Lance Mannion

Sarah Palin: In the American grain

Various friends and relations object when I describe soon to be former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as a great American character. 

I think they hear me say it as if I'm placing the emphasis on great or even as if there's a period after American.

The emphasis is on character, as in if you didn't know there really was such a person as Sarah Palin you'd think someone had made her up.  And in a way someone did.

Us.

Sarah Palin is one of those pure products of America gone crazy or in some cases only slightly cracked through greed, vanity, hubris, religion, idealism, obsession, anger, passion, love, success, failure, whatever, whose stories, happy, sad, comic, tragic, uplifting, inspiring, cautionary, or indicting, tell the story of the country in allegorical miniature.

It's a collection of eccentric personalities that includes heroes and heroines, villains, saints, con artists, geniuses, fools, lunatics, visionaries, clowns, and romantics, but in their odd ways rebels all.

Billy Sunday, John Brown, Alvin York, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, Johnny Appleseed, George Armstrong Custer, Elvis Presley, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Manson, Henry Ford, Bugsy Siegel, Dolly Parton, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Muhammad Ali.  The list goes on.

Some of these characters are great Americans in the sense of having achieved much and done wonderful things to affect the course of history.  The difference between them and other great Americans is that when you tell the stories of those other men and women the focus in on them and the rest of the country seems to be a supporting player and backdrop, there to be either the object or the stage of their greatness, while when you tell the great American characters' stories you are telling the story of their time and place at the same time---you are in fact using them to tell the story of their time and place.  Bugsy Seigel's story is the story of Vegas in the late 1940s.  John Brown's story is the story of the coming of the Civil War.  Marilyn Monroe's story is the Hollywood story.

The stories of great men and women tell us about them.  The stories about great American characters tell us as much or more about us.

Abraham Lincoln's and Richard Nixon's stories contain some striking similarities.  Lonely, introspective, self-starting poor kids, largely self-educated, the sons of angry, withdrawn fathers, devoted mama's boys, outsiders all their lives who despite tremendous successes never fit in among an elite they dominated intellectually and professionally.  But Nixon's paranoia and resentments, his endless capacity for self-destructive hatreds, his knack for turning even victories into occasions for bitterness and self-loathing seem more typically American than Lincoln's patience, self-sufficiency, tolerance, and humility.  Lincoln is what we'd like to be.  Nixon is what we've too often been.

A great American's story is exemplary.  A great American character's story is representative. 

Before John McCain plucked her out of Juneau and placed her front and center on the national stage, Palin was a great Alaskan character.   If you'd heard of her before last August, you might have thought she'd been sprung fully grown like a Venus from the pages of John McPhee's Coming into the Country , with her rifle in one hand, Trig on her hip, and her Miss Wasilla sash across her chest.  She'd have made a good recurring character on Northern Exposure or in the stories of Jack London.  Robert Service could have written a poem about her.

Or written her into life with a poem.

In his Vanity Fair article, Todd Purdum takes issue with Palin's assertion that Alaska is a microcosm of America.  He quotes McPhee to refute her:

“Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’”

I don't know.  I've never been there.  But there's always seemed to me a good reason McPhee called his book what he called it.  Every part of America was once foreign country, until it wasn't.  And it was always bordered by another foreign country called the frontier.   Those borders were never distinct.  You could leave America, leave civilization, by lighting out for the territories, but you could also go the other way, and find your way back in to the country by way of the territories.  In a way, every travel book about the Untied States is about discovering America by wandering along its edges.  Alaska is as good an entry point into the collective American psyche as other lawless outposts on the edge of the wilderness, like Texas or Florida or New York City.

Sarah Palin was a great American character before we knew her.

Palin's story was always interesting but it's become important because of her part in the collective nervous breakdown of the Republican party.

The Party establishment, except for Bill Kristol, wants her gone because:

1. The GOP's still a boy's club.  To the degree that it's not, it's still a club and Palin was not invited to join and never would have been---she is not their kind of people.

2. She's an embarrassment.  The GOP's supposed to be the party of serious grown-ups.

3.  She isn't the least bit interested in even pretending to care about the establishment's issues or their interests.

4.  She's threatening to take control of a significant part of the base, the angry working class and the religious fundamentalists, that the establishment has worked hard to control and exploit without having to listen to it or grant it real power.  This is the big problem Palin has presented them with.  Their preferred method of keeping the base in line has been to keep these people so angry and confused that they don't think, they just react, so that nobody ever stops to ask why not a public option or wonders if a carbon tax might work.  Palin is doing something else.  Taking them and their concerns seriously.  She's offering to lead them.  Where to and to what end I don't think even she knows, but it's scary to the establishment because it might be into a third party or into a weird and wild place where the Party might as well be a third party.  Either way it would be the end of the GOP forever.

Sarah Palin is leading the march off the cliff that began with the rise of the radical Right and the Party's welcoming of the secessionist-minded South.

She's been able to do this and do it in an amazingly short amount of time because she is such a great American character.

In some ways, Sarah Palin's story is like Harry Truman's.  Each of theirs is an all-American story of the little man or the little woman rising through luck and pluck.  Both Truman and Palin were small-time successes, locally important, nationally insignificant, until accidents of history placed them in positions where their talents and virtues allowed them to shine.  The difference between the two characters is, of course, character.  Truman worked hard at everything he did, all his life.  He had a healthy sense of his own self-worth, a confidence in his abilities that kept him going through hard and trying times.  But he knew what was important as opposed to being self-important.  Truman saw how he fit in the grand scheme of things.  Sarah Palin sees everything in terms of how it fits in her grand scheme of self.  She is vain to the point of delusion, and I think that is what is so typically American about her.

Sarah Palin is the embodiment of the desire to hit the lottery, to go on American Idol, to hit the game-winning home run, to meet our soulmate, and the confidence that not only can any of all these things happen but that they will happen or ought to happen.

She represents Americans' unshakeable belief that we were born to be rich, famous, loved, and successful , that God or Fortune meant to smile on us, and if none of this has happened---yet---it's not because we haven't work hard enough, or we don't have the talent, or we're not all that loveable, it's that we wuz robbed.

Whether or not Palin's decision to resign makes political sense, whether or not her reasons were rational or irrational, whether or not she did it because she really wanted to or because there's a scandal brewing she thinks she has a better chance of surviving out of office, the speech itself was wacky.

But it still had some coherent themes.

One is that Sarah Palin is convinced that whatever Sarah Palin chooses to do is the right thing.

Another is that Sarah Palin deserves whatever Sarah Palin believes she deserves.

A third is that anyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin or gets in Sarah Palin's way is stupid or evil, take your pick.

And a fourth is that all of us are endlessly fascinated by Sarah Palin.

Except that it wasn't interrupted by the flight attendant coming along to take a drink order or the band striking up the Bunny Hop, that speech was pretty much exactly like a monologue you've probably been forced to listen to on a long airplane flight or when trapped in a corner by another guest at the wedding.

Palin is the greatest saleswoman for the generally held principle that there ought to be no qualification for anything good happening to us except the wonderfulness of our being us.
___________________

Like hilzoy I didn't find a whole lot new in Pudrum's Vanity Fair piece.  But it was interesting to see the weirdnesses from last fall collected in one narrative.  I think, though, the most important part of the story was this:

None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.

It's amazing that someone so temperamentally and intellectually and emotionally unsuitable could have become President of the United States, and I'm not talking about Sarah Palin in the event that her 72 year old running mate had won the election and then keeled over in office.  I'm talking about her running mate.

It's scary that someone like Sarah Palin could come so close to the Presidency, but it's scarier that someone who thought Sarah Palin should come so close came even closer.  And how is that this man who proved himself unsuitable for the job, not just with his choice of running mates, but in many other ways, is still trotted out by the producers of the talk shows practically every Sunday to blither on and on with what's essentially the message:  You voters were wrong to pick Barack Obama over me!

___________________

The McEwan thought Purdum's article was pretty good, but she has some strong criticism for the aspects of it that tend to portray Sarah Palin as not a great American character but a typical crazy female.

Bill Nothstine, rounding up various blogs' lists of speculations about what Palin's up to, thinks we need a blogger panel on Bizarre Resignations Methodology.

Iran: More dangerous and unpredictable

Tony Karon writing in TIME:

Some observers see Iran's courageous protests against a stolen election as a replay of the 1979 revolution that ended the tyranny of the Shah — or of the "velvet revolutions" that ended communism in Eastern Europe. Others fear a repeat of China's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But none of these comparisons easily fits the unique combination of discord on the streets and infighting in the corridors of power currently under way in Tehran.

The situation is all the more dangerous and unpredictable...

Read the rest.

Where's their vote?

Tom Watson's concerned that folks here are seeing events in Iran from a too American perspective, with the danger of turning opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi into a folk hero.  Tom doesn't like or trust Moussavi and offers a good reason:

Twenty years ago, the newspaper I worked for was blown up by terrorists for demanding that American bookstores show enough courage to carry The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, had issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. Khomeini's hand-picked Prime Minister - a man who publicly upheld the death sentence against the brilliant author - was none other than Mir Hussein Moussavi, darling of western bloggers and media types who have somehow confused his faction's struggle for power in the totalitarian theocracy with a grand moral movement for democracy and social change.

Read Tom's post and follow the links to the TIME and Foreign Policy articles on Moussavi.

I see where Tom's coming from.  I'm not sure I see that Moussavi's all that important to the discussions I've followed online or to what's going on in the streets of Tehran.  Juan Cole posted this report from a professor he's in contact with over there.

Today, under slate skies and despite official warnings that the permit to march had been denied, against rumors that orders had been given to shoot to kill, they came. They came by the tens if not hundreds of thousands, marching east to west along the many kilometers of Enqelab Street to Azadi, or Freedom Square. "It would be dishonorable, na mardi, to not go," a young couple explained. "We have to go." Another man asks who is going, what is going on? He is told that the "Mousavi-chiha" are marching starting at 4. He laughs, "Mousavi-chiha nadarim, hame ye Iran hastand!" We don't have Mousavi supporters, it's now all of Iran...

Seems to me that we're making folk heroes out of the folk heroes, the people of all of Iran.

A sobering update from NPR.

Al Giordano on another failure of the MSM on the Iran story.

Saving our children from the Red Menace...and from good teachers

When Suspicion of Teachers Ran Unchecked in New York

Fifty-seven years later, Irving Adler still remembers the day he went from teacher to ex-teacher at Straubenmuller Textile High School on West 18th Street.

It was the height of the Red Scare, and the nation was gripped by hysteria over loyalty and subversion. New York City’s temples of learning, bursting with postwar immigrants and the first crop of baby boomers, rang with denunciations by interrogators and spies.

Subpoenaed in 1952 to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigating Communist influence in schools, Mr. Adler, the math department chairman and a member of the executive board of the embattled Teachers Union, refused to answer questions, citing his constitutional right.

The end came quickly, recalled Mr. Adler, 96, who later acknowledged membership in the Communist Party: “I was teaching a class when the principal sent up a letter he had just received from the superintendent announcing my suspension, as of the close of day.”

Mr. Adler, who has written 56 books, was one of 378 New York City teachers ousted by dismissal, resignation or early retirement in the anti-Communist furor of the cold war, when invoking the Fifth Amendment became automatic grounds for termination.

Read all of Ralph Blumenthal's story in the New York Times.

Hat tip to Bruce Bernstein.

Iran

Update No. 3.

On the web, I've been following as much as I can via Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post.  On Twitter, @BoraZ has been busy. 

Please leave any other helpful links in the comments.

Update 1: Juan Cole. Mandatory.

Update 2: Tom Watson doesn't share Andrew Sullivan's faith that the Revolution can be Twittered, keeping in mind that Iranian politics can't be sorted out quite so neatly:

...we're all too quick to align the Iranian "reformers" with a westernized liberal ideal of free elections, free speech, and tolerance. Like in the "Twitter revolution" in Moldova, it becomes cartoonishly easy to choose sides based on Tweets. Further, Iran is an old and complex society that simply doesn't fit our Democrat vs. Republican mindset. It's easy to forget, I guess, that Moussavi isn't exactly an American constitutional scholar like Barack Obama. This is a man who shut down the university system in Iran on the orders of Khomeini, and a former prime minister who managed his country's disastrous war with Iraq and has refused to answer questions about his role in the 1988 massacres of political prisoners.

Update 3:  Nate Silver at Five Thirty-eight does what Nate Silver does.  He looks at the numbers, and the numbers tell him that it's possible that Ahmadinjad won.

Puppetmasters

This just in: Cheney to Travel Around Country in Sound Truck. Hopes to bring pro-torture message to every state.

You probably remember that back during the 2000 Presidential Election campaign, apologists for George W. Bush on the campaign trail with him and in the Media responded to charges that Bush was too...um...inexperienced to be President of the United States---

Ahem.

Yes, faithful reader?

You don't really mean "inexperienced," do you?

Well...

You wanted to say dumb, right?  You wanted to say "charges that Bush was too dumb to be President," admit it.

I didn't want to cloud the issue.

That was the issue!  He was dumb as a lox!

Well, I thought so.

We all thought so.  Because it was true.

But people used the word "inexperienced" as a kind of polite euphemism.

That mean you have to?

I try to be polite.

You try to be gratuitously ingratiating to imaginary Conservative readers.  Say what's on your mind.

Ok.  Back in 2000 Bush defenders tried to deflect charges that he was too dumb to be President---

There.  Was that so hard?

Actually, it was kind of fun.

Want to say it again?

Sure.  Back in 2000 Bush defenders tried to deflect charges that he was too dumb to be President---

Which he was.

Thank you, faithful reader.

Dumber than dumb.

Yeah, well---

Couldn't find his ass with a---

Faithful reader?

Yes, Lance?

Can I get on with this?

On with what?

My point.

You have a point?

Yes, I have a point.

Beyond the fact that Bush was too dumb to be President?

Yes!

Huh.  What do you know?

I know that I would like to get on with this post.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

Don't let me stop you.

Faithful reader?

Yes, Lance?

Please shut up.

Sorry. Shutting up.

Thank you.

Can I say one last thing though?

One last thing?

Yep.

Go ahead.  But just one last thing.

Ok.  Bush was too dumb to be President!

Sigh.

He he he.

Where was I?

Bush was too---

Security!

(S/fx. Offstage tussling.  Stage door opening and something faithful reader-sized landing among the garbage cans across the alley.  Cats scream grumpily.  Sounds of door closing, big burly men clapping the dust of their hands.)

Thanks, guys.  Ok, as I was saying.  Back in 2000 when Bush's defenders were trying to deflect charges that he was too dumb...or inexperienced...to be President, much was made of the fact that he counted wise old men like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney among his top advisors.

