather about "meta-narratives" and "interrogating the text" from the social historians of the '80s and '90s).

What's really coming home to roost, however, is the USDA's decision to give official sanction to the scientific nonsense of "organic" farming.

The problem, I should hasten to add, is not that there are not admirable goals of practitioners of organic agriculture; the problem is that the very concept of "organic" food is based upon pure, unadulterated pseudoscientific malarkey.

Or perhaps more accurately, it's pre-scientific malarkey, a cultist set of beliefs that by their very nature defy scientific rationality. Organic boosters have always made sweeping, dogmatic claims for the virtues of rejecting modern agricultural technologies in favor of "natural" farming methods; the very word "organic" reflects the belief of founders of the movement in the idea that their methods would nurture the intangible "vital force" found in living things, but not in inanimate products synthesized by man.

This is, of course, to use the technical term, kaka. Thanks to about a century of modern biochemistry we know there is not any difference between a vitamin A molecule made in the lab or one made in a carrot. Nor is there any difference between a nitrogen atom in a bag of synthetic 10-10-10 fertilizer and a nitrogen atom in a pile of horse manure. Nor is there any difference between a listeria bacterium in a cheese produced by a multi-national conglomerate's industrial dairy plant and a listeria bacterium in a cheese produced by an organic, artisanal, spiritually in tune with the rhythms of the earth cheesemaker in Washington State. The vitamin A molecule will provide you a needed a nutrient, the nitrogen atom will make a plant grow, and the listeria bacterium will make you sick or if you are young, old, in utero, or immunocompromised, possibly kill you — regardless of how "natural" or "artificial" the process was that produced each one.

The point is actually so ridiculously simple I hesitate to say it, but . . . some things made in labs are good! Some things made in nature are very, very bad!

(The FDA's surveillance data suggests that hundreds of people are killed each year by foodborne listeria in the United States, for example, and the FDA's standards set a zero tolerance level. Small farmstead operations are in fact more likely than industrial operations to be affected, since the cheesemaking is taking place near animals and plant matter than can carry the bacetria. Yet when the FDA asked one small cheese-maker to recall her listeria-contaminated products, the organic and small-and-local-food partisans rushed to her defense, asserting that because the bacteria got there in a way that obviously was so good and natural it must be just fine: “The F.D.A. comes from an industrial, zero-defect, highly processed, repeatable perspective, and she comes from a more ancient time of creating with what she gets,” explained one supporter; the maker herself, in true left-meets-right spirit, asserted for her part that the real enemy was Big Government: “I don’t think this issue is about bacteria and it’s not about cheese,” she said. “I think that we’re losing our freedom.”)

But anyway . . . the point is that rather than asking whether it's natural or artificial, the rather more important question is, Is it good or bad?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that some "organic" dogmas happen to have good consequences. It also turns out that some have bad consequences. (Some have very bad consequences.)

Others are neither particularly good or bad in themselves, but are simply foolish and wasteful, or impractical on anything approaching a global scale.

For example:

Slightly good.
Reducing the use of chemical pesticides is good mainly because indiscriminate spraying can harm populations of beneficial insects such as bees and natural predators that help to keep pests in check.

The health benefits to humans of eating food grown without pesticides, however, are literally non-existent: surveillance by FDA of tens of thousands of samples of fruits and vegetables found no detectable pesticides at all in 70 percent; only in 1 percent did residues exceed even the extremely conservative margin of safety established for pesticide residues in food (basically 100 times less than a dose one could consume regularly over an entire lifetime with no observable effects on health). Studies even of occupational exposures to pesticides — thousands of times greater than what consumers are exposed to in food — have found no causal link between pesticides and overall cancer incidence.

And as Bruce Ames pointed out decades ago, naturally occurring carcinogens, mutagens, and toxins in food and drink (toxic alkaloids in many herbs, aflatoxin in peanuts, hydrazines in mushrooms, tannins in grapes, complex organic molecules created in high-temperature cooking and found in browned meats and bread crusts, and — a biggie — alcohol in alcoholic beverages) are found in concentrations thousands of times greater than synthetic pesticide residues, and many have a potential carcinogenic potency thousands of times greater per molecule as well. If synthetic pesticide residues in food are causing cancers, then natural carcinogens in food ought to be causing cancer epidemics.

Slightly silly.
The claim that organic produce is more nutritious than conventionally grown fruits and vegetables, one would think, would be regarded by sane people as absurd on its face; what possible mechanism could there be to explain why a fruit tree fertilized with composted cow dung produces fruits in any substantive way different from a tree fertilized with chemical fertilizer. (When pressed to explain this magical difference, J. I. Rodale, the venerable prophet-cum-huckster of the organic movement who launched the huge publishing empire that still bears his name, invoked, well, magic: "We feel that in organically grown food, you have things you don't even know exist," he explained.)

This claim is still frequently made, and extraordinarily trivial (and perhaps random) for-instances are adduced to support it. A major revew of all published studies comparing organic and conventional produce, however, found essentially no significant differences in nutritional content — though inevitably, of course, organic boosters furiously denounced the study, citing trivial (and perhaps random) for-instances in which they claimed organic produce was marginally superior. Such is faith.

Sightly bad.
Copper sulfate is hardly "natural," but apparently under the theory that it's been used since great-great-grandpa's day, it rates as an "organic"-approved method to control fungal infections of plants, such as early blight in tomatoes. A synthetic chemical fungicide like daconil, by contrast, is verboten.

But in terms of what organic farming is supposed to be about — protecting the environment or human health — this is absurd: copper compounds are crude and indiscriminate poisons; they kill earthworms and other beneficial organisms; they accumulate in soil and in animal tissue. By contrast, daconil breaks down rapidly in soil, is highly selective, is minimally toxic to non-target species, and does not bioaccumulate in mammals. I am always uncomfortably reminded of Talmudic investigations of what is kosher when I start trying to understand why certain pesticides qualify as "organic."

Really bad.
The organic prohibition on genetically modified crops is perhaps the prime instance of "natural"-vs- artificial trumping good-vs.-bad.

For example: Spraying Bt, a bacterial toxin that organic farmers use to control corn borers and similar pests, is blessed by the organic movement because it is natural; genetically modified corn or cotton containing the gene to produce its own Bt — and thus targeting only those insects attacking the crop and sparing collateral environmental damage — is verboten because it is artificial.

(Even more absurdly, organic advocates are willing to embrace varieties of plants produced through radioactive mutation — a genetic blunderbus compared to the precision surgery of genetic modification which inserts a single well defined and well understood gene.)

So irrational is anti-GM hysteria that Greenpeace even for example has worked to block the cultivation of GM rice modified to carry a gene to produce vitamin A — an innovation with the potential to save millions a year from blindness or death in the developing world. (Unlike the trivial nutritive differences organic supporters claim to be able to find between organic and conventionally grown produce, this is truly a life-and-death difference.)

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It's always been difficult for government regulators to push for scientific standards in the face of economic and political interests who don't like standards, and giving the seal of approval to a dogma based on magical thinking fundamentally at odds with the objectivity and pragmatism of the scientific method certainly has not made it any easier.

There is a heavy air of ritual and a concomitant zest for punishing heresy that imbues the whole "organic" movement. But it was ever thus with faith; when was the last time you heard of a scientific or even a pragmatic, religion.

And of course like all good old American religion, there is a heavy dose of hucksterism as well.

Asymmetry rules the waves

2011-01-31T06:00:00.000-05:00

Some lessons about naval power, and being the underdog, which we may have forgotten.

China, the U.S., and 1812

By Stephen Budiansky

From Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet” to Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship force, proponents of a strong U.S. Navy have long been accustomed to making their case a matter of raw numbers.

Or at least, a matter of raw force: The great late-nineteenth-century American seapower theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that only a large and powerful sea force, built to defeat any potential enemy navy in a decisive blue-water sea battle, could maintain control of the oceans in peace or war. Mahan’s basic calculus has guided American navalists’ thinking ever since.

So it’s no surprise that recent concerns over China’s growing naval capacity have been expressed in familiar Mahanian terms,
weighing numbers against numbers, weapon system against weapon system. Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), the new chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, last year pointed to the “unnerving” fact that “China’s navy is larger than our navy,” its 290 ships now surpassing America’s fleet by 6. The new chairman of the committee, Rep. Howard McKeon (R-Calif.), recently warned that “while China today may not intend to attack our carriers, neutralize our bases in Japan and Guam, or push back our naval presence out of the South China Sea, they are without question making the investments and developing capabilities to do just that. The question is whether we will be ready and capable to respond.”

Skeptics who play down the Chinese threat by and large cite the same traditional calculus of naval power, implicitly assuming a head-to-head, fleet vs. fleet clash as well — but pointing to limitations in China’s ability to prevail in such a direct conflict: Many of its ships are old and less capable models, despite a modernization program that began in the 1990s; 54 of its 60 attacks submarines are diesel-electric models, with limited range and underwater speed; and even China’s much vaunted anti-ship ballistic missile now under development may be less of a threat than it has been made to be, its effectiveness hinging on extraordinarily demanding, advanced surveillance technology in order to target an American aircraft carrier.

But there’s a very different way of thinking about naval power that has implications quite different from what either the alarmists or skeptics propose as the proper response to China’s capabilities. Ironically, it is a lesson that goes back to the earliest days of our own navy, some two hundred years ago—when America was the vastly outnumbered underdog and stunned the mightiest sea power in the world by demonstrating that military victories have as much to with psychology, politics, and perception as they do with any quantitative measures of military might.

Today we’d call it “asymmetric warfare,” and while roadside bombs and suicide attacks are daily reminders in Iraq and Afghanistan of this threat to America’s superpower high-tech military on land, we have tended to forget that asymmetry can be a potent threat at sea as well. In fact, the very vastness of the oceans and the difficulty of locating an enemy threat even in this modern age of radar and satellites makes the dangers of asymmetric warfare all the greater in naval warfare.

In the War of 1812, America’s miniscule navy had fewer guns than Britain’s Royal Navy had ships. (“Our navy is so Lilliputian,” scoffed crusty old John Adams at the outbreak of the war, “that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”) Three early victories by American frigates in single ship actions, though of trivial strategic significance to a navy that ruled the waves with more than 700 warships to America’s 20, profoundly shook British complacency and offered a perfect illustration of the huge psychological impact that occurs when a seemingly outclassed foe gets in even one lucky blow. “I like these little events,” commented the American secretary of the navy William Jones after another single-ship victory, by an American sloop of war. “They . . . produce an effect infinitely beyond their intrinsic importance.”

But it was William Jones’s shrewdly calculated strategy to avoid as much as possible such gallant warship-on-warship actions and instead hit Britain in the soft underbelly of its oceangoing commerce in a kind of seaborne guerilla warfare that would truly be the key to fighting the mighty Royal Navy to a standstill. As Jones noted with satisfaction, a single tiny American raider could tie up a hugely disproportionate enemy force vainly chasing across the ocean in futile pursuit: “Five British frigates cannot counteract the depredations of one sloop of war.”

It is deliciously satisfying even two hundred years later to read the increasingly irate chastisements from the British Admiralty to its North American commanding admiral, and his obsequious apologies and excuses, after the American frigate President led no fewer than 25 British warships on a wild goose chase across the entire Atlantic Ocean before slipping past the British blockade off Rhode Island and making it safely back home (and not before snapping up the British admiral’s personal schooner as a prize on the way in).

The impunity with which American warships and privateers continued to evade the British blockade of the American coast in itself shook British opinion, given complacent British public confidence in the Royal Navy’s preeminence; the raids by American ships against British merchant vessels carried out right up to the mouth of the English Channel in the summer of 1814 convinced British merchants that the time had come to end the war as quickly as possible.

Are there lessons for us in this experience from our own past, in an age when the U.S. Navy now fills the superpower role the Royal Navy held in the nineteenth century? One is the irreducible vulnerability even in this modern age of sea lines of communication. More than $5 trillion worth of commerce passes through the South China Sea a year, $1.3 trillion of that American. As the British learned in 1812, there aren’t enough warships in the world to protect sprawling ocean trade against the depredations of an even moderately determined enemy. It is a vulnerability that no amount of conventional naval force can ever adequately protect against.

A more important point, however, is that perceptions matter hugely in war, and in a putative clash with China’s navy even the loss of a single American capital ship could have a stunningly disproportionate blow on American prestige and expectations.

All of which argues for thinking more about meeting asymmetry with asymmetry than with conventional naval power. Representative McKeon among others has been pressing for increased purchases of the F-35 strike aircraft and the naval lobby as always wants more ships. But American naval preparedness in the Pacific needs to take into account not just the direct balance of force but the kind of asymmetric threats America herself once excelled at.

Any simple quantitative accounting of the War of 1812 would easily have concluded that Britain had won the naval conflict, capturing far more American warships and merchant vessels than her enemy did of hers. Yet British naval officers realized that there was more to war than mere numbers. As one commented of America at the war’s end, “Soon will the rising greatness of this distant empire . . . astonish the nations who have looked on with wonder, and seen the mightiest efforts of Britain, at the era of her greatest power, so easily parried, so completely foiled.”

In countering the rising greatness of Chinese naval power, a strategy that relies more on American technological superiority in surveillance, information, and very-long range missiles and unmanned aircraft — and less on sending traditional naval assets like aircraft carriers and their short-range strike aircraft sailing directly into harm’s way — could effectively constrain Chinese naval forces’ freedom of action while at the same time while denying them the crucial opportunity to get in a psychologically potent blow against American prestige. But perhaps we have so long played the part of the lumbering Goliath that we have forgotten how we once astonished the world as the nimble David.

Stephen Budiansky is the author of Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815.

And don't forget to float a navy

2011-01-27T08:48:00.000-05:00

Approximately two nanoseconds after arriving in Washington on their mission to save the country from corruption, socialism, taxes, spending, and unconstitutional runaway government that is threatening to destroy America and liberty as we know it, Tea Party-backed congressmen are beginning to sound like, well congressmen.

At a hearing yesterday, the new tea partyniks on the House Armed Services Committee boldly insisted that the Pentagon budget is not immune from the cuts needed to rein in "runaway spending."

Except, that is, for those parts of the Pentagon budget which involve spending in their own districts: By a remarkable coincidence, congressman after congressman explained that to cut programs or bases in their own districts would place at risk our men and women in uniform and fatally weaken our national defense.

After all, as Scott Rigell, a Tea Party-backed freshman congressman from Virginia (whose district includes the Norfolk naval base) explained, "as a first priority, it is our constitutional duty to stand an army."

Time for another reading-aloud of the Constitution, I guess!

MdHS event postponed

2011-01-27T08:18:00.001-05:00

My lecture and book signing scheduled for this evening at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore has been canceled due to the snow and will be rescheduled for February 10.

Perilous Fight in Baltimore (where else?)

2011-01-26T08:15:00.000-05:00

Neither snow, nor rain, nor cold, nor dark of night shall keep an author from flogging his new book, so please join me in Baltimore Thursday evening at the Maryland Historical Society for a lecture/booksigning for Perilous Fight.

Here's a teaser of my talk:

Many historians over the years have tended to dismiss the War of 1812 as an inconsequential, avoidable and unnecessary conflict, the misstep of a hesitant and weak president that accomplished nothing.

The first professional historians who came on the scene in the late 19th century, beginning with the likes of Henry Adams, planted the even more disparaging idea that the war could not have really been about what Americans said it was about; it could not really have been a fight for American rights, much less a “second war of independence” from Britain, as James Madison's partisans claimed.

In fairness, Henry Adams and his fellow historians were in part reacting to the fact that American history up until then had been remarkably uncritical and unprofessional, full of flag-waving heroism and little objective reflection — but they and their followers since I think almost went to the other extreme, almost cynically dismissing the stated reasons statesmen gave for their actions as obviously nonsense and making it their job to discover and uncover the real motivations and explanations. And so they concluded that the War of 1812 was really all about crass party politics; or it was really all about crass territorial lust for British Canada and Spanish Florida; or it was really about wiping out the Indians on the western frontier.

And for that matter I’m not sure Madison has yet recovered from Henry Adams’s treatment of him. Adams’s books on the Madison administration were and I should say are brilliant, often wickedly funny, based on a real scrutiny of primary sources – so unlike his unprofessional predecessors — but also, when it gets right down to it, a hatchet job of the first order.

But recently I’d hazard to say, the stock of the War of 1812 has been rising a bit, and I very much hope my book will help that process along in its own small way. As the historian Gordon Wood recently observed, even though historians have long been baffled by this war, Americans at the time understood perfectly well what Madison had accomplished, and celebrated it, and rightly so.

As John Taylor of Virginia, the philosopher of Jeffersonian Republicanism put it, this war was almost a metaphysical war; a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport, but for honor – like that of the Greeks against Troy. And I agree with that – it was a remarkable war in that way, in that it was fought over very basic principles of national honor. That doesn’t mean it was fought over airy vanity. National honor, as Madison realized, was something no country could survive without, either at home or abroad. Showing the world that we were prepared to fight for our rights had effects that went far beyond the de jure terms of the treaty that ended the war. For the fact was that Britain never again after the war attempted to press a single American seaman; none of the European powers ever again attempted to seriously interfere with neutral American trade.

Before the war even many sympathetic Britons thought America’s democratic experiment was doomed to failure; democracy, they thought, was a fatal weakness that made both the government of America and its people and society unable ever to achieve the grandeur and greatness of an aristocratic society like Great Britain. But after the war those attitudes had profoundly changed. “The Americans,” said Augustus Foster, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, “have taught us to speak of them with respect.” Those were words with huge meaning, especially in the early 19th century when notions of respect and honor, as intangible as they may seem to us today, had very tangible consequences.

Zero-sum economies

2011-01-24T08:38:00.000-05:00

The dirty not-so-little secret of the Republican party is that for all of its Reaganesque rhetoric about optimism, confidence, and faith in the future, it has always been the party of crabbed protectionism and dour retrenchment; when it gets right down to it it has always sought to nervously preserve the vested economic interests of the moment rather than believing in the prosperity-creating promise of growth and innovation for the future.
For years it was the party of the tariff to protect American manufacturers; now it is the party that seems to believe that only by restricting immigration, cutting wages, and liquidating everything from health-care benefits to entire state governments (yes, the Party of Fiscal Responsibility is trying to get a bandwagon going to allow states to declare bankruptcy in order to shed such trivialities as pensions for retired police and firefighters) can America remain "competitive."

Implicit in all of this is the crabbed view that the economy is a fixed lump to be scrabbled over in a Darwinian fight for survival: thus government spending siphons money away from private investment; thus immigrants take jobs away from those already here; thus trade with countries like China and Mexico cannibalizes American business.

The prescription we are now hearing more about from the intellectuals of the GOP is that we need to address America's "uncompetitive labor market" (as Professor Newt Gingrich recently opined) — a fancy way of saying to cut wages.

The problem with all of this is that economies are not a zero-sum game. That is something Americans above all used to know:

• We welcomed immigrants precisely because more people generate more demand for goods and services; rather than stealing jobs they create more jobs as well as more ideas and more innovation and more energy and more get up-and-go that makes the entire economy expand.

• We (finally) learned to welcome free trade precisely because everyone gets richer when they exchange goods, as my friend Matt Ridley has brilliantly points out in his book The Rational Optimist: the poorest countries in the world are those which have no means of buying from the rest of the world — and, not coincidentally, also have nothing to sell the rest of the world. (And as Paul Krugman points out today, the idea that we can solve our economic problems by boosting exports and cutting imports runs into the rather obvious problem that "we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to.")

• We welcomed government investment in canals, railroads, highways, ports, communications, electrification, education, and scientific research because rather than stealing a piece of the pie they made the pie bigger for all. And as the New Deal (I thought finally) showed, in times of economic downturn, we welcomed government spending to create demand — and jobs — that the paralyzed private sector was temporarily unable or unwilling to.

• And we welcomed high wages for workers because again, rather than sourly viewing this as a "cost," far-sighted industrialists recognized that a well-off middle class created broad demand for goods and services that kept the whole economy growing. (When Henry Ford doubled the wages of factory workers in 1914, he told reporters, “The commonest laborer who sweeps the floor shall receive his $5 per day. We believe in making 20,000 men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment millionaires.” When was the last time we heard that happening, or even heard someone talking that way?)

It's worth remembering that even in the face of all the global "competition" we hear about, America still produces more — generates more wealth — per worker than nearly every other country in the world, even in manufacturing: output per American manufacturing worker (according an analysis by the Conference Board), is about 5 times that of China. We didn't achieve such extraordinary high levels of productivity in the first place by stiffing workers, barring the doors, letting our infrastructure crumble, cutting scientific research, or declaring bankruptcy.

That mantra "job-killing" we're hearing from the GOP is the logic of retrenchment, austerity, liquidation, pessimism, protectionism, and zero-sum economics. It would be enough to wipe the smile off even Ronald Reagan's face.

Why military history is good for you

2011-01-18T09:54:00.006-05:00

Inspired by the well-known list of the world's shortest books (Italian War Heroes; Who's Who in Poland; A Treasury of Scandinavian Humor; etc.) I once proposed to write a book entitled Great Jewish Foxhunters. This was back in my foxhunting days, when I bet I was the only person in the hunt field ever to formulate a phrase in his mind along the lines of, "The hounds are farblunget again."

