Haditha

• May 31, 2006 | 1:25 PM ET | Permalink

Name: LTC Bob Bateman
Dateline: Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.

HADITHA

Fort Hood, Texas, Summer 1995:

Private Ericsson was the blond-haired blue-eyed epitome of American youth.  A little older than his peers at 22, he was often the first to speak up when I called for a response.  In this case I had just put forward the question, “What would you do?” to a hypothetical situation in which several prisoners had been captured who may, or may not, know about an ambush the enemy had emplaced for our unit some distance away.  The prisoners appeared to be civilians, taken in a village from which we had, in this notional scenario, recently taken fire.

“I’d shoot one of them sir, to see if it got the next one to talk,” said Ericsson with a perfectly straight face.  The room remained silent.

“WHAT?!”  It was not my calmest reply because I was, frankly, stunned.  Standing at the front of the room I looked around at the assembled men seated before me.  Nobody was leaping to contradict his comment.  Their attention was split between us.

Ericsson repeated his response, looking me straight in the eye. “I’d shoot one of them sir.  And then, if that didn’t get the next guy to talk, I’d shoot another.”

Jesus.

“Ericsson…” I started to reply, about to tell him how wrong that was, to lecture him and explain about not only the laws of land warfare but how this would additionally be entirely counterproductive in addition to being illegal and immoral, but I stopped myself.  If Ericsson thinks this way…

"No, wait…OK, how many of you think that this is the correct response?”  Now I was addressing the whole group, most of my company in fact.  After a few seconds almost half of the hands went up.

I had a lot of work to do.

I was a Captain at the time.  As a company commander in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, I lived.  Leading the men of my company was the most fulfilling professional experience of my life.  Some days it could also be the most frustrating.

When you are not deployed, the life of an infantryman can be moderately predictable.  In the First Cavalry Division we had a six-week cycle that ran our lives.  For six weeks we would train for war, then the next six weeks we would stand ready to go to war at a moments notice.  Finally, we would “stand down” and our unit would serve as the life support for the post.  During that last period we might train, but it would be within the confines of our barracks areas and motorpool.  I used the opportunity to address ethics.

Ethics training is mandatory in the Army.  It is not, or at least it was not back then, woven deliberately into all training, but it is addressed.  Unfortunately, as with most institutional requirements, what comes down from “on high” as the mandatory training package is often wildly inappropriate.  The pre-packaged ethics training we were supposed to deliver that year was about the misuse of government funds, specifically government travel cards (which had been much in the news at the time).  Given that I was a company commander in an infantry battalion, and absolutely none of my men even had such a card, that training was pretty damned dumb.  The slides we were given were a cover-your-ass block of instruction so that somebody way on high could later say at a press conference, “Every soldier in the division has been given ethics training on the use and abuse of government travel credit cards.”  Useless for my privates, sergeants, and lieutenants, so I took another route.

Bringing all the men available together, I showed them part of a PBS program entitled “Under Orders, Under Fire.”  It was a round-table session sponsored by the Annenberg Center.  Filmed in 1987, it was still perfectly suitable.  The moderator drew out the opinions and thoughts of the collection of academic ethicists, professional military officers, politicians (to include a younger and slimmer Newt Gingrich, and I believe Al Sharpton, among others), religious leaders and journalists.  To do this the moderator posited several hypothetical situations involving the thinly veiled “notional” countries of North Koksan and South Koksan, the former of which is supporting a guerilla movement in the latter.

In setting up this training I showed part of the video to all of my men, setting up the hypothetical scenario I described.  Then my First Sergeant took the NCOs and lieutenants out to another area, while I talked through the situations with the junior enlisted.  We would compare notes and cross-train at the end, but I wanted to hear what the privates might say on these topics when the sergeants were not around, and my First Sergeant wanted to talk to the sergeants without the “Old Man” (that was me, at the ripe old age of 27) around.  Showing my troops the tape, and then discussing with them the same situations, was among the most educational things I had ever done.  What I learned was that my men, a perfect mélange of middle Americana, (and absent their sergeants and lieutenants) were more than willing to use violence in completely inappropriate ways in order to accomplish what they saw as “the mission.”  In short, what they told me they would do was (were they to actually do any of these things) a collection of violations of the laws of land warfare.  It was a direct confirmation of something which I’d only suspected before, and something which drove me to spend a vast amount of time on these topics with the sergeants and lieutenants later.  I trained my men, officers, sergeants and junior enlisted, on these topics a lot thereafter.  I thought to this training when I came home on Sunday and started catching up on the news here.

I will not dispute the accounts now appearing about events that took place in the Iraqi town of Haditha.  So far as I can determine, there is nothing to dispute in the coverage thereof by the national (and international) press.  Thus far their reporting has confined itself, appropriately, to what is known.  That is bad enough.

Should even a small part of the allegations prove true, I will not be surprised, but I will be saddened.  What these charges may mean is that there was not just a failure at the lowest levels, but that there was a moral failure through several levels of command, among the officers.  Beyond that there is little that I can say.

Now is not the time to explain how such things happen, or why.  Although I have spent a good part of my professional and intellectual life seeking to understand how things like this occur, and believe that I have some understanding of the phenomena (here), it is entirely too early to begin commenting now.  In no small part this is because any such explanation at this point may be construed as apologia, which is in itself not a good thing.  If events occurred as they are
currently reported to have occurred, then there is nothing more to say than, “It is wrong.”

Yet at the same time I cannot help but note that those who might be inclined to trumpet these events may themselves do well to maintain some perspective.  War, in short, is savage.  All wars, bar none.  It has always been savage, and it will always be savage.  No matter how “Good” the war is, how completely altruistic the motives of the civilians who send us to this conflict or that one may be, no matter how necessary a war may be, at the level of the Soldier, War is Savage.  Professionals know this, and it is one of the very real reasons that we are (somewhat ironically, for those who do not know us or our morals) so often opposed to the use of force.  In other words, we have an informed idea of what rests inside Pandora’s Box, and this colors our thoughts when considering force.

At the most basic level, the role of the professional military officer is to control and direct the use of violence.  It is to confine the savage, but you cannot prevent it entirely.  You can train for a lifetime, devote vast resources to the creation of a professional force, and emplace institutional checks to reduce the incidence of misdirected violence…but you will never, ever, stop it entirely.  Please keep this in mind.

PROVENCE WITHIN EARSHOT:

I returned on Sunday from Provence, France.  Someday, I suspect, I may have to move there.  Not forever, but for a spell.

You can write to LTC Bob at .

Eric adds: I would also recommend this book.

Bush found out about Haditha from Time.

Karl Zinsmeister, the new chief domestic adviser to President Bush, while embedded as a reporter with the 82nd Airborne in Kuwait in 2003, declared that "many of the journalists observable in this war theater are bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all around them.  A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft”   The Post and CBS News on the killings of two CBS journalists.

Jamison Foer has a really interesting essay on the media here.

And here is Moyers' latest on PBS.

From Tomdispatch:  "Nobody recently has publicly wondered what this thing called "intelligence," over which so many tens of thousands of analysts, code breakers, and agents labor with so many tens of billions of our dollars, really is.  What sort of knowledge about our planet do all those acronymic intelligence organizations really deliver? The value of the Intelligence Community (IC), as it likes to call itself, to deliver this thing called "intelligence," whatever mistakes or missteps might be made, is simply taken for granted.  Given its estimated $44 billion annual budget, if the IC actually worked as an effective intelligence delivery system, we would be a genius nation, a Mensa among states. We would have an invaluable secret repository of knowledge that would be the equivalent of the destroyed ancient Library of Alexandria (which reputedly collected all the knowledge in the then-known world). And you would have to wonder, looking back on the last years: In that case, how exactly could we be quite so dumb?"  Here.