This defense cut two ways.  If you were worried that Bush didn't have enough experience, then here were these two elder statesmen right by his side, each with enough experience for six Presidents (each having worked for three Presidents previously; what good they did those Presidents never seemed to get brought up) to advise and guide him.  If you were worried that Bush wasn't smart enough for the job, then he was at least smart enough to know that and make sure he had these two brilliant and savvy old Washington hands by his side to advise and guide him.

That either way you sliced it, the implication was that Bush himself was not going to be the one running the show was meant to be seen as a good thing.

Actually, this went beyond implication and came close to being an announced and accepted fact when Cheney had himself appointed as Bush's running mate.

By now,though, it's the stuff of history that Dick Cheney was essentially President of the United States and George W. Bush was his front man and puppet for most but apparently not all of Bush's eight years in office.

Cheney pulled Bush's strings, but as Robert Draper reports in GQ, Donald Rumsfeld took his turns as puppetmaster and became adept at manipulating Bush's thinking---that is to say, Bush's gut reactions, since Bush doesn't seem to have thought much about things, he felt his way to decisions, an unhappy trait in someone whose primary feelings are anger, resentment, and arrogance---by playing on Bush's messianic religious beliefs:

April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

Make sure you read the rest of Draper's article, the main thrust of which isn't the methods of Rumsfeld's manipulations but their effect:

Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails...

...in speaking with the former Bush officials, it becomes evident that Rumsfeld impaired administration performance on a host of matters extending well beyond Iraq to impact America’s relations with other nations, the safety of our troops, and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Rumsfeld was eventually run out of the Administration.  At the time it looked as though he was being scapegoated for the Republicans' staggering defeats in the 2006 mid-terms election.  According to Draper's sources, wiser and steadier advisors to the President had been trying to push Rumsfeld out the door for several years and Rumsfeld had managed to stay on only by holding on tight to Bush, who took a long time in coming around to the idea that Rumsfeld had to go.

Rumsfeld lost the bureaucratic infighting.  Somebody cut the strings from his hands at last.  But here's the thing.  It may be that at a certain point during Bush's second term Dick Cheney lost his grip on the strings too.  President Obama pretty much said this in his recent Q & A with Newsweek.  Asked what he thinks about Dick Cheney's non-stop criticism of the President's handling of what is no longer called the war on terror, Obama said:

You know, Dick Cheney had a strong perspective about national security. It was tested in the early years of the Bush administration, and I think it resulted in a series of very bad decisions. I think what's interesting is that, in some ways, Dick Cheney actually lost these arguments inside the Bush administration.

And so he may have won early with Colin Powell and Condi Rice, but over the last two or three years of the Bush administration, I think there was a recognition among Republicans and Bush administration officials that these enhanced interrogation techniques that were being applied—that they had applied early on—were potentially counterproductive; that a posture of never talking to our enemies, of unilateral action, of framing national security only in terms of the application of force, often unilateral—that that wasn't producing.

And so it's interesting to me to see the vice president spending so much time trying to vindicate himself and relitigate the last eight years when, as I said, I think, actually, a lot of these arguments were settled even before we took over the White House.

Dick Cheney lost an argument?  In that administration?  With whom?  Condoleeza Rice?  David Petraeus?  Bush himself?

The only way it seems possible that Dick Cheney lost an argument is if he'd already lost the argument.

The argument over who was the real Decider.

President Obama starts off referring specifically to Cheney's torture regime, but then he generalizes the point to the entire neo-con agenda---"framing national security only in terms of the application of [often unilateral] force"---and from there to the entire eight years of the Bush-Cheney Presidency.

It's easy to read too much into the tea leaves, and one of Barack Obama's themes is that the Bush Administration was wrong about pretty much everything---national security, domestic policy, the economy, you name it, they screwed it up.  But it sounds to me as though the President sees what Cheney's up to these days as an attempt to make the debate all about Cheney's place in history.

Cheney isn't simply claiming that his decision to base our national security on torture was the right one because it kept us safe.  He's claiming that he kept us safe, which, according to other former members of that administration and its apologists, is Bush's legacy.

Looked this way, whether or not torture worked is a secondary and almost minor debate.   Cheney lost that one within the Bush administration a long time ago.  This is Lawrence Wilkerson's point.  The torture stopped in 2004 and if Cheney had been right, that it was torture that kept us safe, then we struck lucky for the whole of Bush's second term.  If Cheney believes this, the he's not just in argument with Barack Obama.  He's in an argument with President Bush.

And I think he is.  I think that's his point.

A lot of informed speculation as to why the previously content to live deep in the shadows Cheney has suddenly been happy to make cable news "All Cheney, all the time" has concluded that he is trying, desperately, to save himself from future indictment and prosecution by holding his own rigged trial in the court of public opinion.

That's probably part of it.

But I don't think it's the whole of it because it doesn't take into account what has clearly been one of Cheney's most defining character traits---his vanity.

Always remember, this is a man who appointed himself shadow-President of the United States.  He knew what George W. Bush was.  He knew his own influence over the boy-man who would be President.  He knew what his role would be in that White House.  And this was fine with him.  He wanted to be the un-elected President of the United States and he believed that it would be a good thing for the country to have him as its un-elected President.  Napoleon, in crowning himself emperor, showed more humility.

What Cheney is doing, consciously or not, is taking advantage of George W. Bush's withdrawl into private life to make himself the face of the Bush administration in the public memory.  He's claiming Bush's supposed one great success---"he kept us safe"---as his own, and he's not simply "relitigating the last eight years," he's attempting to edit them down in the history books to the first four years of the Bush administration when he and Donald Rumsfeld ran the show.

Basically, he's out there boasting of having been the puppet's master and demanding that we applaud the show he put on.

It's almost like a Perry Mason moment played out in the court of history.  The canny attorney has just had to step back and let the witness's own vanity and arrogance trip him up.  He's tricked himself into confessing on the stand.

_____________

Whether you bought the idea that Bush was being smart in relying on the smarter Cheney or that we didn't have to worry that Bush wasn't smart because Cheney was, you had to buy the idea that Dick Cheney was in fact smart, an idea Cheney's biography doesn't support at all, according to this 2004 Rolling Stone article by T.D. Allman, The Curse of Dick Cheney.

Sad to say, but people who knew better than to trust the likes of Dick Cheney, bought into a similar argument---that it didn't matter if George W. Bush was smart enough to be President because he was at least smart enough to invite Colin Powell into his administration, as if there was a real chance that Powell was going to last in that White House.  Worth remembering what Powell thought of Cheney and Rumsfeld.  From Sidney Blumenthal:

On one of Powell's futile diplomatic trips, his informal conversation with reporters turned to a new book, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, by James Naughtie. In it, Powell is quoted as describing the neocons to British foreign minister, Jack Straw, as "fucking crazies". That, the reporters suggested, might be an apt title for his next volume of memoirs. Powell laughed uncontrollably.

______________________

What the Josh Marshall, not Maureen Dowd, said:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

____________________

What Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond said:

George Wallace was a Democrat, so what?

Updated.

Crypto-Confederate Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is taking over from now crypto-Republican Senator Arlen Specter as the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Sessions is a Senator because once upon a time he didn't get to be a federal judge.  He didn't get to be a federal judge because the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time took a look at his record as a U.S. Attorney and the Attorney General of Alabama and recoiled in horror.  There was enough in that record to suggest that Sessions had missed his true calling in life as a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and he took up a career as a government lawyer as the next best way he could think of to undo the Civil Rights movement.

Since he's been in the Senate, Sessions has done his best to prove that the Judiciary Committee was wrong to turn down his nomination for the judgeship because putting him on the bench would have kept him out of the Senate.

Now he's going to be the Republican point man in opposing anyone and everyone President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court and other federal benches, and lest you think that this is just one of those unfortunate accidents of the seniority system and the Republicans might be embarrassed by having an obvious racist heading up their fight against the first African-American President's judicial nominees, they arranged it.  If the seniority system had been working as usual, Iowan Charles Grassley would have stepped right up to replace Specter.

Politics is complicated and messy and, as TPM's Brian Beutler reports, the arrangement was made for Grassley's ultimate benefit not Sessions', but the point is that while they were arranging things the GOP leadership could have arranged it so that someone other than Sessions stepped in and they didn't.  They don't care about Sessions' racism.  They don't mind having someone who is nostalgic for the days of Jim Crow not only in their caucus but as one of their leaders.  They've been quite comfortable with the company of racists for decades.  Why, some of their best friends are racists.

Hell, some of them are racists too, if the truth be told, and darn that political correctness for not letting us tell it.

I have a new reader who I think is a conservative---he or she might just be a contrarian who has briefed himself or herself for the conservatives---who came to the blog for the Dickens but left his or her first comment about the politics.  It was a long, carefully written comment, and I appreciate the effort and hope whoever it is keeps coming back.  I promise more Dickens posts! 

In Monday's post, Hey, hey, my, my, the Republican Party will never die, I wrote that the Republican Party has allowed itself to become the party of greedy rich white folks and bigots, a not unreasonable assertion, since it's, you know, true.

PJK took exception and wrote:

Do you know anything of the other party's history? The Democratic party staunchly defended slavery from its earliest days thru the Civil War (and many northern Dems sympathized with the South during that war). Then they fought against and finally brought an end to Reconstruction (the price of accepting Hayes as president in 1876). And the alliance of Dixiecrats and northern machine Dems kept southern blacks disenfranchised until the 1950's. For all that time-- a century and a half-- it was the party of Jefferson which was linked to slavery, segregation, and Ku Klux terrorism.

I've seen this before.  Whenever they're faced with evidence of racism in their midst, Conservatives resort to pointing out that the Democrats have not always been a party full of saints and heroes.

Well, we've rarely been a party full of saints and heroes.

But besides insulting us with the assumption that we don't know that the Democratic Party was for a long time a congenial home for slaveowners, secessionists, and segregationists, don't these conservatives know that we're glad to talk about it because it gives a chance to brag---because we ran the racists out?  We closed the door on the  last of them a long time ago.

Forty-five years ago now.

The Democratic Party had a divided soul since its inception.  It was the party of Southern planters, which is to say the party of the slavers, but it was also the party of the urban middle and working class and the party of the small farmers in the South and on the western frontier (at the time that meant upstate New York and then expanded to Ohio and the northwest territories that are now Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.  Abraham Lincoln's father was a Democrat).  These three groups had very different interests and ideals but they were united in their fear and loathing of the Northeastern capitalist elites who eventually came to dominate the Republican Party after the Civil War.  But both the small farmers and the urban workers were highly suspicious of their Southern planter allies who they were afraid would be just as glad to see all free labor everywhere replaced with slave labor and wouldn't much mind what color those slaves were, when you got right down to it.

So there was a tension between the factions from the start and alliances were fitful and uneasy.  Also, in the 19th Century all politics really was local and locally, that is up in the Northern cities, the Democrats figured out quickly that they could increase their power by increasing their numbers by recruiting among the tens of thousands of European immigrants pouring into the country.  First, they signed up the Irish.  Then the Irish in their turn signed up the Italians and the Jews and later the Puerto Ricans and Chicanos and...you can see where this is going...the party of the Ku Klux Klan was also the party of Catholics and Jews.

More tension.

I'm eliding too much because time is short, but the Progressive Era arrived, and it arrived at about the same time the Northeastern Capitalists took control of the Republican Party lock, stock, and barrel, during the Presidency of William McKinley.  Theodore Roosevelt resisted, with some success, but he goofed---he decided not to run for what would have been essentially a third term, thinking that his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, was as committed to the Progressive cause as himself.  Not quite.  In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, who temperamentally and in principle was probably not as Progressive as either Roosevelt or Taft, captured the White House and with it the Progressive movement for the Democrats.

Meanwhile, down south, thanks to all those small farmers, the Democratic Party, while racist, was also strongly populist and progressive.  This became a moral challenge for Franklin Roosevelt, who could count on the enthusiastic support of Southern politicians as long as he didn't push them on the issue of Civil Rights.  So he didn't push.

But he nudged.

And that annoyed a lot of Southerners, who began to wonder if the Democratic Party really did want their votes, and who could count and could see that certain numbers were running against them.  The urban Democrats were at it again, recruiting among the new wave of immigrants to the cities.  This wave wasn't coming from overseas though.  It was coming from within, up from the South, as African-Americans moved North to escape Jim Crow and to get jobs in the factories.  Urban white Democrats were not necessarily more enlightened on the subject of race than white Southerners, but they liked to win elections and they were happy to let black people vote and understood black people expected certain things in return for those votes.

Southern Democrats knew that it wouldn't be long before Northern Democrats would be able to outvote them and they had two choices:  accommodate themselves to the changes that they could see coming or leave the Party.

I said we ran the racists out but the truth is they started leaving on their own, starting with Strom Thurmond's run for the Presidency as a proud Dixiecrat in 1948. 

More elision.  It's 1964, Lyndon Johnson is President.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act was a Democratically-led but still bi-partisanship achievement and many Republicans did themselves proud not just by voting for the Act but by having supported the Civil Rights Movement generally.  They were rewarded for their courage and effort by being reviled within their own Party.  The GOP had been moving farther and farther to the right to the point that even Dwight Eisenhower was no longer a hero to the base.  Liberal and moderate Republicans were finding it more congenial, and more productive, to work with liberal and moderate Democrats.  Right Wing Republicans were finding it more congenial, if not nearly as productive, because they were still the minority, to work with those Southern Democrats who could not get over their segregationist hatred for the Liberals who now controlled their party.

The party of slavery, secession, and segregation had become the party of Civil Rights.

Where was a die-hard racist to go?

Ideally, the answer should have been home.

It turned out to be the Republican Party.  The Right Wing Corporatists who ran the Party were happy to welcome them as long as they helped the GOP become the majority party, and here we are.

That's the history, in too small a nutshell.

I don't know what point conservatives think they're making by pointing it out.  Yes, once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of George Wallace.  Once upon a time the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln.  But what does that say about either party today?  Jeff Sessions is a Republican, a leader of the Party, in good standing and held in high regard.

Meanwhile, the African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee is telling Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe that they're not welcome in the Party anymore.

Updated because Rachel is smarter than me and more fun and she's on video: 

_____________

Digby says:

These wingnuts truly seem to believe that the reason people voted for a left leaning Democratic government across the board was because they actually wanted a far right government. If that makes sense to you, then you must be a conservative too.

Hey, hey, my, my, the Republican Party will never die

Updated.

