welp, xmas is over (came and went pretty quickly this year, praise odin) and the head-cold that fired up on monday is beginning to wane just like my unemployment benefits. today we head up to somona to spend a few days and new years eve with jennifer's dad. have fun!
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Friday, December 20, 2002
from abcnews.com:
- Majs. Harry Schmidt and William Umbach are facing up to 64 years in prison for a friendly fire incident over Kandahar, Afghanistan, on April 17 that killed four Canadian soldiers and wounded eight others.
When the two were sent on their mission over Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force gave them $30 million F-16 fighter jets, laser-guided precision munitions, state-of-the-art technology, and something that came as a complete surprise — amphetamines.
Amphetamines, a prescription drug, are known on the street as uppers or speed. Yet, a 20/20 investigation has found, the amphetamines, the speed pills, are now standard issue to U.S. Air Force combat pilots, to help them stay awake on long combat sorties.
The two pilots from Illinois are part of the 183rd fighter wing of the Illinois Air National Guard. Schmidt, trained as a top gun fighter pilot, was sent to Afghanistan in March. Umbach was called up at the same time, leaving behind his family and a full-time job as a United Airlines pilot.
Schmidt and Umbach and their families both viewed their military service with pride. "Being military, we have always lived in the flight pattern. And when we'd see the jets go over it was always a great, wholesome feeling of pride," said Schmidt's wife, Lisa.
Umbach said he felt an obligation to serve. "It's sort of a patriotic thing. I feel like it's something that I should do," he said.
But what happened in the skies over Kandahar on the night of April 17, would change Schmidt and Umbach's lives forever and would bring about their facing a court martial.
'Go Pills'
The Air Force calls the amphetamines it distributes to pilots "go pills." They were quietly reintroduced after being banned in 1992 by the then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak. "In my opinion, if you think you have to take a pill to face something that's tough, you're in the wrong business," McPeak said.
There were reports during the Gulf War of American pilots becoming psychologically addicted to the "go pills" and their use now seriously concerns many leading drug addiction experts.
Dr. Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and one of the country's leading drug addiction authorities, says he was stunned to learn about the Air Force's use of amphetamines. "This is speed. This is where we got the phrase, speed kills," he said.
DuPont, who contends the "go pills" can be highly addictive, said, "It's a frightening concept to me from my experience in dealing with amphetamines to have this be a routine activity."
One Air Force pilot told us, "We all carry them as a bit of insurance."
Controllers in an AWACS plane overhead told Schmidt to hold his fire, but, convinced he and Umbach were under attack, Schmidt opened fire.
"Bombs away. Cranking left. Lasers on. Shack," Schmidt said on the tape.
But DuPont's characterization of heavy amphetamine use suggests the "go pill" policy may be playing with fire. He said, "People who get strung out on amphetamines are, are usually crazy. They're paranoid, they stop eating. … Their judgment is impaired and they do very bad things. … They are among the sickest of all drug addicts."
Unfit to Fly Without Pills?
Yet not only is the Air Force making the amphetamines widely available to combat pilots, it also has informed them they could be considered unfit to fly certain missions if they don't voluntarily take the amphetamines.
"A combat sortie that's seven or eight or nine hours is very challenging. You have highs and lows," said Gen. Daniel Leaf, a two star general and former combat pilot, who has been assigned to defend the use of the "go pills." He says the pills are only prescribed in small, controlled doses.
"The American public should be very concerned if we were not providing every opportunity to counter the demonstratedly fatal potential impact of fatigue," Leaf said.
But amphetamines, no matter the dose, are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration to combat fatigue, and are listed by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule Two narcotic, in the same category as cocaine.
Leaf said the amphetamines are not used for recreation. He described them as a "medical tool."
"Our medical community has carefully evaluated their use, deemed it appropriate. I agree. I believe they're effective. I believe they're well-administered," he said.
But that's not what Schmidt and Umbach said they found when they arrived at their post in Kuwait. According to their defense lawyers, the two pilots were told by superiors they could be found unfit to fly the mission unless they took the pills.
Dave Beck, Umbach's civilian attorney, said, "They will be marked, they will be known. Their careers will basically be over."
Beck said, "What's happened in this case is that blame has been fixed at the lowest level, the pilots.
Capt. Matt Skobel, Umbach's military lawyer, said pilots need the pills in order to complete their difficult missions. "These missions were at the limit of the pilots' physical and mental endurance. And these pills were required to allow them to do it," Skobel said.
Pilots simply sign up on a clipboard for six "go pills" at a time and are told to use them as needed. But Umbach says he knew from his civilian job that such pills were strictly banned for commercial airline pilots.
But use them he did, along with his wingman Maj. Schmidt, on their April 17 night mission over Afghanistan, about an hour before tragedy would strike, according to Schmidt's defense lawyer Charles Gittins.
"An hour after he took the pills … he would have been feeling the maximum serum level in his blood," Gittins said.
It was then, under the full influence of the amphetamine pills, that the two pilots spotted weapons fire near the Kandahar air base, as can be heard on the cockpit tapes obtained by 20/20.
"I've got some men on a road with a piece of artillery firing at us. I'm rolling in self defense," Schmidt can be heard saying on the tape.
‘Friendly Fire’
It was only after Schmidt dropped the bomb that he was told it was not the enemy. What Schmidt hit was a squad of Canadian soldiers, killing four of them, wounding eight. What the military calls friendly fire.
The pilots had not been told the Canadians would be conducting a night live-fire training exercise in the area, even though the Canadians had properly informed the U.S. military.
"They were great soldiers that in a split second got wiped out for no reason," said Canadian Sgt. Lorne Ford, who lost his right eye and suffered a severe injury to his left leg in the incident.
A joint Canadian-American investigation put the blame on the two U.S. pilots for essentially being too quick to open fire under the rules of engagement they were supposed to follow, behavior that experts say is typical of someone on speed or amphetamines.
DuPont said the pills might have prompted the pilots to "a quick conclusion that is wrong. Where if you had a little more reflection, you have come to another conclusion." He said he wouldn't rule out that the "go pills" may have been a factor in the deadly incident.
But the Air Force has ruled out the "go pills" Schmidt and Umbach took as being responsible in any way.
And the two men, now back home in Illinois, face four counts of manslaughter and dereliction of duty, the most serious charges ever brought in a friendly fire case.
"Obviously you feel very betrayed. … It's one of the most devastating things I think anyone could go through," said Schmidt's wife, Lisa.
As for the "go pills" — the speed — the Air Force says there's no reason for any change in policy, that they are essential for combat pilots now being sent to war over Afghanistan and Iraq.
"These men are patriots, these men were sent to fight a war and they're put in a situation where it's either take these pills or you don't fly," Skobel said.
For a pilot, Skobel said, "It's not a choice at all.
December 20, 2002
Quo Vadis, Karl?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The day after the Republican triumph in the midterm elections, a jubilant Trent Lott held a celebratory press conference. "Let's roll!" he exulted. (Good taste is not one of Mr. Lott's strong points.)
Six weeks later, we have to ask: Roll where (aside from Baghdad)? The storm that has broken over Mr. Lott's head is justified. But it may also reflect buyers' remorse: post-election polls suggest broad public unease about where Mr. Lott's party is taking us.
It's not even clear what the Bush administration wants to accomplish now that it has full control. Until now the administration has been all politics and no policy; John J. DiIulio tells us that there is a "complete lack of a policy apparatus," that all decisions are made by the political arm. For the past two years domestic policy has consisted of little more than checking off the boxes on a wish list drawn up circa 1999.
Meanwhile, as problems that weren't anticipated in 1999 have arisen, the administration has done as little as possible, as late as possible.
This has been true even in the areas where George W. Bush gets highest marks from voters. Remember that the administration repeatedly rejected calls for a homeland security agency, changing its mind only when Coleen Rowley went public with tales of intelligence failures. And a growing chorus of critics say that hardly anything real has been done to make the country safer.
Similarly, the administration tried to prevent any independent inquiry into what went wrong on Sept. 11, and how to avoid future attacks. Then, when he could no longer avoid an inquiry, Mr. Bush did his best to undermine that inquiry's credibility by choosing Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head it.
And then there's corporate reform. At first the administration opposed doing anything. Then, after WorldCom blew up, it agreed to a modest reform bill — only to undermine the bill's credibility both by trying to renege on promises to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with adequate funds, and by pressuring Harvey Pitt not to choose a real reformer to head a crucial new panel.
Finally, there's economic policy. Fears that the economy would suffer a "jobless recovery" similar to that of the first Bush administration are no longer hypothetical: over the past year G.D.P. has grown, but employment has continued to shrink, and the risk that the U.S. will slide into a Japanese-style pattern of slow growth and deflation no longer seems remote.
Again, the response has been to do as little as possible. As Congress failed to agree on an extension of unemployment benefits — which means that 800,000 families will be cut off on Dec. 28 — the administration simply stood on the sidelines. Last weekend, too late to help those families, Mr. Bush finally spoke up in favor of an extension, but failed to say whether he favored the merely cosmetic House plan or the more serious Senate plan; those who follow the issue know that this makes all the difference.
Will things improve now that there's a new economic team? John Snow seems to be Paul O'Neill without the charm. Stephen Friedman will probably be more vigorous than his predecessor; The Washington Post reports that one of Mr. Bush's frequent complaints about Larry Lindsey was that he didn't get enough physical exercise. But Mr. Friedman will have plenty of time to work out; it has been made clear that his duties as economic adviser don't include actually giving any economic advice.
Meanwhile, if the trial balloons floated by the administration are any guide to the forthcoming "stimulus" package, it will consist of more items from the checklist: making the tax cut permanent, reducing taxes on dividends. Nice stuff if you make more than $300,000 a year and have a net worth in the millions, but pretty much irrelevant to the actual problems of the economy — except the long-run deficit, which will get even worse. It seems that Karl Rove and his merry band of Mayberry Machiavellis are still calling the shots.
It may be that the bad few weeks the administration has just had were the result of random events. But I think the public is finally waking up to the fact that the people in the White House know a lot about gaining power, but not much about what to do with it.
Quo Vadis, Karl?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The day after the Republican triumph in the midterm elections, a jubilant Trent Lott held a celebratory press conference. "Let's roll!" he exulted. (Good taste is not one of Mr. Lott's strong points.)
Six weeks later, we have to ask: Roll where (aside from Baghdad)? The storm that has broken over Mr. Lott's head is justified. But it may also reflect buyers' remorse: post-election polls suggest broad public unease about where Mr. Lott's party is taking us.
It's not even clear what the Bush administration wants to accomplish now that it has full control. Until now the administration has been all politics and no policy; John J. DiIulio tells us that there is a "complete lack of a policy apparatus," that all decisions are made by the political arm. For the past two years domestic policy has consisted of little more than checking off the boxes on a wish list drawn up circa 1999.
Meanwhile, as problems that weren't anticipated in 1999 have arisen, the administration has done as little as possible, as late as possible.
This has been true even in the areas where George W. Bush gets highest marks from voters. Remember that the administration repeatedly rejected calls for a homeland security agency, changing its mind only when Coleen Rowley went public with tales of intelligence failures. And a growing chorus of critics say that hardly anything real has been done to make the country safer.
Similarly, the administration tried to prevent any independent inquiry into what went wrong on Sept. 11, and how to avoid future attacks. Then, when he could no longer avoid an inquiry, Mr. Bush did his best to undermine that inquiry's credibility by choosing Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head it.
And then there's corporate reform. At first the administration opposed doing anything. Then, after WorldCom blew up, it agreed to a modest reform bill — only to undermine the bill's credibility both by trying to renege on promises to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with adequate funds, and by pressuring Harvey Pitt not to choose a real reformer to head a crucial new panel.
Finally, there's economic policy. Fears that the economy would suffer a "jobless recovery" similar to that of the first Bush administration are no longer hypothetical: over the past year G.D.P. has grown, but employment has continued to shrink, and the risk that the U.S. will slide into a Japanese-style pattern of slow growth and deflation no longer seems remote.
Again, the response has been to do as little as possible. As Congress failed to agree on an extension of unemployment benefits — which means that 800,000 families will be cut off on Dec. 28 — the administration simply stood on the sidelines. Last weekend, too late to help those families, Mr. Bush finally spoke up in favor of an extension, but failed to say whether he favored the merely cosmetic House plan or the more serious Senate plan; those who follow the issue know that this makes all the difference.
Will things improve now that there's a new economic team? John Snow seems to be Paul O'Neill without the charm. Stephen Friedman will probably be more vigorous than his predecessor; The Washington Post reports that one of Mr. Bush's frequent complaints about Larry Lindsey was that he didn't get enough physical exercise. But Mr. Friedman will have plenty of time to work out; it has been made clear that his duties as economic adviser don't include actually giving any economic advice.
Meanwhile, if the trial balloons floated by the administration are any guide to the forthcoming "stimulus" package, it will consist of more items from the checklist: making the tax cut permanent, reducing taxes on dividends. Nice stuff if you make more than $300,000 a year and have a net worth in the millions, but pretty much irrelevant to the actual problems of the economy — except the long-run deficit, which will get even worse. It seems that Karl Rove and his merry band of Mayberry Machiavellis are still calling the shots.
It may be that the bad few weeks the administration has just had were the result of random events. But I think the public is finally waking up to the fact that the people in the White House know a lot about gaining power, but not much about what to do with it.
Thursday, December 19, 2002
"I Am Not For World Empire"
A conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the perils of technology and why he is a Left-Conservative.
On a crystalline day in October, Taki, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell met at Logan Airport and drove up the Cape to Norman Mailer’s home in Provincetown, Mass. Taki is an old friend of Mailer’s; McConnell and Hopkins knew his writing well but had never met the man.
The vagaries of literary reputation are not the main beat of The American Conservative, but we were struck by how many people told us how important Mailer was at a certain time of life and how invariably that time was young adulthood—somewhere between 18 and 21. Perhaps that is the moment in life when readers are most receptive to a certain kind of bold writing.
What follows is a conversation about what most interested the four of us on that day, as well as an addendum Mailer wrote later. We spoke of the present and future more than the past: a mixture of politics (Iraq, the imperial urge, styles of conservatism) and more typically Maileresque themes (the problem of technology). After several hours of talk and the gracious hospitality of Norris Church Mailer we made our way back to normal life, not doubting that we had spent an extraordinary afternoon with the greatest living American writer.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: You’re just back from Europe…
NORMAN MAILER: My wife, Norris, and I went with George Plimpton and his wife Sarah. We did George’s play, Zelda, Scott & Earnest (Terry Quinn, co-author) in six capitals over two visits.
We were in Paris and Amsterdam in June, then at end of summer, in Vienna and Berlin and Moscow and London. It is the most amazing play. There is not one original word in it. It is all taken from Scott’s writings, Zelda’s writings, and Hemingway’s, plus their letters back and forth. The first time we did it, I said to John Irving, “Can you imagine how good this will be with top-flight actors?” He said, no, no, no. The fact that you people are doing it makes it interesting because sitting in the audience, you go back and forth between the originals and the people who are doing it on this night.
I think that is a part of it. Americans need mythos, certainly, in the literary world. Nationally, we have Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and FDR and Camelot, and in some quarters I fear there is Ronald Reagan, but nonetheless, in the literary world, it is probably Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Zelda, the nearest thing to a literary mythos within living reach. People take to it.
AC: Why do you think so? Because they are good, but not necessarily the best.
NM: Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Well, they are arguably the best. Who would you call on in that period? Going back, you could certainly argue that Melville’s a greater writer or Emerson or a few others. But who would you name for now?
AC: I would put Henry Miller there with them.