This “Onion” thing is really an interesting newspaper:  Critics Blast Al Gore's Documentary As 'Realistic' here.

Speaking of which, what a funny song this is.

Ranking Literary Theorists: A bad idea

If anyone knows whether a tape is being made of John Kenneth Galbraith's memorial service today, and where I can get one, I'd appreciate it.

Alter-reviews:

I had a harmonic convergence in thinking about Spalding Gray, last week.  First there was this Times piece about his work.  And as I went for a walk on the beach not far from the last time I saw him—a sadly changed man following his accident, I found I had a copy of the Audio Renaissance production of “Life Interrupted,” here, read by Sam Shephard with an introduction by Francine Prose, eulogies by his agent, Suzanne Gluck; novelist A.M. Homes, his wife, Kathie Russo; his stepdaughter, Marissa, and many others who spoke at both Lincoln Center and Sag Harbor.  This is one of those cases where the audio version has got to be better than the book, since these are after all, monologues.  Walking along the beach, listening to Ms. Prose’s introduction, I was struck by the fact that while I wouldn’t have called Spalding my “friend,” the time we spent together had a lasting impact on me, for he did have an amazing talent for listening—and for offering insights into my life that literally changed my life and my own understanding of it.  Apparently I was not alone.  If you thought you knew Spalding from his monologues, you probably did, but not nearly as well as you will if you listen to these unspeakably sad, moving tributes.  The monologue is pretty great too, but like the life, too short.

I also really enjoyed the audio version of Jerry Lewis’ memoir of his partnership with Dean, here, called “Dean and Me: A Love Story.” (Nick Tosches’ Dino, is one of the greatest books ever, by the way.)   Gregory Jbara does a masterful reading job. And I think I said this, but I loved, loved, loved Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in its audio version. Also really well read.

And I can’t actually bring myself to watch it, apparently, but you may want to buy or rent “Winter Soldier.”  The New York Times describes it thusly:

The young John Kerry appears only briefly in "Winter Soldier," a 1972 antiwar film created by a collective of young filmmakers whose members included Barbara Kopple ("Harlan County, U.S.A.") and Robert Fiore (a co-director of "Pumping Iron," with Mr. Kerry's filmmaking friend George Butler). In his role as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War Mr. Kerry can be seen coaching a young man about to give his testimony during a widely covered meeting organized by the veterans' group at a Howard Johnson's in Detroit, where the organization hoped to turn a spotlight on the abuses and atrocities it believed to be occurring in Southeast Asia.

"Is there something you want to say in terms of the crimes that happened?" asks Mr. Kerry, using the kind of provocative language his presidential campaign went out of its way to avoid.

The film includes little or no documentary evidence, apart from some photographs and film clips that are too blurry to be of much use. So there are some who will be just as quick to dispute the facts it puts forward as they were to dispute Mr. Kerry's Swift boat record in the last presidential campaign. But even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations and desire to please the interviewees, the picture has a deeply upsetting ring of truth.

It also offers a strange kind of comfort, given how few reports of atrocities on this level have come out of Iraq. Perhaps things are much more humane today in the American military; "Winter Soldier" suggests they could hardly be much worse. Milestone Film and Video, $24.95, not rated.”

More here.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Monica
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Dear Eric,
Speaking of NY Times headlines, I always thought that newspapers would kill for a good headline - that old "Extra Extra!" sorta thing.  But apparently not the Times.  This is the second time that they've done this with this specific subject, the Plame Affair: Instead of opening the article with a quick, punchy, effective headline, they create an elaborate, long, winding one. I thought they wanted to sell newspapers! First it was about Rove a few months ago. Now it's about the vice-president: "Notes Are Said to Reveal Close Cheney Interest in a Critic of Iraq Policy"  I'm not a journalist -- not even an English language native speaker -- but wouldn't even an intern pick something a little shorter and spicier, like "Notes May Link VP to Plame Affair"?  Thanks for your great work.

Name: Bryan Short
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Dear Dr. Alterman:
I would like to offer something further to Ken from New Jersey's comment regarding the Reverse Mortgage thread.  While Ken is right that it takes a great deal of professional expertise to read and understand the majority of the loan documents that ordinary Americans sign every day, there exist far more insidious problems than "mere" complexity.  In fact, many "agreements" that we encounter in our daily lives are purposefully inscrutible. For instance, read an insurance policy; no not the "dec" page, but the real policy. Try and understand what your coverage really covers. You will have a wonderful year-long jigsaw puzzle on your hands. Insurance contracts are notoriously drafted to be inscrutible to the purchaser, i.e., the insured. Moreover, what most of the argument of reverse mortgages has sounded like is a policy argument that surrounds the "viatical settlement" controversy. A Viatical Settlement is a payment of money now from a company to a person who is literally on death's doorstep in exchange for ownership of that person's life insurance contract. Not surprisingly, the same arguments arise: "It's an extremely important opportunity for those with terminal illness to pay for better end of life care"; "they should be eradicated because they too easily exploit the weak and desperate"; "they should be regulated" (and are highly regulated by the way). These arguments all skirt the basic economic reality, there is a fundamental lack of equality in these transactions. The buyers, both of viatical settlements and reverse mortgages, have little, if any, choice but to engage in these highly suspect transactions which can strip away a family's assets. The argument should not center on whether it is "good" that people can enter into these types of contracts, but whether they should ever have to in the first place. Should a family/matriarch be forced to sell all or most of the assets they own in order to pay for their current maintenance? I would posit that any civil society should find it repugnant that a person should be forced to sell assets they have accumulated from a lifetime of work and sacrifice, simply to finance their care and maintenance when they can no longer work to maintain themselves.

Name: Ralph Vought
Hometown: Cary, NC
Dr. Alterman,
I have been reading your blog for almost two years and while I truly enjoy most posts and generally agree with most of your points of view, I felt compelled to respond to today's lead. I retired from the Army a year ago and just now feel as though I can freely engage in political discourse, but as a former Soldier, I have been following the events related to the alleged atrocities with alot of doubt regarding the veracity of the events as they have been portrayed. Yes, the military seemingly takes forever to conduct investigations. Yes, the miltary seemingly "covers up" when horrific incidents occur, but to unabashedly portray the events as described by "witnesses" who may or may not have a hidden (or overt) agenda, is, in my opinion, totally over the top. If, after an exhaustive investigation, the accused Marines are determined to have acted with savagery purported, nothing short of maximum punishment should be meted. But let's not punish those involved until or unless we hear all that happened. Could it be that in the heat of battle and in their struggle for survival, there were momentary lapses of reason. Is it possible that the Marines involved were fired upon and in an effort to survive, fired indiscriminately, and afterword, someone may have staged the then weaponless bodies so that they appeared harmless(as all dead bodies do)? Again, I truly enjoy your blog and repeated attempts to hold both the Administration and SCLM more accountable for their acts of both ommission and commission, so please don't be hypocritical in this very important matter. Thanks

Name: Mark McKee
Hometown: Albuquerque, NM
Dr. E:
I thought you might find interest in this op-ed piece by Gerry Bradley, an economist and Research Director for New Mexico Voices for Children, who did an economic study contrasting the state's educational expenditures on the children of illegals, versus the amount of tax revenue we receive from illegals. It turns out Estado de Nuevo Mexico is making a profit of $1.3 to $2 million per year. You don't need to print this, I thought you'd want the links, since everyone talks about numbers and how illegals are destroying the economy, some folks are finally adding up the numbers and they tell a different story.  Op-ed here.  And the study here.  One final thought: I hate Wal-Mart. I really, really hate Wal-Mart. My wife is severely disabled, ergo, I have to shop at Wal-Mart. I owe my soul to the company store... I also grew up in rural SW New Mexico in Geronimo/Billy the Kid/Wild Bunch country. I grew up around illegals. They were called wetbacks and many families in the area hired them, and many put their kids to work next to them. That's how I learned about hard work and grew to know them as people, mostly sweet, decent people, not numbers. I bring it up because I can spot them a mile away and every week when I do our family shopping I see several families of illegals shopping at Wal-Mart. Where else in America would illegals shop? Wal-Mart, I imagine doesn't have a problem with illegals as customers. I hope all goes well for you and your family.