I mention this example of mutually exclusive categories as I have had the feeling, especially of late, that the overlap of readers of this blog with readers of military history may be equally vanishing. But it needn't be
(and I don't say that merely because today is the official publication date of my new book Perilous Fight, about the naval War of 1812).

For one thing, war is important whether you like it or not. Not just whether wars are fought, but how they are fought at the operational and political level has had enormous consequences for the world. As Clemenceau said (which we all, of course, recall from our repeated viewings of Dr. Strangelove): "War is too important to be left to the generals."

But war is also the subject of many of the best things ever written. The reasons for this I think are simple, though not often expressed.

One is that war is one of the few things in life in which reality conforms naturally to the drama of literary form: war is exciting whether you like it or not. Paul Fussell remarked that if his book on World War I had a subtitle, it would have been "An Inquiry into the Curious Literariness of Real Life."

The other reason is akin to the point Calvin Trillin made about his series on small-town murders in The New Yorker many years ago. A grim choice of topic, he readily acknowledged; but what drew him to it, he explained, was not an interest in the gruesome per se but rather the fact that when such an unusual and dramatic event occurs, it lays bare the real connections and nuances of a community that are hidden in normal times; it focuses attention and recollection and offers a window on human nature that is normally firmly shut, and well guarded.

"Ten best" lists and their kin are the curse of the Web, and not having read every work of military history I don't feel remotely qualified to say which are "the best." But here is a list of some of the classics that to me exemplify military history as literature. They are a mix of memoir, fiction, narrative, and analysis that I think offer a persuasive introduction to the genre for someone new to it.

In no particular order:

Winston S. Churchill. The Second World War.
Yes, I know all the criticisms of this six-volume history–memoir. It is self-serving, it is selective, it is heavily ghost-written, it might be Exhibit A of the bromide that "history is written by the winners." It is also brilliant, fascinating, and extraordinary. You can get the correctives elsewhere.

Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of Fox-Hunting Man; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Sherston's Progress.
Sassoon's thinly fictionalized memoir of the First World War captures the terrible fascination of war for the generation whose ideals of courage ran headlong into the brutal realities of modern technological slaughter on the battlefield. The writing is beautiful and elegiacal, but it is Sassoon's wry and unsparing examination of his own naivete — both in his maniacal courage in the trenches and in his subsequent Quixotic protest against the war — that elevates it to the sublime.

Michael B. Oren. Six Days of War.
James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom.
Two near-perfect examples of big-picture military history, one about the 1967 Israeli–Arab war, the other the American Civil War, that interweave events on the battlefield with their political, strategic, and social contexts.

Bruce Catton. A Stillness at Appomattox.
Catton showed what a journalist's sensibility to detail, image, personality, and story can bring to serious history. Academics still routinely sniff that such "popular" narrative histories lack "analysis" and (a favorite line) offer "nothing that historians don't already know." Catton showed why they also sell.

Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
By far the most complete history of the Manhattan Project, this is also a profound exploration of the sprawling interconnections between war, science, and society in the modern world. (And it turns out that physics can be as exciting as war in the hands of a skilled storyteller.)

E. B. Sledge. With the Old Breed.
The memoirs of a quiet Marine in World War II; a brutal account of the terrible face of battle, all the more powerful for its matter-of-fact honesty — the "real war" that usually never gets into the books.

Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory.
The way literature, culture, and language shape the meaning of war, even as war creates its own new myths: the legacy of war, Fussell argues, reaches far and wide and often unconsciously, from the modern sense of irony to images of sunsets to reflexive bureaucratic euphemisms.

Perilous Fight hits the tabloids

2011-01-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

It must say something about these troubled times in which we live that the New York Post devotes almost as much space to its Sunday book coverage as does the Washington Post. (The latter might want to consider renaming its "Book World" section "Book Refuge," now that it's down to 3 pages.) In any case, I feel I've really made it now that the former ran a piece from me yesterday about my new War of 1812 book, describing the life of the typical sailor of that era.
It's a bit on the yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum side, but as it marks my debut in the tabloids, I will defend it to the death.

Mindless technology

2011-01-14T09:27:00.001-05:00

In the aftermath of Sarah "It's All About Me" Palin's speech the other day, the psychiatric profession is probably wondering whether it was a bit hasty in electing recently to remove narcissistic personality disorder from its Diagnostic Statistical Manual, but I will leave that to wiser minds to contemplate. What I have been contemplating is the way that guns have become an exception to even the most simple propositions of cause and effect that apply to every other interaction between humans and technology.

About ten years ago, Bill Whitworth, who presided over The Atlantic as its kind and brilliant editor back then when it was still a grown-up magazine, remarked to me that two issues invariably caused readers to become unhinged: global warming and gun control.

He proposed to me that I write a piece that would try to cut through all of the passions on both sides of these two issues and simply ask, the way a scientist would, what we really know and what we do not know. "You could be deliberately flat-footed" about it, he said.

Apparently I was a bit too flat-footed because the piece never ran. But I found it a fascinating experience researching the piece nonetheless. I deliberately avoided talking to any advocacy groups and instead looked for the most basic data I could find. The evidence did indeed turn out to be more complicated than I had imagined on either issue. But one rather simple conclusion was quite inescapable: where guns are more readily available, more people are killed by guns. More people are killed by accident; more people are killed in the course of crimes; more people commit suicide successfully. For example:

* Assaults in which a firearm is used resulted in a fatal outcome 12 times more often than similar assaults with other weapons.

* Swiss Germans and German Germans have a non-firearm suicide rate that is nearly identical; but the Swiss (where all males up to age 42 are required to keep an army-issued machine gun in their home for their militia service) have a firearm-suicide rate four times higher.

* At that time some 1,200 Americans were killed each year in accidental shootings. The rate has dropped since then, but still accidental firearm fatalities by definition cannot occur without a firearm. (One subcategory of unintentional firearm fatalities worthy of special contemplation is that of "unintentional self-inflicted fatalities," almost always the result of the victim having aimed a loaded weapon at his own head in jest. This, however, may be more relevant to students of natural selection than to criminologists.)

Why this should even be a surprise of course is an interesting question. No rational person would deny that human volition and responsibility play a significant part in the fatal outcomes of any human-technology interaction, whether it is taking heroin or driving a car recklessly or pointing a nail gun at one's head. But likewise no rational person would deny that technology plays a part as well. We require prescriptions for drugs with potentially harmful side-effects; we make it a crime to buy and use heroin; we certainly require many inanimate but nonetheless potentially hazardous items to be kept from children. We have made a reasonable social decision, I think, that the benefits of the automobile outweigh its harm; yet that has not prevented us from honestly acknowledging its harm and the perfectly plain fact that how roads and cars are designed and regulated have an enormous impact on death and injury, completely apart from human volition. (Per capita auto-related fatalities are today half what they were in 1950; deaths per vehicle-mile have dropped sixfold, almost entirely through technological modifications.)

Yet only when it comes to guns do people attempt, usually furiously, to deny that anything but individual responsibility matters, as I mentioned the other day. If we are ever to have a real discussion on this topic, we need to begin with the simple admission that guns — like drugs, medicines, cars, power tools, ski helmets, and every other piece of technology in the universe — can be built and employed in ways that are inherently safer or ways that are less safe.

I would not deny that one can construct a plausible argument for benefits of even widespread gun ownership. But that there may be benefits does not mean that the costs magically vanish, nor that the same practical-mindedness that has brought us speed limits, guard rails, and steering wheels that do not plunge through the driver's chest somehow must cease to operate in the case of the single technology of firearms, a technology whose fundamental technological purpose after all is the efficient infliction of fatal injury.

Not us (cont.)

2011-01-10T11:57:00.003-05:00

I see that most of the following points which have been rattling uneasily about my mind for the last twenty-four hours (since my earlier post on this subject) have already been made this morning by Paul Krugman in his exceptionally clear-eyed piece, but perhaps they are still worth saying if only to get them out of my system.

1. It borders on begging the question to attribute an act of anti-government political violence to "mental illness." As noted in an insightful piece in Slate yesterday, studies of violence and mental illness have found that schizophrenics and manic-depressives are scarcely more likely than anyone else to commit violent crimes. And for that matter, as this extremely penetrating and deeply disturbing article in The Atlantic a few years ago makes clear, psychiatric illnesses are always shaped, conditioned, and expressed through the social norms of the cultures in which they appear: historical and social norms act as "ecological niches" that powerfully validate and reinforce the expression of aberrant beliefs and thoughts. Nineteenth-century Europe saw psychiatric epidemics of "fugue states"; late twentieth century America had its "multiple-personality disorder." (This applies even to trivial disorders such as anxiety neurosis, which has likewise manifested itself in ways always reflecting cultural and historical context, from "neurasthenia" to "hypoglycemia" to the currently fashionable "chronic fatigue syndrome.")

2. It is a complete straw man to turn this issue into a question of "civility" in politics. Politicians have indeed always attacked, vilified, slandered, and demonized one another; and yes we can survive politicians being rude to one another; that is simply not the issue. The issue is crossing the line into delegitimization of the democratic process itself, of winking at or even glorying in reckless talk of violent extra-legal action, of excusing and even condoning or justifying actual threats and violence against government officials (as understandable "anger"), of palliating despicable acts by charging off the blame onto the victims, of legitimizing the idea that extra-legal resistance to government authority has become justifiable on the grounds that government is itself illegitimate, in the hands of illegal usurpers, and that the outcome of democratic elections therefore need not be respected.

3. You have to go back to the 1960s to find any even remotely comparable legitimization of anti-government violence on the left as we have today from Republican elected officials and party candidates, not to mention the chorus of right-wing talk-radio demagogues. It is simply nonsense to assert, as many right-wing commentators and Republican politicians have in the last 48 hours, that "there are extremists on both sides," and to speak as if political violence is a random natural phenomenon, a meteorite falling from the blue sky. I defy you to point to a single Democratic member of Congress or comparable official or candidate who has used the kind of rhetoric we have been bombarded with for the last two years from the right — Sharron Angle explicitly suggesting that if conservatives did not prevail at the polls they would be justified in "Second Amendment solutions" to "protect themselves against a tyrannical government"; Michele Bachman telling her supporters she wants them to be "armed and dangerous" on the issue of a federal energy tax and describing Washington as a city "behind enemy lines"; the barrage of conspiracy theories about the President's supposed foreign birth and his being the agent of a socialist plot to destroy America; the waves of talk-radio-driven death threats against judges and Democratic congressmen over immigration, health care, taxes, abortion, and other reliably demagogic issues of the right.

4. For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle.

5. Political leaders have a special obligation — which no one else can fill — to counter extremism in their own camps, for the simple reason that that is what is called leadership. It is not encouraging that the first recourse of those most culpable in whipping up and profiting from the culture of violent anti-government talk has been to go on the offensive once again. But I suppose it is unsurprising that those who bluster the most about morality and personal responsibility believe that such notions apply to everyone but themselves. I see one bloviator of this camp, furious at the merest suggestion that the right's halo has even lost a hint of its luster in all of this, says we need to speak more about "evil" as an explanation. Evil to me is precisely that kind of grotesque moral abdication.

With belated sanctimony

2011-01-09T13:47:00.003-05:00

With belated sanctimony, the opportunists who gleefully exploited the violent imagery of armed patriots rising up against a tyrannical government, thereby seeking to appeal to the childish vanity of political nitwits, now offer their "prayers" and platitudes about a "senseless" act of actual violence.

Now Speaker John Boehner says "an attack on one . . . is an attack on all"; but last spring he was playing the game with the best of them, terming the Obama health care reform "Armageddon" and taunting one Democrat who supported it that he was "a dead man," suggesting the congressman would not dare show his face back in his home district.

When a man flew a light plane into an IRS center in Texas last February, killing a dedicated federal employee and military veteran, Republican Steve King of Iowa declared that he felt "empathy" for the kamikaze taxpayer. (King explained that he, too was "frustrated" by the IRS, and suggested that these things would not happen if we adopted a national sales tax to replace the income tax and the IRS. The following month, the congressman was whipping up the crowd at a tea party rally shouting, “Let’s beat the other side to a pulp! Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”)

When the offices of ten Democratic congressmen — including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's — were vandalized and shot up last spring, Eric Cantor, now the No. 2 Republican leader in the House, saved all his outrage for the victims of the attacks. The Democrats, he fumed, were merely trying to gain political advantage by revealing that they had been the targets of violence.

Sarah Palin, whose infantile play-acting of pistol-packin' mama had included a map on her website with little cross-hairs "targeting" the congressional districts of Giffords and other Democrats singled out for elimination, offered her usual crocodile-tear prayers as well. I generally have a lot of tolerance for the faith of others even though I don't comprehend it, but I must say if I were the families of any of the victims I would tell Sarah Palin where to shove her prayers. All I could think of was the last words of the American Indian chief who was offered a final chance to convert to Christianity and thus be spared burning at the stake by his Spanish tormentors; he declined, saying he was afraid if he did so he might go to heaven, and meet only Christians there.

A few of these moral midgets have stuck to their guns even now. The founder of the Tea Party Nation organization mumbled the standard platitudes about "senseless violence" but then quickly made it clear that the real danger as far as he was concerned was that "the hard left" would try to use the attempted assassination of a Democratic congresswoman and the slaughter of a distinguished Federal judge appointed by a Republican president, a 9-year-old girl, a 30-year-old staffer, and three elderly retirees, "for political gain" — just as he claimed "the left" did after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by a right-wing anti-government conspiracy theorist.

(I see Palin has now also taken about two nanosecond to revert to type, with a top aide indignantly telling a right-wing talk-radio host that it is "obscene" to use the "tragedy" in Tucson to score political points — meaning against Palin. Her host offered the view that this is what you would of course expect from "depraved liberals." I may be wrong about this, but doesn't the Christian religion include somewhere the idea of repentance for one's transgressions?)

To his credit, John McCain, whose moral sense has often seemed to go AWOL in recent years, offered the strongest and clearest grasp of the moral realities. He avoided that weasely word "senseless"; he eschewed any hint of the smarmy have-it-both-ways "while of course I . . ." utterances of the Boehners and Cantors and Palins of this world who up until now have always found ways to pour gasoline on the flames even while sanctimoniously expressing their disapproval of arson. (Boehner last spring tut-tutted about shooting up the windows of congressmen's offices, helpfully suggesting that such "anger" be productively redirected into helping elect Republicans).

McCain by contrast said simply and immediately, “Whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country, and the human race.”

It is an old question in American politics why we have so many violent nuts in our history. But what is remarkable is that for a nation that went through a revolutionary founding, a brutal Civil War, and periods of enormous social upheaval, we have had remarkably little political violence of the kind that has sent other nations spinning into fascism, communism, dictatorship, ethnic slaughter, and hell. American leaders have for the most part understood how fragile democracy is, how vital it is to uphold the system even while denouncing its temporary incumbents, how precarious is the trust that a civilized society depends upon.

But a few times in our history, notably during the violent white supremacist opposition to Reconstruction and to equal rights for African Americans, violence overtook democracy with remarkable ease. Then too the victims were blamed; then too it was those who protested the outrages who were accused of exploiting their very victimhood for "political gain"; then too leaders winked and shrugged and excused and smirked as they rode the wave of violence that first subverted and then supplanted the political process.

The unstable young man who opened fire yesterday, it is already clear, was more of a nut than a political agent. But to those who would suggest that political violence is just some random occurrence, a meteorite falling from the sky and claiming its victims by chance, I would suggest they look to the way that delegitimization of democratic institutions, inflammatory and demagogic appeals to what our founders called "passion" over reason, and glorification of brutality have ever been the handmaidens of the descent to hell of once-civilized societies.

What we have seen in the last few years is not the usual political theater of opposing candidates who put on histrionic performances at election time and then are great pals off-stage; what we have seen is an ugliness and a willingness to play with fire that is something different — a willingness on the part of too many on the Republican side to pull down the temple itself if they calculate they might be able to salvage more of the ensuing rubble than the other guys. The Arizona sheriff in whose jurisdiction the shootings took place noted the unprecedented rise in death threats against all public officials that has taken place lately. The Secret Service does not talk about threats against the President but credible reports make clear that President Obama faces threats on a scale unlike anything ever before encountered.

Never mind even the childish braggadocio about "second amendment solutions" and "lock and load"; the daily inflammatory rhetoric about "tyranny" and "the end of freedom as we know it" and even the name "tea party" itself, invoking revolutionary resistance to despotism, have accelerated an unprecedented delegitimization of the democratic process itself, a suggestion that those who advance opposing viewpoints are not just political opponents but usurpers.

It is not enough for Eric Cantor and his ilk to express consternation that the tiger they tried to ride has got away from them, and what a bad tiger it is. They're the ones who need to put the tiger back in its cage, and in a hurry.

Why 1812

2011-01-08T09:38:00.000-05:00

Authors for some reason frequently find themselves accosted by the merest acquaintances demanding that they justify their existence, or at the very least explain why they chose to write about the things they do.

I'm always tempted to answer, "because I need to pay the light bill," but remembering how Anthony Trollope ruined his reputation for years after his death by such candid admissions about the practicalities of writing for a living, I will attempt to be more high-minded.

Here's my brief essay on why a new book about the War of 1812 is not only exciting, swashbuckling, stirring, thrilling, and altogether unputdownable — but Important.

Although the official start of the Civil War sesquicentennial is still months away, the preparatory hoopla is already deafening: State tourism councils from Connecticut to Alabama actually began years ago hiring “Civil War event coordinators,” printing glitzy brochures, and developing “comprehensive strategic marketing plans” to assist in the separation of visitors from their dollars in the coming flood of anniversary celebrations. Major newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post have been at it for months with blogs, features, and even regular “live” tweets recounting what was happening 150 years previous at each moment. I have a vision of a veritable legion of Civil War reenactors already taking to their beds each night clad in their authentic Civil War flannel long johns, authentic Civil War muskets at the ready, in barely contained anticipation of the non-stop excitement of the next four years.

By contrast, the upcoming bicentennial of the War of 1812 has barely penetrated the public consciousness. To give you the full sense of just how little it has penetrated, I was half way through writing my book about that war before it even occurred to me that there was a notable anniversary coming.

Many wars have been called “the forgotten war.” The War of 1812 is more like the obliterated war. Or, the war chiefly remembered as the setup for one of Groucho Marx’s “Who was buried in Grant’s tomb?” joke questions. Or, to the slightly more erudite, the war best known for its major battle having been fought after it was over.

The war didn’t even have a name for decades afterwards. It was just “the late war,” until a later war—the Mexican War of 1846—usurped that title.

But the real historical coup de grace was administered by Henry Adams in his brilliant, often amusing, and mostly disdainful account of James Madison’s administration, published at the turn of the 20^th century. Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, was one of the first true professional historians in America, perhaps the very first to depart from the credulous, flag-waving hagiography that had characterized American history writing up until then.

Adams drew on primary sources—letters, congressional debates, newspaper accounts—to paint a devastating picture of a feckless president, a Congress filled with rubes and demagogues, and a futile war filled with miscalculations on both sides that sputtered on for three years, left the young republic bankrupt, and terminated in a peace treaty that was a complete return to the status quo ante. (The Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, did not even mention, much less resolve, the two great issues America had ostensibly declared war with Britain over: the rights of neutral maritime trade and the British practice of forcibly impressing American seamen into their naval service).

Nearly every historian since has followed Adams’s lead, portraying the War of 1812 as a pointless and utterly avoidable conflict that settled nothing, dismissing the popular catchphrase of the time—“a second war for independence”—as rhetorical desperation by Madison’s party out to salvage something from the fiasco, and divining the real motive beneath it all as crass partisan politics, crasser territorial lust for British Canada and Spanish Florida, or the genocidal enmity of American frontiersmen toward the Indians, Britain’s ally.

But lately, I would venture to say, the War of 1812’s stock has been rising a bit. The historian Gordon S. Wood observes in his recent book Empire of Liberty that while “historians have had difficulty appreciating Madison’s achievement, many contemporaries certainly realized what he had done.”

Simply standing up to the mightiest naval power in the world, one that outnumbered America in men, guns, and ships 100 to 1, had been a stunning display of national fortitude. Much like the United States in Vietnam a century and a half later, Britain found herself baffled and chastened trying to respond to a far weaker adversary who had mastered the art of what we would today call “asymmetric warfare.”

America’s miniscule navy had fewer guns than Britain’s Royal Navy had ships. (“Our navy is so Lilliputian,” scoffed crusty old John Adams at the outbreak of the war, “that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”) Three early victories by American frigates in single ship actions, though of trivial strategic significance, profoundly shook British complacency and offered a perfect illustration of the huge psychological impact that occurs when a seemingly outclassed foe gets in even one lucky blow. “I like these little events,” commented the American secretary of the navy William Jones after another single-ship victory, by an American sloop of war. “They . . . produce an effect infinitely beyond their intrinsic importance.”

But it was Jones’s shrewdly calculated strategy to avoid as much as possible such gallant warship-on-warship actions, and instead hit Britain in the soft underbelly of its oceangoing commerce in a kind of seaborne guerilla warfare, that would truly be the key to fighting the mighty Royal Navy to a standstill.