NM: Yes, Henry Miller I would put there. Maybe a century from now, people will decide he was greater. But a myth doesn’t depend on who is greatest. It needs figures who are extremely well known and yet not quite understood. That lends itself to myth. Why we need mythos may be the real question. I would assume it is the counter-weight to technology.
AC: Technology has been a theme you’ve written and spoken about for 50 years. Do you think in terms of sensory deadening or soul deadening, that the impact is much worse now than 40 or 50 years ago? I am not sure whether you do the Internet and all that…
NM: I don’t. That would use up what I have left. Not long ago, I said that what technology promises is less pleasure and more power. Part of the crisis of modern times is that there is a tendency for all of us to become more and more narcissistic and power-driven. (And icy within.)
AC: Are you gloomy about the looming power of the state, of American totalitarianism? You’ve said you’ve been wrong about that many times and have been cheerful about having been wrong.
NM: I am more worried this time than ever. Did you see a piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a marvelous piece by a man named Jay Bookman? If you want to talk about Iraq, I’m ready to get into that.
AC: Our little magazine has been talking a lot about Iraq.
NM: I, too, am not for going to war, so we certainly meet there. What I thought from the beginning is that there is a most peculiar subtext under the Bush administration’s approach on what has to be done with Iraq. Some time ago, they began by suggesting that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat. It is now generally agreed that they are not. The Bush people then began to carry on about the huge danger of a biochemical assault on us. But they’ve not made the case that Iraq is on the ready for such a dire possibility. Then, another big accusation—Iraq is a harbor for terrorists. Well, as far as I can see, and this is from a novelist’s point of view, if I were Saddam Hussein, the last people I would want to have in my country are terrorists from other countries because I am interested in total control over my own land. Terrorists are loose cannons. Why would Hussein want to pay an unforeseen price? Then, on the other hand, if I were a terrorist, going along the underground railway that I assume runs from Pakistan through Iran and has to pass through Iraq to get to Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Palestine, the worst place on this trip would be Iraq because I’d probably be put in a compound. So what is the subtext? Why does the White House want to have that war, why? What do they want? One can name access to oil as the motive, but is that a large enough reward for what could be the unforeseen and immense dangers of such a war?
Then I saw that piece in the Journal-Constitution, printed on Sept. 29, a piece to which no attention was paid in American newspapers. I was surprised by that. It is a powerful piece. Bookman remarks that everybody has been asking, why is there no plan for what is to be done in Iraq after the war is won? Bookman’s firm suggestion is that there has been a plan all the time. We are going to occupy Iraq and occupy it for a long time. Then it all does begin to make its own kind of sense. Because that means we are inaugurating the commencement of the American World Empire. Right there is the subtext. Incidentally, the political seat from which I speak is as a Left-Conservative.
AC: It was much more clean when you were an anarchist. We knew what that meant. But Left-Conservative?
NM: I have to redefine the term for myself every day because on its face, we have an oxymoron. But, it does have meaning for me. I think there are elements in the remains of left-wing philosophy (which has not had all that many new ideas for the last 30 years), that are worth maintaining.
AC: Such as?
NM: The idea that a very rich man should not make 4,000 times as much in a year as a poor man. On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I’m concerned. Liberalism depends all too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover, liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since I happen to be—I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects—but I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal’s mind is blown. He is consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end of real conversation.
On the other hand, conservatism has its own deep ditches, its unclimbable walls, its immutable old ideas sealed in concrete. But lately, there are two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917, yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call “value conservatives” because they believe in what most people think of as the standard conservative values—family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance—dependable human virtues. And then there are what I call “flag conservatives,” of whom obviously the present administration would be the perfect example.
I don’t think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word “evil” as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.
AC: Who in American politics is a value conservative?
NM: Someone like Taft would be a good example of a value conservative. Eisenhower, probably, a gentle value conservative. More recently? Reagan, I think, was not. I will say that I don’t think Reagan ever had an original idea in his life. I once sat next to him, as near as I am sitting to you, at a lunch for eight people. This was in 1972 at the convention that nominated Nixon for the second time. I spent the entire meal trying to figure out a tough question to ask him. I always found that if you meet someone’s eyes, a good question can come to mind. And for two hours he sat there, perfectly calm and pleasant and kept making jokes and talking. It was a lightweight conversation. The physical impression of him was that he had about as much human specific density as, let’s say, a sales manager for a medium-sized corporation in the Midwest. That kind of modest, mild, well-knit heft was in his bearing. During those two hours, he chatted with all six Time reporters at the table, and his eyes never met mine. I found myself unable to come up with that tough question as a result. It became a matter of decorum. The mood was too genial. It occurred to me after he became president that he probably, if he could help it, never spent time talking to anyone who was of no use to him. An instinctive climber who scaled the face of success with great skill: that was his gift, if you will. He was surrounded by people who had many powerful ideas and who illumined him to the point where they could wind him up and then he could do his special stuff. At the time, he had an enormous impact on value conservatives because they thought he was one of them. I suspect he had about as much to do with them as a screen star does with an agricultural laborer.
AC: Returning to the question of empire…
NM: One of the most interesting remarks in the Journal-Constitution piece was that after this excellent explanation of what the subtext probably is, Bookman wrote that if it is true that America is going towards empire, that should be made public to the American people. Let them, at least, have some say on that because it is one of the largest issues we face in the future. I agree wholly with that.
You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I’m not in accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view, America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary. In the last decade, there have been many blows to the psychic integument of conservatism. And the last half-year has been horrific. We have all had to recognize the outsize chicanery and economic pollution of the corporations, we have had to deal with the great blow the Catholic Church took, not to mention 9/11, which was a shock, if not an outright chasm at our feet. I think Americans took a hit that is not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is my belief Hitler could never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, I think 9/11 did something comparable to the American sense of security.
AC: What would the empire builders have done with out 9/11?
NM: I don’t think they would have proceeded this way at all. There is such a thing as luck in human affairs. Without 9/11, I don’t think they could have exploited this push to have a war with Iraq. I think, rather, the administration would have been in trouble. The attention of the media was fixed on the bad market, the increase in joblessness, the Church and corporate scandals, the high school serial killers, the drugs, new and old.
AC: Do you think we may be in al Qaeda’s script or Osama bin Laden’s script? Is there really a war of civilizations, which will, if it starts in earnest, not bode well for American globalism?
NM: I think there is a good deal of reality to this. From a radical Muslim point of view, America is absolutely the Great Satan, and this is a war to the death. But in terms of military realities, I don’t think it is necessary for us to build an empire to be able to contain Muslim rage. For one thing, apart from anything else, it would take Islamic extremists, what? A hundred years to overthrow us? Systematic terrorism for 100 years? Fifty years? Their all-out rage is not likely to last that
long.
Historic moods shift. Temperaments grow old. The point I want to make is that—let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted. That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992, was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years of the Clinton administration. I don’t know if White House principals talk to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.
What they don’t take into account is the exceptional perversity of human affairs. At the least we could become a species of totalitarian country, dominating the world, with very little freedom of speech. Moreover, the entire scheme could fail. The notion itself has an overweening hubris to it.
AC: This could very easily fail— especially if China and Europe were opposed to it.
NM: One of the messages that the flag conservatives are trying to send to China is, I expect: Hear this! You Chinese guys are obviously very bright. We can tell. We know! Because your Asian students in our universities get better marks than our people do. They are more serious. They were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don’t get any pleasure anyway, so they do like the notion of personal, right-at-your-desk power. Technology is ideal for them. All right, goes the unspoken message of the flag conservatives, you guys can have your technology, but you had better understand, China, that you will be the Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well because you will be most important to us, eminently important. But don’t try to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope to be is Greeks.
There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain. That, I am fully ready to speculate, is the subtext beneath the Iraqi subtext, and they may not even be wholly aware of it themselves, not all of them.
AC: What now?
NM: I’m not sure anything can be done. I think America is in pretty bad psychic shape. If it really is, then many people may turn to the idea of Empire as a transcendent solution, a way to get rid of our ongoing guilt. I would argue that there has always been a tremendous guilt in our lives, at least as long as I know. I can go right back to my World War II days in the Army. We were all convinced then that when peace came, we’d return home to a depression. We G.I.’s were bitter about that and we enjoyed our bitterness. We were maybe going to lose our lives, but if we got through this, we’d probably go back to depression. Good luck! But after we returned, the country took off on an economic ascent. A lot of Americans were very happy to be prosperous, but they also felt secretly guilty. Why? Because we are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is essentially a grace note. We are a Christian nation. And the idea, if you really are a Christian and a great many people in America at that point were significantly devout, was that you were not supposed to be all that rich. God didn’t want it. Jesus certainly didn’t. You were not supposed to pile up a lot of money. You were supposed to spend your life in reasonably altruistic acts. That was one half of the collective psyche. The other half: Beat everybody you are in a contest with because you’ve got to win. To a certain extent, and this is a cruel, but possibly an accurate remark, to be an American is to be an oxymoron. On the one hand, you are a good Christian, and on the other, you are viscerally combative. You are supposed to be macho and win. Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t necessarily consort too well in one psyche. Nonetheless, we moved forward, we became more and more powerful, even as the guilt developed in all sorts of subterranean ways. The communist Red Scare of the early Fifties, at a time when the Soviet Union was still hugely ravaged by its war wounds, is one example of how we reacted. When 9/11 occurred, there was an immense guilt mixed in with the rage. I was here in Provincetown, 300 miles away at the time, and the reality of it didn’t hit me directly, but after a while I began to perceive part of the key element in it. The terror of that act involved the TV audience all over America. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we’ve been seeing scenes just like that on the tube and enjoyed them because we were so insulated. A hundredth of our psychic receptivity could enter the box and share the fear while 99% of ourselves felt absolutely safe. Now, suddenly, it was real. Gods and demons were invading the U.S., coming in right off the TV screen. That may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after 9/11 as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.
AC: Do you think there is any turning back? Or are we set on this course? Or is there still a chance to turn prudently away from it?
NM: I think if Bush has to turn away from it, he will do so with great frustration. He will have to go back and live with the old dull insolubles again! I expect the White House feeling still remains that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks or feels. But, force majeure, these flag conservatives are now obliged, nonetheless, to acknowledge the fair amount of division in this country and the unhappiness of France, Germany, Russia, not to mention China, Japan, we can keep naming them. It had to get to the White House principals. They might not be able to bring off this first big step. Were they really ready to do it against the feelings of the rest of the world? Some of the administration who had been all for it in the beginning might have begun to waver. Others, I expect, argued that they had to stay on course. Suck it up! No room for weaklings on this ship!
One of my favorite notions about Bush is that although he is not a bright man, he does have what Ernest Hemingway used to call a bull-s**t detector. Like Reagan, he doesn’t have ideas of his own, but he does listen to his experts. He has to. They know more than he does. Still, he can probably tell fairly often when they are speaking with true authority and when they are glossing over their own uncertainty. Sometimes an expert has to maintain his or her position, even though inwardly dubious of its authenticity. Perhaps Bush can hear who is speaking with inner conviction on a given occasion and who is not. So he tacks with each yaw in the breeze.
AC: There is a lot being said in most of the journals of the American Right about Islam being an essentially evil religion which somehow we have to vanquish. Speak to your sense of Islam and where the Christian West or post-Christian West is in relationship to it and how that could play out.
NM: Well, to begin with, I would say that flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse. The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large.
AC: The conflict between communism and capitalism seems so much more sensible and manageable in comparison.
NM: Looking back, it was kind of logical. Capitalism and communism had clear and opposed objectives but neither was ready to destroy the world. Certainly, the more that conflict ebbed into its conclusion, the less danger was present that the big bang would come.
AC: You have cast the fight as Allah versus moolah—Islam versus money. If ours is indeed a post Christian society in which materialism is the highest good, and it takes a faith to fight a faith, are they not better suited to combat us?
NM: Are they better suited? No, I don’t think so. The difficulty I have when I speak about this is I don’t know enough about Islam. But it does seem to me, on the face of it, that if we did nothing in terms of attacking them, that might delay such a war for 50 years. The next argument would be, well, can we afford to delay? We can win it now and we might lose it in 50 years. But my notion is that this war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other. It is not that complicated to be an effective terrorist after all. Pick up the phone, make a call, and disrupt traffic for half a day. The real question is how pervasive can terrorism get, not whether you can wipe it out. There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist. If we try to become an empire, the real question will become whether we are able to live with terrorism at the level that the Israelis, let us say, are living with now. To be an Israeli these days means that you can never make solid plans, and Jewish people love to have such agendas and carry them out. Now, we are already at the edge of not knowing when our children might be in danger.
AC: You have described the neoconservative support for the war as potentially problematic for Israel. Why?
NM: America could win easily over Iraq, but if Saddam has a Samson complex, what would his last act be? Might he hit Israel at the end with everything he’s still got? At that point, he is a very dangerous man. Nothing more to lose. He would never dare to attack Israel first. That would certainly destroy him. He wouldn’t even dare, I think, to allow terrorists to do it for him because of the obvious reason that it would be too easy to trace it to him. But if Saddam has lost everything, if he is remotely as bad as they paint him—and he may well be—then the likelihood is that he will pull down the columns of the temple: He will be ready to rest as history’s super-terrorist. What I don’t understand, therefore, is why the Sharon government is so ready to gamble with Israel’s aility to defend itself (or be defended) against extreme attack.
AC: Perhaps because they think that if he is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, then Israel will no longer have a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, and that is potentially risky.
NM: Immensely risky. But at that point, they can both destroy each other. In miniature, it’s analogous to the potentiality for instant destruction that America had with the Soviet Union. So, time itself might bring a species of peace. Have they thought it through?
AC: Can we address more generally Israel and its unavoidable existential dilemma, which is the Palestinians? I don’t think you’ve written a lot about Israel…
NM: No. I’ve never been there. For a basic reason, which is that I am always writing a book. To go to Israel would mean another book to write, and it would be an important book. It would take over all I am doing now, and what I am working on now is more important to me.
AC: But you were never any kind of anti-Zionist…
NM:No, I start with a set of simple, unsophisticated notions about Israel. It was such a small country when it began. If the Arab leaders had had any kind of human goodness in them, they could have said, these people have been through hell. Let’s treat them with Islamic courtesy, the way we are supposed to treat strangers. Instead they declared them the enemy. The Israelis had no choice but to become strong and to get allied with us. In the course of doing so, some of the best aspects of the Jewish nature—irony, the love of truth, the love of wisdom and justice, suffered internal depredations.
The prevailing attitude over the decades demanded that they become good farmers, good technicians, and good soldiers. No need to use the minds for fine-tuning any more. Do not even speak of hearts. Be there when you’re needed became the overriding virtue.
Once it was a matter of saving their country, everything changed. Quantity changes quality, which may be the best three words Engels ever wrote. Quantity changes quality. As the Israelis became tougher, so they lost any hard-earned and elevated objectivity, any high and disinterested search for social value. The logo became Israel, my Israel. That was inevitable. It is also tragic, I think. Israel is now one more powerhouse in the world. But what they’ve lost is special. Now, they treat the Palestinians as if the Palestinians were ghetto Jews. It is one of the great ironies. You know, the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, be turned inside out.
AC: Do you think there is any way they can escape that dilemma with the Palestinians?
NM:I don’t see how. Not right now. It may be that what they feel is that if they don’t gamble now, they will be destroyed later. If a war with Iraq ends with Americans installed there, Israel could feel more secure for decades to come. But it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neo-cons may feel this is our best shot, this is our best opportunity, this is the moment when we have to take a chance because, if we don’t now, we are likely to be doomed 10, 20, 30 years down the road.
But, again, I say, you don’t gamble that way. I’ve always been thoroughly opposed to gambling with your last thousand bucks. Especially if you have a family. That is one reason I am a Left-Conservative. That is the conservative part of me.
AC: What’s your opinion of Ariel Sharon?
