March 16, 2007
More on 24 III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST I confess to having never seen 24. I don’t even know what network it’s on. And having read the descriptions of the show by Messrs. Burns and Smoler, I think I’ll take a pass, thank you. Watching people—even unspeakably bad people—being tortured does not strike me as an entertaining way to pass an evening hour. Naturally, this does not stop me from having a few comments. First, I think Pat Buchanan has about as much influence in American politics today as my cat (who has a much pleasanter persona, although the local rodent population would probably beg to differ). Buchanan reached his peak in 1992—half a generation ago—when he did his best to sabotage the reelection campaign of the first President Bush in his speech at the Republican convention that year. Today he is just a largely forgotten Looney Tune on the right and therefore of interest only to people on the left who would like to think that he’s a significant figure. He’s not. I have no doubt that the average American voter today couldn’t even tell you who he is. Second, torture. I don’t know much about it, but I’m pretty sure that Hollywood torture and real-world torture are two different things. I remember the famous scene in Goldfinger where James Bond is strapped down on a saw table, moving steadily in the direction of a rapidly spinning circular saw blade. “Do you expect me to talk?” the ever-unflappable Bond asks. “No, Mr. Bond,” says Goldfinger. “I expect you to die.” Goldfinger then decided for reasons I can’t remember not to kill him, which ultimately proved, of course, to be a big mistake. In the real world, I suspect there is less drama and more results. My guess is that there are very, very few James Bonds in the real world, i.e., everyone talks when tortured. The question is the quality of the information obtained, for the object of torture will say whatever he thinks is most likely to make the pain stop. If it’s a confession to a heinous crime that’s wanted, regardless of the truth, then confession is what is produced. If it’s truth that’s wanted, however, then truth is what is forthcoming. So torture is worthless as an instrument of justice, but very efficacious when it comes to intelligence gathering. Certainly Sir Francis Walsingham found it useful in protecting Queen Elizabeth from Catholic conspirators. And the Elizabethan Jesuits, et al., were a bunch of boy scouts compared to our enemies today, as revealed in the blood-chilling statements made the other day by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. I hate to put in a good word for torture, but if the torture of someone who is proud to have held Daniel Pearl’s severed head in his hands can save a planeload or a city of innocents, then, alas, so be it. Third, Mr. Smoler writes, “In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule.” This seems to me to be nothing but a paranoid fantasy of the Looney Tunes left, à la Oliver Stone. Half a century ago the conspiracy mongers tended to be on the right, with Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society finding Communists lurking behind every bureaucratic door. Today they are on the left, getting all bent out of shape about such things as the Trilateral Commission, whatever that is. Of course, conspiracies of this sort are nonexistent outside television and the movies. Conspiracies, after all, require absolute secrecy while they are hatching, and as Benjamin Franklin explained nearly three centuries ago, “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” If there is one country in the world where democracy is secure it is the United States. The reason for that is that probably 99 percent of the population are committed democrats, and the one percent who are not are utterly marginalized, off in Pat Buchanan and Cindy Sheehan land.
March 15, 2007
More on 24 II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:55 PM EST Alexander Burns notes that Joel Surnow, the executive producer of 24, is described in The New Yorker as an isolationist with no faith in nation-building, is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted, and thinks we should have replaced Saddam Hussein with “some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line.” He thinks 24’s politics can be described as rightist in the manner of Pat Buchanan’s politics, writing that “where neoconservative Republicans and liberal internationalists alike favor an expanded international role for the United States, Surnow apparently would prefer a more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy,” and that “on the one hand, 24 presents the United States as a nation under siege by terrorists, requiring all possible means of self-defense in order to beat back the barbarians at the gates. On the other hand, the show depicts an America profoundly threatened by the machinations of big business, the arms industry, and irrationally militaristic government officials. This rendering of the United States may not be in line with the conservatism of George W. Bush, but it is a conservative rendition all the same.” I have some reservations about this argument. 24 plot arcs almost invariably go like this: Terrorists (Muslims, Serbian nationalists, or Mexican drug lords) acquire weapons of mass destruction and threaten American civilians, and will at one point descend into a subterranean labyrinth while retaining possession of a polished metal cylinder. Attempts to defeat these terrorists are sometimes obstructed by weedy civil libertarians, but the always infallible method of torture is employed first against the terrorists, then against U.S. officials who are members of the rightist cabal that has indirectly supplied the terrorists with WMD. These U.S. officials are themselves advocates of the more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy that Surnow would apparently prefer, yet they are clearly villains. They do not have what Pat Buchanan takes to be Israel-centered dual loyalties, or any ideals about exporting democracy, and with one belated exception, they do not have economic motives. They are authoritarian imperialists, but both their imperialism and their contempt for legalism are driven only by their understanding of the imperatives of national security. In 24, legalism must be defeated when it obstructs the torture of terrorists, but it must be vindicated by defeating the cabal, and each series sees first the triumph over one form of legalism and then the successful defense of that different form of legalism (the President’s authority must always be vindicated against the machinations of unelected officials). I don’t think the domestic villains of 24 descend from Pat Buchanan’s despised neoconservatives or liberal internationalists; they rather seem to have wandered in from a dog-eared copy of Seven Days in May. They are the sort of villains liberals enjoy thinking villainous—I know I do—although since remarkably few American conservatives champion covert coups against our own government in the interest of national security, the villains are probably widely detested on all sides. These villains have no obvious analogs in real U.S. politics (Latin America, Asia, and Europe have not been so fortunate). On the wisdom of foreign military adventures 24 is generally silent. Some of the show’s terrorists want to punish what they describe as American arrogance and interventionism—arguably a crypto-Buchananite position, but also one associated with various Left tropes—but it is not clear that we are meant to sympathize with their grievances. The show’s heroes are always loyal to the elected President, unless he turns out to have murdered his predecessor. So I am still not sure 24’s politics taken in toto conform to any existing American conservative template. I carelessly used the word “rightist” in the post to which Mr. Burns has responded, and while thinking through the perhaps less than urgent topic of 24’s politics, it occurs to me that I should probably remember that the terms “right” and “left,” which originally denoted seating patterns in the eighteenth-century French Estates General, have little if any fixed content. Defending a threatened Republic against obscurantist enemies, and doing so by any means necessary, was once a left position. Covertly or overtly rooting for the victory of viciously illiberal misogynist homophobes over the soldiers of a liberal democracy is nowadays not unknown on the left, although some rightists also take such a position. So I am a little embarrassed to have used the word “rightist” about 24, which I enjoy but find hard to take too seriously (I am pretty confident that this last is also true of Mr. Burns). I think the New Yorker article, which does take 24’s politics seriously, may be making a mistake in assuming that 24’s torture fetish will significantly affect public debate or private judgment, not least because 24’s pleasures do not include brilliant realism. This year, within a few hours of the season premiere, the show’s hero was torturing his own brother. I find it difficult to imagine any viewer for whom the effect was other than Grand Guignol.
