WordPlay - Language, Politics, and Meaning

A Parable About Nuclear Power

    [In the civilized chat room where I normally vent, there is an ongoing debate about the reality of global warming. I am not a person with clustered values - I very much believe that global warming is taking place, and, in consequence, it would be a good idea for the well being of mankind if it developed other energy sources besides burning biomass products. Can't hurt, anyway.

    At any rate, I am for that reason a big advocate of nuclear power. Though it is undeniable that there are serious problems with nuclear energy, my thought is that, like all novel technologies, solutions will develop as its use becomes widespread, i.e., is 'fully implemented'.  One of the other posters, a very witty and thoughtful guy, took me to task, noting that nuclear energy has been in use for over 50 years. Well, that is not the same thing in my view as full implementation. The following skit is my longer riposte.

---

[Scene I.

In another universe, far, far away. June, 1901. A committee room in Washington. Staffers, congresspersons, etc. No press, as this is only a routine meeting of the Department of Transportation. A lone individual sits, facing the Committee. Vice President Debs speaks.]

Debs: Mr. Ford, I regret to tell you that this Department simply cannot authorize funding for your proposal. There are just too many unanswered technological questions.

Ford: What do you mean? What questions?

Debs: Almost too many to address. But to name one, these horseless carriages of yours -

Ford: I prefer the term automobiles.

Debs (shrugging): Whatever - these 'automobiles', as you would have it, can carry only a limited fuel supply. Any trip beyond a few dozen miles is as a practical matter impossible. For this nation to make any serious investment in such vehicles -

Ford: I appreciate that, but I think as the number of automobiles increases, it is entirely possible that some business will see an opportunity in establishing fuel depots or stations of some sort.

(A rumbling guffaw goes through the room.)

Debs (smiling sympathetically): Please, Mr. Ford. These horseless - automobiles - have been with us for over a decade now. It is fully implemented and understood technology. There are over 5,000 of them in the nation. Do you see any sign of some vigorous business man pursuing the notion of fuel depots?

Ford: Well, no, but the installed base is so small that -

Debs: And where do you suppose such an entrepreneur would obtain the fuel for these mythical depots? You are not seriously suggesting that the petroleum producers will replace their kerosene business with refinery for this - ah - ah -ah -

Ford: 'Gasoline.'

(The chuckles grow louder.)

Debs (barely suppressing a giggle): Of course. Gasoline. So you think mythical oil refineries would come into existence as suppliers for these mythical fuel depots?

Ford: Yes. Possibly. If the demand grew big enough.

Debs: Then why don't they exist right now? Everyone knows what a horseless -

Ford: Automobile.

Debs: Whatever - automobile is. These machines have been around for years. If these issues can be resolved, why haven't they been?

Ford: Well, one reason may be is that the regulations of this department are so confining that -

Debs (sharply): I hope you are not showing contempt for this Department.

Ford (to himself): The chairman is, of course, entitled to hope.

Debs: What was that?

Ford: Nothing. I can see which way this is going.

Debs (now impatient): Well, I will leave you to the mythical depots and the mythical fuel. Even if they did exist, where could the cars drive? They are much heavier than ordinary buggies. They seriously rut roads and byways. It's a major concern.

Ford: Major cities have paved roads now. Perhaps smaller cities, and towns will do the same. Perhaps even between cities.

(A roar of laughter.)

Debs (joining in the hilarity): You are seriously suggesting  that this nation will see paved roads from coast to coast? In small municipalities  and country roads? Just to provide access for these horseless carriages of yours? Really, Mr. Ford!

Ford (wearily): Yes, really. Times change. Technology advances. Necessity actually is the mother of invention.

Debs: Well, like any other mother, it should have some idea of how the children will be raised before she births them. We haven't even discussed the design problems of your invention, the possibility of accident, collisions with other drivers, the narrowness of most alleys -

Ford: There is no need for that, Mr. Vice-President. As for the vehicle itself, I believe this is a good design, but of course improvements will be made as we obtain experience of the users. There is a lot of engineering that remains to be done. And as for the rest, I can envision an entire culture of signals, customs,, manners, etc - as

Debs: As these machines come into wider use. Of course. The problem, Mr. Ford, is that these machines have been in use for over a decade, and there is no sign of the emergence of any of this stuff. This Department is going to have to insist that you work out all the problems BEFORE any additional funds are expended. It is a reasonable request, Mr. Ford. There are profound questions of public safety involved here. We can't take any chances here, none at all.

Ford: I know there are dangers. There are always dangers. But has it occurred to you that this institutional myopia may cause more harm than it saves?

Debs (sharply): Enough.  You were close to contempt before.  The Committee has  no more time to waste on this nonsense.  If you are able to formulate solutions to all these issues, we might reconsider. But, like any sensible bureaucracy, we must see fully worked out solutions BEFORE we authorize substantial funding. Good day, Mr. Ford.

(Ford rises stiffly and leaves.)

Debs: God knows we can do without that type. Now who's next? I doubt he can provide anything as rich as that. Horseless carriages, indeed!

Clerk: Actually, chief, it might be even better. A guy named Alfred Beach. Thinks he can honeycomb Manhattan with a bunch of tunnels. Callls the idea a 'subway'.

(A roar of laughter.)

Debs: Oh, wow! WOW!! Send him in.

[Curtain.]

Scene 2.

The Ford Household, that night.  Ford's wife in the parlor.

Ford enters, exhausted.

Wife: How did it go, my darling?

Ford: Not so good. They laughed at me. I have to provide answers for problems I can't solve until I can cope with them in practice. It's just a hopeless bureaucracy. Sometimes I think the day General Grant met that Marx fellow was a really bad day for the the US. (Sniffs). But that smells good. What is it?

Wife: Latkas and brisket. Rabbi Goldstein's wife brought them by - to thank you for the donations to the temple and the Zionist Foundation.

Ford: Ah, he didn't have to do that. He knows how much I believe in those causes. At any rate, I guess that's the end of the horseless carriage.

Wife: Don't you mean 'automobile'?

Ford (looks at her sharply, then subsides): Whatever.

A silence.

Wife (timidly): You could always move to a parallel time track, you know.

Ford: Parallel time track?

Wife: Yes. One a little more sympathetic to men like you. With clearer horizons.

Ford: Can it be done?

Wife: Yes. I've looked into it. It's possible. (Very timidly). Of course, you would have to pay a karmic debt. You'd become an anti-Semitic asshole there.

Ford (startled): What, me? An asshole?? Anti-Semitic?

Wife: Yes. But you could realize your own vision there.

Silence.

Ford: It's a thought.

Curtain.

[N.B. Alfred Beach actually built the first small New York subway in 1869, without objection. So gimme a cookie.]

Cultural Transformation

    One of the posters I respect most on the small discussion board I normally frequent, made the interesting point that, while victory is possible in a military conflict, cultural transformation is not. With all due respect, the point does not reflect recent history. For the discussion as to whether a culture can be transformed was a matter of huge world-wide deabte not so long ago.

    You might remember both cultures. One of them wore spiky helmets, goose stepped through Europe, and started two World Wars within three decades. The other invented ritual disembowelment as a form of suicide, preferred the most hideous death to the most honorable surrender, and for the first four decades of the last cerntury attributed divinity to a mortal man. If anyone had suggested in 1935 that either of these relentlessly authoritarian, militaristic cultures would be transformed into functional democracces within two decades, the Paul Krugmans of the day (Walter Lippman) would have laughed them to scorn.  Yet between 1945 and 1955, that is exactly what happened. It happened despite the existence of the Cold War, and the relentless slander of Soviet propaganda that sounded as loudly as an off-key brass band in those years.