NM: He is what he is. A brute. A powerhouse general. I think his defense would be: “I am what fate has made me.” If he had lived in the ghetto, he would have been one of the stronger men there and probably one of the more disliked. But now he is an Israeli. What is obvious, what stands out in most Israelis is that they are patriots. My God, they are. After Hitler, how could they not be? In that sense, I am sure Sharon thinks he is doing the only thing he can do; that he is doing the right thing. Just as I was going on earlier about Christians having this great guilt that they were not compassionate, but greedy, so I think there is a similar inner crisis in Israel. I think they are ready to say: We are no longer humanists. We’ve become the opposite of ourselves. Still, we protect the country. We dare the unknown. If Saddam unloads on us? If a large part of Israel is lost to such a war? Well, sometimes one must undergo serious surgery. I think the Sharons are ready for that. Of course, the neocons here will not be losing their own arm or leg or lungs.
AC: Shifting course a bit, years ago in your writing, you created a kind of antithesis between blacks and whites, writing not about civil rights but about black and white attitudes towards life.
NM: Yes. Black and white with their separate geist.
AC: American has become much more complicated now with browns and yellows. Does that lead to any of the sorts of generalizations that came out of “The White Negro”?
NM: You’ve got to put more of a point on the question.
AC: Our side of the immigration debate generally feels that America is getting transformed into something less like the country we understand and are used to. It seems a kind of foreign place. It is not an argument we often use, but that is in the back of it. Have you thought much about the more multicultural America? What are its possibilities? What are its limitations?
NM: I haven’t thought about it for a very good reason, which is, I don’t like thinking about it. There are so many complexities to it and such a collision with so many of my own values. On the one hand, at the time I wrote “The White Negro,” I felt that America was very much in need of black culture as such and that black culture had an understanding of life that white culture didn’t have. That is how I felt then. Since then I’ve come to the conclusion that—these remarks are so general, they don’t appeal to me—but the collision I have in my mind and am trying to think it through and can’t—is that I believe that the integrity of races and cultures is very important. It is something you can’t talk about. Hitler took care of race-talk forever. Well, not forever, but for the next 100 years. But I do think that there is such a thing as the integrity of each culture and that cultures ought to be able to go in different directions, even collide. Given the modern world of technology, I am not even sure, however, that the race or culture question is even paramount any more. The long-term tendency is to have no races. It is as if technology has become the dominant culture in existence and may soon be the only real culture. In other words, the similarities between computer experts all over the world is now far greater than their differences in ethnicity.
AC: Go back to the integrity of races as very important. I know it is a politically incorrect thought but it doesn’t have to be expressed with rancor. It might be interesting.
NM: I don’t have any rancor about it, I just have a feeling there is a true problem. To the degree that you lose your culture, you’ve lost what may be irreplaceable. We can end up with a world that is totally homogenized. Of course, the problem, which was never solved, is how can these different races and cultures live together with some equity? Democracy has often made vigorous attempts to solve this. But the tendency to homogeneity can go too far. The answer is somewhere in the balance. And the immense difficulty is keeping a viable balance, a lively balance.
Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, but America is being lost and has been lost in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost is through television.
Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a 7- or 8-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much any more. The habit has been lost. Every seven to 10 minutes a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption. Add to that our present-day classrooms. Does anybody ever say that one reason our education is in such a blighted mess is that just about all schools now use fluorescent lights? Why? Because they cost a little less. I would say that in the final count of dollars and cents they cost more. What characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer than they do under incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent tubes offer an unhappy livid light. Skin looks washed out and a bit sickly. If everybody seems uglier than they are normally, why, then, everyone grows a little depressed. They begin to think, what am I doing with all these plain-looking people? Aren’t I worth more?
That contributes to the deterioration of the powers of concentration. Bad architecture, invasive marketing, ubiquitous plastic—these deleterious forces bother me much more than immigration.
* * *
I could go on about this. Our first problem is not immigration but the American corporation. That is the force which has succeeded in taking America away from us. It has triumphed in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. I would cite 50-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenize our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses. It is the front-runner in the competition to see what can make the world more disagreeable. To the degree we have exported this crud all over the globe, we wield already a punitive species of world hegemony. If I find myself viscerally opposed to the notion of an American Empire, it is because of the all-pervasive aesthetic empti-ness of the most powerful American corporations. There are no cathedrals left for the poor—only sixteen-story urban renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a left-conservative as a left-medievalist. I am, of course, not serious about such a term, but we are all medieval in one fashion—our movie stars, musical entertainers, tycoons, and politicos are treated these days as an awe-inspiring if rampant bunch of barons, counts, dukes, earls, princes, princesses, queens and kings. It is a world we can live in, but let’s not forget those medieval ratios of difference in income between rich and poor. I once spent a weekend with a wealthy Swedish publisher who lived near Malmo, and he complained for all of a night how much of his wealth was taken from him by income tax. Before we said goodnight, however, he did remark: “You know —when all is said, I do sleep better because I know that in Sweden we can say at least that no one goes to bed hungry or without a roof over his head.” A nice remark. I know that if I were an American making several thousand times more than the poorest man in town, I would not only be afraid of that poor man, but of my relatives and certainly of my enemies, and I would toss at night wondering how to make more money so everyone could recognize that I was the most splendid and exceptional fellow around.
If such a man is not the bane of real conservatives, then I don’t know why we are in a dialogue. Once, in the Democratic primary of 1969, I ran for mayor of New York in the hope that a Left-Right coalition could be formed and this Left-Right pincers could make a dent in the entrenched power of the center. The best to be said for that campaign is that it had its charm. I am not so certain, however, that this idea must remain eternally without wings. It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center. Our notion was built on the premise that we did not really know the elements of a good, viable society. We all had our differing ideals, and morals, and political ethics, but rarely found a way to practice them directly. So, we called for Power to the Neighborhoods. We suggested that New York City become a state itself, the fifty-first. Its citizens would then have the power to create a variety of new neighborhoods, new townships, all built on separate concepts, core neighborhoods founded on one or another of our cherished notions from the Left or the Right. One could have egalitarian towns and privileged places, or, for those who did not wish to be bothered with living in so detailed (and demanding) a society, there would be the more familiar and old way of doing things—the City of the State of New York—a government for those who did not care—just like old times.
It was a menu for social exploration and experiment. If we had been elected, we might have ended up with everything in an abysmal mess. It was a wicked scheme since we had (just like our flirtation to go to war with Iraq) no real notion of how it would all turn out—which is the essence of the wicked—up the ante and close your eyes while you wait for the turn of the card.
Nonetheless, some germ of the idea of a society open enough for people to live intense social lives still appeals to me. I repeat—we do not really know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow all exits and promote a single central secure point of view) may prove to be the least good answer of them all. Until the Left and that part of the Right loyal to its old values can come to recognize that with all their differences, they also have one profound value they might look to protect in common—the vulnerable dignity of the human creation—we are all obliged to travel passively into the vain and surrealistic land of corporate hegemony with its basic notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any country anywhere—a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise of democracy which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and learn from its own human errors.
I see that I have ended by writing a small polemic. It could be said that old polemicists never die.
A conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the perils of technology and why he is a Left-Conservative.
On a crystalline day in October, Taki, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell met at Logan Airport and drove up the Cape to Norman Mailer’s home in Provincetown, Mass. Taki is an old friend of Mailer’s; McConnell and Hopkins knew his writing well but had never met the man.
The vagaries of literary reputation are not the main beat of The American Conservative, but we were struck by how many people told us how important Mailer was at a certain time of life and how invariably that time was young adulthood—somewhere between 18 and 21. Perhaps that is the moment in life when readers are most receptive to a certain kind of bold writing.
What follows is a conversation about what most interested the four of us on that day, as well as an addendum Mailer wrote later. We spoke of the present and future more than the past: a mixture of politics (Iraq, the imperial urge, styles of conservatism) and more typically Maileresque themes (the problem of technology). After several hours of talk and the gracious hospitality of Norris Church Mailer we made our way back to normal life, not doubting that we had spent an extraordinary afternoon with the greatest living American writer.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: You’re just back from Europe…
NORMAN MAILER: My wife, Norris, and I went with George Plimpton and his wife Sarah. We did George’s play, Zelda, Scott & Earnest (Terry Quinn, co-author) in six capitals over two visits.
We were in Paris and Amsterdam in June, then at end of summer, in Vienna and Berlin and Moscow and London. It is the most amazing play. There is not one original word in it. It is all taken from Scott’s writings, Zelda’s writings, and Hemingway’s, plus their letters back and forth. The first time we did it, I said to John Irving, “Can you imagine how good this will be with top-flight actors?” He said, no, no, no. The fact that you people are doing it makes it interesting because sitting in the audience, you go back and forth between the originals and the people who are doing it on this night.
I think that is a part of it. Americans need mythos, certainly, in the literary world. Nationally, we have Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and FDR and Camelot, and in some quarters I fear there is Ronald Reagan, but nonetheless, in the literary world, it is probably Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Zelda, the nearest thing to a literary mythos within living reach. People take to it.
AC: Why do you think so? Because they are good, but not necessarily the best.
NM: Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Well, they are arguably the best. Who would you call on in that period? Going back, you could certainly argue that Melville’s a greater writer or Emerson or a few others. But who would you name for now?
AC: I would put Henry Miller there with them.
NM: Yes, Henry Miller I would put there. Maybe a century from now, people will decide he was greater. But a myth doesn’t depend on who is greatest. It needs figures who are extremely well known and yet not quite understood. That lends itself to myth. Why we need mythos may be the real question. I would assume it is the counter-weight to technology.
AC: Technology has been a theme you’ve written and spoken about for 50 years. Do you think in terms of sensory deadening or soul deadening, that the impact is much worse now than 40 or 50 years ago? I am not sure whether you do the Internet and all that…
NM: I don’t. That would use up what I have left. Not long ago, I said that what technology promises is less pleasure and more power. Part of the crisis of modern times is that there is a tendency for all of us to become more and more narcissistic and power-driven. (And icy within.)
AC: Are you gloomy about the looming power of the state, of American totalitarianism? You’ve said you’ve been wrong about that many times and have been cheerful about having been wrong.
NM: I am more worried this time than ever. Did you see a piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a marvelous piece by a man named Jay Bookman? If you want to talk about Iraq, I’m ready to get into that.
AC: Our little magazine has been talking a lot about Iraq.
NM: I, too, am not for going to war, so we certainly meet there. What I thought from the beginning is that there is a most peculiar subtext under the Bush administration’s approach on what has to be done with Iraq. Some time ago, they began by suggesting that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat. It is now generally agreed that they are not. The Bush people then began to carry on about the huge danger of a biochemical assault on us. But they’ve not made the case that Iraq is on the ready for such a dire possibility. Then, another big accusation—Iraq is a harbor for terrorists. Well, as far as I can see, and this is from a novelist’s point of view, if I were Saddam Hussein, the last people I would want to have in my country are terrorists from other countries because I am interested in total control over my own land. Terrorists are loose cannons. Why would Hussein want to pay an unforeseen price? Then, on the other hand, if I were a terrorist, going along the underground railway that I assume runs from Pakistan through Iran and has to pass through Iraq to get to Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Palestine, the worst place on this trip would be Iraq because I’d probably be put in a compound. So what is the subtext? Why does the White House want to have that war, why? What do they want? One can name access to oil as the motive, but is that a large enough reward for what could be the unforeseen and immense dangers of such a war?
Then I saw that piece in the Journal-Constitution, printed on Sept. 29, a piece to which no attention was paid in American newspapers. I was surprised by that. It is a powerful piece. Bookman remarks that everybody has been asking, why is there no plan for what is to be done in Iraq after the war is won? Bookman’s firm suggestion is that there has been a plan all the time. We are going to occupy Iraq and occupy it for a long time. Then it all does begin to make its own kind of sense. Because that means we are inaugurating the commencement of the American World Empire. Right there is the subtext. Incidentally, the political seat from which I speak is as a Left-Conservative.
AC: It was much more clean when you were an anarchist. We knew what that meant. But Left-Conservative?
NM: I have to redefine the term for myself every day because on its face, we have an oxymoron. But, it does have meaning for me. I think there are elements in the remains of left-wing philosophy (which has not had all that many new ideas for the last 30 years), that are worth maintaining.
AC: Such as?
NM: The idea that a very rich man should not make 4,000 times as much in a year as a poor man. On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I’m concerned. Liberalism depends all too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover, liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since I happen to be—I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects—but I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal’s mind is blown. He is consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end of real conversation.
On the other hand, conservatism has its own deep ditches, its unclimbable walls, its immutable old ideas sealed in concrete. But lately, there are two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917, yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call “value conservatives” because they believe in what most people think of as the standard conservative values—family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance—dependable human virtues. And then there are what I call “flag conservatives,” of whom obviously the present administration would be the perfect example.
I don’t think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word “evil” as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.
AC: Who in American politics is a value conservative?
NM: Someone like Taft would be a good example of a value conservative. Eisenhower, probably, a gentle value conservative. More recently? Reagan, I think, was not. I will say that I don’t think Reagan ever had an original idea in his life. I once sat next to him, as near as I am sitting to you, at a lunch for eight people. This was in 1972 at the convention that nominated Nixon for the second time. I spent the entire meal trying to figure out a tough question to ask him. I always found that if you meet someone’s eyes, a good question can come to mind. And for two hours he sat there, perfectly calm and pleasant and kept making jokes and talking. It was a lightweight conversation. The physical impression of him was that he had about as much human specific density as, let’s say, a sales manager for a medium-sized corporation in the Midwest. That kind of modest, mild, well-knit heft was in his bearing. During those two hours, he chatted with all six Time reporters at the table, and his eyes never met mine. I found myself unable to come up with that tough question as a result. It became a matter of decorum. The mood was too genial. It occurred to me after he became president that he probably, if he could help it, never spent time talking to anyone who was of no use to him. An instinctive climber who scaled the face of success with great skill: that was his gift, if you will. He was surrounded by people who had many powerful ideas and who illumined him to the point where they could wind him up and then he could do his special stuff. At the time, he had an enormous impact on value conservatives because they thought he was one of them. I suspect he had about as much to do with them as a screen star does with an agricultural laborer.
AC: Returning to the question of empire…
NM: One of the most interesting remarks in the Journal-Constitution piece was that after this excellent explanation of what the subtext probably is, Bookman wrote that if it is true that America is going towards empire, that should be made public to the American people. Let them, at least, have some say on that because it is one of the largest issues we face in the future. I agree wholly with that.
You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I’m not in accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view, America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary. In the last decade, there have been many blows to the psychic integument of conservatism. And the last half-year has been horrific. We have all had to recognize the outsize chicanery and economic pollution of the corporations, we have had to deal with the great blow the Catholic Church took, not to mention 9/11, which was a shock, if not an outright chasm at our feet. I think Americans took a hit that is not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is my belief Hitler could never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, I think 9/11 did something comparable to the American sense of security.
AC: What would the empire builders have done with out 9/11?
NM: I don’t think they would have proceeded this way at all. There is such a thing as luck in human affairs. Without 9/11, I don’t think they could have exploited this push to have a war with Iraq. I think, rather, the administration would have been in trouble. The attention of the media was fixed on the bad market, the increase in joblessness, the Church and corporate scandals, the high school serial killers, the drugs, new and old.
AC: Do you think we may be in al Qaeda’s script or Osama bin Laden’s script? Is there really a war of civilizations, which will, if it starts in earnest, not bode well for American globalism?
NM: I think there is a good deal of reality to this. From a radical Muslim point of view, America is absolutely the Great Satan, and this is a war to the death. But in terms of military realities, I don’t think it is necessary for us to build an empire to be able to contain Muslim rage. For one thing, apart from anything else, it would take Islamic extremists, what? A hundred years to overthrow us? Systematic terrorism for 100 years? Fifty years? Their all-out rage is not likely to last that
long.