March 15, 2007
More on 24 Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:55 PM EST As a fellow 24 fan, I was excited to read Fred Smoler’s post yesterday, “24 and the Politics of Popular Culture.” He writes about a recent New Yorker piece on the show and asks: “Is 24 a ‘rightist’ show? While everything [New Yorker writer Jane] Mayer says about 24’s depiction of torture is true, the series has other recurring themes. In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule.” Mr. Smoler’s is a question that I have contemplated as well. I agree with his argument that it’s too easy to caricature the show’s politics. At the same time, I’d add that the New Yorker article actually goes a long way toward clarifying just what those politics are. Toward the end of the article, Jane Mayer gives a quick rundown of producer Joel Surnow’s political views: dislikes welfare, resents liberal courts, likes Reagan, hates Carter, etc. Then Mayer adds: “Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An ‘isolationist’ with ‘no faith in nation-building,’ he thinks that ‘we could have been out of this thing three years ago.’” Surnow’s political profile is clearly that of a rightist, but his views on foreign affairs are distinctly out of step with those of the Bush administration. Surnow believes, according to Mayer, that we ought to have replaced Saddam Hussein with “some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line.” Where neoconservative Republicans and liberal internationalists alike favor an expanded international role for the United States, Surnow apparently would prefer a more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy. This makes sense, in the context of Mr. Smoler’s description of the show. On the one hand, 24 presents the United States as a nation under siege by terrorists, requiring all possible means of self-defense in order to beat back the barbarians at the gates. On the other hand, the show depicts an America profoundly threatened by the machinations of big business, the arms industry, and irrationally militaristic government officials. This rendering of the United States may not be in line with the conservatism of George W. Bush, but it is a conservative rendition all the same. On March 3, Mr. Smoler discussed the influence of Gerald P. Nye’s Senate Munitions Committee on another piece of popular culture, The Plainsman. In 24, it appears that Nye’s fears about belligerent businesses have been resurrected. I’m not sure what Nye would have thought about torture, but I imagine he’d be very sympathetic to Surnow’s warnings about government conspiracies and the profit motive for war. 24 tries hard to mix up the standard political labels of the present day. In the third season, for example, an incumbent Democratic president loses the endorsement of the AFL-CIO to his Republican challenger. In real life, that’s about as likely as a successful recombinant DNA experiment of the type Mr. Smoler’s post mentions. Despite the show’s best efforts to evade ideological labels, however, Surnow’s views come through all the same, and I think “rightist” is a safe label to apply to them. It certainly isn’t the rightism of Paul Wolfowitz, but it is an awful lot like that of Pat Buchanan. Unlike Pat Buchanan, though, 24 sure is fun to watch.
March 15, 2007
Barack Obama and Peter Pace Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST As a follow-up to my last post, and in the interest of fairness: When asked whether he agreed with General Peter Pace that homosexuality is immoral, Sen. Barack Obama replied: “I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters. That’s probably a good tradition to follow. . . . I think the question here is whether somebody is willing to sacrifice for their country, should they be able to if they’re doing all the things that should be done.” Not quite worthy of Profiles in Courage.
