Alfred Hitchcock and Knowingly Knowing

Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing. His films terrify us for two reasons. The first is the quotidian quality of his characters and situations—there’s nothing exotic at all about the heroes of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” or “North by Northwest.” Nor did Hitch need creepy old houses or dense woods to create his worlds: a concert hall or an open field in bright sunshine will do just fine, thanks—but I defy anyone who’s seen “North by Northwest” to ever look at crop-dusters quite the same again.

Hitchcock’s other insight was just as simple: he understood that the human imagination produces horrors far more vivid than any film-maker could possibly create in a studio. The scariest moments in “The Birds” don’t come when the… erm… title characters actually attack, but rather when, seemingly innocuously at first, they begin to gather on the telephone wires. Similarly, we don’t know what’s waiting at the bottom of those stairs in “Psycho,” but we know to be afraid of it. This is why there is more horror, in any legitimate use of that term, in any of a half dozen of Hitchcock’s scariest films than in all the Dead Teenager flicks ever made put together. We are, in short, hard-wired to be afraid of the unknown. Hitchcock knew it, and used that knowledge to make great films. Alas, today’s right wing knows it, too, and they play on that fear to attempt to legitimize their own prejudices and paranoia.

It was probably sometime in the late 1980s, a decade or so after I graduated from college, that I first heard the term “knowingly know,” a term that refers to not simply the fact that one’s acquaintance is a member of some group, but that one recognizes that they are. I’ve heard the phrase most often with respect to homosexuality. Even if only 2% of the population is gay, if you know 35 people, the chances are better than even you know someone gay. If I recall correctly, there were 306 people in my high school graduating class: even at the 2% figure (certainly at the low end of estimates), the mathematical chances we were all heterosexual would be about 1 in 500 (.98 ^ 306th). Still, I didn’t know any of my classmates to be gay—a very different thing from whether they actually were or not.

In college, I had one gay friend and a couple of acquaintances—or so I thought until years later, when I learned that another of my closest college friends was in fact gay. When, at some point in the early 1990s, my friend and colleague told me that she and her partner had traveled from Iowa to Wisconsin the previous weekend to be “married” in a Quaker ceremony, it took me a little by surprise—not because I didn’t know of their relationship, or because I disapproved in the slightest: I simply hadn’t given the concept of gay marriage any thought. I am pleased to say, in retrospect, that it took me less than two seconds to move from confusion to congratulations. It was, in short, a no-brainer: of course Karen and Penny should be able to marry each other. The fact that I’d hitherto never considered the possibility said something about the time, something about the small-town world I had always inhabited, and something about my own egocentric but perhaps understandable conflation of my own lived experience and the normative.

I will, of course, never know if my reaction would have been any different had the concept of gay marriage been presented to me in the abstract, especially if I’d never “knowingly known” any gays or lesbians. And this is the essence of the “knowingly know” phenomenon: being presented with an impersonal, generic concept is a fundamentally different experience than choosing whether to endorse a policy designed to better the life experience of one’s friends.

Anyway, that college friend I didn’t know was gay until years later? I was privileged to attend his wedding—complete with two plastic grooms atop the cake—in the early summer of 1994. Now, of course, practically everyone not merely knows someone gay, but knowingly knows. And poll numbers reflect that change in cognition. A CNN poll released Wednesday shows, for the first time, that the majority of those polled said that “gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married and to have their marriage recognized by law as valid.” While that’s good news from my perspective, other results from the same poll were more troubling. And that’s why this blog piece isn’t really about gay marriage at all.

What saddened me in particular was this question: “As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?” Over two-thirds of respondents, alas, opposed. True, there has been considerable fanfare about the opposition, not merely from the usual demagogues like Gingrich, Beck, and Palin, but also—chillingly—from the Anti-Defamation League, which issued what Salon.com’s Alex Pareene aptly describes as a “shameful, mealy-mouthed statement” about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”: touting religious freedom in one breath and then suggesting that because of “understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site,” the proposed site should be abandoned because “building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.”

Give me a damned break. First off, this is precisely the kind of namby-pambyism that used to give liberals a bad name. Someone might get upset? That’s a reason to suddenly forget the 1st Amendment? And who, exactly, would be “cause[d] pain”? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush, hardly a hard-core Islamophile, said this:

These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race. America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.

Whatever may have happened later, and indeed whatever his motives may have been at the time—political calculation, geo-strategic positioning, or deeply-held personal belief—Mr. Bush, then if never else, said and did what was right, and it seems that most people listened. True, there were some isolated incidents of violence against Muslims, vandalism against mosques, and the like, but it could have been far worse than it was, and President Bush deserves credit for his calming influence.

Unfortunately, that dose of reality seems to have worn off, and there are far too many today who appear incapable of distinguishing Islam from a tiny group of radicalized adherents (if, indeed, the hijackers can be said to be Islamic at all, any more than Fred Phelps can be described as Christian). These, then, are the pain-afflicted victims cited by the ADL: people who can endure the empty chair at the dinner table or the hole in the ground where colossal buildings once stood, but not an expression of the religious freedom central to this country’s identity for well over 200 years.

But then I got to thinking about knowingly knowing. The CNN poll is national; The Wall Street Journal commissioned one last month of just New Yorkers. The headline reads: “Poll: Majority of New Yorkers Oppose Ground Zero Mosque.” If one didn’t know that the WSJ is now another Rupert Murdoch mullet-wrapper instead of the corporatist but reputable newspaper it once was, one might be tempted to stop there and conclude that the people of the area have a real aversion to the completion of the Cordoba Initiative, as the project is called.

But read a little further. Manhattanites actually approve of the construction: “support for the $100 million project appeared to be strongest in Manhattan, where 46% of poll respondents said they were in favor of it, compared to 36% who said they were opposed.” Now, I realize that there was a time gap between the WSJ and CNN polls, but surely the real difference between them is the demographic profile of those surveyed: most especially where they’re from.

Lost in the rhetoric is the fact that a major impetus for the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which isn’t a mosque per se, and which is two full city blocks from Ground Zero) is simply this: it’s needed. According to a WSJ blog by Aaron Rutkoff, “The project is driven in part by the needs of a growing Muslim population in Lower Manhattan. The nearest existing Islamic prayer space, the Tribeca Mosque, has been holding three evening prayer services on Fridays to keep up with demand.” In other words, there are a lot of Muslims in Lower Manhattan. People there know them, interact with them, in many cases are them. In other words, they knowingly know.

But, outside a couple of major cities and a smattering of other areas, how many Americans knowingly know anyone of the Islamic faith? How many folks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, site of another backlash against Islam in general, actually have had a conversation with someone named Farooq or Mohammed or Amir?

Let’s leave aside the compelling arguments that the right’s outlandish rhetoric plays directly into the hands of radical Muslims by actually making the case that American foreign policy is indeed a “war on Islam,” when it plainly is not. Let’s also pass over the fact that dozens of Muslims died in the 9/11 attacks, that it was a Muslim man who alerted authorities to the bomb in Times Square in early May, that one of the prime movers of the Cordoba project is quoted as saying, “We decided we wanted to look at the legacy of 9/11 and do something positive,” and that she hopes “to reverse the trend of extremism and the kind of ideology that the extremists are spreading.”

Let’s just look at the numbers based on knowingly knowing, or, looked at differently, in terms of how much the respondent’s life would actually be affected by the completion or non-completion of the project:

General U.S. Population: Opposed by 39 points

New Yorkers (all five boroughs): Opposed by 21 points

Manhattanites: In favor by 10 points

If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a pretty clear correlation between knowingly knowing and supporting the Cordoba Initiative. Perhaps the right, erstwhile champions of local control, ought to STFU?

There will be anti-Muslim bias in some circles for a long time to come, just as there still is in some places against African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, gays… But there is an antidote to this poison. It’s called education: not the teach-to-the-test crap advocated by many on the right (and some, truth to tell, on the left), but areas like critical thinking, argument formation, written and oral communication, multi-cultural experience. Ignorance doesn’t merely breed fear: it is the very essence of fear. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock.

This is a battle, but one that must be won. That’s why I’m still in the trenches. Unafraid.

What If the Government Really Did Budget Like Families Do?