Historic moods shift. Temperaments grow old. The point I want to make is that—let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted. That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992, was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years of the Clinton administration. I don’t know if White House principals talk to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.
What they don’t take into account is the exceptional perversity of human affairs. At the least we could become a species of totalitarian country, dominating the world, with very little freedom of speech. Moreover, the entire scheme could fail. The notion itself has an overweening hubris to it.
AC: This could very easily fail— especially if China and Europe were opposed to it.
NM: One of the messages that the flag conservatives are trying to send to China is, I expect: Hear this! You Chinese guys are obviously very bright. We can tell. We know! Because your Asian students in our universities get better marks than our people do. They are more serious. They were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don’t get any pleasure anyway, so they do like the notion of personal, right-at-your-desk power. Technology is ideal for them. All right, goes the unspoken message of the flag conservatives, you guys can have your technology, but you had better understand, China, that you will be the Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well because you will be most important to us, eminently important. But don’t try to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope to be is Greeks.
There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain. That, I am fully ready to speculate, is the subtext beneath the Iraqi subtext, and they may not even be wholly aware of it themselves, not all of them.
AC: What now?
NM: I’m not sure anything can be done. I think America is in pretty bad psychic shape. If it really is, then many people may turn to the idea of Empire as a transcendent solution, a way to get rid of our ongoing guilt. I would argue that there has always been a tremendous guilt in our lives, at least as long as I know. I can go right back to my World War II days in the Army. We were all convinced then that when peace came, we’d return home to a depression. We G.I.’s were bitter about that and we enjoyed our bitterness. We were maybe going to lose our lives, but if we got through this, we’d probably go back to depression. Good luck! But after we returned, the country took off on an economic ascent. A lot of Americans were very happy to be prosperous, but they also felt secretly guilty. Why? Because we are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is essentially a grace note. We are a Christian nation. And the idea, if you really are a Christian and a great many people in America at that point were significantly devout, was that you were not supposed to be all that rich. God didn’t want it. Jesus certainly didn’t. You were not supposed to pile up a lot of money. You were supposed to spend your life in reasonably altruistic acts. That was one half of the collective psyche. The other half: Beat everybody you are in a contest with because you’ve got to win. To a certain extent, and this is a cruel, but possibly an accurate remark, to be an American is to be an oxymoron. On the one hand, you are a good Christian, and on the other, you are viscerally combative. You are supposed to be macho and win. Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t necessarily consort too well in one psyche. Nonetheless, we moved forward, we became more and more powerful, even as the guilt developed in all sorts of subterranean ways. The communist Red Scare of the early Fifties, at a time when the Soviet Union was still hugely ravaged by its war wounds, is one example of how we reacted. When 9/11 occurred, there was an immense guilt mixed in with the rage. I was here in Provincetown, 300 miles away at the time, and the reality of it didn’t hit me directly, but after a while I began to perceive part of the key element in it. The terror of that act involved the TV audience all over America. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we’ve been seeing scenes just like that on the tube and enjoyed them because we were so insulated. A hundredth of our psychic receptivity could enter the box and share the fear while 99% of ourselves felt absolutely safe. Now, suddenly, it was real. Gods and demons were invading the U.S., coming in right off the TV screen. That may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after 9/11 as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.
AC: Do you think there is any turning back? Or are we set on this course? Or is there still a chance to turn prudently away from it?
NM: I think if Bush has to turn away from it, he will do so with great frustration. He will have to go back and live with the old dull insolubles again! I expect the White House feeling still remains that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks or feels. But, force majeure, these flag conservatives are now obliged, nonetheless, to acknowledge the fair amount of division in this country and the unhappiness of France, Germany, Russia, not to mention China, Japan, we can keep naming them. It had to get to the White House principals. They might not be able to bring off this first big step. Were they really ready to do it against the feelings of the rest of the world? Some of the administration who had been all for it in the beginning might have begun to waver. Others, I expect, argued that they had to stay on course. Suck it up! No room for weaklings on this ship!
One of my favorite notions about Bush is that although he is not a bright man, he does have what Ernest Hemingway used to call a bull-s**t detector. Like Reagan, he doesn’t have ideas of his own, but he does listen to his experts. He has to. They know more than he does. Still, he can probably tell fairly often when they are speaking with true authority and when they are glossing over their own uncertainty. Sometimes an expert has to maintain his or her position, even though inwardly dubious of its authenticity. Perhaps Bush can hear who is speaking with inner conviction on a given occasion and who is not. So he tacks with each yaw in the breeze.
AC: There is a lot being said in most of the journals of the American Right about Islam being an essentially evil religion which somehow we have to vanquish. Speak to your sense of Islam and where the Christian West or post-Christian West is in relationship to it and how that could play out.
NM: Well, to begin with, I would say that flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse. The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large.
AC: The conflict between communism and capitalism seems so much more sensible and manageable in comparison.
NM: Looking back, it was kind of logical. Capitalism and communism had clear and opposed objectives but neither was ready to destroy the world. Certainly, the more that conflict ebbed into its conclusion, the less danger was present that the big bang would come.
AC: You have cast the fight as Allah versus moolah—Islam versus money. If ours is indeed a post Christian society in which materialism is the highest good, and it takes a faith to fight a faith, are they not better suited to combat us?
NM: Are they better suited? No, I don’t think so. The difficulty I have when I speak about this is I don’t know enough about Islam. But it does seem to me, on the face of it, that if we did nothing in terms of attacking them, that might delay such a war for 50 years. The next argument would be, well, can we afford to delay? We can win it now and we might lose it in 50 years. But my notion is that this war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other. It is not that complicated to be an effective terrorist after all. Pick up the phone, make a call, and disrupt traffic for half a day. The real question is how pervasive can terrorism get, not whether you can wipe it out. There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist. If we try to become an empire, the real question will become whether we are able to live with terrorism at the level that the Israelis, let us say, are living with now. To be an Israeli these days means that you can never make solid plans, and Jewish people love to have such agendas and carry them out. Now, we are already at the edge of not knowing when our children might be in danger.
AC: You have described the neoconservative support for the war as potentially problematic for Israel. Why?
NM: America could win easily over Iraq, but if Saddam has a Samson complex, what would his last act be? Might he hit Israel at the end with everything he’s still got? At that point, he is a very dangerous man. Nothing more to lose. He would never dare to attack Israel first. That would certainly destroy him. He wouldn’t even dare, I think, to allow terrorists to do it for him because of the obvious reason that it would be too easy to trace it to him. But if Saddam has lost everything, if he is remotely as bad as they paint him—and he may well be—then the likelihood is that he will pull down the columns of the temple: He will be ready to rest as history’s super-terrorist. What I don’t understand, therefore, is why the Sharon government is so ready to gamble with Israel’s aility to defend itself (or be defended) against extreme attack.
AC: Perhaps because they think that if he is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, then Israel will no longer have a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, and that is potentially risky.
NM: Immensely risky. But at that point, they can both destroy each other. In miniature, it’s analogous to the potentiality for instant destruction that America had with the Soviet Union. So, time itself might bring a species of peace. Have they thought it through?
AC: Can we address more generally Israel and its unavoidable existential dilemma, which is the Palestinians? I don’t think you’ve written a lot about Israel…
NM: No. I’ve never been there. For a basic reason, which is that I am always writing a book. To go to Israel would mean another book to write, and it would be an important book. It would take over all I am doing now, and what I am working on now is more important to me.
AC: But you were never any kind of anti-Zionist…
NM:No, I start with a set of simple, unsophisticated notions about Israel. It was such a small country when it began. If the Arab leaders had had any kind of human goodness in them, they could have said, these people have been through hell. Let’s treat them with Islamic courtesy, the way we are supposed to treat strangers. Instead they declared them the enemy. The Israelis had no choice but to become strong and to get allied with us. In the course of doing so, some of the best aspects of the Jewish nature—irony, the love of truth, the love of wisdom and justice, suffered internal depredations.
The prevailing attitude over the decades demanded that they become good farmers, good technicians, and good soldiers. No need to use the minds for fine-tuning any more. Do not even speak of hearts. Be there when you’re needed became the overriding virtue.
Once it was a matter of saving their country, everything changed. Quantity changes quality, which may be the best three words Engels ever wrote. Quantity changes quality. As the Israelis became tougher, so they lost any hard-earned and elevated objectivity, any high and disinterested search for social value. The logo became Israel, my Israel. That was inevitable. It is also tragic, I think. Israel is now one more powerhouse in the world. But what they’ve lost is special. Now, they treat the Palestinians as if the Palestinians were ghetto Jews. It is one of the great ironies. You know, the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, be turned inside out.
AC: Do you think there is any way they can escape that dilemma with the Palestinians?
NM:I don’t see how. Not right now. It may be that what they feel is that if they don’t gamble now, they will be destroyed later. If a war with Iraq ends with Americans installed there, Israel could feel more secure for decades to come. But it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neo-cons may feel this is our best shot, this is our best opportunity, this is the moment when we have to take a chance because, if we don’t now, we are likely to be doomed 10, 20, 30 years down the road.
But, again, I say, you don’t gamble that way. I’ve always been thoroughly opposed to gambling with your last thousand bucks. Especially if you have a family. That is one reason I am a Left-Conservative. That is the conservative part of me.
AC: What’s your opinion of Ariel Sharon?
NM: He is what he is. A brute. A powerhouse general. I think his defense would be: “I am what fate has made me.” If he had lived in the ghetto, he would have been one of the stronger men there and probably one of the more disliked. But now he is an Israeli. What is obvious, what stands out in most Israelis is that they are patriots. My God, they are. After Hitler, how could they not be? In that sense, I am sure Sharon thinks he is doing the only thing he can do; that he is doing the right thing. Just as I was going on earlier about Christians having this great guilt that they were not compassionate, but greedy, so I think there is a similar inner crisis in Israel. I think they are ready to say: We are no longer humanists. We’ve become the opposite of ourselves. Still, we protect the country. We dare the unknown. If Saddam unloads on us? If a large part of Israel is lost to such a war? Well, sometimes one must undergo serious surgery. I think the Sharons are ready for that. Of course, the neocons here will not be losing their own arm or leg or lungs.
AC: Shifting course a bit, years ago in your writing, you created a kind of antithesis between blacks and whites, writing not about civil rights but about black and white attitudes towards life.
NM: Yes. Black and white with their separate geist.
AC: American has become much more complicated now with browns and yellows. Does that lead to any of the sorts of generalizations that came out of “The White Negro”?
NM: You’ve got to put more of a point on the question.
AC: Our side of the immigration debate generally feels that America is getting transformed into something less like the country we understand and are used to. It seems a kind of foreign place. It is not an argument we often use, but that is in the back of it. Have you thought much about the more multicultural America? What are its possibilities? What are its limitations?
NM: I haven’t thought about it for a very good reason, which is, I don’t like thinking about it. There are so many complexities to it and such a collision with so many of my own values. On the one hand, at the time I wrote “The White Negro,” I felt that America was very much in need of black culture as such and that black culture had an understanding of life that white culture didn’t have. That is how I felt then. Since then I’ve come to the conclusion that—these remarks are so general, they don’t appeal to me—but the collision I have in my mind and am trying to think it through and can’t—is that I believe that the integrity of races and cultures is very important. It is something you can’t talk about. Hitler took care of race-talk forever. Well, not forever, but for the next 100 years. But I do think that there is such a thing as the integrity of each culture and that cultures ought to be able to go in different directions, even collide. Given the modern world of technology, I am not even sure, however, that the race or culture question is even paramount any more. The long-term tendency is to have no races. It is as if technology has become the dominant culture in existence and may soon be the only real culture. In other words, the similarities between computer experts all over the world is now far greater than their differences in ethnicity.
AC: Go back to the integrity of races as very important. I know it is a politically incorrect thought but it doesn’t have to be expressed with rancor. It might be interesting.
NM: I don’t have any rancor about it, I just have a feeling there is a true problem. To the degree that you lose your culture, you’ve lost what may be irreplaceable. We can end up with a world that is totally homogenized. Of course, the problem, which was never solved, is how can these different races and cultures live together with some equity? Democracy has often made vigorous attempts to solve this. But the tendency to homogeneity can go too far. The answer is somewhere in the balance. And the immense difficulty is keeping a viable balance, a lively balance.
Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, but America is being lost and has been lost in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost is through television.
Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a 7- or 8-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much any more. The habit has been lost. Every seven to 10 minutes a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption. Add to that our present-day classrooms. Does anybody ever say that one reason our education is in such a blighted mess is that just about all schools now use fluorescent lights? Why? Because they cost a little less. I would say that in the final count of dollars and cents they cost more. What characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer than they do under incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent tubes offer an unhappy livid light. Skin looks washed out and a bit sickly. If everybody seems uglier than they are normally, why, then, everyone grows a little depressed. They begin to think, what am I doing with all these plain-looking people? Aren’t I worth more?
That contributes to the deterioration of the powers of concentration. Bad architecture, invasive marketing, ubiquitous plastic—these deleterious forces bother me much more than immigration.
* * *
I could go on about this. Our first problem is not immigration but the American corporation. That is the force which has succeeded in taking America away from us. It has triumphed in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. I would cite 50-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenize our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses. It is the front-runner in the competition to see what can make the world more disagreeable. To the degree we have exported this crud all over the globe, we wield already a punitive species of world hegemony. If I find myself viscerally opposed to the notion of an American Empire, it is because of the all-pervasive aesthetic empti-ness of the most powerful American corporations. There are no cathedrals left for the poor—only sixteen-story urban renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a left-conservative as a left-medievalist. I am, of course, not serious about such a term, but we are all medieval in one fashion—our movie stars, musical entertainers, tycoons, and politicos are treated these days as an awe-inspiring if rampant bunch of barons, counts, dukes, earls, princes, princesses, queens and kings. It is a world we can live in, but let’s not forget those medieval ratios of difference in income between rich and poor. I once spent a weekend with a wealthy Swedish publisher who lived near Malmo, and he complained for all of a night how much of his wealth was taken from him by income tax. Before we said goodnight, however, he did remark: “You know —when all is said, I do sleep better because I know that in Sweden we can say at least that no one goes to bed hungry or without a roof over his head.” A nice remark. I know that if I were an American making several thousand times more than the poorest man in town, I would not only be afraid of that poor man, but of my relatives and certainly of my enemies, and I would toss at night wondering how to make more money so everyone could recognize that I was the most splendid and exceptional fellow around.
If such a man is not the bane of real conservatives, then I don’t know why we are in a dialogue. Once, in the Democratic primary of 1969, I ran for mayor of New York in the hope that a Left-Right coalition could be formed and this Left-Right pincers could make a dent in the entrenched power of the center. The best to be said for that campaign is that it had its charm. I am not so certain, however, that this idea must remain eternally without wings. It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center. Our notion was built on the premise that we did not really know the elements of a good, viable society. We all had our differing ideals, and morals, and political ethics, but rarely found a way to practice them directly. So, we called for Power to the Neighborhoods. We suggested that New York City become a state itself, the fifty-first. Its citizens would then have the power to create a variety of new neighborhoods, new townships, all built on separate concepts, core neighborhoods founded on one or another of our cherished notions from the Left or the Right. One could have egalitarian towns and privileged places, or, for those who did not wish to be bothered with living in so detailed (and demanding) a society, there would be the more familiar and old way of doing things—the City of the State of New York—a government for those who did not care—just like old times.
It was a menu for social exploration and experiment. If we had been elected, we might have ended up with everything in an abysmal mess. It was a wicked scheme since we had (just like our flirtation to go to war with Iraq) no real notion of how it would all turn out—which is the essence of the wicked—up the ante and close your eyes while you wait for the turn of the card.