March 14, 2007
Hillary Clinton and Peter Pace Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:55 PM EST It’s fashionable in many political and academic circles to take a dim view of John F. Kennedy, whose media-made image as a Camelot knight in shining armor almost demanded an over-correction. In the years since his assassination and apotheosis, JFK has undergone substantial historical revision. He now comes across as a man who was as glib as he was poignant, and as cynical as he was idealistic. Certainly in the realm of civil rights, he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, earned low marks for their tepid response to the great moral problem of their day. In the first installment of his three-volume study of the postwar civil rights movement, Taylor Branch paints a picture of a young President who was more concerned with preserving the peace than promoting racial justice. Thus in 1961 the Kennedys brokered a deal with Mississippi state authorities by which Freedom Riders would be peaceably arrested upon crossing into the magnolia state, even though they were fully within their constitutional rights (as per a Supreme Court decision) to demand the integration of facilities servicing interstate bus passengers. But people have the capacity to grow. During the darkest days of the Birmingham campaign, John Kennedy admitted that newspaper images of black schoolchildren being attacked by police dogs made him “sick.” On June 11, after two and a half years of steady procrastination, Kennedy took to the airwaves to demand a comprehensive civil rights act barring segregation in places of public accommodation and in the workplace. Just minutes before his live broadcast, the President received the finished draft of his speech. He made extensive edits and ultimately ended up extemporizing—on live TV—what was arguably his finest public address. Referring to the events in Birmingham, Kennedy said, “I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. . . . It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. . . . It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case. . . . We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. “The heart of the question,” he continued, “is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” Forty-four years later, it is dispiriting, to say the least, that one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to have absorbed not a single word of Kennedy’s historic and influential address. When asked whether she agreed with Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently declared that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Sen. Hillary Clinton responded that it was a matter for “others to conclude.” I’m all for crediting John Kennedy with intellectual and moral growth. The same applies to his brother, Robert Kennedy, who failed miserably at promoting civil rights during his tenure as attorney general, but who emerged as an important and deeply compassionate champion of racial minorities and the poor in the short time he had left in this life. So how much leeway should we afford Hillary Clinton? She has been a United States senator for more than six years. She has been in public life for well over two decades. She is 59 years old. How much more time does she need to get right with history, and with the scripture she claims to hold dear? John Kennedy spoke of nothing less than the Golden Rule. Surely, Senator Clinton understands this. “The heart of the question,” John Kennedy affirmed, “is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Substitute “gay” for “black,” and we are grappling with the same question today. Hillary Clinton’s answer is unsatisfactory. It is unbecoming of the junior senator from New York State, and altogether inadequate for someone who wishes to carry the Democratic party’s standard in the next presidential election.
March 14, 2007
Jack Ruby Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:00 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the conviction of Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and that is the subject of today’s lead piece on this website. Jack Ruby is also the source of one of my few disagreements with the editor of this magazine, who some years ago was very briefly but deeply interested to learn that a company founded by my grandfather was several times mentioned in testimony given to the Warren Commission. One of Jack Ruby’s associates, a salesman named George Senator, had lived with Ruby for five or six months in 1962 and had worked for my grandfather’s company for half a dozen years in the 1950s. Startled by this, my editor printed out a few hundred pages of Warren Commission testimony and dropped them off at my apartment. I made my way through part of this interminable document, and then packed it in. Nothing in it had shaken my conviction that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone, and George Senator seemed as dull as dishwater. My friend and editor, surprised by my perfect indifference to this connection to one of the great events of our childhood, seemed disappointed in my want of curiosity, and in consequence I began to feel a bit ashamed of myself. Since it is always more pleasurable to feel annoyed with someone else than with oneself, I called up my father, and asked him if it was true that he had once employed Jack Ruby’s roommate. Yes, it was. Had my father known this man? Yes, he had. Armed with these admissions, I pounced: Why had my father never mentioned these astonishing facts? My father briefly pondered this question. Well, he said, the man had never been much of a salesman.
March 14, 2007
24 and the Politics of Popular Culture Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Last month The New Yorker ran a longish article on Joel Surnow, cocreator and executive producer of the Fox television series 24. Vice President Cheney is apparently very fond of 24; Joel Surnow calls himself “a right wing nut-job”; and Jane Mayer, the author of the article, mostly reads 24 as ideology, as her title suggests—“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind ‘24.’” Her analysis centers on torture, noting that 24 depicts torture by American national security officials as omnipresent, absolutely necessary, and more or less infallible. The torture always occurs in the context of what is called a ticking-bomb scenario, when the person being tortured knows something that must be discovered within, at most, hours, in order to save vast number of civilian lives. On 24, this is almost always an imminent threat of a terrorist attack involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Ms. Mayer points out that it is not clear that a ticking bomb scenario has ever actually occurred, and she is disturbed by the fact that on 24 torture always works. The vital information is always given up more or less immediately. On her account 24 is an apology for some of most contested premises of the War on Terror. It repeatedly drums in the notion that we are in a situation of unprecedented danger, savage measures are clearly necessary, and we should let the administration get on with the job. I found myself thinking about that New Yorker article as I watched the latest episode of 24 in an airplane on Monday night. Is 24 a “rightist” show? While everything Mayer says about 24’s depiction of torture is true, the series has other recurring themes. In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule. These officials are invariably attempting to overthrow either the President or crucial portions of the Bill of Rights, and sometimes they aim to extend American imperial power over some portion of Central Asia, so as to control a crucial oil pipeline or provoke a war with one or another Muslim state. They have attempted various constitutional coups and have not scrupled at sterner measures. They have to date assassinated one American President, and last week they appeared to have critically wounded another. It may be interesting that the good and virtuous Presidents they seek to overthrow or murder are black, while the evil plotters are invariably white. The plotters act in the name of national security but are clearly villains, and are sometimes described, by their virtuous antagonists, as traitors. Sometimes the President is himself one of their number, sometimes the Vice President is in on the conspiracy, sometimes defense contractors are in on it too. One criminal President, who conspires at the murder of his heroic predecessor, looks and sounds like the result of a recombinant DNA project working with genetic feed stock from Richard Nixon and Orin Hatch, and is a fundamentalist Christian. This is not a traditionally conservative conception of the Bush administration. My sense is that 24 is less a consistent ideological argument than an updated version of The Perils of Pauline, with about as much political import as the original. It is perhaps mildly interesting that people on the right enjoy imagining that the government is on the verge of a happily unsuccessful fascist coup, as do people on the left, at least when they are watching television. This probably means nothing much. After all, many Americans enjoy reading novels about their cities being infested with vampires and have watched television series based on that premise. 24’s endlessly reiterated defenses of torture does not seem to have had much effect. After three or more years of them, the revelations about Abu Ghraib produced widespread revulsion in both the public at large and within crucial elements of the Republican party, and the American military and the courts remain aggressively hostile to arguments in defense of torture. It is no doubt a bad thing that 24 consistently defends torture, although I am not sure it is such a good thing that 24 repeatedly asserts that the government is riddled with fascist traitors. It may be interesting that the first sin attracts some critical attention, and the second, as far as I can tell, none at all. One thing seems clear: If you are going to analyze the politics of a work of popular culture, you probably ought to take on the whole of the available evidence.