Name: Mark
Hometown: New York, NY
Bruce is on Leno this Monday June 5. Also liked the shout-out for Dan Zanes. With a 6-year-old, and 3-year-old he's a god-send for adults having to listen to kid's music, and a great way to introduce your kids to great music.

Name: Marty
Hometown: Boulder
Eric,
Thanks for printing the list of "conservative rock songs" that Ryan Scott shared with you. I'd like to make a point about the list's suggestion that the Beatles' "Revolution" is conservative because of the line, "Don't you know that you can count me out." As you undoubtedly know, that line actually follows the line, "When you talk about destruction," not the line, "We all want to change the world," as the list compiler would have us believe. Furthermore, perhaps the compiler of the list should listen to the version of "Revolution" found on the White Album, where John Lennon actually sings, "Don't you know that you can count me out -- in." Also, it was a good point Ryan had about Lynyrd's Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." I think most people would say that song is conservative because of the line, "Now Watergate does not bother me." I suppose all the scandals and abuses of the Bush administration don't bother them, either.

• May 30, 2006 | 12:04 PM ET | Permalink

Bush’s war:  Another massacre, another cover-up

I can’t say whether it’s a conscious strategy but the administration is, once again, proving itself so incompetent and dishonest in so many directions simultaneously we find it impossible to keep up, even in our own imaginations.  For instance, the Washington Post reported over the weekend…

“Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. "I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am good,' " Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif's house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.
...
The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said it sent copies of the journalism student's videotape to mosques in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, using the killings of the women and children to recruit fighters.
...
"They are waiting for the sentence -- although they are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who killed a dog in the United States," said Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer preparing a file for Iraqi courts and the United Nations, if the U.S. trial disappoints. "Because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans.''

Points about the above: In addition to the mass murder of innocent individuals

1. We are apparently discrediting the idea of democracy.
2. We are creating recruitment videos for anti-American terrorists.
3. We are paying a trillion dollars to do this.
4. We are losing our young men and women to do this.
5. We have destroyed a country to do this.

The country is not even safe enough for reporters to do their own reporting on a massacre; or for the nationals hired to do the reporting to reveal their names.  Note these sentences:

Four people who identified themselves as survivors of the killings in Haditha, including some who had never spoken publicly, described the killings to an Iraqi writer and historian who was recruited by The New York Times to travel to Haditha and interview survivors and witnesses of what military officials have said appear to be unjustified killings of two dozen Iraqis by marines.
...
The name of the Iraqi who conducted the interviews for The Times is being withheld for his own safety, because insurgents often make a target of Iraqis deemed collaborators.

The complete Time story, including the focus on the  cover-up is here.  (Time originally broke the story, and deserves our gratitude for having done so.)

What the smart boys at The Note think is important about this story: “John Murtha: Media Superstar and News Driver.”  Here.

14 Dead in Anti-American riots in Kabul American soldiers fire on the crowd (Someone tell these people we liberated them too) More here.

The Iraqi insurgency is winning.

Guantanamo hunger strikers now number 75, here.  As many as 24 prisoners under age 18 may have been held at Gitmo.

Earthquake in Indonesia  (How is that Bush’s fault?  I’m working on it.)

Forget about peace in the Middle East.

Forget about Egyptian Democracy.   I love stories where conservatives finally figure out that this guy’s been lying to them too.  Too bad, it's Egypt’s democrats, rather than Wall Street Journal editorialists, who are likely to be arrested and tortured, huh?  Here.

Here’s what ABC News thinks is genuine news about Bush’s new treasury secretary, known to be a job pretty much nobody wanted, also from “The Note”:

ABC News' Jessica Yellin reports a former Bush Administration official said this about the Paulson pick this morning: "Paulson is a fantastic pick.  He has a keen, singular understanding of the financial markets.  The markets will love the pick.  His fingers are truly on the pulse of the global economy.  He is held in the highest regard in the financial services industry and Wall Street.  One of the world's most prominent investment bankers as Treasury Secretary is absolutely huge.

Next up, my mother on why I deserve a raise…

Another great Time story here on the all-but-ignored war in the Congo.

New York Times to Liberals: “Apologize Now!”  Look at this subhed:

Talk of Pelosi as Speaker Delights Both Parties
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Representative Nancy Pelosi, who would lead the House if Democrats win a majority, is an unapologetic liberal.

Excuse me, Mr. Times Headline Writer, but exactly why are liberals supposed to “apologize?”

Todd Gitlin is similarly incensed here.

Quote of the Day:  “I think religion is bad and drugs are good.  Why don't you go find me a campaign manager?”  Bill Maher, not running for office.

How about those Mets?  Aren’t daily newspapers a miracle by the way?  I went to bed at 11:30 with the Mets tied 7-7.  This morning, I woke up with a full report on the game delivered to my breakfast table.  How incredible an achievement is that?  Young people today, sheesh.

Bruce is on Leno tonight; he’ll be on Conan on June 23.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Ken
Hometown: New Jersey
In response to Stupid's recent statements on reverse mortgages (I agree wholeheartedly, by the way), it is interesting to note that while our government is willing to turn a blind eye toward (or in the case of the recent bankruptcy law changes, overtly conspire with) the financial industry while they use a wide variety of purposely difficult-to-understand financial tools (reverse mortgages, 0-interest loans, ARMs, unlimited consumer credit, etc., etc.) to essentially steal money from middle class Americans, old and young, they were shockingly quick and continually willing to fight to ensure that the very rich can pass on their entire estates to their kids.  Before somebody breaks out the old "you should never sign on the dotted line without understanding the fine print" argument, let's not forget that the overwhelming majority of us don't have the means to buy our way into and pay our way through an Ivy League MBA program.  While we're at it, it might be important to add that, even those of us without an Ivy League MBA, understand that constantly spending more than one earns (particularly when you are well aware of large pending financial obligations) will result in a financial catastrophe.