Nonetheless, some germ of the idea of a society open enough for people to live intense social lives still appeals to me. I repeat—we do not really know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow all exits and promote a single central secure point of view) may prove to be the least good answer of them all. Until the Left and that part of the Right loyal to its old values can come to recognize that with all their differences, they also have one profound value they might look to protect in common—the vulnerable dignity of the human creation—we are all obliged to travel passively into the vain and surrealistic land of corporate hegemony with its basic notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any country anywhere—a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise of democracy which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and learn from its own human errors.
I see that I have ended by writing a small polemic. It could be said that old polemicists never die.
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
salon.com | Sept. 16, 1999
Counting spies
The soundtrack of surveillance is a little girl's voice, broadcast over shortwave, monotonously reciting numbers.
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By David Pescovitz
Twisting the dial of your shortwave radio, you come across the most "experimental" sounding station you've ever heard. A glockenspiel tune is followed by the voice of a little girl speaking numbers and letters in what sounds like a random order. A techno DJ's pirate radio remix? Performance art? No, you've stumbled across a "numbers station," and the message inside the madness just wasn't meant for you. Somewhere in the world, a government spook, maybe CIA, MI6 or Mossad, is furiously scrawling down the numbers on a pad, a decoding key open at his side.
"Shortwave numbers stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication -- spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified shortwave receivers," reads the Web site of The Conet Project, an outfit that's compiled 150 numbers stations recordings from the last three decades on a four-CD set. (The word "Conet" is the sign-off signal on one station.)
And that's the short of it. For 30 years, intelligence organizations have allegedly broadcast one-way messages to their agents in the field via shortwave and the transmissions happen to sound weirder than any Stockhausen score or minimalist electronica you've ever heard -- a child's voice, or the obviously synthesized intonation on what's known as the "Lincolnshire Poacher" station, named for the folk song accompanying the numbers.
"Alleged" is a key word here when talking about the numbers stations' purpose, even though it seems that everyone with their ear to the airwaves is in agreement as to the stations' spy connection. A rare mainstream media article about numbers stations published in the Daily Telegraph last year quoted a spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry, responsible for regulating the airwaves in the U.K.: "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption."
But when I wandered into Aquarius Records in San Francisco's Mission District, how could I not consume? While I began browsing through the improv-jazz works of John Zorn, the electro-acoustic ontology of Terre Thaemlitz and the surreal soundtracks of Ethiopian field recordings, I barely noticed the sounds emanating from the store's stereo -- a computer voice calmly rattling off digits. Likely a new release, I thought, from Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, the British composer who injects snippets of electronically eavesdropped cellular phone calls into his mixes.
The numbers continued to flow through my brain as I shopped, though, present enough to be distracting but not repetitive enough to be annoying. Call it mutant Muzak. After 20 minutes, I found myself and the clerk in deep conversation about "The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations," one of the store's "staff favorites." Like the clerk, I was hooked on the bits of Conet lore that were spread like a cultural virus by the Aquarius employees and customers. Probably unlike him, I dropped $60 to analyze the Conet CDs in the comfort of my home.
My preferred dose? One CD of Conet before bedtime. Repeat if necessary. Be warned, though: Side effects may include grainy and nihilistic nightmares starring a grayscale spy cabal armed with an arsenal of dead media. Conet as soundtrack to a J.G. Ballard noir documentary. Indeed, Ballard's style of (non) fiction blends seamlessly with the blurb on Conet's stark, minimalist packaging: "The origin of these stations is in dispute. Their purpose is unclear. Some of these organizations should have been closed down after the 'end of the cold war,' yet they continue to transmit like clockwork."
And therein lies the mystery that keeps headphones on hundreds of numbers listeners around the world. Most of these people aren't the avant-audio enthusiasts who frequent Aquarius. They don't know from musique concrete. These shortwave buffs are knob-twiddlers of a different sort. For them, the process of numbers stations is more interesting than the product. Under the mainstream radar, numbers stations Web sites, online chat rooms and e-mail lists thrive with listeners sharing frequencies, recordings, rumors, stories and speculations about the strangest sounds on the dial.
"If you tune in to the BBC World Service, you know where the studios are, who the intended audience is and where the transmitters are, but with numbers stations you don't know any of that," says Simon Mason, a chemistry lab supervisor in England who in 1991 penned one of the first texts detailing the numbers racket, "Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery." "It's like a mystery novel or television show, but the difference is no one will ever come out with a solution."
Mason was a teenager twiddling the knobs on his father's shortwave set in the early 1970s when he was first caught in the numbers trance.
"I listened to the Voice of America and Moscow Radio and eventually came across shipping and aircraft stations," he says. "I was able to find an explanation for those. Then I heard the strange voice -- someone saying, 'Papa November' for five minutes while a snake charmer's flute played in the background. And there was no explanation anywhere."
Convinced that he was just the victim of ignorance, Mason's interest in shortwave waned. Until the 1980s, when he tuned in again and was confronted with the same mystery he'd encountered as a child. Finally, he discovered a mention of the numbers stations in the American magazine Monitoring Times.
"That showed me that I wasn't alone in listening to these things," he says.
Several years of spending many hours a day tuning in and cataloging led to Mason's "Secret Signals." Shortly after its publication, the West Yorkshire-based ENIGMA (European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association) was established and through its esoteric ENIGMA Journal, a nascent network of seekers formed.
"Numbers station enthusiasts are usually in their late 30s, because they would have had to grow up with shortwave, which most people consider a dead media these days, but also they're usually what we call Anoraks, obsessive nerd types into railway engines and things like that," he says.
Chris Smolinski, for example, the 32-year-old software engineer in Baltimore who runs the Spooks Spy Numbers Station Mailing List. With more than 300 members, Spooks is where numbers enthusiasts meet and greet online.
"With the Net, I can post that I'm hearing something and instantly find out who else around the world is hearing it," he says.
Recently, for instance, the list was abuzz with reports of the first French language numbers broadcast. Based on format patterns, Smolinski says, it was determined that the station was most likely Russian in origin. Also good for a few online laughs are the technical gaffs common on the Cuban numbers stations.
"We have jokes about how Castro can't do good radio," Smolinski says. "Lots of times you'll hear Radio Havana on top of the numbers because someone plugged in the wrong patch-cord." Like most numbers enthusiasts, Smolinski has a sense of humor about his hobby. "Fortunately, conspiracy nuts haven't latched on to numbers stations and given us a bad name," he says. After all, he and Mason have no delusions about someday cracking a numbers code -- indeed, knowing what the spooks are saying would spoil the climax of this never-ending story.
Basically, this isn't "The X-Files."
Take the time Smolinski visited what an online associate told him was a CIA numbers station transmission tower an hour southwest of Washington. In the middle of a field, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence complete with U.S. government "no trespassing" signs, are several radio towers. Did Smolinski jump the fence?
"I certainly wouldn't do something foolish like that," he says, before proudly adding that he "did get a few nice photographs that I posted on my Web site. After all, the government doesn't play any games -- they pretty much acknowledge the numbers stations and what they're used for."
Conet, then, is a cultural artifact, an audio snapshot of a surveillance culture heard live or plucked from the airwaves and burned to CD. Not post-Cage chaotic white noise that "just sounds cool" over a kick drum, but content-rich transmissions that, quite simply, we'll never fully understand.
Tune in.
Counting spies
The soundtrack of surveillance is a little girl's voice, broadcast over shortwave, monotonously reciting numbers.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Pescovitz
Twisting the dial of your shortwave radio, you come across the most "experimental" sounding station you've ever heard. A glockenspiel tune is followed by the voice of a little girl speaking numbers and letters in what sounds like a random order. A techno DJ's pirate radio remix? Performance art? No, you've stumbled across a "numbers station," and the message inside the madness just wasn't meant for you. Somewhere in the world, a government spook, maybe CIA, MI6 or Mossad, is furiously scrawling down the numbers on a pad, a decoding key open at his side.
"Shortwave numbers stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication -- spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified shortwave receivers," reads the Web site of The Conet Project, an outfit that's compiled 150 numbers stations recordings from the last three decades on a four-CD set. (The word "Conet" is the sign-off signal on one station.)
And that's the short of it. For 30 years, intelligence organizations have allegedly broadcast one-way messages to their agents in the field via shortwave and the transmissions happen to sound weirder than any Stockhausen score or minimalist electronica you've ever heard -- a child's voice, or the obviously synthesized intonation on what's known as the "Lincolnshire Poacher" station, named for the folk song accompanying the numbers.
"Alleged" is a key word here when talking about the numbers stations' purpose, even though it seems that everyone with their ear to the airwaves is in agreement as to the stations' spy connection. A rare mainstream media article about numbers stations published in the Daily Telegraph last year quoted a spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry, responsible for regulating the airwaves in the U.K.: "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption."
But when I wandered into Aquarius Records in San Francisco's Mission District, how could I not consume? While I began browsing through the improv-jazz works of John Zorn, the electro-acoustic ontology of Terre Thaemlitz and the surreal soundtracks of Ethiopian field recordings, I barely noticed the sounds emanating from the store's stereo -- a computer voice calmly rattling off digits. Likely a new release, I thought, from Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, the British composer who injects snippets of electronically eavesdropped cellular phone calls into his mixes.
The numbers continued to flow through my brain as I shopped, though, present enough to be distracting but not repetitive enough to be annoying. Call it mutant Muzak. After 20 minutes, I found myself and the clerk in deep conversation about "The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations," one of the store's "staff favorites." Like the clerk, I was hooked on the bits of Conet lore that were spread like a cultural virus by the Aquarius employees and customers. Probably unlike him, I dropped $60 to analyze the Conet CDs in the comfort of my home.
My preferred dose? One CD of Conet before bedtime. Repeat if necessary. Be warned, though: Side effects may include grainy and nihilistic nightmares starring a grayscale spy cabal armed with an arsenal of dead media. Conet as soundtrack to a J.G. Ballard noir documentary. Indeed, Ballard's style of (non) fiction blends seamlessly with the blurb on Conet's stark, minimalist packaging: "The origin of these stations is in dispute. Their purpose is unclear. Some of these organizations should have been closed down after the 'end of the cold war,' yet they continue to transmit like clockwork."
And therein lies the mystery that keeps headphones on hundreds of numbers listeners around the world. Most of these people aren't the avant-audio enthusiasts who frequent Aquarius. They don't know from musique concrete. These shortwave buffs are knob-twiddlers of a different sort. For them, the process of numbers stations is more interesting than the product. Under the mainstream radar, numbers stations Web sites, online chat rooms and e-mail lists thrive with listeners sharing frequencies, recordings, rumors, stories and speculations about the strangest sounds on the dial.
"If you tune in to the BBC World Service, you know where the studios are, who the intended audience is and where the transmitters are, but with numbers stations you don't know any of that," says Simon Mason, a chemistry lab supervisor in England who in 1991 penned one of the first texts detailing the numbers racket, "Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery." "It's like a mystery novel or television show, but the difference is no one will ever come out with a solution."
Mason was a teenager twiddling the knobs on his father's shortwave set in the early 1970s when he was first caught in the numbers trance.
"I listened to the Voice of America and Moscow Radio and eventually came across shipping and aircraft stations," he says. "I was able to find an explanation for those. Then I heard the strange voice -- someone saying, 'Papa November' for five minutes while a snake charmer's flute played in the background. And there was no explanation anywhere."
Convinced that he was just the victim of ignorance, Mason's interest in shortwave waned. Until the 1980s, when he tuned in again and was confronted with the same mystery he'd encountered as a child. Finally, he discovered a mention of the numbers stations in the American magazine Monitoring Times.
"That showed me that I wasn't alone in listening to these things," he says.
Several years of spending many hours a day tuning in and cataloging led to Mason's "Secret Signals." Shortly after its publication, the West Yorkshire-based ENIGMA (European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association) was established and through its esoteric ENIGMA Journal, a nascent network of seekers formed.
"Numbers station enthusiasts are usually in their late 30s, because they would have had to grow up with shortwave, which most people consider a dead media these days, but also they're usually what we call Anoraks, obsessive nerd types into railway engines and things like that," he says.
Chris Smolinski, for example, the 32-year-old software engineer in Baltimore who runs the Spooks Spy Numbers Station Mailing List. With more than 300 members, Spooks is where numbers enthusiasts meet and greet online.
"With the Net, I can post that I'm hearing something and instantly find out who else around the world is hearing it," he says.
Recently, for instance, the list was abuzz with reports of the first French language numbers broadcast. Based on format patterns, Smolinski says, it was determined that the station was most likely Russian in origin. Also good for a few online laughs are the technical gaffs common on the Cuban numbers stations.
"We have jokes about how Castro can't do good radio," Smolinski says. "Lots of times you'll hear Radio Havana on top of the numbers because someone plugged in the wrong patch-cord." Like most numbers enthusiasts, Smolinski has a sense of humor about his hobby. "Fortunately, conspiracy nuts haven't latched on to numbers stations and given us a bad name," he says. After all, he and Mason have no delusions about someday cracking a numbers code -- indeed, knowing what the spooks are saying would spoil the climax of this never-ending story.
Basically, this isn't "The X-Files."
Take the time Smolinski visited what an online associate told him was a CIA numbers station transmission tower an hour southwest of Washington. In the middle of a field, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence complete with U.S. government "no trespassing" signs, are several radio towers. Did Smolinski jump the fence?
"I certainly wouldn't do something foolish like that," he says, before proudly adding that he "did get a few nice photographs that I posted on my Web site. After all, the government doesn't play any games -- they pretty much acknowledge the numbers stations and what they're used for."
Conet, then, is a cultural artifact, an audio snapshot of a surveillance culture heard live or plucked from the airwaves and burned to CD. Not post-Cage chaotic white noise that "just sounds cool" over a kick drum, but content-rich transmissions that, quite simply, we'll never fully understand.
Tune in.
Fans of pencils pocket No. 2, opt for their No. 1: Blackwing 602
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 12/17/2002
Writers like to think that it is the man or woman sitting upstream from the pencil who may become immortal. But here is the story of a pencil that has achieved immortality all by itself.
We are talking about the legendary Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, which went out of production in 1998. Up in Writers' Valhalla, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Archibald MacLeish are shedding a silent tear. Down here on Earth, Stephen Sondheim, Andre Gregory, and Roger Rosenblatt are scrounging to locate leftover 602s. The pencils once cost 50 cents; now they are selling for as much as $20 apiece on the Internet.
What's the allure? Well, just look at it! It's the DeLorean gullwing coupe of the pencil world. And not only beautiful, but adept. The 602 boasts a super-soft lead - ''They wear down quickly so I feel like I'm getting a lot done,'' Sondheim once told an interviewer - that comes with its own motto: ''Half the pressure, twice the speed.'' ''Yesterday, I used a [Blackwing] soft and fine, and it floated over the paper just wonderfully,'' Steinbeck wrote.
The famous oblong eraser extends down into the pencil head and cantilevers out from its tapered ferrule for extra use. This is possibly the only pencil eraser that has ever served as a metaphor for death: ''People die too absolutely these days, disappear like pencil marks to an eraser - black wing,'' MacLeish wrote in a letter to a friend.
So what happened? Staples happened.
In 1994, Eberhard Faber was bought out by Sanford, now a division of Newell Rubbermaid, a $7 billion conglomerate that doesn't have much use for beautiful little products such as the Blackwing. When the metal-crimping machine that stamped out the eraser ferrule busted in 1998, Sanford didn't bother fixing it. ''The decision was based on volume requirements,'' spokesman Mike Finn explains. What gets made is the junk they push through the office-supply superstores. Thank you, Tom Stemberg.