There was an interesting story on the HuffPo site by Johann Hari site a couple of days ago about the decision of Moody’s, the leading credit agency, to downgrade Ireland’s bond rating from Aa1 to Aa2. No, I don’t pretend to be economist enough to understand all the implications and repercussions (it would be nice if a few folks in Congress admitted similar ignorance), but the story caught my eye because of my affection for that country and because of Hari’s discussion of the implications of the Irish situation for the US:

The Republicans want to bring this vision from Ireland… to the US. They say–yes, this is rough, yes, it hurts, but it is for a necessary purpose. If we don't do it, the bond markets will downgrade our debt and we will be even worse off. Only austerity can hold off the prospect of a debt crisis.

So let's return to the truth buried in that little story on the financial pages. Ireland has been doing exactly what the Republicans urge, with a two year headstart. What are the results? Last week, a study by the International Monetary Fund nobody's idea of a left-wing pressure group—found that country’s economic collapse now “exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy, and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress [anywhere] in post-World War Two history.”

Why? During a recession, ordinary consumers quite sensibly cut back and spend less. But if the government does the same, it means nobody is spending. This is bad enough for all the people who suffer immediately: the swelling army of the unemployed, the repossessed, the abandoned. But it turns out it makes its original goal—paying off the debt—impossible too. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains: “If you introduce austerity measures, the amount you can raise in tax falls, and welfare payments go up—so you don't have enough money to pay your debts anyway.”

If nothing else, I rather appreciate the phrasing of Stiglitz’s “cautionary note against deficit fetishism.” Hari also argues that:

When consumer spending collapses, governments need to borrow and spend to prevent a depression—and then pay off the debt from the proceeds of growth once we have brought the good times back. It's revealing that the countries that have done this hardest and fastest—like South Korea, which spent a fortune on employing people to green the country's infrastructure -- have been the first to pull out of this recession, while the countries glugging Republican-juice have sunk deeper into the gloop.

Needless to say, Hari goes on to assert that “the choice today is between a deficit and a depression. It is immoral not to borrow and spend when it could revive the economy and prevent all these lives being written off.”

A couple things intrigue me about this. One is the manifest hypocrisy of the Republicans, who exploded the deficit with their pet projects (read: tax cuts for fat-cats) but now fret about it with deep and abiding concern. Isn’t it about time somebody called “bullshit” on this tactic? Here are the facts for the last 50 years, based on figures posted on the usgovernmentspending.com website: From 1961-69, i.e. the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, federal debt as a percentage of GDP fell from 53.04% to 35.93%, a reduction of nearly a third. The Nixon/Ford years produced little change, as the percentage dropped slightly to 34.42% in 1977. The much-maligned Carter administration further reduced the rate to 31.91% in four years. By 1993, Reagan and Bush the elder had more than doubled that number to 66.17%, all the while yammering about fiscal responsibility. Then came Bill Clinton, who lowered the rate to 56.46% by 2001. Then, guess what? Along comes Bush the Lesser and the percentage shoots up to 83.29% by 2009.

In summary, then: every Democratic president in the last 50 years except Barack Obama, who inherited an economy in free-fall, has reduced the federal debt as a function of GDP. Every Republican president since (and including) the sainted Reagan has increased that debt percentage significantly. So this isn’t at all about Republicans caring a whit (or something that rhymes with “whit”) about the deficit. It’s all about budgetary priorities. If they’d admit that, I’d still disagree, but I might be able to muster a little respect (or at least less contempt) for their position.

But the other element of the Republican talking points that catches my attention is the whole conflation of government economic policy with family finances. In these difficult times, the argument goes, everyday people are being forced to tighten their belts; the government should do the same. Let’s leave aside the fallacy of considering these two fundamentally independent concepts as if they were the same thing. Let’s pretend, in other words, that the parallels are legitimate.

What, then, would the Republican strategy mean to a household? Well, they’d spend less (or they'd say they would, which isn't quite the same thing). In the world of family budgets, it probably is a good idea to put off buying the big-screen TV or the new Jacuzzi when times are tough. You might go out to eat less often, watch Netflix instead of going to the movies, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer.

But there are some expenses you just can’t forgo. If you’re looking for work, cutting off your internet service might save you a few dollars in the short term, but it will also inhibit your ability to find out about job opportunities or to apply for those that do exist. If you live several miles from your place of employment, you could save money by not driving to work, but you run the risk of losing your job. If you’re a contractor, turning off your cell phone will save you perhaps $1000 a year, but prospective customers (or your telephone service) can’t contact you, and your business losses will outpace the savings. Cutting expenditures on clothes might be an option… unless you go for an interview at a place where dressing well is a job requirement. And on and on.

Similarly, fiscal responsibility in government is a good thing. Cutting back on unnecessary spending—say, a pair of bright shiny wars that have already cost nine years, over a trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) and over 5,000 Americans’ lives (not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani civilians who have also perished in the conflict)—might be a good idea. But refusing to spend money to stimulate job growth, to provide a safety net for those put out of work through no fault of their own, to provide short-term support for an automobile industry that directly or indirectly provides literally millions of jobs: that’s the equivalent of refusing to take your flu-ridden kid to the doctor because the credit-card bills are already kind of high.

And then, of course, there’s the income side. We don’t want any more than we’ve already got. Yes, we’re having trouble paying the bills, but collecting over half a trillion dollars (an estimated $564,000,000,000) just by allowing tax cuts on people making over $200,000 a year to expire—well, that, in Republicania, is simply beyond the Pale. Imagine if households really operated the way the Republicans say the federal government should: “No, that pay cut I took a few years ago, don’t worry about taking me back to my old income; we’ll just eat less, and my friend says sending your kids to college is over-rated, anyway.”

Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of pork in every budget, and probably a considerable amount of our old friends Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, too. Nor does either party have a monopoly on self-righteous posturing or on prioritizing re-election over the common weal. That said, even if we buy the Republican talking point analogizing from federal spending to household budgeting, their argument just doesn’t make sense.

The WikiLeaks Documents and the Eye of the Beholder

The top story of the week is—or at least should be—the release of tens of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks. The responses have been predictable. Supporters of the wars in Iraq and particularly in Afghanistan sniff that we learned nothing new and endangered lives in the process; it’s even been suggested that the release of the documents was in fact orchestrated by the Obama team to embarrass the Bush administration, although it escapes me exactly how discrediting a Bush policy that is being echoed by Obama serves the latter politically.

Meanwhile, opponents of the war(s) claim that we now have proof of what we’ve suspected all along: that the war in Afghanistan is not going at all well, that the Pakistani government is more of an enemy than an ally, that the US is underwriting the actions of drug lords, that there have been far more civilian casualties than previously reported. Hey, and remember that really cool scene at the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War” when the Mujahideen finally have the ability to counter Russian air power? Well, guess who those folks are now, and whom they’re using those weapons against?

The White House immediately condemned the release of the documents. On Sunday, the day the documents went up on the WikiLeaks website, National Security Advisor James Jones said in a statement that “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.” The next day, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a press briefing that:

I think our reaction to this type of material, a breach of federal law, is always the same, and that is whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it—besides being against the law—has a potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe.

Not long afterward, however, the tone had changed. Michael Isikoff reports that David Lapan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations, said that:

a preliminary review by a Pentagon “assessment” team had so far not identified any documents whose release could damage national security. Moreover, he said, none of the documents reviewed so far carries a classification level above “secret”—the lowest category of intelligence material in terms of sensitivity.

On Thursday, though, there was another reversal. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen held a press conference. Gates warned that the incident is:

a pointed reminder that much secret information is treated as such to protect sources of information, to protect the lives of our men and women in uniform, to deny our enemies the information about our military operations, and to preserve our relationship with friends and allies…. the battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships in that key part of the world.

Mullen, meanwhile, argued that WikiLeaks founder/point person Julian Assange “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier.”

It’s really a spectacular example of the eye-of-the-beholder phenomenon. Private Bradley Manning, who may or may not have been responsible for the leak (my commentary here), is a whistle-blowing hero who brought abuses to light… or a traitor who endangered the lives of American servicemen and –women and/or those who have cooperated with American forces… or a very disturbed young man who made the whole thing up.