As Jones noted with satisfaction, a single tiny American raider could tie up a hugely disproportionate enemy force vainly chasing across the ocean in futile pursuit: “Five British frigates cannot counteract the depredations of one sloop of war.”

It is deliciously satisfying even two hundred years later to read the increasingly irate chastisements from the British Admiralty to its North American commanding admiral, and his obsequious apologies and excuses, after the American frigate President led no fewer than 25 British warships on a wild goose chase across the entire Atlantic Ocean for months before slipping past the British blockade off Rhode Island and making it safely back home (and not before snapping up the British admiral’s personal schooner as a prize on the way in).

And it was pressure from Britain’s panic-stricken merchants to stop this depredation of their trade—American warships and privateers by the summer of 1814 were operating right in British home waters, taking and burning prizes—that finally brought Britain to the bargaining table in earnest.

William Jones is a man still far too little known or remembered today. But if anyone is a hero in my story, it's Jones, a strikingly "modern" figure in many ways.

Whatever the actual written terms spelled out in the Treaty of Ghent, something was changed forever by the war. The European powers recognized that America was now a nation to be reckoned with, and Britain never again interfered with American trade or attempted to press American sailors. During the war, Augustus Foster, Britain’s former minister to Washington, had arrogantly sniffed that Americans “were not a people we should be proud to acknowledge as our relations.” But afterward, he summed up the consequences of the war in one simple phrase: “The Americans . . . have brought us to speak of them with respect.”

At home, that same sense of new respect was palpable, too, as the war forged a sense of national identity and purpose that had been notably lacking before. As Madison’s Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin observed, the people “are more American; they feel and act more as a nation.”

But it was Virginia’s John Taylor who perhaps best explained both why the War of 1812 is worth remembering and why it has so baffled historians ever since. It was, Taylor said, a “metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport, but rather a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy.” Even 200 years later that’s indeed something worth remembering, and honoring.

Stephen Budiansky's new book is Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

And speaking of bullshit . . .

2011-01-06T08:35:00.002-05:00

In a further sign of the downfall of civilization as we know it, the New York Times reports today that a leading scholarly journal in psychology is preparing to publish a paper purporting to find evidence of ESP.
The conclusive experiment was that 53% of the time, undergraduates were able to correctly anticipate behind which of two randomly chosen, concealed boxes on a computer screen a dirty picture would appear. (Non-dirty pictures yielded a showing no better than chance.)

What I want to know is why ESP phenomena always manifest themselves in ways that occur only ever so slightly greater than chance. Surely any perceptual ability worth its name would be a lot better than that. (I'd even settle for 75%, though 100% doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for.)

If ESP exists, it sure is lousy.

The other characteristic of ESP is that it always seems to be of remarkably useless practical consequence. When I was researching my book about animal cognition (rapturously greeted by animal lovers everywhere and widely available in discerning second-hand bookstores), I read with increasingly dropping jaw the accounts of "animal communicators" who would speak telepathically with your pet (for a modest fee) and report its innermost thoughts. It always turned out that dogs and cats had, quite remarkably, thoroughly mastered (at least in their innermost thoughts) all of the shallowest rhetorical tropes and cliches of New Age self-help books ("She's in a constant state of stress and it's depressing her immune system," reported one communicator, of a house cat she telephathically interviewed).

Perilous Fight at the Maryland Historical Society

2011-01-05T08:31:00.000-05:00

I'll be giving a talk about my new book on the War of 1812 at sea, Perilous Fight, on Thursday, January 27, at 5:30 pm at the Maryland Historical Society. Please come along if you're in the greater Baltimore area that evening!

Chicken crap vs. bull shit

2011-01-04T10:54:00.000-05:00

What a difference a few weeks make! It seems like only yesterday that teary-eyed Speaker Apparent John Boehner was denouncing as "chicken crap" the Democrats' insistence on bringing to an actual vote their proposal to limit the extension of the Bush tax cuts to those earning less than $250,000 a year.
Boehner's reasoning was that, since the measure had merely been a campaign promise of the President of the United States and had the support of 55% of the House and 53% of the Senate, it was only a symbolic political publicity stunt since we all know that it is a sacred fundamental tenet of American democracy, or at least has been as long as the Democrats control the White House and Congress, that no bill may ever be adopted unless it commands the support of 60 senators so why bother trying.

With barely a face-saving pause for a breath, the GOP leadership then began excitedly discussing its plans in the coming Congress to hold repeated votes to repeal health care reform, explaining that while it was true that such a proposal has no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate much less being signed by the President, it was not merely symbolic because its passage by the House would "put enormous pressure" on those other branches of the government to go along. They also pointed out that repealing health care was a campaign promise of many of the newly elected Republican congressmen.

The other completely non-symbolic bill with no chance of passing that the GOP is rushing to introduce early in the new session is an amendment to correct the otherwise perfect Constitution by permitting any piece of legislation duly passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President to be repealed by a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, apparently operating on the theory that drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa makes a person Leonardo Da Vinci, alternates paeans to James Madison (“James Madison IS the U.S. Constitution, and he provides such a role model,” Cantor said) with gushing enthusiasm for this effort to undo everything Madison wanted.

As I have pointed out before, Madison in fact saw the power of the states as the greatest threat to sound representative government and sought to break down state loyalties, check the state legislatures' propensity for mischief, special-interest politics, and corruption, and curb their influence in the new national government in a number of ways.

Both symbolically and substantively, the Constitution established a direct relationship between the people and the new Federal government, rather than exerting sovereignty solely through the states as under the Articles of Confederation. It was no coincidence that the ratification procedure called for conventions of the people, rather than the state legislatures, to vote on adopting the new Constitution. The Constitution likewise gave the Federal government direct taxation power over individuals, apportioned representation in the House by population rather than equally among the states, made Federal legislation the supreme law of the land that all state courts must abide by even when it conflicts with state law, and enumerated in detail powers that would henceforth be forbidden to the states and reserved to the "general government."

Madison wanted even further restrictions on the states, insisting in particular that representation in the Senate be apportioned by population just as in the House. (This is usually treated by textbook histories as simply a big-state versus small-state issue — populous states such as Virginia would naturally favor a system that gave them more clout in the Federal government — but in fact, as Gordon Wood persuasively argues, Madison was much more concerned by the fact that equal representation of the states in the Senate would make that body a mere creature of the states.)

And far from approving of the idea of a state veto over Federal legislation, Madison wanted exactly the reverse — a Federal power to "revise" state laws. When the convention rejected that proposal, Madison was convinced that the lack of a Federal veto would prove so fatal a flaw in the system of government that the entire new Constitution would fail in practice.

One of the other great promises of the new GOP House leadership is that they will read aloud the Constitution at the opening of the session. Let's hope they read the whole thing for a change.

Shamelessly courting the fat vote

2011-01-03T06:26:00.002-05:00

In the new year a reveler's fancies naturally turn to thoughts of weight reduction, but the good news for 2011 is that dieting is all just a liberal plot.

Now, admittedly, simple petulance might explain the attacks on Michelle Obama's campaign for healthier diets that have been heard of late in certain quarters. Sarah Palin in her best smart-ass girl in the back of the class manner sarcastically announced that "Michelle Obama said we should not have dessert" as she (Palin) demonstrated her (Palin's) combined woodcraft and culinary skills by preparing s'mores on her "reality" TV show a few weeks ago.

Rush Limbaugh arguably did her one better earlier in the season, however, declaring that diet and exercise "are irrelevant"; a conclusion he derived by applying a rigorous logical chain of reasoning ("I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama's gonna be out there ripping into 'food desserts' and saying, 'This is why people are fat,' I know it's not true"). Limbaugh further backed his assertion by noting that "a nutrition professor" lost 27 pounds by eating Twinkies.

But trying to set the minds of gluttons at ease is arguably a matter also of shrewd politics and playing to one's constituency. Here is a plot I made of Republican voting versus obesity rates in the 50 states, demonstrating the undeniable correlation between these two variables (the solid blue line is the best-fit linear regression of the data):

But some are more equal than others

2010-12-20T11:20:00.002-05:00

I apparently need to get out more often, because it turns out that right under my own nose was proof that I spoke too soon the other day when I cautiously marveled that the conservative bloviation machine seemed to have tired this year of its annual fear-mongering story about "the war on Christmas."

None other than my very own Burgville, Virginia, is in fact Ground Zero in this year's sinister seasonal assault upon traditional values. This time, carrying on their true war against Christianity under the clever guise of "free speech" (I quote from a letter writer in our local newspaper, if you can still call that collection of legal notices and barely rewritten press releases a newspaper), the opponents of Christmas have infiltrated the local courthouse lawn where one of those extremely tasteful displays of the plastic Holy Family in colorful garb used to preside in unchallenged splendor each year, just in the shadow of the extremely tasteful monument of the Confederate soldier.

Earlier this year the local political authorities sensibly adopted a policy recommended by a citizens' advisory board that the courthouse lawn ought to be left alone, ostensibly to protect the shrubbery but presumably in truth because (a) the business of the courts being to dispense justice equally without fear or favor, religious displays promoting one or another belief were out of place there and (b) there is not exactly a shortage of private homes, church properties, businesses, which also possess lawns upon which people may erect whatever tasteful personal expressions of their religious faith they desire.

This led to a storm of outrage over the "attack on Christmas," and the authorities' promptly reversing their decision.

When the issue first came up several years ago, however, the court administration, which even in Burgville apparently can read the Constitution, realized that there was no way on earth to maintain a policy allowing one private group of citizens to erect a religious display on public property without providing an equal opportunity to any other group of private citizens, so they set up a first-come-first-served system by which any interested parties could claim various spots on the courthouse lawn for their tasteful seasonal displays come December with no restrictions on content other than they be a reasonable size.

Back in July, the atheists, fired with the true zeal of the non-believer, stole a march on everyone and grabbed up the prime spots. So along with the baby Jesus we have signs lauding the separation of church and state, denouncing religion as "myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," and one beseeching "the force" to be with our troops.

The result has been amusing to those who like to see the sputtering of those actually confronted with the simple rational implications of their previously unquestioned claims to superior privilege and infuriating to those who have not progressed beyond what developmental psychologists refer to as Stage 0 of moral development in children. (This is also known as the "egocentric judgment" stage, defined as seeing what is good as what they themselves like or is helpful to them.)

To give him his due, the conservative Christian member of our board of supervisors whom I featured the other day for his allegations of gay gropers in the TSA, defended the free-for-all on the courthouse lawn, telling the Washington Post, "I don't call it a circus. I call it a free-speech forum." But most of his fellow conservative Christians have been displaying their usual Stage 0 cluelessness, genuinely incomprehending why anyone would object to their customary tasteful display or why "negative" messages should be permitted alongside "positive" messages celebrating religion.

I don't really have much sympathy with in-your-face atheism, but I think this assertion of an equal right to a piece of the courthouse lawn is a great public service in reminding the comfortable members of the majority faith how it feels to be subjected to their own in-your-face triumphalism and commandeering of civic space — and I have the ever-so-slight hope that a few minds might be thus opened to the problems that inevitably arise when religion is injected into the public arena.

But the grandstanding by politicians over religion has always been to me a stronger reason to keep politics and religion each where they belong. There is nothing more reliably comical than the unctuous sanctimoniousness of a politician donning the mantle of piety. ''I just don't like what's going on in America today, all over the country, with the aversion some people seem to have toward Christ,'' declared that great theologian Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma the other day, who vowed that he would refuse to ride his horse in any December-seasonal parade that did not have the word "Christmas" as part of its official name.

As usual, the great H. L. Mencken knew how to respond to such two-bit political piety. The occasion was another one of his over-the-top jeremiads about Arkansas, a state he declared to be so bereft of intelligence that not even the efficient mercies of the Red Cross could prevent its inhabitants from starving to death from sheer stupidity. This led to the inevitable wails of wounded protest from the state's boosters. The state legislature duly passed a resolution censuring Mencken for his calumnies, thereby arguably confirming his judgment — and indeed when called by the AP for a comment Mencken observed, "My only defense is that I didn't make Arkansas the butt of ridicule. God did it."

This of course (as Mencken's biographer William Manchester relates) only "set the yokels to hollering louder," though this time one legislator hoped to strike a pose of Christian forbearance and asked the members of the body to stand for a few moments of prayer for the soul of H. L. Mencken, which was solemnly done.

Again reached by the AP for a comment, Mencken replied: "I felt a great uplift, shooting sensations in my nerves, and the sound of many things in my ears, and I knew the House of Representatives of Arkansas was praying for me again."

Have a joyous holiday of your choice, and since I know all of you only read this blog at work when you should be enriching your employer instead and that you'll be on your own time the next week or so and thus have better things to do, so will I.

See you back in the new year.

You can always beat an honest man

2010-12-17T07:21:00.000-05:00

In Walking the Tightrope of Reason, the philosopher Robert Fogelin relates that someone once drew a useful distinction between two kinds of skeptics: both accept the limitations of rationality and knowledge, the difference being that "East Coast skeptics" find this deeply troubling while "West Coast skeptics" find it liberating.

No one has ever accused me of being laid-back, but to my surprise I find myself definitely in the West Coast camp — or, at least, I find balm for my outrage and irritation at the world's ongoing idiocies and mendacities in the knowledge that it not only was ever thus, but is probably inescapably thus.

Although skeptics are not the same as cynics, there is certainly a similarity between the skeptic of the West Coast variety and the true cynic, of the Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken ilk, in that both generally are very happy people: they have none of the gloom of the moralist, they find the follies of their fellow man not a source of disappointment and despair but rather utterly predictable and thus merely a source of amused confirmation ("all part of life's rich pageantry," as Inspector Jacques Clouseau once remarked).

It is always comforting by the same token to find that exactly the things that so fill us with indignation in contemporary human affairs have been wryly remarked upon by much earlier generations and chalked up to inevitable laws of human nature. The other day I ran across this excellent explanation in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers for the maddening tendency of those in the wrong, who know they are in the wrong, not only to become aggressive and insistent but to prevail. (For some reason this made me think of Republicans and health care reform.) As Trollope explains, it's an unequal contest from the get-go:

“Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned. . . . A man in the right relies easily on his rectitude, and therefore goes about unarmed. His very strength is his weakness. A man in the wrong knows that he must look to his weapons; his very weakness is his strength. The one is never prepared for combat, the other is always ready. Therefore it is that in this world the man that is in the wrong almost invariably conquers the man that is in the right, and invariably despises him.”

Some of my best friends are Calvinists

2010-12-16T07:06:00.002-05:00

Whenever I write about the environment on this blog, I get a lot of interest from the global warming skeptics, and judging by my NORAD-command-post-type situation room map that shows where in the world my readers are at any moment, a lot of them live in places where you'd think people would positively be praying that the global warming scientists are right:
I mean, as much as I like Scandinavia and Scotland, even their admirers and fans have to admit they could do with a bit of warming, especially this time of year.

So perhaps it was one of those Scots readers who on behalf of the spiritual founder of the Scottish church took umbrage the other day at my use (in a post on global energy consumption and environmentalism) of the term "Calvinistic" to mean sternly moralizing and convinced of the sinfulness of man; he took me to task for this bit of "pseudo-history" and went on to explain that John Calvin not only gave us the Reformation but industrial efficiency, economic justice, the modern essay form, and I think one or two other things.

I think even I know better than to get into theological disputations, which cannot possibly be my strong point, and on this score I'll just point out that my dictionary includes in its definition of "Calvinism" (along with a belief in salvation through grace alone) the belief in the moral depravity of mankind, which was rather my point.

But I do know something about literary forms, and here I'm sure I'm on more solid ground in saying that Calvin cannot possibly be the guy to thank for the modern essay; surely Montaigne is more on the mark. What Calvin did bequeath in the way of literary form is the Scottish church sermon, a fifteen minute set-piece that has followed the same form since John Knox preached the first.

I know this because one of my favorite books of all time says so. I quote from native Scotsman R. B. Robertson's Of Sheep and Men, the finest bit of travel writing I've ever read, one of the funniest books I've ever read, and certainly the funniest book about sheep I've ever read.

The tour de force of the book is his account of the Billy Graham Crusade's appearance in Scotland, to which Robertson devotes a full chapter whose effect I can only compare to one of those Mark Twain stories whose full humor creeps up on you as it builds and builds to its convulsive climax.

"During the closed season for sin, which synchronizes pretty exactly with the lengthening evenings and the end of the winter run of salmon," Robertson begins, "religion becomes the principal pastime of our parish, as it has always been the principal national pastime of the Scots. So, when Evangelist Billy Graham picked our little country of Scotland for one of his biggest jamborees to date, he was not bringing an unknown commodity to our people."

Robertson notes at one point that "Graham, perhaps because he is at least partly of our race, followed the pattern" of the traditional Scots sermon pretty closely, which Robertson explains thusly:

The sermon is a sort of national institution in Scotland, and it is expected to fit a pattern which has been precisely defined since John Knox preached the first. It must consist of six parts: the Text; followed by a Firstly (explanation); a Secondly (theology); a Thirdly (illustration), and two Finally Brethrens, the first of which should give us a brief tantalizing glimpse of the Heaven we have undoubtedly forfeited because of our sins or because we are not of the Elect, and the second a much longer description of the Hell we are undoubtedly doomed to for all eternity.

Some of my best friends . . .

2010-12-15T12:09:00.002-05:00

Who says we won't have Nixon to kick around any more?

Nixon is indeed the gift that keeps on giving: From even beyond the grave that unmistakable voice periodically speaks with fresh fulminations about liberals, Jews, blacks, and (in the batch of new White House tapes released just the other day) even the Irish and Italians. (According to Nixon's deep sociological analysis, the Irish drink a lot.)

Nixon's creepy obsession with the Jews was clearly a mania that went well beyond his more general penchant for crude ethnic profiling ("I'm not prejudiced, I've just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits. The Jews have certain traits, the Irish have certain traits," Nixon told Charles Colson on February 13, 1973, then proceeded to demonstrate his complete freedom from prejudice by observing that "virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks, particularly the real Irish," that Italians "don't have their heads screwed on tight," and "the Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”)

Jack Shafer at Slate catalogs some of Nixon's earlier paranoid ravings about the Jews ("What about the rich Jews? … You see, IRS is full of Jews, Bob. … That's what I think. I think the reason they're after [the Rev. Billy] Graham is the rich Jews"; "The Jews are born spies. You notice how many of them are? They're just in it up to their necks. … Also, an arrogance, an arrogance that says—that's what makes a spy. He puts himself above the law"; "Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. … All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?")

Yes, an absolutely vintage sampling for all true Nixon connoisseurs.

All of this, though, has had me musing about (on the one hand) the once-widespread beliefs about ethnically unique human traits one encounters in the late 19th century in particular — traits usually deterministically ascribed to genetics, race, climate, or social "stages" of development — and (on the other) the almost complete failure of modern social history to offer in place of such racist-inflected pseudo-science any convincing explanation for the cultural differences one undeniably does encounter in different societies.

When I was researching my book on the War of 1812 (coming soon to a bookstore near you), one of the first books I read was Theodore Roosevelt's famous and still quite admirable account of the naval war, written when he was a very young man during the grand age of social Darwinism. It is startling, amidst Roosevelt's very straightforward and meticulously reconstructed accounts of battles at sea, to suddenly come across pages of racial-genealogy mumbo-jumbo earnestly establishing that "native" Americans were as racially pure as their English foes whom they encountered on the high seas ("The infusion of new blood into the English race on this side of the Atlantic has been chiefly from three sources — German, Irish, and Norse; and these three sources represent the same elemental parts of the composite English stock in about the same proportions in which they were originally combined, — mainly Teutonic, largely Celtic, and with a Scandinavian admixture. The descendant of the German becomes as much Anglo-American as the descendant of the Strathclyde Celt has already become an Anglo-Britain . . . ")

And on and on he goes, analyzing the relative intelligence, bravery, hardiness, and fighting spirit of such subspecies as the Celto-Turanian, the anglicized Welsh of Cornwall, the Dano-Irish, the Huguenots. (He starts lumping, however, when it comes to the Italians and Portuguese, whom he treats as one big happy family of not very good navy material: "They were treacherous, fond of the knife, less ready with their hands, and likely to lose either their wits or their courage when in a tight place.")

What we do know about cultural norms and behaviors, I think, is that they exist; they are not products of genes (as the social Darwinists thought) or temperature and rainfall (as Buffon claimed); that they are amenable to change with remarkable swiftness at times (witness the way dueling and flogging, both accepted and even lauded in the "civilized" worlds of 1812, and in their navies in particular, would just a generation later be seen as positively barbaric); and that historians and sociologists and anthropologists, for all of their blather about "discourse" and Foucault, really have gotten nowhere in offering a convincing mechanism of explanation for why societies differ and how and why they change.

One thing that does unmistakably come through from contemporary accounts, letters, and diaries from the War of 1812 is that Americans really were different from their European counterparts of the time in some basic traits of character and behavior, and that these differences went very deep — that is, they were indeed "cultural" and were the product of some fundamentally different conceptions of the individual and his lot in life, his self-worth, and his acceptance or rejection of fate.