Sanford is flogging a Blackwing wannabe called the Turquoise 4B, which it says has a ''very similar'' lead, but, alas, no eraser. Cartoonist Doug Compton (''Karmatoons'') e-mails me that the Turquoise doesn't measure up: ''The graphite comes loose often when sharpening the pencil and breaks off below the wood level, which is quite irritating. Once this happens at one [spot] it usually continues on down the pencil, rendering it useless.'' Disappointed Blackwing fanatics have been exchanging sales information in the Classifieds section of the Web site pencilpages.com, and, of course, trolling for the pencils on eBay.
Dolores Carr, a Pennsylvania retiree, found a few boxes among her parents' effects and is selling them for $20 each, citing a forthcoming New Yorker article about the pencils that might drive the cost even higher. ''Maybe they'll start making them again,'' she says, ''and the price will go down.''
Don't bet on it. My friend, the writer Joseph Finder, didn't.
''I use nothing but Blackwings,'' he says. ''The lead is wonderful, and the eraser is like the Pink Pearl. Plus the hexagonal body means they won't roll off your desk.'' When a local stationer told him Blackwings were no longer available, Finder and his assistant called every office-supplies wholesaler they could find. ''I've stockpiled them,'' he admits, and has no interest in selling. He has sent boxes as gifts to Rosenblatt and Gregory, whom he describes as ''Blackwing addicts.''
Speak, addict: ''This is the only interview I have ever given on a really interesting subject,'' says essayist (Time, Lehrer NewsHour) Rosenblatt, who does not own a computer or word processor. ''This pencil has been a highlight of my life, which tells you a lot about my life. Nothing has been the same for me since Joe Finder told me about these pencils. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just look at them.''
Like another friend of mine, book critic Katherine Powers (''Now I'm scared to use them, knowing how valuable they are''), Rosenblatt has never thrown away a Blackwing, so uncertain is the prospect of replacing them. ''You might want to remind Joe Finder that this is the season of giving, and it calls for generosity,'' Rosenblatt concludes. ''I'll send him my address if he doesn't have it.''
All I can say is: Thank God I use the PaperMate Gel Roller.
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 12/17/2002
Writers like to think that it is the man or woman sitting upstream from the pencil who may become immortal. But here is the story of a pencil that has achieved immortality all by itself.
We are talking about the legendary Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, which went out of production in 1998. Up in Writers' Valhalla, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Archibald MacLeish are shedding a silent tear. Down here on Earth, Stephen Sondheim, Andre Gregory, and Roger Rosenblatt are scrounging to locate leftover 602s. The pencils once cost 50 cents; now they are selling for as much as $20 apiece on the Internet.
What's the allure? Well, just look at it! It's the DeLorean gullwing coupe of the pencil world. And not only beautiful, but adept. The 602 boasts a super-soft lead - ''They wear down quickly so I feel like I'm getting a lot done,'' Sondheim once told an interviewer - that comes with its own motto: ''Half the pressure, twice the speed.'' ''Yesterday, I used a [Blackwing] soft and fine, and it floated over the paper just wonderfully,'' Steinbeck wrote.
The famous oblong eraser extends down into the pencil head and cantilevers out from its tapered ferrule for extra use. This is possibly the only pencil eraser that has ever served as a metaphor for death: ''People die too absolutely these days, disappear like pencil marks to an eraser - black wing,'' MacLeish wrote in a letter to a friend.
So what happened? Staples happened.
In 1994, Eberhard Faber was bought out by Sanford, now a division of Newell Rubbermaid, a $7 billion conglomerate that doesn't have much use for beautiful little products such as the Blackwing. When the metal-crimping machine that stamped out the eraser ferrule busted in 1998, Sanford didn't bother fixing it. ''The decision was based on volume requirements,'' spokesman Mike Finn explains. What gets made is the junk they push through the office-supply superstores. Thank you, Tom Stemberg.
Sanford is flogging a Blackwing wannabe called the Turquoise 4B, which it says has a ''very similar'' lead, but, alas, no eraser. Cartoonist Doug Compton (''Karmatoons'') e-mails me that the Turquoise doesn't measure up: ''The graphite comes loose often when sharpening the pencil and breaks off below the wood level, which is quite irritating. Once this happens at one [spot] it usually continues on down the pencil, rendering it useless.'' Disappointed Blackwing fanatics have been exchanging sales information in the Classifieds section of the Web site pencilpages.com, and, of course, trolling for the pencils on eBay.
Dolores Carr, a Pennsylvania retiree, found a few boxes among her parents' effects and is selling them for $20 each, citing a forthcoming New Yorker article about the pencils that might drive the cost even higher. ''Maybe they'll start making them again,'' she says, ''and the price will go down.''
Don't bet on it. My friend, the writer Joseph Finder, didn't.
''I use nothing but Blackwings,'' he says. ''The lead is wonderful, and the eraser is like the Pink Pearl. Plus the hexagonal body means they won't roll off your desk.'' When a local stationer told him Blackwings were no longer available, Finder and his assistant called every office-supplies wholesaler they could find. ''I've stockpiled them,'' he admits, and has no interest in selling. He has sent boxes as gifts to Rosenblatt and Gregory, whom he describes as ''Blackwing addicts.''
Speak, addict: ''This is the only interview I have ever given on a really interesting subject,'' says essayist (Time, Lehrer NewsHour) Rosenblatt, who does not own a computer or word processor. ''This pencil has been a highlight of my life, which tells you a lot about my life. Nothing has been the same for me since Joe Finder told me about these pencils. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just look at them.''
Like another friend of mine, book critic Katherine Powers (''Now I'm scared to use them, knowing how valuable they are''), Rosenblatt has never thrown away a Blackwing, so uncertain is the prospect of replacing them. ''You might want to remind Joe Finder that this is the season of giving, and it calls for generosity,'' Rosenblatt concludes. ''I'll send him my address if he doesn't have it.''
All I can say is: Thank God I use the PaperMate Gel Roller.
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Artist: Eric B and Rakim
Album: Follow the Leader
Song: Follow the Leader
Verse One:
Follow me into a solo
Get in the flow - and you can picture like a photo
Music mixed mellow maintains to make
Melodies for MC's motivates the breaks
I'm everlastin, I can go on for days and days
With rhyme displays that engrave deep as X-rays
I can take a phrase that's rarely heard, FLIP IT
Now it's a daily word
I can get iller than 'Nam, a killin bomb
But no alarm - Rakim will remain calm
Self-esteem make me super superb and supreme
But for a microphone still I fiend
This was a tape I wasn't supposed to break
I was supposed to wait, but let's motivate
I want to see who can keep followin and swallowin
Takin the making, bitin it and borrowin
Brothers tried and others died to get the formula
But I'ma let ya sweat - you still ain't warm
You a step away from frozen, stiff as if ya posin
Dig into my brain as the rhyme gets chosen
So follow me and were ya thinkin' you were first?
Let's travel at magnificent speeds around the Universe
What could ya say as the Earth gets further and further away
Planets are small as balls of clay
Astray into the Milky Way - world's outasight
Far as the eye can see - not even a satellite
Now stop and turn around and look
As ya stare in the darkness, ya knowledge is took!
So keep starin soon ya suddenly see a star
You better follow it cause it's the R
This is a lesson if ya guessin and if ya borrowin
Hurry hurry step right up and keep followin
The Leader
Verse Two:
This is a lifetime mission, vision of prison
Aight listen
In this journey you're the journal I'm the journalist
Am I Eternal? Or an eternalist?
I'm about to flow long as I can possibly go
Keep ya movin cause the crowd said so
Dance - cuts rip ya pants
Eric B on the blades, bleedin to death - call the ambulance
Pull out my weapon and start to squeeze
A magnum as a microphone murderin' MC's
Let's quote a rhyme from a record I wrote
(follow the leader) Yeah - dope
Cause everytime I stop it seems ya stuck
Soon as ya try to step off ya self-destruct
I came to overcome before I'm gone
By showin and provin and lettin knowledge be born
Then after that I'll live forever - you disagree?
You say never? Then follow me!
From century to century you'll remember me
In history - not a mystery or a memory
God by nature, mind raised in Asia
Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're not a slave
Cause we was put here to be much more than that
But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But I'm here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake the brains, reveal my name
I guess nobody told you a little knowledge is dangerous
It can't be mixed, diluted; it can't be changed or switched
Here's a lesson if ya guessing and borrowing
Hurry hurry, step right up and keep following
The leader
Verse Three:
A furified freestyle, lyrics of fury
My third eye makes me shine like jewelry
You're just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maid
I'll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade
I can't wait to break and eliminate
On every traitor or snake - so stay awake
and follow and follow, because the tempo's a trail
The stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail
I'm Rakim the Fiend of a Microphone
I'm not HIM, so leave my mic alone
Soon as the beat is felt, I'm ready to go
So fasten your seatbelt, cause I'm about to flow
No need to speed slow down to let the leader lead
Word to daddy, indeed!
The R's a rollin stone, so I'm rollin
Directions is told, then the rhymes are stolen
Stop buggin', a brother said, dig em, I never dug 'em
He couldn't follow the leader long enough so I drug 'em
into danger zone, he should arrange his own
Face it, it's basic, erase it, change ya tone
There's one R in the alphabet
It's a one-letter word and it's about to get
More complex from one rhyme to the next
Eric B be easy on the flex
I've been from state to state, followers tailgate
Keep comin but you came too late, but I'll wait
So back up, regroup, get a grip, come equipped
You're the next contestant - clap ya hands, you won a trip!
The price is right - don't make a deal too soon
How many notes could you name this tune?
Follow the Leader is the title, theme, task
Now ya know, you don't have to ask
Rap is Rhythm And Poetry, cuts create sound effects
You might catch up if you follow the records E. wrecks
Until then keep eatin and swallowin
You better take a deep breath and keep followin
The leader.
Album: Follow the Leader
Song: Follow the Leader
Verse One:
Follow me into a solo
Get in the flow - and you can picture like a photo
Music mixed mellow maintains to make
Melodies for MC's motivates the breaks
I'm everlastin, I can go on for days and days
With rhyme displays that engrave deep as X-rays
I can take a phrase that's rarely heard, FLIP IT
Now it's a daily word
I can get iller than 'Nam, a killin bomb
But no alarm - Rakim will remain calm
Self-esteem make me super superb and supreme
But for a microphone still I fiend
This was a tape I wasn't supposed to break
I was supposed to wait, but let's motivate
I want to see who can keep followin and swallowin
Takin the making, bitin it and borrowin
Brothers tried and others died to get the formula
But I'ma let ya sweat - you still ain't warm
You a step away from frozen, stiff as if ya posin
Dig into my brain as the rhyme gets chosen
So follow me and were ya thinkin' you were first?
Let's travel at magnificent speeds around the Universe
What could ya say as the Earth gets further and further away
Planets are small as balls of clay
Astray into the Milky Way - world's outasight
Far as the eye can see - not even a satellite
Now stop and turn around and look
As ya stare in the darkness, ya knowledge is took!
So keep starin soon ya suddenly see a star
You better follow it cause it's the R
This is a lesson if ya guessin and if ya borrowin
Hurry hurry step right up and keep followin
The Leader
Verse Two:
This is a lifetime mission, vision of prison
Aight listen
In this journey you're the journal I'm the journalist
Am I Eternal? Or an eternalist?
I'm about to flow long as I can possibly go
Keep ya movin cause the crowd said so
Dance - cuts rip ya pants
Eric B on the blades, bleedin to death - call the ambulance
Pull out my weapon and start to squeeze
A magnum as a microphone murderin' MC's
Let's quote a rhyme from a record I wrote
(follow the leader) Yeah - dope
Cause everytime I stop it seems ya stuck
Soon as ya try to step off ya self-destruct
I came to overcome before I'm gone
By showin and provin and lettin knowledge be born
Then after that I'll live forever - you disagree?
You say never? Then follow me!
From century to century you'll remember me
In history - not a mystery or a memory
God by nature, mind raised in Asia
Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're not a slave
Cause we was put here to be much more than that
But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But I'm here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake the brains, reveal my name
I guess nobody told you a little knowledge is dangerous
It can't be mixed, diluted; it can't be changed or switched
Here's a lesson if ya guessing and borrowing
Hurry hurry, step right up and keep following
The leader
Verse Three:
A furified freestyle, lyrics of fury
My third eye makes me shine like jewelry
You're just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maid
I'll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade
I can't wait to break and eliminate
On every traitor or snake - so stay awake
and follow and follow, because the tempo's a trail
The stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail
I'm Rakim the Fiend of a Microphone
I'm not HIM, so leave my mic alone
Soon as the beat is felt, I'm ready to go
So fasten your seatbelt, cause I'm about to flow
No need to speed slow down to let the leader lead
Word to daddy, indeed!
The R's a rollin stone, so I'm rollin
Directions is told, then the rhymes are stolen
Stop buggin', a brother said, dig em, I never dug 'em
He couldn't follow the leader long enough so I drug 'em
into danger zone, he should arrange his own
Face it, it's basic, erase it, change ya tone
There's one R in the alphabet
It's a one-letter word and it's about to get
More complex from one rhyme to the next
Eric B be easy on the flex
I've been from state to state, followers tailgate
Keep comin but you came too late, but I'll wait
So back up, regroup, get a grip, come equipped
You're the next contestant - clap ya hands, you won a trip!
The price is right - don't make a deal too soon
How many notes could you name this tune?
Follow the Leader is the title, theme, task
Now ya know, you don't have to ask
Rap is Rhythm And Poetry, cuts create sound effects
You might catch up if you follow the records E. wrecks
Until then keep eatin and swallowin
You better take a deep breath and keep followin
The leader.
welp, mattdatt doesn't buy the calico cat story, and i'm not convinced either, but the attorney general IS worried about naked statues and believes in angels and magical beings and did lose an election to a rotting corpse.
Oh my God. You know what? I totally have to say something. Seriously, guys, you have to listen—this is way important. Kim? Erica? Amy? Are you listening? Okay, here it is: I am so not a fully developed person.
Shut up, Erica, it so totally is true, and you know it.
It's like Jung says. He's all, like, the primary task of a human is fulfillment through the process of individuation and the establishment of harmony of the conscious and unconscious. That's what totally makes a person, like, whole. Except for me. I'm so not my own person, it's not even funny.
God, I can't believe I even have to say this because it's, like, so obvious. You know how individuation is, like, determination or contraction of a general nature to an individual mode of existence? How it's, like, the emergence of the individual self from the general? Well, that is so ridiculously not me, you know?
Okay, so Jung, he also was way into classifying personality types, right? He said there's, like, extroverts and introverts, and me, I am so obviously an extrovert. Anyway, so, like, the weakness of extroverts lies in their tendency toward superficiality and an overdependence on making a good impression. Because they are well adapted to society, they usually accept popular social mores and convictions, and tend to be somewhat conventional in their judgments. They dislike being alone, regard reflection as morbid, and lack the tools for self-criticism. Hel-lo? Does that sound like anyone you know? I thought so.
Even though this is so clearly the case—like, how I really lack individual thoughts and opinions—my friends are still like, "Brittany, you are so totally the bomb." I give my opinions on things, and people listen to me like I know what I'm talking about, but I, like, so completely do not. I mean, I'm not smart at all. Like, I am so totally one-dimensional, I can't even believe it.
If I am to develop a well-rounded personality, it's, like, essential that at some point my ego and intellect become aware of the existence of this other center of the personality—the center that contains this far greater intellect and will than the ego's center. Like, without developing the ability to become self-sufficient, there is no way I will become conscious of all the unknown potentials lying dormant in the unknown parts of my psyche.