Assange may be correct in his assertion that there is no single event or revelation that is the most damning, but rather, as he said in a press conference part of which is posted on the website of The Guardian, “it’s war; it’s one damned thing after another.” Still, it’s difficult to justify the release of documents which give names and other identifying information about Afghanis who aided the US military: this charge was first leveled by the Times of London; alas, the article in question is now behind a pay-wall, but the coverage of The Australian is not. Whatever we may think about whether the war is good policy, or whether American soldiers have been paragons of virtue, the Taliban are not the good guys in any rational assessment of what’s going on in that part of the world. Indeed, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid declared in an interview on the UK’s channel 4 and quoted by The Telegraph’s Robert Winnett, “If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them.”

It is reasonable to distrust a government which invokes largely if not exclusively fabricated threats to national security every time it gets embarrassed by a revelation or every time it needs a “wag the dog” moment: this was standard operating procedure in the Bush administration, and, though the practice may have waned in the Obama regime, it has by no means disappeared. That said, recklessness is recklessness, and Assange’s after-the-fact protestations—that many Afghani informants were “acting in a criminal way,” that the Obama administration knew about the release of names but “did nothing to help WikiLeaks to vet the data,” that “any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information,” that, as he said in another interview, the information was “not of tactical consequence”—ring rather hollow.

Indeed, when the White House denied that Assange had contacted them, he backtracked, saying that he had done so through the New York Times; it is clear that the administration had been in contact with the Times, but not that the Times had relayed Assange's alleged offer. Department of Defense spokesman Col. David Lapan denied the allegations in a statement Friday:

It's absolutely false that WikiLeaks contacted the White House and offered to have them look through the documents…. We never had the opportunity to look at any of the documents in advance to determine anything. The documents were brought to the attention of the White House, but no copies of documents, or opportunities to review were given.

Anyone else find it interesting that this release came from the Pentagon and not the White House?

Needless to say, Fox News is claiming that the fact that Assange said that he had offered, through the Times, to give the administration the opportunity to vet the documents and the White House acknowledged that they’d talked to the Times means that the offer was made and ignored. It doesn’t. It may be that the offer was never made, whether because Assange is lying or because the Times didn’t do what he asked of them. It may be that the White House made a blanket request to stop the publication of any documents at all and Assange refused to comply. But the Obama administration certainly wouldn’t be the first to commit a sin of omission and try to cover their tracks after the fact. Someone is covering their butts here—Assange? The Times? The White House? Your guess is as good as mine.

On the other points, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said, “Whether those individuals acted legitimately or illegitimately in providing information to the NATO forces, their lives will be in danger now. Therefore we consider that extremely irresponsible and an act that one cannot overlook.”

One more point can be made here: apparently all three of the major newspapers which had advance copies of the documents—the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel—published only selected, redacted examples of the documents. They apparently had both the journalistic desire to cover the story and the common sense not to publish material that stands a good chance of getting specific people killed. Why WikiLeaks couldn’t do that, too—they claim to have vetted all the documents, after all—is a mystery.

There’s an interesting piece by Tunku Varadarajan on The Daily Beast website—we’re not talking Fox News here!—which compares Assange to Andrew Breitbart, describes him as a “fraud,” and concludes, “WikiLeaks is a brothel of self-promotion, Assange its puffed-up pimp.” I fear there’s more than a kernel of truth there.

There’s one more element to the story: there is evidence that “strongly suggests,” in the words of gawker.com, that “Manning has some sort of LGBT identity, and that the man who snitched on him exploited this to win trust.” The Telegraph declares that he is “openly homosexual,” an interesting assertion in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” age. The Gawker article includes a screen capture photo of Manning’s Facebook page, showing such “likes and interests” as “QueerToday.com,” “Stonewall Democrats,” and “LGBT America.” These aren’t conclusive, of course, but they do suggest a little more than do his fondness for the Rachel Maddow Show and the National Center for Transgender Equality. The Telegraph also cites a status update in which Manning claimed to be “‘livid’ after being ‘lectured by ex-boyfriend.’”

And here again we are going to see a divide. There will be those who, ignoring the thousands of gay and lesbian soldiers who have served honorably for years, will perceive the unsuitability of homosexuals for military service. Conversely, there will be those who argue that had Pvt. Manning been able to talk openly to a comrade or a superior about his recently-failed relationship, he would not have reached the level of despair and agitation that precipitated his action. Moreover, they would claim, à la Gawker:

Adrian Lamo is an out bisexual, while an increasing number of clues suggest that Manning is, if not transgendered, deeply uncertain about his sexuality and/or gender. Interviews with Lamo's acquaintances and a close reading of the chat logs suggest Lamo traded on this identity to exploit Manning at his most vulnerable, as questions about his sexuality were unbearably pressing on his personal and professional lives.

While this latter scenario is plausible, the fact remains that there is much we don’t know, up to and including whether Pvt. Manning had anything to do with this. Even assuming he was responsible, his motives are at best unclear, and it’s anyone’s guess whether his sexuality is in any way related to all this.

What we’re left with, then, is even more questions than we had before. But a few things are clear: if someone gets singled out by the Taliban and killed (or worse), someone—probably more than one someone—has blood on his hands. And it’s beginning to look as if Julian Assange’s halo is slipping.

Bradley Manning: The Questions Far Outnumber the Answers

In this iteration of my blogging life, I have posted 25 essays; over on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, I’ve posted 70 links (17 of them to this blog). In that time, no one really disagreed (publicly) with me except around the edges. I take this as more of a bad thing than a good one. My purpose in writing these pieces isn’t to be affirmed (although that’s nice, and I thank those of you who have offered your approbation): it’s to engage in a conversation about what I perceive to be significant issues of our day.

So I was actually pleased when one reader, a friend and former student, took issue with me yesterday over a post to the Facebook page. I had linked this article on the website of an organization called Courage to Resist. The piece concerns Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is apparently now being held more or less in isolation, charged with having turned over to WikiLeaks the now-notorious video subsequently titled “Collateral Murder.” My commentary on the video itself can be found here.

Anyway, this particular reader wrote, reasonably enough, that “When you sign with the military; you agree to the uniform code. When you sign to that, you have to align with all military actions. Justified or not…. that kind of behavior will infect the code.” He also took issue (as do I) with Courage to Resist’s slogan, “Support the troops who refuse to fight.” It is a little disingenuous to voluntarily join the armed forces and then come to a crisis of conscience over the fact that armies kill people. On the other hand, to suggest that many enlistees are provided with misleading if not outright fabricated information about what their military lives and duties will be (nothing in writing, of course) is merely to acknowledge reality. We could go around and around on this for days, and it’s really just a side issue. So let’s move on.

Be it noted, then, that all I did was post the link and note Pvt. Manning’s arrest, his apparent inability to access civilian counsel, and the (as far as I’m concerned) indisputable fact that the center-piece crime with which he is charged is an act of whistle-blowing. I made then, and make now, no determination of whether Pvt. Manning’s alleged actions were—or ought to be—legal or even ethical. Importantly, however, I do insist that “legal” and “ethical” are separate categories; in cases like this one, especially, it is possible to be the latter without being the former.

Many readers of this blog will know that this spring I taught a topics course on the American theatre and the Vietnam War. One of the texts we used was The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Daniel Berrigan’s adaptation of actual court transcripts in one of the most seminal anti-war protests of the Vietnam era. The eponymous nine protesters destroyed several boxes of draft records with homemade napalm, then stood in a circle, singing, calmly waiting for the police to arrive. They offered nothing like a traditional defense in court, merely pointing out the potential conflicts of interest of an obviously stacked jury and seizing every opportunity to make the case about the war instead of about their own actions. They were convicted, of course—there could be no doubt about their guilt in legal terms—but they became heroes to millions of people in the process.

Does Pvt. Manning belong in that same category? Frankly, it’s very hard to say. There are far more questions than answers. If the reporting of the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima is to be believed, Pvt. Manning was, and probably still is, a very messed-up young man. Nakashima's lead paragraph describes a 22-year-old soldier who “had just gone through a breakup. He had been demoted a rank in the Army after striking a fellow soldier. He felt he had no future, and yet he thought that by sharing classified information about his government's foreign policy, he might ‘actually change something.’” If that’s an accurate description, his actions were more desperate than heroic, more Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame than Daniel Ellsberg (to whom some have compared Manning) releasing the Pentagon Papers.

But there is much in this story that just doesn’t make sense, at least yet. The best reporting I’ve seen on the issue is the lengthy and detailed essay by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Greenwald’s analysis is filtered through a reliably progressive lens, to be sure, but he’s clearly done the work: his documentation is, by contemporary journalistic standards, a thing to behold.