Name: Paul Fraser
Hometown: Mexico City, Mexico
I have some comments on the immigration controversy from a Mexican perspective.  I have lived and worked in Mexico for the last 20 years and during that time, I , as an attorney, have tried to help people get tourist visas from the embassy here in Mexico City from time to time. Mind you I am talking about a visa just to visit the U.S. for a few weeks.  It is so difficult to get this visa that the average person has no chance at all of convincing the people at the embassy that he is just going for a few days or weeks.  The people at the consulate office are rude and arbitrary as to who the select for the visas.  Just as an example, my wife, when she was my girlfriend, tried to get a visa to travel with me to the U.S. to visit my parents.  She was nearly 50 years-old and white, tall and classy looking.  She certainly didn't fit the profile of one who would overstay their visa and look for work in the U.S.  Apart from that, I guaranteed her stay in the U.S.  She was turned down three times basically because she was not working and living with me, so she had no perceptible income.  I finally intervened with the consul and she received her visa.  What's the point of all this antecedent?  Just this.  If it is so difficult to get a tourist visa, how difficult is it going to be to get a work visa? 

I contend that it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for the average Joe (these are the people that usually cross the border illegally) to get this visa.  I would be willing to bet that he will need an invitation to work to get this visa and certainly would not get a visa for his family. I have not heard one word about the implementation of this so called guest worker program but it will certainly be subject to quotas just like residency.  Neither the Bush administration nor anybody else has talked about this because they want to bar everybody and this guest worker bullshit is just a smoke screen.  There will be no guest workers or very few guest workers.  If that happens, we will just go back to the same old system where people will illegally cross the border by hook or crook, and employers will find some way to shield themselves from prosecution for hiring illegals (one way is to hire people through roving agencies that vet out possible employees and swear on a stack of bibles that they are legal).  Businesses, especially those who hire immigrant labor, should be aware of this anomaly in Mexico and try to make sure that access to these work visas will have specific standards and procedures that are not overly complex and that are reasonably within the capacity of workers to comply. Refusal to grant a visa should be very specific and fall within specific categories such as a criminal record or history of disease, etc. I like your column and have heard you talk on the internet at UC. I am not left wing but agree with most of your commentary (Easy to do with Bush in office)

Name: Ben Ross
Hometown: Bethesda, MD
Take a look at the right-wing blogosphere's reaction to the recent revelation of Jack Abramoff's contributions to Democratic County Executive and gubernatorial candidate Doug Duncan.  You won't see a word.  It's like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark -- showing that the right wing acts in unison, as if in coordinated response to talking points issued from somewhere.  You would think Republicans would be thrilled by the revelation of Abramoff contributions to a prominent Democrat.  The circumstances are more than sufficiently suspicious to cause a right-wing blogger to draw all sorts of dire conclusions.  And they cannot possibly be unaware of something that appeared on the front page of the Washington Post two days running.  How come?  The most plausible explanation I can think of is that Duncan has been doing the Republicans' work by attacking the Democratic primary frontrunner for governor, Martin O'Malley.  They don't want his candidacy to collapse.  But the why isn't the main point.  Surely, if there were a crowd of bloggers making their own strategic calculations, they wouldn't all come out the same way.  The herd behavior is remarkable

Name: Ryan Scott
Hometown: Portland, OR
Eric,
Here's a mix of politics and music that you might find (unintentionally) amusing, if you haven't seen it already.  It's a reprint of the top "conservative rock songs" that apparently was first published in the National Review. It's an odd list, with a few odd rationalizations justifying how some of the songs are conservative.  ("My City is Gone"?) But even though the article must stretch the meanings and interpretations of many of the songs in order to include them on the list, they fail to mention the real reason Sweet Home Alabama should be considered "conservative."

Name:  David Gottlieb
Comments:
Dear Eric,
In the interests of keeping columnists I like accurate, in your Friday Altercation:

And let’s hear it again for Jesse Oswald, Archeologist, here.  (Scroll down)  Congrats to the fine investigative reporters of this new newspaper, “The Onion” for tracking down this fine political analyst and exposing his views to the public.

I think you wanted this link actually.

• May 26, 2006 | 11:31 AM ET | Permalink

Slacker Friday

I’ve got a new Think Again: Straight Talk Distress, here, and a new Nation column, here, “Time Is on Their Side.”

And let’s hear it again for Jesse Oswald, Archeologist, here.  (Scroll down)  Congrats to the fine investigative reporters of this new newspaper, “The Onion” for tracking down this fine political analyst and exposing his views to the public.

Good God, another massacre by U.S. troops.  Sorry, this war is evil.  Congrats to all the neocons and liberal hawks who thought it would be a “cakewalk” for the role they played in creating the horrific situation that allowed these crimes to come about.  More here.

If you can’t lie you can’t work in this White House.

Krauthammer's amazing, isn’t he?

Why does Novak still have a column in the Post?

Watching press elites this week scramble to tear down Al Gore (again) has been both depressing and predictable.  For instance, here, Slate makes up facts about Gore and the 2000 Democratic primaries.

Here is Bill Moyers’ Baccalaureate address at Hamilton College.

Homer, philosopher.

Quotes of the Day, Homer:

• "What's the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean, isn't God everywhere?"
• "Don't you think the almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?"
• "And what if we've picked the wrong religion?  Every week we're just making God madder and madder?"

My buddy Dan Zanes.

Funniest footnote I’ve ever seen:

*

Here.

Alter-reviews:

Miles Davis - "The Legendary Prestige Quintet Recordings."  A 4 CD set featuring remastered versions of the famed quintet sessions from the '50s that included John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.  Over the course of three studio dates, they recorded what became five historic albums for Prestige Records:  The New Miles Davis Quintet, Cookin’, Workin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’ all taped by Rudy Van Gelder at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, NJ, has been remastered in 24-bit from the original analog masters and presented in the sequence recorded at sessions beginning in November 1955 and concluding in October 1956 and has just been released together as the Prestige boxed set The Miles Davis Quintet: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions.  A bonus CD features eight previously unissued radio and television audio performances.  Included on Disc 4 are two tunes from The Tonight Show With Steve Alle, including Oscar Pettiford’s “Max Is Making Wax.  The packaging features cover art by Miles (the painting “New York by Night”) and includes five complete musical transcriptions of Miles’s solos, and a 40-page booklet with by Bob Blumenthal.  He writes: “The Miles Davis Quintet heard here was Davis’s means of seizing the moment when his physical health and his musical concepts were on an upswing, and when the public and the music industry had finally begun to pay attention….This is the band Davis organized when he wanted his recordings to stand for more than snapshots of his momentary interests.”  What are you waiting for?

Slacker Friday:

From: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Hometown: The left side of the bar at Antone's
Eric,

"'Heart of Austin music' had blues in his blood"

Clifford Antone, the man who hosted the blues scene in Austin, Texas, passed away.  I will miss him.

Austin back in the day had many eccentrics.  Clifford was among the best of them.  He was always gracious and friendly.  He was a fan first, a business owner second.  He believed in nurturing young talent and rewarding high-mileage veterans.

One Sunday night back in 1989 my girlfriend and I stopped by his club, which was then just north of the University of Texas campus.  We had been there the previous Friday night, at which time Clifford had told us that there was to be a secret performance by the guitar legend Albert Collins on Sunday.  The problem, he said, was that this particular performance was a fundraiser for the Travis County Republican Party.  Clifford hated the idea.  So did Collins.  But Collins needed the money and the Republicans then -- as now -- had all the money.  So as a favor to Collins Clifford decided to host the party.  But he wanted us to show.  We would be on the guest list so we would not have to pay, he said.

When we got there, the place was filled with ill-fitting blue suits, white shirts, and red ties. Many of the Republicans sported big tortoise-shell glasses.  They all stood in rows.  Heads bobbing in unison.  Weight shifted to the back leg.  Lower lip protruding.  Eyes half-closed. Soul, baby.  Soul.