One small prob, though: I am sooo reliant on my parents, even though I'm always going off on how I can't stand them. Even more so, I'm dependent on the approval of my peer group—a group I chose specifically for its tendency to give my thoughts and actions unconditional approval. And because I hang out pretty much exclusively with these friends and discount the opinions of those not in my peer group, I sort of get the idea I am not totally dumb. But the reality is, I, like, so totally am. Like, when I read things, I comprehend them only at the shallowest level. My opinions are just parroted reductions of things I overheard in passing or saw on TV. How sad is that?
Okay, I'm not completely dumb. I'm just really immature. I have a decent IQ, so I do have a chance of developing into a well-rounded, self-actualized person someday.
As for right now, though my God. I mean, like, no friggin' way.
Shut up, Erica, it so totally is true, and you know it.
It's like Jung says. He's all, like, the primary task of a human is fulfillment through the process of individuation and the establishment of harmony of the conscious and unconscious. That's what totally makes a person, like, whole. Except for me. I'm so not my own person, it's not even funny.
God, I can't believe I even have to say this because it's, like, so obvious. You know how individuation is, like, determination or contraction of a general nature to an individual mode of existence? How it's, like, the emergence of the individual self from the general? Well, that is so ridiculously not me, you know?
Okay, so Jung, he also was way into classifying personality types, right? He said there's, like, extroverts and introverts, and me, I am so obviously an extrovert. Anyway, so, like, the weakness of extroverts lies in their tendency toward superficiality and an overdependence on making a good impression. Because they are well adapted to society, they usually accept popular social mores and convictions, and tend to be somewhat conventional in their judgments. They dislike being alone, regard reflection as morbid, and lack the tools for self-criticism. Hel-lo? Does that sound like anyone you know? I thought so.
Even though this is so clearly the case—like, how I really lack individual thoughts and opinions—my friends are still like, "Brittany, you are so totally the bomb." I give my opinions on things, and people listen to me like I know what I'm talking about, but I, like, so completely do not. I mean, I'm not smart at all. Like, I am so totally one-dimensional, I can't even believe it.
If I am to develop a well-rounded personality, it's, like, essential that at some point my ego and intellect become aware of the existence of this other center of the personality—the center that contains this far greater intellect and will than the ego's center. Like, without developing the ability to become self-sufficient, there is no way I will become conscious of all the unknown potentials lying dormant in the unknown parts of my psyche.
One small prob, though: I am sooo reliant on my parents, even though I'm always going off on how I can't stand them. Even more so, I'm dependent on the approval of my peer group—a group I chose specifically for its tendency to give my thoughts and actions unconditional approval. And because I hang out pretty much exclusively with these friends and discount the opinions of those not in my peer group, I sort of get the idea I am not totally dumb. But the reality is, I, like, so totally am. Like, when I read things, I comprehend them only at the shallowest level. My opinions are just parroted reductions of things I overheard in passing or saw on TV. How sad is that?
Okay, I'm not completely dumb. I'm just really immature. I have a decent IQ, so I do have a chance of developing into a well-rounded, self-actualized person someday.
As for right now, though my God. I mean, like, no friggin' way.
December 10, 2002
'All These Problems'
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A man from Mars — or from Europe — might expect Mississippi voters to favor progressive taxation and generous social programs. After all, the state benefits immensely from the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson: it doesn't pay a lot of federal taxes because it has the lowest per-capita income in the nation, and it does receive a lot of aid. Unlike, say, New Jersey, which pays far more into the U.S. Treasury than it gets in return, Mississippi is a major net recipient of federal funds.
But Mississippi is, in fact, the home of Trent Lott — a leader of a party determined to roll back as much as it can of the Great Society, perhaps even the New Deal. Why do Mississippi and its neighbors support politicians whose economic policies seemingly run counter to their interests?
Do I really need to answer that?
Fifty years ago the politics of race in America weren't at all disguised. Jim Crow laws both impoverished and disenfranchised Southern blacks; Southern whites voted for politicians who promised to keep things that way. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act ended overt discrimination. Yet race remains a major factor in our politics.
Indeed, this year efforts to suppress nonwhite votes were remarkably blatant. There were those leaflets distributed in black areas of Maryland, telling people they couldn't vote unless they paid back rent; there was the fuss over alleged ballot fraud in South Dakota, clearly aimed at suppressing Native American votes. Topping it off was last Saturday's election in Louisiana, in which the Republican Party hired black youths to hold signs urging their neighbors not to vote for Mary Landrieu.
Still, nobody now misses the days of overt racial discrimination. Or do they?
Last week, at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, Mr. Lott recalled Mr. Thurmond's 1948 race for the presidency. "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
What, exactly, did Mr. Lott mean by "all these problems"? Mr. Thurmond ran a one-issue campaign: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race," declared his platform.
Is it possible that a major modern political figure has sympathy for such views? After all, the Bush administration includes figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; some of Mr. Lott's best friends . . . Yet during the 1990's he was extensively involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens — a descendant of the White Citizens Council — telling them at one point that they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." When this came to light in 1998, Mr. Lott declared himself ignorant of the group's aims. Was he also ignorant of the aims of the 1948 Thurmond campaign? Or was he just, in the excitement of the moment, blurting out his real views?
At first the "liberal media," which went into a frenzy over political statements at Paul Wellstone's funeral, largely ignored this story. To take the most spectacular demonstration of priorities, last week CNN's "Inside Politics" found time to cover Matt Drudge's unconfirmed (and untrue) allegations about the price of John Kerry's haircuts. "Just two days after moving closer to a presidential race, John Kerry already is in denial mode," intoned the host. But when the program interviewed Mr. Lott the day after the Thurmond event, his apparent nostalgia for segregation never came up.
Now Mr. Lott has apologized for a "poor choice of words." But choice of words had nothing to do with it. What he did, quite clearly, was offer a retroactive endorsement of a frankly racist campaign.
And yes, there are political implications. In the midterm elections, Democratic candidates carefully avoided doing anything to mobilize the black vote, fearing that this would just encourage turnout by rural whites. But the rural whites turned out anyway, while blacks didn't. In Louisiana, black turnout — the result of a determined get-out-the-vote operation, perhaps helped by Mr. Lott's remarks — was the key to Ms. Landrieu's unexpected victory. Might I suggest that this tells us something?
'All These Problems'
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A man from Mars — or from Europe — might expect Mississippi voters to favor progressive taxation and generous social programs. After all, the state benefits immensely from the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson: it doesn't pay a lot of federal taxes because it has the lowest per-capita income in the nation, and it does receive a lot of aid. Unlike, say, New Jersey, which pays far more into the U.S. Treasury than it gets in return, Mississippi is a major net recipient of federal funds.
But Mississippi is, in fact, the home of Trent Lott — a leader of a party determined to roll back as much as it can of the Great Society, perhaps even the New Deal. Why do Mississippi and its neighbors support politicians whose economic policies seemingly run counter to their interests?
Do I really need to answer that?
Fifty years ago the politics of race in America weren't at all disguised. Jim Crow laws both impoverished and disenfranchised Southern blacks; Southern whites voted for politicians who promised to keep things that way. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act ended overt discrimination. Yet race remains a major factor in our politics.
Indeed, this year efforts to suppress nonwhite votes were remarkably blatant. There were those leaflets distributed in black areas of Maryland, telling people they couldn't vote unless they paid back rent; there was the fuss over alleged ballot fraud in South Dakota, clearly aimed at suppressing Native American votes. Topping it off was last Saturday's election in Louisiana, in which the Republican Party hired black youths to hold signs urging their neighbors not to vote for Mary Landrieu.
Still, nobody now misses the days of overt racial discrimination. Or do they?
Last week, at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, Mr. Lott recalled Mr. Thurmond's 1948 race for the presidency. "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
What, exactly, did Mr. Lott mean by "all these problems"? Mr. Thurmond ran a one-issue campaign: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race," declared his platform.
Is it possible that a major modern political figure has sympathy for such views? After all, the Bush administration includes figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; some of Mr. Lott's best friends . . . Yet during the 1990's he was extensively involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens — a descendant of the White Citizens Council — telling them at one point that they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." When this came to light in 1998, Mr. Lott declared himself ignorant of the group's aims. Was he also ignorant of the aims of the 1948 Thurmond campaign? Or was he just, in the excitement of the moment, blurting out his real views?
At first the "liberal media," which went into a frenzy over political statements at Paul Wellstone's funeral, largely ignored this story. To take the most spectacular demonstration of priorities, last week CNN's "Inside Politics" found time to cover Matt Drudge's unconfirmed (and untrue) allegations about the price of John Kerry's haircuts. "Just two days after moving closer to a presidential race, John Kerry already is in denial mode," intoned the host. But when the program interviewed Mr. Lott the day after the Thurmond event, his apparent nostalgia for segregation never came up.
Now Mr. Lott has apologized for a "poor choice of words." But choice of words had nothing to do with it. What he did, quite clearly, was offer a retroactive endorsement of a frankly racist campaign.
And yes, there are political implications. In the midterm elections, Democratic candidates carefully avoided doing anything to mobilize the black vote, fearing that this would just encourage turnout by rural whites. But the rural whites turned out anyway, while blacks didn't. In Louisiana, black turnout — the result of a determined get-out-the-vote operation, perhaps helped by Mr. Lott's remarks — was the key to Ms. Landrieu's unexpected victory. Might I suggest that this tells us something?
Monday, December 09, 2002
Friday, December 06, 2002
jumpin' cats! i had completely forgotten about the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS until today when, reading some of the annotations to the league of extraordinary gentlemen, it was mentioned in a paragraph devoted to attempting some translation of what represents spoken martian in the story! my friend alan, back in louisville, has a copy of this amazing thing. outstanding.
Trent Lott being all "united we stand" with victims relatives, as well as kissinger and the shrub avoiding laws.
from the nytimes:
and this commentary from dodgson on the article:
from the nytimes:
- WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims said today that their choice as a Republican appointee to the commission investigating the terrorist attacks was being blocked by Republican leaders and the White House, setting up an early showdown over the panel's membership.
The family members said they had settled on Warren B. Rudman, the former senator from New Hampshire, as their choice for one of the five Republican slots on the 10-member commission.
Last month, President Bush selected Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, as the commission's chairman. Democrats have named George J. Mitchell, the former senator from Maine and peace envoy to Northern Ireland and the Middle East, as vice chairman. The other four Democrats and four Republicans must be appointed by the leaders of the two parties in Congress by Dec. 15.
The families were effectively given a voice in the panel's makeup under a deal that gives veto power over one Republican appointment to two Republican senators close to the families, John McCain of Arizona and Richard C. Shelby of Alabama.
Stephen Push, a spokesman for the families, said they believed that Mr. Rudman was the only Republican both highly qualified to participate in the investigation and sufficiently independent of his party's leadership to ensure a thorough and impartial inquiry.
"Warren Rudman is the only Republican candidate for this position that all the families trust," he said.
Mr. Push said the families had put Mr. Rudman's name forward to Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who will be majority leader in the new Congress, through Mr. McCain. But he said Mr. Lott had so far refused to agree to their request.
Republican aides on Capitol Hill confirmed his account, saying Mr. McCain was supportive of Mr. Rudman but that there was an impasse with Mr. Lott over his appointment.
Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for Mr. Lott, said the senator was "reviewing a list of candidates and will approve who those members will be in the near future."
Mr. Push also said the families were concerned that Mr. Rudman's selection was being blocked because of opposition from the White House.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said the administration, having chosen Mr. Kissinger as chairman, would not have any voice in the remaining selections.
The fight over the slot is especially important because it will take six votes on the panel to issue subpoenas, and the family members say they want to make sure one Republican is sufficiently independent of the White House to join the five Democrats in any close vote.
Family members said they intended to keep pressing Mr. Lott to appoint Mr. Rudman, who previously co-authored a report, with former Senator Gary Hart, Democrat of Colorado, on the nation's vulnerability to terrorism. They said they would not back down, even if it meant having the commission start its work with only nine members.
Mr. Kissinger and the other panel members also faced new pressure today to publicly identify their business clients for potential conflicts of interest, as many of the relatives of Sept. 11 victims have demanded.
The families have said that Mr. Kissinger in particular may face a conflict because of his consulting work for prominent corporate and business clients, including several large multinational companies with Arab interests.
Congressional officials said a new report by the Congressional Research Service found that Mr. Kissinger and other committee members would be required to publicly identify any client who had paid them more than $5,000 for consulting work over the last two years.
White House officials said they stood by their previous position that Mr. Kissinger was not required to disclose his client list because the position is part time and unpaid.
The report, which had been requested by the Democratic leadership of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has not been made public. But Congressional officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, outlined its findings, which were first reported today by The Financial Times. The officials said the report found that government regulations required Mr. Kissinger and the others to make full public financial disclosures, including identifying their clients.
Mr. Kissinger's office in New York did not return calls today. In a television interview last weekend, he said that he would sever ties with any of his global clients if they presented conflicts. But he said he would not reveal his client list publicly.
and this commentary from dodgson on the article:
- It turns out that the Republican leadership had an informal agreement to let the families of 9/11 attack victims approve one of the five Republican committee members (with Sens. McCain and Shelby, who have close ties to the families, acting as their agents). Which is particularly significant because the commission will require six votes to issue a subpoena --- so if all five Republicans are beholden to the White House, then Dubya and co. will be able to squelch any inquiry which threatens to make them the least bit uncomfortable.
And the families have made a perfectly respectable choice, former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman. But that's not enough for Trent Lott, who has refused to agree to the appointment. The families claim he's being pressured by the White House, but it can't be --- Ari Fleischer said explicitly that the White House, having chosen Kissinger would have no voice in the selection of the other committee members. And if that's a lie too, then Fleischer had better be careful. If he keeps this sort of thing up, he may wind up with a reputation.
Besides, the White House has said that really they want independent inquiry into the handling of terrorism before 9/11. Perhaps they just don't want that independence taken to extremes --- otherwise, we might wind up with a free-floating inquiry into anything the President and his associates have ever done in their public and private lives, which could drag on for years, issue thousands of subpoenas, cost millions of dollars, and delve into private matters of no legitimate interest to the public at all. And that would offend Republican ideas of good government. All things in moderation.
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
zoso.
beautiful, so beautiful.
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
from jay babcock's site:
- 01 DECEMBER 2002: REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU SHOP FOR CLOTHES.
December 1, 2002
From the LATimes Sunday Magazine:
COVER STORY
Levi Strauss and the Price We Pay
The Cost of Apparel Has Declined for a Quarter Century, Helping Make Americans the Best-Clothed People in History.
All Is Right in the Word, Unless You Ask How It Happened.
By FRED DICKEY
Brenda Pope sits at the kitchen table and stares sadly at her work-hardened hands. Inside one wrist is the purple welt of a surgical scar that runs halfway to her elbow. Twenty years at a sewing machine gave her the carpal tunnel injury. That scar and $15,000 in severance is what she has to show for those years. Near the edge of Blue Ridge, Ga., the Levi Strauss plant where she once worked now sits empty, a glass-and-brick shell overlooking acres of empty parking lot. Bored security guards stroll the grounds to protect what no one any longer values. A factory dies an honorable death when it falls apart from hard work and time. This one was cut down in full productivity.
For a half-century, this apparel sewing plant was a wellspring that pumped life into the town. The workday was switched on by the gathering of 400 workers, mainly women, chattering as they punched the clock. Hour after hour, they created a cadence from clacking sewing machines, generating wealth for their bosses and modest wages for themselves.
The plant was shut in June, one of six Levi plant closures that left the San Francisco apparel giant with just a tiny U.S. manufacturing presence--a plant in San Antonio, Texas, devoted to quick turn-around products that have deadlines overseas plants can't meet. At the end, the Blue Ridge workers stood in small knots, tossed about by a maelstrom of emotions. Some were in shock. Some muttered that they would never again wear Levi clothing. Most worried about the future. Brenda Pope was one of those.