March 13, 2007
MacArthur’s War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:55 AM EST The editor of this magazine sent me a galley of a soon-to-be-published novel of alternate history, Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson’s MacArthur’s War, and I read it in a Chicago hotel room. MacArthur’s War is not, I think, particularly interesting, but it is, in its way, very sensible, and in one respect instructive. Niles and Dobson’s point of departure is the battle of Midway, where against all odds the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers for the loss of one of our own. Japan lost the initiative and would never recover it. Niles and Dobson create a tiny change—the Japanese cruiser Tone in our history was late in launching a scout plane, with fateful results, but here the Tone’s catapult is repaired in time to launch that scout, which duly finds Admiral Spruance’s TF 16. The result is that the Japanese sink two U.S. carriers and lose only one of their own. This is quite plausible, and in the world imagined there is a great but also intriguingly limited effect: Nimitz’s prestige being damaged, MacArthur manages to wrest control of the Pacific War from Admiral King. Niles and Dobson also make a second and quite independent change in our history: A crucial experiment at Los Alamos goes wrong in September of 1944, killing three important scientists and delaying U.S. production of nuclear weapons. This, too, could certainly have happened. So the greatest American naval victory vanishes, as does our greatest feat of military research and development. What are the results? In the long run, almost none that much matter. Niles and Dobson see MacArthur as a brilliant general with a repellant character and think his plans for defeating Japan were in some respects better than Admiral King’s. In real history, we advanced on two separate axes in the Pacific, because the Army and the Navy came close to waging parallel wars against Japan. In this altered world, MacArthur is in a position to invade the Japanese home islands in March of 1945, and has taken fewer casualties than we suffered historically (he does not invade Iwo Jima or Saipan, or feel the need to control the worst terrain on Okinawa, etc.). But the casualties we take in Operation Downfall, the invasion of Kyushu, only planned in our history but actually executed in this one, are horrific. With no atomic bombs, the U.S. launches incendiary raids on Hiroshima that seem to kill at least as many as died historically in the first nuclear attack. Human suffering is not significantly reduced by the non-appearance of nuclear weapons in 1945, nor is history much changed. Nuclear weapons are eventually invented anyway in this world, in 1956, and MacArthur, rather than Dewey, loses the presidency to Truman in 1948. There is nothing implausible about Niles and Dobson’s alterations of history, nor in the consequences they allow to flow from their first alterations, but the implication is that when an antagonist is as terribly outweighed by its opponent as Japan was outweighed by us, and as crippled by gross irrationality, something much like the historical outcome is inevitable. Fascinating and sometimes deeply disturbing alternate histories depict worlds eerily but plausibly different from our own, can give a disorienting sense of contingency, and can sometimes persuade us of the profound importance of a specific moment, when everything might have turned out very differently indeed. Niles and Dodson have instead successfully communicated a sense of one historical moment’s mass and inertia. Japan’s leaders assumed that Americans would lose their will for a fight if victory could be made sufficiently expensive and its prospect sufficiently delayed. This sort of thinking has been a good calculation of likely American behavior on other occasions, and may be again, and soon, but it was not a particularly likely outcome in the 1940s. The consequence is good history but a less-than-diverting novel, because this is a milk-and-water approach to writing alternate history. The genre works best when it grossly unsettles, and it can work well when it is furiously imaginative although merely playful. Working out just how differently the world might reasonably have been is most effectively done in a novel. Working out how overwhelmingly likely was the history that actually happened should be the subject of an essay, not a fiction.
March 12, 2007
Chicago II Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:15 AM EST Here is Rudyard Kipling enjoying himself in the city, which described as "inhabited by savages,” from his American Notes, published in 1891: “I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,
And all thy glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material.” I HAVE struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon. This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the “boss” town of America. I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was “the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty’s earth.” By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next country or state, he says, “God A’mighty’s earth.” This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity. Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a great horror. Except in London—and I have forgotten what London was like—I had never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot. A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices. He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations, and bid me watch the stream of traffic across the bridges. He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage. “Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door howling:—“For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me, and me only!” Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The other makes me ill. And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress. I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through scores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few hundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat through their noses. The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion required or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned out so many hundred thousand dollars’ worth of such and such an article; there so many million other things; this house was worth so many million dollars; that one so many million, more or less. It was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells. It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I should admire; and the utmost that I could say was:—“Are these things so? Then I am very sorry for you.” That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand. About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a cocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord should miss his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then, I should have been sorry for him. To-day I find eleven hundred thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in that they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies. Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different ways. In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a little scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less favored countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed. And that was on a Saturday night. Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all—a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design. To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond), and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the Judgment, and ran:—“No! I tell you God doesn’t do business that way.” He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it as daily life—his own and the life of his friends. Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular preacher. Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold and silver idols, his hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the sacred vessels, would count himself, spiritually, quite competent to send a mission to convert the Indians. All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again. One of them took me to their City Hall and Board of Trade works, and pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I saw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I felt that there had been a mistake in their billeting. By the way, ’Tis a consolation to feel that I am not writing to an English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of the great fire, to allude casually to the raising of the entire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before the golden calf. But you, who are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no account, know things, will understand when I write that they have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than Mahajans and not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after harvest. But I don’t think it was the blind hurry of the people, their argot, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate interests that displeased me so much as a study of the daily papers of Chicago. Imprimis, there was some sort of a dispute between New York and Chicago as to which town should give an exhibition of products to be hereafter holden, and through the medium of their more dignified journals the two cities were yahooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like opposition newsboys. They called it humor, but it sounded like something quite different. That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of the productions. Leading articles which include gems such as “Back of such and such a place,” or, “We noticed, Tuesday, such an event,” or, “don’t” for “does not,” are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in these papers were faithfully reproduced all the war-cries and “back-talk” of the Palmer House bar, the slang of the barber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman car porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that the paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe that the public educate the paper; yet suicides on the press are rare. Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what he called politics. I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a travelling-cap worth eighteen-pence, and he made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said that this was a rich country, and that the people liked to pay two hundred per cent, on the value of a thing. They could afford it. He said that the government imposed a protective duty of from ten to seventy per cent on foreign-made articles, and that the American manufacturer consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat would, with duty, cost two guineas. The American manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound fifteen. In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the effeteness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget that this people were a rich people, not like the pauper Continentals, and that they enjoyed paying duties. To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters. Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it would in England, and when native made is of inferior quality. Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might not produce things. This man said that if protection were abandoned, a tide of pauper labor would flood the country, and as I looked at his factory I thought how entirely better it was to have no labor of any kind whatever rather than face so horrible a future. Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys paying money for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen-penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated level a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten with the same sort of blindness. But my friend’s assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of Chicago. See now and judge! In the village of Isser Jang, on the road to Montgomery, there be four Changar women who winnow corn—some seventy bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun Dass, the money-lender, who on good security lends as much as five thousand rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, the smith, mends the village plows—some thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred and sixty-five days; and Hukm Chund, who is letter-writer and head of the little club under the travellers’ tree, generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the mid-wife have not yet made public property. Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bushels, a hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the year, and scores of factories turn out plow-gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers do work which Hukm Chund and the barber and the midwife perform, with due regard for public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. So far as manufactories go, the difference between Chicago on the lake, and Isser Jang on the Montgomery road, is one of degree only, and not of kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang, for all its seasonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago. Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor does Purun Dass fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd. The East is not the West, and these men must continue to deal with the machinery of life, and to call it progress. Their very preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam’s curse, by saying that such things dower a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. They do not say, “Free yourselves from your own slavery,” but rather, “If you can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of this world.” And they do not know what the things of this world are! I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing my head, which, as you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them about six miles from the city; and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight. As far as the eye can reach stretches a township of cattle-pens, cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which leads to an elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn—as they wait sometimes for days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of their fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold! that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and return no more. It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive. It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork un-barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was the mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state ere they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes travel. Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery under me. Also there was a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was blood-red. Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of things and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their hinder legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of death. Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and made promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in their backs and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats, and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red man, who was backed against the passage-wall, you will understand, stood clear of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently came forth at the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said “Hough, hough, hough!” and skelped all the hair off him, except what little a couple of men with knives could remove. Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and passed down the line of the twelve men, each man with a knife—losing with each man a certain amount of his individuality, which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and when he reached the last man he was very beautiful to behold, but excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been in case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his most cherished notions. The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying. They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such a one had ceased to foam on the floor, such another and four friends with him had shrieked and died. But a pig is only the unclean animal—the forbidden of the prophet.
March 11, 2007
Chicago Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST I am in Chicago, a town where my father was raised on and off, and which I barely know. What seems odd is that if you observe current American mass culture through popular culture and literature, I am not sure how much anyone else would know about Chicago either, and that seems a vast change from the way we used to imagine ourselves. When I was a kid, Chicago was more central. Called, originally slightingly, the second city, meaning second to New York, Chicago seemed the capital of an inland empire. Saul Bellow set novels here, as did Dreiser and Cather and a fair number of others. The sort of poetry schoolchildren remembered memorialized Chicago—it had spawned phrases like “hog butcher to the world” and “city of big shoulders”—and world revolution was supposed to triumph here: The Jungle ended, very memorably, with the stirring vow that “someday, Chicago will be ours. It was thus a hyper-modern and ultra-American city, more modern and in a sense more American than New York, which predated the Republic. The quintessential American architectural form, the skyscraper, was invented here, and approaching the city from its airport the spires rise above the plain like Oz. L. Frank Baum had lived in Chicago, and I think it shows. Or, more harshly, the city rises like Babylon, and one of the old stories we told ourselves was of the farm girls come to Chicago as to Babylon. There were contradictions to the images of Chicago. It was the promised land, one of the goals of the great migration out of the old South, and it was simultaneously a starkly and brutally segregated city. It was the city of a new kind of political order—the big city machine—and was simultaneously a place of violent anarchy, for it was the city where Dillinger was gunned down, and it was Al Capone’s city. A fantasy of Chicago made a vast impression on people like Bertholt Brecht, for whom it symbolized immensely violent capitalist energies. Chicago no longer seems to evoke that intense energy in the minds of foreigners, or for that matter for too many Americans, and we seem to have also lost the once more varied sense of its history as well. On that drive in from the airport it still rises up out of the fields where as child I was taught they otherwise raise only corn and the regiments, harder than hickory, that brought the jubilee. A decade or so ago, when the merits of displaying the Confederate battle flag were being debated in the House of Representatives, an Illinois congressman, I think from Chicago, observed with deceptive mildness that there was no harm in the practice, and that 20-odd rebel flags were indeed displayed in the Illinois statehouse, where he had once served. Asked to explain himself, he noted that they were battle trophies. It would be nice if we thought more about Chicago when we thought about who we are. Rather bizarrely, by the time I was a young man Chicago was conspicuously represented in popular culture only by one TV police show and by the teen comedies of John Hughes, and neither was too explicitly identified with Chicago. I suppose when we thought about ourselves in those days, we were reduced to two nations, and Chicago was a reasonable venue to serially dramatize that, in principle no different from someplace like Philadelphia.