In every single right hand sat a can of Coors Light.

We scurried to the bar in a hurry and ordered a couple of Shiner Bocks.  We shared an eye-roll with the bartender.  Then Clifford came out to greet us.  He put his hands on our shoulders and led us into the back room where Collins was tuning up.  As we turned, he said "looks like we are the only Democrats in the place.  Anyone who is not a Goddamn Reaganite is a friend of mine."

When we got to the back room Collins was exchanging riffs with -- gasp and gag -- Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the South Carolina Gamecock fratboy who used racism to win elections and then played the black man's songs back to him as if that would make everything OK.  As I saw him, I could not help but superimpose the image of Willie Horton on his head.

It turns out this was Atwater's party all along.  The Republicans had invited him to come talk at a fundraiser.  He had insisted that it should be a concert with Albert Collins at Antone's.

I am sorry to report that Lee Atwater, who died about a year after this event, could both sing and play guitar.  He was really good.  He was not Albert Collins good (who was?).  But he did hold his own up there.  It's too bad.  I would have liked to see him sent to the woodshed by the master of the Telecaster.

Clifford, throughout the night, was friendly to his uptight guests.  They were potential blues fans, after all.  And they were helping out Albert Collins, who never got the rewards he deserved.  And that mattered more than anything.

We will miss you Clifford.

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago
Hey Eric, it's Stupid not to recognize myself.  So I'm reading about these heartless creeps who want retirees to become homeless and die so that their kids can fatten up on the inheritance, and then I realize one of those creeps is me!

A couple of points/clarifications.  If reverse-mortgages were merely being viewed as a financial tool, I’d just ask for better regulations to protect against the situations Larry Howe raised.  I saw examples where a three-year reverse mortgage (e.g., the borrower has to leave the home for a nursing home and pay off the entire loan) carried effective interest rates over 42% because of the huge costs and higher interest rates that these loans entail.  That’s more than twice most state usury laws.

But it's more than that.  The New York Times editorial I referred to called reverse-mortgages "a kind of social policy" and predicted they would "become a social norm as the broad middle class of aging Americans begins to face a financial squeeze."  Imagine the reaction if Hillary Clinton suggested the way to bridge failed pensions and rising health care was for seniors to tap their home equity, or that the middle class was fated to carry mortgages until death!  Even Dubya's smart enough not to admit things like that, and indeed, home equity as "social policy" strikes me a lot like privatized social security.  For the present, a widescale promotion of reverse-mortgages (with the misleading image that they are the equivalent of a lifetime monthly annuity) as a normal retirement supplement would hide the pension crisis/savings crisis/prescription drug crisis/etc. and reduce the pressure to solve them.  The generational warfare issue is thornier, and I understand I probably sound like one of King Lear's ingrate kids
here.  But the Times rhapsodized about $2 TRILLION in home equity ready to be tapped into by reverse-mortgages.  If the lion's share of that money winds up with creditors and the health care system where in the past it would have gone to the next generation, isn't that a seismic shift in the concentration of wealth?  Fine, forget the kids, but tax some of this windfall but do something to prevent this from becoming yet another regressive tax.

Name: Barbara C.
Hometown: Pompano Beach, FL
Eric,
On Al Gore: John Kerry gave long "intelligent" answers to questions also.  But John Kerry does not have Al Gore's new found, hilarious, sense of humor, and his experience as a VP working with heads of state.  When you look back on Democratic Presidents; i.e. Jack Kennedy, it is that sense of humor that propelled them to popularity among a cross section of voters.  I call it "The "C" Factor.  The C stands for Charisma.

Name: Stephen Hock
Hometown: Haverford, PA
Dear Dr. Alterman,
In the list of living American authors with their own journals, don't forget Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon Notes has been since 1979.

Name: M. George Stevenson
Hometown: Bronx, NY
Doctor: "Is London Calling 'better' than Eat a Peach?  Is The Godfather better than Jules and Jim? Is Sentimental Education better than Anna Karenina?"  Yes, no-ish and yes: Romantic iconoclasm ALWAYS trumps regional/religious romanticism.  Your round, my friend.

Name: Dan Fischer
Comments:
Roth's work over the past 10 years is a marvel in itself, but The Human Stain is only a piece of it, and certainly not the best part.  Sabbath's Theater holds that position--any novel that Martin Amis finds filthy is one of a kind.  But it's much more than that--funny and outrageous, which The Human Stain isn't.  I'd rank Stain behind American Pastoral as well.  Lists like these will always stir people up, but what I find most objectionable is that this one seems to stick to the safest names. Now that Charles Portis (I'm dead serious here) seems to have more or less withdrawn from the field, American lit is far from the most interesting reading around.

Name: Jordan Weltman
Hometown: Seattle, WA
Eric,
Quote of the day from Bush at a news conference with Blair: Iran, he said, "needs a government that is going to recognize that part of being a great country is to be in line with your international obligations."

Name: Catherine
Hometown: New York, NY
Eric,
Regarding Maureen Dowd and her insipid babbling on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.  If it weren't for John Tierney it would be a real toss-up to figure out who to award the dunce cap to over there, Brooks or Dowd.  I'm convinced Tierney was only hired to make Brooks and Dowd look less like idiots.  If it weren't for Krugman, worth the price of the subscription all by himself, I'd cancel.  I am so sick and tired of Dowd droning on and on about nothing.  Seinfeld is off the air.  She's not writing for Seinfeld.  She is writing for the New York Times.  Someone needs to inform her.  She's not cute, she's not funny, she sounds like an idiot, and I resent it.  There are so few women on the op-ed pages of this nation's newspapers, you might think that as one of the few she would shoot a little higher than giggling school girl jokes about Clinton's wandering penis and Gore's wardrobe.

Name: Thomas Heiden
Hometown: Stratford, CT
Eric,
OK, let me get this straight.  Cheney, and others of his ilk, felt that the post-Watergate restrictions on Executive branch power were excessive.  To my knowledge, no one has ever succeeded in getting him to provide any evidence to support the view that harm had come from these restrictions.  Nonetheless, he asserted the changes were not necessary. These restrictions did not appear out of the blue as some power-grab by the Legislative branch - they came about because the American people collectively felt that Nixon's malfeasance proved the Executive branch had too much power, and they demanded and expected that said power be curtailed. Virtually from the moment they took the reins (and much more so after 9/11), Bush and Cheney began to do the exact same types of things (excessive secrecy, defiance of the other branches of government, illegal snooping, menacing of the press, illegal handling of funds, dirty campaign tricks, ad nauseam) that had led to the restrictions in the first place. In short, they immediately began to provide the proof to refute Cheney's contention!  One of the most basic ideas of the Founders was to learn from historical mistakes so that they would not be repeated.  Clearly they did not anticipate an administration so malignant that it would deliberately seek to enlarge upon mistakes already proven.  What is the difference between us collectively condemning such conduct 30-some years ago and swallowing it so much more complacently now?  You have clearly and repeatedly pointed to the acquiescence of the MSM in all of this, and this writer frequently points to the Fox/Limbaugh propaganda apparatus (which was also erected in response to Watergate) as a major factor.  For whatever reason(s), we have accepted much lower standards for our government than we did then.  And so we will have to learn again from and for this mistake.  Wondering what the price of this lesson will be, and when that bill will come due, keeps me awake at night.

Back on Tuesday.