From about the time of William McKinley until the moment Dwight Eisenhower decided to send the troops into Little Rock, the Republican Party was pretty much based on defending an economic model that had failed again and again.

Let the rich guys and the guys who want to be rich do what ever they want to make money and everything will turn out all right in the end.

After Little Rock (you can date it earlier, from Strom Thurmond's defection from the Democratic Party, or later, from the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but after whatever point it became clear that the Federal Government was no longer going to allow states to treat some of their citizens as less than human), the Republican Party added to its defense of a failed, 19th Century economic model, a defense of a morally indefensible, 19th Century social order in which white men got to do whatever they wanted, say whatever they wanted, hire whomever they wanted, do business with whomever they wanted, and otherwise throw their weight around and run everything to their own comfort and advantage, even if, especially if, this reduced other, non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual people to second and third class citizens.

What this has meant is that for almost two generations now the basic case the Republican Party has been making for itself has been, Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could turn back the clock to 1898 or at least to 1928?

You wouldn't think this would be an attractive argument in a nation that prides itself on its forward-thinking and on being the main force for progress in the world, but, sadly, there are a lot of people who are miserable enough in the present and scared enough of the future that every now and then the Republicans have been able to scare up enough votes to keep themselves in office where they can work hard on their war against time.

Predictably, however, when they've come into power, people, even rich white people who voted for them, realize that they don't want to return to the days of robber barons and lynching or of dust bowls and Hoovervilles.  It turns out that was was wrong with the Good Old Days is exactly what the Republicans want to bring back and the reason most of us are glad for the whole concept of progress is the Republican ideal, a world run by greedy rich people and bigots.

Basically, this is what the Bush Administration gave us for the last eight years and once again it didn't work.

Just as it did in 1929, that notion wrecked the country.

So it was rightly rejected in the last two elections.

Of course the Republicans haven't rejected it, and currently they're running around in circles trying to find a way to save it.  They call what they're doing "re-branding" or they say they're out working on new ideas for the 21st Century, but they're not fooling anybody, except maybe themselves.  What they want is another way to sell the old reactionary notions to enough gullible people to get themselves back into power.

It's not going to happen...for a while.

Pam Spaulding reports that at least one important Republican has a clue---Jeb Bush.

Jeb says that the Republicans are not going to come back unless they free themselves from their worship of Ronald Reagan.  It would appear that Jeb Bush watched his big brother trying to be a Reagan avatar and drew at least a few right conclusions.  Reaganism, at least what most conservatives seem to think of as Reaganism, doesn't work, not anymore at any rate.  (This is a good place to give another shout out to Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future and one to James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War .)  Jeb seems to understand that the Republicans have to stop trying to sell people on regressive time travel.  We can't get to the future by returning to the past, he's seems to be saying, even a more recent past than the glory days of William McKinley or Calvin Coolidge.

He's right, but I don't believe he means it.

Jeb is a smarter, more enlightened guy than his brother, and I'm sure that like their old man he's personally repulsed by the thought of living in a nation run by greedy rich guys and bigots.  But he's a Bush.  Based on what he did as governor of Florida, I'd say his alternative is his old man's alternative, a world run by rich guys who aren't gauchely greedy and who keep the bigots in line.

McKinleyism all over again.

(This is a good place to give a shout-out to Eric Rauchway's Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America .)

It would be nice to think that the People have finally figured this out once and for all, that all the Republicans have to offer is a return to a past in which greedy rich guys and bigots rule and they're willing to let the country go to rack and ruin as long bringing this about.   It would be nice to think that they'll never again be able to convince enough people that the past is a better place to live than the present, that going backwards is more productive and healthy than moving forward.  It would be nice to think that at last we are seeing the party of greedy rich guys and bigots in its death-throes.  And who knows?  Maybe we are.

The trouble is that in the United States, money talks.  In fact it shouts and gives orders.  And the greedy rich guys have most of the money and they want to keep it, all of it, to which end they are willing, irrationally and ironically, to spend a great deal of it buying up politicians, of both parties, journalists, and even some college professors, who will support and advance the idea that the country is better off when we let the greedy rich guys run it into the ground.

Updated to note that while Ian Welsh and I are counting the Republicans out yet, Republicans themselves don't seem to want their Party to survive:

Ultra-conservative Republican Senator John Cornyn admits the GOP has shrunk itself into a regional party and needs to open up its ranks to more moderates to avoid shrinking itself out of existence, to which Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele replies as if from Bizarro World, "The last two Republican Senators from the Northeast better get with the program or leave the Party."

Steve Benen says that as far as he can tell Jeb Bush didn't mention Ronald Reagan by name when he suggested that the GOP has to give up its nostalgia for the good old days, but a lot of conservatives took the hint anyway and it made them so mad they violated their own Saint Ronnie's Eleventh Commandment and spoke most ill of their fellow Republican.

Steve also reports that Reagan Worship is so strong within conservatives that the now-presumptive Republican candidate to replace Arlen Specter, Pat Toomey, is counting on Saint Ronnie's ghost to win the election for him.  "The state hasn't changed since 1984," says Toomey of the state that has voted for the Democratic candidate for President five out of the last five elections.

Also, Joe Conason on selling a toxic brand.

There's always another source

I don't think I quote myself enough.  So...as I was saying a little while back, trying to pick out the best example of why oh why we don't have a better press corps is like trying to pick out the best example of a jelly bean in an Easter basket.  But today let's go with a spicy purple one instead of a fruity orange one---the infatuation with access.

An awful lot, too much, of political reporting depends on reporters having sources inside the corridors of power.  For the last decade and more most of those sources have been Republicans and conservatives because that's who was (is) in power.  The first deleterious result of this has been that these reporters have been constantly spun to the right their Right Wing sources.   But even more pernicious has been the way many journalists have been seduced by their access to the powerful into thinking of themselves as players in the power elite and how they've allowed their loyalties to shift from their readers and viewers who want and need to know what's going on inside their government to their sources who do not want people to know what they're up to. 

The epitome of this was Tim Russert's unembarrassed admission that he regarded all his conversations with his powerful sources as being off the record unless they gave him permission to treat them otherwise.

Russert also confessed to being a very lazy journalist who sat around his office waiting for sources to call him to tell him what the day's news was.

For plenty of them, access itself became the be-all and end-all.  Gaining access was the point of being a journalist.  They expected to be judged by their bosses, by their sources, by their audiences outside the Beltway (if they cared what their audiences outside the Beltway thought) and by each other on the amount of access they possessed.  The marks of the best journalists weren't scoops or Pulitzer Prizes---you have to report what your sources tell you to get those---but by who was in their Rolodexes and Blackberrys and on their speed dials.

This prizing of access above things like, well, reporting, meant that these would-be insiders lived in terror of losing it and were sycophantically grateful to the sources that continued to grant it.  They would never dream of burning any of these sources, even the ones who lied to them over and over again.  Hello, Karl Rove.

Not every journalist in D.C. was willing to grovel and crawl like that.  But even the best ones---best in the sense of seeing their jobs as reporting the facts not transcribing the spin---have to work and live in that culture of speaking nothing but flattering words to power.  Their bosses expected them to develop and maintain access.  Their friends and colleagues judged their work, and their worth, by their degree of access.  Their sources could be arrogant and capricious when it came to granting or denying access.  Burn a source for even the most principled of reasons and you have a lot of explaining to do.

Judith Miller became a heroine among Beltway Insiders for going to jail basically as a martyr to the cause of access.

Journalists who would never have done what she did, allowed herself to be used to out a CIA agent and then protected the people who used her, rallied around her, because she was defending, not a principle, but a tool of the trade, the tool of the trade.  Access.

Their reasoning went:  If our sources can't trust us to protect them when they're lying and committing crimes against the nation then they will cut off our access, and how can we do our jobs without access?

Never seemed to occur to them that there's always another source.

Mentioned last week that one of our recent features for Mannion Family Movie Night was Thirteen Days, the Kevin Costner film about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Pretty good movie, once you get past Costner's terrible Baastin accent and accept that his character, Kenny O'Donnell, isn't meant to be the real Kenneth O'Donnell, President Kennedy's Appointments Secretary, but a composite character made up of parts of O'Donnell, Dave Powers, and Robert Kennedy---even though Bobby Kennedy is an important character in the film, Costner's O'Donnell is given lines and things to do that I suspect only Bobby could have gotten away with in those situations in real life.

There's a short scene in the movie, set in a hotel in Chicago where JFK's gone to butter-up Mayor Daley.  It's the middle of the crisis and Kennedy is in Chicago against his own wishes because he's been convinced by Bobby and O'Donnell he needs to keep up the appearance that there is no crisis, that everything's copasetic, and all those not so secret meetings of top aides at the White House and the various military maneuvers in and around the Gulf don't mean that the country's on the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  Naturally, nobody's really fooled.  The press is on to the story, and one intrepid reporter chases down O'Donnell as he's getting into an elevator in the hotel and demands to know what's really going on.  The reporter actually knows something big's happening.  He just wants O'Donnell to confirm some things so his paper can run with the story.

O'Donnell blows his stack.

He screams at the reporter, tells him he's threatening national security, and then he threatens him.  If the reporter prints the story, O'Donnell says, that's it.  He's cut off.  He and his paper.  No more access.

The reporter falls back a few steps, stunned.  For a second or two, he looks abashed and afraid.  You think he's about to apologize and promise O'Donnell he'll play ball from here on out, just don't cut off his access.

Then he rallies himself and says simply, "I'll get another source."  And he strolls away.

The point of the scene isn't what troublesome assholes journalists can be.  It's not even that O'Donnell is right that the story needs to be kept secret and the reporter is wrong to want to publish it.  It's simply that here's another aspect of the crisis that's getting out of hand.  The President and his men are losing control of the situation on all fronts.  There is in fact a limit to the amount of control they could possibly have even if everything was breaking their way.  The point of the scene is part of the movie's larger theme---boy, did we and the world get lucky.

The scene between O'Donnell and the reporter's fiction.  But scenes like it were played out, in Chicago and back in Washington, between many of Kennedy's aides and advisors and reporters.  Scenes like it are still being played out, of course.

The lesson for journalists here is a simple one.

"I'll get another source," the reporter says, and you know he will.

There's always another source.

When oh when did we ever have a better press corps?

Last night, for the third straight time, President Obama failed to turn a press conference into the political equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert or whatever it is he's supposed to do to keep the Media Bobbleheads awake and doing their jobs and earning the six-figure salaries that apparently aren't incentive enough to make them care about boring topics like unemployment and pandemics and war and stuff.

From Media Matters, here's Chris Matthews talking to Lawrence O'Donnell after the conference:

Why, Lawrence, are these press conferences that this guy holds so frighteningly boring? Why does everybody act like they're in a sepulchre of some kind? They're so dutiful, it's boring beyond death. Have you noticed the way reporters behave in his presence? I've never seen anything like it.

O'Donnell did not reply, "Well, Chris, maybe it's because they realize times are tough, our problems are many and difficult, there are no easy or magic solutions, and the President has come on television not to entertain the press corps but to explain to the American people what he's trying to do to help fix things.  Maybe they think that the appropriate way to act under those circumstances is like serious-minded adults and not like a bunch of college kids on Spring Break."

To be fair, I don't think Matthews wants the President to turn his press conferences into performance art pieces.  I think he and a lot of his colleagues are just wishing that President Obama's press conferences were more like what they "remember" President Kennedy's were like, with the President getting off more witty lines and bantering with reporters and turning every answer into a short and easy to quote rhetorical gem, a super-condensed variation on JFK's inaugural address.

That's how I "remember" Kennedy's press conference too and if the President modeled himself on that "memory" of JFK, his press conferences would make for more exciting television.

The trouble with this is that Matthews and his crowd and I are remembering President Kennedy's press conferences all wrong.  In my case, I'm not remembering them at all.  I'm old, but I'm not that old.  My first clear memory of John F. Kennedy's presidency is its end, and what I remember of that is the frightening grief of all the adults around me.

What I "remember" about President Kennedy is what I learned after he died, and much of that was pure myth or at least based on other people's memories that were so gilded that they were practically fiction.  One of those myths is that JFK was absolutely brilliant at his press conferences.  And he was.  You've probably seen the same clips I've seen.  Kennedy was witty, he was incredibly quick, he did banter with reporters and he seemed to enjoy the banter, and he could turn an answer into a short rhetorical gem.

But those clips are highlights chosen because they illustrate and reinforce the myth.

The truth is that President Kennedy was brilliant at his press conferences---in pretty much the same, boring, serious-minded adult way President Obama has been at his.

At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and Library, the main exhibit halls are designed to look like rooms in the Kennedy-era White House.  One of those rooms is the press room.  You go in, take a seat in one of the rows of folding chairs that face a monitor at the front of the room, and watch extended clips of some of Kennedy's press conferences, and what strikes you right away---what struck me when I was there three weeks ago, at any rate---is how thoughtful he was.  You can see him taking the time to think through what he wants to say, see how his mind is working ahead of his mouth, how hard he is trying to give a serious and intelligent and intelligible answer to each question.

One of the results of this effort is that he says "uh" a lot.  A lot.

He also doesn't look at the camera all that often or at the reporter whose question he's answering.  He has a habit of looking down and away, at a spot at the right hand corner of his lectern, as if there's something there that shouldn't be there and he's about to brush it away.  His right hand is always at work too.  His finger circles and crosshatches the papers in front of him, as if he's doodling or writing note to himself and has forgotten he's not holding a pen.

It's bad television.

But it's great television.

Because he's not playing to an audience.  He's not performing.  He's working.

He clearly thinks of this---explaining what he and his administration were up to---as an important and serious part of his job.  He wants his answers to be as thorough and accurate (if not necessarily as complete and forthcoming) as they can be.  He isn't all that eloquent.  But he is astonishingly articulate.  He speaks in complete if not always elegant sentences, in well-organized paragraphs full of concrete facts and details and examples.

I forget who it was but one of the journalists who covered him said that at a time when many men Kennedy's age were desperately trying to appear younger than they were Kennedy was conspicuously trying to come across as older.  Despite the emphasis his Presidential campaign and his rhetoric put on youth and "vigah," on the job Kennedy emphasized his maturity.  You can see this in the press conferences.  You can see him reining himself in, resisting the temptation to be glib and quickly correcting himself when he gives into the temptation.  He speaks more slowly than he did when he was giving a speech.  His voice is deeper.  He is thoughtful, reflective, not humorless by a long shot but not constantly or even routinely jovial or even convivial.

In short, he's often dull.