      In my opinion, there were two reasons for this. Military victory was not one of them - plenty of nations have triumphed militarily and adminstered the vanquished people in such a way that it reinforced all of their cultural idosyncracies. Although it is not the Fourth of July, I am going to rhapsodize a bit. I think the first reason is that all of that Declaration of Independence stuff this nation was found upon actually does apply in real life. The vast majority of flesh and blood human beings could care less about the Holy See of Rome, the Caliphate, the worker's paradise, or the Master Race. What matters to them is whether they can live their lives in decent security and advance their own interests in a basic manner - pursue happiness, in a phrase. They gravitate naturally towards instituitions that make that possible. The US occupation in Germany and Japan made the creation of that institutions - i.e., in Joyce's phrase, waking up from the nightmare of history - possible.

    The second reason is that the American military is fully accultured. That is, American soldiers do not behave imperially, because this is not in fact an imperial society. It has no racial center. It has no territorial imperatives. It is resented by every power elite in the world because the social infrastructure is not based (in theory) on elites. That resentment is rationalized in endless sophistry, but the resentment is always has that base.

     It was not until 1949 that some French historian noted that both the major Hegelian movements (Communism and Naziism) were at base the same authoritarian, anti-populist movement, and both deserved the label 'fascist'. Another fact once common knowledge  that has been forgotten is how dangerous in practice these movements actually are. The core Nazi and Bolshevik cadres were small, and numerically overwhelmed. But they were ruthless and unsocialized (wives and children, at least as major influences and motives, are conspicuous in their absence) and prevailed. The weight of numbers does not equate to political force when force of arms is involved.

    The 'cultural transformation' of Iraq is to my way of thinking no less achievable then Germany and Japan. All it means is the creation of institutions that actually reflect popular will. The notion that the Iraqi people are condemned to endless civil war and sectarian battle is at base a crude racial slander.. The elements obstructing the formation of such institution are fascists - not revolutionaries, or freedom fighters, but the same sort of violent elitists as the ones Europeans became familiar with at such wearisome length in the last century.

A Tip of the Hat

    A very brief post, simply to tip my hat to someone who has followed the same path I have, Neo-Neocon, whose weblog is linked to the right, and of course linked to the left. The fourteen posts in which she describes the evolution of her thought is strikingly similar to the route I took, though God knows the stops were very different. She is also much more dubious than I am about Obama, whom I am willing to trust in the interests of dowsing the insanely heated political language (read: invective) of this country.

     But her blog is always interesting, well-written, and judiciously thoughtful. A tip of the hat.

'The Demented Left' - A Clarification

    It is not my policy to comment on comments to my posts. But two different responses to the '9-11' post take me to task for the lack of charity implicit in the phrase 'Demented Left'. I think there is some justification for those comments. Some clarification is definitely in order.

    By 'Demented Left', i most emphatically do not mean to denounce every person who has a left-of-center point of view or reservations about United States policy. For what it's worth, I consider myself one of them. But neither am I going to abandon the phrase. It applies as I use it to one specific element of the Left that if fairly describes.

    That is the segment that believes that the United States is a negative, even malevolent, force in the world at large; and, as a corollary that ANY use of force or power by the US intrinsically immoral and must be opposed on principle. In two earlier posts, the 'Introduction' and 'Two Centuries of History', I opined how this remarkable state of collective mind came to be. It is the product of (a) the overhang of 50 years of Soviet propaganda that unaccountably did not die when the Soviet Union did, but lived on, sullen and resentful; and (b) the deliberate moral obtuseness of the Baby Boom generation (of which I am a member) about Vietnam, the defining 'moral crusade' in their lifetimes.

    A remarkable state of collective mind, because the actual state of historical fact is the complete polar opposite. In the last century, the  United States has not only been a positive force in world affairs, but often the only positive force. I don't write this with any gushing adolescent sense of belief in the 'city on the hill'. The US has its own problems with racism, cultural wars, and the like, in the same way that a child will inevitably have elements of its parents' DNA. But beyond these borders, the world remains unrepentantly the same sewer of racial bigotry, religious strife, ethnic envy, and class warfare that it has always been. Europe in particular has learned absolutely nothing from the last century.

    European liberalism would not exist if it were not for the United States. Even in the form it does exists, it is so infected with elitism, class envy, and - above all - contempt for the common morality of ordinary people - as to be unworthy of the name. Europe remains a continent of elites, dominated by princes, priests, and professors. (With a little tweaking, there's a good Frank Sinatra lyric hiding there. But this particular song lyric happens to be accurate.) Beneath all the lip service, all the platitudes, European thought has never accepted the fundamental premise of American democracy, that all men are created equal, that the power of the state should reside in the mass of ordinary human beings. It always searched for an elite - king, Pope, proletarian vanguard, whatever. The cheerful, open magnificently tolerant pluralism that has become the hallmark of American culture remains its enemy.

    If there is a note of anger in the phrase 'Demented Left' (and there is), the reason lies there. With all the cant about People, the Demented Left cares very little about the well being of actual people. The word 'immoral' is tossed about in connection with Vietnam like a frisbee at a barbecue. No question that the war was poorly organized, miscommunicated to the American people, mistakenly conceptualized as a Cold War theater. But the prosaic reality is that it was an attempt (unfortunately successful) to impose a barbaric totalitarianism on a people who were terrified of it. The war may have been misguided and misconceived, but the US was the moral power in the arena - the good guys. The other side was the imperial one. Real human beings fled south for nearly twenty years, into the sea when the land was gone. That actual fact could matter less to the Demented Left.

    Much the same can be said of Iraq, a subject that is a little too big for this post. But history is repeating itself. Back in the 60's, the New Left disapproved - maybe - of Ho Chi Minh and Mao. But it hated Johnson. These days, it hates George Bush and Cheney. It disapproves of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. But the worst that can be said of Bush and Cheney is that they may be proven to be unwise and naive. Bin Laden and Hussein were mass murderers. There is no moral equivalence whatsoever, either with Johnson to Ho, or Bush to his enemies.  That makes no difference to the Demented Left.

    I could go on and on in this vein. But I think this is apology enough. I did not mean to include the entire Left in the phrase 'demented'. I mean it to apply only to those still locked into that Cold War, New Left rhetorical position, insisting on that negative value despite all the factual indications to the contrary. There are enough of those to go around without slandering the others.

A 9-11 Story, with a Nod at Columbine

    There must be a zillion 9-11 stories. Here's mine, not so much an account of the event as an explanation why the event is meaningful to me.

    My younger daughter is neurologically disabled. She is not at all mentally retarded. In fact, she is almost unnaturally alert and involved in her environment. But due to what appears to have been a prenatal injury (not her mother's fault), the processing is off in her brain. The result is an array of autistic-like behaviors that collectively disable her. Her speech is literally childish, her gait is the off-balance duck walk of a one time toe walker, and she has the obsessiveness and eye for irrelevant detail of the true autistic. All this results in profound disability. After a few years of frustration, she ended up in the class of the 'educably retarded', in which environment she is quite comfortable.

    But she is not dumb, quite bright, in fact. (Beneath her mangled syntax and garbled pronunciation, her active vocabulary is actually age normal, maybe above.) The upshot of all this is the paradox, that while  she is comfortable with the special ed routine, she is also very easily bored by it. Back in 1998, when she was 10, the boredom began to show itself in some acting out behavior that was not a good omen for the future. Her mother (from whom I am divorced) and I thought it would be a good idea to have her spend a month each year in an environment as different and as far from home as possible. There are all sorts of special camps for special kids. We wanted one at a fair distance from anything familiar. We are Californian. I found one in the Catskills, upstate New York, with a month long term, beginning in late July, ending in late August. It was expensive, but not pricey. The references were excellent. In February of 1998, we enrolled her in the camp. She went that following July.