What seems clear is that Pvt. Manning admitted to (“took credit for”? “claimed responsibility for”?) not only the release of the 2007 video, but of another similar video from Afghanistan and of some 260,000 diplomatic cables. The exact nature of the charges against him is not entirely clear, at least to me, but surely they’re linked to some broadly-construed concept of “national security,” a descriptor so flexible in application that it means anything from “the continued existence of the republic is legitimately at risk” to “this has the potential to be mildly embarrassing to someone with some clout.” See, for example, the brouhaha over the release of information regarding warrantless wiretaps in the Bush administration: to hear the Dick Cheneys of the world tell it, the threat to the American citizenry wasn’t that our government was eavesdropping on our private conversations without as much as probable cause, it was that we knew they were doing it.

Greenwald identifies a number of, shall we say, anomalies in the story as presented to us:

Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they “could do serious damage to national security?” Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to “quickly” confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat, given the obvious ease with which that could be preserved, intercepted or otherwise surveilled? These are the actions of someone either unbelievably reckless or actually eager to be caught.

In fact, the first question that comes to my mind isn’t why Manning did this, but if he did. Perhaps it is plausible that he had access to the materials he describes. Perhaps he really did find a somewhat less than reputable pseudo-journalist via Twitter and offer him his confession—in a fit of remorse? or of braggadocio? Perhaps Adrian Lamo, the “journalist” in question, really didn’t offer him confidentiality and really did fear for the safety of American citizens when he went scurrying off to nark on Pvt. Manning. But it strikes me as equally plausible that Manning had nothing to do with the release of the video(s), that the cables were never released at all, and that the claims of responsibility are more a cry for help than either a baring of the soul or an assertion of existential heroism. Voluntary false confessions are a fact of judicial life, and while I’m not a psychologist, it strikes me that Manning’s mental and emotional profile would bear considerable resemblance to those of people who do falsely confess.

Given the Army’s secrecy, we’re unlikely to find out much more about this case. All of which means that we don’t know if Pvt. Manning in fact did what he claims to have done, and, if he did, what his motives were either in the commission or in the confession. With so many facts unresolved, our own prejudices and predilections will inevitably fill the void. Pvt. Manning will therefore likely be, in different people’s eyes, a hero, a traitor, a victim, or just a pitiable young man, possibly forever. Who knows? Maybe one of those descriptions might even be accurate.

The Pentagon's Unspeakable Priorities

Two days, two stories about the Pentagon and sexuality. One of them is about perverts. The other one is about gay people.

Yesterday, Lt. Dan Choi, who majored in Arabic and environmental engineering at West Point and served as an infantry officer in Iraq (gee, we wouldn’t have any use in the military for credentials like that, would we?) was officially discharged under the provisions of the inane “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy” that President Clinton was chicken-shit enough to sign into law in 1993, and which President Obama has, with nearly as much moral cowardice, allowed to not only stay on the books, but be enforced. (For the record, the catch-phrase is inaccurate, as a number of servicemen and –women didn’t “tell” until they were outed by civilians and subsequently… erm… asked.)

Of course, the Pentagon took nearly a year and a half since Lt. Choi came out on the Rachel Maddow Show last March. Since then, through his leadership role in Knights Out, an organization for gay and lesbian West Point alumni, and through a host of speeches and acts of civil disobedience, Lt. Choi has become something of a poster child for the movement to overturn DADT. It is also worth noticing that, in the interim, Lt. Choi continued to serve, and to do so while being completely honest about his sexual preference. He has said repeatedly that his coming out of the closet has had no effect on his relationship with his comrades-in-arms. While I am not so naïve as to believe that claim simply because he makes it, I do find it more than a little significant that I can find literally no evidence—or even assertion—to the contrary.

Anyway, despite tens of thousands of signatures on petitions, despite the Commander-in-Chief’s claim that he seeks to overturn DADT (with the support of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Bush-appointed Secretary of Defense), and after (obviously) months of dithering, the Army finally made it official and discharged Lt. Choi. Apparently they had sent a letter to his father’s address some time ago, but father and son are estranged, so the first Lt. Choi heard of the final decision came by telephone yesterday.

Lt.—now Mr.—Choi is clearly an intelligent and articulate young man. He’ll be fine. So will the overwhelming majority of the other soldiers (and sailors, Marines, etc.) whose services are lost to the country’s military because a gaggle of old male Republicans, led by Hypocrite-in-Chief John McCain (who assured us he’d be guided by “our military leaders” with respect to DADT… until, of course, they no longer supported his paranoia and prejudice), are homophobic bigots and Barack Obama doesn’t have the stones to tell them where they can shove their hatefulness. Don’t give me surveys. Don’t give me excuses. Don’t give me “after the Army has had a chance to review the proposal.” Give me the best people we can get. Now. And it strikes me that, given the way the world looks today, a fit, intelligent, experienced, respected Arabic-speaker might just be an asset.

The other Pentagon news is just downright creepy. According to Brian Bender of the Boston Globe,

Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports.

Bender continues,

the fact that offenders include people with access to government secrets puts national security agencies “at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations,” according to one report by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service from late 2009.

So what we’re talking about here has broader ramifications than just a sordid tale of a little cadre of pervs getting their jollies with kiddie porn, which is disgusting enough. This is actually a national security issue. (One might note, sardonically, that DADT creates similar security issues: soldiers who stand to lose their jobs if their sexual preferences are revealed are certainly more susceptible to blackmail than those whose jobs are not thus jeopardized.)

There have apparently been a number of arrests and at least some prosecutions as a result of an investigation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency which began in 2006. These were all kept quiet, of course, because we wouldn’t want the populace to know how their tax dollars were being spent, now would we? Among those found to have purchased child pornography: two contractors with top secret clearances at the National Security Agency, a contractor at the National Reconnaissance Office (they’re the spy satellite people), a contractor at Edwards Air Force Base (where weapons testing takes place), and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (which develops secret weapons and technologies). It is not clear that the DARPA manager had child pornography per se, but there was “[a] large amount of pornography… including images that appeared to be of children” on his office computer.

What is especially disturbing about this is that many of these people just get shuffled to a different office, à la pedophile priests. One contractor admitted in an interview to renew his security clearance that he watched child pornography at least twice a week on his home computer. So that got him prosecuted, right? Nope. Well, at least he lost his job, though? Nope. He got transferred to a field office; an agency spokesperson “could not immediately say whether the particular contractor was still working for the organization.”

Am I the only one absolutely incensed by this? Literally thousands of servicemen and –women have been discharged under DADT for telling the truth about themselves: that they are gay. They don’t need to have ever engaged in gay sex, or to have hit on a fellow soldier, or to have done literally anything to disturb the smooth operation of their unit. Just to be gay is enough to get you discharged. By contrast, engage in the illegal as well as despicable practice of buying and viewing child pornography on a government computer, open yourself up to “blackmail, bribery, and threats,” and chances are you won’t even lose your security clearance.

The late, great George Carlin’s description of “military intelligence” as an oxymoron has never rung truer.

Global Warming, the Charlie James Syndrome, and a Very, Very, Very Big Number

Ever since I was a little kid, I have been aware of what I refer to as the Charlie James Syndrome. My father, although he grew up in New England, was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. He started following the “Gashouse Gang” of the 1930s, and remained a loyal Cardinals supporter until the day he died.

I, on the other hand, followed the utterly hapless New York Mets. So it was that one day late in the 1963 season, my Dad and I were listening to a Mets-Cardinals game on the radio (we didn’t have a TV). Despite my loyalties to the Mets, I was aware that the Cardinals were in a pennant race (they ended up in second place, 6 games behind the Dodgers), whereas the Mets finished 15 games out of 9th place in a 10-team league. So my loyalties were divided.

Anyway, on that particular day a journeyman outfielder for the Cardinals named Charlie James hit two home runs, giving St. Louis its margin of victory. In that same game, Stan “The Man” Musial, a future Hall-of-Famer, went something like 0-for-5 with three strikeouts. “Clearly,” thought I, roughly a week or so from my 8th birthday, “Charlie James is a vastly superior baseball player to this Musial guy my Dad keeps talking about.” Needless to say, he wasn’t. James’s career OPS (On-Base Percentage Plus Slugging Average) was .652. Musial’s lifetime OPS was .976; even in 1963, when he was 42 years old and James had the best year of his career, Musial was still the better hitter by a .729-.697 margin.