But another thing that's striking is that he is often also plainly annoyed by some of the questions.  Not because he thinks they're intrusive, but because he thinks they're trivial or besides the point or that they show signs that the reporters who asked them didn't really understand the issues or hadn't done their homework. 

At that time, many of Murrow's Boys were still in the primes of their careers.  Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.  Newspapers were thriving and still drove political reporting.   This was a golden age of journalism, at least according to my professors in college.  And yet there's President Kennedy visibly irked by questions about process and personality---inside the Beltway stuff---as he's trying to lay-out policy and explain the issues for the American people.

I'm sitting there watching this and thinking, after Brad DeLong, Why oh why couldn't we have had a better press corps?

But I shouldn't have been thinking that.  I knew better.  Not very long before our visit to the museum I had read the chapters on Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, in Nothing to Fear, Adam Cohen's excellent history of FDR's first hundred days, and I had been struck by this passage:

Perkins also disliked how the press covered her professional life.  She found Washington reporters more cynical and sensationalistic than the ones she had dealt with in New York.  They were constantly asking her what her "angle" was, she complained.  Perkins issued press releases that focused on important matters---"not what I think of John L. Lewis' latest outburst," she said.  "That's not the news.  The news is the government's inquiry into the wages and hours of the coal mining industry."  Many of the press questions struck her as no-win.  "They would say, 'Have you consulted Secretary Ickes about this?'" she said.  "If you say 'No,' then Ickes is offended because they say, "Perkins refuses to consult with other Cabinet officers.'  If you say 'Yes,' then they've got to know just what you said, what he said, why he said that, and they've got to go ask him what he said, what he meant."

According to Cohen, by almost any measure Perkins was Roosevelt's most successful and influential Cabinet secretary.  She was the one most responsible for steering FDR on a more Progressive course and for keeping him on that course.  She was one of only two Cabinet members who stayed in their job for the whole of FDR's Presidency.  In short, she was the heroine of the New Deal.

And yet when it was all over, when Roosevelt was dead and Perkins had left the Department of Labor, the consensus among the press corps was that she'd been a failure.

The assessment was based purely on personal animosity.  Reporters didn't like her because she didn't like them.  Part of this was a failing on her part.  She didn't see herself as a politician and didn't like having to act like one, even though her job was extremely political.  She didn't enjoy being a public figure either, although she was better at acting like one than she was like acting like a politician.  That is she could perform when she had to but she couldn't pretend.  She thought of reporters as nuisances and didn't like having to explain her thinking or her actions to them.  But what she really didn't like about reporters is that they didn't want her to explain either her thinking or her actions.  They were, she thought, far more interested in having her explain herself. 

As long as they were going to take up her time, she felt, they should take the time and the trouble to learn what the issues and the policies she was grappling with were.  They should act like serious-minded grown-ups with important jobs to do.

Why oh why, she must have asked herself countless times, can't we have a better press corps?

_________________

One of my favorite parts of last night's press conference was when the President answered Jeff Zeleny's question about what things had surprised, enchanted, humbled, and troubled him the most over the course of the past hundred days, a question that wasn't as trivial as Zeleny's unfortunate choice of the word enchanted made it sound.   It was a question about what it was like for Obama to be doing a job he's had to learn how to do as he does it.  John McPhee has written whole books about other people doing just that.  And the President took it seriously, even though he began his answer with some joking around.

You can read the whole transcript here.  I'm just going to quote one part of his answer, where he deals with what has most humbled him:

Humbled by the -- humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life, and there are a lot of different power centers. And so I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line.

And so, you know, what you do is to -- is to make your best arguments, listen hard to what other people have to say, and coax folks in the right direction.

This metaphor has been used before, but the ship of state is an ocean liner. It's not a speedboat. And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue, of how to bring about the changes that the American people need, is to -- is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, you may not see all the consequences of that change a week from now or three months from now, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, our kids will be able to look back and say, "That was when we started getting serious about clean energy. That's when health care started to become more efficient and affordable. That's when we became serious about raising our standards in education."

Nothing profound in that or particularly original, and it's not a model of rhetorical elegance---although notice how much more eloquent he got as he went, as he gathered his thoughts; it's not a little rhetorical gem, but it holds together.  What I like about his answer is its directness, and I mean that in the sense that it is fairly straight-forward, but also in that it is directed.  It moves from Point A to Point B to Point C along the most direct route it can take.  The thing is that the Media prefers it when the most direct route is a short cut and they don't understand that sometimes a thought has to travel a long way.

I don't know who taught it to me---somebody did, I rarely came up with these things on my own---but when I was teaching freshman comp and using poetry as one of the means to do it, I used to explain to my students who were skeptical of the connection between their essays and the poems of Robert Frost that the best definition of poetry I knew was Coleridge's, which I misquoted as "the fewest and best possible words in the best possible order."  A pretty good definition of good prose right there, I'd say.  But I'd always add that while the fewest and best words might mean five, it can also mean a thousand.  There isn't a short cut for every thought.

Our press corps seems to believe that the fewest words are the best words, that every thought can follow a short cut, so it's no wonder then that when they're forced to travel a long way with an idea they keep piping up to ask, "Are we there yet?"

"Please, Mr Taxman, leave our rich corporate masters alone!"

It's Tea Bag Day!

I hope you're all taking to the streets with your boxes of Red Rose and Lipton.  Oh, I forgot.  Most of you are sane and sensible and blessed with a gift for recognizing irony.  Then I guess like James Wolcott you're on your way out to infiltrate and disrupt the protests.

The streets are going to be filled---or at least mildly congested---with a whole lot of regular folks whom rich people despise as losers protesting against raising taxes slightly on the rich people who think of them as losers.

In gratitude the rich are toasting their defenders with Korbel Brut and taking back every thing they said about their being losers.

Their new preferred word is "suckers."

If the Tea Baggers had been alive in 1773, they'd have taken to the streets to protest that the King needed to quarter more troops in their homes, the Stamp Act didn't go far enough, and tea was just too darn cheap as it was.

How would Ronald Reagan have dealt with pirates?

Updated.

This blog is officially a Sympathy For Pirates Free Zone.  Whatever socio-economic, political, and cultural forces drives them out to prowl one of the Seven Seas, they've chosen to respond to those forces by taking up careers as thugs and thieves, which is all pirates are and all they've ever been.  The great nations can deal with those forces and the problems that arise diplomatically and sympathetically in the background.  In the foreground they should deal with the pirates just the way the Navy did Sunday.

I've heard and read suggestions that we should stop calling the pirates pirates because it romanticizes them, as if none of us can hear the word without conjuring up images of Jack Sparrow, Peter Blood, and the black mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts, whoever happens to be the Dread Pirate Roberts this week.  Probably true, but it's not true that very many grown-ups will then apply those images to the thugs and thieves out there committing their acts of piracy.  Mixing up movies with reality is something Right Wing bloggers do, healthy-minded adults know that real rabbits don't talk with Brooklyn accents and real pirates don't do amusing impersonations of Keith Richards.  Not while on the job, anyway.   They're pirates, and calling them terrorists, as I've seen suggested, muddies that issue and, speaking of Right Wingers, gives them another chance to relive their glory days after 9/11 when they could shut down every argument by accusing dissenters of being soft of terror. 

Before the Navy SEALs went to work, were the Right Wingers on Fox and elsewhere really declaring that the President was too soft on piracy?  Guess so.  Of course shoot first and slap down anyone who asks questions later has always been their preferred method for dealing with any problem where killing someone else is an option, even if it's not at all a desirable one.  As long as they don't actually have to be in the line of fire they're always all for going in with guns blazing.

As if making someone else dead is the only measure of toughness.

They need to read Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth.

Will's book is not a 261 page argument that Reagan was a bad President.  Will doesn't even think Reagan was all that bad a President, certainly not in the way Richard Nixon was a bad President or George W. Bush was a bad President.  He doesn't think Reagan was a good one, not by a long shot.  Will gets into all the things he thinks Reagan did wrong that hurt the country, especially his turning the United States from a creditor nation into a debtor nation and setting us up for the economic disaster President Obama's now trying to clean up.  But Will isn't as interested in ranking Reagan as he is showing that however he ranks Reagan wasn't a successful Conservative President.

That's because Reagan was a pragmatist before he was an ideologue, Will says, and on the most important issues he had to deal with---taxation, the end of the Cold War, terrorism---he usually did the practical thing rather than the conservative thing.  Maybe I'll get into all that in another post.  Here, though, what I want to highlight is another difference between Reagan the actual human being and the Right Wing Hero conservatives idealize and idolize.

Reagan was nowhere near as bloodthirsty.

In fact, if the bodies are ever tallied, it will probably turn out that Ronald Reagan was directly responsible for the deaths of far fewer people than any other President since Eisenhower, except Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.  Barack Obama may already have more blood on his hands.

I'm not forgetting all the people who did die because of what he did, all the people in Central America killed by the Contras and the Death Squads we trained and supported, all the people who died of AIDS because he refused to acknowledge the crisis.

I'm just saying, as Will is saying, that Reagan's response to situations in which shooting first and asking questions later was an option, it was not his preferred option.  Reagan was extremely reluctant to put American troops in harm's way.  He was pushed throughout his Administration to invade Panama to take out Manuel Noriega and he resisted it.  When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan pulled the Marines out.  When Reagan, who became President mainly because of Jimmy Carter's allegedly weak-kneed handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, had to deal with his own hostage crisis (Lebanon again), Reagan's response was to do what we supposedly never do---he negotiated with terrorists.  (He tried to buy the hostages' release too, which led to the Iran-Contra scandal, which Will argues was a worse assault on the Constitution than Watergate.)  And when his attempts to negotiate and pay ransom failed and the terrorists tortured and killed the CIA station chief, Reagan responded by...doing nothing.  Not because he wasn't really tough, but because he was tough enough to adhere to one of his principles.  Reagan had ruled out any retaliation against terrorists that might get civilians killed.  He called that, a shrugged-off acceptance of collateral damage, a form of terrorism itself.

Reagan could talk the bloody-minded talk, but Will says he was often talking it to pacify his critics on the Right.  Reagan himself was not a prisoner of his own rhetoric.

So how would Reagan have dealt with the pirates?

Probably exactly the way President Obama did, by taking his time, by attempting to talk the pirates into surrendering, by looking for a way not to get anybody killed, by not being bloody-minded, by being tough not to be in a rush to show off how tough he was.

Make sure you visit Will Bunch's blog, Attytood.

__________________

The Corner's Jonah Goldberg was insufficiently anti-Obama on the subject of pirates and was taken to the woodshed by Rush Limbaugh.  Jim Wolcott calls on Goldberg to stand up to the blowhard.

Update:  Dennis Perrin thinks I'm full of it.

Every time I write something less than hateful about Reagan, there are always some people who react as if I'm making the case that he should be on Mount Rushmore.  For the record:  I didn't like the guy!

All your virtue are belong to us

Don't usually pay much attention to the Right Wing bloggers, but I agree with Mark Lewis on this one.  Whittaker Chambers would make a fascinating subject for a movie and Sam Tanenhaus' biography an excellent basis for the screenplay.

But I don't know why Lewis thinks that such a movie would be a conservative Milk.

Has he read Tanenhaus' book?

I'm sure he's held it in his hands, turned all the pages, and run his eyes over every word.  But did he take any of it in?

Conservatives have a habit of missing the points of movies and songs they call "conservative."  Maybe they have the same problem with books.

Tanenhaus makes Chambers a sympathetic figure, but he doesn't present him as heroic or even particularly likable, mainly because he wasn't either.

Whittaker Chambers was a strange, creepy, and grubby little person with an outsized man-crush on the friend he would later betray, Alger Hiss.  In Tanenhaus' biography, he comes across as something of a fantasist and his motivations for joining the Communist Party and becoming a spy---actually, not much of a spy.  More of an agent provocateur---weren't intellectually deep or politically consistent, and the same went for his conversion to the Right.   He did what he did because he was acting out a script in his own head in which he was a romantic, mysterious, and misunderstood hero.

Unless the director gave Chambers the sort of whitewashing Raoul Walsh gave Custer in They Died With Their Boots On, Chambers is likely to give the audience a case of the willies.  Add to this that the movie would also have to include as a "conservative" hero, Richard Nixon, and I just don't see how the film would advance the conservative cause the way Lewis thinks Milk advances whatever brand of liberal politics it is he thinks Milk advances.

I'm guessing he thinks Chambers' story would vindicate the hysterical anti-communism of the 1950s, in which case it might be better to make it more of a Right Wingers' answer to Good Night and Good Luck and have it try to capture the spirit of a time in which effete and craven Liberals refused to take seriously the threat posed bythe international Communist conspiracy, leaving it up to brave and noble, and picked-on and reviled, conservatives to take a stand against the Red Menace.

In that movie Chambers' unattractiveness would become a defining virtue, the outward signs of his role as an outsider, the inside he's on the outside of being the Northeastern Liberal Intellectual Elite.

Chambers' place as a hero of conservative folklore has a lot to do with the same sense of class resentment and victimization that Nixonland author Rick Perlstein argues drove Richard Nixon, and in fact Chambers himself is actually a bit player in the epic tragedy of Richard Nixon.  It was Nixon who got Alger Hiss, Chambers was just what the title of his own autobiography says he was, a witness to history, not a maker of it.

Basically, a realistic movie version of Whittaker Chambers' life would be the story of a not very important, or even interesting, victim of historical events he barely comprehends let alone influences.  Harvey Milk made things happened.  He did his bit to change the world.  Chambers didn't make anything happen.  Things happened to him, except when he happened to other people, like Hiss and Nixon.

There is nothing particularly conservative about that story.  It's an accident of history that in this case the story was played out by people who identified themselves by their political affiliations.  In order to see Chambers' story as a heroic conservative folk tale, you have to ignore the existential and concentrate narrowly on the political.

On the cause of anti-communism.

A lot of conservatives believe that anti-communism is their cause.  That's partly because they held onto a world view formed around 1949 for decades after the rest of the country left it behind.

The Right never understood why most Americans weren't still looking under their beds for Communists, even as Richard Nixon opened up China and forged a detente with the Soviet Union, even as Ronald Reagan, shocked and horrified by the "liberal" anti-nuke movie The Day After, decided to do his bit to rid the world of the threat of thermonuclear obliteration by negotiating radical arms treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev.

But it's also because they have a habit of assigning all virtues to themselves and attributing to liberals any and all attitudes they deem insufficiently respectful of those virtues.

A habit that has led to another habit of theirs, mixing up their political interests with morality.

Works like this:

Communism is evil.  Conservatives hate Communism.  Therefore Conservatives hate evil and those who hate evil must be for evil's opposite.