• May 25, 2006 | 1:26 PM ET | Permalink

Gore galore

I went to a dinner for Al Gore last night.  After being introduced by his hosts, Harry Evans and Tina Brown, he fielded questions and the first one, from Charlie Rose, was the right one: “What would it take to convince you to run for President in 2008?”  Gore gave a long, interesting answer in which he pointed out that the transformation of our political culture into one of short soundbites was not one in which he felt most comfortable or to which he thought he was particularly good at adapting.  I fear he’s right about this.  To listen to the long, thoughtful, erudite answers Gore gave to questions last night —Chris Buckley asked him about nuclear power; I asked him about the weaknesses of our political and journalistic establishments that allow the Bush administration to get away with its mendacity/extremism/incompetence for so long— is to bring oneself to tears over the contrast between this thoughtful, intelligent, articulate and well-informed would-be statesman, and the purposely ignorant ideologue whom the Supreme Court placed in the world’s most powerful office.  But Gore is no good at pithy quips and tries hard to tell the truth, even when it hurts.  There’s little value on that in our debased political culture, where Maureen Dowd complains about his coffee tastes, his clothes, about everything except what matters, and she’s on the Good Guys’ team.  I have no question that Gore is the person best qualified in America to be president today.  And I think he’d be the strongest Democratic candidate, but matching his brave new, liberated, truth-telling self with the demands of contemporary political campaigning would not be easy and may not be possible.  And it’s that mismatch, I fear, that may keep him out of the race, though I feel even more certain now, he’s thinking about it.

One thing I think it’s OK to report was a longish, by these standards, talk I had before dinner with Tipper where, when I told her that the word in smart circles was that she did not want him to run again and that might stand in his way.  She vehemently objected to this notion and insisted that whatever was good for Al, was good for her.  She would not stand in the way of any decision he made about his political future.

Finally, if my argument is correct, that Gore is the only candidate who could unite the Moveon.org and DLC wings of the party, since he’s long had the trust of the latter and recently (and deservedly) earned the trust of the former, it’d be nice to hear some support for that idea from the Al Fromms and Will Marshalls of the party.  I might be wrong about that, but if I’m not, I think it’d matter to Gore if we heard it out loud.

And forgive me, but I want to give a shout-out to one of my heroes, and new friends, Altercation reader, Matt Groening, who not only has not ‘sold out’ after all these years, but even more amazingly, has remained fresh.  There are not many people I don’t pretend to be all cool around when I meet them, but with Matt I couldn’t help it.  Here’s to you, sir.  (And while we’re doing this shoutin’ out thing, here’s to Jesse Oswald of a newspaper called “The Onion.”  Quite a perspicacious fellow, this Mr. Oswald.  I can’t wait to read his ideas on archeology.)

I've got a new Think Again column, Straight Talk Distress.

Quote of the Day:  Great catch from TP:  “The WP notices that President Bush appointed a new domestic policy adviser.  Karl Zinsmeister, a longtime editor of the conservative American Enterprise Institute's magazine, has a knack for piercing through cant.  Last summer, for example, he wrote: ‘What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over.’"  Here.

Police state update:  (Laws for thee, but not for me.)

I read on Mickey that Tom Edsall, who is a contender for America’s most sophisticated mainstream political reporter, is taking a buy-out from The Washington Post.  This may be a matter of personal choice, but the symbolism is really worrisome for the state of contemporary journalism.  Nobody adds context more diligently, or writes about politics more thoughtfully in the news columns than Tom.  And the book he wrote with his wife Mary, CHAIN REACTION, is the most important book to be written about liberalism and the challenges facing Democrats in this country in two decades.  You simply can’t understand the main currents of American politics if you haven’t read it, and I say this as someone who took much too long.

Walter Pincus is the Post’s other best reporter, and will undoubtedly be retiring soon.  Todd Gitlin makes a bunch of useful points in re “Dean” Broder and Hillary, here.  Broder is a long way from being the best reporter anywhere, Establishment myths not-withstanding.

And Boehlert asks:  “Can Jacob Weisberg actually read the mind of Hillary Clinton?”

What is it with these “Best of"s?  Maybe it’s me, but I did not even get through Toni Morrison’s Beloved and I think she’s a wonderful writer.  Hence, I have a hard time understanding how anyone could think it’s the best book of the past 25 years.  (Her best, in my notso humble opinion is Song of Solomon.)  Ditto Phillip Roth’s Human Stain.  It’s inferior, in my opinion, to both Counterlife and Operation Shylock, and possibly Patrimony.  Delillo’s Underworld has some wonderful parts, but it’s a big sprawling mess, and nowhere near as powerful as White Noise.  Updike’s Rabbit quartet is magnificent in every way, but it’s really four books published over a period of four decades.  Is that fair?  If so, Roth’s Zuckerman Bound was published by FSG in 1985.  And it’s not on the list, though it’s pretty unarguably his masterpiece, and they were published together, not over four decades.  And while I’m biased, Doctorow’s The March belongs here too.

Time had much the same problem when it picked the best pop album of all time—and came up with Bob Marley’s “Exodus”—which is not even close to being Marley’s best album, much less the best of anyone’s.  It turns out the guy who got to pick it, Christopher John Farley, just wrote a Marley bio.  The whole “best of” thing is kind of crazy.  Is London Calling ‘better’ than Eat a Peach?  Is The Godfather better than Jules and Jim?  Is Sentimental Education better than Anna Karenina?  Well, it may be fun to argue about, but…

Meanwhile, the Philip Roth Society announces the publication of Philip Roth Studies. Cormac McCarthy is apparently the only other living American author with his own journal, though Saul Bellow had one too.

Here, by the way, are some quotes I read of Phillip’s in The Guardian last December, by Martin Krasnik. They are pretty interesting.

M: "Why don't you smile?" I ask.

P. "There once was this photographer from New York. 'Smile,' she always said. 'Smile!' I couldn't stand her or the whole phenomenon. Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense. So I got rid of both her and the smile."

M: "Do you ever smile at all?"

He looks at me. "Yes, when I'm hiding in a corner and no one sees it."

"Are you satisfied with your life?" I ask.

P: "Eight years ago I attended a memorial ceremony for an author," he says. "An incredible man full of life and humour, curiosity. He worked for a magazine here in New York. He had girlfriends, mistresses. And at this memorial ceremony there were all these women. Of all ages. And they all cried and left the room, because they couldn't stand it. That was the greatest tribute ..."

M: "What will the women do at your funeral?"

P. "If they even show up ... they will probably be screaming at the casket."

M: I ask him if he is religious. "I'm exactly the opposite of religious," he says. "I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. Are you religious yourself?" he asks.

P: "No," I say, "but I'm sure that life would be easier if I was."

"Oh," he says. "I don't think so. I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I don't even want to talk about it, it's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers.

It's a horrible existence being a writer filled with deprivation. I don't miss specific people, but I miss life. I didn't discover that during the first 20 years, because I was fighting - in the ring with the literature. That fight was life, but then I discovered that I was in the ring all by myself."

(end)

Altercation Book Club, by Eric Rauchway

Urban populists
Tony Michels, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xii+335 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. USD 27.95 (cloth).

The first fib we tend to believe about American socialism is that there wasn't any. Hardly had Werner Sombart urged an understanding that the U.S. couldn't have socialism than the Socialist Party of America shot to its greatest electoral successes in 1910-1912, winning enough state and local offices to worry observers about "the rising tide of socialism", and garnering Eugene V. Debs 6% of the presidential vote in 1912. So important were the Socialist positions and the Socialist vote in that hotly contested campaign that Theodore Roosevelt, the only-slightly-ex Republican, felt compelled to co-opt them (along with Bryanism, and indeed whatever other tendencies toward discontent he could lay claim to).