    It became summer routine. Between 1998 and 2004 (when she became too old), her mother would take her to the camp. A month later, towards the end of August, I'd come to New York, enjoy Manhattan for a few days, then drive upstate and pick my daughter up. Then it would be back to Manhattan for another day or two of sight-seeing, then home to  the San Francisco Bay Area. A routine developed.  After we returned from camp, we'd check into a Times Square hotel, visit Virgin Records, roam Times Square, and see an appropriate musical. Then next day, some morning event, lunch at the Top of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center, and something in the afternoon.  Monday  or Tuesday, the flight home, always the 8:00 a.m flight out of Newark to San Francisco. Newark is a much better access point to lower Manhattan than either of the NYC airports.

    2001 was no different. We showed up at the Top of the World on day two after the camp pick up. I was touched that the waiter remembered us. It wasn't that we were expected, but my daughter is a very memorable personality and this was the fourth year in a row we had appeared in late August. The human memory is capable of phenomenal feats of detail. The lunch was lovely, and my wonderful little girl enjoyed the awesome vista, as she always does. The next day we flew out of Newark back home to the Bay Area.

    I could dress this up and say that this was one day, or two, before 9/11. But it wasn't. It was two weeks to the day before that event. Two weeks later, our flight would be the one hijacked and crashed into to the Pentagon. I don't know what happened to our waiter with the good memory that day. My hope is that he had not yet arrived for work.

     Not the closest brush with fate, but close enough. The mental image I have, of me sitting with my perpetual little girl, doing my best to comfort her, answering her machine gun questions -  she talks a mile a minute when she is excited or nervous, and she sure as hell would have been scared out of her wits - while four maniacs who know nothing of her vitality, her innocence, her intensity, the lives she has touched, her immense value, prepare to murder her for no good reason whatsoever, except their own lust for self-glorification - makes me dizzy with fury and relief, seven years later, as I write this. This (obviously) is history that never happened. Yet the event touched close enough to make the scenario as vivid as the reality itself. Perhaps you have to know my daughter.

    'For no good reason' - that to me is the point. I have been in criminal law for 35 years, a prosecutor for the last 18. Without doubt, my world view has been shaped by my career. For better or worse, I see the world through that lens. In practice, that means a tendency to analyze actions and behavior in terms of stark, immediate motivation. Forget all your meaning of-life beliefs, what does what you did gain you?  More money? Impress the girl? Self gratification of some other type? Spare me the subtleties, the next ten years, and the life to come, what do you get NOW??

    This perspective is likely the point of departure between me and the Demented Left. I don't necessarily believe the reasons stated for a criminal act are the actual motivators for that act.  In my opinion, that is very infrequently the reality. In the case of the 9/11 conspirators, spare me your discussions of the Palestine problem, the 11 Century Caliphate, or obscure suras in the Quran. These are rationalizations, and transparent ones at that. What is really going on is the same narcissistic interest in self-glorification through spectacular acts of public violence and destruction that motivates high-school shooters - the Columbine pair, for example.

    Both crimes involve unsocialized, unfeminized males, who become morbidly fascinated with grandiose  acts of destruction. They do not have some reason to shoot their classmates, and then shoot them on that basis. They decide to shoot their classmates and then find a rationale. They do not fly planes into buildings because they are religious martyrs. They become fascinated with the idea of flying planes into buildings and only latterly become religious martyrs. They are first and last criminals, and by definition unprincipled - despicable, cowardly narcissists.

    There are some implications from this for how these appalling acts are to be approached analytically. There is at present, and will be for some time, an ongoing debate as to whether Islam is a violent or peaceable religion. I am no Islamic scholar, and not about to become one.  But the correct answer seems to me that it is both - as are Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, and the other major faiths. Just as Christianity has enough substance to provide fodder for the mystic St. Theresa of Avila and the ultra-rational Aquinas, for Quaker brethren and Jesuit warrior priests, so does Islam provide enough universality to house both soldier and peacemaker. The religion would not be a major faith if it did not have this degree of universality, a place for every type of personality.  The question, then, is not what the religion offers (everything), but what the actor chooses to find in it. Am Anfang war die Tat, in the beginning was the Deed, Goethe wrote famously in Faust, and so it is with crimes of this type.

    It is the misfortune of the whole Earth at present that the Middle East produces these criminal males in enormous numbers - young men with no viable future in their society, no hope of achieving social status, no possibility of intimacy with young women, for whom the notion of spectacular, violent destruction (with simultaneous suicide) becomes an enthralling possibility of self-realization. I was not sure whether or not the Iraq War was a wise tactic or not - I am still unsure.

    But I am quite sure that the worst move of all would have been to leave those stagnant, morbid societies in the same state they were in at that time, spewing out masses of angry, alienated young males. Change of any kind had to be an improvement over the status quo, and I am glad that it is underway. The crime against my daughter never happened, as vivid as the scenario is to me. But there were others on those planes, comforting frightened children, hoping against hope, at the mercy of monsters. They stood in our place. I am not about to forget them.

A Genius for the Capillary - Willie Horton Revisited

    The Main Stream Media really knows how to attack personalities it doesn't like. But it also knows how to defend personalities it does like. In these last few decades, it has liked Democratic Presidential candidates to the point of adoration. This protection can take as infinite a number of forms as the English language has nuances, from bad jokes to nonchalant indifference to vicious deliberate slander. I expect Barack Obama to travel under this protective shield through the balance of 2008.

   Today I am going to look back at one of the more interesting MSM defense tactics of recent years, the successful diversion of a potentially lethal attack against the jugular into a remediable cut on the capillary. This was the method by the manner in which the MSM defused a potentially devastating issue that confronted the Dukakis campaign in 1988. I am referring to the scandal that arose by the unaccountable grant by the Dukakis administration of weekend furlough privileges to Willie (or 'William') Horton, a first degree murderer serving a life term in prison in Massachusetts. As almost every one remembers, Horton did not return from the furlough, but instead fled to Maryland. There he perpetrated a horrific burglary/kidnapping/rape against a luckless young couple. He sits now in a Maryland prison, there for life, as the authorities in Maryland for obvious reasons have no intention of returning him to the gentler care of Massachusetts.

    A scandal lay at the base of this tragedy, not the private kind, which are bad enough, but the truly monumental public kind - official nonfeasance so aggravated that it was tantamount to malfeasance, so gross that it is in fact prima facie evidence of a character disorder. Without explanation (and none was ever forthcoming), it should have been immediately decisive, a dagger in the heart of the candidacy of Michael Dukakis. Why and how the immediate impact was not is the subject of this piece.

    A little background. Work furlough programs are in use throughout the United States in a variety of prisons and jails. Work furlough is distinguishable from parole in that the inmate is released to a day job of some sort, but returns at the end of the shift to the jail or prison that he or she left. For the vast majority of nonviolent offenders who pose no imminent risk of harm, and who are shortly going to be returned to society either by parole or serving out their term, these programs make a lot of sense. The prisoner becomes acclimatized to life outside the institution, and creates a place for himself when released. The chances of coming back are at least marginally reduced.