Communism is evil.   Liberals don't hate Communism.  Therefore Liberals don't hate evil and those who don't hate evil must be for it.

This is, of course, based on historical nonsense.  Anti-communism wasn't inherently virtuous and even if it was it certainly wasn't an exclusive virtue of the Right's.

As a quick trip to the John F. Kennedy Museum and Library will tell you.

More later.

Meanwhile, Roy Edroso offers a few more suggestions for a conservative Milk.

Lincoln's best poem

Every blade of grass is a study;
And to produce two,
Where there was but one,
Is both a profit and a pleasure.
And not grass alone;
But soils, seeds, and seasons --
Hedges, ditches, and fences,
Draining, droughts, and irrigation --
Plowing, hoeing, and harrowing --
Reaping, mowing, and threshing --
Saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops,
And what will prevent or cure them --
Implements, utensils, and machines,
Their relative merits, and [how] to improve them --
Hogs, horses, and cattle --
Sheep, goats, and poultry --
Trees, shrubs, fruits, plants, and flowers --
The thousand things of which these are specimens --
Each a world of study within itself.

---A. Lincoln.  From an Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, rearranged as a poem by Fred Kaplan.

Reading off my Kindle at the County Fair with Abraham Lincoln

I kind of want a Kindle .  Note to wife and kids:  I'm not hinting around for Father's Day.  Another set of Rumpole DVDs would be perfect.  If I'm ever going to own a Kindle, I'll wait for the day they've come down in price to the point that I can treat it like a book and not an expensive toy and if I leave it on the subway or drop it in a puddle or spill a soda all over it I'll think, Gosh, that's too bad, guess I'll just have to buy another copy.

But a Kindle would come in handy when I travel.  Even for a short trip I'll throw three or four or even five books in my suitcase because I never know what I'll be in the mood to read when I get where I'm going and I want to be prepared.  And there have been many nights when I'm up late and suddenly get the urge to read a particular book or a work by a particular author and no one's ever answered my knock at the library door at midnight.  The local Barnes and Noble locks up at eleven.   The only places to buy books in the pre-dawn hours are one aisle over from the greeting cards at Price-Chopper or that place by the airport that just driving by it in the middle of the day makes me want to go home and take a shower.  It would have been cool the other night if I could have downloaded the book I had a hankering to read, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume.

Insomnia makes me a little crazy.

Funny thing, though.  These middle of the night fits of desire to edumacate meself never seem to carry over into the daylight and send me rushing out to the library or the bookstore first thing in the morning to be there when they open their doors.

If I had a Kindle it would fill up fast with a lot of books downloaded at one in the morning that were totally forgotten by two.

And here's another thing.

The day might come when I can treat a Kindle like a book, but the day will never come when a Kindle treats me the way a book does.

Each and every book is unique and each treats you differently when you read them.  I don't mean that the effect on your brain, on your heart, on your soul is different, although that's the case.  I mean that impression they leave is as physical and individual as that of a person or a dog or a tree or a rain shower.  Reading a book is a sensual as well as an intellectual adventure.  Obviously books look different.  They have different covers, different typefaces.  We take in at a glance that they come in different sizes and even in slightly different shapes.  But we feel all that and other differences too.  Books have weight.  They have smells.  They have sounds.  We can hear the differences between them.  Each book makes its own sound when it's opened---that cracking of the glue in the spine, a faint whisper of trapped air being released---and when it's slapped shut.  It sounds like itself when it slides off the shelf or is dropped on the floor or tossed onto a bed.  The sound of its pages turning is its voice.  Our nose knows the difference too.  Books smell.  The glue smells, the ink smells, the paper smells.  And in the dark we can tell the difference between two books on the nightstand just by picking them up and feeling the heft and shape in our hand.

Even two mass market paperback editions of the same book will feel different, particularly if one has been read and the other's brand-new.

But a Kindle is always itself.  No matter how creative publishers get with the interfaces, the Kindle will still feel like a Kindle, and that feeling will be the same as the feeling we get when we handle a calculator.  Next to nothing.  They are pretty much soundless, smell-less, weightless.  Holding one in your hand is a repetitive act.  When you pick one up to read, your hand and fingers shape themselves tonight the way the did last night, the way they will tomorrow, and while the turning of actual pages doesn't seem like it counts much in the way of work, it's far more intelligent and stimulating than pushing a button or running a finger over a glass screen.  It's intelligent because it gathers intelligence.  People think with their senses, the brain is just the command and storage center.  Our hands are probably the smartest things about us, much more reliable than our eyes.  Language made us human.  Opposable thumbs made us sapient.

Books make us smarter just by making us handle them.

Reading creates motion and sensation.  It stimulates.  A reader with a stack of books on the couch next to her or on her desk in the library or on the table in front of her at Barnes and Noble goes through a marvelous and intricate sensual dance just setting down one book and picking up another.

If she's reading on a Kindle she could switch between five or six books without you noticing her move or hearing a thing and she'll never have to worry about spilling her coffee or knocking over her stack of books in the process.

Barnes and Noble.  The library.

Here's something else important about the difference between reading a regular paper and glue book and reading it on a Kindle.

You have to go get that paper book from somewhere.

And from someone.

Reading a book is a social and socializing act.  Reading a book requires a trip to the fair.

I'll explain, but I have to take the long way around.

I'm sure you all know about the AIG exec who rather than return his bonus quit his job via a snotty and self-righteous op-ed in the Times.  Some people have sympathized with the guy or at least made a stab at understanding where he was coming from.  He'd worked hard.  He said.  He was good at his job.  He said.  He was honest.  He said.  And even though he worked in the division that sank AIG he had no idea that all that fraud and stupidity and reckless indifference to facts and likely consequences was going on.

He said.

Matt Tiabbi answered his points, one by one.

But even if all his claims about himself aren't bullshit, they are claims about himself.   He himself is his only object of concern.  He shows no sign that he understands that his job was playing not just with other people's money but with their lives.

People lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their life savings because of things AIG and the other big Wall Street casinos did.  It doesn't matter that he was personally honest and competent, he was still part of it.  In fact, his honesty and competence contributed to the disasters, because he helped keep that division, and AIG, going while the mess was being made.  The mess was bigger, the harm was greater, because he gave his incompetent and dishonest colleagues cover and time to continue making messes and doing harm.

It doesn't matter if he didn't know what was going on at the time.  He knows it now.  And it should bother him.  He should feel guilty, even if the actual blame doesn't fall on him.  It should bother him that he's pocketing millions of dollars while the people who were screwed by his fellow wheelers and dealers are wondering if they're going to have enough money to buy groceries next week.

But I get no sense that he has a sense that other people besides himself were screwed or that they even exist to be screwed.

Now, maybe he's just one of the legions of sociopaths who are attracted to jobs that promise money and power.  Maybe the culture of the financial world has become sociopathic and he, good soul that he once was, has been infected.

But I think the word might be too harsh.  It might be that he's not anti-social, he's just been de-socialized.  His problem isn't that he's a sociopath.  He's alienated.  Alienated in just that way sociologists and novelists in the 1950s warned that people who are cooped up in offices all day and caged in suburban split-levels all the rest of the time become alienated.

Cut off from the outside world with all its sensual stimulation, surrounded by a relatively small-set of like-minded co-workers, an individual can start to lose track of the fact that there is a world outside his own skin, that there are people different from himself with needs and desires that don't match his own.

The way the world works these days requires that millions of people remove themselves from it for hours and hours at a time, spending their days in what are essentially halls of mirrors, wrapped up in their own thoughts, focused on their own needs and wants and desires, when they aren't wrapped up in the abstractions called corporations they work for.  It's no wonder they grow a little heartless.  It's no wonder they go a little mad.

People need to mix and mingle with all sorts and conditions.  We need to bump into each other, step on each other's toes, get in each other's ways, and then we need to laugh it off, apologize, do that little side to side dance people who nearly collide on the sidewalk do trying to let the other person pass.  We need it to reminded that there are other people out there, outside ourselves, and they're not going where we're going, looking where we're looking, thinking what we're thinking.  It forces us to sympathize.   Not just with other people though.  With ourselves.  I don't mean in the sense of self-pity.  I mean in the sense of developing self-knowledge.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

To quote one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite poets.  The poem, by the way, is called To a Louse, and goes on:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us...

Seeing ourselves as others see us means seeing ourselves as selves, as distinct from them, and it does free us from many a blunder and foolish notion and cause us to leave off airs in dress and action by reminding us that what look like blunders and foolish notions in others aren't at all foolish to them and vice versa.

What we need is to get out and go to the fair.

Speaking of Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln loved books and reading.  Obviously.  I think he'd have enjoyed having a Kindle, growing up out there on the frontier where there weren't libraries and bookstores.  There are still towns and places, even in the United States, where Kindles would be a godsend to curious and intellectually minded children...adults, too.  But you know what else Lincoln loved?

Fairs.

Fairs are fun but they were more than fun for him.  They were the best places to go to get that power from the giftie and see ourselves as others see us by being forced to see them as they see themselves.

Agricultural fairs are becoming an institution of the country. They are useful in more ways than one. They bring us together, and thereby make us better acquainted and better friends than we otherwise would be. From the first appearance of man upon the earth down to very recent times, the words, "stranger" and "enemy" were quite or almost synonymous. Long after civilized nations had defined robbery and murder as high crimes, and had affixed severe punishments to them, when practiced among and upon their own people respectively, it was deemed no offense, but even meritorious, to rob and murder and enslave strangers, whether as nations or as individuals. Even yet, this has not totally disappeared. The man of the highest moral cultivation, in spite of all which abstract principle can do, likes him whom he does know. To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization. To this end our agricultural fairs contribute in no small degree. They render more pleasant, and more strong and more durable the bond of social and political union among us. Again, if, as Pope declares, "happiness is our being's end and aim," our fairs contribute much to that end and aim, as occasions of recreation, as holidays. Constituted as man is, he has positive need of occasional recreation, and whatever can give him this associated with virtue and advantage, and free from vice and disadvantage, is a positive good. Such recreation our fairs afford. They are a present pleasure, to be followed by no pain as a consequence: they are a present pleasure, making the future more pleasant.

That's from an Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, September 30, 1859.  Italics mine.

Fred Kaplan in what is becoming one of my favorite books on Lincoln, called simply Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer , elaborates a bit:

Like other socializing devices, from local markets to national legislatures, from language to law, from psychology to philosophy, state fairs exist, he proposed, to help make strangers into neighbors, to create sympathy between regions and nations, and, by inference, between North and South.  They help transform tribal loyalty into identification with all things human...

...True happiness, Lincoln implies, resides in being in consonance with the values that fairs promote, and happiness can best be construed philosophically as promoting the values and processes of civilization, one of whose "highest functions" is to eliminate enmity and promote sympathy "among strangers, as nations, or as individuals."  Self-interest at its most enlightened, he argued, is always other interest as well.

Again, my italics.

One of the things I miss about living in Syracuse is going to the State Fair every August.  You can learn a lot at the State Fair.  Somewhere in my head I have the exact number of dairy farms there were in New York State in 2003, the last time I was at the Fair, and the total tonnage of cheese produced here.  I know things about lemon sharks.  I know there are such things as lemon sharks.  I know exactly how many times a ten year old boy will go down a giant inflatable slide shaped like the Titanic sinking before he gets tired.  Seventy-two.  But what you mainly learn at a state fair is that just your one little patch of that state is filled with people who have very different ideas of what's important in life and what makes it worth living.

For instance, you learn that there are people who think that chainsaw sculptures are among the highest forms of art.  You learn that there are people for whom the raising of prize-winning guinea fowl is as great an achievement as winning a case before the Supreme Court is to a lawyer or a Pulitzer Prize is to a writer.  You learn that there are people who'd rather eat an elephant ear while strolling the midway than dine on a dessert made by the pastry chef at the most elegant restaurant in Paris.  You learn that there are some people who know how to make a sausage roll and some people who just don't.

In short, you learn that there are a lot of people in the world who are very different from you and who aren't the least bit sorry about it.

Back to the Kindle.

Reading is a solitary joy.  That's one of its main pleasures.  It can take us out of the world.  But before Kindle and e-books and the internet, you had to go out into the world first to get that book.  You had to go to the fair in the form of the library or the bookstore, and for me going out to get books, going to the library and the bookstore, is part of the fun.

At the bookstore and the library you have to mix and mingle.  You have to deal with and talk to and make allowances for all sorts and conditions.  You have ask for help or graciously decline it when it's offered and you don't need it.  You have to brush up against other people and squeeze out of the way so they can reach the book they want.  You have to nod and smile when you and someone else reach for the same shelf at the same time.  You have to face the fact that while you're reaching for something by Steinbeck they're reaching for the latest by Danielle Steele and that they are thinking about your choice what you're thinking about theirs---How can anybody read that crap?

In short, books, paper and glue books, by virtue of making us go out to the fair to get them help "correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy".

I still wouldn't mind owning a Kindle though.  But you know what I would like a whole lot better?

A bookstore nearby that was open at three in the morning.

_________________

Related, because after all this you still need more to read:

Wren worries that the Kindle is going to turn books into ephemera.

Josh Marshall worries that the Kindle is going to make writers and readers slaves to Amazon.com.

Rana isn't as worried as Josh and Wren. 

And here's an obliquely relevant quote from Terry Pratchett:

Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty.  After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being from constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards, the spiral can only wiggle downward.

The National Farm and Home Hour

Learned this just now from Adam Cohen's account of Franklin Roosevelt's first hundred days, Nothing to Fear .

One of FDR's most important pieces of legislation during that whirlwind three months was the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the farm bill, which was the heart of the President's program to help rescue farmers crushed by debt and falling food prices.  The plan was for the government to pay farmers to reduce production in order to raise prices.  There was things in the bill presented to Congress to rile Progressives and Conservatives and it stood a chance of not passing.  So Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, took to the radio to rally support.  The program he went on was the National Farm and Home Hour.

The National Farm and Home Hour.

Sixty minutes of programming on a major network devoted to farming and things like live coverage of "livestock exhibitions and harvest festivals".

Different time.  Different country.

It ain't so, Joe

I don't like New Deal revisionism when it's done by Republicans, but I don't like it when it's done by Democrats either.  So I was self-righteously indignant when I saw Yahoo's headline linking to this story from Politico.

"Biden:  Obama inherited tougher economic situation than FDR."

Um...no.

At least, not yet.

Politico's own headline (of the moment, at any rate) is: "VP:  Obama's job harder than FDR's."