One of my favorite examples of this was the many often quite humorous accounts by American prisoners of war of how they drove their captors to distraction with their refusal to accept their lot the way the British expected (and the way the French prisoners in the same prisons did). Just days after the crew of the American privateer Frolic arrived in Barbados, the British jailer of one of the Americans told him that his forty men were more trouble than the five hundred French prisoners he had: “A Frenchman settles down at once in a prison, into habits of quiet order, industry, mild gaiety, and respectful submission, . . . but your men have such a wild, reckless, daring, enterprising character that it would puzzle the devil to keep them in good order.” And the much-harassed commandant of Britain's notorious Dartmoor Prison, where 6,000 American seamen would be held by the war's end, made almost exactly the same numerical comparison: He had, he told an acquaintance, never “read or heard of such a set of Devil-daring, God-provoking fellows, as these same Yankees; I had rather have the charge of five thousand Frenchmen than five hundred of these sons of liberty." (He was kind enough to add: "And yet, I love the dogs better than I do the damn’d frog-eaters.")

A long excursion from Richard Nixon's anti-Jewish ravings to Captain Thomas G. Shortland's admittedly equally shallow comparisons of Yankees and frogs; yet I wonder still what it was about Americans of 1812 that made them different.

There's several new advance reviews of Perilous Fight posted at my author website (follow the "News and Reviews" link) as well as a large crop of early reader reviews now up on Amazon. All authors have profoundly mixed feelings about Amazon's practice of vox populi reviewing, but what I come away with, no matter what, is always a bit of encouragement that people are actually reading books!

Sins of emission

2010-12-13T10:23:00.001-05:00

Far be it from me to defend the capitalist system, but can't environmental organizations recognize that economic activity counts for something?

Invariably whenever the subject of carbon emissions, energy use, or other instances of mankind's global "footprint" arises, the standard environmentalist narrative is all about how big the average American's shoe size is.
Paul Ehrlich is one of many who has retailed the idea that it is the Western, affluent, consumptive, materialistic lifestyle that is to blame for the world's ills, just as much as "overpopulation," if not more so.

Ehrlich produced an agitprop slogan to flog this idea in the form of a pseudo-mathematical formula,

I = PAT

meaning "impact" equals population times affluence times technology.

But as I've written elsewhere, when you actually analyze (pdf with more detail) the effect of modern technology on things like growing food, you find that impact per person stays constant — or even declines — as individual affluence grows. The amount of land used to grow food in America, for example, has remained virtually unchanged in a hundred years despite a tripling of population and a large increase in the consumption of high-quality protein (meat, e.g.). In other industries, technological improvements likewise allow for greater production with less input of energy or other raw materials.

The Washington Post the other day ran a front-page story on carbon emissions featuring a large graph comparing the United States, China, and India; it showed both total emissions and emissions per capita over the last 50 years, and the most recent data (from 2007) looked like this:

The message, as usual, was that although China has surpassed the U.S. in total carbon emissions, the U.S. generates much more per person.

But what the Post, and environmental groups, never seem to look at is the impact per unit of economic production. The United States manufactures a lot of things the world needs and buys (food, airplanes, lumber, chemicals; in fact, the U.S. is still the largest manufacturer in the world, something most people don't seem to know) and it does so at vastly greater energy efficiencies than do less developed countries.

Here's the same data as above but adding a comparison of carbon emissions per dollar of GDP generated:

In fact, instead of I=PAT, it's more like I=PA/T: while population and affluence do increase consumption, technological gains counteract the impact of both. (And as affluence rises, it is also increasingly decoupled from material consumption altogether.)

Of course to concede that technology is often good for the environment runs against the Calvinistic, anti-materialistic strain of the environmental movement — a strain that goes back to John Muir and Henry Thoreau at least — and which tends to view the planet's ills as at heart a matter of personal guilt to be expiated through renunciation and penance. (A hilarious specimen of this was offered the other day by Prof. Kevin Anderson on Bishop Hill's blog, where he explained earnestly how little he washes himself or his clothing in order to save the planet.) You even used to hear a lot of derisive comments within the environmentalist movement about "technological fixes," as if that were somehow cheating (like buying indulgences).

Per capita comparisons are fine if you want to emphasize the idea that energy use is a personal sin and that industry and commerce either don't exist or are an evil in themselves, chargeable to our individual burden of sins by virtue of our citizenship in a country that is successful at these things. But a more sensible way of looking at it is that energy use is an unavoidable fact of existence — and so should be made in a way that produces the greatest buck for the bang.

Hey, didn't you guys lose?

2010-12-10T08:28:00.004-05:00

Back at the centennial of the Civil War, South Carolina, which one might think had a lot to answer for in the first place, got things off to a rousing start by holding the opening conference of the national centennial commission at a segregated hotel in Charleston, which meant the black member of New Jersey's delegation could not stay there. (After the intervention of the President of the United States, the meeting was moved to the nearby U.S. Navy base — which, as Federal property, was not subject to the state's segregation laws.)

It was a small symbolic point but it spoke to the larger fiasco of the entire centennial, which was imbued with the kind of mindless military pageantry, unstated but reactionary politics, and shallow antiquarianism masquerading as history that you can still see on display any weekend of the year where Civil War reenactors congregate.

This time around there is no national commission to honor the 150th anniversary of the war, which is probably just as well. Still, South Carolina is getting things off on its usual moonlight-and-magnolias foot with a hundred-bucks-a-head "Secession Ball" on December 20, sponsored by the Confederate Heritage Trust (mission: "to present the true history of the South").

This "event of a lifetime" promises dinner, dancing, open bar, and no shortage of bozos dressed in period attire, plus this special bonus:

The wonderful news is that the ORIGINAL Ordinance of Secession will be available for viewing by our guests. This is not a lithograph, but the ACTUAL document which has been protected for years in the vault and hasn’t been seen in years. Those sponsoring tables will be able to have a group photograph with all Sponsors made with the ORIGINAL ORDINANCE

I guess they won't be having their picture taken with the ORIGINAL Declaration of the Causes of Secession, which was adopted along with the ordinance and which enumerated the justifications for South Carolina's decision to secede:

• "the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery"

• "the increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery"

• "the action of the non-slaveholding States," which "assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions," "have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution," "have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery," and "have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States."

Yes, that's a "heritage" we can all celebrate, isn't it? Rejecting democracy, denouncing free speech, and upholding the sacred right, guaranteed by the Constitution itself, to keep other human beings as property.

Adult supervision required

2010-12-08T09:33:00.003-05:00

God knows one should not kick a man when he's down, and no one is downer these days than the old-fashioned print journalist.

Still, it is hard to read even the old-fashioned New York Times these days without cringing at stories filled with slipshod and overheated writing, tone-deaf colloquialisms, and patently obvious questions left begging for answers and contradictions left unexplained.

I'm not talking about lapses in the kind of persnicketty points of grammar and usage that everyone loves to play gotcha discovering, and then arguing over ad nuaseam, and which are generously featured in the Times's own weekly roundup of mea culpas in its "After Deadline" blog (typical specimen: "There are many ways to go astray in using 'like,' and we are unfortunately familiar with all of them. Herewith a few new examples of the two most common missteps: using 'like' as a conjunction, which is colloquial at best; and using it (as a preposition) to compare things that are not grammatically or logically parallel . . . ").

I'm talking about entire stories that leave one wondering if the editors went out for a smoke and never came back, or perhaps were simply cut as a cost-saving measure along with free coffee for the employees.

A case in point was today's feature story about a town in Nebraska that chose to build a very large sign with the town's name on it. Aside from the remarkably condescending tone of the entire article towards what was described in the lead as "a blink-and-miss-it place called Hooper" (further helpful explanations about this quaint part of the country: "You pronounce Hooper not with a HOO, but with a kind of HUH"; "You can get your hair cut at Don’s barber shop, where the Farm Journal — or is that Playboy? — is made available"), the writing was almost comically bad in a way that left me wondering if it had been originally conceived as an entry in the Bad Hemingway Contest: a multiplicity of single-word sentences ("They feared being missed. Bypassed." "Unnoticed. Unknown.") and even one single-word paragraph: ("Still."); metaphors right out of Introduction to Creative Writing class ("The Lions Club, which donated the neon marquee, no longer roars"); and this expressive use of capitalization: "They resolved to erect a sign beside the bypass to remind people of Hooper. Not just a sign, but a SIGN."

Okay, we GET it.

Purple prose is as old as newsprint, of course; one of my colleagues at U.S. News used to regale us with stories of his city editor at a small paper where he had once worked, who would rewrite every crime story to include the phrases "a fusillade of bullets" and "even grizzled detectives blanched when they saw the body." (The editor had briefly been at the Hearst paper in Chicago, which apparently explained this.)

And I'll never forget (as much as I try) the front-page series the Washington Post ran on Ted Kennedy in 1979 when I had just moved to D.C., one installment of which featured a lead which began (I'm relying on memory but it was either this or very close) "Chappaquiddick. The name thunders like the bass line of a Bach cantata." (Or yeah? Which one, buster?)

Still.

There's something of desperation in the overwritten prose that seems to be on the rise in the Times's feature writing these days (I wasn't aware until today's news analysis story on the history of liberal disillusionment with Democratic presidents, for example, that John F. Kennedy was a "hipster"). And don't even get me started on Sam Sifton's restaurant reviews ("It tastes of funky sophistication, illicit rides in late-night cabs . . .")

More worrying, though, there's something of distraction in the stories with leads buried two-thirds the way down floundering in convoluted explanations and crying out for one of those editors I used to know and love whose chief purpose was to help the reader but whose only slightly lesser purpose was to save writers from themselves. God knows they need it.

Know thyself

2010-12-06T16:33:00.000-05:00

If you don't have a mirror handy to hold up when the Republicans who are now forcing through their prized extension of the Bush tax cuts come looking for the cause of the unending deficits that so horrify them, here's a handy chart to hold up instead. (Courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; basic data from the Congressional Budget Office):

We're No. 1!

2010-12-06T11:19:00.003-05:00

Perhaps because they've been too busy peering under the cranberry sauce in search of socialists or unmasking the homos running airport security, our conservative defenders of traditional values have been commendably quiet this year about the "War on Christmas" that they usually trot out at this festive season.

I always thought that coming out in favor of Christmas was the ne plus ultra of that particular species of political schmuckiness which consists of casting demogogic pandering as lonely courage. But then came the spate of Republican politicians (may of them presidential hopefuls) who spent much of this year staking out the even more daring position that, in the inimitable words of the Iowa GOP state platform, "America is good."

Taking the prize in the Profiles in Phony Courage award in this crowded field is probably Mitt Romney, whose recently published paean to "American exceptionalism" is titled "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness." But many others have been hard at work, too, bravely telling the American voter how wonderful he is just for being himself. (And I thought these were the guys who were always making fun of "self-esteem" . . . )

I can think of many ways America is exceptional: institutions guided by the rule of law; a longstanding commitment (going back to the earliest days of the early republic) to seek a more just and humane international order; a willingness to confront our own imperfections and failings and correct them (slavery, most notably; the disfranchisement of African Americans and women); a tolerance for dissent that remains extraordinarily resilient.

Yet every one of these claims to genuine exceptionalism springs from exactly the opposite impulse from the self-satisfied jingoism that we're hearing ad nauseam from the brave souls standing up for American exceptionalism.

It is not exactly a radical notion that virtue begins with self-knowledge and the ability to question one's natural impulse to self-regard and self-interest. And the evil — evil is not too strong a word — that arises from the kind of simple self-admiration being loudly trumpeted on the right is in fact the very antithesis of American values.

For example: When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, there was a rush on the part of the Bush administration and its apologists to insist, with great circular reasoning, that what was done there was virtually by definition not bad, since we were the ones who did it ("see, we don't torture," in the words of the commander in chief who approved torture).

Contrast that with the Founders' recognition that people are people ("But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary," as James Madison wrote in Federalist 51); that what is popular is not always what is right, and that virtuous government is one that challenges and checks the natural impulses of man, that places principles above interests, and that holds accountable without favor those who do wrong.

I was recently speaking with a former Marine officer who (like a number of other military men I have spoken to on the subject) is still appalled by what took place at Abu Ghraib precisely because it was a blot on the honor of the nation; he understood what cheap politicos who bray about American exceptionalism do not — that honor is what you do, not just who you are.

Cage rattling for fun and profit

2010-12-03T11:54:00.002-05:00

Interest groups have long known, of course, that there's nothing like a terrifying tale to loosen the grip of donors on their wallets. The NRA routinely announces that the government is coming for your guns; Greenpeace that the whales, tigers, oceans, or planet are being annihilated.

Still, the NRA and Greenpeace actually do something with the money they raise. A few enterprising spirits came to realize, however, that terrifying people about public policy could be a complete business plan in itself; no need to actually spend time lobbying congressmen, preparing position papers, consulting with experts, building political coalitions, or any of the other tedious business of public policy.

We have an excellent example of this entrepreneurial spirit alive and well here in my very own Loudoun County, Virginia, in the form of one of our elected county supervisors, one Eugene Delgaudio, whose day job consists of running an outfit modestly named "The Public Advocate of the United States," whose cash-flow plan consists in its entirety of sending out heavy-breathing fundraising appeals warning of the advancing "homosexual agenda."

Exactly like the flim-flam scientific and medical charities I remember doing some investigative stories on years ago when I worked at Nature, "Public Advocate" spends almost all of its operating budget on fundraising operations (though, also like those bogus charities, it tries to define fundraising as "education," which reminds me of nothing so much as the Reagan Administration's brief attempt to define ketchup as a "vegetable" to save money in school lunch programs).

In any case, business at Delgaudio's "small office of volunteers and low-paid staffers" is apparently good, because for 30 years it's kept him supplied with the necessities of life. "Radical homosexuals will terrorize day care centers, hospitals, churches and private schools . . . You'll see men hand-in-hand skipping down to adoption centers to 'pick out' a little boy for themselves," reads a typical Delgaudio fundraising message. Almost all warn of impending congressional action on "The Gay Bill of Special Rights," "The Homosexual Classrooms Act," or other legislative initiatives that he alone seems to be aware of.

Delgaudio actually managed to make "The Daily Show" with one of his utterances (regarding the county government's anti-discrimination policy), but the other day he truly outdid himself, discovering that the TSA's "sexual assault searches" and "homosexual porno scanners" are also part of the "Gay Bill of Special Rights" — as is the agency's non-discrimination hiring policy altogether:

"That means the next TSA official that gives you an 'enhanced pat down' could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission."

I am sure most of this is calculated; business after all is business. Still, you do wonder sometimes about the obsessions on the right with certain topics; like the evangelical anti-pornography crusaders who see sex everywhere, there's something about it all that makes even a confirmed skeptic about Freud such as I am wonder whether he wasn't onto something now and then, especially with that business about "projection."

"They want us to think about homosexuals," Delgaudio once indignantly complained (the particular occasion was his protest against the county's anti-discrimination policy, which he termed "freaky, bizarre, and fruity"). "It's freaky," he continued — with such admirable command that it did not betray even the merest hint of irony — "because most don't think about homosexuals."

Bad dogs and other psychics

2010-12-01T10:58:00.000-05:00

Writing in the New York Review of Books about Jimmy Carter's recently published White House Diary, Gary Wills observes:

Jimmy Carter is a better man than his worst enemy would portray him as. And his worst enemy, it turns out, is himself. At least, I cannot imagine a more damaging blow to his reputation than he delivers in White House Diary.

Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing in the book than Carter's egomaniacal obsession with recording for posterity every passing thought and every flare up of the presidential hemorrhoids, Wills points out, is the ex-president's excruciating credulity regarding the abilities of "psychics" to "help us with sensitive intelligence matters."

Carter writes in the book:

We've had several reports of this parapsychology working; one discovered the map coordinates of a site and accurately described a camouflaged missile site. . . . We had a session in the Situation Room concerning a parapsychology project where people can envision what exists at a particular latitude and longitude. . . . The proven results of these exchanges between our intelligence services and parapsychologists raise some of the most intriguing and unanswerable questions of my presidency. They defy logic, but the facts were undeniable.

Anyone who's seen a carnival fortune teller at work or who has a passing acquaintance with the psychic-debunking work of the magician James "The Amazing" Randi will recognize the method by which psychics perform their prodigal feats: sometimes it's as simple as knowing the answer ahead of time; usually it's by offering predictions so vague, and unbounded in advance by agreed-on definitions of what constitutes a correct result, that they can always be claimed as a success after the fact ("something special will happen today"); always it's by relying on the quirk of human psychology that is more impressed by a single correct coincidence than a 100 blank shots.

Exactly the same foibles explain the obsession of the security agencies with other pieces of pseudoscientific malarkey — notably the lie detector, aka polygraph. Study after study has shown that the polygraph, a piece of 19th century electrical-gizmo quackery, is no better than chance at detecting deception; still, agencies like CIA and NSA justify its use by citing its "successes," defined usually as instances in which an employee confronted with a "deceptive" polygraph result suddenly blurts out a confession.

The trouble of course with such after-the-fact justification is (a) a certain number of genuine culprits will be fingered just by chance by any methodology that produces a fair number of positive hits, even one that is purely random and (b) it totally ignores the false-positive rate, that is, the number of perfectly innocent people wrongly fingered. (The latter is not a trivial point; repeatedly it has happened that intelligence officers have lost their security clearances and jobs on the basis of this witch-doctory even though a single scrap of real evidence is never adduced before or after of any wrongdoing on their part. The polygraph methodology is even worse in this regard, in fact, in that cool pathological liars tend to breeze through while conscientious honest people tend to flunk it. One of the striking revelations in the internal NSA history I referred to the other day is that in every one of the serious spy scandals to ht the agency mentioned in the report, the employees who were betraying their nation to the Soviets passed a polygraph test.)

A new field ripe for pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo in the security biz, I fear, is now detection dogs. The business is absolutely booming for drug-sniffing dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, money-sniffing dogs, illegally imported meat-and-plant sniffing dogs. But again, this is a perfect opportunity for the same flim flam. There's no real penalty for false positives, and the evidence is beginning to suggest that detection dogs generate a lot of false positives. (Excuse me: I was corrected by a guy from Homeland Security at a recent dog conference where I was giving a talk when I asked him about false-positives; he chastised me that the correct term is "nonproductive responses." And the rate, whatever you call it, is conveniently classified.) Likewise, there's enough people carrying some sort of stuff to keep dogs looking good no matter how scientific or unscientific the whole business is — you finger enough people, some of them are going to be bad guys.

The guy from Homeland Security actually I thought was even more revealing, in his answer to my question about the false-positive rate, when he said that part of the purpose of the dogs was "deterrence." Exactly: if you can make people think it works, it doesn't matter whether it's voodoo or not.

Good leaks and bad leaks

2010-11-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

It's a truism that government secrecy is less about safeguarding national security than about covering asses: During the cold war it happened time and again that leaked intelligence secrets revealed not just something that our government knew about the Soviets but that the Soviets knew we knew — or vice versa. (The secret bombing of Cambodia, for example, could hardly have been much of a secret from the people the bombs were landing on; the only people in the dark, as always, were the American public.)

A vast amount is also classified through sheer inertia or habit. During the year I held a top secret security clearance, while working for the U.S. Congress, I can recall among the thousands of pages of classified materials I read a single piece of information that was a genuine secret, in the sense that it could plausibly harm American national security were it revealed; it had to do with a very specific capability of a weapons system then under development. Even the compartmentalized "codeword" intelligence material I saw (classified up the wazoo on the grounds that it could give away the capabilities of our intelligence collections systems) I very much doubt would have been any surprise to the Soviets.

During the Nixon Administration, more notoriously, secrecy invoked in the name of national security was used to hide political dirty tricks, domestic espionage on the White House's "enemies," and other sordid crimes.

More generally, though, Watergate struck a healthy blow against the entire notion (still much beloved by Dick Cheney, for one) that efficient government requires an umbrella of secrecy over internal policy deliberations so that decisionmakers may receive candid advice: a notion that, after all, goes against the very grain of democracy and the principle that the people have not just a right but a responsibility to be informed participants in the policy decisions made in their name.

There is no doubt that the latest WikiLeaks dump, of a quarter of a million State Department e-mail messages, is news. But if the aim was to strike another salutary blow at needless government secrecy, it makes about the worst possible case for a cause I for one am otherwise in much sympathy with. At first blush there is no whistleblowing here, no revelations of wrongdoing or corruption or rogue espionage plots or military adventurism, not even much in the way of history or insight into decisionmaking: all there is is indiscretion. And diplomatic channels are one of the very few realms of government where a case for across-the-board confidentiality actually has merit: wars have been triggered by diplomatic indiscretions less indiscreet than those contained in these leaked cables.

Many other commentators have already noted the grave damage that has been done to the ability of American diplomats to receive honest and accurate information about matters of the first importance in maintaining international security, promoting American values of human rights and democracy, and averting war; most stomach-churning of all is the thought that dissidents and human-rights activists in oppressive regimes who courageously took enormous risks in speaking to American contacts could find their courage rewarded with imprisonment, or worse.

In my recent talk about secrecy and intelligence history I quoted the observation that the government's obsession with secrecy promotes the public's obsession with conspiracy; as an observer both within and without the "black" world I'd also note that excessive secrecy breeds contempt for the entire system of secrecy: classification of the trivial makes it harder to protect the classification of the vital.