    But these laudable goals make no sense at all in the case of prisoners serving terms of life without possibility of parole or parole so far off in the future that acclimatization to society is meaningless. There are both moral objections - these terms reflect the gravity of the offense, and are often imposed in lieu of the death penalty - and practical - these are ultra-dangerous personalities who pose a clear threat to ordinary citizens. With one exception, in 70's and 80's, no state in the Union offered work furlough to lifers.

    The one exception was Massachusetts, under Michael Dukakis, during the so-called Massachusetts Miracle. How this situation came to be is inexplicable. The Massachusetts legislature authorized a work furlough program in 1972 during the term of Dukakis' predecessor, Philip Sergent.  Although the reasons why the program should not extend to life termers are self-evident, the  Massachusetts Supreme Court, finding that the legislative intent was unclear, held that it extended to first-degree murderers. (Massachusetts is evidently as over lawyered a state as California or New York.) The legislature immediately clarified its intent by enacting legislation that expressly barred life termers from participating in work furlough programs.

    Dukakis vetoed it, noting that enactment of the legislation would "cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation." Both Dukakis' action, and the expressed rationale, are jaw droppers, literally stupefying. There is no element of rehabilitative purpose in a life sentence - that is exactly the reason why the term is life. Also, at the practical level of real human behavior, extending the work furlough privilege to life termers means that the State is basically relying their sense of honor - nonexistent in the vast majority of cases - as the only of their guarantee their return to confinement. In essence, Dukakis was entrusting the personal safety of any number of ordinary people to the sense of the social responsibility of the most anti-social members of society, convicted sociopaths.

    But there was another aspect of Dukakis' action that was even more repugnant morally. During the 70's, a debate was ongoing in Massachusetts as to whether the death penalty should be re-instituted after the 1971 Supreme Court decision (Furman v. Georgia) that declared it unconstitutional. Not unexpectedly, Dukakis opposed the reenactment of death penalty. That opposition took the form of assuring the Massachusetts public that murderers who might otherwise be condemned would be confined for  life.  Simultaneously with these representations, the Dukakis Administration was aggressively insisting on work furlough privileges for the exact same inmates.

    So in addition to a mind boggling reversal of values, Dukakis was cynically breaching a fairly serious promise made to the Massachusetts public. Even if there had never been a scandal, if there were no Willie Horton, this outrageously highhanded course of conduct would have a serious bearing on his fitness for the Presidency. In my personal view (I have been a practitioner of criminal law for more than 30 years, both as public defender and prosecutor), it is absolutely disqualifying.

    But as it happened, it was Horton who ripped the veil off the whole charade. He had been imprisoned in 1974 for the savage murder of a 17 year old delivery boy, stabbed 19 times and left in a garbage can to bleed to death. But, not wanting to cut the heart out of his rehabilitation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on June 6, 1986, granted him the privilege of a weekend furlough. Horton may have been a sociopathic murderer, but he was no fool. He seized his opportunity for freedom, and fled to Maryland. Since of course he could not re-enter society on any normal terms, he remained at large. On April 3, 1987, he confronted Clifford Barnes in his own home, pistol whipped him, and stabbed him 22 times. When Barne's fiance came home, he raped her twice, then fled in Barnes car. He was arrested, tried and convicted . On October 22, 1987, he was sentenced to life in a Maryland prison, a sentence he is serving as of the time of this writing.

    That same month the Reader's Digest published an article on the Horton affair, and the incident became a small, but national, scandal. Horton was not the only escapee from the Massachusetts work furlough program - there were more than 80 - but he was far and away the most spectacular recidivist. Nonetheless, despite the negative publicity and social concern, Dukakis and his administration continued to defend the program relentlessly, reiterating that it was 'necessary for efficient prison administration'. It was only in  April, 1988, not coincidentally at about the same time Dukakis began his presidential run, that the Massachusetts work furlough program was finally reformed.

    Al Gore was the first to confront Dukakis with the Horton incident. But it was not until the autumn, after Dukakis had become the Democratic nominee, that the matter changed from a small scandal into a large one. After reactions in focus groups showed that the issue was so powerful that it changed the minds of committed Dukakis voters, the Bush campaign publicized it widely, most notably in two television ads. The first, run by one a Republican political action committee, showed Horton's mug shot and arrest photograph. The second was far more widely seen, and featured about 30 actors (two Hispanic, three African American, the rest White) going through a revolving door ad with a voice-over that described the differences between Bush and Dukakis on hard crime. Both can be seen on You Tube.

    The Main Stream Media reacted to these ads quickly and unanimously, denouncing . . . Bush . . .  for appealing to  the supposedly racist fears of suburban White America. Bush was allegedly trying to stampede the electorate with the specter of Dukakis unleashing a horde of Black criminals in suburbia'.  That perspective solidified into Conventional Wisdom within days, and became Settled History within weeks. Read any main stream account you like about the 1988 campaign and you find a denunciation of the racist tactics of Bush and his dark angel, Lee Atwater. The extent to what that focus group may have been responding to an issue of real substance, and Bush quite appropriately communicating that concern to the voters at large, is almost never mentioned.

    Neither ad nor issue was at all racist. I hate to go Greek on my readership, but we do have to journey back to Aristotle-land at this point. The substance of the matter was Dukakis' irresponsibility in granting work furlough to dangerous inmates. The accident was that the inmate who demonstrated emphatically how irresponsible the policy was happened to be Black. (There were White esscapees, but none committed such a violent offense when at liberty.) A little thought experiment - suppose Horton was in prison for a less violent crime, say drug sales or a property crime, granted work furlough, and committed the same new offense - a Black criminal 'unleashed on suburbia', but without the violent past. Even assuming that an ad decrying the event were even run (unlikely), does it change a single vote? Criminals of every race are paroled all the time, and it is the unfortunate fact that many commit new, even more serious crimes. Such an ad would be laughable - no campaign would spend the money for it. The meat on the table - the substance - was Horton's life term for a conviction of first degree murder.

    Turn the issue around - suppose Dukakis had reacted to the irrelevant issue of Horton's race. He takes the podium and angrily insists that he is not an unleasher of Black violent criminals upon suburbia, that he is an equal opportunity unleasher of violent criminals of ALL races. Not exactly an effective riposte, is it? It is no wonder Dukakis never made it. But he didn't have to say anything. The media did it for him.

    Why this instant and thoughtless rejection of an extremely serious issue concerning Dukakis? I think there were two reasons. The first has at least some plausibility. The unfortunate statistical fact is that the vast majority of negative political ads of both parties are grossly unfair, and should be viewed warily and skeptically. However, these particular ads were the rule-proving exception, summarizing in an icily concise 30 seconds a real concern relative to Dukakis' moral values.  However understandable the initial skepticism, the Media owed the American public some hard thought about the real issues in play.

    The second is more cynical. Then as now, the Media was composed largely of Democrats sympathetic to liberal causes. Although Reagan had governed effectively for eight years - how effectively would not be known until the early 90's - it  passionately wanted a Democratic president. In truth, no focus group was needed to show how devastating Dukakis' defense of this absolutely bizarre work furlough policy was to his chances. In my view, it was completely disqualifying. The American public ultimately shared that view.

    So the potentially lethal stroke had to be parried if Dukakis was to have any chance at all. The accident of Horton's race, an absolute irrelevancy, was thus transformed into the major talking point. The thrust at the jugular was thereyby diverted into a cut on the capillary. Dukakis never had to explain - directly - why he had taken the positions he did on prison policy in Massachusetts. To the best of my knowledge, to this day, he never has. An abject apology, and perhaps even monetary compensation was due Clifford Barnes and his fiance. It never came.