But on that one particular September day in 1963, Charlie James sure had a better game than Stan Musial did. For some reason, that game stuck in my mind, and it has become an important memory—not merely because a little boy got to share a baseball game broadcast with his Dad, but for the lesson of Charlie James. It wasn’t too long before I realized that anomalies happen, but that doesn’t make picking Stan Musial instead of Charlie James a bad idea.

So with all the hoo-ha about climate change, I have remained ever-so-slightly skeptical. True, I trust scientists more than I trust politicians, and I have found the protestations of the right more than a little foam-flecked. But the fact that the arguments being adduced against the whole idea of climate change aren’t convincing doesn’t mean that those in favor of the theory are much better.

And, of course, there is ample anecdotal evidence that the doomsayers are exaggerating. All of us have a friend in northern climes who jokes about having to shovel 14” of global warming in the winter. I just returned from Ireland, where the reason we couldn’t go inside Thoor Ballylee, W.B. Yeats’s tower, was that the coldest winter in nearly a half a century had led to flood damage that hadn’t been cleaned up yet.

Both sides of the debate are guilty of selective interpretation of evidence. Some readers will recall the O.J. Simpson trial, in which prosecutors made a big show of making the defendant try on a pair of gloves, ready to strut their stuff when one more nail was added to Simpson’s coffin. Of course, the gloves were too small, leaving the prosecutors scrambling to babble—accurately but with palpable desperation—that, reasonably, the gloves would have shrunk because of the exposure to blood. But all Johnny Cochran needed was one little chink in the armor; when, with rhetorical flourish, he proclaimed, “If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit,” the trial was effectively over.

I am always reminded of that when I see someone claiming that, for example, an increase in snowfall is actually attributable to global warming. I follow the scientific explanation, and it makes sense, but there’s still that nagging feeling that I’m buying into a scam. So what would be a statistic that would prove unequivocally that global warming is a real and present danger?

How about this, from the official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report on the Global State of the Climate:

June was the fourth consecutive month that was the warmest on record for the combined global land and surface temperatures (March, April, and May were also the warmest). This was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.

I first saw this passage, by the way, on the Guardian’s website. [N.B. I find it interesting that the mainstream US media—even such “liberal” bastions as MSNBC and the Washington Post—ignore the most significant statistic of the story; I can’t find the story at all on the New York Times website.] OK, let’s look at that 304 consecutive month number. Logically, there’s a 50-50 chance that each month will be warmer than or cooler than the 20th century average. So, the odds of having 304 straight months above that average based purely on chance are 1 in 2 to the 304th power, or roughly 1 in 3.25 times 10 to the 91st power. That is, 1 in 32,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Those strike me as rather long odds. You know the expression “one in a million”? The odds of 27 consecutive months being above the 20th century average are less than one in a million. That gives you a rough idea of what 304 would be.

Or look at it this way: Charlie James hit a homer about every 48.5 at bats. 304 consecutive months isn’t James homering twice in one game: it’s his hitting a home run in 53 consecutive at bats. (The major league record is 4.)

Now, global warming deniers… you were saying?

The GOP and Unemployment

Chances are, you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you didn’t make at least some attempt to keep up with the news. It’s likely, then, that you’ve already heard, or at least heard about, Senator Jon Kyl’s latest attempt to wrest the coveted title of Arizona Wackadoodle of the Year from the stiff competition presented by Jan Brewer. I’m talking, of course, about that moment when Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday lapsed briefly into journalistic mode and actually asked a tough question of a Republican.

Noting the Republican opposition to expending unemployment coverage to millions of Americans currently out of work is grounded in a pious concern for deficit reduction, that increased expenditures must be counter-acted by concomitant cuts elsewhere, Wallace wanted to know what was going to be cut in order to accommodate the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. We’ll forgo the enumeration of the obvious evasions and outright misrepresentation in Kyl’s response, and concentrate on a single sequence near the end of the interview (it starts at about the 6:23 marker on the linked video):

Wallace: How are you going to pay the $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people… making more than $200,000 a year?

Kyl: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right… if you decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the costs of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to, but you should never have to offset the costs of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

Really. He said that. You see, reducing taxes on rich people without either cutting spending or finding alternative sources of income doesn’t add to the deficit. Providing a little more safety net to people thrown out of work by a recession caused largely if not exclusively by those same fat-cats whose tax breaks Kyl is defending: that increases the deficit, and therefore cannot be allowed. I should also note here that pre-emptive wars in West Asia and preventing the government from making the people responsible for the worst single man-made ecological disaster of all time pay the full cost of cleaning up their mess (the part you can put a price-tag on, at least): no effect on the deficit whatsoever. These statements are true in the parallel universe in which up is down, black is white, and Jon Kyl has an IQ above room temperature. In Celsius.

Kyl’s inanity was, if nothing else, good business for left-leaning bloggers and commentators. Rachel Maddow’s evisceration of Kyl’s argument may be taken as exemplary. Maddow pointed out that the deficit is indeed a function both of money coming into the system and money going out. I’m not sure her gin-and-tonic (without the gin part) metaphor was as effective as it was snarky, but her analysis is cogent and persuasive.

But there are still some things unsaid. First is the unchallenged assertion that tax cuts for the wealthy in fact “spur the economy.” This has been Republican gospel since the Reagan administration, which, of course, doesn’t come close to making it true. An article by John Tamny on Forbes.com—hardly a socialist bastion!—points out that “the top income tax rate was 91% in the 1950s, but the S&P 500 rose 245%. On the other hand, the combined federal tax on income and investment during the presidency of George W. Bush was lower than at any time post-World War II. Despite the relatively low tax burden, the S&P fell 36% on Bush's watch.” Wow, how bad must the rest of Bush's economic policy have been if all those “stimulative” tax cuts produced those results?!?

Indeed, there are those who argue that the effect of such cuts is so stimulative that revenues actually increase. While this theory isn’t quite as preposterous as it might seem on its face, it’s still kind of a reach: the logical extension of this line of reasoning, after all, is to say that the way to maximize government revenue is to eliminate taxes altogether. More to the point, recent history simply puts the lie to this canard: Reagan cuts taxes, revenue plummets; Clinton introduces targeted tax increases, revenue increases; Bush II cuts taxes, revenue sinks like a stone.

Here's a graph based on Congressional Budget Office numbers, demonstrating this fact. (I pulled this from a web post entitled "Do Tax Cuts Increase Revenue" by Robert Ricketts, who holds an endowed chair in taxation at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University.) It is worth noting here that this chart shows both income and outlay numbers as a percentage of GDP, not in dollars per se. This formulation makes sense to me; more importantly, it obviously makes sense to someone with a lot better credentials in this area than either my own or (I strongly suspect) those of the overwhelming majority of people likely to be reading this essay.

Moreover, helping the wealthy in particular is as macroeconomically problematic as it is ethically bankrupt. In an ideal world in which rich people see themselves as part of a larger society, perhaps, the whole “trickle down” concept might work. Might I humbly suggest, however, that fundamental amorality and the sense of entitlement evinced by the good folks at Goldman Sachs or BP doesn't suggest that they're much interested in anyone but themselves? Use their extra liquidity to help the economy? Why would they want to do that when there's an offshore account with their name on it?

In contrast, the further down the economic ladder one finds oneself, the more likely one is to want to spend rather than save the extra cash a tax cut might precipitate. And while Republicans would have us believe that jobs are created by the sainted owners of Small Business, Inc., the fact of the matter is that demand for goods and services really drives the economy. If everyday people want to buy more widgets and have the wherewithal to do so, that creates jobs: for the widget-makers, the construction workers who expand the plant, the truckers who schlep the widgets from the factory to the store, the gas station operators who supply the fuel for those trucks, and on and on. Saving, though often an admirable thing to do, doesn't do that.

We might also note this graph, showing that since the Johnson administration, every Democratic president has increased revenue more than spending, and every Republican president has increased spending more than revenue. Thus, debt as a percentage of GDP declined fairly steadily after World War II... until it spiked under Presidents Reagan and Bush I. It then fell again during the Clinton administration, only to start climbing again during Bush II. So all this concern for the deficit is, to be kind, rather a new-found creed for Republicans.