Um...maybe.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected in a huge landslide.  He was given a more Democratic and more Progressive Congress.  He faced a more sympathetic and independent press corps.  He didn't inherit two wars.  And the American people had suffered over three years of ever-deepening misery under an President whose temperamental and principled reluctance to take action had begun to look like pig-headed, heartlessness---they were ready, eager, for a President who would dive in and do anything and everything to help, and while they expected solid results, they were overcome with gratitude and joy at just the effort itself.  It made them even more enthusiastically open to Roosevelt's plans.  And it helped that Roosevelt's banking crisis, the first problem he had to tackle, was the relatively straight-forward one of making sure depositors' money was safe and that they could get at it.  On the day he was inaugurated you couldn't cash a check to buy groceries with.  Eight days later, assuming your bank survived the holiday, you could.  Right out of the gate, FDR put food on people's tables.  That made him an instant practical success in a way President Obama couldn't be.

On the other hand...well, it would take a whole book to list all the particulars on the other hand, like this one by Eric Rauchway.

But it turns out I can't find anywhere in the story where the Vice-President says either that the economy is in worse shape than when Roosevelt took office or that President Obama's job is harder than FDR's.

What he said was that Obama's first hundred days, which are only a little more than half over, are more "difficult" than Roosevelt's, by which he means that the situation is more "complicated."

This is quite possibly true, in the sense that piloting a boat through a storm isn't as difficult or complex as assembling a model of the same boat inside a bottle after you've lost the instructions.

Which makes it debatable.  But you know what?  I don't want to debate it.  I don't even want to hear it.  You know why?  Because whether or not it's true, it sounds like excuse-making to me.

It's a joke, right, how every repairman who comes to your house has to tell you what a mess the guy who came before him left?  It's not a joke here.  Every repairman we've had in has said it but that's because the guy who came before them all was a former owner who fancied himself a do-it-himselfer and liked to get creative.  Nevermind.  President Obama and his spokespersons can't help sounding like those repairmen from time to time.  The guy who came before left a horrendous mess.  Here's the thing.  We don't want to hear it.  Not over and over, anyway.  We know about the guy who came before.  That's why we hired you.  Please, get to work and fix it.

We can watch the repairmen, although that's kind of rude unless you're ten years old.   Better to listen from another room.  We can hear them banging about, grunting and groaning with the effort, whistling while they work, talking back and forth about what a bugger this line or that joint is, and not saying, we hope, things like "Shit!" and "Oh oh" and "Where did that come from?"

We can't watch the President and his advisors at work or even listen in.  We have to rely on their reports to know that the work is being done and find out how it's going.

And that's all we need to hear.  What's being done and how it's going.  We don't want to hear "Shit!" and "Oh oh" and "Where did that come from?"  And we don't need to be told a hundred times what a mess the guy who came before left.

My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part Two.

Part One is here.

"What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds  that underlie the words.  Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished.  Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.  This is because meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed."

When Robert Frost talked about "the sound of sense," he meant that reading and writing, using language to transmit a thought, was a physical act.  We understand words by their sounds.  The sense of a poem is conveyed sensually.  We have to hear it to make sense of it.  If something doesn't sound right, it doesn't mean right---or mean anything.  You can't be a good poet or writer if you have a tin ear.

(The deaf have a different experience, but I would guess that they still feel words.  Maybe there's not  a sound of sense but a sensing of sense.  And Steve Kuusisto has an interesting post up at newcritics about how as a blind lover of literature he hears things in a poem sighted readers are, well, deaf to.  Walt Whitman, Steve says, had a lousy ear.)

We learn to use our language at the same time we are learning to sort out and make sense of the physical world we got dumped into without a manual or set of instructions.  Our first words are tied to the immediately physical, to things and actions, and are tools for helping us manipulate those things.  Talking is our first physical labor.  Naming things, saying them, is our way of taking hold of them.  The word and the object are physically connected by the sound.

Words that have no sound have no sense.  Make no sense.  My students who could not hear what they wrote and read were at a loss.  Words on a page did not connect to the real world or to themselves.

For most of my students, the ones who had been lucky enough to have had some one who read out loud to them when they were young and so helped connect spoken words to written words, the connection was severed just at the point when it should have been even more strongly reinforced.  Adults stopped reading out loud to them before they'd learned to really read and write.  Just about the time when they were ready to graduate from picture books to chapter books the grown-ups shut up their own copies and said, Now you are old enough to read it for yourself.  And when their teachers began to teach them to write sentences more complex than See Spot run, dealing with the written word became a more or less silent and private activity.  These children went off by themselves to read by themselves to themselves.   They sat at their desks and struggled, in silence, to turn out compositions that their teachers would read silently, later, and neither they nor the teacher would ever hear the sound of their words.  By the time they reached my class, words on a page barely whispered to them, if they made any noise in their heads at all.  All writing was something done instead of and apart from speaking.

If I'd been a true scholar I'd have studied this.  I'd have conducted surveys and researched current pedagogic theories and practices.  Maybe I'd have published a few papers, gotten a book out of it.  But I was a young teacher in a hurry and I saw this as a problem that needed to be dealt with right then and there and not as an opportunity to build an academic career on.  I was impatient and short-sighted is what I was.  I decided to try to fix things and set out to reconnect the sight of their written words with the sounds and I did this the only way I could think of because it is the only way to do it.  I had them reading out loud.

Whatever we studied or discussed, poems, passages from essay, their own work, we read it first.  I didn't ask for volunteers.  I just pointed.  If I asked a question and you answered it, you had to be ready to read to the class the paragraph or the verse you were talking about.  When they'd written their second drafts, I broke them up into small groups that I called editorial boards (each one organized around one of the better writers in the class, although I never pointed that out) and they helped each other with the next revision by reading over, out loud, what worked and what didn't.  My classrooms were pleasantly noisy places.  Colleagues who passed by the door would ask me later what was going on.  "It sounds like you're having a party in there."

I don't know how much good this approach did.  There were problems with it.  Not every student can read well out loud or wants to.  Telling students to write like they talked was all well and good, provided they thought first about what they were talking about, and just because they could talk about something better than they could write about it, that didn't mean they were all born orators and storytellers.  Without careful questioning and tactful prompting they could be just as vague and dull and grammatically- and lexiconally-challenged when they talked as when they wrote.  But it did some good.  It brought the language back to life for them.  It made them interested in the sound of their own voices.  It forced them to focus on specific examples when they set out to make a point.  It made class a lot more fun than it would have been if the only sound they heard was my voice droning on about grammar and usage.  And most of them left the class with at least one poem in their head and heart that had moved them in some way.

Whatever good it did them, it suited me and made teaching more enjoyable, and that fact has often made me wonder how much it really was the case that I was on to something useful and how much it was just the case that I was rationalizing my own fun and games.  Then the other day I was reading Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer and I came across something that made me hopeful that I hadn't been just fooling around.

Young Abe Lincoln, as we all know, loved learning and he loved books.  But out on the frontiers of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, where he grew up, books were scarce, and formal schooling a rare luxury.  Lincoln was in and out of schools, never completing a whole year at any one, and it's hard to say that when he was done he'd had even the equivalent of a fifth grade education.  Most of what Lincoln knew he taught himself, and that included how, beyond the basics, to read and write, and he taught himself how to do that by reciting.

And he often recited from memory.  One of the ways he made up for the lack of books he owned was to memorize the ones he could borrow.  He'd commit favorite passages, chapters, poems, speeches, entire essays to memory and when he needed to he'd recite, sometimes to himself, often to anyone he could make stand around an listen.  It was not an unusual sight, wherever his family happened to be living, to see the tall, gangly, squeaky-voiced boy, normally a shy and quiet and solitary type, standing on a stump or sitting on a fence and delivering a speech by his political idol Henry Clay or a soliloquy from Shakespeare to a crowd of playmates or curious and amused adults.

Around he time he turned fourteen, Lincoln immersed himself in a couple of anthologies he found among his step-mother's small but prized collection of books, Lindley Murray's The English Reader and William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, Or, a a Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Verse.  Kaplan writes:

Both equate, as William Scott does on his title page, "READING and SPEAKING."  Scott placed emphasis on reading aloud, a practice Lincoln had already adopted.  From the start, reading seemed to him an aspect of oral performance, the words enunciated in the theater of his own head or aloud to himself or to family and schoolmates.  Public recitation as a teaching device emphasized the connection.  The repetition that Lincoln believed facilitated comprehension also promoted memorization.  "Abe could Easily learn & long remember and when he did learn anything he learned it well and thoroughly," his stepmother recalled.  "What he learned he stowed away in his memory...repeated over & over & over again till it was...fixed firmly & permanently..."  He developed an anthology of the mind, independent of whether he had the actual book in hand.  "My mind is like a piece of steel," he later remarked, "very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible once you get it there to rub it out."

The man who wrote, and said:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Was the boy who amused himself as he did his chores by reciting:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
  And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Lincoln was Lincoln, and what worked for a self-taught genius may not have any application for us ordinary mortals, but one of Kaplan's points is that Lincoln made himself Lincoln through his reading and writing, through his love for and careful use of the English language, and for Lincoln words were physical things, they had a sound, and through their sounds they made sense, they were meant to be heard.

I don't know if there was a Lincoln among my students.  If there turns out to have been, I'm not going to take credit for her success.  All I'm hoping is that somewhere out there are some people who love the sounds of words and appreciate the connection between the sounds they make and sense they convey and, if they are teachers, they're passing that along to their students, and if they're not teaching they're making use of it in courtrooms and newsrooms and town meetings or in the theaters of their own minds, and that all of them are reading out loud to their kids.

__________________________

The other President from Illinois:  I suppose I should write "one of the other Presidents from Illinois" since, technically, Ronald Reagan counts.  In fact, he was born there and Lincoln and Obama weren't.  But you know what I mean.

President Obama clearly relishes the connection between the spoken word and the written one.  So I hope there'll be a lot of reading out loud in this new course at Ohio State, Barack Obama and/as Literature.  The reading list is made up of some of the President's favorite books and includes, naturally, a collection of the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln.

Hat-tip to Gabrielle David at Rabble Rouser's Forum.

My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part One.

"There is, thank God, no Teacher Meter," wrote the poet and essayist and sometime teacher Wendell Berry, "And there never is going to be one.  A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild."

My former students aren't old enough to have grandchildren yet.  I don't know what good I did any of them and never will know.  I like to think that all over Indiana there are these thirty-something parents reciting their favorite poem from college to their kids at bedtime in the bad music hall cockney accent used by that professor, what was his name again?---

Now in Injia's sunny clime
Where I used to spend my time
A-serving of her Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din...

Don't scoff.  I had them in tears by the end of it, every time.

What I hope, though, is that, since so many of my students were education majors, that I managed to impress upon them the one truly useful insight I had into the teaching of composition, which was this:

Written English and Spoken English are not two different languages.

Very shortly after I started teaching I discovered that a great many of my students couldn't write.

But they sure could talk.

They could tell me anything.  They could describe a process, analyze a poem, compare this to that and contrast that to this, and narrate an adventure, not always eloquently, but thoughtfully, coherently, interestingly.  They were a pleasure to listen to.

But when they tried to write out a description or an analysis, when they compared and contrasted, when they narrated an event on paper the result would be something close to gibberish.

They wrote in a different language than they spoke, following different rules of grammar and usage that they understood imperfectly and using vocabularies that were not their own or which contained a mere fraction of the words that flowed out of them when they spoke. 

I had them writing three drafts of every paper and I met with them individually to go over their first drafts with them---some weeks I would have sixty to seventy half hour editorial conferences to go over essays sentence by sentence.  I don't know how I managed this.  I was young.  I thought I was superteacher,  I guess.  Usually there'd come a point in a meeting when, hiding my exasperation, I'd point to a particularly tangled or empty paragraph and ask the student what he or she had been trying to say in it.

They'd look at it, their own words, often less than a hour from their printer, and they wouldn't know.  They wouldn't even recognize it as their own writing.  It was gibberish to them too.

I'd pull the paper back and say, "Tell me what you wanted to say."

And they would.

Sometimes it took some prompting.  But they would do it.  They would tell me a paragraph that was thoughtful, coherent, interesting.

And while they were telling me, I'd write down what they were saying.

When they were done I'd read back to them what they'd said.

This would lead to an exchange that went something like this:

Me:  Sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

Student:  Sure does.

Me:  Try writing like that.

Student:  How is that?

Me: Write like you're talking to me.

Student:  I can do that?

Me:  Well, leave out the ums and ers and like you knows.

Student (very doubtfully):  Um...ok...

They tried, but it was difficult for them.  They thought speaking and writing were very different skills, like painting and sculpting or carpentry and plumbing.  Basically, they didn't believe they talked smart enough.  Writing looked smarter than they felt, it looked more difficult to decode than anything anyone told them.   Then I realized what was happening.  To them good writing looked like something.  It didn't sound like anything, let alone an ordinary person talking.  When they wrote they weren't transcribing what they heard inside their own heads, they were copying something they had seen, something they had been taught was good writing.  Being normal American teenagers, most of them weren't readers, and this meant that what most of them were trying to make their writing look like was what they thought teachers thought was good writing, textbooks and encyclopedias.

It meant that for the most part they were trying to make their own writing look like boring writing.

I keep saying look like because to them it didn't sound like something.  Writing had no sound.  Words on a page probably weren't completely silent to them but they didn't speak with a normal human voice.  The words they read had no feeling, and I mean that they conveyed no emotions, but I also mean that my students didn't feel the words.  Their bodies didn't react to them.  The written word was actually alien to them. 

I had never thought deeply about this before and I'd had no experience teaching small children and, since this was years before my own kids came along and went through it, I had no idea what was going on in grade schools these days.  I had only my own vague memories of learning to read and write.  But what I mainly remembered was that when I was a kid grown-ups were always reading to me.

My favorite books had been books that Captain Kangaroo read to me and when I was old enough to read them myself I read them like the Captain did, out loud.  You should hear me read Caps For Sale .  I still read it just as I remember the Captain reading it, drawing out the peddlers call almost mournfully, "Caaaaaaps!  Caps for sale!  Fifty cents a cap!"

At some point before I reached fourth or fifth grade this must have stopped.  I don't think I ever read the Hardy Boys out loud or that any of my teachers read The Gift of the Magi or The Ransom of Red Chief out loud.  But it was around this time in my life that I found a paperback copy of Macbeth among my father's books.  By the time I got to eighth grade, I'd read all of Shakespeare's plays except Henry VIII (because I knew he hadn't written all of it.  I still haven't read it, and I refuse to bother with The Two Noble Kinsmen either.).  And reading Shakespeare inspired me to write my own plays.  Writing my own plays made me want to read other people's plays to find out how it was done in contemporary English prose---I never got the hang of writing in Elizabethan blank verse.   For the end of my grade school years and on into high school, then, my personal reading mostly included plays, which is to say, writing that was meant to be spoken out loud, and since I joined the Drama Club, that's what happened to a lot of what I read.  It got said.