    But in the end, rough justice was done. Bernard Shaw, the CNN anchor, opened the second Presidential debate, with perhaps the bluntest question ever posed in that forum (also the most meaningful) - how Dukakis would react if he came home and found his wife murdered. I don't know the first thing about Shaw's politics, but he was a responsible reporter. Also, being African-American, he may have had a little less concern about being perceived as racist. In any case, there, in response, in front of the entire world, Dukakis exhibited the same baffling indifference to criminal violence he had shown as Governor of Massachusetts for 12 years. His already troubled campaign was doomed.

    In the genial forum in which I normally discuss these and other issues, one of the more conservative posters, who normally is sympathetic to me, expressed his sharp disagreement with the propriety of Shaw's question. He was appalled in 1988 and still outraged 20 years later. I would agree with him if the same question had been put to any other candidate in any other campaign - even candidates whom I heartily dislike. But it was a meaningful question to Michael Dukakis. He deserved it. Clifford Barnes and millions like him deserved an answer. Willie Horton had seen to that.

    The whole saga is one worth revisiting in this March of 2008. We are entering into a campaign that is a hundredfold more heated than the one in 1988.  One candidate in the field is far more glamorous than Dukakis could ever hoped to be. There are all kinds of way in which the MSM protects its darlings. How it will do so in this case remains to be seen.

    The one certainty is that it will, somehow.

   

Where the Hell Do You Put the Gas Tank?: or, Thinking Clearly About Iraq

    War, as William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, is hell. I'll go further - war is intrinsically evil. So far from resenting the opposition to the Iraqi War in concept, I respect it. War as a policy choice in a democratic society should always be regarded with deep, dark suspicion.  The notion of dispensable people, 'cannon fodder', eggs for omelets, and all the rest, are almost the touchstone, the authentic signature, of a totalitarian state - whether you can its head king, kaiser, fuhrer, or comrade secretary.

    But to state categorically that war is intrinsically evil is not to say that it is intrinsically the greater evil. The bumper sticker cliché that 'war is dangerous to children and other living things' is absolutely true. But peace can be dangerous, too, as the children of Rwanda, of Cambodia, of Bosnia, of pre-World War II Europe, of Bosnia, could tell you. There are dangers in letting loose the dogs of war, always and everywhere, no argument. But there are also dangers in placating despots and in appeasement. You can go as badly wrong with peace as with war. This is possibly the saddest commentary on human history that I can state.

    What has galled me for some time about the Demented Left is that it seems completely blind to this rather elementary analytical framework. The only way to think sensibly about the decisions as momentous as these is to make some rational, decently intelligent assumptions about the way history would unfold if there had been no invasion of Iraq, decide in some logical way which course of action produces the lesser evil, and come to the appropriate conclusion. If any member of the mainstream media ever did that, I'd respect the process, even if I disagreed with the analysis.

    But that is not the way the war opponents behave. There is no comparison of alternatives, there is no attempt to judge whether the world is better or worse off for what happened five years ago. Instead - until recently, when the situation in Iraq began to up tick and the silence suddenly became deafening - there has been vehement, shrieking, hysterical denunciation - as if the evils of this course of action were the only evils, as if there were not serious and even greater risks in NOT acting. Of course, lives have been lost, of course there has been a huge human cost - and every one of those lives, every  iota of that cost, matters. But that does not mean that the War was the greater evil. In the world that never came to be, the human cost, the loss of life, might have been incalculably greater.

    I will descend to a loose analogy. An automobile designer has to make a decision as to where to put the gas tank - that is, the 12 plus gallon firebomb designed into every car. No matter where it is place, particular individuals are going to die because of the placement. If the cannister were only two inches forward (or back, or here or there), the worst sort of tort lawyer pontificates, that child would be alive. True enough - but there are numberless other children, not present in the courtroom, alive and well because the tank was place where it was. It requires a deliberate act of intuitive imagination to conjure them up - one that most of us can accomplish, given the cue and impetus.

    Exactly the same sort of intuitive imagination is required to think clearly about Iraq. There are thousands of persons who are dead or maimed because the invasion took place. These we know, and count, and mourn. The issue is whether there are a much greater number of persons alive and well (or who will remain alive and well over the next few decades). This is the process the Demented Left deliberately refuses to undertake - for to do so implies that the War was one alternative among others, with costs and benefits that could be, and had to be, calculated. Admitting this prosaic fact would deprive it of its shrill, moralizing voice. That is the self-serving reason clear thought is  anathema to it. 

    Being sensitive to the real human cost of the War does not mean melting into a pool of limpid, insipid  sentimental pathos. A year or so back, I picked up a truly priceless book, "The New Yorker Book of War Pieces" (ISBN 00805209018). It is a collection of the real time journalism that appeared in the New Yorker between 1939 and 1945 - 'Letter from London', 'Letter from Paris', 'Letter from Warsaw', and so forth. These days the New Yorker is heavily politicized, but there is nothing political at all about these pieces. They are contemporary journalistic reports, written to describe in great depth the emotions and reactions of the people of those cities to events in real time. Neither the population they observed, nor the writers themselves, all of whom are very gifted, could know that Hitler would batter his army to pieces in the Soviet Union, that the United States would ultimately enter the war with decisive effect, that all would end happily - at least for the survivors. That real time ignorance is what makes the collection priceless.

    What jumps out in the early pieces, written in London and Paris in the first two years of the war, is how frustrated the public in Western Europe was, that Western leadership had allowed the momentum of Nazi Germany to develop into such a towering, apparently irresistible, force by 1939. This of course is a historical cliché these days, but it is interesting to read it described by journalists who - beneath all their professionalism - were genuinely afraid, for themselves, for their friends, for their nations, for the world. The articles do not contained the studied judgment of history, but the real immediate anguish of intelligent people who agonized that the civilization they knew and loved might be endangered by the short-sightedness of English and French political leadership in the late 30's. They agonized, even though they did not know anything then of how barbaric the Nazi regime would actually prove to be.

    Interesting reading - but to me it brought clearly to mind the essential temporal paradox in intuiting the direction of the path not taken. If the prime ministers of England and France (specifically Stanley Baldwin and your choice of one of five or six French heads of state) had reacted to Hitler's initial acts of aggression in 1935 with the force that everyone now agrees they should have, then the time track in which the wisdom of that use of force is clear would never come to be. The statesmen would not have been praised. They would have been vilified, attacked, denounced, damned. The temper of those times was even more pacifistic than these, and with more reason. Over one million students around the world signed a pledge not to bear arms for their country in 1935. The utterly senseless slaughters of the Great War, the true cause of most of the misery of the last Century, lay only two decades back in the past,

    So the mainstream media of that day - the Keith Olbermans, Paul Krugmans, the editors of the New York Times - would almost certainly attacked that leadership with the same venomous hatred we see expressed these days. Hitler was no threat - he had disavowed the claims in Mein Kampf when he assumed power (which is true), his actions were only a fully justified attempt to rectify the imbalance of the Versailles Treaty (also true). Look at this needless loss of life - in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds! This unnecessary disorder! This leadership should be dismissed - or worse!

    Yet the war that would have been dangerous to living things, did not commence in 1935, and a peace that proved to be far more dangerous continued. In 1940, the same intellectuals who would have sneered at an earlier, timely intervention, feared for the existence of their community and their lives, and denounced Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the others for their myopia. Such is it always on the editorial pages.