But, really, this blog isn't about Republican hypocrisy on the deficit. That point has been made repeatedly by many people with far better economic credentials than mine. Curiously, neither the Corporate Media nor even the Democratic Party seems particularly interested in disseminating this data, but it's readily available. What I want to discuss is a different kind of radical inconsistency in Republican rhetoric. I hasten to note that some of the opinions expressed below are espoused by only a handful of Republicans, but 1). they're either former leaders of the party, elected officials, or the party nominee for significant state or federal office and 2). their positions have not—as far as I have been able to determine, at least—been repudiated by party leaders in either sense of that term (i.e., by Michael Steele on the one hand, or John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, et al., on the other).

I refer here to the practice of demonizing the unemployed. The most recent round of this process can probably be traced to this February, with Senator Jim Bunning's absurd but effective one-man crusade against extending unemployment benefits. To be fair, Bunning's opposition was at least initially advanced on prodecural grounds: that such a bill shouldn't have been presented for unanimous consent. To say that I don't understand the arcane rules whereby a single Senator (other than the majority leader, perhaps) can hold up important legislation is to err on the side of understatement. But it's equally true that I fail to comprehend how the Democratic leadership lacks the political will and/or parliamentary expertise to circumvent the obstructionist tactics of a single crackpot.

Anyway, while as far as I can determine Bunning made no assertion that the unemployed deserve what they get, his defenders did. Our friend Jon Kyl suggested on the Senate floor in early March, for example, that “continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.” He does immediately claim that “I'm sure most of them would like work, and probably have tried to seek it.” A couple days later, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay included no such qualifiers. Here's part of his exchange with CNN's Candy Crowley on State of the Union.

CROWLEY: ...people are unemployed because they want to be?

DELAY: Well, it is the truth. And people in the real world know it.

Most recently, Tom Corbett, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, told radio reporter Scott Detrow that “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are going to sit there and—I’ve literally had construction companies tell me, I can’t get people to come back to work until… they say, I’ll come back to work when unemployment runs out.”

And then, of course, there's Sharron Angle, who is running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Here's my personal favorite sequence from her interview with John Ralston of Face to Face:

RALSTON: You think that a bunch of people are sitting out there saying, “You know what, this is great! I got my unemployment check coming in, I'm not going to go out and look for a job?”

ANGLE: No, they're not.

RALSTON: But that's what you're implying.

ANGLE: It's not what I'm implying. What I'm implying is that there are some jobs out there that are available. Because they have to enter at a lower grade and they cannot keep their unemployment they have to make a choice. We're making them make a choice between unemployment benefits and going back to work and working up through the ranks of that job and actually building up a good wage again and building up some seniority in that job. And what we need to do is make that unemployment benefit go down, not just completely remove the safety net from them while they go out and look for a job.

RALSTON: So you're saying if people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, as many have during this recession, Sharron Angle's solution is to cut their unemployment benefits so low so they're somehow gonna go out and find jobs that don't exist? How does that make any sense?

ANGLE: There are jobs that do exist. That's what we're saying, is that there are jobs. But those are entry-level jobs.

First off, of course, unemployment benefits are already indeed only a percentage—usually about half—of what a worker could make at a job in his or her trade. So Angle really has no idea what she's talking about. Moreover, her solution to the problem is to take that unemployed accountant or dental hygienist or machinist and make 'em work at Mickey D's. If they apply themselves, they might make assistant manager in only a few months.

By now, you'll have spotted a trend. In what is becoming, apparently, mainstream Republican thinking, the real reason we shouldn't extend unemployment benefits isn't really the deficit at all. It's that the unemployed are lazy, unmotivated, and probably unethical: cut their benefits and they'll find a job fast enough.

Be it understood: I have no doubt that there are those who really are lazy bums, who scam the system, who remain out of work not because they'll make as much on unemployment as on the job, but because the difference between a paycheck and an unemployment check might be small enough to make staying out of work more attractive. But surely these people are a small minority, and the overwhelming majority of people currently out of work are in fact trying desperately to find employment: indeed, according to a very interesting article by Heather Boushey, Christine Riordan, and Luke Reidenbach, writing for the Center for American Progress and the National Employment Law Project:

At the end of May, nearly half of those unemployed (46 percent) have been out of work and actively seeking a job for at least six months, a post-World War II record high. Currently, there are nearly five workers actively searching for work for every job available, compared to just one and a half job searchers per job opening before the Great Recession began.

That people would prefer to seek employment in a field for which they have training and experience—provided that their skills are both current and relevant—doesn't strike me as an unreasonable desire. Perhaps some additional safeguards against abuse might be appropriate (I'm not necessary advocating this; I just don't know), but the whole foundation of unemployment compensation is that the only people receiving it are those who have been part of the work force but for reasons beyond their control are temporarily out of a job. That the current economic malaise means that more people are in this situation longer strikes me as self-evident.

Yet the entire Republican Party seems to be gravitating en masse towards this curious and frankly rather distasteful blame-the-victim mentality. It is long overdue for the leaders of the GOP to go on the record to suggest that Americans currently out of work are, as a group, neither unmotivated nor unethical: and that means a frank repudiation of the likes of Kyl, DeLay, Corbett and Angle. If the RNC and the minority leaders of the two houses won't do so out of ethical necessity, then they should do so out of self-interest. After all, if the unemployment numbers are created by sluggishness not in the economy but in the workforce, they can't very well be blamed on Obama and the Democrats, can they?

Be it noted: I am not so naïve as to think that the GOP won't try to have it both ways, but they'll sacrifice any credibility they might have had. Or such, at least, is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

A brief look at three recent stories...

OK, so I lied. I truly intended to write about the nexus of theatre and social work, as I said on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page. (And I will, soon.) But then three different stories worthy of comment all broke within a few hours. The timing of one, the announcement of where LeBron James will play next year, was planned. The other two—Federal Judge Joseph L. Tauro’s pair of decisions regarding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the verdict in the Johannes Mehserle trial—simply happened when they happened. So here are three slightly shorter than normal commentaries which add up to one slightly longer than normal essay.

DOMA

Let’s start with what might turn into one of the most significant civil liberties stories in some time. Federal Judge Joseph L. Tauro’s decisions in two cases regarding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) certainly give some hope for those seeking marriage equality, despite the almost inevitable appeal (and probable victory) by the Obama administration, which is in the difficult position of being duty-bound to fight to uphold a statute they don’t believe in. Tauro’s ruling in the case brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has no immediate or direct effect on states which forbid same-sex marriage, but rather it suggests that in states in which gay marriage is permitted, all marriage benefits, including those under the auspices of the federal government, must be afforded to any couple which meets that state’s legal requirements for marriage. What would happen to a couple legally married in one state and subsequently denied benefits in a state in which same-sex marriage is not permissible remains unclear, at least to me.

Tauro’s citation of the 10th Amendment, which the right wing so often invokes as a rationale to oppose, say, a federal health care system, to argue that Massachusetts rather than Congress has the right to define marriage within the commonwealth, makes for a delicious irony. But it’s not yet clear that this isn’t a double-edged sword: it would, for example, re-affirm the constitutionality of other states’ bans on same-sex marriage. Law professor/blogger Steven L. Taylor makes this point, predicting that appeals to the full faith and credit (Article 4) and equal protection clauses (14th Amendment) have better long-term prospects.

The more important and potentially precedent-setting decision came in the other case, one filed by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, a New England–based advocacy organization. Here, equal protection guarantees, rather than states’ rights, was at the center of the opinion. The states’ rights argument is still there—“the passage of DOMA marks the first time that the federal government has ever attempted to legislatively mandate a uniform federal definition of marriage—or any other core concept of domestic relations, for that matter” and “the federal government nonetheless recognizes any heterosexual marriage, which a couple has validly entered pursuant to the laws of the state that issued the license”—but the decision is grounded firmly in more ethical than purely legalistic terms.

Here’s the meat of Tauro’s rationale: 

Congress undertook this classification for the one purpose that lies entirely outside of legislative bounds, to disadvantage a group of which it disapproves. And such a classification, the Constitution clearly will not permit.” And then we get the big guns: “where, as here, ‘there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects’ from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification. As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” (emphasis in original) 

I find it interesting that Tauro cites the implicit guarantee of equal protection in the 5th Amendment rather than the explicit statement in the 14th. His point is valid either way, of course.