--

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News has an insightful article on the state of government secrecy.

Historical evidence vs historical fantasy

2010-11-27T11:29:00.000-05:00

The "how private property rights saved the Pilgrims" fairy tale that I wrote about the other day certainly has its ardent supporters. The problem is that it is a near-total fabrication — a fine specimen of the kind of hand-waving reasoning, glib anachronisms, and misuse of historical evidence that characterizes a great deal of what passes for historical "lessons" presented by the tea partyites.

The one kernel of actual historical evidence used to support this entire fantasy is Plymouth governor William Bradford's description of the discontent that the "common course" engendered among the colonists. But nowhere is there any evidence that this discontent produced famine or failure; indeed the first Thanksgiving was observed in 1621, the year after the Plymouth settlers arrived, as a celebration of their bountiful first harvest. Nor is it anything but the most naive kind of historical anachronism to call the "common course" of the Plymouth settlers "socialism" or "collectivism." Nor is there any evidence that the allocation of individual plots of corn land to each family in 1623 "saved" the Pilgrims, as the spinners of this right-wing allegory allege. Nor, for that matter, did this alteration in 1623 extend to anything like modern capitalism or property rights or free markets: as Bradford noted, the allocation of individual corn plots was for "only for present use" and conferred no right of inheritance; meanwhile, in every other respect the colony continued "to go on in the general way as before."

And, as I noted in my previous post, at Jamestown — where disaster and famine did occur — it was not because of the way property was held but because of the incompetence, greed, laziness, and false expectations of the settlers, who lacked practical skills. (And yes, Jamestown features in the same "socialist state"-to-"free market," failure-to-abundance fairy tales of the right; tea party supporter Dick Armey cited Jamestown in a speech at the National Press Club earlier this year making this same claim.)

But of course the real purpose of all of this historical fantasy-spinning is a false syllogism to begin with: an attempt to ominously equate perfectly mainstream ideas of every decent civilized society (such as, yes, universal access to basic health care) with Soviet-style collectivization. I don't know any sensible person who advocates the abolition of private property. I also don't know any sensible person who thinks that raising taxes on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans by a tenth, or requiring polluters to clean up their act, or preventing financial institutions from endangering the entire free market system through irresponsible greed is "socialism," much less that it will destroy private property or the incentives of the free enterprise system.

Most sensible people in fact recognize that with all rights come responsibilities, indeed that rights cannot be successfully maintained without obligations and responsibilities; all the more so, when those who have benefited the most from private property rights owe the most to the commonweal: the educated workers they are able to hire, the justice system that protects and enforces property and contracts, and the social stability without which demagoguery, confiscation, and revolution ensue.

Victorious underdogs

2010-11-25T12:10:00.001-05:00

I have just posted over at the "News and Reviews" section of my author website my article that appeared in MHQ on America's against-all-odds struggle in the naval War of 1812.

The article is a brief introduction to the themes and some of the key personalities (especially Secretary of the Navy William Jones, a man truly ahead of his time) that feature in my soon-to-be-released book Perilous Fight.

The War of 1812 was the strangest war in American history, one that deeply divided the nation, one that in the words of Virginia's John Taylor was almost "a metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport, but rather a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy." But it offers some fascinating and remarkable lessons, not least how America one played the nimble David in a David-and-Goliath struggle against a far mightier military foe: what we'd call "asymmetric warfare" today. As a country more used to being caught in the role of the muscle-bound Goliath in more recent conflicts, it's an inspiring and still-relevant tale.

And you can read the Publishers Weekly review of my book here.

Commies and cranberries

2010-11-23T08:08:00.002-05:00

Living a sheltered life, I had to learn from the New York Times about an apparently widespread movement that has been working to recast Thanksgiving as a lesson in the evils of socialism and a celebration of the wonders of free enterprise.

According to the ever-reliable Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and various tea party websites, the original English settlers practiced a kind of collectivism is which all worked the land together and shared the proceeds; this led to bickering, thievery, idleness, and famine as the settlers refused to toil when they could not each reap the benefits of their own work. Only when they abandoned such dangerous socialist ideas and divvied up the land into individual privately-owned parcels did they at last enjoy a bountiful harvest . . . which is what we are actually celebrating at Thanksgiving. (Of course, no right-wing historical revisionism is complete without a conspiracy theory and a sense of victimization at the hands of the liberal elite: so it turns out that this "real reason for Thanksgiving" was "deleted from the official story," according to one widely circulated retelling that has appeared on tea party blogs.)

Actually, the first English colonists in Massachusetts and Virginia did work together, but this was neither the cause of their misfortune nor a reflection of any utopian, much less collectivist, spirit: the colonies were organized and backed by joint-stock companies of wealthy English merchants — and the settlers worked for the company.

The real problem, though, was that the men recruited for Jamestown and Plymouth were expecting quick and easy riches without having to work at all.

Most of the participants of the debacle at Jamestown listed their occupation as "Gentleman," which was defined at the time as, "Whosoever can live without manual labor." John Smith kept desperately requesting that the company send men who possessed some actual skills and who were willing to get off their rear ends and work, but to no avail: "When you sende againe I intreat you rather send but thirty Carpenters, husbandmen, Gardiners, fishermen, blacksmiths . . . than a thousand such as we have." Likewise he advised the Puritans, planning their colony in Massachusetts, "One hundred good labourers better than a thousand such Gallants as were sent to me, that would do nothing but complaine, curse, and despaire, when they saw all things clean contrary to the report in England."

The "report in England" had promised nothing so much as a get-rich-quick scheme, and it was good old capitalist avarice, not socialist idealism, that propelled most of these "Gallants" to the New World. Poems, plays, books, sermons preached from pulpits in London all painted America as a literal "Paradise" where the natives cooked in pots and pans of solid gold, plucked emeralds and rubies off the ground, and

Where Nature hath in store
Fowle, Venison, and Fish,
And the Fruitfull'st Soyle
Without your Toyle,
Three Harvests more,
All greater than you Wish

So here's an alternative interpretation of the Thanksgiving story:

A bunch of overprivileged toffs, backed by off-shore capitalist speculators, expected to live idly off the work of others (when they weren't simply plundering treasure off the natives), and nearly starved to death from their own greed and idleness. (In Jamestown, they did starve to death.) Only when they faced up to the fact that they were going to have to work for a living, and threw off their foreign corporate masters, did they begin to prosper. And that is why we celebrate Thanksgiving today. The end.

What the founders REALLY thought (2)

2010-11-19T09:53:00.000-05:00

In his private correspondence, George Washington was particularly scornful of the argument advanced by opponents of the Constitution that it gave too much power to the national government.

"The Men who oppose a strong & energetic government are, in my opinion, narrow minded politicians, or are under the influence of local views," he wrote Alexander Hamilton.

Or, as he expounded on the matter in another letter: "No man is a warmer advocate for proper restraints and wholesome checks in every department of government than I am; but I have never yet been able to discover the propriety of placing it absolutely out of the power of men to render essential Services, because a possibility remains of their doing ill."

The framers of the Constitution were unarguably concerned that the power of government might be abused, but they were equally concerned that the general government be — as Washington put it — "strong & energetic" enough to carry out the duties of good governance. (And, by the way, despite the incredibly doctrinaire assertion by the tea partyites and their libertarian fellow travelers that the only legitimate purpose of government is to guard individual liberty, you would be hard pressed to find anyone among the founding generation who took so crabbed a view.)

Their concern was not that a powerful Federal government was in itself a threat to liberty (as I noted in my previous post, on the contrary the framers saw a powerful general government as the best guarantor of the rights of all against the factionalism, local interests, and unjust tendencies of the state legislatures); it was not, as the tea party comic book version has it, that government power was in itself tyrannical; they were rather concerned about three very specific problems which might lead to tyranny — and, strikingly, all three were evils that the founders saw not as stemming from the power of the Federal government but rather as inherent in the machinery of democracy itself: it was too much democracy, rather than too little, that they feared.

One, which seems quaint today but which greatly occupied their thoughts, was foreign influence and the danger that elections left the country vulnerable to such intrigues. "As often as Elections happen, the danger of foreign Influence recurs," John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson. (Adams, in fact — with more than a little justice in light of later experience — was suspicious of elections altogether for the opportunities for corruption they presented: "Elections, my dear sir, Elections to offices which are great objects of Ambition, I look at with terror. Experiments of this kind have been so often tryed, and so universally found productive of Horrors, that there is great Reason to dread them.")

Second was the tyranny of the majority I wrote about the other day: the danger that a majority made up of one religious sect, one economic class, or dominated by one region would favor its interests at the expense of the minority.

Third was a fear that the presidency would devolve into a de facto monarchy, perhaps even a hereditary one.

But Washington, for one, argued with some passion that even these fears were being grossly exaggerated by local politicians who simply feared their own oxen being gored. Ultimately, the government could exert no power that the people would not accede to through representatives of their own choosing and who were subject to recall at the next election. The popular cant that portrayed any exercise of power by government officials as "tyranny," he said, was simply a smokescreen for factional and local interests:

It is agreed on all hands that no government can be well administered without powers; yet the instant these are delegated, altho' those who are entrusted with the administration are no more than the creatures of the people, act as it were but for a day, and are amenable for every false step they take, they are, from the moment they receive it, set down as tyrants; their natures, one would conceive from this, immediately changed, and that they could have no other disposition but to oppress.

Of these things, in a government constituted and guarded as ours is, I have no idea; and do firmly believe that whilst many ostensible reasons are assigned to prevent the adoption of it, the real ones are concealed behind the Curtain, because they are not of a nature to appear in open day.

By the way, why do the tea partyites look upon the Constitution with a reverence bordering on idolatry while simultaneously making a cult of Patrick Henry (or at least his name) — who was one of the most implacable foes of ratification?

Soak the poor!

2010-11-18T14:23:00.000-05:00

It has been one of the fondest dreams of plutocrats, big business, and libertarian think tanks for the better part of the last hundred years to replace as much of the income tax as possible with a national sales tax, the better to shift the tax burden from the whiny wealthy to the uncomplaining multitudes. Coolidge's and Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, pushed the idea in the 1920s; in 1932, with the budget deficit approaching 60 percent of expenditures, members of both parties endorsed a national sales tax in the face of strong urging by industry and the "experts" of the need to balance the budget at all costs. Only a mass revolt by the public — mail poured into congressional offices opposing the idea — stopped its final passage.

Still, libertarian think tanks like Cato periodically dust off the notion and extol its wonders (they are particularly enamored of the the idea that with a sales tax, individuals get to "choose" the amount of tax "they are willing to pay" by deciding how much to spend).

Now, the latest entry from the burgeoning number of do-it-yourself-solve-the-deficit committees has proposed a 6.5 percent "Debt Reduction Sales Tax" — once again seeking to use the Federal budget deficit as an opportunity to rally around this egregiously regressive form of taxation.

The one good thing is that people are also beginning to talk about increasing the income limit subject to Social Security payroll tax; currently only the first $106,800 of income is subject to the 6.2 percent payroll tax (12.4 percent for us self-employed persons which, along with paying for all of your own health insurance, are two of the great joys of being your own boss); everything after that is tax-free, which as a tax policy that has always been completely nuts, if politically explainable.

The highly regressive effect of the payroll tax means that those in the lower brackets pay a much greater percentage of their total income for payroll taxes than do the higher brackets, and contribute a substantially greater percentage of the total revenues collected. Here's a chart I compiled (data from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center) showing the percentage of total payroll tax revenue and percentage of all Federal tax revenues (payroll, income, estate, corporate) contributed by each income bracket:

Another way to think about the regressive structure of the payroll tax is to calculate the effective tax rate by bracket; this chart shows the percentage of income actually paid on average by those in each bracket, comparing payroll tax and Federal income tax:

It is good that serious people are trying to initiate that much-talked of and so far little realized "adult conversation" about the budget. But the effort to use a sudden sense of crisis — much of that generated by the disastrous policies of those "fiscal conservatives" Reagan and Bush — to revive regressive tax schemes is a very old tune. A good place to start balancing the budget would be to restore the modestly higher marginal rates on the upper brackets that last brought us balanced budgets and even surpluses under Bill Clinton, eliminate tax loopholes, and shift the payroll tax to a more progressive structure by removing the $106,800 income limit. As the New York Times's do-it-yourself fix-the-deficit interactive calculator shows (you too can be infinitely more responsible than the GOP's "Pledge to America"!), that alone would close more than 3/4 of the short-term budget shortfall and half of the long-term gap.

What the founders REALLY thought (1)

2010-11-17T09:52:00.000-05:00

Reading the correspondence of Madison and Washington regarding the ratification of the Constitution, I continue to be struck by how their actual views are so much at odds with the caricatured views presented as gospel by the tea partyniks.

Again and again, far from seeing a strong Federal government as a threat to liberty, they saw it as the essential guarantor of liberty against the tyranny of popular majorities.

Standard textbook histories portray the decision to call a constitutional convention as a reaction to the weakness of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, notably the lack of taxation power. And to be sure the founders often spoke of the need for a new arrangement that would give the Federal government the power necessary to perform its essential duties; as Madison wrote in Federalist No. 37, "Energy in Government is essential to that security against external and internal danger, and to the prompt and salutary execution of the laws, which enter into the very definition of good Government."

But, as Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, the "inadequacies of the Confederation" were actually a far less important impetus for the new Constitution than was the manifest failure of the states to "secure individuals agst. encroachments on their rights." Madison observed that while representative government by definition must bow to the will of the majority, majorities made up of any one faction — economic, regional, religious — inherently tend to become oppressive and even tyrannical towards competing factions. And all experience has shown, he said, that neither concern for the general welfare of society, nor concern for one's individual reputation and character, nor even religious scruples were sufficient to overcome the power of self-interest of men acting together in such majorities. (Religion, he sharply noted, "has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it." All the more so, he said, when it is reinforced by the herd mentality, "the sympathy of a multitude" that makes men acting on the "strongest of religious ties . . . join without remorse in acts agst. which their consciences would revolt, if proposed to them separately in their closets.")

The only check that Madison saw against such a tendency toward self-interest and oppression was a government encompassing enough that no one faction of local interest, economic class, or religious sect could expect to dominate it — so that "no common interest or passion will be likely to unite a majority of the whole number in an unjust pursuit." A powerful Federal government that represented the entire country would counterbalance the tendency toward majoritarian tyranny, injustice, and bad government all too manifest in the states.

Of course, that has been precisely the history of the United States: time and again, it has been the Federal government which has been able to act to protect the rights and liberties of all against the tyranny of locally powerful and entrenched interests. It was the Federal government that summoned the will that states and localities could not to require railroads and mine owners to take even the most rudimentary steps to protect the safety of their workers, to require drug makers to stop selling dangerous quack products to the public at large, to restore to African Americans the voting rights that had been stolen from them at gunpoint and then by legal chicanery and intimidation for a hundred years, to end segregation, to bring to justice corrupt politicians — not to mention white supremacist murderers — who had long been protected by local judges, juries, and prosecutors.

War's apologists

2010-11-15T10:49:00.004-05:00

Apologists for George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq — including George W. Bush, who writes in his new memoir that the cause was "eternally right" — point out, quite unexceptionably, that the war accomplished something, even if not the something it was supposed to.

Bush had the decency at least to portray himself as "sickened" by the discovery that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction — before going on to trumpet the war for having eliminated a brutal and threatening regime and instituted democracy (of a sort) in an important Arab country; more-ideological defenders of the war just brush aside the matter of WMD as if it were some nit-picking detail.

(Less logically impressive as a retroactive justification for the war is the oft-repeated mantra that the "surge" "worked," which is rather like endorsing arson on the grounds that such an excellent job was finally done putting out the ensuing blaze. One champion of this line of argument is the otherwise-often sensible David Brooks, who in a column last summer managed to equate liberals who opposed the surge with conservatives who insist that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim.)

It is also a fair point to note that many of the arguments made against the Iraq war are made against every war. Just as every war in American history has been championed by its supporters with soaring talk of honor and freedom, so every war has been damned by its opponents with bitter talk of war profiteers and bereaved mothers.

(The American communists who furiously opposed America's entry into World War II — until they deliriously championed it following Hitler's attack on Soviet Russia — managed to flip from one to the other with an agility that still must hold a record; at the start of 1941 Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were writing and singing anti-war songs that told of the evil capitalists out to make cannon fodder of Billy Boy:

Can you use a bayonet, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Do you want a silver medal, charming Billy?
No desire do I feel to defend Republic Steel
I'm a young boy and cannot leave my mother.

or defiantly insisted:

Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain't gonna send me 'cross the sea . . .

Wendell Wilkie and Franklin D.,
Seems to me they both agree,
They both agree on killin' me

and a few months later they were belting out rousing choruses of "Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?" and "Round and round Hitler's grave.")

But the question is never whether wars are likely to accomplish something, or whether wars bring death and suffering; the question is whether a war's accomplishments are likely to be worth the sure cost they exact. And one of the most frightening historical facts to emerge about the Iraq war is how little — correct that, no — thought was given to this most basic question by the war's architects.

Bush claimed in his interview on NBC two weeks ago that he himself was "a dissenting voice . . . I didn't want to use force. I mean force is the last option for a President." But as newly declassified government records posted last month by George Washington University's "National Security Archive" make abundantly plain, the war was such a foregone decision in the Bush administration that no decision was ever even made; as the Archive notes (thanks to The Economist's "Lexington" for first calling my attention to this):

Some Bush officials insist the war decision was made just before the March 2003 invasion. The evidence does not support that construction. . . . Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, observes, “Never to my knowledge, and I’m pretty sure I’m right on this, did the President ever sit around with his advisors and say, ‘Should we do this or not?’ He never did it.” George J. Tenet of the CIA agrees. He wrote, “There never was a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” And again, based on conversations with colleagues, “In none of the meetings can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions. Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do?”

Dwight Eisenhower, a man no one can accuse of sentimentality or pacifism, understood that war was truly a last resort precisely because its consequences were unfathomable and ungovernable, even when the cause was necessary and just. Amid talk in right-wing circles of launching a "preventive war" against the Soviets in the late 1940s, Eisenhower delivered several sharply-worded warnings that "war settles nothing": by its very destructive power it invariably unleashes as many new problems as it solves.

An honest accounting of the consequences of the Iraq war would include some legitimate accomplishments for good; it would also include:

the strengthening of Iran, which is almost certain (unlike Saddam's Iraq) to soon possess nuclear weapons;

the death of Iraqi Christianity and the mass exodus of the country's secular intelligentsia;

the diversion of U.S. and British troops and firepower from Afghanistan and the hunt for Bin Laden;

and (worst of all to my thinking) the vitiation of American moral authority to summon armed resistance to any future, and potentially far graver, threats

One of the reasons I find the much-neglected War of 1812 such a fascinating study is because of what it vividly shows about the unpredictable consequences of war; for complex reasons, the War of 1812 was a one of those very rare conflicts in which a military stalemate was transformed into an enduring political triumph, both at home and abroad. (In part it was because America went into the war such an utter underdog; in more recent wars America has more often played the role of the muscle-bound giant obliging played by Great Britain back in 1812.)

Far more typical are wars that are won on the battlefield only to be lost in the peace — and in the ensuing seismic disruptions that war inescapably brings.

--

I have just posted at the "News and Reviews" section of my author website a pdf of the talk I gave this year at the Society for Military History conference on the political ramifications of American and British war strategies in the War of 1812.

More on Snooze's last snore

2010-11-10T18:07:00.000-05:00

In response to my post about the demise of U.S. News & World Report, one of my old colleagues just sent me several of his fond recollections of the place, including one that I had unaccountably forgotten from my time there.

During my twelve years at the magazine the proprietor, one Mortimer B. Zuckerman, went through no fewer than five different editors; the shortest-lived was Roger Rosenblatt, who lasted a scant year. Roger came in with a whirlwind of energy and humor and was a wonderful person to work with in many ways; in retrospect it should have been clear that he was not going to last long from the way he almost immediately began making remarkably indiscreet — though invariably hilarious — cracks about Mort.

The magazine had been nominated for a National Magazine Award and Roger had gone up to New York to sit with Mort at the awards luncheon where the final winners would be announced. As soon as the lunch was over Roger called one of the other top editors back in Washington.

"I have good news and bad news," said Roger.

"Give me the bad first," the editor said.

"We didn't win. Conde Nast Traveler won in that category."

"Too bad. What's the good news?"

"Mort shot himself."

U.S. News, R.I.P.

2010-11-10T07:26:00.006-05:00

Journalists are a bunch of softies. While they have a paying job all they can do is bitch and moan and make cynical cracks about what a rag they work for; but when a paper folds, nobody gets more mawkishly sentimental and misty-eyed reminiscing about its bygone glories.

These days when papers and magazines fold in the wink of an eye, death by Internet scarcely merits a mention, much less a tear. Even the once mighty and great are barely squeaking through as ad pages, circulation, and revenues plummet. Exceptions like the Washington Post Company, which just reported "sharply higher" earnings, are exceptions only because they had the wit to cut their losses in the dead-end business of reporting and delivering the news long ago. The Post earlier this year threw the rotting carcass of Newsweek overboard (well, they got $1 for it, a pretty fair price considering that the mag was losing close to $50 million a year); but years ago the company decided to concentrate less on news and more on easy pickings like anxious parents of college-bound underachievers (the Kaplan test-prep business now supplies three-quarters of the company's operating income) or politicians in urgent need of likening their opponents to snarling rabid illegal-immigrant-loving jihadists (the Post's half-dozen TV stations reported income up 68 percent in the third quarter, much of that from political advertising in the just-concluded midterm elections).