    (I can't write like this article and duck the implicit challenge. It's my own belief that Bush and Blair chose the least of the evils, and here are the reasons. If there is no invasion of Iraq, the enlightened self-interest of both Hussein and Osama Bin Laden leads to Al Quaeda seeking sanctuary in Iraq, or some affiliated safe haven in the Mid East. There had been discussions between the factions as early as 1998 - their enmity  was only skin deep.  Bin Laden would retain his mythic, invulnerable status, Hussein would gain among fundamentalists by the alliance. They would also both be confident that they could act without any fear of consequence, because the West would once again have demonstrated its pusillanimity. Hussein would be free to continue seeking WMD, which he would have every chance of obtaining in an open ended time frame. He would have at his disposal a well-financed and intact distribution mechanism in Al Quaeda. The support the US has garnered for the war against terrorism would not be nearly so significant, because of its own failure to walk the walk.

    The world, in short, would be a much more dangerous place than it is. Just one man's opinion - it may be wrong, but it is not irrational. I say this fully knowing how much this war has cost men and women who deserved much better from life. The fault lies with Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and the others who preach and practice religious warfare. But a fat lot of good assigning blame does for dead soldiers. I will not dismiss our honored dead and the others as cannon fodder, necessary sacrifices. Yet I do believe they have not died in vain.)

    Can it be that Bush and Blair are martyrs to a history that never happened? Saviors without honor in the land of might-have-been? I do believe it is certainly possible. For the reasons given above, I believe it is a fact.  But I have to say that is only my belief. The automobile designer at least has collision studies, historical data, test runs. A policy maker has only insight, intelligence, and intuition.   There are simply too many human and random factors involved to say with any definite certitude, with respect to a decision as far reaching as invading Iraq, which is better or worse. No responsible person can plausibly claim to know for sure. Like it or not, the debate has to end in some sort of conjecture.

    But that said, it is possible to insist on rational assumptions, and a logical approach to the issue, rather than a simple reiteration of pre-existing value judgments. My complaint with the vast majority of war opponents is that they limit themselves to bemoaning the present situation, without even considering the thought that there were negatives in the alternatives. It is not that I disagree with their thinking. It is that they don't think at all.   

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, or Vietnam Revisited

    Back in 1963, when I was a junior in high school, summer jobs were not so easy to come by - the negative aspect of Baby Boomer demographics. Finally, a friend managed to line me up with a job busing tables at a local Catholic retreat house. I served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, washed dishes, and did my best to keep a low profile. It wasn't much, but the start of my career of gainful employment.

     A strict rule of silence was enforced then on Catholic retreats. The participants, entirely male, did not speak to each other, and particularly at meal time. Instead, they listened to a tapes on a variety of thematic topics. These were not all religious talks, which might surprise some. There was a considerable amount of diversity. There were not all that many, and so I heard the same speech over and over again that summer. One of the most striking, so striking that it has stayed with me these 45 years, was a speech that Dr. Thomas Dooley had given to a group of nuns, reporting on his experiences in Southeast Asia between 1954 and 1960.

    The Kingston Trio had made the name famous back in 1958, with a superb arrangement of an old Civil War song. But the flesh-and-blood Tom Dooley was well known before that. He was the author of three solid books about conditions there, the most well-known being 'Deliver Us From Evil', published in 1956. He'd been dead prematurely dead two years (of cancer) when I did that repetitive listening. So what I was hearing dated back to 1961 at the latest, probably earlier, long before there was any political baggage attached to discussions of Southeast Asia.

     If you did have to listen to a talk over and over, that was a good one to hear - light and entertaining (though the subject was very serious), and leavened with a lot of humor. The subject was the same as the books, Dooley's first-hand impressions of the refugee camps in Haiphong and the repulsive cruelty of the the Stalinist regime from which they fled. I still remember him describing the exact meaning of the title 'Deliver Us from Evil' , which only indirectly referenced the Scriptural passage. The direct reference had to to do with an incident which Dooley had personally witnessed and in which he even participated.

    Three young Vietnamese children had been brought to the border by the police of the North Vietnam. Their vocal cords had been cut (or tongues cut out, I forget which) as punishment for treasonable speech. When Dooley asked the guard how children so young could possibly have committed treason, the guard asked him, Dooley, to recite the Lord's Prayer. When Dooley reached the phrase, 'And deliver us from evil', the guard stopped him.

    "That is the treason", he declared, "for there is no evil in the People's Republic of Vietnam."      

    The Vietnam debacle was the second greatest trauma in the history of the United States. (First is the Civil War, without any serious contender, and we may all hope to God that it remains unrivaled on the list.) It was fought on the wrong terms, by the wrong nation, with the wrong Army, with the the wrong tactics, and explained in the wrong way. It ended, when it finally ended, with a total collapse of interest and will. The precipitate and hasty abandonment was followed by the most monstrous atrocities perpetrated in my lifetime. Domestically, It engendered a cynicism about American power, American objectives, and American values that persists to this day - in fact, that seems to be permanently embedded in Western culture. It was an improvident, unwise, absolutely absurd exercise in mismanagement. It was in every respect but one a complete disaster.       

     The one respect in which it was not a disaster, or should not have been, was the moral perspective. The Vietnam War was colossally unwise. It was never immoral. Anyone who heard Tom Dooley once, let alone all summer long, knew – or should have known - that reality. At base, after all the heat, after all the millions of words, after all the sound and fury, what the war was about was a frightened, even terrified, people resisting the imposition of a relentlessly tyrannical and inhumane regime. The moral judgment should always have been weighed in their favor, and their allies by association. 

      But as the 60's lengthened, and Vietnam became more controversial with each passing year, that base insight was lost. There is no question that the tactics and posturing of the Johnson Administration had much to do with this. The War should never have been fought primarily by the American military. The rationale should never have been expressed in the Cold War grandiosity language of the Kennedy inaugural address. Vietnam was a sideshow to the major East-West conflict, if it was a part of it at all. The issues were local, Vietnamese resistance to Vietnamese oppression. But as South Vietnam came to be perceived as an American client state, awareness of the elementary justice of the basic cause - small, but anything but trivial - became obscured by the superheated rhetoric.

    It was the wrong army. It was also the wrong type of army. If it was to be fought by the US, it should have been fought by a professional military, and not sullen and discontented draftees. (Popular armies perform wonderfully well in wars of national survival, or great causes, as Victor Hanson Davis has convincingly pointed out. But the Vietnam War was neither.) The military tactics were the wrong tactics. The war was sold to the public on the wrong basis, duplicitous if not outright fallacious. But none of this accounts for the complete reversal in the moral polarity that occurred in the late 60's and early 70's, in which the Stalinist thug Ho Chi Minh was somehow transformed into the a native Populist, the actually elected South Vietnamese government perceived as a repressive state, and the assistance of the United States as some sort of imperial venture. It does not account for the vehemence, the shrill, shrieking hysteria that became the dominant tone of war opposition. The reasons for that lie elsewhere.

    They have to do with the determination of the New Left and its fellow traveler draft resisters to characterize the opposition as a moral issue, a crusade, a matter of good versus evil. It was not sufficient simply to question the practicality, the wisdom, the sensibility of the military approach to Vietnam. To wax philosophical for a moment, arguments of that type address the means only and leave the end intact. Accepting the justice of the end (resisting the tyranny of North Vietnam) would not do for the war opponents, and particularly not for draft opponents. Success on that limited basis would not lead to an end to the war, but only an alteration in the manner in which it was conducted. Above all, it would not lead to an end to the draft.
   