The second fib we tend to believe about American socialism is that it was an overseas import. We have an easier time believing that swarthy foreigners brought alien radicalism to these shores than that it sprouted here of its own. This is true even if we're sympathetic to those early, pre-Bolshevist, not-especially-Marxist, non-revolutionary Socialists, even if we're poring over Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers on a grandparent's coffee table. We have the idea that socialism came over on the boats with a population already hardened in conflict with European oppressors. This too is untrue: the most Socialist of states in 1912 were Oklahoma and Nevada, along with Western states more generally, states not so rich in foreign immigrants as in mad-as-hell, pitchfork-wielding farmers, native-born American internal migrants whose orators made the eagle scream in protest against monopolist railroaders and predatory lenders. They became Socialists, or Populists, or Progressives, because the American dream had failed them, and even after Socialism failed them too, they retained a leftist streak for decades.

Moreover, Tony Michels explains in a beautifully written and crisply narrated history, foreign immigrants became Socialists for similar reasons and likewise passed down to their children the legacies of this experience. Jewish immigrants to New York, seeking a language of community that would allow them to protest the injustices they saw in the city's great industries, found Socialism, adapted it to their needs, and thus became just as American as those angry white Protestant farmers out West.

As it happens, like those prairie populists, idealistic Jews coming to America from Russia had originally imagined themselves escaping Eastern oppression for a Western Eden, setting up as virtuous farmers in the unclaimed spaces of the plains. They had in mind, Michels writes, "a kind of Jewish version of Utah." But, like so many of the would-be homesteaders, they "possessed none of the skills needed to survive in a far-flung region." (35) So they fell back on the cities, where they found a new ideal among some older immigrants: German socialists. "German socialists ... highly valued their own culture.... [yet t]heirs was a universalistic and secular ideology." (43) For Jewish immigrants, as for so many others, the process of Americanization meant learning from earlier immigrants. Contact with the Germans, and the catalyst of strikes and protests in 1886, affected the idealistic Russian Jews in a further, significant way: it encouraged them increasingly to drop Russian and use instead Yiddish, a language not unlike German and commonly shared among Jewish immigrants. The result was a Jewish labor movement with a common tongue and points of contact with other Americanized immigrants.

As Jewish immigrants built a community in New York around Yiddish, they created a public culture in their language whose principal feature was the lecture. "[Y]oung Russian Jews were more likely to attend a lecture than a synagogue service, dance hall, saloon, card game, [or] night school...." Michels notes. The lecturers were not notable for their highbrow style or even, particularly, their expertise: "[F]ew lecturers could claim expertise in the subjects they addressed, including the most important one, socialism.... 'Most of our lecturers,' the writer Leon Kobrin later acknowledged, 'perused a book, or sometimes a pamphlet, and then lectured on it to the broad public.'" (78) This being so, what did the speakers have to offer? Again, like their counterparts on the radical plains, like William Jennings Bryan or Thomas Gore, they offered the intensity of religion brought to politics: "Aiming to inspire listeners more than to edify them, [Abraham] Cahan adopted the style of a traditional Jewish preacher or magid, illustrating his points with parables, jokes, and dramatic gestures." (80) By speaking in Yiddish, and in the preacherly idiom, the politicians could, as they said, reach "Moyshe", the ordinary Jew in the street.

And what were the politicians telling "Moyshe"? or rather, more importantly, what did he hear? Increasingly, the medium became the message: the growth of Yiddish culture, as a democratic form of communication, became an end itself, irrespective of its apparent political content. "Yiddish culture and Yiddish education will grow continuously and will become a formidable force that will bind together as one not only the educated people with the folk, but also all Jews from all countries," wrote Chaim Zhitlovsky in 1898. (134) And even as new immigrants came to New York's Jewish community, they could not help feel as Zhitlovsky did. "[W]e should not and cannot posit any political demands for the Jewish proletariat, as the Bund does in Russia, because we live in entirely different conditions, in free conditions of a democratic republic," one leader wrote in 1912. (168) Instead they created a culture "at once 'purely secular' and 'thoroughly Jewish,'" focused on shared language, customs, entertainment, and learned traditions. (179)

The continuously Americanizing community of Jewish immigrants and their children, adapting to American ways while constructing their own culture, continued growing until the era around World War I. Then, the violent creation of the Soviet Union exacerbated existing splits between the more serious radicals and the rest of the community. Soviet-sponsored splitters campaigned against the old guard. As Michels writes, "How could it have been otherwise? Socialists espoused universal principles yet created a movement consisting entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews." (253) The anti-German and anti-radical sentiment of the war and afterward pushed Jews, along with other immigrant Americans, away from their own language and politics. Immigration restriction in the 1920s took its toll, too: Americanization was no longer an ongoing process, but something that within a generation would have finished.

Even as their distinctiveness waned, their political impact increased. In the 1930s, the Jewish socialists finally threw in their lot with the leftover Bryanite populists and any number of other disaffected communities to back Franklin D. Roosevelt for President. The New Deal's political indiscipline and indiscriminate cultural appeal at long last brought together these outsider groups that for so long had enjoyed the comforts of culture instead of political power. But Michels's particular story does not quite end with that ambivalent success: the transition from outsider to insider is never complete in this country with no real insiders of its own. No coalition ever completely absorbs or eliminates these legacies of incomplete acceptance. Their peculiarities eventually assert themselves, prying apart even the most apparently invulnerable political alliances, and necessitating new debates over how people become American.

Eric Rauchway
Professor
Department of History, UC Davis

Disclosure: Michels, Rauchway and Alterman all entered the Stanford History Ph.D program together in 1991.
_________________________________

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Norman gravely
Hometown: Woodbridge, Va
In regards to your debate with Tucker Carlson, wasn't that bit from Tucker about Finland's suicide rate bogus?  I thought you had debunked that claim in Altercation a while back.

Name: Richard Opie
Comments:
Re the Tucker Carlson: Mr. Carlson apparently did not take advantage of your offer to submit evidence on the Finnish suicide rate (a wholly unrelated and ridiculous response to your point regarding the Finland's "education for life" policy).  The best I can do, from the WHO website, is that Finland is 12th and Cuba is 16th. 

One other point - anytime I hear a conservative start to tell me what liberals "stand for" or about the "difference" between liberals and conservatives I listen up because I know what will follow: a bunch of 10 second sound bite garbage.  Tucker didn't disappoint.  His premise: liberals see politics "almost as an "end" and conservatives see politics as an unappealing means to an end, the end being "to be left alone" is as false as the conclusion; that explains why they have alot of trouble believing someone they disagree (I assume politically) with can be decent person.  First of all, I am a Liberal, and I disagree with a lot of really decent people, family included.  Secondly, politics to me is the means by which we cooperate to make life better.  Perhaps the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives want to use politics to make life better for themselves, and liberals want to use politics make life better for everyone.  As evidence for that, look to the way the Republican congress has comported itself.