March 11, 2007
The Libby Verdict VII Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:00 PM EST I’m hoping this post can act as a kind of concluding note, since this exchange has gone on for half a week now and has moved rather far afield from the initial topic of discussion, the Libby verdict. I’ve enjoyed this conversation, so let’s see if I can’t sum up my side of things in an evenhanded fashion. I think Mr. Gordon and I aren’t really disagreeing on much at this point, but we’re debating slightly different topics. It seems to me that Mr. Gordon is arguing about the powers and rights of the executive, whereas I’m more focused on the appropriate times and ways for the executive to exercise his prerogatives. On a purely legal level, Mr. Gordon’s approach is surely the more appropriate one. In the realm of politics, though, there are plenty of traditional constraints on the executive that don’t come from the law. One of those constraints, relevant to the discussion at hand, is the tradition of consulting with home-state senators before making U.S. attorney appointments. President Bush was not bound to do this by law, but he did it out of respect for the Senate. Indeed, it was due to the urgings of Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) was nominated for his day job as a U.S. attorney. To return to Mr. Gordon’s point, of course the President “can delegate as he pleases on the day after inauguration” and on every other day as well, but there are times when legally acceptable delegation disrupts the proper workings of the government, and thus undermines the national interest. I suspect we have an intractable disagreement on when these times would be. Second, Mr. Gordon writes: “I wonder if Mr. Burns isn’t begging the question here. To fire a U.S. attorney in order solely to impede a lawful investigation would be tantamount to an obstruction of justice, and no such thing has been shown, merely asserted.” I don’t believe I am begging the question. Something is not legally an obstruction of justice just because, on a moral level, it is “tantamount to an obstruction of justice,” and it’s not realistic to expect a case such as this one to result in such a charge. Mr. Gordon is right that the full evidence of this case has yet to emerge. From where I’m standing, though, the circumstantial evidence and the emerging testimony looks pretty grim. I’m not sure why President Bush “would invite so much additional trouble for so little possible gain,” but I think it’s worth noting that the man spent nearly all of his Presidency with a docile and cooperative Congress. The rigorous oversight we’re seeing now is a new development to which this White House is unaccustomed. Finally, Mr. Gordon writes that he is “happy to agree” that the Patriot Act should not have been abused politically, “provided Mr. Burns will agree that the Senate minority should not misuse Senate rules to prevent a timely up-or-down vote on presidential nominees.” The linkage between these two issues seems pretty weak to me, since U.S. attorneys have not been the focus of any controversy regarding Senate filibusters. In general I’d agree that the President’s nominees deserve votes in the Senate, just as the legislative majority’s bills generally deserve conclusive consideration by the full legislative body. I’m not so sure, though, that it’s a “misuse” of Senate rules for the minority to make the majority’s life difficult. Indeed, the Senate has historically been a much more collegial body than the House for the very reason that 60 votes are needed to get anything done. It’s only relatively recently, with the deepening acrimony of both houses of Congress, that the 60-vote threshold has become a source of total dysfunction.
March 11, 2007
More Historical Analogies Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Historical analogies, illuminating ones and less illuminating ones, have often featured on this blog. A pico-scandal in Germany bubbled up this week, for last Sunday German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke, touring the Holy Land, observed that “this morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” If the Israelis are using Ramallah as a holding pen while they make plans to gas and incinerate all of its inhabitants, and indeed all Palestinians everywhere Israel’s army can reach, there is nothing much wrong with this sly analogy. If that is not the Israeli plan, there may be a problem. As it happens, Bishop Hanke was not traveling on his own: he was part of a group of 27 members of the German Bishops Conference visiting Israel, and it turns out he was not the only German bishop with a flair for analogy. Crossing a checkpoint into East Jerusalem, the archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, informed reporters that “this is something that is done to animals, not people.” Meisner went on to opine that just as the Berlin Wall was brought down so this wall would be brought down, for walls separating Israeli and Palestinian territory served no purpose. While much can be said against the proposed route of Israeli-built barriers—for example, some of the proposed sections look like land grabs—the analogy between the two walls being the same in principle would be exemplary if West Germans had been crossing into East Germany and murdering large numbers of East German civilians, and if the German Democratic Republic’s main purpose in building the Berlin Wall had been to make those homicidal West Germans stop. If that was not the case, this analogy, too, looks problematic. If you do not like the tone of some anti-Israeli polemics, you are constantly warned against confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This warning is always very helpful, because the temptation to make that foolish mistake occurs more and more frequently these days. The notion that the Israelis are the new Nazis is peculiarly readily easily confused with anti-Semitism, but happily the German clerical authorities have helped us to understand that nothing like that occurred here. The head of the German Bishops Conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, subsequently decided that “in light of the painful reality of the separation fence some of the members of the delegation said harsh things, some of which were not appropriate.” Admirably stringent language, but it is hard to tell what, precisely, the Cardinal was talking about, for he also insisted that the Bishop Hanke had no intention to compare the past and the present, for “it is impossible to compare current problems with the murder of the Jewish people.” Here, I think, the cardinal underestimates Bishop Hanke, who may have been doing it with sublime idiocy, but it is impossible to miss the fact that he was indeed making the comparison. A more plausible defense would have been to suggest that we should not be too hard on Bishop Hanke, for other celebrated Germans have recently confused RAF Bomber Command with Auschwitz, the U.S. Eighth Air Force with Auschwitz, and Abu Ghraib with Auschwitz (this last, by the way, not in some sectarian pamphlet, but in the pages of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s great conservative newspaper). Bishop Hanke may not be in good company, but he is in quite a lot of company, and it is at least possible that his intention was less to impeach the Jews than to dilute the gravity of the charges against those who tried to exterminate them, by attributing comparable crimes to not only the Jews themselves but to the other historical actors who once seemed morally distinguishable from the people who ran Auschwitz.