Had I but world enough and time....end of Part One.  Follow the link to Part Two.

Of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE...

February 12, 1809 was yesterday...

Now he tells us

Bob Woodward's offering Barack Obama ten rules of thumb for a successful President.

Funny thing.  Woodward forgot to put one key item on the list.

Early in your first term and then again just before you're up for re-election, try to get a highly regarded, powerful and influential editor at the Washington Post to write sycophantic, myth-building bestselling books about you based entirely on bald-faced lies by your toadies, henchmen, and court lackeys.

Actually, Woodward's list of commandments can be boiled down to a single golden rule:

Do not be like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney in any way.

All Woodward's points are fairly obvious, easy but important lessons drawn from the biographies of the best Presidents.  (The Post requires registration.  In case you don't have time, I put the list, without Woodward's commentary, at the bottom of this post.) They are things most of us already knew before 2000 and had learned again the hard way by 2004.  Which is why so many of us never wanted George W. Bush to get anywhere near the White House and so looked forward to getting him out of there.  The qualities and habits and methods Woodward says a successful President needs are qualities, habits, and methods George W. Bush---and Dick Cheney---were temperamentally averse to.

They are qualities, habits, and methods that Bush and Cheney shunned from the first day of their co-dependent Presidency.

And they are qualities, habits, and methods Bob Woodward told us they had, told us didn't matter, and ignored entirely as bases for judgment when he couldn't bring himself to tell us either of the first two things in his books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, qualities, habits, and methods Woodward discovered they didn't have when it came time to write his next two books, State of Denial and The War Within, both of which were written too late to be of any use in judging whether or not Bush should be re-elected in 2004.

Funny thing, when he was writing The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind had no problem seeing and reporting that Bush and his gang not only lacked those qualities, habits, and methods but openly disdained them.  But then he didn't rely solely on the word of liars, sycophants, and cringing careerists for his research.

And Richard Clarke knew it and warned us about in Against All Enemies .But then he was there.

___________________________

Updated to save you the trouble of registering at the Post right this minute:  Woodward's to do and to don't list:

1. Presidents set the tone. Don't be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.

2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even -- or especially -- when there are vehement disagreements.

3.A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.

4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure that bad news makes it to the Oval Office.

5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.

6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.

7. Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.

8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.

9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.

10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public -- and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.

George Bush's last second chance and the American refutation of the Book of Ecclesiastes

Unless the aliens landed before noon Tuesday and he donned his old flight suit, jumped into the cockpit of an F-14 conveniently parked on the White House lawn, kept fueled up and with rockets armed for eight years for just such an emergency, and flew off into the skies to shoot down all the flying saucers by himself and I missed it, former President George W. Bush is going to be remembered mainly for four things.

Starting and failing to win a war of aggression against a nation that was no threat to us.

Playing air guitar while a great American city drowned, then leaving it to rot in the mud for three years.

Getting caught flat-footed by the greatest financial meltdown in the country's history since 1929, a meltdown in great part caused by his administration and Party's policies, practices, and neglect.

Reading a children's storybook while terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center.

History books will note that Bush lied us and bullied us and frightened us into the War, that the only victims of Katrina he appeared to muster any compassion for were a rich Southern Senator and his own incompetent head of FEMA---"Heckuva job, Brownie."---that his "solution" to the economic collapse was to give away the Treasury to the crooks and fools who'd made the mess, that he'd been warned a month ahead of time that terrorists planned to hijack airplanes and use them to kill people.  Historians will add other details, about torture, about alienating allies, about politicizing all aspects of government and turning the Justice Department into the legal arm of the Republican Party, about the attempt to hand over all our Social Security money to the same crooks and fools who wrecked our banking system.  But in the popular imagination, George W. Bush will be the President who turned everything he touched to shit.

In the month or so before he left office, left town, and, let's hope, left us alone at last, squads of Bush League apologists took to the airwaves and the op-ed pages to try to persuade History to look kindly on their old boss and hero.  It was irritating to listen to and read, but also amusing, because the only way most of them could find to go about making the case that Bush had been a successful President was by arguing that he hadn't actually been that bad.

The rest just made up a character named George Bush and told folk tales about a fictional Presidency.

But to the degree any of them were serious, they were forced to rely on one idea.  History would prove that George W. Bush was right.

No, it won't.  Like I said, History's already being written and it's not good news for Bush. 

Even if the pages were still blank, though, think about what's being argued.  That sometime, in the future, George W. Bush will turn out to have been a completely different person and President for the one we took him for.

In the future, George Bush is going to get yet another shot at getting it right.

He's going to be given one more second chance after a lifetime of second chances.

For a variety of reasons many Washington Media Insiders were heavily invested in the idea of Bush as a successful President and they never tired of assuring us that any day now he'd start acting like one.

David Broder was particularly fond of this pretty story.

This claque of journalists and pundits rooted overtly for Bush's transfiguration which they seemed convinced was inevitable, if it wasn't already happening right before their eyes.  The day was coming soon when he would lead them up the mountain to blind them with his glory and there they would build tents for him and for Ronald Reagan on his right and Winston Churchill on his left.

They covered George Bush as a phoenix, reborn and brand new as President after every self-immolating screw-up and act of destruction.  This is it, this time he'll turn it around.  Every defeat was a victory in disguise, the re-defining moment.

All their hopes and expectations were based on the notion that people change.

Starting over is one of our national myths, an item of faith in the religion of America.  Pack up and move.  Go west, young man.  Hit the gym.  Change jobs.  Get out of that awful marriage.  Go back to school.  Win the lottery.  Quit smoking.  Stop drinking.  Give up gambling and running around.  Find Jesus, and be born again.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

This was the basis of George Bush's whole political career.  At age 40 or so, after a lifetime of failure, screw-ups, and disgrace, he'd put down the bottle, turned his life over to Jesus, and practically overnight become a new man.  That as a new man he was hardly indistinguishable from the old one except that instead of trying to do anything for himself and making a hash of it he let smarter, more diligent, more determined and focused men use him as their tool.  Nevermind that last part.  The important part of the story is that he changed.

And having changed he was now ready and able to be the success he was born to be.

This idea, that people change, especially when God and Jesus take them by the hand, and that that change always leads to success and happiness, is so dear to so many Americans that they were willing to reward Bush for the great things he had not yet done on the grounds that of course now that he had changed he would do them.  They made him Governor of Texas and then President of the United States, even though there was nothing in his past that suggested he'd be any good at either job and much that showed he would in fact be as bad as he turned out to be.

The past didn't matter.  He'd changed.  That which had been crooked had been made straight.  That which was wanting had been numbered.  All was not vanity and vexation and seeking after wind.

If he can do it, we can do it.

We elected George Bush President of the United States to reward ourselves for the changes we were going to make that would make us better, happier, richer, wiser, thinner, sexier, younger, stronger, cleaner, sober, worthier of love and therefore loved.

People change.  Bush changed.  We can change.

This is the central tenet of one of the great American religions.  There's Football, there's Money, and then there's the Church of the Second Chance, which has many denominations and hundreds of forms of worship, rites, rituals, and practices.  It is the religion of the self-help movement and the psycho-therapeutic industry.  It has replaced Christianity in many of the mega-churches.  Used to be you rose from the Mourner's Bench to testify.  Now you attend workshops and form support groups.  The point used to be saving one's soul for a better life to come.  Now the point is saving one's sense of self-worth in the here and now, and considering how miserable, lonely, and self-loathing so many of us are, it's hard to argue that this isn't a good point for a religion to make.

People change.  Bush changed.  I can change.

Well, people do change.  They kick bad habits and develop new, good ones.  They change jobs and discover talents they never knew they had.  They find satisfaction in tasks they'd never had reason to suspect they'd be any good at.  They go back to school and learn new skills and new ideas and new methods.  They move across country and make new friends, discover joys in scenery they'd never imagined was out there to enjoy, find the change in the weather has improved their health and mental well-being. They go to a doctor and come out with a prescription and within weeks their moods have evened out, their sadness has lifted, their anxiety is gone.  They fall in love and discover that it's true, the whole world loves a lover, and they love the whole world in return.

They fall asleep misers and misanthropes on Christmas eve, secret, solitary, and self-contained as oysters, and wake up on Christmas morning as good a friend, as good a master or mistress, as good a man or woman as the good old City knows.

People change.  But they transform.  They don't transmutate.

The new persons they become are made out of the same stuff as the old persons they were.

And more often than not it's not the case that they have changed but that their circumstances have.  They've been given an opportunity.

The apparently mediocre and deservedly obscure math teacher miserably going through the motions in a suburban high school where the principal's a blockhead, the students are without ambition, and the parents think schools exist to justify the hiring of a football coach takes a job in the inner city and a few years later is winning awards and receiving Christmas cards from former students beginning their graduate work at MIT and Cal Tech.

The drop-out from that teacher's old school enlists because there's nothing else to do and a few years later is commanding a company of Marines.

The washed-up quarterback working as a clerk in a grocery store gets a second look and a tryout and fifteen years later is leading his team to the Super Bowl.

But there's nothing magical about the apparent changes in these "new" people.  If you look back, the teacher always knew his subject and had a talent for explaining it, just no one was listening to him.  The Marine captain was always brave and a quick thinker and she had a way of getting people to follow her lead.  Kurt Warner always had a good arm and a good eye.

The "changed" person who showed no signs before her transformation that she would become this "new" person is a rare, rare bird.  And it's more likely in such a case that it's not that she didn't show any signs but that there was no one around her perceptive enough to spot them or that her circumstances before the change were so horrific that she wasn't able to be any kind of person at all, she was merely a reaction to or a reflection of the horror.

And a person can only change with a change of circumstances to the degree she has the talent or the skill or the wisdom or the discipline to take advantage of the change.  A bad accountant can change accounting jobs as many times as he wants but if the problem is that he's innumerate he's not going to change himself in the process.

Change requires the person who wants to change to make smart choices about what to change into.

A man who does not take advice well, who is incurious, short-tempered, and impatient, who can't be bothered with minutia, nuance, and ambiguities, who needs to surround himself with flatterers and toadies and lackeys, who loses focus easily, who refuses to admit mistakes which means he can't correct them, who thinks that he is owed the job instead of having to earn it, is not going to change into a good President no matter how much he has "changed" by sobering up and turning to Jesus and no matter how many second chances he's given.

When people talked about Barack Obama's lack of experience as a disqualification for the Presidency, they were not looking at his biography.  When other people talked about how Sarah Palin's lack of experience should not be a disqualification, because look at Barack Obama, they weren't looking at her biography.

The record of President Obama's life is the record of someone who has always been changing himself for the better, of someone who has worked exceptionally hard at whatever he's done, learned from every job he's undertaken how to do the next job, who has improved himself by leaps and bounds all his life.  All Presidents have had to learn on the job.  President Obama has a history of learning on the job extremely well.

The record of Sarah Palin's life, though, is the record of someone who has always managed to improve her situation while not doing very much to improve herself.  It's the record of a vain and overly self-confident person who has just assumed she's deserving of and up to whatever job she's decided she wants.  Look at her now and you see someone who didn't learn anything from the fall campaign except that people don't love her as much as she deserves to be loved.  She has said she may run for President, she's probably going to run for the United States Senate, but she's not doing anything to prepare herself for either job.  Instead she's busy teaching herself how to become a better celebrity and making headlines by whining and pitying herself in public.

The record of George Bush's life wasn't simply the record of a chronic fuck-up.  It was the record of someone who learned nothing from his mistakes, of someone who did nothing different every time he was given a second chance.   The myth of George W. Bush is the myth of a man who changed.  But I'm not sure Bush himself ever thought for a moment he needed to change.  It looks to me as though he thought of his drinking as an obstacle not a symptom of deep-rooted unhappiness or a sign of a bad or a weak character.  I think he made the mistake of thinking the only problem he had was drinking and he thought of his drinking as if it was a form of temperamental asthma, a health problem that kept him from running that four-minute mile he knew he was capable of running if he could only find a cure and get up his wind.  Once he quit, he thought, he was done.   It never occurred to him that even if his lungs were up to it, his legs might not be, and he needed to go into training.  Didn't help that he was surrounded by people who found it to their advantage to spot him a hundred yards in every race and move the finish line closer and bribe the judges and knobble the competition.

George Bush's record after he quit drinking is not the record of a man who stopped fucking up but of a man who stopped trying.  As I said, Bush's successes after he got clean and sober were due to his putting himself in the hands of other people who succeeded for him without taking any of the credit.

George Bush did not change, but the story of his life could be told in a way that made it sound as if he did, and the American faith in change and our belief in a second chance is so strong that Bush's handlers and enablers hardly had to work to exploit it.

It was often said by his admirers that George Bush was authentic, that he was exactly what he appeared to be.  But this was a vice not a virtue.  He didn't have the character or the temperament for the job and he never tried to change that, and given that once in office he pursued policies that had proven countless times in the past to be worse than useless, there was never a real chance he would turn out to be a successful President.   History will not give him another second chance.

Unless...

Maybe he learned something from all the time he spent working with President Obama in the last couple months.  Maybe when he's out of office and away from Dick Cheney he'll be able to listen to his father, follow his example.  Maybe he'll make friends with Bill Clinton too.  He was never a good President, but maybe like Jimmy Carter he can become a good ex-President...

Sorry.  Can't help myself.  I'm an American.  I believe in second chances.  The religion of Change is my religion too.

__________________________________

I don't think History will be kind to Bush, but Will Bunch is worried that the attempts to rewrite it in Bush's favor will continue for a long time yet to come.  Good reason to worry.  Long after 60 per cent of the people had figured him out, plenty Media bobbleheads were still at it.

This time, they kept insisting, he'll be different.

Some of them stayed at it till the end.

He can still turn it all around.  History will come to rescue his reputation.  It's happened before.  Look at Harry Truman.

A real understanding of history has never been required mental equipment for a job in the Washington Press Corps.

There are historical reasons for Truman's unpopularity when he left office, reasons that have no parallel in assessments of Bush's Presidency.  And the reasons for Truman's late in life ascension to beloved elder statesmen are more biographical than historical.   The case for Harry Truman was made by Harry Truman in Merle Miller's Plain Speaking .  Truman turned out to be his own best advocate.  Historians had already begun to revise their estimation of Truman, but Truman himself is the one who changed the popular conception of his Presidency.