Name: Edward Furey
Comments:
The Dover, Del. reception of the Fred Phelps gang is a little reminiscent of a family legend about the Ku Klux Klan.  It is not widely known, but the Klan was quite strong on Long Island in the 1920s. The Klan in those days was anti-black as mostly an afterthought, concentrating its wrath on the Catholics and Jews in the north in the sure and certain hope that it had little to fear from their wrath, at least in Suffolk County.  On the occasion of one of their major marches down the Main Street of Bay Shore they were greeted with a barrage of bottles from members of my family and some other Irish Catholics (perhaps assisted by the odd Pole and Italian, and some of the local Jews -- the texts are unclear on this point), forcing them to march through broken glass.  One of my great uncles, a football player at Columbia when that actually signified something, decided broken bottles weren't quite enough, stormed into the line of march, pulled off one of the Klansman's hoods and punched him out on the spot. The guy turned out to be a local grandee who never lived down being outed as a bigot and being punched out for his troubles.  Little things like that -- and groveling to keep one's trade -- can drive a man to Tolerance.  The Klan's failure to intimidate area Catholics and Jews (pace The Onion) cost it much of its cache and it faded away on Long Island.  No doubt, socio-economic factors played a role, but sometimes a little fisticuffs can help the Socio-Economy along.

Name: Larry Howe
Hometown: Oak Park, IL
Eric-- The correspondents who challenged Stupid and Larsen's critique of reverse mortgages make some interesting counterclaims.  But in the two personal cases that were cited, it seems not coincidental that both parties were in desperate situations with no alternative.  And therein lies the problem with Jim from Shelton's claim about choice.  While the reverse mortgage provides these retirees with cash flow and shelter, they don't calculate the costs.  That's always the danger of a desperate bargain.  The solace they take from their immediate security doesn't change the fact that some financial institution got rich selling them the money to pay for that house, and now another one is making another fortune draining their equity back out of it.  Forget about leaving an inheritance for one's kids, what happens if the reverse mortgagee outlives the value of the property?  What then?  Larsen's right this is a scheme to render hardworking people into lifelong debtors.  Brings us back to the etymology of "mortgage" (mort = death, gage = pledge).  Just like our government, American personal finances are overrun by debt.  This is what comes of a consumer economy driven by an insatiable need for growth.  When there's not enough wealth to propel that growth, credit is the fuel used to stoke the furnace.  But credit is the bank's term.  Understood in the full financial frame, the bank's assets (revenue generated by interests on the credit they extend) are debits for those on the other end of the loan.

May 23, 2006

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales
United States Department of Justice
935  Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20535

Dear Mr. Gonzales:

We write with growing concern about what appears to be an eroding respect in the Department of Justice for the absolute right of a free press to pursue the news without fear or favor.

The most recent instance was your appearance this past Sunday morning on the ABC program This Week, on which you suggested that New York Times journalists who reported on the National Security Agency’s monitoring of phone calls between the United States and countries abroad—a controversial subject of essential national importance—might be prosecuted for espionage.

As you remarked on This Week, "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility."

You left unclear what those statutes might be.  One speculation is that you might be thinking of the 1917 Espionage Act, which made it a crime to receive national defense information and transmit it.  Never in the difficult history of the past 89 years has the Act been applied to American journalists.

In the same week that USA Today published a disturbing account of secret eavesdropping on the phone calls of American citizens our colleagues at ABC News—Brian Ross and Richard Esposito—reported that a senior federal law-enforcement official had advised them that the government is monitoring its phone calls in an effort to establish which sources the pair have drawn upon in their reporting.  Reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post, Ross and Esposito reported, may also be under surveillance as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

The New York Sun, a newspaper with a well-known pro-administration tilt, followed up with a similar report on May 16th.  According to the Sun, FBI sources confirmed to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, that the Bureau is monitoring the calls of a number of news organizations as part of a leak investigation—possibly in regard to reporting on the CIA’s detentions of terrorism suspects at locations outside the United States.  Another speculative pretext is published accounts of the agency’s use of Predator drones in Pakistan.

This kind of secret prying into the private conversations of professional journalists is unworthy of our democracy, Mr. Gonzales.  You know better than we do that the law has long required law-enforcement agencies which subpoena the phone records of journalists to notify those journalists within 90 days of obtaining the records.  Neither ABC nor the Times has received any such notification.  In any event, we remind you that when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald sought copies of phone records from the Times in 2002 in connection with its reporting on an allegedly fake Islamic charity a federal judge sided with the paper in its refusal to comply.

ABC has suggested that its records may have been obtained without normal due process under a “national security letter” created by the Patriot Act of 2001.  No one knows, of course, and in the absence of straight talk from the Justice Department rumors and suspicion are gaining traction.

The press-freedom committee of the Overseas Press Club frequently reminds authoritarian governments that good journalists are a foundation of great nations.  No nation has ever been better served by its journalists than the United States.  We trust we don’t need to remind you, Mr. Gonzales, that the private telephone records of reporters and editors deserve the full protection of the law.

Respectfully,

Larry Martz
Kevin McDermott
Norman A. Schorr
Co-chairman – Freedom of the Press Committee

• May 24, 2006 | 12:52 PM ET | Permalink

The Bush Putsch: Officers Speak

Former military man and present-day historian Andrew Bacevich on the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz attitude toward 9/11, here.

Yes, it was a disaster.  Yes, it was terrible.  But by God, this was a disaster that could be turned to enormous advantage.  Here lay the chance to remove constraints on the exercise of American military power, enabling the Bush administration to shore up, expand, and perpetuate U.S. global hegemony.  Toward that end, senior officials concocted this notion of a Global War on Terror, really a cover story for an effort to pacify and transform the broader Middle East, a gargantuan project which is doomed to fail.  Committing the United States to that project presumed a radical redistribution of power within Washington.  The hawks had to cut off at the knees institutions or people uncomfortable with the unconstrained exercise of American power.  And who was that?  Well, that was the CIA.  That was the State Department, especially the State Department of Secretary Colin Powell. That was the Congress.

Meanwhile, Gregory D. Foster, professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University. wrote a brilliant op-ed in The Baltimore Sun a few weeks back. Here are some excerpts:

Even as Long War rhetoric artfully circumvents such politically discomfiting terminology as "insurgency," its underlying message should be clear: We dutiful subjects should be quietly patient and not expect too much (if anything) too soon (if at all) from our rulers as they prosecute their unilaterally proclaimed war without end against ubiquitous evil.

The intent of the message is to dull our senses, to dampen our expectations, to thereby deaden the critical, dissenting forces of democracy that produce political turbulence and impede autocratic license. Being warned here amounts to being disarmed - intellectually and civically.

President Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace; the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid; and the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, among other authoritative purveyors of received wisdom, all warn us that we're embroiled in - and destined to be further subjected to - what is to be known as a Long War.

It would be one thing if such semantic legerdemain reflected revelatory strategic insight or a more sophisticated appreciation of the intrinsic nature of postmodern conflicts and enemies. But that is not the case. In fact, it's hard to avoid the cynical view that America's senior military leaders are willfully playing public relations handmaiden to their political overlords at the expense of a naive, trusting citizenry.

And lest we forget, the Tiger Force book is out, here.

Let us not let the passing of Jim Carey pass without noting his pioneering.  I knew the man only slightly, but when I was writing my first book, Sound & Fury, back in 1989, I had a lot of unformed notions (and more than a little anger) about the media, but it wasn’t until I discovered Carey’s work that I found an intellectual framework—particularly regarding his discussions of John Dewey—to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing in a fashion that might give these notions some lasting value.  I find that I have returned to these ideas over and over during the intervening period and I hope my own works carries on a small part of the