I imagine there are those who are already frothing at the mouth that their irrational prejudice is described as irrational prejudice, but the appeal to equal protection—to fundamental fairness, in other words—would seem to have at least some hope of long-term resonance. Nonetheless, I confess I’m tempted to agree with blogger and law professor Jack M. Balkin, who knows a lot more about these things than I do: “Whether one likes it or not—and I do not—Judge Tauro is way ahead of the national consensus on the the equal protection issue. I personally think that discrimination against gays and lesbians is irrational, but a federal district court judge—who must obey existing precedents, and who is overseen by a federal judiciary and a Supreme Court constituted as they currently are—is in a very different position than I am.”

About the 10th amendment argument, Balkin writes: “To be sure, there is something delightfully playful and perverse about the two opinions when you read them. Judge Tauro uses the Tenth Amendment—much beloved by conservatives— to strike down another law much beloved by conservatives—DOMA. There is a kind of clever, ‘gotcha’ element to this logic. It is as if he’s saying: ‘You want the Tenth Amendment? I'll give you the Tenth Amendment!’ But in the long run, this sort of argument, clever as it is, is not going to work.” Balkin concludes: “I believe that the civil rights of gays and lesbians will someday be vindicated by legislatures and courts. But not in this way.” The good news and the bad news is that he’s probably correct.

Ultimately, getting it right is important. Grounding a legal argument in legitimate constitutional terms not only makes for better law, it also pre-empts ring-wing arguments about judicial activism. They’ll still ululate, of course; it would be nice if they didn’t have a point. But there’s also a pragmatic issue. Rights are being denied right now, and there’s part of me that wants to leave the niceties until later and get the policy right absolutely as soon as possible. Ultimately, though, I’d prefer that the courts do what they’re supposed to do: rule purely on the basis of constitutional authority. Of course, I can say that in part because my own marriage and the benefits thereunto appertaining are not being threatened by “irrational prejudice.”

Johannes Mehserle and Oscar Grant

The other really significant story that broke Thursday afternoon was the verdict in the murder trial of former Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer Johannes Mehserle. Mehserle was filmed (by several different people from various angles) on January 1, 2009, firing a fatal shot into Oscar Grant III, who was face-down on the ground with another cop’s knee on his neck at the time. The scenario has a grim familiarity: white cop kills young black male, concocts a totally implausible defense, and is pretty much exonerated by an all-white jury in a totally different jurisdiction. True, he was convicted—the MSNBC headline reads “Mehserle Verdict: Guilty.” That’s technically true, of course, but guilty of what? The jury rejected 2nd-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter charges, settling instead on involuntary manslaughter. In other words, “Oops.”

And we wonder why so many members of minority populations (black, gay, Hispanic…)—hell, people in general—don’t trust the police. The reason is that some idiot cop shot an unarmed man in front of dozens of witnesses and several cameras and, despite the overwhelming, obvious, video evidence and eye-witness testimony that there was nothing whatsoever involuntary about his action, essentially got away with it. (He can petition for probation alone as his punishment.) If you’ve met a dozen cops in your lifetime, the odds are overwhelming that you’ve met one who went into police work not to serve the community but to strut around with a sidearm and act important.

It would be silly to say that all (or even most) cops are racist, testosterone-overdosed jackasses. It would be equally silly to deny that some are. Be it noted: the truly bad cop here may well be Tony Pirone, described by Julianne Hing of colorlines.com as “the true villain of the night.” It may well be that Mehserle just panicked (which doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, at least), whereas Pirone is the sort of arrogant prick who likes to prance around threatening people, swearing at them, and generally giving everyone else in uniform a bad name. It was Pirone’s swaggering and violence that appear to have escalated what could otherwise have been a controlled situation. Will Pirone face as much as a reprimand? Are you kidding?

That said, it was Mehserle who pulled the trigger, and his story that he didn’t really mean to shoot Grant, that he thought he was reaching for his Taser, is, well, laughable—or it would be if this transparent fabrication hadn’t worked. Mehserle admitted in cross-examination that he had used his Taser to intimidate Grant and other suspects in an alleged fight—the reason the cops were called out to begin with. Moreover, as multiple videos show, there was no reason to Tase Grant in the first place, so even in the frankly unlikely event Mehserle were telling the truth, he’d still have used excessive force.

Also, of course, his Taser was on the other side of his body from his pistol: we’re talking about reaching for it with your other hand. How likely was he to have made that mistake and not discovered it until Grant was dead or dying? If you answered “about as likely as Sarah Palin’s being Rachel Maddow’s next guest host,” you win. Mehserle never claimed at the scene that the shooting was an accident. He tried out the line that he thought Grant was reaching for a gun, but 1). he knew better, and 2). he didn’t follow procedures if he thought that was true. He showed no signs of contrition until he cried under cross-examination. There are more holes in his testimony than in the Detroit Lions’ defense.

And yet… he was all but acquitted. I wish I could figure out why. Unwillingness to believe that a cop would behave the way Mehserle obviously did behave? Fear? If so, of what? Racial animus? Really? All I know is that these people apparently have a lot to answer for. I don’t hold them responsible for the rioting after the verdict was announced (most of the protests were peaceful, but some weren’t). As usual, there are conflicting claims about who—protesters or police—instigated the violence. I do hold that jury culpable, however, for the next case like this one. They had a chance to at least send a message to the next Johannes Mehserle and indeed to the next Tony Pirone. They missed that train.

LeBron James

Last, and most definitely least, of these stories is the fact that LeBron James will be “taking [his] talents to South Beach” for the foreseeable future, i.e., he’s leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat. When he first entered the NBA straight out of a northeastern Ohio high school, James looked to be just what Cleveland needed to give the city its first championship in any major sport in 40+ years. It was a “local kid makes good” story. James was a little brash, but he seemed willing to play for the good of the team, and the fact that he comported himself off the court like the stereotype of a teen-aged multi-millionaire was mitigated if not excused by the fact that many lesser athletes behaved far worse.

But all that changed. James became a two-time league MVP, a “superstar” with all the gazillion endorsement deals that entailed. And somewhere along the way he started believing his own hype. He yammered about how he had “spoiled” Cleveland with the quality of his play. Really? How many championships did you deliver, LBJ? Clevelanders would trade all the MVP awards in creation for a single championship. The fact that you wouldn’t doesn’t change this fact.

And, while he is unquestionably an outstanding athlete, he just flat gets outplayed (or matched by those of considerably lesser talent) when it matters most. My favorite basketball statistic is what has come to be called the “Larry Bird formula” because Bird contributed in such a wide variety of ways: it is an attempt to view, in a single number, a player’s contributions to his team’s success. There are several variations on this theme. Here’s mine: Add points, rebounds, assists, blocked shots, and steals. Subtract turnovers, fouls, and missed shots of any kind (you’re not helping your team if it takes you 25 shots to get your 20 points). Take that number and divide it by minutes played. Multiply by 1000 to eliminate the decimal point. A good score, one you’d expect consistently from a star player, is 500. A really good game, the kind you’d expect not infrequently from a superstar, is 750. A put-the-team-on-his-back-and-carry-them number is 1000.

James played very well in the Cavs’ two wins against Boston in the playoffs: 837 in game 1, 1128 in game 3. But he managed only a 326 when Boston tied the series in game 4, and, in the embarrassing blowout home loss (game 5) that really decided the series, he got a 214. The other Cavs forward, Antoine Jamison, got better numbers in both those games. In games 4 and 5, the pivotal sequence in the series, James shot 31% from the field, including 0-for-9 from 3-point range, and had 10 turnovers. Real superstars play at their best when the team needs them most, and they’re consistently good or better. James? Nope. Equally importantly, what separates James from the legitimate greats is that he doesn’t really raise the level of play of his teammates. And despite his obvious physical attributes, he is only an average defender: there’s a lot more to playing D than steals and rebounds.

Why did Boston beat Cleveland this year? Well, there was excellent team play, an inspired performance by Rajon Rondo… and two days off by the Cavs’ alleged superstar. No, not off days; days off. As John Krolik writes, “LeBron James was supposed to be the next golden boy of the NBA. He will never be that player, and that would have been true regardless of what team LeBron decided to go to. LeBron James, Golden Boy died the moment LeBron lost to the Celtics in this year's playoffs. The decision LeBron made on Thursday night was nothing more than LeBron's acknowledgement of that reality.”