So I will try to manfully resist the urge to wax too sentimental over the news of late last week that my erstwhile employer, U.S. News & World Report, will cease publication in December.

Even through the mists of time and nostalgia, there is much that looks stodgy, ludicrous, self-important, and just plain dull about the traditional weekly newsmagazine. And U.S. News possessed added dimensions of unlovable absurdity unique among the once-great triumvirate of newsweeklies. Whenever we felt ourselves in danger of running short of cynical self-pity, we used to leaf through the bound volumes of back issues, particularly from the pre-1973 era when the magazine's founder David Lawrence was still at the helm. U.S. News in the Lawrence age was not only stodgy but cluelessly conservative, and a few minutes of random page flipping was invariably rewarded with some masochistic amusement in the form of cringe-inducing headlines from the not-too-distant past (my personal favorite being the one on a story from the 1960s about the changing demographics of Washington, D.C., which read — I swear this is exactly accurate — "More and More Negroes All the Time").

And yet . . . you can say all you want about the inevitable impact of the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle, and the loss of the commanding place of the mainstream media, but the fact remains that the demise of U.S. News has as much to do with sheer stupidity, vanity, and greed as it does with the inexorable march of technology. And that is worth a word of lamentation even if not a tear.

I arrived there in 1986, two years after real estate developer Mort Zuckerman (invariably referred to in Spy magazine in those days as "the lisping demi-billionaire Mortimer B. Zuckerman") bought the place, and the Mort-induced chaos was even more comical than any of those old David Lawrence headlines; stories would be assigned and canceled multiple times in the course of a week, legions of new editors with vaguely defined duties would appear and disappear (a number of them with British accents, which apparently prevented Mort from realizing that they didn't have a clue what they were talking about), big-name neocon columnists would be hired at lavish sums and, it was clear, with fabulous promises of power, importance, and responsibility within the organization that, equally clearly, only they had been informed about; and when a writer actually did get to report and write a story that survived through the whole week, it would be edited and reedited by multiple layers of editors who not infrequently would pass the story back and forth, repeatedly deleting each other's edits and reinstating their own, while the hapless writer looked on with the kind of horrid fascination one might have while witnessing a slow-motion car crash.

My only real claim to fame in all of my years there was the time when one of those editors was "top-editing" a story I had already dealt with through multiple iterations. He was always affecting in his editorial queries the kind of tough-guy, green-eye-shade, staccato newsman's prose he thought made him sound like he knew what he was doing — all the more comical as it was the complete antithesis of his actual character — and he would pepper the stories he edited with comments of the ilk "WHO HE?" "WHAT MEAN?" and so on.

On this occasion he had typed in a "WHAT MEAN?" following one perfectly plain and patently clear sentence in the piece, and when I got the story back — having by now absolutely had it with the whole business — I typed in, in reply:

WHAT FUCK THINK MEAN?

My one contribution to the rich, and now vanished, newsroom lore of U.S. News.

Some day I may also reveal the story of how Mort's editorials were "written."

And yet . . . there was still enough of the venerable machinery of the old U.S. News in place to keep the magazine propelling itself along by sheer inertia, at least for a while anyway, through all the Mort-created turbulence; and in time I came to find those vestiges of the old magazine's approach and temperament and mindset not only admirable but, in a certain crazy way, even inspiring.

For one thing, the place was still unmistakably an institution when I arrived there; it took its obligations to its readers seriously, and everything about the old institutional structure of the place reinforced the idea that it was a serious business. There was a wonderful library that could put its hands almost miraculously on anything a writer asked for; there was a very capable "economics unit" that compiled statistics and data; there was great effort put into producing useful and accurate charts and graphs and tables; there were rafts of foreign and domestic correspondents, and people to transcribe tape recordings of interviews, and regular lunches and breakfasts for editors and writers with important newsmakers.

A few months into my tenure, still reeling from the new chaos more than I was yet appreciating the solidity of its old underpinnings, I remarked to a colleague that it seemed amazing that the magazine actually managed to come out every week.

He replied, "I used to think that too, until I realized there was nothing you could do to stop it from coming out."

The old formula of the weekly newsmagazine was admirable, I thought, and still do, in being focused on serving readers. There was a great deal of self-effacement about the (old) magazine's approach, for all of its seriousness about itself. Bylines were tiny and placed at the end of stories; photographs were small and the design unostentatious; and exactly (in fact) like (some) Internet news aggregators of late, the magazine's unflashy but worthy purpose was to pull together, out of an avalanche of information, the essential nuggets that would help people make sense of a confusing swirl of events. Simply put, in this older way of doing things, journalists didn't blow their own horns; they tried consciously to put themselves in the position of people who were not in the Washington power game; they did not worry about cutting a daring figure among the journalistic in-crowd: they tried more to be reliable guides than wise guys.

For proof that that is still a noble and useful mission — and one that people will part with good money for — there is no better evidence than The Economist, which charges a hundred bucks a year, has no bylines whatsoever, is serious and factual, and is growing leaps and bounds in a business otherwise sickening and dying. (Its ad revenues increased by an astounding 25 percent in 2008; circulation grew by more than 10 percent in 2009, and was even up a modest amount in the first half of this year, to more than 800,000. In every graph charting the decline and fall of the magazine industry, The Economist is that one line defiantly running the other direction.)

A few of us at Snooze in the 1990s kept pointing to The Economist as a model worth paying attention to. But it was a completely losing battle. On the one hand, there was Mort's inexperience, insecurity, and arrogance as an editor-in-chief and publisher that sent us lurching almost every week in a new direction — I think depending on which of his trendy (Manhattan, Long Island) or wonky (Washington) friends he last spoke with; one week he would order up a multi-page, news-free story on nuclear arms control theory informed mostly by a conversation he had had with some think-tank guru; another week he would furiously insist on lavish photo spreads chasing some sensational and already media-saturated story (memorably, Princess Di's death). Week after week commands would come down from on high to do a story that (a small amount of checking would invariably reveal) originated either in someone Mort talked to at a party or something Mort read in the New York Times; woe to the beat reporter who had real sources who knew that Mort's friend was full of kaka.

Meanwhile the explanatory and analytic journalism that was the essence, I always thought, of why anyone would read a weekly magazine in the first place was increasingly marginalized in the frenetic search for a new magic formula to "reinvent" the magazine.

(I should hasten to add that I have nothing in principle against rich owners, nor even against rich owners who try to run the publications they own. But the ones who succeed at it are the ones who bother to learn the business, and not just assume that because they made a fortune in real estate or consulting they are natural geniuses as editors and writers. The Washington Post Company is a fine example of this; Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother Katherine at the helm, first worked at everything from ad sales to local beat reporting on the Metro section to learn how the business actually worked. Before that, he was a D.C. cop for a few years, figuring that if he was going to be the proprietor of a major metropolitan daily, he really needed to know something about his town beyond what a privileged upbringing had given him. I'm still in awe of that example he set — all the more impressive for how rare such an attitude is. Mort, by contrast, did not even know the names of most of his own staff, much less what they did, or why.)

Undeniably, all of this editorial mishegas at U.S. News was abetted by the vanity of all too many writers and editors themselves. The political reporters all wanted their names in big type and to be big shots in journalistic circles so they could get on TV and rake in extra bucks on the lecture circuit; the photo editor wanted to win photo prizes and be able to brag in her circle about the famous big-name arty photographers whose work she commissioned; the "investigative" reporters wanted to "break" news (they never did, but always failed to do so at great length); the various brilliant senior editors were always vying to come up with a "smart take" or "fresh angle."

And then finally of course, after all the free-wheeling spending on famous American neocons and British-accented nonentities came the inevitable spate of equally mad penny-pinching. David Lawrence, for all of his reactionary ways, was a believer in employee ownership, and the old U.S. News had always treated its staff well. There weren't lavish perks of the kind you hear about from the flush days of Conde Nast or Time, but there was a sense of being valued and treated decently. The offices were designed well and efficiently; there was a pleasant cafeteria that was in many ways the hub of life at the office, where writers and editors who put it in long hours could take a break and bat around ideas and share anecdotes of politicians, wars, and mayhem they had covered in the past; and probably above all — beyond any personal comforts or perks — the experience of walking every morning into a handsome building with the name of the company over the doors out front and a conference room within that could seat the whole staff just made you feel you were working somewhere that mattered.

It took almost no time at all for the building to go from elegantly inspiring to something that made you feel you were experiencing first-hand the waning days of the Soviet Union. The cafeteria and library vanished, equipment was piled up in odd places, the large portraits of the former editors were stuffed away in a closet (and eventually damaged and discarded, I think), two floors including the conference room were sublet to a D.C. think tank, offices were replaced with those dreaded fabric-covered cubicles, and finally the U.S. News name was pulled off the building altogether as part of a deal giving the think tank even more of the space plus its own logo out front.

The effect on morale of things like that is not trivial. I'm sure there was a lot of waste in the pre-Mort days, but the Mort days brought nothing but penny wise and pound foolish decisions (along with some worse-than-foolish asset-stripping). I trace the moment when the last vestige of esprit de corps died to the day Mort's chief henchman appeared in the newsroom with some visitors in tow and loudly declared (in an accent I think he cultivated from careful study of "My Cousin Vinny"), "And this is where we keep the overhead." Charming guy. (Actually, as I recall now, he had earlier ingratiated himself to the staff by informing us — I think at the time we were about to lose the conference room and a few floors of the building — that as a once-employee-owned business there had been a "a lot of excessive life-style enhancement around here.") And then came the final death knell of news organizations everywhere, buyouts and layoffs.

I don't in the least regret the 12 years I worked there; I did well, I got to do interesting things, I learned a lot about writing and life, I made good friends who taught me a lot more about writing and life, and I left on my own two feet before the worst came. What I still resent, though, is that the guy who had the money to buy the place didn't love it and care about it even as much as we cynics did.

In announcing the decision to end print publication, a U.S. News official explained that the move "allows us to continue to grow our online business," which is the modern-day magazine's equivalent of the politician or executive who "wants to spend more time with his family," I suppose.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

A first-class temperament

2010-11-08T08:25:00.001-05:00

Gratuitous advice follows electoral defeats like buzzards follow the gut wagon, and since last Tuesday the experts have appeared in their customary thick flocks to tell President Obama where he went wrong: He attacked the Republicans too much or too little, he failed to communicate or failed to offer substance, he was too solicitous of his base or too neglectful of it, he set his sights too high or set them too low. He has been told he made a lame mistake in blaming George W. Bush for the nation's economic woes because people's memories are short; he has been told it was a fool's errand to try to work with Republicans rather than taking his case to the people; he has been told he erred in politics or in substance in letting a second-order priority like health care come to dominate political events for a year and distract, either in message or in substance, from the focus on the economy.

My previous post about FDR has had me musing for the last couple of days about the elusive nature of political leadership in a large and complex democracy. Franklin Roosevelt undeniably had circumstances in his favor: no one could forget the devastating proof the Great Depression had provided of the failed Republican policies of economic Darwinism, and even 12 years later, running for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, FDR could land a hard jab at his foes simply by uttering the word "depression."

It was also a time when the president's voice spoke far louder than any president's can today in this age of blather overload; FDR's famous "fireside chats" reached an audience modern presidents can only wistfully dream of.

But FDR had something that no amount of advice can instill; that lazy word "charisma" doesn't come close to capturing the essence of it, for what he had was a character and temperament perfectly attuned to the simultaneous, and almost diametrically opposed, demands of high office and of rough and tumble politics. He had the patrician's unflappable self-confidence in himself without a hint of the pomposity of other aristocratic presidents (George Washington, a prime example); he had a hide as thick as a rhinoceros without a hint of the insensitivity and aloofness that usually accompanies that otherwise envious trait (Calvin Coolidge, a prime example); he had a sense of unshakable moral destiny without being troubled in the least by the fact that there were those who did not share his moral certainties (something that destroyed a moralist like Woodrow Wilson); he loved the intellectual details of policy without ever being consumed by them (the way Jimmy Carter or James Madison was).

And the reason FDR was such an absolutely skilled politician was that he unabashedly loved politics: he wasn't exaggerating in the least when he said, "I love a good fight." In retrospect it's easy to think that FDR had it easy, with a large Democratic majority in Congress and broad public demand for swift action, but reread how he handled Congress in the famous first "hundred days" and it's clear he played them like an accordion: working disparate constituencies, sending up tactically crafted measures to build momentum, sensing political timing and opportunity day by day. (James MacGregor Burns's Rendezvous With Destiny is still one of the best accounts of this.)

The more I study history and human nature the more I find myself convinced that (all of the political pundits and business schools and self-help gurus notwithstanding) the essential qualities of leadership simply cannot be learned; I'm not saying they are genetic — it's hard not to believe that part of FDR's remarkable character, particularly his extraordinary blend of self-confidence, equanimity under pressure, and fellow-feeling, owed much to his personal struggles with polio — but that they do stem from intrinsic temperament and character more than any other factor.

There was a passage in one of Anthony Trollope's "political" novels in which one of his characters is comparing three different prime ministers and how each responded to the burdens of office that I thought grasped this essence well: the leaders who can not only bear up under the pressures of vast responsibility, not only handle the practical politics of the job, but actually enjoy it too, do not come along every day. "The amount of trouble" that a man endures in the premiership, Trollope's character begins, "depends on the spirit and nature of the man":

Do you remember old Lord Brock? He was never troubled. He had a triple shield — a thick skin, an equable temper, and perfect self-confidence. Mr Mildmay was of a softer temper, and would have suffered had he not been protected by the idolatry of a large class of his followers. Mr Gresham has no such protection. With a finer intellect than either, and a sense of patriotism quite as keen, he has a self-consciousness which makes him sore at every point. He knows the frailty of his temper, and yet cannot control it. And he does not understand men as did these others. Every word from an enemy is a wound to him. Every slight from a friend is a dagger in his side. But I can fancy that self-accusations make the cross on which he is really crucified. He is a man to whom I would extend all my mercy, were it in my power to be merciful.

Bring out smear no. 247

2010-11-06T09:41:00.003-04:00

Another modest request from a historian to the giddy-with-victory Republicans in Congress: can't you come up with some imaginative, new stories to use against a Democratic president, rather than recycling oldies from decades or more ago?

The latest one making the rounds comes courtesy of the tea-party's perennially fact-challenged Rep. Michele Bachmann — who, when she isn't calling the president "very anti-American" and his administration "a gangster government," or urging the people of her native Minnesota to be "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax," likes to invent interesting facts such as that the government now controls 51 percent of the American economy, or that Jimmy Carter (President of the United States, 1977–1981) was responsible for the 1976 swine flu outbreak and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945) for the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

Bachmann — who is claiming her right to the No. 4 spot in the House leadership as a fitting reward for the tea partyniks' contribution to the GOP electoral victories — told CNN the other day that President Obama is spending "$200 million a day" of taxpayer money for his trip to India. Asked where she got this fact from, she said, “These are the numbers that have been coming out in the press.” Part of the story, repeatedly circulated by Rush Limbaugh and the usual chain-e-mails, was that "34 warships" had been dispatched for the president's trip as well.

This one unmistakably brings to mind the 1944 charge by Republican leaders that FDR had ordered a navy warship to fetch his dog. But FDR, being an old political campaigner from way back (who, in his own words "loved a good fight"), knew how to use an opportunity like this; and in a speech laced with deadpan sarcasm he used the GOP's own smear as the springboard for the take-no-prisoners opening assault to his 1944 reelection campaign:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks — on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but [brief dramatic pause] Fala does resent them.
You know — Fala's Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself — such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as [small chuckle] "indispensable." But I think I have a right to object to libelous statements about my dog.

I'm just hoping Bachmann really slips one of these days and attacks Bo.

The blogger's lament

2010-11-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

The Internet is a humbling place. On the one hand, one can reach gazillions of readers at the speed of light. On the other hand, one doesn't, since all of those readers are occupied looking at dirty pictures, posting comments in all capital letters for greater emphasis, or viewing the YouTube video consisting, in its entirety, of an overweight guy in a white T-shirt sitting on his tractor and digging a post hole with a tractor-mounted post-hole digger (40,000 views to date).

The other thing those readers are probably doing is writing their own blogs (I recently read that approximately 40% of all Koreans have their own blog, a great many of them devoted largely to pictures of things they've eaten at restaurants), or staring at the array of statistical displays, graphs, and maps with flashing dots that bear no small resemblance to NORAD's command center deep under a mountain in the Colorado Rockies, except that they're available for free, showing how many readers at that exact instant are reading their blogs, along with which words and phrases they have copied, and where in the world they are located. (Who is that person in Torre Di Mosto, Italy, who's reading this now? And, more important, why?)

I've actually enjoyed my experimental plunge into the blogosphere to date, largely because, as H. L. Mencken said of this kind of essay-writing (even if he may have been lying through his teeth when he said it, as Russell Baker suggests in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books), "My one purpose in writing I have explained over and over again: it is simply to provide a kind of katharsis for my own thoughts. They worry me until they are set forth in words."

On the other hand, I can see all too clearly where this is all heading; here is an informative graph tracing one writer's career trajectory, past and future (note the logarithmic scale):

History and secrecy

2010-11-04T13:06:00.002-04:00

I have posted over at the "News and Reviews" section of my author website the text of my invited lecture to the National Security Agency last spring about secrecy and intelligence history. (It will also be published in issue 25.6 of the journal Intelligence and National Security, which explains the funny British punctuation.)

I basically argue that the continuing, excessive secrecy surrounding Cold War signals intelligence and cryptology is bad not only for history but for intelligence itself.

You could hear the sound of one hand clapping at the end of my talk.

Come the revolution . . .

2010-11-03T13:45:00.001-04:00

Well, finally — and at a cost of only $4 billion — the American people have succeeded in selecting who will represent them in Washington for two whole years.

Since 1855, a house of Congress has changed political hands 34 times. I have little doubt that each of those 34 times, the newly victorious party has characterized the vote as a mandate for change and a rebuke to the previous incumbents' misguided ways.

For some reason, however, only Republicans seem to describe such victories (Reagan in 1980, Gingrich in 1994, Boehner in 2010, e.g.) as "revolutions," "historic," "monumental" (well, actually that was how Glenn Beck described his own achievements in contributing to the GOP victory yesterday), or (as the ever-eloquent Sarah Palin put it) "a big darn deal."

(Yes, I went back and looked at how Democrats and the media described the 2006 midterm election, in which Democrats wrested control of both the House and Senate away from the Republicans, and there was plenty of talk about a "message of change," but nothing about a "revolution" or anything close.)

Some of this rhetorical excess reflects the extraordinary success of the GOPs' spin campaign in casting themselves as the perpetual outsiders storming the citadel of establishment power (the "liberal elites" who run things, you will recall). But some of it I've always thought is a kind of subtle reverse-bias effect of the "liberal mainstream media," which treats Democratic victories as simply what is to be expected (even, as in 2006, when the Republicans had held control of both houses for 12 years), while GOP gains are shocking, amazing, surprising, and newsworthy, in the category of man-bites-dog.

It would be idle to deny that the Republicans succeeded in crafting a message that hit home with a majority of those who showed up at the polls yesterday. But I wonder if we could possibly be spared the hyperbole in describing the significance of an event that occurs on average every 5 years in American political history. And if it's a "revolution" when one house changes political hands (leaving the other house and the presidency in the hands of the opposing party), what term should we use to describe it when one party sweeps two, or even all three?

We just don't call them "enemies"

2010-11-02T14:01:00.002-04:00

John Boehner has been making much rhetorical hay on the campaign trail out of President Obama's urging Hispanic voters to punish their political "enemies" and support their "friends." (Boehner professed to be shocked that "today we have a president who uses the word 'enemy' for fellow citizens." Gee, didn't some American president use that term once before about fellow citizens — and follow it up by having their offices burglarized, their phones tapped, and their IRS returns audited? Well, that's so yesterday, I suppose.)

It's clear that Obama spoke carelessly; he meant to say "opponents." The Republicans, however, have made it clear that whatever they call the guys who are less than 100% with them, those guys are enemies: a story in the Washington Post today cites top GOP leaders relishing the opportunity they may soon have to punish corporations such as Wal-Mart that strayed from the fold by deigning to work with the Democratic administration on legislation such as health-care reform and an increase in the minimum wage. (Boehner, for one, sent a letter to the pharmaceutical industry association chastising them for "cutting a deal with a bully.")

Well, I suppose that will be a "new tone in Washington" in one way.

By the way, being a committed crowdophobe I declined to follow the more intrepid member of my household to Jon Stewart's rally on the Mall on Sunday, which was just as well as I saw and heard more (i.e., anything) watching a few snatches at home than those who were there in person. Pictures of the many signs on display at the rally have been posted around the Net, and while a lot I admit struck me as too clever by half (or too self-consciously absurdist), there were a few absolute zingers. My favorite making a real point was the one that read:

NO ONE LIKES

PAYING TAXES

What makes

you so special?