    Full disclosure must be made here. I did not serve in Vietnam or in fact in the military at any time. When I began college in 1964, I enrolled in ROTC, fully expecting to complete the course and do my service as a ROTC officer. I was not particularly looking forward to it. I am not militaristic. I did think it would be a valuable maturing experience. But fate intervened in 1965, in the form of the first episode of mild rheumatoid arthritis with which I have coped without too much difficulty my entire adult life. Almost the first words out of the mouth of the internist who diagnosed it was, 'at least you won't be going into the Army'.

    So when I opposed the War in those years - and I most certainly did - it was not because I had anything personal at stake. I believed the war was foolish because it was wasteful. I did not buy completely into the New Left dogma, with its endless misquotation of Eisenhower about Ho Chi Minh's likely success in a referendum in 1956. But it was also the case that my memory of Tom Dooley and all he had seen and reported was a long time in the past. 

    But even for a fervent war opponent, the extent to which the war opposition had at base the self-serving interests of the Boomer generation was unsettling. Everyone mouthed the sentiments - moral language is as easy to mimic as any other - but the bottom line for a huge percentage of resisters, maybe the majority, was a resentment of being inconvenienced by two years military service, with kp, field drill, and master sergeants with their own view of the world. Simply insisting the war was badly conducted would not do - it didn't avoid that inconvenient two years. So the war became an impassioned moral cause, a crusade. 'Hell, No, I Won't Go' became a slogan that was chanted with blazing eyes and and an even more blazing self-righteous indignation. The United States Army was recast as an invading army, and the defense of South Vietnam as an imperialist venture, a Western power imposing its will on a Third World people, as so often in the past. America thus became Amerika in those years of mass insanity.

 Insisting that the issue was a moral one, rather than simply a matter of political alternatives, neatly linked draft resistance to war opposition. Obviously, if the war was evil and immoral, to participate in any form was to become complicit in the immorality. That inconvenient two year obligation thus disappeared. Consistency with that transparent rationalization is also the reason why Vietnam soldiers were treated so disgracefully shabbily in those years. To the extent that one acknowledged that the troops in Vietnam were not acting immorally, one had to acknowledge that maybe the righteousness of war opposition was in some doubt. Maybe - perish the thought - some of the protest was motivated by selfishness and moral cowardice. That was not a notion that could even be entertained as a thought at that time, let alone spoken aloud. So the troops were vilified and the motives of the protesters never questioned.

    This transformation of the dialog from a limited political issue to a great, sweeping moral condemnation that was absurdly blithe to the actual facts of Vietnam has had huge repercussions. It was catastrophic for the people of Southeast Asia. Persuaded by all the inflamed rhetoric that the United States was interfering with the popular will of a distant people, Congress not only withdrew troops, but cut off aid to South Vietnam, at a time in 1974 when many military historians believe that nation might have been able to withstand the assault with reasonable support. The successors to Ho Chi Minh, as Stalinist as he was, overran Saigon in 1975 and imposed the same brutality as they had in Hanoi two decades earlier. Deliver us from evil. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took advantage of the power vacuum the West had left behind to perpetrate the most appalling genocide since World War II, maybe in history, in the killing fields. (In 2005, filmmakers trying to make a documentary about the massacre found too few survivors to contribute. 

   In the United States, the war protest gave birth to the Great Sacred Cow of the demented Left - that it had taken to the streets and, by heroic measures, brought an unjust and immoral war to its knees. For many Boomers, participation in the anti-war movement is the most significant moral action of their lives. For many, these are life episodes too precious to rethink critically – and they don't. But the protests didn't stop the war. What it brought to a halt was the draft, which ended in 1971, as did the protests – for it is hard to deny that had been the real point all along. The war went on until 1975. And the events that followed? The repugnant atrocities of Pol Pot and the concrete demonstration that North Vietnam had intended all along a ferociously tyrannical Communist regime? In one of the great acts of collective rationalization in recorded history, the Baby Boomers - my generation - shrug their shoulders. Not our problem. 

     But the fact was that Tom Dooley had been telling the plain, unvarnished truth. The Vietnamese people - the real flesh-and-blood kind, that live and die, suffer and hope - not the mythic 'People' of immemorial Leftist cant - began running from Ho Chi Minh in 1955. They kept running for the next two decades, as far south as the land would take them, then into boats and the open sea when the land ran out. The war was a dumb war, unwisely formulated, stupidly communicated, even more stupidly fought. But it was a just cause and a moral undertaking. It was the protest, with its utter contempt for the actual human reality, that was immoral.

    Tom Dooley had it right. I heard him clearly enough back in 1963. But by 1968, I'd stopped listening. So had everybody else.

                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

(This article first appeared on the website American Thinker on February 15th, 2008 under the title 'Boomers and the Vietnam Shrug', at the site linked here.

The History of Two Hard Centuries in One Hundred Easy Words

   A brief history of Western civilization (or anti-civilization) in the last two hundred years.

    The major nations of Europe were never able to assimilate the ideas of liberal British philosophy as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the United States of America. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries,  cultural arrogance and xenophobia impelled them to inflict appalling, unforgivable horrors on other peoples in the form of colonialism. Before they could actually be made to pay for these crimes, they spent the Twentieth Century battering themselves to pieces in a series of utterly absurd tribal wars. They also created the monstrously cynical Soviet Union, which furthered  its own imperial ambitions by perversely corrupting one liberation movement after another in the ostensible name of the 'People'. Old Europe then handed the whole Godforsaken mess it had created to the aforesaid United States of America. The great irony of our times was thus created. The original anti-colonial nation has to bear the totally slanderous label of colonialist.

    That's actually about one hundred fifty words, but give me a cookie. The point is this. Over the course of the last century, what the  relentless barrage of Soviet propaganda did was create an ambiance, a sense, that the effects of American power are somehow intrinsically negative. The pronouncements were relentless, ruthless, and utterly cynical. It was the Soviet Union (so it said) that upheld the banner of human freedom. The United States backed the forces of reaction for its own despicable national interest.

    Now that happens not to be true. It is in fact an outrageous lie. It should by rights have ended in 1991 and the years immediately thereafter, when the curtain was ripped off and the full extent of the corruption and brutality of the Soviet Union was relentlessly exposed for what it was. All of the Communist mythology was completely debunked. Alger Hiss was indeed a perjurer. The Rosenbergs were in fact spies. All those various liberation movements that postured as popular uprisings were Soviet dominated, and actually fascist.  But the most important insight, the global discovery, was the complete absence of good faith in all of this posturing. Respect for truth behind the Iron Curtain was non-existent.

    Now, what should have happened after these revelations, as a matter of simple intellectual honesty, was a complete rethinking of the entire history of the Cold War - for it is impossible to underestimate how completely pervasive, how universal, the effects of Soviet propaganda actually were during those years. Quite apart from the avowed Marxists and sympathizers, most persons of good will assumed that there was something to Soviet claims, even if exaggerated -  that there was at least a kernel of accuracy - that there were rights and wrongs on both sides. (I myself fall into that category.) But that was not the case. Absolutely nothing - literally nothing - that the Soviets and their sponsored states could be accepted as valid.  Complete bad faith - to use blunter language, whole cloth fabrications, in which nothing is true - is a surprisingly difficult phenomenon for most people to assimilate.

    So  a complete reexamination of recent history was required. But did it happen? No. Rather than thoughtful confessions of error and studies revisions of opinion, what the Demented Left did was subside into a sullen silence. Yeah, the revelations following the Cold War had  - reluctantly - to be accepted. But that did not mean that  - somehow - you know - the influence of the United States  - you know - was negative. Don't ask us how, but somehow. Above all, the baseline, the mother ship, the Great Sacred Cow of the Baby Boom Left - the opposition to Vietnam - remained unaffected. Since it had survived the revelations in the Killing Fields and the Stalinist thuggery of the Vietnamese Republic, that was hardly surprising. But it was disappointing.

    This attitude that the effects of United States power are somehow negative is just that - an attitude, an unattached value judgment, seldom or never reduced to concrete terms. There is a good reason for this. It isn't true. I don't mean to imply that US influence is some sort of panacea, a cure for all that ails ya in a particular society. That's nonsense. The racism, sexism, class-ism, culturism - above all, the xenophobia which is the the universal human disease - which run through the whole sordid history of humankind was hardly going to vanish with Thomas Jefferson's wonderful pronouncements. I also don't mean that force majeure does not produce intimate human tragedy. Military force never gets the real Bad Guys cleanly and elegantly - they're always hiding in a bunker somewhere, with champagne and concubines. The damage is always collateral. Bad Guys hold whole nations hostage.

    But despite these considerations, the plain fact is that in my lifetime, the enormous crimes against humanity have not occurred where the United States is. They occur where it is not - in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Eastern Europe. Where United States influence has been pronounced, human values have always advanced and often thrived. I will make one example stand for all. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, anyone who argued that the authoritarian militarist societies of Japan and Germany - both traditions a thousand years old -  could be reformed into working democracies, would have been considered insane. But it happened, in the most successful nation building in human history.

    These mundane factual observations counted for nothing, in relation to that sullen value judgment. When the Iraq War began, it was interesting to me how all that old Cold War machinery sprang back to life. Like some banal science fiction story in which an unlucky astronaut stumbles into a lost city and triggers its ancient weapons, all the cliches of the 60's were enthusiastically revived. Everything old became new again. There must have been tears of nostalgia in the eyes of some of the old New Lefters.

    The Demented Left KNOWS that any exercise of United States power is negative.  It doesn't know why. It can't say why the deposition of a repulsive monster was an exercise in imperialism, or what is immoral about the attempt (apparently succeeding as of the date of this posting) to mediate the conflict of two ancient sects. (The radicals have become reactionary over Iraq - a subject of a later post.) It doesn't have to say why. It just KNOWS. That ancient value judgment, the product of systematic Soviet disinformation and propaganda over four decades, was never revised, never re-evaluated.

     I have to wax philosophical here for a moment. As a matter of elementary logic, pure value judgments are absolutely insignificant. The reason is that they aren't reasoned. There is no progression from predicate fact to conclusion. If you can't say why you are for or against something, and back it up with some meaningful reference to actual factual criteria, then - despite all your moralizing, your passionate intensity - your opinion is no better or different than your preference for rocky road ice cream over butter pecan. That happens to be the situation in which most of the members of the Demented Left find themselves.

    But it doesn't make any difference to them. They don't know why they know, but it doesn't make any difference. They KNOW.

                                                                                        - Genuine Realist

   

'Imposing American-Style Democracy': Iraq, part 2

    Back in 2004-5, I used to post regularly on a UK-based political discussion site named 'Open Democracy'.  (This is the site.) Other than the fact that the site was not particularly open, and anything but democratic, the title was reasonably descriptive. The tenor of the vast majority of the posts was what might be called 'Marxist Triste', i.e, acknowledgment that the Cold War had ended, and - yeah - probably in the right way - but wouldn't it have been nice if . . .? The Iraq War had clearly revived their flagging spirits. To a man and woman, they were convinced that the stated rationales about WMD or regime change was at best secondary, at worst a subterfuge, and that the war was really an exercise in American 'imperialism'.  Resisting the temptation to offer the basic response of an Irish American to British subjects moralizing about empire - 'you oughta know' - I posted back and forth. They were all cynically sure that the various deadlines the US had set for the return of power to the Iraqi people would be postponed or ignored. When they were scrupulously met, one after another, and the cynicism of the comrades remained undented, I lost interest in the site and stopped posting there.

    One striking phrase occurred over and over in the posts. What the United States was doing in its unforgivable empire-building zeal was 'attempting to impose American-style democracy' in Iraq.  The expression  interested me, and particularly the underlined phrases. The connotative sense of the phrase is ominously imperial. 'Impose', of course, means to require someone else do something against their will. The adjectival phrase 'American-style' has a loose relation to the noun phrase 'American life-style'. In the manner of traditional conquerors, the crass Americans insist that the hapless Iraqis adopt their way of life. The crass neocons will not be satisfied until Iraqi girls are walking down the streets of Baghdad in miniskirts, with a pork sausage in one hand and a music video playing on their Ipods. It all sounds as arrogantly smug as Americans are supposed to be, and dreadfully parochial.

    But hold the phone. Let's take the expression apart rationally, before buying into the metaphorical background. The actual phrase is 'American-style democracy''. Just what exactly is 'American-style democracy'? And is there any relevant sense in which such a thing could be imposed? What does the ominous sounding phrase actually mean?

    There is not enough space to analyze 'American-style democracy' in depth, but the Reality Principle produces the salient point instantly. 'American-style democracy' does NOT mean the cloning of American institutions in a foreign culture. Not even the most demented anti-American sloganeers would advance such a contention. In its efforts at nation building, some of which have been more successful than any other in history (Germany, Japan), the United States has never attempted any such thing.

    So what exactly is 'American style democracy' in this context? As noted, too big a topic to do exhaustively. My intuition is that the essence of 'American style democracy' boils down to two central elements - (1) the Jeffersonian notion of egalitarian inalienable right, and (2) the Lincolnian notion of consensual government - in a word, the core of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, combined. The institutions of government vary radically - the Iraqi Constitution adopted in 2005 on Islamic principles is as different from the German as the Japanese is from the United States, etc. But the essence of individual right and consensual government is common to all.

    So this 'American style democracy' that is supposedly the point of imperial ambition - an insistence on consensual government. Perhaps the notion is not so ominous after all. But let us return to the verb - 'impose'. How on earth is it possible to impose consensual government on any people? 'OK, buddy, back into that polling booth . . . slowly'?' The concept is preposterous. It would be as useful to talk about 'imposing liberty', which is a nonsense phrase that no one would use - unless they were deliberately trying to obscure the difference between liberation and conquest. This of course was exactly what was going on.

    I have discussed the phrase 'imposing American style democracy' in some detail because it illustrates perfectly the conundrums the Demented Left faces on this issue. Like it or not - and the Demented Left does not like it one little bit - deposing a dictator of appalling cruelty, attempting to establish a nation based on consent of the governed is a Good Thing To Do. There is no way around it. Such an undertaking is not 'imperial' by any normal definition of the word. (My British friends implicitly agreed with this, by defining 'empire' in terms of breathtaking absurdity, engaging in the Glass Bead Game with unrepentant zeal.) The objections are political and practical - not the moral question, 'should it be done? (of course it should), but the realistic one, can it be done - with the resources available and without undue human cost'?

    But this reduction of the issue to its actual prosaic elements means that judgment on the war and the Bush Administration must be left to the voice of history, which may deem it wise or foolish, as time unfolds the matter - and for those who want to condemn now, and unequivocally, and with the vehemence of zealots, that will never do. For that reason, bland political language is absolutely out of the question. The issues must be formulated in terms that make it suitable for instant denunciation - moral language, in short. Thus, the commendable objective of deposing a madman oppressor is transformed into 'imposing American style democracy', 'empire' becomes redefined to something that Caesar Augusts, Napoleon, or Stalin would never have recognized, street gangs engaging in random mass murder become 'revolutionaries' or 'freedom fighters', etc.

                                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

   

t