Will the Cavs miss him? Of course. He’s a very good player, capable of great things, and the team was built around him, so both offensive and defensive strategies (and perhaps some other personnel) will have to be adjusted. But the prediction of a friend that they’ll go 7-75 next year is wildly exaggerated. And while the Heat will have three first-line players—James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade—they’ll have contracts (and egos) to match. Of the three, only Wade has ever spent any time not being the undisputed star of his team—back when Shaquille O’Neal’s skills were just beginning to decline. There’s one ball. And with all that money going to three players, the salary cap means that the supporting cast will be comprised almost exclusively of journeymen. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Heat watching next year’s finals from their respective living rooms. I confess that I would rejoice in any final featuring neither the Heat nor the Lakers.

One last thing on this topic. There is something more than a little disturbing about all the grand-standing: “the King” (who’s never had a crown) “holding court” as teams came begging hat in hand, the hour-long special on ESPN—how self-important can you get? (On the other hand, what does it say for the integrity of ESPN that they’d go along with this farce?) LBJ’s childishness, however, was surpassed by the petulance of Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, who wasted no time posting on the Cavs’ official website an open letter trashing the guy he had just been fawning over, describing a “narcissistic, self-promotional build-up,” a “cowardly betrayal,” a “shameful display of selfishness and betrayal,” a “heartless and callous action.” He followed up his missive with an interview with the AP, claiming that James “quit” in the Boston series. The fact that he’s right doesn’t change the fact that it’s a rather unseemly display. (The promise to bring a championship to Cleveland before Miami gets one is at least intriguing.) Ultimately, it’s all about one rich guy getting miffed at another rich guy.

We get it, boys. You’re both multi-millionaires, and you think that all you need to do is stamp your feet and you’ll get what you want. You think your shit don’t stink. You’re wrong, as usual. Please, both of you, STFU.

The Lessons of Easter Week, 1916

One cannot spend any time in Dublin, certainly not on the kind of Study Abroad trip from which I have just returned, without being reminded of the Easter Rising of 1916. It gets discussed extensively on the Historical Walking Tour and at Kilmainham Gaol. The train stations—Heuston, Connolly, Pearse—are named after leaders of the rebellion. Bullet holes from the conflict are still visible in the columns in front of the General Post Office. The W.B. Yeats exhibit at the National Library shows what the city looked like after an English battleship had shelled O’Connell Street that week. The only full statue in the city to a specific woman known to have actually existed (as opposed to Queen Maeve or Molly Malone) is dedicated to the Countess Constance Markievicz, whose sex alone prevented her from being executed in the Rising’s aftermath. There are Easter Week-specific tours of the city. And on and on.

Of course, the Easter Rising ultimately failed. There was no lasting Irish Republic established that week, and everyday Irish men and women were lukewarm at best towards the insurrection. But the rhetoric of Pádraig Pearse at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa less than a year earlier proved prophetic: 

Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

Pearse and fourteen others faced firing squads at Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol after the Rising, and three others were either executed outside Dublin or died on a hunger strike in prison, but it was only a few years later that there really was an Irish Free State. Significantly, however, neither the establishment of the Free State nor even the declaration of the Republic (as distinct from a dominion) of Ireland hold anything close to the hold on the public imagination as do the events of Easter 1916.

W.B. Yeats was to write in one of his most famous poems,” Easter, 1916,” written five years after the events he describes, “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” But there’s a sense in which Yeats had it wrong: it wasn’t so much Easter Week itself which was transformative, although those events are certainly not to be ignored. Rather, it was the tone-deaf over-reaction of the English authorities to what had transpired that inexorably changed public opinion. Whereas early on the general populace blamed the Republicans for catalyzing the destruction perpetrated by the British, that attitude dissipated in the wake of the ongoing series of executions. It seemed a little barbaric that the English provided emergency medical assistance to James Connolly so he wouldn't die before they had a chance to kill him. Moreover, the killings or long-term internments of a number of nationalists who had little if any connection to the Rising suggested that the British authorities were more interested in a show of force than in justice.

Not included in the list of those executed, for example, were Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist who was outspoken in his opposition to the tactics (though not the goals) of the rebels, and two pro-British journalists, Thomas Dixon and Patrick McIntyre. Still, all three were arrested, unarmed and unresisting, and ultimately shot to death by British soldiers. It didn’t help that the officer in charge, although indeed arrested for murder, was able to successfully plead insanity (battle fatigue), and ultimately retired at 40 with a full pension. England also extended martial law long after there was any real unrest in Ireland.

As a result of all this, the Irish people in general became considerably more radicalized, more impatient, more willing to employ violence rather than more peaceable means to achieve their ends. The moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, which held 68 parliamentary seats at the time of the Rising, managed to retain only seven in the December 1918 by-election. By contrast, Sinn Féin, which had held only six seats in the spring of 1916, re-organized under Éamon de Valera (who escaped execution after the Rising only because he was American-born) and promised to employ “every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection.” Although as an organization Sinn Féin had not been directly involved in the Rising, a good number of its members had been, and they had the best name recognition among the nationalist groups. The result was an over 12-fold increase in their parliamentary representation after the 1918 elections: to 73 seats.

We could tease out some of the nuances and discuss Sinn Féin’s subsequent tactics, but this isn’t a history lesson; it’s a political blog. So what is the real point of recounting history of nearly a century ago? Simply this: there was a lesson to be learned here. To repeat: the Irish people weren’t on the side of the radicals until the English arrogantly over-reacted. I can find literally no one, from Irish historians to the BBC, who disagrees with this assessment. Yet these simple lessons—even people who disagree with you will respect you if you act justly, and moderates will become extremists if you don’t—seem to have been particularly difficult for the politically and militarily powerful to learn. The English couldn’t wrap their heads around it in the wake of Bloody Sunday, taking some 38 years to finally, a little over a fortnight ago, admit that the victims (13 dead, as many more seriously injured) of those horrible events in Derry in 1972, had done nothing to deserve their fate. The IRA certainly got a lot of recruits from those who had seen what happened to peaceful protesters.

This kind of obliviousness, however, is not a peculiarly English phenomenon. We Americans have gotten very good at it, especially recently. With few exceptions, world opinion was overwhelmingly sympathetic to this country after the events of September 11, 2001. Then came the invasion of Iraq, a country which had precisely bupkis to do with 9/11. Then there was Abu Ghraib. And Guantanamo. And waterboarding. More importantly, there were the obviously disingenuous denials. And, suddening, a good share of the Islamic world, people who had been neutral towards the US or even leaning a little towards friendship, started viewing American foreign policy—Bush’s, Obama’s, it doesn’t matter—in Western Asia as arrogant, imperialistic, and unjust… and not without reason.

Now comes a report that the Fourth Estate, once charged with a primary role in speaking truth to power, has been abrogating that responsibility: the following is from the abstract of a study by Harvard students:

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

That I have no use for cowardly journalism is hardly a news flash; that it appears that many elite media institutions have completely caved on any kind of pursuit of objective reality falls under that ever-widening category of “I hate it when I’m right.” Anything the lunatic right challenges, no matter how frivolous the protestations, becomes “controversial,” and that means shying away from accurate terms in favor of euphemisms. The defenders of the duly constituted Iraqi government became “insurgents”; the civil war there couldn’t be called a civil war; prisoners of war would be subject to the Geneva Conventions, so those folks became “captured enemy combatants”; waterboarding, which had been a classic example of torture for generations, was now simply an “enhanced interrogation technique.” If this is what we get from the so-called left-wing media, then what hope have we?

More to the point, everyone smarter than Liz Cheney, and that’s damned near everybody, knows that this is all a steaming pile of bullshit. And, as Watergate taught us, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. Denying the facts was hard enough a generation ago; in the internet age, it’s a virtual impossibility, although there are plenty of folks, especially but by no means exclusively on the political right, who are willing to give it a try.

Maybe, however, we should learn the lessons of the Easter Rising and its aftermath: that making martyrs of those willing to be martyred is seldom a good idea; that avoiding responsibility can last only so long; that people are ultimately smart enough not to be distracted by legalistic niceties, especially when those lawyerly phrases ring immediately hollow to any reasonably intelligent 12-year-old. If what we want to do is to “win the hearts and minds” of the Islamic world, we need to change course in a big old hurry. If we want to continue to be the world’s greatest recruiter of al-Qaida operatives, we need only proceed down the path we’re on. After all, it worked so well for the British in 1916.