He told his own story in a direct, simple but eloquent, and above all truthful fashion, and he changed people's minds.

Perhaps Laura will be able to speak up for George the way Harry was able to speak up for himself, but no one should be expecting any literary surprises from George W. Bush.  Grant's Memoirs were only a surprise to people who hadn't read his letters and war dispatches or met with him for extended conversations.

Cliff Schecter sums up Bush's legacy of failure.

Jon Swift delivers the rebuttal.

_________________________

Bleg:  Please help keep this blog going strong with your donation.  You can donate through PayPal, using the button below (Send money to lmannion109[at sign]yahoo[dot] com) or the button at the top of my right-hand sidebar. You don't need to have a PayPal account.  Or you can send donations by snail mail to Lance Mannion, PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561. Make checks or money orders payable to my bookkeeper, E. Reilly. Thank you for your support and generosity. Most of all, thanks for reading.

 

Malia Obama's daddy

What Malia said to him the other day:

"Better be good."

Saving the New Deal that saved us

Yes, Mr Hume, we all know the New Deal was a failure, if by failing you mean that it didn't end the Great Depression.  We learned that in high school.

As an afterthought.

The New Deal didn't end the Depression.

It saved the nation!

Conservatives' current attempts to rewrite the history of the 1930s isn't new.  Undoing the New Deal has been their one over-riding idea for seventy-five years.  It's not even an idea.  It's a vendetta.  Circumstances---another instance of their beloved utterly unregulated, every man for himself brand of capitalism destroying the economy, the election of a Democratic President---have forced them to step up their efforts.  They have to harp on the failure of the New Deal, first, to justify sabotaging Democratic attempts to bring relief to the poor and aid to the middle and working class and, second, to set up their inevitable claims down the road that those attempts didn't actually bring the relief and aid they appeared to bring.

But to make the case that the New Deal failed, if what you mean is simply that it didn't end the Depression, you have to mean that the Depression was purely an economic problem, a perfect storm of economic crises, and that the New Deal was only an economic response, a bunch of government spending programs designed to return the country to prosperity.

The Depression was a political crisis.

The causes were economic, but the effects were political in that the entire body politic was on the verge of coming apart.

Roosevelt didn't set out in his first hundred days to put a chicken back in every pot and a car in every garage.  The New Deal wasn't designed to end the Depression, to the extent that it was designed at all---the legislation FDR introduced and the programs he implemented were a hodge-podge of experiments, ad hoc and stop-gap measures, items from a decades-old Progressive wish list, and familiar though with greatly increased budgets government building projects, not to mention a quick re-legalization of beer, much of it in conflict with itself, some parts of it canceling out others, all of it more full of hope and wish than of predictable positive result.  Roosevelt's first and primary intent wasn't to end the Depression.  It was to put the brakes on it.

He was out to keep things from getting worse while alleviating people's suffering and holding the country together.

This wasn't a matter of a lot of individuals losing their jobs and everybody else having to cut back on their spending.  It was a matter of whole neighborhoods losing their jobs at once and lots of people cutting back on eating and of having to give up their homes.

In Detroit and Pittsburgh, half the workforce was unemployed.

In Iowa, close to 17,000 farms a year had gone up for foreclosure.  In Mississippi, on inauguration day, more than a third of all the farms were on the auction block.

In Illinois, 2000 schools had to close.

When Roosevelt took office, the banks in 32 states had shut their doors.

People were starving.

Families were ruined.

Whole communities were disintegrating.

And it was all so crazy.  As H.W. Brands writes in new biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class :

The most discouraging aspect of the Great Depression was that it defied common logic.  People went hungry while farmers dumped milk in ditches and left crops standing in the fields.  The thriftiest savers, cautious souls who had shunned the stock market as reckless speculation, saw their carefully tended nest eggs vanish overnight as banks collapsed.  Factories sat idle while millions wanted nothing more than to go back to work.

And for over three years, President Hoover kept treating the Depression as an economic problem and in the way business-friendly politicians like to treat economic problems, by telling people that the problem would fix itself, folks just needed to be patient, tighten their belts, maybe give a little more of the money they didn't have to local charities, an approach that as bad news followed bad news had begun to look to the People like neglect with a sugarcoat of sanctimony.  It had begun to look to the People that the government, supposedly their government, didn't care what happened to them, and what good was a government that was willing to sit by and watch while the lives of its citizens fell to pieces? 

The Depression wasn't just an emptying of the country's collective wallet.  It was a hollowing out of its collective soul.

The People had begun to doubt.

They doubted their government.  They doubted their form of government.  They doubted business.  They doubted capitalism.  They doubted their fellow Americans, they doubted their neighbors, they doubted their friends, they doubted themselves.

When FDR hauled himself up on his withered legs and stood at the podium to take his oath of office and deliver his inaugural address, he didn't see his job that day as addressing the nation's economic woes alone.

He was there to address the people's doubt.  He was there to address their fear.

I AM certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

The country, not just its economy, needed to be saved, and Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal saved it.

Of course conservatives ignore this part of the history when they call the New Deal a failure.  They prefer to focus on numbers, which they fudge when they're not just making them up, and they also like to talk as if the Depression itself, even as an economic event, came out of nowhere and all at once, as if hadn't been wearing America down for years before FDR took office, as if it blew in overnight like a storm and struck with full force on March 3, 1933 while Herbert Hoover was riding sullenly in the car with Roosevelt on the way to the Inauguration.  Their attacks depend on no one remembering that Hoover had been dealing with the Depression by doing  the pretty much nothing that conservatives want Obama to do now, while the crisis worsened and worsened.

And it depends on no one remembering that Roosevelt was often stymied by conservatives of his day in Congress and in the Courts.

But ultimately, it depends on people forgetting what the New Deal meant politically.

In his inaugural address----which by the way is almost entirely without any specific references to the economic problems as economic problems; they are discussed more as moral failures with moral solutions, the address is almost as much a spiritual and religious document, a sermon, as it is a political manifesto, and it is that, a manifesto---right after the line about fear itself, Roosevelt says:

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Those two sentences gave a lot of people a shock.  They could sound as though Roosevelt is asking for the people to make him a dictator.  What they were, though, was the opening clause of the New Deal.

The deal Roosevelt was offering was this:  If the people would put their faith back in the government and work with it, the government would put its faith in them and work with them to solve the current problems, including the ongoing ones that weren't caused by the Depression but may have been caused by the same anti-democratic forces that had caused the Depression (i.e. the greedy rich), and any future problems.  In short, if the People were willing to work harder at governing themselves, the government would never again stand by while the nation bled and People suffered.

FDR's first inaugural address was a Revolutionary document, in that, like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it harkened back to the Revolution, the the document of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and reiterated and expanded upon the essential theme that the government of the United States is government of the People, by the People, for the People.

No wonder conservatives hate Roosevelt and hate the New Deal.  Their idea of how the government works is that it's government of us, by them, for them.

Instinctively, if not always intellectually, conservatives understand that the New Deal did in fact save the country and it saved it from them.

(Top two uncredited photographs borrowed from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum website.  Bottom photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of Dr X.)

__________________________

Many conservatives aren't content with arguing that the New Deal didn't end the Depression.  They've added the lie that it actually made the Depression worse.

David Sirota and Adam Cohen have dealt with that whopper, Sirota in his syndicated column and Cohen in the New York Times.

Updated:  It wasn't all FDR on his lonesome, of course.  Read Digby on Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, and her role as conscience of the New Deal.

Bleg:  Please help keep this blog going strong with by donating a dollar or two today. You can donate through PayPal, using the button below (Send money to lmannion109[at sign]yahoo[dot] com) or the button at the top of my right-hand sidebar. You don't need to have a PayPal account.  Or you can send donations by snail mail to Lance Mannion, PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561. Make checks or money orders payable to my bookkeeper, E. Reilly. Thank you for your support and generosity.

 

History lessons from Larry, Moe, and Curly

I don't know if it's true that all women hate the Stooges, but my mother sure did.

Local station when I was a little kid used to show an hour of The Three Stooges every morning between six and seven.  Back then I was an early riser, the earliest riser in the Mannion homestead, and I loved having the house to myself.  I'd pour myself a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice and settle down in front of the TV to watch the Stooges.  I had to keep the sound down very low, though, because Mom Mannion was a light sleeper and as soon as she heard the first Nyuck nyuck she'd come flying downstairs to turn off the television and chase me out to the kitchen with my breakfast.  She'd be furious with me too, because if she'd told me once, she'd told me a thousand times, she did not want me watching the Stooges, ever.

I guess I never thought she was serious, because this was the one rule I defied over and over again.  Frankly, I don't know how I got away with it.  Mom Mannion was often threatening to sell me to the Indians, and looking back on it now, as a parent, I think that in this case the transaction would have been justified.  At least, she'd have had grounds for opening negotiations.

Not that I understand even to this day her objection to the Stooges.

She tried to explain it to me again and again, and I tried to explain my position back---I was not learning that "Pick two" was a legitimate way to settle an argument, I assured her, or that drawing a saw across some porcupine's head would do more harm to the saw than to the porcupine.  And the Stooges looked out for each other, I said.  No matter how mad Moe got he still stuck by Larry and Curly.  This is true, by the way.  The Stooges loved one another.  For all the violence they inflict on each other, their mutual affection is always clear and always made a point of, which is not true of the Marx Brothers, who often seem bound together more by mutual hostility than by family loyalty.  Mom Mannion didn't buy this.  As far as she was concerned, the only lessons the Stooges taught was that people were idiots and violence is funny.

Well, people are idiots and violence can be funny, but nevermind.

Mom Mannion and I reached what I thought was a fair compromise---I would continue to watch the Stooges and she would continue to turn off the TV whenever I made the mistake of letting her catch me watching them.  Consequently, I had the entire Stooges oeuvre memorized by the time I finished first grade.

I wonder how Mom Mannion would have felt, though, if she'd known that what I was really learning from the Stooges is what America looked like in the 1930s, when she was growing up.

It was from watching the Stooges that I learned who the iceman was and what he cameth for, that people used to listen to the radio instead of watching television, that a dime would buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, that there were still horse-drawn delivery wagons working in the streets, and that men wore suits everywhere, even in the unemployment line.

It was from the Stooges that I learned what America looked like when it was poor.

The exhibit currently on display at the Roosevelt Library and Museum, Action, and Action Now: FDR's First 100 Days---and I'm sorry I'm still full of news from Monday's visit---includes lots of pictures from the worst days of the Depression, before FDR took office---runs on banks, dust storms, farm children in rags, and lines of men in suits in front of soup kitchens and employment offices.

The pictures are shocking, but they're familiar.  You know them from history books and documentaries.  Doesn't lessen the shock.  It's distressing to see people in pain and trouble, to see families that are homeless and children who are actually starving and adults whose spirits are broken and who can't help them, and it's unnerving to realize that these are Americans not European war refugees whose pictures are also on display and in some cases impossible to distinguish from the Americans in the other photographs.  Still, as I said, the pictures are familiar.

I'm convinced, however, that the pictures were familiar to me before I ever saw them in books.

I already knew what America looked like during the Depression because the Stooges had shown it to me.

I'm thinking of one of their shorts specifically and I can still recall it vividly.  It opens with Larry, Moe, and Curly as soldiers in the trenches on the day World War I comes to an end.  There's a short scene of the three of them celebrating the fact that they're going home and then there's a fade out and fade in and now we see them in the present, their present, the early 30s, in civilian clothes and walking sadly down an empty city street.  Empty as in there are few people out shopping, store fronts are boarded up, and nobody seems to be doing any business or any work.  The Stooges are looking for jobs.  They're out of work and it's clear they've been out of work for a long time.

Now, you may be tempted to think, of course they're out of work, they're the Stooges, who in their right minds would hire them?

If you're thinking that then you're probably a woman and never watched the Stooges.

Larry, Moe, and Curly held all kinds of interesting jobs, jobs that required skill and competence, jobs at which they were apparently good when they weren't poking each other in the eye and knocking each other over with errant swings of sledge hammers and accidentally setting each other's pants on fire.  The Stooges were eminent surgeons ("Calling Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard..."), they were college professors ("B-A Bay, B-E Bee..."), they were house painters, plumbers, airplane mechanics, veterinarians, chefs, moving men (of course), and famous detectives.  During the Civil War they were the best secret service agents in Grant's army.  Which is my too cute way of saying that the Stooges were whatever the writers needed them to be for the purposes of plot or bits of slapstick...or to make a point.

There was a point in showing the three out of work, there was an extra point in showing that they had fought in the Great War, that they were veterans.  I didn't make the connection when I was six, but audiences in their time would have grasped it immediately.

The Stooges were potential Bonus Marchers.

This was not meant to suggest that the Bonus Army was made up of knuckleheads.  It was meant to suggest that the government of the United States, before FDR became President, was.

The Stooges, although ragged and unshaven (and of course they're wearing suit coats, those coats just don't match their patched and threadbare pants), and having to put newspaper in their shoes to plug up the holes in the soles, have great dignity as they make their way down the street.  This is another instance of their sticking by each other, too, which adds to their dignity.  They are what they often were, everymen.  The Bonus Marchers, by comparison then, are everymen too.  Every-Americans.  And, you'll remember, that the Bonus March ended when the United States Cavalry, under the command of Douglas MacArthur, charged the marchers with their sabres drawn.

The Bonus March revealed what most people had pretty much come to suspect, that under Herbert Hoover and the Republicans the government of the United States was not on the side of the people.

FDR and the New Deal changed that.

When conservatives take to the air and to the op-ed pages to tell us that the New Deal didn't work they're hoping people have forgotten that the New Deal wasn't just a series of government handouts and public works projects.

The New Deal Roosevelt offered was a deal between the government and the people, and the deal was this, that the People of the United States and the Government of the United States were one in the same.   The New Deal was an old deal, the old deal, the one that had been broken by the Republicans.  The government did not exist to keep the People in line, certainly not to keep them out of their own capitol city.   The government was there so that the people could help each other and take care of their country together, their country.  Under the New Deal, the government would treat its People as people and not as invaders to be chased away at the point of a sword.

The Stooges' moment of dignity in that short doesn't last long.  This is the Stooges, after all, not Sullivan's Travels.  Pretty soon they're back to their usual knuckleheadness.  But it in that moment they came down on the side of the Bonus Marchers and by extension the People and the New Deal.

And that's what I learned before I knew I had learned it from watching the Three Stooges.

Can I turn the TV back on now, Mom?

Dedicated to the memory of Steve Kuusisto's dad.