And there were two riffs off Christine O'Donnell that deserve at least an honorable mention:

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL

TURNED ME INTO A NEWT

and:

I MASTURBATE

AND I VOTE

Beating a dead passenger pigeon

2010-11-02T14:01:00.000-04:00

I don't mean to turn this into Steve Budiansky's Debunking the Species–Area Curve Blog, but my post the other day on species-extinction alarmism has provided yet another opportunity (as if I needed one) to prove the theorem that it is impossible to raise even the mildest questions about the scientific methodology used to generate predictions of imminent ecological doom without being told that:

(a) You are a shill for corporate interests
(b) You lack the qualifications to discuss the issue
or
(c) You are not truly passionate about saving the planet

For the record, I think we should be doing a lot more to save endangered species from extinction. I also think we ought to be doing the things that are actually likely to achieve that objective, and not harm the cause by overstating the case with sweeping predictions based on mathematically and scientifically dubious methodologies. (And as I mentioned in another post the other day, why is it always the ecologists — but never the nuclear physicists, mathematicians, linguistic theorists, astronomers, Wittgensteinian philosophers — who tell me I may not write about their field because I lack the qualifications? I'm pretty sure than ecology is not as hard as any of those other subjects.)

Anyone who has actually read the definitive review article* on the methodological basis for the oft-repeated predictions of mass extinction would have legitimate reason to be dubious about the way the so-called "species–area relation" (or "curve" or "effect") has been employed to generate these scary scenarios.

The history, briefly told, is this: Biologists back in the 1960s and '70s looked at islands and found that the bigger the island, the greater the number of species. They then tried to fit the relationship they had found between area and number of species mathematically, using an extraordinarily simple-minded formula.

The next step was where the real trouble began: conservation biologists took this extraordinarily simple-minded descriptive statistical tool and had the bright idea of using it as a predictive tool for what happens to the number of species when a habitat (such as a tropical rainforest) is shrunk in size.

It was never intended to be used this way; it is not a mathematical formula that in any way models cause and effect of extinction processes; and indeed the definitive review article I mentioned cautions against using it this way for several reasons:

1. The statistical association between species number and area is likely a "correlation . . . without a functional relationship." Just because two variables tend to vary together does not mean one is causing the other to vary.

2. Only one-half the variation in species number from one unperturbed island to another can even be accounted for statistically by variations in area, meaning that other factors besides habitat area are at least as important in determining species abundance.

3. The species-area curve tends to generate impossibly large species numbers when extrapolated to larger areas, raising doubts as to its realism even as a valid description of biological reality.

4. The parameters in the species-area formula have no biological significance; in other words, they are just fudge factors in a cookie-cutter formula that does not (as any true mathematical model must) incorporate a cause and effect understanding of mechanism.

Vernon Heywood, a well-respected plant biologist, made this point as well in a rare critical review. I've quoted him before but I'll quote him again for the simple reason that I have never seen any of the propagators of the predictions of mass extinction acknowledge, confront, discuss, address, deal rationally with his key point:

"The species–area curve (in a mainland situation) is nothing more than a self-evident fact: that as one enlarges an area, it comes to encompass the geographical ranges of more species. The danger comes when this is extrapolated backwards, and it is assumed that by reducing the size of a forest, it will lose species according to the same gradient."

As Heywood then went on to point out, there are many reasons why this is not going to happen: species are not distributed at random, conservation measures are already protecting many critical habitats, many species can adapt to other habitats as the original forests are cut down, and preservation of even small bits of critical habitat (ecological "hotspots") may be enough to save many endangered species.

We know that a few species a year are being killed off by human action. The tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of species that we keep reading about — the mass extinctions, the catastrophes of unprecedented magnitude — all come from a remarkably bad bit of bad theoretical science. And you don't need a Ph.D. in ecology to see that there's a problem here, both with the misuse of scientific methodologies and with the politicization of the subject.

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* Connor, E.F. & McCoy, E.D. The statistics and biology of the species-area relationship. Am. Nat. 113, 791–833 (1979)

Two cheers for hypocrisy

2010-11-01T09:17:00.001-04:00

Apologists for the role that money plays in American elections often point out that this is nothing new; the only difference between today and a supposedly more idealistic and virtuous past was that politicians were more hypocritical in the old days: they kept the smoke-filled rooms and money bags hidden out of sight from polite company.

There's some truth to that; if you read the memoirs of the New Dealers, for example, you encounter plenty of political wheeling and dealing and party fund raising. The fiction that the crass business of politics did not exist was so much a part of the American ethos that to call a president a politician used to be an insult. Of course America's greatest presidents were politicians to the core even as they were great statesmen and leaders; Lincoln understood and played the game as well as anyone, and I always liked the anecdote about FDR who would sometimes make the point to visitors that he was a roll-up-his shirtsleeves politician with the best of 'em by having them draw a line across the map of the United States, and he would proceed to reel off the name of every county it passed through.

And yet, the very fact that money was kept hidden had the salutary effect of making it possible for politicians on occasion to rise above politics. If you have to profess to be idealistically motivated, there is of course much bluster and cant. But once in a while it can also shame you into doing the right thing.

In today's climate, by contrast, politics have become almost about nothing but the process of politics itself. What used to be an unseemly necessity, a means to an end, is now exalted as an end in itself. Political reporters cover the cynical strategizing and competing campaign coffers as if that were the central story. The once anonymous backroom guys who did the dirty work are now celebrated and profiled and admired for the cleverness of their cynical handiwork of attack ads and the campaign jujitsu moves they innovate, and above all for the money they haul in.

It is not just that money talks; money so dominates the proceedings these days that no one else can get a word in edgewise. I remember first grasping this back in the 1990s while perusing the infamous diaries of Bob Packwood, the senator from Oregon who resigned after he was revealed (as Time aptly put it) to be "a letch, lush, and liar." Five thousand pages of the senator's own diaries had been turned over to the Senate Ethics Committee as part of their investigation, and when the documents were made public everyone else in town was eagerly gleaning them for the salacious tidbits. But what I found myself transfixed by was not the sex but the money. The sex was here and there; the money was day in and day out. It's no exaggeration to say that every waking moment of Bob Packwood's life as a United States senator — and I am sure it was no different for any of his 99 colleagues — was spent thinking about money, finding money, worrying about money, raising money. There wasn't one morning, afternoon, or evening that was not devoted to arranging fundraisers, attending fundraisers, speculating about possible future fundraisers; every meal, every trip, every phone call was an opportunity to haul in some more cash.

And this was not just an election-year phenomenon: it was full time, all the time. The first thing a newly elected legislator does upon arriving in Washington is to start raising money for his reelection.

When you read the accounts of the New Dealers it was manifest that politics was important and interesting and exciting; it was also manifest that it was never but a means to an end. Agree with them or not, they came to Washington to do something and to accomplish something; they spent a lot of time arguing about what was best for the country (hell, if you listent to the Nixon tapes, even Nixon for god's sake spent a lot of time discussing what was best for the country, in between obstructing justice, suborning perjury, and ordering burglaries).

Today a politician's politician like Mitch McConnell doesn't even have to pretend that he's in Washington to accomplish anything, except win. "The single most important thing we want to achieve . . ." he began the other day — was, what? bring the war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion? reduce wasteful spending on pork barrel projects? place Social Security on a sound fiscal footing? inspire Americans to serve their country? safeguard individual liberties? make educational opportunities more widely available? reduce the terrible debt we keep hearing about, even?

No, the "single most important" goal that the Republican party hopes to achieve as a result of its expected electoral gains tomorrow, the Senate GOP leader declared without an apparent blush, "is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Oh, at times like this for a little hypocritical decency. The problem with money in politics is not so much that it buys elections, or even politicians' votes; the problem is it has bought our soul.

A kind word for a kind horse

2010-10-30T10:45:00.001-04:00

By this point in an election campaign we are all probably ready to think of other things, so a small pause in our journey through this vale of political tears to say a kind word about a being who was mercifully free of worrying about tax policy, tea partiers, Newt Gingrich's presidential ambitions, or Joe Miller's campaign promise to secure our borders the way communist East Germany secured hers. (I have been reminded lately, anyway, of Tom Lehrer's remark from a similar time a while ago — that the friends who kept pressing him to come up with new funny political satires made him feel, under the circumstances, like a resident of Pompeii asked to offer amusing observations about lava.)

The explanations offered by the hewers of prose for the deep hold that animals can have on our affections come mostly in two unsatisfactory varieties, soppy sentimentality (glops about "unconditional love") or reductionist biology (diagrams of oxytocin and hormone receptors). Neither are entirely wrong, but for me these have always seemed to be at the wrong level of explanation: they're not incorrect, they just miss the point.

The melancholy duty of putting down my old horse yesterday reminded me of this again. I don't think I'm being sentimental when I say he was a kind and gentle soul; as he lay in the field yesterday morning, unable to rise to his legs for the first time in his twenty-eight years, he seemed to take it with quiet resignation, nickering softly to me when I came up to him, something he almost never did in his galloping and jumping days.

But it was the feel of his mind, and his quiet and slightly strange presence that somehow radiated through the farm and my life, whose absence now I feel the sharpest. I went hunting this morning for a passage from Leonard Woolf's memoirs that I vaguely remembered; he is the only writer I know of who has ever come even close to capturing the feeling I am trying to describe, and so I will just let him say it for me:

I do not know why I am so fond of animals. They give me the greatest pleasure both emotionally and intellectually. I get deep affection for cats and dogs, and indeed for almost every kind of animal which I have kept. But I also derive very great pleasure from understanding them, their emotions and their minds. They are, too, as I have said, usually amazingly beautiful. I was always condemned by Lytton [Strachey] on this account for being sentimental and many people, particularly intellectuals, would agree with him. I daresay that to some extent they are right. . . .

But I think there is also something more to it. If you really understand an animal so that he gets to trust you completely and, within his limits, understands you, there grows up between you an affection of purity and simplicity which seems to me peculiarly satisfactory. There is also a cosmic strangeness about animals which always fascinates me and gives to my affection for them a mysterious depth or background.

I'll miss Natch's cosmic strangeness. He was a horse without guile or malice; would that man could say as much.

Natch (and his owner) in their energetic youth

So . . . who's out of touch?

2010-10-28T08:09:00.001-04:00

The New York Times's resident conservative columnist David Brooks is usually thoughtful, independent-minded, and original. But every once in a while the transmitter Karl Rove implanted in his brain goes off and he delivers the latest pre-recorded message from GOP Central. This time it was another rendition of the Republicans' generic pseudo-anti-"elitism" shtick I wrote about in a recent post. Brooks's take was to assert that when Democrats point out that the GOP has nominated some first-class flakes this year (Christine O'Donnell, Carl Paladino) or that Republicans have engaged in despicable demagoguery over health care ("death panels," "government take-over"), the Democrats are actually just indulging their psychological need to "feel superior."

So remember: if you nominate flakes or engage in demagoguery, it says more about your opponents than yourself.

Meanwhile, one of the "out of touch" members of the highly educated, East Coast dwelling, intermarying "New Elite" that right-wing think-tanker Charles Murray warned us about in his Washington Post piece has written to the paper one of the gentlest kick-em-in-the nuts replies I have had the pleasure to see in print in ages:

I am one of the brides mentioned in Charles Murray's commentary — the "consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MPP)" who married "a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA)." But Mr. Murray used a faulty example to characterize his New Elite.

He failed to recognize the host of ways the populations attending "elite" educational institutions have changed as society has shifted. I grew up as a Muslim in American suburbs, with immigrant parents who worked their way up the corporate ladder and speak of biases they faced because of skin color or accent. I never attended a private American school while growing up, but I did live in Pakistan for two years during high school. In American public schools, I was awarded some money by the Rotary Club and even got elected Key Club secretary. I didn't watch TV. I took no luxurious domestic vacations with my parents.

I left Harvard to work with Bangladeshi women whose faces have been burned with acid. Having lived and worked with those less fortunate than I and having experienced South Asia, I hardly feel that I am out of touch with humanity.

I look forward not to the genes that my children will "double" but to the richness of vicarious experiences that they may get when I tell them about my experiences abroad or their grandparents' first days in America. The supposed New Elite isn't a monolith, and it may even be a force for change.

Samira Khan, Boston

Species extinctions and question begging

2010-10-27T10:02:00.001-04:00

In the "it must be true because I said it myself" department comes a new "study" in Science on the species-extinction crisis authored by 174 conservation biologists who looked at their own list of species they considered to be threatened and concluded from this that many species are threatened.

As I noted in a previous post, the whole science behind the extinction crisis is riddled with circular reasoning, but this is an especially fine example. No new research was involved, no field studies, no nothing that involved actual science as we know it. (The researchers for example concluded that habitat loss is one of the "root causes" of global biodiversity loss; this conclusion was derived from the fact that many of the species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List were presumed to be threatened, and accordingly placed on the list in the first place, because of . . . habitat loss)

The timing of the paper is not coincidental; diplomats are currently meeting in Nagoya, Japan, to discuss new international agreements to protect biodiversity. Several of the co-authors of the Science paper offered the usual perfunctory quotations about the need to curtail human use of the earth's land and the exploitation of the developing countries as a source of food and timber; environmental groups are pressing for a pledge to place a quarter of the earth's land off-limits to human use.

Yet there is the striking fact that many parts of the earth (North America, coastal Brazil) have been heavily exploited for agriculture and logging for centuries with almost no species losses occurring; many species have shown that they can adapt to human-modified environments with aplomb. A priori there is no reason to believe that agriculture and species conservation are of necessity mutually incompatible goals. Other evidence suggests that focusing conservation measures on the relatively small number of "ecological hotspots" where highly endemic species are concentrated is a hugely more effective strategy than blanket, across-the board proscriptions fencing off vast portions of the planet.

And of course, if we really are serious about setting aside land for nature preserves, the most effective steps by far would be to support intensive research on new GM varieties of staple crops with higher yields, more disease and insect resistance, and higher nutrient content so that more people can be fed on fewer acres; discourage land-gobbling organic farming; and above all unequivocally endorse the intensive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which more than any other single technology has spared land from the plow. (But it's far easier to bemoan mankind's "disconnection from the natural world.")

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By the way, in my earlier post on extinction alarmism, I made the point that exaggerated warnings of impending doom and politicized science "is already causing a dangerous political backlash that has handed ammunition (exactly as in the case of global warming) to those who want to reject any and all evidence of human impacts on the natural environment," to which one reader complained that I was inventing a "straw man." He obviously has not met the American "tea party" and its evangelical Christian wing in particular, which are inhabited by plenty of flesh and blood examples, such as the West Virginia electrician interviewed by the New York Times who declared that it was impossible for burning of coal to cause any trouble for the earth since God "made this earth for us to utilize," or the founder of an Indiana tea party group who similarly asserted, “Being a strong Christian, I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”

George Washington (what an elitist)

2010-10-26T16:06:00.002-04:00

If you're looking for elitists in American politics, nobody but nobody beats the Founding Fathers.

The framers of the Constitution feared the people as much as they feared monarchical tyranny. Much of the machinery of the Constitution was engineered not only to ensure stability and order against the passions of the moment, but to protect a distinctly elitist and ranked view of society that most of us find literally incomprehensible today.

To Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and their fellow pro-constitutional Federalists, it was self-evident that there existed a natural social hierarchy — and that within that hierarchy only "gentlemen" possessed the disinterest, wisdom, sense of honor, and virtue to engage in political affairs. "There must be rulers and subjects, masters and servants, rich and poor," the historian Gordon Wood quotes a Boston minister in a typical formulation of this view. The challenge that the framers spent a great deal of time worrying over was how to ensure that a government which respected popular sovereignty through the electoral process would elect to high office only members of the proper ruling class.

Hamilton, who had risen from illegitimate birth and poverty to wealth and power, was as firm a believer in the social hierarchy as any; individuals might move through the ranks through natural ability but the ranks were immutable, and had to be respected in any civilized society. Even as rabid a republican as Jefferson privately spoke of a "natural aristocracy." Some were destined to lead, others to obey.

The electoral college, the indirect election of senators, life appointments for judges, as well as the considerable property requirements maintained by most states for voting, all reinforced the object of restricting office to the "legitimate" ruling class. Adams — who once declared that the distinction between gentlemen and commoners was the "most ancient and universal of all Divisions of People" — conceived of the Senate as a direct parallel to the British House of Lords, maintaining the interests of the gentry as a counterweight to the common people's representatives in the House of Representatives. And as for President Washington, to say he lacked the common-man touch was about like saying Christine O'Donnell is a little bit strange or John McCain owns a few houses: Washington hated to be touched, made his birthday a national holiday in the manner of sitting English kings, would turn a withering imperious stare on anyone who he felt did not show due respect, and thought ordinary people (such "as compose the bulk of an Army," whom he had come to know as commander-in-chief in the Revolution) were by nature incapable of acting in other than selfish private interest.

Behind all of this were several remarkably obnoxiously elitist ideas, from our modern perspective. One was that only men of wealth and leisure could be expected to possess the natural nobility and personal honor to rise above crass self-interest and be fit for public service.

Another was that there existed an identifiable and immutable class of the privileged few, largely defined by birth, family, independent wealth, dress, manners, and established social status, who had a natural right to rule — even in a republic.

The republican backlash that Jefferson rode to the presidency in 1800 understandably rebelled against these "aristocrats" who "fancy themselves to have a right to pre-eminence in everything," as one republican politician put it. To the horror of the Federalists, the legislatures of the post-Revolutionary generation were filled with an influx of "middling" men — small farmers, mechanics, tavern owners, who unabashedly ran for office (rather than affecting an attitude of reluctantly being summoned to public duty), who brashly declared themselves just as good men as those who put on airs of gentility, and who returned in full the contempt of the Federalists toward their supposed inferiors.

So far so good. The idea that ability depended upon birth or class or wealth or airs of gentility was and is obnoxious to American core beliefs.

But the Jeffersonian republicans went much further in their democratic zeal, and at times almost seemed to take the view that ability didn't depend even upon ability — dismissing specialized knowledge such as the law as just another tool of aristocratic domination, dismissing college education as useless "book-learning." As I noted the other day, the republicans exalted popular opinion over formal qualifications or professional competence to the extent that virtually every office in many localities became elective — sheriffs, judges, and militia captains included.

Amid all of this, the republican attitude toward education was distinctly schizophrenic. On the one hand there was a widespread belief that, as one essayist of the time put it, "the throne of tyranny is founded on ignorance," and that if ordinary men were to exercise the privilege of self-government they needed to share in "wisdom and knowledge."

On the other, there was the continuing association of learning, especially university education, as the privilege of the hated elite. And indeed, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the other colleges of the young republic were "supposed to train only gentlemen," as Gordon Wood notes. So even as they called for widespread public education, the Jeffersonian republicans were much given to insisting that, for example, (as Jefferson himself once put it) a ploughman was just as likely as a "professor of moral philosophy" to offer the correct answer on a question of ethics. Not only did one not need to wear lace ruffles, silk stockings, and powdered wigs to hold valid political opinions; one did not even need knowledge: the instinct for virtue was innate in all men.

Fast forward 200 years, and we have the phenomenon of conservatives hurling the epithet "elitist" as a universal term of abuse at their liberal opponents. In a particularly fatuous essay in the Washington Post on Sunday, the conservative think-tanker Charles Murray (famous for his 1994 book on race and IQ, The Bell Curve) defended this favorite accusation of Sarah Palin et al., by explaining that because the better-educated people in the country tend to live in certain places (the East and West Coasts, plus a few colonial outposts such as the Research Triangle of North Carolina), marry each other, send their children in turn to the better universities, watch "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" instead of "Oprah" and "The Price is Right" on television, and read real books rather than Harlequin romances and the "Left Behind" Christian novels, they constitute a "New Elite" that "real Americans" like Sarah Palin are right to disdain for their superior airs and being "out of touch."

Of course the slight flaw in this argument is that unlike the real elitists who founded our nation 200 years ago, today's "New Elitists" do not view political power as the exclusive purview of one social class; do not want to limit voting or office holding to people who dress in a certain way or have a certain level of independent wealth; do not believe in restricting admission to colleges, including the most prestigious, to the sons of "gentlemen" only. In fact the only substantive difference between the "New Elite" and "real Americans" as Murray, Palin, et al. define it is (a) they tend to be more politically liberal (and thus, by the way, actually less interested in telling other people how to live their lives than is the religious right) and (b) they tend to be better educated. (It is even possible that (b) is the proximate cause of (a). And it is no more surprising that people who went to the same colleges or who work in the same line of work tend to marry one another than it is that people who go to the same bars or churches or sports events do.)

Leaving aside the contention that "the real America" is an accurate term for the one-third of the population who live in small towns, work blue collar jobs, and go to church regularly, I'd be the first to acknowledge that there is much that is virtuous and admirable in the values of small communities, the skills and satisfactions of manual work, and in the compassion and decency that is a part of (some) religious practice. I'd also like to be the first to add that there is nothing particularly virtuous about commercial, tawdry, and badly written escapist women's fiction, exploitive television, or ignorance. (Nor, for that matter, in such other characteristics of the "real America" as its higher rates of drug addiction, divorce, spouse and child abuse, obesity, gun violence, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, false disability claims, and illiteracy as compared to the "New Elite.")