Blue Ridge is a town of nearly 2,000 in north Georgia, just south of the Tennessee and North Carolina lines. Blue-green hills rise sharply a few miles south of town and provide a gateway to the Appalachians, gaining loveliness as they gain height. Residents are mostly Scots-Irish, descendants of the hard-edged people who broke the Cherokees, and then broke the soil. Today, many here, like Pope, are working poor.
Measured against what most of us feel we need, the 44-year-old single mother asked little. She wanted to live among familiar pines and trustworthy people, create value with her hands and raise her child in the old ways. She did not think she needed a college degree to do these things. She was right, until she made the mistake of pricing herself out of the labor market--a feat accomplished by earning $14 per hour putting zippers in Levi's famous blue jeans.
When Levi moved Pope's job out of the country, she became one of hundreds of thousands of American workers who have lost jobs during the past six decades as the garment industry seeks lower wages in underdeveloped countries. In that context, the decision to close the Blue Ridge plant was hardly unusual. Levi had clung to its last U.S. manufacturing plants long after most of its competitors had fled.
Yet when a company like Levi, with a reputation for good management and strong relations with employees, finally turns out the lights in the United States, it might be an occasion to measure the human toll, here and abroad, of the flight of garment industry jobs--and to remember that it's happening so that American consumers, who buy more clothing than any people in history, can get a shirt for $20 instead of $25.
In 1950, 1.2 million Americans were employed in apparel manufacturing. By 2001, that figure had fallen to 566,000. In the same time span, the U.S. population almost doubled. Jobs went out of the country, and finished products came in. In 1989, the U.S. imported $24.5 billion in apparel; in 2001, $63.8 billion. In the last quarter of 2001, 83% of all apparel sold in this country was imported.
The migration of these jobs is seen as the natural result of globalization, the economic process that melds the technology and finance of the developed world with the vast labor pool of the underdeveloped. This trend is especially attractive to the apparel industry because, basically, all it needs are sewing machines and low-paid workers.
Globalization has crept up so stealthily that it wasn't generally recognized until full grown. It accelerated around the end of World War II, when the industrialized world was reshuffling, says Charles Derber of Boston College, author of "Corporation Nation," a book that views corporate power through a populist filter. As American corporations witnessed the economic rise of Japan and other foreign competition, they started looking for an edge, and they found it in cheap labor abroad. "They realized that more money could be made by using those billions of workers as producers as well as consumers," Derber says.
Many corporate executives view this sea of cheap labor as an attractive profit center, or, if they find it predatory and distasteful, as a competitive necessity. Economists say globalization will be the platform for Third World countries to build their own free-market economies, and that low wages are part of the growth process.
Michael M. Weinstein, a New York economist who has studied the job-flight phenomenon, says of the plight of Pope and others like her: "Any policy you give me for saving that person's job is going to threaten somebody else's. I don't mean to sound callous, but there are plenty of low-end jobs [in the U.S.] that need filling. If we bar low-cost goods from abroad, it would be the poorest among us who depend on these products who would be punished most harshly."
In other words, it is the poor who would suffer most if, say, clothing at Wal-Mart suddenly cost more. Weinstein adds, "We don't need garment jobs to have full employment for Americans. It's a good thing when these jobs go to the worst-off people in the world. I regard it as unconscionable to clamp down on sweatshops that are making these people's lives better than they would otherwise be."
The search for the worst-off people in the world means the garment industry is looking for a target that's always moving. As soon as wages rise in one country, work can be moved to another. Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee in New York City, calls this long-distance shuffle a "race to the bottom" of the wage scale. The committee has a list of hourly apparel wages in Third World countries, including: Guatemala, 37 cents; China, 28 cents; Nicaragua, 23 cents; Bangladesh, 13 to 20 cents.
In addition to low wages, manufacturers in many countries benefit from child labor and long workdays as well as the absence of health plans, environmental protections, workplace safety standards and efforts to organize workers. In fairness, some U.S. apparel makers, Levi among them, have taken steps to police conditions in plants overseas, and to pay fairly. But those efforts are far from universal.
"American companies make showcase visits to these offshore plants, but they always get the VIP tour and are maneuvered to talk only to employees who have been coached for such occasions," says Kernaghan, an old-style, angry labor activist who knows his enemy, doesn't trust him and never gets too close.
Levi Strauss & Co. has taken on the role of dressing people to look sexy and cool, but the company began in 1853 as a wholesale dry goods business. Its first garments were work pants made of canvas-type material to serve workers in dust-clogged mines and on docks. As the years passed, Levi grew, its sales reaching $4.3 billion by fiscal 2001, and the company expanded its manufacturing to other parts of the country. Levi became a paragon of corporate beneficence. It provided benefits, fair wages and even helped employees earn diplomas. It donated ball fields to the small towns where it operated. Even unions liked the company.
Ann Woody was a management employee at the Blue Ridge factory. She remembered when Bob Haas, a descendant of the founders and Levi's president and CEO, visited the plant about a decade ago. Workers planted a tree in his behalf to show their affection. It was a touching moment of mutual fidelity.
Company fortunes faltered in the mid-'90s in the face of competition from goods made overseas. When the time came for Levi to close Blue Ridge, Haas had become chairman of the board, replaced as president and CEO by Philip A. Marineau, who was recruited from Pepsi-Cola to "turn this thing around."
To reduce labor costs, Marineau had to break the paternal mold that the Haas family had formed over many years. Journalist Karl Schoenberger wrote in his 2001 book, "Levi's Children," that "Levi Strauss is one of the very few major companies in the apparel industry that has not been indelibly branded a scoundrel by human rights critics. . . . It has the distinction of trying harder and far longer than any other multinational corporation to do the right thing."
The new boss was tough enough to say to the workers: Sorry, but this is about money.
Marineau doesn't do fireside chats. He's all business. Asked why the company closed Blue Ridge and turned out faithful workers, he says: "To be competitive in the marketplace required us to lower our cost of goods. It required us to go offshore. Apparel prices have gone down for the last 25 years, and it continues unabated, driven by an aging population that wants to spend less on clothing."
In announcing the six plant closures, Levi said it was becoming a "marketing company," and that future production in almost all cases would be by contract manufacturers. That would take place in 50 countries, including Mexico, Bangladesh and China.
To author Derber, that explanation is code language that actually says: We're going for the cheap labor, and we don't want the dirty hands of ownership that go with sweatshops. The goal is to have "plausible deniability" about labor conditions. He said that foreign plant owners are rarely steeped in touchy-feely management techniques and operate with the backing of powerful politicians who can impede whatever government oversight might technically be on the books.
Asked why Levi contracts out its manufacturing, Marineau gives several competitive business reasons, then he pauses and acknowledges, "The apparel industry is chasing low-cost labor."
For Levi, the advantages became obvious this year. In the third quarter, which ended Aug. 25, Levi's sales were up 3.5%, its first increase since 1996. Five weeks ago came an agreement to sell a new line of lower-priced jeans through the vast Wal-Mart Stores chain. Marineau predicted that the new Levi Strauss Signature brand would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales each year--all from garments made abroad.
To its credit, Levi has been a pioneer overseas, creating a corporate code of standards for every manufacturer with which it contracts. Levi also pays inspectors to enforce the standards. Writer Schoenberger acknowledges Levi's effort, but says, "How well they have managed to enforce that code is probably very debatable," given the serpentine twists in Third World countries.
In fact, enforcing the codes of various private groups and international organizations is not achievable, Weinstein says. Groups such as the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and the International Labor Organization have no real leverage to control American multinationals because the United States has such vast economic clout. "Say the Philippines has a beef against American trade practices," he says. "What are they going to do, refuse to do business with the U.S.?"
That segues into a main Kernaghan point. The labor activist says that the most effective step against globalization abuses would be to pass legislation in the United States prohibiting the entry of goods from countries whose products fall short of acceptable standards. In other words, the U.S. would be saying to multinationals operating offshore: We can't stop you from making clothing in sweatshops, but you can't sell it here.
"We have the power to determine what comes into our country," says Jay Mazur, retired president of Unite, the union that traditionally represented most American apparel workers. "We say cocaine can't come into our country; so we can say that goods produced in sweatshops can't either."
Kernaghan and his allies (human rights advocates and some labor unions, but thus far not many politicians) believe that such legislation would eliminate the common explanation companies give for abusing humane standards--we do it because our competitors do. Opponents argue that the law would send clothing prices higher in the U.S.
Karen Collis was the president of the Unite local in Blue Ridge. When Levi announced the closure, there was little the union could do except negotiate severances. Collis, 31, is luckier than most. She's bright, young and ambitious. She has a supportive husband and plans to use her $11,000 severance to pursue an accounting degree. She may be one of the few for whom being laid off will be a blessing.
Collis, though, knows her former co-workers do not need severance packages. They need employment. She is upset--at the union she believes gave up on the Blue Ridge plant, at Levi for turning its back on loyal workers, and even at Mexico, which is where she and other workers heard their jobs are going.
So in the race to the bottom, is Mexico the next stop?
In the sand-blown Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, two hours southwest of San Antonio, a mother of five prays that Collis' prediction comes true. It won't. The woman, who did not want her name used for fear of reprisal at work, lives in a two-bedroom crumbly stucco house so narrow it seems you can't open the back door without closing the front. The tiny front room is filled with rows of family photos, religious symbols and a snowy old TV that is always on and seemingly never watched. Even the furniture coverings are threadbare. At the moment, the room is festive and crowded as several relatives have gathered for the momentous occasion of this interview. Her children are almost awkwardly polite and listen as attentively as if this were pay-per-view.
She says she earns about $55 a week sewing cloth bags at the local factory. Two years ago, she earned twice that much working on Levi jeans at a large factory, but it closed and the jobs moved to Central America and the Far East. The closure left her and her husband, whose own job is spotty, with far more bills than money.
Today, she worries that she will fall behind on her sewing quota. She is not as nimble as she once was. She holds her bladder until lunch or quitting time to avoid slowing down. She knows that 100 people would line up for her job, and would gladly take the latest starting wage of about $35 per week. There is no job security and no one to appeal to because the union in her plant is as answerable to the company as she is.
This year's economic downturn in the U.S. has hurt the Mexican apparel industry, but most jobs were lost because companies moved to countries with lower wages, says Julia Quinonez, head of CFO (Border Committee of Women Workers) in Piedras Negras. She says that 4,500 apparel jobs have disappeared from that small city in the past three years and that wages have gone from $4 per hour 10 years ago to an average of 80 cents today. Quinonez says the jobs are going abroad, or farther south in Mexico, where wages are about 60% of those along the border and labor protections are rarely enforced.
Martha Tovar, president of Solunet-InfoMex, an economic research company in El Paso, Texas, says that 68 textile plants closed in Mexico last year, depressing conditions in the border area, including the poor woman's family in Piedras Negras. Prices are so high, they cross the border to buy beans and rice, and occasionally--very occasionally--some chicken or cheap beef. When told that some housekeepers in L.A. earn her weekly income by lunchtime, the mother's eyes widen and she says, "How can that be?"
Her ambition is to gather her family and slip across the border, where she wishes to find out if such stories can be true for her. Asked how she would do that, she shrugs. "I'll just use a guest pass to cross over, then not return."
She has little curiosity about the companies responsible for her wages. She would, however, like to ask them--whoever they are--"Why is it that you can't pay me enough so I can live decently? So that I can feed my family chicken even once in a while?"
She is not an economist and she has never heard of globalization, but her instincts tell her that the job that allows her barely to survive is soon going the way of thousands of other jobs in her town. In the race to the bottom, it turns out, Mexico is in the rearview mirror.
Lisa Rahman would consider that Mexican family blessed with riches, because $1 an hour far exceeds any amount the 19-year-old garment factory worker would dare dream of when asleep in her family's shack. Her closer-to-earth ambition is to double her income to about 30 cents per hour. That would mean chicken in her rice maybe once a week.
Rahman lives with and is the main support for her parents and two young relatives in the vast slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. All she can afford is one room, and during the rainy season, the family collects the bedding and moves to the one dry corner so that they don't get soaked. She has never gone to school, ridden a bicycle or seen a movie. Her wages allow the eating of chicken maybe once every two months. She describes the neighborhood: "Ninety to 100 people in my neighborhood all use one water pump, one outhouse and one stove with four burners."
Rahman has worked in garment factories since she was 10, the last three years at the Shah Makhdum factory. She says she often works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. seven days a week, with a day off maybe once a month. Her take-home pay is the equivalent of 14 cents per hour. The factory is hot, and the drinking water is dirty. If she gets sick and can't work, she doesn't get paid. If she gets sick very often, she'll be unpaid permanently.
Rahman is waif-like--about 5 feet and 110 pounds--and has round eyes that float in her still-young brown skin. Everything about her begs for a protective arm around her, but that draws her no slack on the job: "If we fail to meet [production quota], the supervisors yell and curse at us. They curse our parents and call them filthy [names]. Sometimes they slap us."
One product that Rahman worked on most recently was for the Walt Disney Co. of Burbank, a contract purchaser from the factory. It's a Winnie the Pooh shirt that retails for $17.99. Asked to guess the shirt's retail price in the U.S., Rahman says, "About 50 or 100 taka," which is 86 cents to $1.72.
Rahman had never heard of Disney, Disneyland or Mickey Mouse until a labor dispute broke at the plant recently over working conditions. The Disney licensee promptly suspended its work there--forcing Rahman and others to reverse field. They are now trying to have the manufacturing resume.
Rahman says she hopes to work at the plant until she is old.
And what's old?
"Thirty."
A spokesman for the Disney company, Gary Foster, says of Rahman's allegations about the Shah Makhdum plant: "We have visited that plant 12 separate times, and everything she says about it is untrue." Asked if Disney garments are still being produced there, he says, "As far as we know, there is no Disney licensee making products in that plant." Asked why he isn't certain, he says, "That is the licensee's decision."
Bangladesh is a desperately poor nation of 134 million that needs a lot of Lisa Rahmans to staff its 3,300 sewing factories. The country provides garments for most major American apparel manufacturers, including Levi. In 2000, Bangladesh companies made 924 million garments for U.S. companies with a wholesale customs value of $2.2 billion.
Recently, however, the Bangladesh minister of commerce complained that wages in other countries, such as China, were undercutting laborers in his nation. That is not surprising to labor activist Kernaghan. He says that fickle multinationals have found new low-wage destinations, and China heads the list.
Richard H. Dekmejian, an international relations expert at USC, makes a judgment on where globalization is leading us: "Third World countries have no choice but to let these companies operate so their teeming populations don't die of hunger. People take what crumbs they're able to catch. But the overall impact of globalization is that the rich get richer and the poor starve. That will eventually lead to an explosion. It's inevitable."
Union veteran Mazur is more sanguine. "The world sees us as the great economic engine, and they just want it to work for them, too. By giving the world fair wages for labor, we would create social stability, and make peace more possible."
Sitting at the table with Brenda Pope is her 11-year-old son, Brian. He's a chubby, pleasant boy, well-mannered in a "yes sir, no ma'am" way that sounds almost quaint to a Southern California ear. Brian was found to have lupus a year ago, and he has red splotches on his face and arms caused by the disease, which can kill if it's not carefully--and expensively--controlled. He can do nothing about his face, but he reflexively tries to cover his sleeveless arms. When I ask if he would mind playing outside for a while, he complies without a murmur. When he's gone, I ask his mother how he's doing.
"Lots of kids give him a hard time. They call him pizza face and stuff like that. It just breaks my heart. He once asked me, 'Momma, are you ashamed of how I look?' When the doctor told him about the lupus, the only