March 10, 2007
The Libby Verdict VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST I’m glad that Alexander Burns likes my idea for handling politically sensitive cases in the federal government. It was a somewhat off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion, and, obviously, looking at how the various states have decided to handle such cases and picking the best ideas should be part of any attempt to reform the system. One of the greatest strengths of our federal system is that we have 51 laboratories in which to incubate good ideas (and expose bad ones). Mr. Burns writes, “The replacement of U.S. attorneys at the beginning of a President’s term is partly political, certainly, but it also has to do with the President’s right to delegate his authority as he pleases.” I’m afraid I don’t see why he can delegate as he pleases on the day after inauguration and not on other days. It seems to me that those who work for the executive branch are, with rare exceptions, either under the civil service system or they serve at the pleasure of the President, period. The President has the power—and thus the right—to fire those in the latter group whenever it suits him to do so. Of course he has to take any resulting political heat, which is a real constraint on his freedom of action. As Richard Nixon found out after the “Saturday Night Massacre,” that heat can be considerable to put it mildly. I believe—perhaps someone can confirm this—that the firing of Archibald Cox, et al., was when the term “firestorm” entered the American political lexicon. He writes, “Back to the case at hand. Even for the firings that were not intended to impede investigations . . .” I wonder if Mr. Burns isn’t begging the question here. To fire a U.S. attorney in order solely to impede a lawful investigation would be tantamount to an obstruction of justice, and no such thing has been shown, merely asserted. I note that Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, involved in one of these firings, has lawyered up, which might indicate some fire beneath all the usual smoke, but I find it hard to believe that President Bush—whose political capital at the moment is minuscule—would invite so much additional trouble for so little possible gain. He writes, “In a little-known provision of the Patriot Act, the President was granted the authority to install U.S. attorneys indefinitely and without Senate approval, in the case of a security emergency. . . . I hope he’ll agree, though, that a national security law should not be misused in such a political fashion.” I’m happy to agree with that, provided Mr. Burns will agree that the Senate minority should not misuse Senate rules to prevent a timely up-or-down vote on presidential nominees.
March 9, 2007
The Libby Verdict V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST I find John Steele Gordon’s latest post largely agreeable. When I wrote that I “understand why conservatives resent [Lawrence Walsh’s] investigation,” I was referring to the politically timed indictments that he mentions. Mr. Gordon’s proposal for a semiautonomous Office of Governmental Integrity within the Justice Department is not at all a bad one. There are such offices in many state justice departments—albeit not tailored exactly to Mr. Gordon’s suggestions—and they have done good work in the past. On the question of the fired U.S. attorneys, Mr. Gordon writes: “I’m not sure what is suspicious here. U.S. attorneys are not protected by civil service regulations. . . . The President can fire them for cause or for political reasons or because he does not like their taste in neckties.” This may be the case, but I think it’s a pretty well established principle that a prosecutor should not be fired for prosecuting the President’s political allies. The White House can legitimately fire a U.S. attorney in order to give another lawyer prosecutorial experience, but most of these latest firings in this case were not justified in that way. I also think Mr. Gordon somewhat oversimplifies the question of when and how U.S. attorneys have customarily been replaced. Mr. Gordon writes: “President Clinton fired every single U.S. attorney in the country (with the exception of Michael Chertoff in New Jersey, for whom Senator Bill Bradley interceded) as soon as he entered the White House. Why? To replace them with political allies, of course.” The replacement of U.S. attorneys at the beginning of a president’s term is partly political, certainly, but it also has to do with the President’s right to delegate his authority as he pleases. Because all the power in the executive branch flows from the office of the President, it is up to the President to decide which agents should be able to exercise that power. No one would suggest that a President should need specific cause to replace the cabinet or sub-cabinet of his predecessor. Similarly, there’s no reason why a President shouldn’t be able to delegate his legal powers to people of his choice. There are appropriate times and places for such delegation to take place, though, and I think it would be generally accepted that the middle of a second term, during politically sensitive investigations, would not be the right moment. Back to the case at hand. Even for the firings that were not intended to impede investigations, there is something highly suspicious about the conduct of the executive branch. In a little-known provision of the Patriot Act, the President was granted the authority to install U.S. attorneys indefinitely and without Senate approval, in the case of a security emergency. The Senate can eventually confirm his appointments, but there is no definite term of service—as there used to be—for an interim U.S. attorney. It was through this provision that the White House installed J. Timothy Griffin as U.S. attorney for Arkansas. I’m not sure what’s going on in Little Rock these days, but I’m pretty sure there’s no emergency of the kind anticipated by the Patriot Act. Again, Mr. Gordon is correct that U.S. attorneys can legitimately be appointed and replaced for political reasons. I hope he’ll agree, though, that a national security law should not be misused in such a political fashion.
March 9, 2007
That Persistent Buzz Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:40 AM EST The world’s laziest blogging technique is to post whatever idle thoughts pop into your head in reaction to whatever you happen to be reading or watching at the time. These days I’m the world’s laziest blogger, so that suits me fine. Anyway, the other day I was reading an S. J. Perelman piece from the early 1940s called “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Blend?,” in which a bakery magnate confronts his wastrel of a nephew. Perelman liked to salt his writing with slang terms, as can be seen in the magnate’s bitter complaint: “It’s a stench in the nostrils of the cup-cake trade—throwing away your guilders on fly chorus girls and driving your Stutz Bearcat in excess of sixty M.P.H.” That quote reminded me of a passage in my favorite O. Henry story, “The Moment of Victory,” which was first published in 1908. In it, a young man tries to impress a young woman and gets the age-old response: “‘Hello, Willie!’ says Myra. ‘What are you doing to yourself in the glass?’ “‘I’m trying to look fly,’ says Willie. “‘Well, you never could be fly,’ says Myra with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.” So here we have a slang term that goes back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt, was still alive at mid-century, continued to flourish in the 1970s (with Superfly, for example), and, according to my extensive contacts in the hip-hop world, is still a favorite of rappers today (as in “Cause I’m so fly / Ya eyes don’t lie,” from “U Know What It Is,” by Young Jeezy, and I’ll bet that’s the first time Young Jeezy has ever been cited on the American Heritage Blog). I thought the earlier uses might have had some connection with aviation, which was just getting started in O. Henry’s day and still carried an image of glamour in Perelman’s. (The O. Henry story takes place on the eve of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, but it could have been a mild anachronism.) Perhaps they did, but according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, “fly,” in the somewhat similar sense of “artful, knowing, shrewdly aware,” goes back to around 1810, with “U.S. fly dame, a harlot” dating at least to 1888. Of its derivation, Partridge writes: “Perhaps ex the difficulty of catching a fly [this would not explain the harlot — FS], more prob. cognate with fledge, fledged, as Sewel, 1766, indicates (W.); though Bee’s assertion that it is a corruption of fla, abbr. flash, is, considering the devices of c. [cant], not to be sneered at.” Wiping the nascent sneer off my face, I tried to think of another slang term that had accomplished the knife’s-edge feat of maintaining its rakish tone for a century without either falling into disuse or becoming mainstream. I couldn’t come up with anything, nor could I think of another example of white-to-black slang migration. It moves in the opposite direction all the time, of course, but how often does a term start out in the pages of Munsey’s and The New Yorker and end up being used as a mocking signifier of wannabe homeyness, as in the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”? (Actually, that would make perfect sense for today’s New Yorker, but not for 60-odd years ago.) Leafing through a book of obsolete slang like Partridge’s can be as depressing as walking through a graveyard: page after page of words and phrases that once were young and fresh and lively and important to lots of people, and now are buried deep in the cold, cold ground. Yet somehow “fly” has managed to escape this fate. Although there are too many birds and bees and insects swarming around this entry already, I will venture to say that this virtually unprecedented achievement qualifies “fly” to be known as the cockroach of linguistics.
March 9, 2007
The Libby Verdict IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that there are times when an administration should not be in charge of an investigation of governmental wrongdoing, especially when higher-ups in the administration itself or members of Congress are under a cloud. What I object to is appointing someone to function as a prosecutor with only one case and with unlimited resources and unlimited time with which to pursue that case. When such a prosecutor has to do his or her job under intense media and political scrutiny, the pressure to produce scalps can be overwhelming, almost regardless of the evidence, as can be the temptation to keep the investigation going for years in order to stay in the public eye. As someone said, if a man has only a hammer he is likely to find a lot of nails that need to be hit. Instead, I propose the following. Congress should establish, within the Justice Department, a permanent organization to be called, say, the Office of Governmental Integrity. The head of this office would hold the rank of an associate attorney general but would be appointed, like the head of the FBI, to a ten- year, non-renewable term. He could be fired only for cause. This office would handle automatically all cases involving government personnel above a certain level (say, Presidents, Vice Presidents, cabinet members, and members of Congress) and such other cases as the attorney general, on his own or at the direction of the President, should think proper. This would give the necessary appearance as well as reality of complete independence, and would also provide the same constraints that other federal prosecutors have, which is to say, finite (but adequate) resources and time, and more than one case to handle, limiting the tendency to become obsessed. This wouldn’t be a perfect solution (welcome to planet earth) but would be a vast improvement over the idea of a special prosecutor, which, as I said, has proved to be an awful idea. Two other points in reference to Mr. Burns’s post. He writes, “I don’t think Lawrence Walsh was an unmitigated disaster on the scale of Kenneth Starr, but I can understand why conservatives resent his investigation.” Iran-Contra needed to be investigated, but it didn’t require six years’ worth of investigation. I have it on good authority from several members of the legal profession who dealt with him in the past that Lawrence Walsh is a pretty loathsome individual, but that is neither here nor there. What I find unforgivable was his decision to issue indictments of Caspar Weinberger and others and to name George H. W. Bush as an unindicted co-conspirator on the Friday before the presidential election of 1992. The first President Bush was almost certainly political toast at that point anyway, but Walsh’s act was one of pure partisanship. There are no legitimate reasons he could not have issued those indictments two months earlier or five days later. Mr. Burns refers to the “suspicious dismissals of eight United States attorneys” recently. I’m not sure what is suspicious here. U.S. attorneys are not protected by civil service regulations but rather serve at the pleasure of the President, just as do cabinet and sub-cabinet members and White House staff. The President can fire them for cause or for political reasons or because he does not like their taste in neckties. Perhaps they should be under civil service, but that is an argument for another day. What I find amusing here is that the left is making a big deal out of this while trying their best to ignore some rather relevant history. The New York Times the other day editorialized that U.S. attorneys should only be subject to being replaced in office at the beginning of a presidential term. That means, I guess, that it’s okay to fire U.S. Attorneys for political reasons on January 21 of years following leap years but not any of the subsequent 1,460 days of a President’s term. Or perhaps the Times was hoping that no one would notice that President Bill Clinton fired every single U.S. attorney in the country (with the exception of Michael Chertoff in New Jersey, for whom Senator Bill Bradley interceded) as soon as he entered the White House. Why? To replace them with political allies, of course.
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