Ironically, it is conservatives who are the first to scream at the idea that standards or qualifications are being compromised in the name of affirmative action or "political correctness"; yet when liberals dare to suggest that, frankly, you might ought to know something (or even read a book or two, including one by someone you might disagree with) before you shoot your mouth off about economic policy, immigration reform, or foreign affairs, that is "liberal elitism." I agree with Thomas Jefferson that the ploughman probably is as wise as the professor of moral philosophy when it comes to basic principles of right and wrong. At the same time I am extremely glad that the people charged with making decisions about our financial system know much more about finance (and the gold standard) than Glenn Beck does, that the people in command of our foreign policy and military know much more about foreign policy and military affairs than Sarah Palin does, and that judges before they are given the power to relieve a citizen of his liberty or rule on the constitutionality of acts of the legislature have had to spend three hard years studying the law and many more practicing it.

That's not elitism: that's standards.

And that's why even an unabashed elitist like George Washington could (in his famous Farewell Address) say of all the rest of us in a democracy :

Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

A man of principles

2010-10-24T09:37:00.001-04:00

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) is one many GOP leaders who have been endeavoring to make "stimulus" as dirty a word as "bailout" and "takeover." (Which is interesting itself, since the bailout and takeover of the banks was done at the behest of the George W. Bush administration, before the election, in October 2008, and was supported by 91 Republican representatives and 34 Republican senators including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell — the same Mitch McConnell who had the chutzpah to go on TV recently railing against the bank takeover as a prime example of the "extreme" government that the radical Obama administration has brought to the land of liberty. At least McConnell wasn't as blatant as Rush Limbaugh's revisionism; "chutzpah" doesn't even begin to do justice to Limbaugh's big-lie fabrication that "not one Republican voted for the TARP bailout.")

Sessions was on TV the other day, too, where he went so far as to claim that the 2009 stimulus bill — the $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act — "has created not only unemployment, but the big circumstance with the debt that we’re dealing with." Not that that stopped Sessions himself from soliciting $81 million under the Act for a road and rail project in his district, or from arguing (in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood) that the project "will create jobs" — and, yes, "stimulate the economy."

Asked about this small contradiction in his political philosophy, Sessions explained it as a question of his principled opposition to Democratic policy, apparently redefining the term to mean "opposed to in theory, as distinct from practice." Sessions said:

"What I have not done is allow my strong, principled objection to the bill to prevent me from asking federal agencies for their full consideration of critical infrastructure and competitive grant projects for North Texas when asked to do so by my constituents."

No wonder they lost

2010-10-22T09:20:00.000-04:00

(Incidental knowledge picked up while researching a book on the War of 1812.) Actual names of Royal Navy vessels from the Napoleonic and War of 1812 era:

HMS Cherub (sloop of war)
HMS Primrose (brig)
HMS Frolic (brig)
HMS Nymphe (frigate)
HMS Eclair (brig)
HMS Opossum (brig)
HMS Clinker (gun brig)
HMS Catch Up a Little (tender)
HMS Adonis (schooner)
HMS Pickle (schooner)
HMS Fairy (brig)
HMS Biter (gun brig)

I think you meant a thorn branch

2010-10-20T08:32:00.000-04:00

Human foibles are universal but there is a particular kind of sanctimonious arrogance that only the truly devout rise to. Virginia Thomas's bizarre phone message to Anita Hill the other day offered a fine specimen of the genre:

Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.

That was pretty good, but what elevated it to the ranks of the great was Ms. Thomas's subsequent explanation: that she was "extending an olive branch" to Ms. Hill, and "that offer still stands." A small prize will be awarded to anyone who can detect an "offer" anywhere in this message, much less an olive branch.

But my soul is pure

2010-10-19T10:49:00.001-04:00

Carl Paladino, the very angry Republican tea party candidate for governor of New York, managed to go 72 hours last week without making an offensive remark or threatening to take out a reporter, which may be a new record. (Though his fellow tea partier Joe Miller, running for U.S. Senate in Alaska, had his private security guards grab and handcuff for 30 minutes a reporter who tried to question him about his reported misuse of his government office for political activities when he was an Alaska county attorney in 2008. Miller indignantly explained that he had already made clear he would not answer questions about his "personal life.")

Paladino's spate of good behavior was apparently prompted by growing signs of public disaffection with his wild-man persona in general (a new New York Times poll puts him at 24 percent) and his anti-gay remarks in particular, which he delivered a week ago to the brief acclaim of the very anti-gay Yehuda Levin, the kind of Orthodox rabbi who appears to be trying his best to give anti-semitism a good name. After being hailed by Levin for reading a script that Levin himself provided (in which Paladio ominously warned that children are being "brainwashed" into thinking homsexuality is acceptable), Paladino offered the standard "some of my best friends are . . ." and "the press misinterpreted and misstated my views" non-apology apology. That prompted the rabbi (whose metaphors seem a bit out of date) to denounce his erstwhile hero for having "folded like a cheap camera" to the "gay agenda."

Actually, though, Paladino was arguably following a well-worn strategy of calibrated cynicism that has been employed for decades by conservative politicians in their courting of the bigot vote. The formula is to play to popular hatreds with well-recognized code phrases (or not-so-code phrases) but then to turn around and express outrage at the suggestion that one is bigoted oneself. (Paladino in his original speech angrily said it would be "a dastardly lie" to "misquote" him as being in any way antihomosexual.)

Taking it one step further, the practitioners of this art often suggest that it is their critics who are the real bigots. Glenn Beck of course is the master of this, combining the racist appeal and the self-immunization in a single thought, notably when he declared that President Obama has "exposed himself as a guy with a deep-deated hatred for white people." Similarly, conservative columnists and think-tankers regularly offer up the analysis that it is a "liberal myth" that conservatives have ever appealed to the racist vote, and that it is liberals who are "playing the race card" when they try to point out the racial political game conservative politicians are playing. (Similarly, when liberals mention that Republican tax proposals will transfer $700 billion over the next 10 years to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, that is fomenting "class warfare"; and, as I wrote about in my book about the white terrorist violence in the Reconstruction South, whenever progressives decried the assassinations and beatings of African Americans who attempted to exercise their right to vote in the years after the Civil War, that was "waving the bloody shirt.")

The Washington Post ran a recent specimen of this genre by a University of Virginia political scientist who asserted that it was, yes, a liberal myth that the Republican Party ever courted the white racist vote as part of a "Southern Strategy," and that the shift from Democratic to Republican party affiliation among white Southerners in the 1950s and 1960s was purely a phenomenon of growing income and other long-term, slowly evolving cultural and economic factors. Now, I should be clear that I am not in any way arguing that all conservatives are or were bigots. Barry Goldwater's 1964 candidacy perfectly encapsulated the postwar GOP coalition of traditional pro-business Republicans, anti-communist foreign-policy conservatives (who would come to include the disaffected neocons), and social conservatives. But there is no denying that the last group was a powerful force in the South, that race was at the forefront of Southern white social conservatism, and that Goldwater and other Republican leaders unabashedly appealed to the white conservative racist vote after seeing an opportunity created by Lyndon Johnson's historic support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is shown vividly by the votes in the presidential elections during these years. The swing from overwhelmingly Democratic in 1956 to overhwlemingly Republican in 1964 in the Southern states was breathtakingly abrupt. And to those who would try to argue it was not about race, it is instructive to also consider 1968, when George Wallace's unabashedly racist-tinged third-party campaign garnered as vast a chunk of the deep-South vote as did Goldwater four years earlier — so much for long-term demographic shifts toward the Republican economic agenda:

Wallace is an interesting study himself on this point. He began politics as a New Deal Democrat and largely retained his progressive economic views throughout his career, championing the "underdog" and programs for the poor. But after his first unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama in 1958 — when he was called the worst thing a politician could be called in those years in the South, namely a "moderate" on racial issues — Wallace knew that the only path to political success was by appealing to the white racist vote. His opponent, John Patterson, had run an openly racist campaign in which he declared his steadfast opposition to any "mixing" of the races and earned the backing of Ku Klux Klan. When it was over Wallace said to his campaign aide Seymore Trammell, "Seymore, do you know why I lost? I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again."

Running for president in 1968, Wallace became adept at playing both sides of the street in the classic manner, throwing red meat to white Southern racists while cloaking it enough deniability to soften his appeal elsewhere; thus like Strom Thurmond (who carried four deep-South states in 1948 as the candidate of the segregationist "States Rights Democratic Party" and who switched to the GOP in 1963), he would couch his opposition to school integration as a stand against communism or big government or for "states rights."

Liberals have subtly enabled the politics of coded racial appeal by making racism and other bigotry into a personal moral issue — a question of the content of one's soul. You could make a respectable argument in fact that neither Goldwater nor even Wallace or Thurmond were racists in their hearts. But they shamelessly played racial politics, and they and their political heirs rode to considerable electoral success on that cynical strategy of appealing to the worst in the hearts of others. I have mentioned before the essay by my state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Linwood Holton, who lamented the fact that when faced in the 1960s with the chance to take the high road — and put together what Holton argued in fact could have been an unstoppable coalition of pro-business voters, moderates, and African Americans — the GOP instead took the low road by, as Goldwater himself notoriously put it, appealing to the disaffected conservative racist vote in the South on the theory that "you go hunting where the ducks are."

The GOP is still shamelessly playing this game, though now the ducks include right-wing hatreds for gays and Muslims in addition to the more traditional racial enmities.

Card-carrying experts

2010-10-18T09:13:00.002-04:00

There has been a lively discussion on the H-WAR list over the past few days about whether journalists "ruin" military history.

H-WAR is one of 100 or so interactive discussion lists on the H-NET website devoted to various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, and it's downright lousy with academics — members of that professional guild that as a rule guards its turf more assiduously than a moose in mating season. True to form, a few of the card-carrying certified PhD authorized expert historians who weighed in offered the standard supercilious assessment of mere writers who attempt to venture into their rarefied precincts:

far too often journalists produce shoddy, sloppy work. . . The real danger is that too often journalists create a narrative of the event that gets seared into public memory, usually an inaccurate, simplistic narrative. This then becomes the dominant narrative that historians struggle to overcome and reverse, rarely with much success.

But it was striking that this view was very much in the minority; much more typical was what another PhD military historian, one who teaches at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, had to say:

Journalists who venture to write history, or more specifically military history, have — on the whole — done the reading public a huge favor. Their biggest assets are their rather finely honed investigative techniques and instincts along with a real ability to communicate in writing. . . . I for one am glad to have journalists involved — they not only provide the framework for further analysis but they are often the larger reading public's conduit into military history.

This actually follows very closely a rule that I have observed for some time. I have written as a journalist about a wide range of topics over the years, and almost without fail, the more technical, difficult, specialized, recondite the field, the more its practitioners welcome "outsider" non-specialists writing about it. Within the sciences and social sciences, the subatomic physicists, engineers, and linguists have been unfailingly encouraging and polite and generous and full of praise for the result; the cell biologists and geneticists somewhere in the middle; the ecologists and psychologists hands down the worst.

Likewise, in my forays into writing history, the professional historians who dealt with more technical matters like intelligence, codebreaking, and to an only slightly lesser extent military history have uniformly treated me like a colleague from the start. (Dick Hallion, the U.S. Air Force's chief historian — a PhD historian and author of many well-regarded books on aviation and military history — went out of his way to pooh-pooh the very idea that there was anything terribly hard about his field; he airily assured me it would take me "six months" to get up to speed on the literature. He also could not have been more kind, helpful, and supportive to somebody who basically just showed up on his doorstep naively announcing he planned to write a book covering the entire history of a subject that Hallion himself had devoted his entire professional life to studying.)

The Tudor historians I ran into while writing my book on Sir Francis Walsingham were a distinctly mixed crowd, some being warily helpful and others unmistakably hostile; the most clannish and condescending (and in some cases downright insulting) by far were the American and Southern historians.

Some of this of course is that practitioners of obscure disciplines are just so happy anyone notices their existence at all that they are thrilled with the attention and the company. But much more I suspect is simple protectionism: the nuclear physicists know that a popularizer is no threat to their livelihood. The more a field is open to anyone who can read and write plain English, the more its professional occupiers take refuge in credentialism and mystification to hold their fort.

Different kinds of capital

2010-10-16T10:39:00.000-04:00

My friend Matt Ridley has an interesting discussion on his Rational Optimist blog about whether we owe modern prosperity to the accumulation and amassing of capital over generations or to the bursts of innovation that allow each successive generation to produce more at lower cost. The "innovators" appear to win the debate hands down over the "accumulators," which I think is another reinforcement of the point I made the other day about inherited wealth. A rational and prosperous society is one that encourages and rewards the accumulation and bequest of wisdom, not cash, from each generation to the next.

Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and other fellow travelers

2010-10-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.

With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."

The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic."

Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent" — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."

Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for the "idle rich" and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.''

In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism." I'm not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.

I'm being oppressed

2010-10-13T08:18:00.000-04:00

Ever since I can remember, companies that disliked having to obey environmental, safety, and truth in advertising laws, and wealthy individuals who disliked paying taxes on their inheritances and unearned incomes, have found it helpful to express their dislikes as courageous stands for liberty and individual rights against the tyrannical oppression of the state. Washington think tanks supported by corporations and rich guys, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have been working for decades to give this traditional agenda of corporations and rich guys an intellectual gloss of libertarian philosophy.

But it's always been just about money. When pressed for specific examples of government oppressiveness that is interfering with liberty, prosperity, and entrepreneurial innovation, they either start mumbling about "excess paperwork requirements" or retreat into Reaganesque panegyrics to free enterprise.

Even people who should know better have bought into the portrait of Ronald Reagan as a latter-day Tom Paine who struck a blow for liberty by unleashing American competitiveness and innovation from the oppressions of burdensome government restrictions. But in fact all Reagan really did to the political economy was to accelerate the massive transfer of income from labor to capital and from the middle class to the wealthy that has marked the last three decades, and to institutionalize the Republican Party's intellectual disconnect between rhetoric and reality on balanced budgets. And as for American private prosperity as a whole, the Bill Clinton years (which gave us a budget surplus along with higher taxes that — had they not been promptly dismantled by W. — would have placed us on a course to pay off the entire Federal debt and also place Social Security on a sound footing) were marked by a faster and more sustained growth in U.S. GDP than any other period in modern history, including the Reagan era; for the record here is a chart (click to enlarge) using the official data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis:

Real U.S. GDP (billions of 2005 dollars)

More entries in the Herbert Hoover look-alike contest

2010-10-12T09:46:00.001-04:00

We tend to forget that Herbert Hoover was once unremitting in his scorn for the "idle rich," thought inherited wealth was practically sinful, favored steeply graduated income taxes and estate taxes "for the deliberate purpose of disintegrating large fortunes," and frequently decried the unfair distribution of income between capital and labor.

What we remember him for is his unfeeling disregard for the suffering of those who lost jobs, homes, and farms in the Depression. So did the voters, who did not again elect a Republican to the White House for another 20 years, and who gave the GOP a majority in the House only twice in the following 60 years.

Today's Republicans have done a remarkable job of trying to sound like the heartless Herbert Hoover. It can't be because it's good politics; it must be because they can't help themselves. A whole line of GOP candidates have been insisting this year, for example, that unemployment is the product of lazy workers. Rep. Steve King of Iowa explained that he was against extending unemployment benefits because "we shouldn't turn the 'safety net' into a hammock." Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, said that "continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work." And Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota denounced aid to the states to prevent hundreds of thousands of teachers from being laid off as a "bailout," as did the House minority leader and Speaker apparent John Boehner.

All of those statements are remarkably close in substance to actual Herbert Hoover quotes from 1931 and 1932. But where the Republicans manage to quote Hoover almost (and in several cases literally) word for word is in the line "we can't squander ourselves into prosperity." Last week Boehner again reprised this bit of Hooveresque wisdom, declaring “the greatest threat to job creation in our country is the flawed idea that we can tax, spend and borrow our way to prosperity.’’

The alternative, as the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell explained, is to cut taxes on the rich — "the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it." This, of course, is a reprise of the Reagan-era "supply-side" fantasy that economic growth is determined by how much stuff we can make, and not by the trivial question of whether anyone is willing and able to buy it. An interesting measure of the validity of this concept was just provided by a report that with interest rates hovering near zero percent, companies have been borrowing huge amounts — some $1.6 trillion — and sitting on the money (after all, it might come in handy . . .). What the private sector is not doing with its ready access to cash and credit is to build plants, buy goods and services, and hire workers.

The concept of the government stepping in to borrow and actually spend money in such a situation of economic stagnation is not complicated. As Abraham Lincoln remarked (okay, perhaps apocryphally) of his do-nothing general of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, during the Civil War, "If General McClellan is not using his army, I should like to borrow it for some time."

Bad cases, bad law

2010-10-11T10:24:00.001-04:00

It is both a strength and a weakness of the American political system that so much energy is expended on matters of principle. Other nations tend to find this admirable, humorous, inspiring, irritating, or all of the above. During the negotiations following the end of World War I, the French premier Georges Clemenceau was repeatedly driven to distraction by Woodrow Wilson and his high-minded notions on how to refashion the world for good; Clemenceau remarked that he could deal with Woodrow's aide Colonel House, who was a practical man and who seemed to understand how to cut a deal, but that talking to Wilson was "like talking to Jesus Christ."

Part of the appeal of invoking great principles in politics, of course, is that it invests a dirty or mundane business with lofty purpose and high drama; it doubtless feels better to declare that one is fighting to uphold liberty and great constitutional principles than to admit that one just wants to retain one's slaves, pay less taxes, or wrest away various colonial possessions from Spain (to cite a few examples from American history). The ever-reliable Ambrose Bierce defined politics as "A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."

But it was actually a definition a few lines down in The Devil's Dictionary that I found myself contemplating in connection with the American tendency to invest political battles with great consequence:

Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

On issues as diverse as animal rights, gun control, user fees for national forests, and local zoning ordinances, I've seen people who did not really differ very much on practical grounds, and who might well have reached a pragmatic compromise on substance, engage in take-no-prisoners battles royal over their competing underlying ideologies. The more an issue becomes a proxy for a contest of fundamental belief, the more each party digs in its heels — and the louder each becomes.

Contests over principle in fact tend to be fought over trivial or grotesque matters at the farthest frontier precisely because they are seen as establishing bulwarks against encroachment at the core; thus the NRA insists that there will be no gun rights at all if guns are banned in bars and schools; thus the ACLU defends the free expression of Nazis and pornographers to safeguard the free speech rights of sane and decent people.

The case heard last week by the Supreme Court in which members of the fringe (that's the polite term) Westboro Baptist Church invoked their First Amendment right to tell the families of dead soldiers how happy they are that God killed their sons as punishment for the military's supposed tolerance for homosexuality ("God hates fags" explains one of their frequently seen picket-line signs) is a perfect illustration. The New York Times and other journalistic organizations filed a friend of the court brief arguing that as "lamentable" as the church's utterances are, "it is in the interests of the nation" (as the Times editorialized) that political speech be protected, and warning of the "chilling consequences" if a monetary damage awarded against the church to the family of one soldier were upheld.

But a refusal to acknowledge reasonable exceptions to a principle can be damaging to the principle too. I've often found my fellow journalists to be doctrinaire to the point of pomposity — and to the point of endangering the very principles they claim to be defending — on matters of press freedom. One of the worst recent instances was the fall-on-their swords defense of confidential sources in the Valerie Plame matter. It would have been one thing if the confidential source had been a courageous whistle-blower exposing wrongdoing at the peril of his job; but instead it was a government hack issuing Roveian spin and using anonymity as mere political deniability. The only effect of all of the high-minded words about the role of the press in a free society that were spilled in the course of the affair was to make reporters look like a bunch of patsies.

By the same token, I am deeply skeptical that it does much to bolster freedom of speech to invoke that principle in the case of the deliberately confrontational picketing of soldiers' funerals by the Westboro Baptist Church. Those actions fall much more in the category of a common breach of the peace than anything deserving of the sweeping legal protection of a blanket immunity. As the father who sued the church said, “If the law can’t help us and the courts won’t do something, someone is going to take this into his own hands.”

Accepting exceptions and even occasional inconsistencies in the application of principles is a sign not only of maturity and wisdom but arguably philosophical necessity. Our instinctive commitment as rational beings is to the idea that we can develop perfectly consistent and logical systems of rules in law, mathematics, and other supposedly rational endeavors, and we have almost a horror of inconsistency as a betrayal not only of principle but of rationality itself. But a few years ago I read a fascinating book by the philosopher Robert Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, which explored among other things Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on games with inconsistent and incomplete rules; one of the striking conclusions is that in both formal systems and everyday life, we routinely get along just fine with logical systems that lack complete and consistent rules for dealing with the extreme and rare cases. Moreover, trying to build a system that can cover every conceivable case turns out to be literally impossible.

We'd be better off sometimes if we temper our passion for rigid principle with humility about life's complexity and even absurdity; or if we remember the wisdom of that great philosopher Lord Peter Wimsey, who observed, "The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody."