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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
University of Miami Responds
University of Miami Student's Removal Not Related to Rap SongRe the Nov. 27 Free Musings blog entry "Free Expression under Fire": The University of Miami initially declined to comment on this situation because of its policy regarding student privacy.
However, after the student has released selected facts publicly, the University of Miami wants to clarify some of his statements.
There is no connection between the Seventh Floor Crew rap song issue and the student being returned to his parents' supervision. However, it was that initial posting on the student's blog that brought the Web site to the University's attention.
The next day, UM officials discovered that the student had used university property and its computer network to post highly inappropriate and explicit photographs and, as the student indicated in the story, he also posted a suicide note.
Using the university's computer systems to post explicit images is a clear and blatant violation of established university policy and the Student Code of Conduct. University employees and students are subject to severe disciplinary action for violation of these policies.
The posted explicit images, along with the suicide note, resulted in the student being interviewed and evaluated, and his parents were notified that he could not continue to live on campus.
The university had the option of asking the student to withdraw from classes, but concluded that returning him to his parents' supervision, asking them to find alternative housing for him and allowing him to attend classes were better options for his future.
JERRY LEWIS, vice president, university communications, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 30, 2005 at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
'America Right or Wrong'
Author Incurs U.S. Backlash with Wake-up Call Book
By Michael RoddyBritish journalist and think-tank fellow Anatol Lieven wrote his book "America Right or Wrong" as a wake-up call for the United States to curb its nationalism or face the consequences.
For his trouble, Lieven received hate mail, was derided on Internet blogs and, in possibly the cruelest cut of all, was labeled "anti-American" in a review in the New York Times.
"It was actively slanderous," he fumed almost a year later.
But perhaps not all that surprising.
"While America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in the cellar," he writes in the book, published in 2004 and just re-issued in paperback.
"Usually kept under certain restraints, these demons were released by 9/11," he adds, seeing the attacks on Washington and New York in September 2001, as the trigger that unleashed the nationalist, messianic "dark side" of America.
The Republican Party of President George W. Bush, who has proclaimed the right of the United States to intervene around the world for preventive war and to foster democracy, should rename itself the "American Nationalist Party," Lieven writes.
"That was what you might call a 'minor provocation'," he laughed during a recent interview in London.
Lieven, 45, does not hate America. He lives in Washington where he is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. However, he sees serious problems afflicting the world's only superpower.
"At the moment America is just overextended and riding for a fall," he told Reuters.
"It doesn't have the resources, the financial resources, and it can't raise enough men to fulfill its present goals of basically dominating everywhere."
Kicking down the HillHow did America, which pushed communism over the brink to extinction and spearheaded the globalization that raised world wealth to record levels, get in the position where, as Lieven sees it, it is "kicking to pieces the hill of which it is king?"
To explain, Lieven goes back to colonial times, the frontier era, and most particularly to America's early 19th-century President Andrew Jackson, whom Lieven says did much to nurture nationalism, and a "messianic" belief America can do no wrong.
Jackson personified a new "folk law" of America, taking precedence over written law, Lieven writes. Along with it came deep suspicion of America's East Coast, its intellectuals and "Yankee" lawyers -- a regional hostility Lieven says persists to this day in the South and in Texas, Bush's home state.
"This picture is a tremendously important part of the self-image of George W. Bush, of Dick Cheney (from Wyoming, another frontier state) and indeed of their administration as a whole, and it has shaped that administration's aggressiveness in international affairs," Lieven writes.
The neo-conservatives in the Bush administration embraced the concept of preventive war to promote America's influence in the world, Lieven says. All it needed was the trigger al Qaeda provided.
Lieven, who has written about the Baltics and Chechnya, could be accused -- and has been -- of being a card-carrying "old worlder" who fails to understand the nuances of American politics and civilization that have helped the country thrive for more than two centuries.
He counters his critics by in effect quoting their words back at them, citing major American historians and political figures, such as the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright, an outspoken foe of the Vietnam war three decades ago.
"He (Fulbright) sets out categorically this argument against a messianic belief that America can tell other nations what to do, even if they don't agree, because we (the United States) have the best system in the world and American power was inevitably good.
"It's in Fulbright; it's not something Anatol Lieven made up," the author said.
Lieven hasn't finished with America. For a book on American strategy, he is teaming up with a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, John Hulsman, whom Lieven describes as "the last of the Eisenhower Republicans."
"I am quite convinced that if (U.S. President Dwight) Eisenhower were to come back today he would have written a review in support of my book," Lieven joked.
"Eisenhower argued again and again for calm, for restraint, for understanding your enemy, for distinguishing between different kinds of enemies and for not uniting enemies against you," he said of the former general who served as president in the 1950s.
"What he would have made of the 'neo-cons', God alone knows."
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 29, 2005 at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, November 28, 2005
Note from a Fellow Blogger
Goodbye to America
By Hossein DerakhshanI've literally become homeless and I'm not joking.
You might have seen a small change in my little biography on my home page. I had said that I was in New York and that's what had actually changed my life. But I'm now out of the states and can't go back at least for six months.
It was actually my blog that got me into trouble after a month of staying in my friend's flat in lower-Manhattan, NYC. It's a sad but real story.
The last time I decided to go back to Toronto for a night, I took a bus. A huge mistake, now I know. When I wanted to come back to NYC, I was obviously stopped and interviewed by U.S. Customs and Border Security people at the Buffalo border, like everyone else on the bus.
But when they realized I was going to the States to speak at a blog-related conference (ConvergeSouth) they googled my name right in front of me. Two of them, actually.
They carefully scanned the results and found this English blog. One of them, a very sharp guy in fact, started to read every single post on my blog. And it didn't take long until he shocked me: "So you live in New York, right? That's what you've written in your on blog."
I had no idea googling people at the border had become a possibility. So instead of defending me with some simple legal arguments about what I meant by that, I kind of felt desperate and said I did that because I was there for some back-to-back events and conferences and I thought saying you are in New York is sexier than Toronto -- which actually is, don't you think?
He was ecstatic. My blog made his day, or in this case, his night. He kept reading my posts and asking questions about a lot of them: Why did I go to Iran, what are my feelings about Bush administration, why I separated from my wife, what did think about Iranian politics, etc.
The guy was so in love with his job he wanted to get me into deep trouble so ultimately I could never go back to his lovely country, apparently. So he started to look for evidence that I'd also worked in the States and were paid by them. Until he found, in my archive, a post I'd written before leaving for Iran, to ask for the blogging community's attention and support, especially if something happened to me in Iran and about how they could help in that case.
Sarcastically, I'd reminded everyone not to be surprised if, while in detention in Iran, I confessed about some absurd wrongdoings form the Islamic regime's point of view, such as: getting money from the CIA, trafficking illegal drugs, dating Natalie Portman and Kiera Knightly, etc.
"So you are getting money for the Bush administration," the officer asked. I was speechless. "Come on! This is a joke. Read the whole thing and put it in a context." Fortunately the guy was a smart man and realized the sarcasm. However he said these things are not quite appropriate to be on your blog when you are at the border. He was right.
But later, when he had still doubt about letting me in or not, he found the latest issue of Newsweek in my small suitcase on which I had my NYC address. There were many others with my Toronto address, but that single was enough to convince him about my situation. I didn't challenge him again. God, I wish I were a lawyer. I could've said this magazine is important for me and I didn't want to miss a single issue of it by being away from home.
So then he took me to another room and spent about two hours writing a report and registering and documenting my refusal of entry.
Now the result is that, apparently, I can't visit the States at least for six months and even after that I should prove I'm established enough in Canada. I also have to explain why I failed to register my departure when the bus driver didn't stop while crossing the U.S. border to Canada.
Now I feel there is no place in New York City, the most cosmopolitan city in the world. But it's not the end of the world. Even it might be better for me to spend more time in Europe and learn new languages.
It's sad to see America is not the land of the free anymore.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 28, 2005 at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Free Expression under Fire
Posted by fm on November 27, 2005 at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Sudoku Puzzle 009
Posted by fm on November 26, 2005 at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, November 25, 2005
Bush Skips Planned 'Lecture'
Posted by fm on November 25, 2005 at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Singing the Op-Ed Blues
Open Letter to the Los Angeles Times
By Barbra StreisandThe greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity, but demands it. Your decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community.
It seems that your new leadership, especially Publisher Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with your readers and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your Op-Ed pages may have increased, in firing Scheer and hiring columnists such as Jonah Goldberg, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted. I suspect this may ultimately decrease the number of readers of those same pages.
My greatest fear is that the underlying reason for Scheer's termination is part of a larger trend toward the corporatization of our media, a trend that we, as American citizens, must fervently battle for the sake of our swiftly diminishing free press.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 24, 2005 at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Darfur Genocide
- Insist that your elected officials support a stronger U.S. contribution to the African Union to significantly increase troop strength in Darfur.
- Tell them that there must be enforcing of "no fly zones" and sanctions already specified in U.N. Security Council resolutions and the establishing of a secure environment for delivery of humanitarian aid.
- Ask that we increase NATO logistical airlift support and combat unspeakable sexual violence against young girls and mothers.
Posted by fm on November 23, 2005 at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Courageous Voice
Posted by fm on November 22, 2005 at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, November 21, 2005
Anatomy of Fascism
Book Review of "The Anatomy of Fascism" by Robert O. Paxton
By Samantha PowerFascism, to hear President Bush tell it, has been revived by Islamic militants. "The terrorists are the heirs to fascism," he has said. "They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased: they must be defeated."
In this statement, Bush laid out his checklist for what constitutes fascism. Such checklists are required because fascism -- unlike Communism, socialism, capitalism or conservatism -- is a smear word more often used to brand one's foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them. Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of several books, including "Vichy France," is not the first scholar to wade into a definitional and historical quagmire in order to answer the question, What is fascism? Indeed, his book "The Anatomy of Fascism" -- which doubles as a history and a sustained argument -- is not the most original study of the subject. But it is so fair, so thorough and, in the end, so convincing that it may well become the most authoritative.
Why should readers care about fascism? Paxton offers one answer at the outset. "Fascism was the major political innovation of the 20th century, and the source of much of its pain." But in exploring how such uncouth nobodies as Hitler and Mussolini introduced what the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce described as an "onagrocracy" -- or "government by braying asses" -- he also hopes to enable us to recognize "what the 21st century must avoid."
"The Anatomy of Fascism" is the work of a distinguished scholar who has sifted through the primary sources, the tomes and the trends in an effort to synthesize and even settle prior debates. His main emphasis is on Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, but in order to demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power while most remained marginal, he contrasts these "successes" with fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere.
Paxton proceeds chronologically, tracing how fascist movements are born, take root, assume power, govern and self-destruct. At every stage he explores the interaction among the leader, the state, the party and civil society, examining the symbiosis between socioeconomic conditions and the political agents who seized upon and shaped them.
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed mightily to the advent of fascism. The war generated acute economic malaise, national humiliation and legions of restive veterans and unemployed youths who could be harnessed politically. The Bolshevik Revolution, but one symptom of the frustration with the old order, made conservative elites in Italy and Germany so fearful of Communism that anything -- even fascism -- came to seem preferable to a Marxist overthrow.
Still, Paxton retains an important capacity for incredulity. How on earth was it that Benito Mussolini, who won a mere 4,796 votes out of 315,165 in the 1919 election, could find himself appointed prime minister in 1922? The answer, Paxton makes clear, was not Mussolini's policy platform. "They ask us what is our program," Mussolini said. "Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy." Rather, it was the societal ills, the conservatives' fear of a Communist revolution, the paralysis of Italy's liberal constitutional order and the violence inflicted by fascist militia -- violence that made the state eager to co-opt the violent themselves.
How could Hitler, whose Nazi Party placed ninth in 1928 (with only 2.8 percent of the popular vote), soar to first in 1932 (with 37.2 percent)? In Germany, storm troopers intimidated enemies, Hitler himself delivered mesmerizing harangues and the Nazi Party became a catchall movement that appealed to those Germans from all classes who were disillusioned with the bankrupt mainstream parties.
But none of this was enough to bring about fascist rule. One of Paxton's main contributions is to focus less on the "Duce myth" and the "Führer myth" and more on the indispensable "conservative complicities" behind the fascist takeovers. Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements "normalized" the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it. "At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution," Paxton writes. King Victor Emmanuel III responded to Mussolini's "gigantic bluff," the Black Shirt march on Rome, not by imposing martial law but by offering him the prime ministership. And in 1933 it was the ambitious German Catholic aristocrat Franz Von Papen, believing he would be the one who gained power, who arranged the deal that gave Hitler the chancellorship.
Fascists never assumed power in countries where governing structures functioned "tolerably well," where conservatives retained confidence or where local fascists remained "pure" by avoiding political compromise or elections. "It was not enough to don a colored shirt, march about and beat up some local minority to conjure up the success of a Hitler or a Mussolini," Paxton writes. "It took a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at alliance building and comparable cooperation from existing elites."
Fascist movements and regimes are different from military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. They seek not to exclude, but rather to enlist, the masses. They often collapse the distinction between the public and private sphere (eliminating the latter). In the words of Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi Labor Office, the only private individual who existed in Nazi Germany was someone asleep. And, crucially, their durability depends on their ability to remain in constant motion. It was this need to keep citizens intoxicated by fascism's dynamism that made Mussolini and Hitler see war as both desirable and necessary. "War is to men," Mussolini insisted, "as maternity is to women."
Paxton leaves his readers with a working definition of fascism:
"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Fine-tuning definitions, however, is less important for the future than identifying and neutralizing fascist threats. This recognition will come, Paxton believes, "not by checking the color of shirts" but "by understanding how past fascisms worked." We should "not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas," he writes; nor should we look for hate crimes and extreme nationalist propaganda. Rather, we should address the conditions and the enablers -- political deadlocks in times of crises, and conservatives who want tougher allies and elicit support through nationalist and racist demagogy.
For every official American attempt to link Islamic terrorism to fascism, there is an anti-Bush protest that applies the fascist label to Washington's nationalist rhetoric, assault on civil liberties and warmaking. Paxton's study has made it no less likely that the label will be appropriated. But the lasting contribution of this splendid book is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid accomplices.
Samantha Power, a lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is the author of " 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide."
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 21, 2005 at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Foresight and Leadership
- Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
- Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
- Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
- Robert Byrd (D-WV)
- Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
- Kent Conrad (D-ND)
- Jon Corzine (D-NJ)
- Mark Dayton (D-MN)
- Richard Durbin (D-IL)
- Russell Feingold (D-WI)
- Robert Graham (D-FL)
- Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
- James Jeffords (I-VT)
- Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
- Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
- Carl Levin (D-MI)
- Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
- Patty Murray (D-WA)
- Jack Reed (D-RI)
- Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
- Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
- Paul Wellstone (D-MN)
- Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Here's what some of these Senators had to say on October 11, 2002, or in the days leading up to that vote.
Daniel Akaka (D-HI): "Great uncertainty surrounds the President's post-war strategy. Remember the day the war ends, Iraq becomes our responsibility, our problem. The United States lacks strategic planning for a post-conflict situation. Retired General George Joulwan recently said that the U.S. needs 'to organize for the peace' and design now a strategy with 'clear goals, milestones, objectives.' Our objectives in Iraq have not yet been made clear: is it our goal to occupy Baghdad and if so, for how long? A rush to battle without a strategy to win the peace is folly.
"I support action by the United Nations in the form of a resolution calling for unconditional and unfettered inspections in Iraq. Only after we exhaust all of our alternative means should we engage in the use of force, and before then, the President must ensure we have a strategy and plans in place for winning the war and building the peace."
Kent Conrad (D-ND): "Before we ask young men and women to put themselves in harm's way, I must be convinced that we have exhausted every other possibility, pursued every other avenue. For me, and I believe for the people I represent, war must be the last resort. Saddam has not directly threatened his neighbors since the Gulf War. And a recent threat assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency concludes that Iraq is not likely to initiate a chemical or biological attack on the United States.
"Yet the President is contemplating a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq with the goal of ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a new regime. Never before in the history of this nation has the Congress voted to authorize a preemptive attack on a country that has not first attacked us or our allies. In my judgment, an invasion of Iraq at this time would make the United States less secure rather than more secure. It would make a dangerous world even more dangerous."
Mark Dayton (D-MN): "There appears to be no imminent threat to the United States from Iraq. If there were, the Bush Administration could not have decided last summer to delay this unveiling until September because, in the words of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Jr., 'from a marketing point of view, you don't bring out new products in August.'
"Because Iraq's threat is not immediate, and because U.N. diplomatic efforts are just under way, I believe it is unwise and unnecessary for Congress to vote now on a future use of military force. So why is Congress rushing to judgment at this time? It is for political advantage in the upcoming election, rather than diplomatic or military necessity."
Richard Durbin (D-IL) "Historically, we have said it is not enough to say you have a weapon that can hurt us. Think of 50 years of cold war when the Soviet Union had weapons poised and pointed at us. It is not enough that you just have weapons. We will watch to see if you make any effort toward hurting anyone in the United States, any of our citizens or our territory.
"It was a bright-line difference in our foreign policy which we drew and an important difference in our foreign policy. It distinguished us from aggressor nations. It said that we are a defensive nation. We do not strike out at you simply because you have a weapon if you are not menacing or threatening to us. Has September 11, 2001, changed that so dramatically?"
Russell Feingold (D-WI): "Both in terms of the justifications for an invasion and in terms of the mission and the plan for the invasion, Mr. President, the Administration's arguments just don't add up. They don't add up to a coherent basis for a new major war in the middle of our current challenging fight against the terrorism of al Qaeda and related organizations. Therefore, I cannot support the resolution for the use of force before us.
"I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. My colleagues, I'm not suggesting there has to be only one justification for such a dramatic action. But when the Administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the Administration's motives in insisting on action at this particular time."
James Jeffords (I-VT): "I am very disturbed by President Bush's determination that the threat from Iraq is so severe and so immediate that we must rush to a military solution. I do not see it that way. I have been briefed several times by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, CIA Director Tenet and other top Administration officials. I have discussed this issue with the President. I have heard nothing that convinces me that an immediate preemptive military strike is necessary or that it would further our interests in the long term.
"We must ensure that any action we take against Iraq does not come at the expense of the health and strength of our nation, or the stability of the international order upon which our economic security depends. Just think of what progress we could make on non-proliferation if we were to put one fraction of the cost of a war against Saddam Hussein into efforts to prevent the emergence of the next nuclear, chemical or biological threat. Strong efforts at strengthening international non-proliferation regimes would truly enhance our nation's future security."
Edward Kennedy (D-MA): "It is wrong for Congress to declare war against Iraq now before we have exhausted the alternatives. And it is wrong to divert our attention now from the greater and more immediate threat of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorism. We cannot go it alone on Iraq and expect our allies to support us. We cannot go it alone and expect the world to stand with us in the urgent and ongoing war against terrorism and Al Qaeda."
Patrick Leahy (D-VT): "This resolution, like others before it, does not declare anything. It tells the President: Why don't you decide; we are not going to. This resolution, when you get through the pages of whereas clauses, is nothing more than a blank check. The President can decide when to use military force, how to use it, and for how long. This Vermonter does not sign blank checks.
"We have heard a lot of bellicose rhetoric, but what are the facts? I am not asking for 100 percent proof, but the administration is asking Congress to make a decision to go to war based on conflicting statements, angry assertions, and assumption based on speculation. This is not the way a great nation goes to war.
"The key words in the resolution we are considering today are remarkably similar to the infamous [Gulf of Tonkin] resolution of 38 years ago which so many Senators and so many millions of Americans came to regret. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not pass a Tonkin Gulf resolution. Let us not set the history of our great country this way. Let us not make the mistake we made once before."
Carl Levin (D-MI): "The vote we take today may have significant consequences for our children and our grandchildren. I believe our security is enhanced when we seek to enhance the authority and credibility of the United Nations and when, if military force is required, it is done with support of the world community."
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD): "America cannot face this situation alone. The support and cooperation of allies would enable us to share the risks and costs. We need international legitimacy, international support, and international manpower. I also worry that unilateral action could undermine the war on terrorism. Some special forces have already been withdrawn in the efforts to hunt al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The focus of our top military and civilian leaders could shift away from Bin Laden and al Qaeda."
Jack Reed (D-RI): "Acting alone will increase the risk to our forces and to our allies in the region. Acting alone will increase the burden that we must bear to restore stability in the region. Acting alone will invite the criticism and animosity of many throughout the world who will mistakenly dismiss our efforts as entirely self-serving. Acting alone could seriously undermine the structure of collective security that the United States has labored for decades to make effective. Acting alone today against the palpable evil of Saddam may set us on a course, charted by the newly announced doctrine of preemption, that will carry us beyond the limits of our power and our wisdom."
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): "If we do this right, Mr. President, we will truly make the world safer for our families. If we choose the wrong approach, I am deeply concerned that we will start down a road that could ultimately create a more unstable and dangerous world for our children and our grandchildren. There is no doubt that we can defeat Saddam Hussein in battle. The test of our strength is not in our ability to marshal our military forces, but our willingness to adhere to that which has made us great.
"We are a strong and powerful nation, made that way by our willingness to go the extra mile in the name of liberty and peace. The time is now for us to work together in the name of the American people and get it right."
Ron Wyden (D-OR): "I am not convinced that Saddam Hussein currently poses a clear and present threat to the domestic security of our nation. While my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee has left me convinced of Iraq's support of terrorism, suspicious of its ties to al Qaeda, I have seen no evidence, acts, or involvement in the planning or execution of the vicious attacks of 9/11."
Please take a moment to call or write these Senators and thank them for what they tried to do.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 20, 2005 at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Sudoku Puzzle 008
Posted by fm on November 19, 2005 at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, November 18, 2005
Our Endangered Values
Posted by fm on November 18, 2005 at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Lessons of History
Posted by fm on November 17, 2005 at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Years of Misguided Policies
Posted by fm on November 16, 2005 at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
LA Times Fires Robert Scheer
L.A. Times Fires Longtime Progressive Columnist Robert Scheer
By Amy Goodman
Source: Democracy NowThe Los Angeles Times newspaper last week announced that it was firing longtime columnist Robert Scheer. Scheer has been at the Los Angeles Times for 30 years and was one of the most progressive voices at the paper. In recent years, his columns took on the Bush administration and its justifications for the invasion of Iraq. Scheer believes that his firing was because of ideological reasons.
In a posting at the Huffington Post blog, he wrote "The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher."
The Los Angeles Times also fired Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer-Prize winning conservative staff cartoonist.
Amy Goodman: We are joined on the line by Robert Scheer, author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. He's also co-host of the syndicated radio show with Arianna Huffington, Matt Miller and Tony Blankley. Welcome to Democracy Now!Robert Scheer: Hi.
Amy Goodman: Well, Robert, can you talk about what happened?
Robert Scheer: Well, what happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Sometimes Bill O'Reilly would sometimes go after me every day, and this went on for the last couple of years, and I'm still standing. I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed. And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column. It had run as a column -- I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.
And even as recently as last week, my last column, which I'm quite proud of, was on the Defense Intelligence Agency report that Senator Carl Levin released last week, and I wrote about how in February 2002 they knew there were no ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, that the key witness was a phony. This was released. Eight months later George Bush went before -- spoke just before the Senate decided its decision and at that time knew that the key witness for this, really the only witness they had, was a phony, yet went and lied to the country. That column last week broke that news for the readers of the Los Angeles Times that the paper neglected to cover in any serious way. So, you know, it's very disappointing.
The only other fact here that I would throw in, the paper is concerned about what the Bush administration thinks, because the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Corporation and now owns a television station, a very profitable one, in the same market in Los Angeles as the newspaper. And next year they have asked -- they have to get a waiver in order to be able to do that, because that violates the law right now. They expected Congress -- when they bought the property, they thought Congress would pass that law allowing them to have those two major outlets in the same market. It is now illegal, and in 2006 they are coming up for a waiver, and the Bush administration's F.C.C. could easily deny that waiver to them.
Amy Goodman: Robert Scheer, I wanted to read you some comments of the people in charge. We did try to get someone on, but they didn't respond. Andres Martinez, the editorial page editor, said, "The opinion pages are our newspaper's town square. Our readers expect us to publish all points of view and the broadest range of opinion, from those of our editorial board and columnists to those of our readers and op-ed contributors. And we intend to do exactly that." The Los Angeles Times publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, said, "You've got a new editorial page editor and a new publisher. We sat down and talked about the pages and decided to make changes." The Times op-ed editor, the opinion editor Nicholas Goldberg, said, "I think we have put together a smart, original and provocative team of writers who reflect a variety of interesting and thoughtful perspectives on local, national and foreign affairs. A good column involves a relationship developed with readers over time, and I invite our readers to develop their relationships with these engaging minds in the weeks and months to come." Your response, Robert Scheer?
Robert Scheer: You know, somebody who could say that, when all isn't said, they can condone anything. We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers. They know I have a strong -- not only that I have a strong relation to readers, but so did Ramirez, the cartoonist. You know, it's just gibberish.
The Los Angeles Times is being shroodled by -- its owners are laying off 70 people this week. They're just gonna -- John Carroll, the distinguished editor of that paper, left because he said they are just going to pillage the paper. He won 13 Pulitzer Prizes in recent years for the Los Angeles Times, and he clearly – it was discussed by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker -- left because he said these people don't care about journalism. These people are just going to suck what they can out of the property. So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote. Why? Because I exposed how the whole Jessica Lynch thing was a fraud, when the newspaper hadn't even covered the news story, or that I attacked the whole W.M.D. from the beginning, I attacked the war from the very beginning? And this is just one column once a week, 720 words on the Op-Ed page, and he couldn't take that.
The decision came from the publisher. It certainly was cleared by Chicago. And then they come out with these fine sounding words about relation to readers and their obligation. It has nothing to do with that. You know, this was the case, you know, with the New York Times with Judy Miller, it's the case with the L.A. Times and the Wen Ho Lee case, where they are now claiming we have a shield thing, we have to protect our reporters with a free press. What they are interested in at the L.A. Times is profits, and then when it's convenient to them, they wave the flag of free press.
But you had one voice at that paper on the Op-Ed page consistently opposed to this war. I've been with the paper for almost 30 years. I have broken a lot of stories. The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter. And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there. And what they know now, because they have had the response of, I don't know what -- I hear from people in the building they have had 3,000 or 4,000 people have emailed and written letters. They have gotten thousands of phone calls. They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.
Amy Goodman: Robert Scheer, I wanted to play for you a comment of or part of a speech by President Bush on Friday on Veterans Day.
President George W. Bush: While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Amy Goodman: President Bush in his address on Friday against a backdrop of soldiers and veterans. Robert Scheer, among the things he said was that it is irresponsible, his critics are being irresponsible in expressing dissent at this time. Your response.
Robert Scheer: Well, this is the big lie technique, and it's really frightening at a time when 60% of the American public know this guy is lying, and they say it. They finally have gotten it. He thinks that by reiterating this lie he can get away with it. And there are two components to it that -- I mean, two such blatant lies. He dares to mention the U.N. in this speech, and yet President Bush knows the issue had nothing at all to do with so-called claims of intelligence. The issue was that the United Nations inspectors were there. The United Nations inspectors had access to everywhere they had to go. They said they were not finding these weapons. As it turns out, the U.N. got the Nobel Prize because they got it right.
And so, let's just begin -- the big lie technique here is to never discuss that. Why did you go to war when the U.N. inspectors there on the ground with access to all of the sites where they were supposed to have these weapons, and they were getting this access; that's number one. Secondly, the argument for imminent threat, that makes you move in, kick out the U.N. inspectors -- you are going to go to war -- the argument is there's a tie between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden, the guys who blew up the World Trade Center. That's the big [inaudible]. And for Bush not to address the revelation of only last week that -- certainly if he didn't know it, maybe he's so out to lunch he didn't know it, but certainly the security officials in his administration knew about the Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum very clearly lining out that there was no evidence of a tie between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and so there certainly was no imminent justification.
But I would also point out he is lying about that Senate report. The fact is the Senate never made -- because of the Republican leadership, the Senate never did the phase two of the report, and phase one of the report did not go into the administration's distortion of the evidence. That was supposed to be left for phase two, and they haven't gotten around to it, and it's been two years.
Amy Goodman: Robert Scheer is speaking to us from a cruise ship in the Pacific. He is on a Nation cruise which is why you are hearing his voice breaking up. Again, the Los Angeles Times columnist, I should say former columnist, was fired on Friday after almost 30 years. The author Jonah Goldberg will now be an L.A. Times op-ed columnist, the author of Liberal Fascism. Your response, Robert.
Robert Scheer: Yeah, well, that gives the – I think it shows what they're really all about. The publisher has told – you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative. He has specifically told them that. And so why don't they tell their readers that? Why doesn't the editor of the editorial page tell the readers our publisher, my publisher, my boss, the guy who owns this press -- remember A.J. Liebling's thing: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. The owner of this paper has taken direct control over the editorial page. Jeff Johnson is an accountant. He's not a journalist. He has said, "I am going to run the editorial page. I'm going to run the columns and the editorials," very clearly, and he's told both of those individuals very clearly in those meetings he referred to that "I'm in charge and I want this page to be more conservative."
Amy Goodman: Well, Robert Scheer --
Robert Scheer: And here he picks Jonah Goldberg, one of the most conservative columnists, to do his bidding for him.
Amy Goodman: I want to thank you very much for being with us. I know there will be a protest tomorrow outside the Los Angeles Times at noon. We will continue to cover the story and hope we can get the Los Angeles Times management on, as well. Thanks for joining us, Robert Scheer, former columnist at the Los Angeles Times for some 30 years.
Robert Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, is a contributing editor to The Nation, and author of numerous books. He has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. Scheer's national column is distributed by Creators Syndicate to more than 20 metropolitan dailies across the United States.
Robert Scheer has taught courses at Antioch College in San Francisco, New York City College, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches courses on media and society. Scheer is director of the Privacy Project at the Annenberg School, and he also has a weekly syndicated political radio show co-hosted with Arianna Huffington, Matt Miller and Tony Blankley on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif.
Scheer can be contacted at rscheer@aol.com.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 15, 2005 at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, November 14, 2005
Right to Habeas Corpus
Posted by fm on November 14, 2005 at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Rage and Riots across France
Posted by fm on November 13, 2005 at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Sudoku Puzzle 007
Posted by fm on November 12, 2005 at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, November 11, 2005
Media at a Crossroads
25 Years after Reagan's Triumph
By Norman Solomon
Source: CounterPunchBy a twist of political fate, the Oct. 28 deadline for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to take action on the Plamegate matter is exactly 25 years after the only debate of the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. How the major media outlets choose to handle the current explosive scandal in the months ahead will have enormous impacts on the trajectory of American politics.
A quarter of a century ago, conservative Republicans captured the White House. Today, a more extreme incarnation of the GOP's right wing has a firm grip on the executive branch. None of it would have been possible without a largely deferential press corps.
Among other things, Reagan's victory over Carter was a media triumph of style in the service of far-right agendas. When their only debate occurred on Oct. 28, 1980, a week before the election, Carter looked rigid and defensive while Reagan seemed at ease, making impact with zingers like "There you go again." More than ever, one-liners dazzled the press corps.
For the next eight years, a "Teflon presidency" had the news media making excuses for the nation's chief executive, who often got his facts wrong while substituting folksy exclamations for documented assertions. The Democratic Party's majorities on Capitol Hill rarely challenged Reagan, and the Washington press corps used the passivity of the Democrats to justify its own. As Walter Karp wrote in Harper's magazine a few months after Reagan left office, "the private story behind every major non-story during the Reagan administration was the Democrats' tacit alliance with Reagan."
That tacit alliance included going easy on Reagan and his vice-president-turned-successor, George H.W. Bush -- despite the Iran-Contra scandal that exposed their roles in the illegal funneling of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, a CIA-backed army that intentionally killed civilians in Nicaragua while trying to implement Washington's goal of overthrowing the Sandinista government.
"For eight years," Karp wrote in mid-1989, "the Democratic opposition had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless president with an appalling appetite for private power. That was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics of the Democratic Party into news."
Today, words like "feckless" and "lawless" seem like understatements when applied to the current president. A pattern of mendacity, callousness and appalling priorities has brought deadly consequences from Baghdad to New Orleans. The administration appears to be nearly drowning in scandals. Yet the news media -- again with notable assists from Democratic leaders in Congress -- are doing much to keep the Bush regime afloat.
Predictably, the Oct. 15 referendum on a constitution in Iraq provided the Bush administration with a new opportunity to roll out a retooled line of propaganda vehicles. A manipulative process, massaged under the duress of occupation, yielded a "yes" vote among Iraqis who chose to participate. Seen through a narrow lens -- keeping the carnage and intimidation out of the frame -- the election was a victory for democracy. Seen more broadly, it was a travesty.
Like two decades ago, the absence of tough Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill -- combined with an overly respectful press -- enables the White House to retain extensive political leverage. While the day of reckoning in human terms is every day in Iraq, the political day of reckoning on Iraq policy has yet to come in Washington. And at the rate things are going, many more years will pass before the need for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq becomes incontrovertible in American media and politics.
Part of the Reagan legacy is the Washington press corps' refusal to ask tough questions with even tougher follow-ups. Although the polls say that President Bush and his Iraq policies are very unpopular, Democrats in Congress and reporters are still hanging back. Their polemical statements and probing stories are the political and journalistic equivalents of slapping the wrist rather than going for the jugular.
Nothing is more dangerous than a cornered wild beast. And if the day comes that its political survival appears to be at stake, the Bush administration will counterattack with extreme ferocity. Judging from the past, there are solid reasons to doubt that the press corps -- and leaders of the overly loyal opposition -- are inclined to pursue key issues of White House deception to the point that the administration will be truly backed into a corner. As usual, the tasks of demanding truth and affecting the course of history for the better will fall to independent journalists and grassroots activists.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 11, 2005 at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, November 10, 2005
American Hypocrisy
Watching CNN Redefine a Heroine of the Resistance
Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy
By Robert O. LopezWho can argue with the honors paid to Rosa Parks, the woman described repeatedly as "the mother of the Civil Rights movement"? As the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda where, not too long ago, Ronald Reagan's corpse lay, she is the heroine nobody can find fault with. Fifty years ago, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. In this simple act, the story goes, the American civil rights movement was born.
I wish the story could end on that high note. Instead, a hagiography filled with hypocrisy is slowly turning Rosa Parks into a conservative weapon against the present generation of antiracist activists, who are already being contrasted against Park's "unassuming" and "modest" way of changing things, to quote Kyra Phillips on CNN. After celebrating Parks' diminutive size and "quiet" courage, Phillips asked Reverend Joseph Lowery, an African American civil rights advocate, how Parks' memory made him feel about all the current-day commentators who are "always on the TV set complaining and shouting." Phillips was convinced that Parks was "very different;" in fact, a few minutes earlier both Phillips and Lowery had agreed that Parks was an angel chosen by God. [1] Even Parks' defiance was assumed only by divine right, a right not likely to be conferred on any people of color who wish to continue fighting for equality today.
Skepticism at times like this borders on bad taste, but a small dose of skepticism is necessary to save Rosa Parks from some bad-faith hero worship poised to handicap the very struggle she contributed to. As Rev. Lowery retorted to Phillips, now is not the time to let people "praise Rosa Parks through one side of their mouths" and then from the other side, back Bush's reactionary pick for the Supreme Court. [2] A realigned Court could easily roll back affirmative action, and Alito's draconian record on prison rights would hurt the African American inmate population (which, among males at least, is still larger than the number of blacks in college).
The same trend occurred last year, upon the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. On one rhetorical level, spokespeople from all sides of the political spectrum sang odes to the progress made since the 1950s. Heartfelt recollections surfaced from countless famous black people, including both superstars and scholars, who spent their childhoods in the segregated South. On a hidden level, however, the discussion made it harder for younger minorities, who have no authenticating memories of pre-1960s segregation, to speak frankly about racial inequality today. And on the lowest level of the rhetoric, the vulgar discussion on talk shows and call-in programs stated what the saccharine speeches on the top level were implying but not saying directly: The struggle was over, because racism was a thing of the past. Unhappiness in the 21st century is a function of ingratitude and the cultural flaws of people of color themselves, over which white people have no power.
Between the Brown anniversary and Parks' death, Hurricane Katrina intervened, changing things. American racial tensions became as globally evident as they were in the Rodney King riots thirteen years earlier. I was hoping for a frank discussion of America's present racial problems; if any good could come out of the disastrous death toll in the Gulf states, at least we could take the opportunity to update our consciousness and abandon the trite clichés about racism existing fifty years ago "but not today." To our country's credit, some discussion did surface in the media. Prominent scholars were invited onto CNN, MSNBC, and others, to discuss the racial implications of Katrina. But we can always count on the smug white sanctimony of men like Lou Dobbs of CNN, who quickly poked at race scholars to ask, "haven't these black spokespeople had anything to say about the fact that New Orleans' mayor was black?" Race sputtered as a topic for a little while and seemed, somehow, to be forgotten. And maybe people of color needed to forget it for a while, because the press was sending mixed messages and the discussion seemed to expose all of us to too much risk. At one moment, the viewer was asked to sympathize with black mothers whose infants were dehydrated at the Superdome; at the next moment, reporters shared the lurid stories about rape and people firing at the rescue workers who were trying to save them (there was no need to tag these monsters as black, since the streaming images created a bizarre epistemology that assured us that they were black before anyone needed to ask.) Rape and irrational violence are not exactly new stereotypes to affix to men of color, and the underlying threat in the press was simple: talk too much about racial inequality and we will Willie Hortonize the whole damn city.
"Le Rage des Oubliés," ran the headline of France's Liberation in the shameful days after Katrina struck. "The Rage of the Forgotten." The picture below the headline featured a lone black woman in tattered clothes, screaming at the top of her lungs on one of the battered streets of New Orleans, presumably one of the many African Americans left stranded without food or water. [3] The tragic truth in the French critique of American racism was its prophetic rather than descriptive quality: the angry ones were going to be forgotten, because they were angry. The American press knows two courses of action when dealing with angry minorities: crush them or erase them.
With extreme sadness, I see Rosa Parks slowly being marshaled in the latter course. "Unassuming," "humble," this "small-framed" "seamstress" "chosen by God" is the perfect antidote to the "Rage des Oubliés." Instead of discussing Rosa Parks' readiness for confrontation or how enraged she must have felt about the Montgomery law, the adjectives emphasize her sacrificial meekness. Kyra Phillips may have simply blurted the question that much of white America is thinking but refuses to ask: "now what do you think of all those commentators who keep complaining all the time on the television, when Rosa Parks' approach was so different?"
In death, she is brought into the Capitol Rotunda. The honor is not hers, I would argue, but the Rotunda's. In a sickening irony, she lies in the same spot that served to honor J. Edgar Hoover's corpse shortly after his death on May 4, 1972. [4] Hoover, the longest-lasting head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, worked indefatigably to destroy everything that Rosa Parks stood for. To place her coffin inside the Rotunda is a not-too-subtle act of ownership by the conservative Washington camp that follows in Hoover's footsteps, not Rosa Parks'. Her story will now belong to someone else, and this time, she cannot refuse to be placed where they want to place her. The story will now go something like this: racism once existed, but it does not anymore. It ended because God chose one small seamstress, and she defied the law, but she defied it meekly, quietly, unassumingly, without pride or aggression. If you are patient and quiet, you will be remembered. If you are angry or militant, you will be forgotten, just as the French headline says.
To his great credit, Reverend Joseph Lowery politely resisted Kyra Phillips' innuendoes on CNN. "It takes all approaches," Lowery said. "I do not condone violence, but I do condone militancy." Phillips, blonde and smiling, may or may not have understood that Lowery was telling her she was wrong. She did not say anything in response. But the endless photographs of Rosa Parks to follow simply reinforced everything Phillips had said: black-and-white pictures of a bygone era, the small "quiet angel" as Lowery called her, serenely defying her oppressors in a feminine, almost Christ-like sacrifice consciously differentiated from the black woman screaming at the top of her lungs in the wreckage of New Orleans.
Turning heroes against their causes is a very old routine in American racial history. When I teach African American literature to college students, I always observe how well students have learned the "I love Martin Luther King but I hate Malcolm X" game. They vaunt Frederick Douglass' method of opposing slavery through self-education and they condemn Nat Turner's violence (in a mock trial I held in Camden, New Jersey, for instance, the students called Douglass' ghost to the stand and used his testimony to convict Turner.) Someone somewhere usually manages to rewrite racial history in the United States to instill:
- indifference to the racial problems of the present,
- a false remembrance of past heroism in the face of an injustice that is supposedly gone, and
- an even falser nostalgia for the classier, more polite, more Christian, nicer, and more acceptable forms of antiracist resistance that used to exist.
All this rewriting can be translated to the crass thought, "they don't make colored people the way they used to."
African Americans are not immune to this willful amnesia. Footage of Condoleezza Rice waving to the crowds at an event to honor Rosa Parks' memory should remind us of that. When he died in 1895, fifty years after his heroic act of publishing a famous slave narrative, Frederick Douglass' memory was manipulated in a similar way. Pundits used some of the same contortions to distance early twentieth-century America from racial problems. Many apologists hoped to construe race oppression as something that died with the defunct practice of slavery. Some favorably contrasted Douglass' Christian patience against the more explicit demands of an educated black elite led by W.E.B. DuBois. The stakes in race were high and the strategies a little desperate: the beginning of the twentieth century found the United States uncomfortably tied up in a quagmire not unlike the occupation of Iraq. President McKinley had led the United States to war against Spain in 1898 and found himself saddled with former Spanish territories, especially Puerto Rico and the Philippines, laden with social problems and insurgencies. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington praises McKinley as "the best example" of "those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient and polite." [5] Washington's disturbing lack of criticism may be explained by the apparent agenda revealed by his article, "Signs of Progress Among the Negroes" in a 1900 edition of Century. Washington wanted to export his Tuskegee model for black education to the newly acquired Caribbean territories full of Spanish-speaking Negroes who, as he says in Century, "are largely an agricultural people, and for this reason, in addition to a higher degree of mental and religious training, they need the same agricultural, mechanical, and domestic training that is fast helping the negroes in our Southern States." Washington continues: "Industrial training will not only help them to the ownership of property, habits of thrift and economy, but the acquiring of these elements of strength will go further than anything else in improving the moral and religious condition of the masses, just as has been and is true of my people in the Southern States." [6]
Washington's idealistic vision of Americans uplifting "liberated" blacks from the former Spanish colonies came at a time when countless American intellectuals were decrying the effects of the Spanish-American War. To counteract war guilt and charges of racism toward "little brown brothers" in the Philippines and the Caribbean, Washington employed his own race's history as a way of enforcing paternalism onto other races. And to do so, Washington used the sanctified memory of Douglass, who had only recently died.
In his 1901 autobiography, Washington describes what happened years earlier, when Douglass was told to move from the whites-only car of a train, to the section reserved for Negroes:
This reminds me of a conversation which I once had with the Hon. Frederick Douglass. At one time Mr. Douglass was travelling in the state of Pennsylvania, and was forced, on account of his colour, to ride in the baggage-car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid. When some of the white passengers went into the baggage-car to console Mr. Douglass, and one of them said to him: "I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner," Mr. Douglass straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting, and replied: "They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me." [7]
A troubling nuance hides beneath the surface praise of Douglass: Heroism is not resisting. Heroism is not making a scene. Instead, heroism means accepting with grace the restrictions unfairly imposed, only with an internal sense of dignity. Booker T. Washington is a hero in his own right for advancing industrial education; nonetheless he made several unsavory claims in Up from Slavery, including the falsehood that the Klu Klux Klan did not exist [8] and specious generalizations about black people's profligacy based on what he observed as a guest in a few families' homes. [9] His main detractor, DuBois, criticized Washington for using his autobiography to silence the protests of educated black men, many of whom did not want to accept Jim Crow laws with the patient dignity Washington attributed to Douglass. (Since it is Washington telling the story and not Douglass, it would be unfair to assume that the description of Douglass' reaction to post-bellum segregation in Up from Slavery accurately reflected Douglass' philosophy.) DuBois attacks Washington for encouraging silence: "the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners." [10]
The early twentieth century and early twenty-first century share a tormented racial landscape. In both settings, it is easy for the shameful crime of racism to seem like a thing of the past. The Civil War ended in 1865 and The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965: forty years later, in both cases, America was/is a little tired of race and anxious to stop thinking about it. Nonetheless, in both cases, African Americans still confront(ed) the persistent racism that never went away, and new races keep/kept complicating the equation because of imperialism, global migration, and war. Booker T. Washington used African American experience to abet the exploitation of Asians and Latinos in 1901. In October 2005, Lou Dobbs interviewed Jesse Jackson and prodded him to admit that illegal immigrants from Mexico were stealing jobs from unemployed black people in New Orleans. Dobbs' program on CNN has become an endless crusade against immigrants (especially Latinos, Asians, and Muslims), whom Dobbs has blamed for terrorism, taxes, real estate scams, crime, and the bus that blew up during the evacuation of Houston before Hurricane Rita--as a final coup de grace, Dobbs finally finds a way to blame people of color for the sufferings of people of color. Rosa Parks will soon be used in the same way. The tactics are remarkably similar and should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention to race (unfortunately, few people are.) Where there are signs of persistent racial problems, such as Jim Crow back then, and Hurricane Katrina now, one camp usually advises people of color not to complain too much, to be "quiet" and "unassuming" and to "go slowly." Supposedly, we hear, this means being like the dead black heroes of a romanticized past--Frederick Douglass with his inner dignity in a segregated train car, Rosa Parks with her small seamstress body and unassuming angelic nonviolence.
One of the most astute people to deconstruct racial hypocrisy was James Baldwin, when he quoted Thurgood Marshall as saying, "They don't mean go slow." [11] Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass were not patient, unassuming, meek, or angelic; and only the most perverted logic of historical denial could ever lead us to characterize them as such. They were heroes because they fought, they complained, and they stood strong in the face of entire societies wanting them to shut up or die. Nor, I would contend, were they entirely nonviolent. It is an aggressive act to initiate a boycott and one that knowingly provokes a violent backlash. Douglass' famous chiasmus that "you have seen how a man became a slave, now you will see how a slave became a man," occurs, after all, after he physically strikes the white man determined to beat him into submission. Nothing will make me happier than seeing Rosa Parks brought back out of the Capitol Rotunda, where our memories of her can breath again--that is, as long as we can still remember who she really was.
[1] Live From. Narr. Kyra Phillips. CNN. 31 Oct 2005.[2] Ibid.
[3] Liberation. 5 Sept 2005.
[4] Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987. 482.
[5] Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery (1901). New York: Dover, 1995. 88.
[6] Washington, Booker T. "Signs of Progress Among the Negroes." Century Magazine 1900. American Studies at the University of Virginia. 31 Oct 2005.
[7] Washington, Up from Slavery, 47-48.
[8] Ibid., 38.
[9] Ibid., 51-56. Washington notes with indignation, for example, that he visited a home that had "One fork, and a sixty-dollar organ!" (54).
[10] DuBois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folks (1903). New York: Penguin, 1989. 39-40.
[11] Baldwin, James. "Faulkner and Desegregation." Collected Essays. Ed. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 209.
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Posted by fm on November 10, 2005 at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Note from an Avid Reader
Disappointing Circulation Decline
By Oren M. SpieglerAs an avid reader of about twenty newspapers per week and as a newspaper contributor through letters to the editor, it saddens me to note that according to the latest survey, newspaper readership continues to steadily decline nationwide.
The newspaper continues to be a valuable encyclopedia of up to the minute information, serving every possible constituency with news, opinion, weather, advertising, sports, and countless other features. It remains one of the great bargains of our time, heavily subsidized, of course, by advertisers. The ability of a production staff to put together a daily paper with such an extraordinary amount of information packed in is a constant amazement to me.
I rarely go anywhere that I might have idle time without bringing along newspapers to read. As I ride public transit, happily reading my newspapers, I note so many individuals who always use their commuting time to stare out the window into space, apparently with nothing better to do. Have they no interest in being informed, knowing what is going on in the world around them?
I have told my wife, with some seriousness, that I would like for my tombstone to read, "You will never be lonely if you love to read." Newspapers are my primary source of satisfying my thirst for knowledge and engaging in lifelong learning. The decline in their popularity does not make for a bright, enlightened, successful populace, and does not bode well for our future.
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This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 09, 2005 at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
The Corpse of Habeas Corpus
The Police State is Closer than You Think
By Paul Craig Roberts
Source: CounterPunchPolice states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate. The hysterical aftermath of September 11 has put into place the main components of a police state.
Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.
President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the U.S., the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.
These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give rein to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness.
The judiciary has to some extent defended habeas corpus against Bush's attack, but the protection that the principle offers against arbitrary seizure and detention has been breeched. Whether courts can fully restore habeas corpus or whether it continues in weakened form or passes by the wayside remains to be determined.
Americans may be unaware of what it means to be stripped of the protection of habeas corpus, or they may think police authorities would never make a mistake or ever use their unbridled power against the innocent. Americans might think that the police state will only use its powers against terrorists or "enemy combatants."
But "terrorist" is an elastic and legally undefined category. When the President of the United States declares: "You are with us or against us," the police may perceive a terrorist in a dissenter from the government's policies. Political opponents may be regarded as "against us" and thereby fall in the suspect category. Or a police officer may simply have his eye on another man's attractive wife or wish to settle some old score. An enemy combatant might simply be an American who happens to be in a foreign country when the US invades. In times before our own when people were properly educated, they understood the injustices that caused the English Parliament to pass the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 prohibiting the arbitrary powers that are now being claimed for the executive branch in the U.S.
The PATRIOT Act has given the police autonomous surveillance powers. These powers were not achieved without opposition. Civil libertarians opposed it. Bob Barr, the former U.S. Representative who led the impeachment of President Clinton, fought to limit some of the worst features of the act. But the act still bristles with unconstitutional violations of the rights of citizens, and the newly created powers of government to spy on citizens has brought an end to privacy.
The prohibition against self-incrimination protects the accused from being tortured into confession. The innocent are no more immune to pain than the guilty. As Stalin's show trials demonstrated, even the most committed leaders of the Bolshevik revolution could be tortured into confessing to be counter-revolutionaries.
The prohibition against torture has been breeched by the practice of plea bargaining, which replaces jury trials with negotiated self-incrimination, and by sentencing guidelines, which transfer sentencing discretion from judge to prosecutor. Plea bargaining is a form of psychological torture in which innocent and guilty alike give up their right to jury trial in order to reduce the number and severity of the charges that the prosecutor brings.
The prohibition against physical torture, however, held until the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As video, photographic, and testimonial evidence make clear, the U.S. military has been torturing large numbers of people in its Iraq prisons and in its prison compound at Guantanamo, Cuba. Most of the detainees were people picked up in the equivalent of KGB Stalin-era street sweeps. Having no idea who the detainees are and pressured to produce results, torture was applied to coerce confessions.
Everyone is disturbed about this barbaric and illegal practice except the Bush administration. In an amendment to a $440 billion defense budget bill last Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in U.S. government custody. President Bush responded to the Senate's will by repeating his earlier threat to veto the bill. Allow me to torture, demands Bush of the Senate, or you will be guilty of delaying the military's budget during wartime. Bush is threatening the Senate with blame for the deaths of U.S. soldiers who will die because they don't get their body armor or humvee armor in time.
It will be a short step from torturing detainees abroad to torturing the accused in U.S. jails and prisons.
The attorney-client privilege, another great achievement, has been breeched by the Lynne Stewart case. As the attorney for a terrorist, Stewart represented her client in ways disapproved by prosecutors. Stewart was indicted, tried, and convicted of providing material support to terrorists.
Stewart's indictment sends a message to attorneys not to represent too dutifully or aggressively clients who are unpopular or demonized. Initially, this category may be limited to terrorists. However, once the attorney-client privilege is breeched, any attorney who gets too much in the way of a prosecutor's case may experience retribution. The intimidation factor can result in an attorney presenting a weak defense. It can even result in attorneys doing as the Benthamite U.S. Department of Justice (sic) desires and helping to convict their client.
In the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a shield of the accused. This is necessary in order to protect the innocent. The accused is innocent until he is proven guilty in an open court. There are no secret tribunals, no torture, and no show trials.
Outside the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a weapon of the state. It may be used with careful restraint, as in Europe today, or it may be used to destroy opponents or rivals as in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
When the protective features of the law are removed, law becomes a weapon. Habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege, no crime without intent, and prohibitions against torture and ex post facto laws are the protective features that shield the accused. These protective features are being removed by zealotry in the "war against terrorism."
The damage terrorists can inflict pales in comparison to the loss of the civil liberties that protect u.s. from the arbitrary power of law used as a weapon. The loss of law as Blackstone's shield of the innocent would be catastrophic. It would mean the end of America as a land of liberty.
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions."
Roberts can be contacted at paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com.
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Posted by fm on November 08, 2005 at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, November 07, 2005
Lost in Translation
A Rose by Any Other Name
By Umberto EcoThere are writers who do not bother about their translations, sometimes because they lack the linguistic competence; some sometimes because they have no faith in the literary value of their work and are anxious only to sell their product in as many countries as possible.
Often the indifference conceals two prejudices, equally despicable: Either the author considers himself an inimitable genius and so suffers translation as a painful political process to be borne until the whole world has learned his language, or else the author harbours an "ethnic" bias and considers it a waste of time to care about how readers from other cultures might feel about his work.
People think an author can check his translations only if he knows the language into I which he is to be translated. Obviously, if he does know that language, the work proceeds more easily. But it all depends on the translator's intelligence. For example, I do not know Swedish, Russian, or Hungarian, and yet I have worked well with my translators into those languages. They were able to explain to me the kind of difficulties they faced, and make me understand why what I had written created problems in their language. In many cases I was able to offer suggestions.
The problem frequently arises from the fact that translations are either "source-oriented" or "target oriented," as today's books on Translation Theory put it. A source-oriented translation must do everything possible to make the B-language reader understand what the writer has thought or said in language A. Classical Greek affords a typical example: in order to comprehend it at all, the modern reader must understand what the poets of that age were like and how they might express themselves. If Homer seems to repeat "rosy-fingered dawn" too frequently, the translator must not try to vary the epithet just because today's manuals of style insist we should be careful about repeating the same adjective. The reader has to understand that in those days dawn had rosy fingers whenever it was mentioned.
In other cases translation can and should be target-oriented. I will cite an example from the translation of my novel Foucault's Pendulum whose chief characters constantly speak in literary quotations. The purpose is to show that it is impossible for these characters to see the world except through literary references. Now, in chapter 57, describing an automobile trip in the hills, the translation reads "the horizon became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages: we glimpsed endless vistas." But, after "endless vistas" the Italian text went on: "al di la della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi." If these words had been translated, literally "beyond the hedge, as Diotallevi remarked," the English-language reader would have lost something, for "al di la della siepe" is a reference to the most beautiful poem of Giacomo Leopardi, "L'infinito," which every Italian reader knows by heart. The quotation appears at that point not because I wanted to tell the reader there was a hedge anywhere nearby, but because I wanted to show how Diotallevi could experience the landscape only by linking it to his experience of the poem. I told my translators that the hedge was not important, nor the reference to Leopardi, but it was important to have a literary reference at any cost. In fact, William Weaver's translation reads: "We glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien," Diotallevi remarked..." This brief allusion to the Keats sonnet is a good example of target-oriented translation.
A source-oriented translator in a language I do not know may ask me why I have used a certain expression, or (if he understood it from the start) he may explain to me why, in his language, such a thing cannot be said. Even then I try to take part (if only from outside) in a translation that is at once source and target-oriented.
These are not easy problems. Consider Tolstoy's War And Peace. As many know, this novel -- written in Russian, of course -- begins with a long dialogue in French. I have no idea how many Russian readers in Tolstoy's day understood French; the aristocrats surely did because this French dialogue is meant, in fact, to depict the customs of aristocratic Russian society. Perhaps Tolstoy took it for granted that, in his day, those who did not know French were not even able to read Russian. Or else he wanted the non-French-speaking reader to understand that the aristocrats of the Napoleonic period were, in fact, so remote from Russian national life that they spoke in an incomprehensible fashion. Today if you re-read those pages, you will realize that it is not important to understand what those characters are saying, because they speak of trivial things. What is important is to understand that they are saying those things in French. A problem that has always fascinated me is this: How would you translate the first chapter of War And Peace into French? The reader reads a book in French and in it some of the characters are speaking French; nothing strange about that. If the translator adds a note to the dialogue saying en francais dans le text, it is of scant help: the effect is still lost. Perhaps, to achieve that effect, the aristocrats (in the French translation) should speak English. I am glad I did not write War And Peace and am not obliged to argue with my French translator.
As an author, I have learned a great deal from sharing the work of my translators. I am talking about my "academic" works as well as my novels. In the case of philosophical and linguistic works, when the translator cannot understand (and clearly translate) a certain page, it means that my thinking was murky. Many times, after having faced the job of translation, I have revised the second Italian edition of my book; not only from the point of view of its style but also from the point of view of ideas. Sometimes you write something in your own language A, and the translator says: "If I translate that into my language B, it will not make sense." He could be mistaken. But if, after long discussion, you realize that the passage would not make sense in language B, it will follow that it never made sense in language A to begin with.
This doesn't mean that, above a text written in language A there hovers a mysterious entity that is its Sense, which would be the same in any language, something like an ideal text written in what Walter Benjamin called Reine Sprache (The Pure language). Too good to be true. In that case it would only be a matter of isolating this Pure language and the work of translation (even of a page of Shakespeare) could be done by computer.
The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what happens in an Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant asks 100, you offer 10 and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.
Naturally, in order to believe that the negotiation has been a success you must have fairly precise ideas about this basically imprecise phenomenon called translation. In theory, different languages are impossible to hold to one standard; it cannot be said that the English "house" is truly and completely the synonym of the French "maison." But in theory no form of perfect communication exists. And yet, for better or worse, ever since the advent of Homo sapiens, we have managed to communicate. Ninety percent (I believe) of War And Peace's readers have read the book in translation and yet if you set a Chinese, an Englishman, and an Italian to discussing War And Peace, not only will all agree that Prince Andrej dies, but, despite many interesting and differing nuances of meaning, all will be prepared to agree on the recognition of certain moral principles expressed by Tolstoy. I am sure the various interpretations would not exactly coincide, but neither would the interpretations that three English-speaking readers might provide of the same Wordsworth poem.
In the course of working with translators, you reread your original text, you discover its possible interpretations, and it sometimes happens -- as I have said -- that you want to rewrite it. I have not rewritten my two novels, but there is one place which, after its translation, I would have gladly rewritten. It is the dialogue in Foucault's Pendulum in which Diotallevi says: "God created the world by speaking. He didn't send a telegram." And Belbo replies:"Fiat lux. Stop."
But in the original Belbo said: "Fiat lux. Stop. Segue lettera" ("Fiat lux. Stop. Letter follows.") "Letter follows" is a standard expression used in telegrams (or at least it used to be standard, before the fax machine came into existence). At that point in the Italian text, Casaubon said: "Ai Tessalonicesi, immagino." (To the Thessalonians, I suppose.) It was a sequence of witty remarks, somewhat sophomoric, and the joke lay in the fact that Casaubon was suggesting that, after having created the world by telegram, God would send one of Saint Paul's epistles. But the play on words works only in Italian, in which both the posted letter and the Saint's epistle are called lettera. In English the text had to be changed. Belbo says only "Fiat lux. Stop." and Casaubon comments "Epistle follows." Perhaps the joke becomes a bit more ultraviolet and the reader has to work a little harder to understand what's going on in the minds of the characters, but the short circuit between Old and New Testament is more effective. Here, if I were rewriting the original novel, I would alter that dialogue.
Sometimes the author can only trust in Divine Providence. I will never be able to I collaborate fully on a Japanese translation of my work (though I have tried). It is hard for me to understand the thought processes of my "target." For that matter I always wonder what I am really reading, when I look at the translation of a Japanese poem, and I presume Japanese readers have the same experience when reading me. And yet I know that, when I read the translation of Japanese poem, I grasp something of that thought process that is different from mine. If I read a haiku after having read some Zen Buddhist koans, I can perhaps understand why the simple mention of the moon high over the lake should give me emotions analogous to and yet different from those that an English romantic poet conveys to me. Even in these cases a minimum of collaboration between translator and author can work. I no longer remember into which Slavic language someone was translating The Name of the Rose, but we were wondering what the reader would get from the many passages in Latin. Even an American reader who has not studied Latin still knows it was the language of the medieval ecclesiastical world and so catches a whiff of the Middle Ages. And further, if he reads De Pentagono Salomonis he can recognize pentagon and Solomon. But for a Slavic reader these Latin phrases and names, transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, suggest nothing.
If, at the beginning of War And Peace, the American reader finds "Eh bien, mon prince... " he can guess that the person being addressed is a prince. But if the same dialogue appears at the beginning of a Chinese translation (in an incomprehensible Latin alphabet or worse expressed in Chinese ideograms) what will the reader in Peking understand? The Slavic translator and I decided to use, instead of Latin, the ancient ecclesiastical Slavonic of the medieval Orthodox church. In that way the reader would feel the same sense of distance, the same religious atmosphere, though understanding only vaguely what was being said.
Thank God I am not a poet, because the problem becomes more dramatic in translating poetry, an art where thought is determined by words, and if you change the language, you change the thought. And yet there are excellent examples of translated poetry produced by a collaboration between author and translator. Often the result is a new creation. One text very close to poetry because of its linguistic complexity is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Now, the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter - when it was still in the form of an early draft -- was translated into Italian with Joyce himself collaborating. The translation is markedly different from the original English. It is not a translation. It is as if Joyce had rewritten his text in Italian. And yet one French critic has said that to understand that chapter properly (in English) it would be advisable to first read that Italian draft.
Perhaps the Pure Language does not exist, but pitting one language against another is a splendid adventure, and it is not necessarily true, as the Italian saying goes, that the translator is always a traitor. Provided that the author takes part in this admirable treason.
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This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 07, 2005 at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Semiannual FAS-FAX Report
The Bad News in Black and White
By Joseph T. Hallinan
Source: Wall Street JournalThe Fourth Estate is braced to get more bad news about itself next week.
On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases its semiannual figures on circulation -- and they are expected to show that paying readers continue to disappear at an alarming rate during the latest six-month period.
Challenged by online rivals, a dearth of younger readers and an advertising downturn, newspapers are suffering through their worst slump in years. The last ABC figures, which were released in May, were the worst for the industry in nine years, showing that average daily circulation had dropped 1.9% in the six months ended March 31 from a year ago.
Indications from the biggest newspaper publishers show many expect similar plunges for the six months ended in September.
Gannett Co., the nation's No. 1 publisher with about 100 papers, says its daily circulation through Sept. 25, including its publications in the United Kingdom, was down 2.5% over year-ago levels. At No. 2 Knight Ridder Inc. -- whose largest shareholder has called for the sale of the company -- the daily drop was 2.9%.
Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others, says its circulation as reported to ABC will be down around 4%. That estimate excludes figures for Newsday, of Long Island, N.Y., which has been censured by the ABC following a scandal in which it -- along with several other newspapers -- admitted artificially boosting circulation results. By mutual agreement, its circulation won't be released on Nov. 7.
Not all chains are expected to report such big drops. Sacramento-based McClatchy Co. says daily circulation was down 0.7% as of September, to just under 1.4 million copies. But it also expects circulation for the full year to fall around 1% -- ending 20 consecutive years of circulation growth.
The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., expects circulation to be up slightly, because of increases in online readership. ABC in recent years has allowed the inclusion of certain online readers in circulation figures.
In all, there are about 1,500 daily papers in the U.S. The ABC numbers cover nearly 900 of them. Since some of the papers will be reporting under new rules this period, an apples-to-apples comparison to previous numbers may be difficult in some cases.
The growing worry in the industry is the numbers reflect not just a slump, or a simple extension of a long-term decline in readers, but a more tectonic shift in habits. More Americans clearly are getting their news online; about 30% of adults turned to the Internet for news in 2004, compared with almost none in 1996, according to a poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Such figures have newspaper owners scrambling to make sure readers going online get their news from their own sites -- not Yahoo, MSN, or other popular Internet-only sites that have sprung up.
At the same time, some see a shift as an opportunity to win over new readers -- especially the younger ones who don't tend to read papers at all.
"By one measure the newspaper business is facing this crisis," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank that's part of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. "But by another it is also looking at the best opportunity for growth that it's had in two generations."
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This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 06, 2005 at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Sudoku Puzzle 006
Posted by fm on November 05, 2005 at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, November 04, 2005
Liberal vs. Literal Religion
Heresy comes from a Greek word meaning "to choose." It's the path of those who, throughout history, have chosen "the road less traveled." And as Robert Frost observed, it makes all the difference. Heresy is also, the Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr says, about the only place where the holy spirit can be found. "The religion of the priests is always orthodox, and always serving the gods of the culture, mostly money. The religion of the prophets is always heretical, choosing better stories and more demanding paths. It's the only religion worthy of the name." Well, that's just what a heretic would say!
The New F-Word?
By Charles Derber
Source: UU World MagazineOn the Sunday after Election Day 2004, Davidson Loehr took to his pulpit at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Tex., and delivered a sermon entitled "Living under Fascism."
"I mean to persuade you," he told his parishioners, "that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying."
Fascism is a hot-button word, and posting the sermon on the church website pushed the button. Word of the sermon "began spreading through the Internet like wildfire," Loehr said in a recent interview. Bloggers started writing about it, and linking to it, and before long the church's server was overwhelmed by such a flood of hits that it crashed.
This spread the word further and inspired Chelsea Green Publishing to contact Davidson Loehr and propose a book. The result, "America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher," was published last month.
Loehr, a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar, holds a doctoral degree in theology, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago.
Shortly after the book was published, UU World Magazine asked Charles Derber to interview Loehr. Derber is a professor of sociology at Boston College and author of "Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy." An edited version of that conversation follows:Charles Derber: You are very critical of organized religion and clerical hierarchies. Is religion bad for democracy today? Is it always bad for democracy?
Davidson Loehr: Literalistic religion is always bad for democracy and is, in fact, one of its mortal enemies.
There's a Buddhist metaphor that says all religions, gods, saviors, sages, and teachings are so many fingers pointing to the moon. The object, of course, is to see where they're pointing, not to worship the finger. While democracy demands civil behavior and encourages all citizens to grow into their best selves, it also recognizes that there are many roads - many fingers - and makes sure you are free to find the path toward our common behavioral goals that fits you. That's part of the moral reasoning behind the separation of church and state.
But when you are stuck in that deadening literalism, you aren't looking for the light; you're worshiping the finger. Then other paths threaten the primacy of your own path and must not be allowed. So literal religions are natural allies of authoritarian and repressive governments, but are never happy residents in a democracy where people are free to shrug off literalist notions of salvation.
Derber: You also are very critical of existing concepts of God. Under the existing orthodoxy, is God a fascist? Is any concept of God consistent with critical thought and humanism?
Loehr: When God is a finger, he'll be looking for a trigger to pull. In the real world, God doesn't "exist" as a being, a critter with a neocortex, kneecaps, and eyeballs. The word "God" is a symbol that stands for those ideals and allegiances that we happen to think are most demanding of respect and obedience. Once again, we're looking for the "moon," for enlightenment, illumination. Looking for the moon empowers the seekers, but not the priests or the politicians.
In Christianity, this is the difference between the gospel of John in the New Testament and the Gospel of Thomas, which was excluded from the New Testament precisely because it empowers everyone, rather than empowering only the leaders - whether priest, church, politician, or state. This argument is developed by Elaine Pagels in her book "Beyond Belief."
God-talk isn't the description of a critter, it's an idiom of expression, used to address issues we believe very important. But since there is no fellow called God that exists except as an imaginative creation, that means that when preachers speak as though there is such a fellow, and claim to be speaking for this fellow, then they have turned the symbol "God" into a hand puppet to do their - but not your - bidding. Pretending to speak for this fellow empowers the churches and keeps the ministers in their jobs. Still, the number of ministers who wish they could tell their people that they really know that these myths are just myths - that number is immense!
Derber: You describe fascism as a kind of political fundamentalism. Can you explain what you mean by this?
Loehr: I think it's useful to see fascism as political fundamentalism, and fundamentalism as religious fascism. They have nearly identical social and political agendas. They both want men on top in every way; women defined by their biology - and by men; literal rather than liberal understandings of religion; and obedience rather than empowerment. Both also operate on a foundation of fear rather than trust.
When you find virtually identical agendas, they must have preceded the individual examples of fundamentalism or fascism, and this is the case. One of the most important things we need to understand about these agendas is that their roots are biological. They are a kind of biological default setting of sexually dimorphous territorial animals, including us.
Derber: When did political fundamentalism - or fascism as you define it - begin in America and why is it taking root so strongly now?
Loehr: It's always been here, and in every culture. For example, the Pilgrims wanted a theocracy. Many of the original colonies each had their own local religion, and barred or drove out those who didn't accept their provincial beliefs. Freedom of religion came about because of the abject failure of the colonies' effort to restrict it.
But it's more useful to ask about the forces controlling America at any time, and whether they're friendly or unfriendly to command-and-control regimes. Right now, we're in a time that is completely friendly to command-and-control, to rule by our worst plutocrats and imperialists. I think we are in a position similar to Germany after 1933. And remember, Hitler presented himself as the super-Christian and claimed that Christian morals were to be the center of his Nazi regime to reprimand the excesses of liberalism. Fundamentalism and fascism go hand in hand.
Derber: Explain your view of the relation of corporations to fundamentalism and fascism.
Loehr: They all have close family resemblances, in their need for a command-and-control culture. When corporations exalt profits for the owners above profits for the earners, they finally need to destroy unions and government controls, to keep the workers disempowered. Fascism, as the marriage of business and government with business giving the orders, combined with an over-the-top nationalism, is the perfect ally to help keep people in an obedient rather than in an uppity mode. And fundamentalism, always an ally of power and greed, is the perfect form of religion. Together, these three - plutocracy, imperialism, and fundamentalism - form a dangerous kind of perfect storm, complementing each other perfectly, especially when you add their nearly complete control of the media.
Derber: What would you say to critics who argue that if we really lived under fascism you wouldn't be able to write this book or publish it without being killed?
Loehr: Well, one answer is that they are correct; it could be much more dramatic than it is - and may yet become so. But another answer is to remind ourselves that we are already shipping prisoners to other countries so they can be tortured - and, I assume, sometimes murdered. We're not as far away from full-blown fascism as many people would like to think.
Derber: You suggest that we all need to challenge the priests and ministers and clerical hierarchies that have abused religion for their own purposes. Can you explain this and suggest concretely how people can do this?
Loehr: Throughout history, I think the most honorable moral power has always come from the prophets, not the priests. And prophets are non-priests, for the most part - ordinary people who come screaming in from the countryside to upbraid the priests and politicians for selling out to those with money. It's rare that ministers won't care if they lose their biggest pledgers - who often use their money as a tool to restrict the preacher and the church to stay within their comfort zone. It's embarrassing to think of how many times these people demean religion in this way - with the all-too-willing compliance of the ministers. It's human nature, just as it's natural for ministers to want to be liked.
But right now, in the most dangerous time our country has been through in my lifetime, the silence - I want to say, the cowardice - of the pulpits is especially disturbing. Some time back, I spoke to a group of about fifty colleagues at a retreat, about how they must find a way to speak out from the pulpit about the illegal war, the murder of over 100,000 innocent Iraqis whose worst sin was living in a country with oil and strategic military location our imperialists want, about the increasingly dishonest and vicious economy that transfers money by the truckload from the earners to the owners, and the rest of it. There was dead silence. Afterwards, driving back home with two ministerial interns in the car, I asked for their reaction to that scene. One of them said, "I never before saw so many people who suddenly needed to look at their shoes." That's shameful, and if the people in the churches don't challenge it, nobody will.
Derber: Do you feel progressives should embrace a religious or overtly moral agenda? How does this relate to the anti-corporate economic agenda you advocate?
Loehr: I don't think progressives - and I don't care for that word - should fake a religious position. The Left is making a dangerous mistake in thinking this is about religion. It's about responsibility, morality, ethics - but not religion. Talking about being decent, responsible people who care for one another and work to create a culture that empowers rather than enslaves - this kind of talk trumps religion. It's the way leftists should be talking, rather than whining - and I think it's perceived as whining - about individual rights unbalanced by individual responsibilities. Religion doesn't own these greater concerns: they arise in, and are the rightful property of, the human character, individually and collectively. I don't care whether people have a religion, a spirituality, or not. People differ. But I do care that they are inspired and commanded by the notion that we must all try to serve the greatest good for the greatest number, that we be decent and compassionate, and that we try to leave our small section of the world a little better than we found it. These concerns are the human soil from which all the gods have been born, as temporary expressions and protectors of it.
The greedy corporatism we have - and "corporatism" is the word Mussolini used as a synonym for fascism - should be opposed because it's unethical, immoral, unfair, brutal, a mortal enemy of our greater humanity. Those are the kind of terms I think we should be using. Too often, people in religion are so desperate for any feeling that they might, after all, be relevant that they jump on the fundamentalist wagon and try to say that America really is a religious nation - just a liberal religious nation. That's dangerous nonsense. The conservatives have framed the word "religion," and liberals lack the numbers, the clout, or the moral significance to effectively reframe it.
Davidson Loehr was a professional musician, Vietnam War combat photographer, and a carpenter before he entered the University of Chicago in 1979 to earn M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy and religion. He is senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, a 640-member congregation in Texas. Loehr has been named Best Minister/Spiritual Leader by the Austin Chronicle in 2005.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 04, 2005 at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman
American Myths
By Davidson LoehrIn one of the shortest sermons ever delivered, and one of the most famous, the Buddha said "All I do is sit by the river, selling river water."
I think it's one of the most profound revelations of the secret of nearly all wisdom: that nothing is hidden, that we just need to be reminded of things we already knew, so that perhaps this time we will awaken, and act.
I wish more people would attend memorial services. Because if they did, and if they heard the memories and stories people get up to tell about the person who has died, they would realize that we know exactly what is right and wrong, good and bad. We know exactly how a noble life is to be judged. Not by might, arrogance, wealth or intimidation, but by the kinds of things every religion has always preached: compassion, understanding, peace, love. We don't really fool people. That's the river water, and every good preacher makes their living by selling it.
So as we're going to talk a little about the American myths, I need to say that we can talk about them, but you already know what's wrong with them, and how life would look if we were living it more wisely.
Every society has basic stories that define it, and it isn't hard to list some of the deepest myths of America. I think there are four basic myths.
First is our fascination with newness. We have been the "New World" since at least 1492, but "newness" is a central part of who we are. To Americans, it has always symbolized an improved version of what came before. They called this the New World, and named their settlements New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New England. When they went west two centuries later, they named a patch of desert New Mexico.
If you read studies of traditional cultures, you find that all of them would regard this idea that "new" means "improved" as completely insane. Most societies look to the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of their elders, in a way Americans haven't for a long time. If new means better, than old begins to mean outmoded and irrelevant. And if you don't think old means irrelevant, ask a dozen people over seventy how they feel our society regards them. We don't have elders to whom we routinely look for wisdom that surpasses our own.
The second part of the American story is about Success and Capitalism; and in America they are also tied to Salvation, for one of the most fundamental equations of American mythology is the simple formula that "wealth = worth."
Our myth of success is probably the most important myth in American history. It was given its most powerful expression during the 19th century through the many stories written by Horatio Alger (1832-1898), the chief prophet of our American Success myth. Take just one of his stories, a story called "Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins' Luck." You have probably never heard of it. But a century ago, it sold fifty million copies in paperback and was read by millions more. That means that almost all of the adult population of the United States a hundred and thirty years ago bought or read that one little book. And Alger wrote over 134 books. I don't think you can overstate the influence of a book read by virtually every adult in America, and don't think we have had any book to match it since then.
Horatio Alger was a Unitarian minister in the 1860s. He was also a pedophile who took street children with him on his travels as sexual toys.
A third part of our American myth is our radical individualism. This is the country of Lone Rangers. The myth of the lone cowboy is one of our most powerful myths. We could talk about this for hours, but this is a point that hardly needs reinforcing in Texas.
The fourth part of our American myth that I want to consider is our imperialism.
From the start, the Pilgrims saw themselves as God's chosen people, the faithful remnant come to the New Eden to create the New Jerusalem, with a mandate from God to extend the kingdom of Christ, to extend it across the whole new world, to bring civilization to this wilderness. In the 19th century, mythic heroes including Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill saw themselves as God's agents appointed to civilize the west. Buffalo Bill believed he stood between civilization and savagery.
Officially, our imperialism goes back at least to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was quickly and repeatedly interpreted to mean that we could advance our economic interests aggressively in this hemisphere, which we have done ever since.
These parts of our script have been with us for a very long time. But things have not been good for the American Dream for quite awhile, at any of these four levels.
First, our addiction to the new has been frustrated at many points. We no longer have any new frontiers, no wildernesses left to take over or move on to. Forty years ago, the TV series "Star Trek" tried to satisfy our wanderlust by defining "Space" as "the final frontier," sending our Lone Rangers off in space ships. But the frontier metaphor had already worn thin when we settled California over a century ago. And now the last of the "Star Trek" programs is being cancelled, and the last installment of the "Star Wars" movies has been finished – another series of cowboys on the space frontier.
Here's an example of how completely we have adopted an imperialistic attitude toward the rest of the world. Think about this, if you will. Fifteen years ago, we essentially kidnapped the president of another country and brought him to this country to stand trial in a drug deal which had also involved agencies of our own government connected with the Iran-Contra affairs. We arrested him after a coup attempt we supported failed to kill him.
If you Google Noriega's name, the third entry shows a mug shot of him after we arrested him. The caption underneath reads, "Manuel Noriega, former president of Panama, rescued by American marines for incarceration in the United States." Now think about this. If Iraqis invaded the United States, kidnapped our president and took him back to put in an Iraqi prison for causing the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis in the past few years, how would you look at a caption of his mugshot that read, "George W. Bush, former president of the United States, rescued by Iraqi soldiers for incarceration in Iraq"? We have an attitude toward all other nations that we would find arrogant and criminal if they expressed it toward us. As almost anyone from other countries can tell you – even Canadians – this attitude is 100% American.
We have presumed the right to meddle in Middle Eastern oil pricing for eighty years, and assume that our actions must be justified because we want cheap oil. But think about this. Imagine Saudi Arabia or Russia sending troops into Kansas to regulate the price of wheat because they want cheap food. We have invaded half a dozen tiny countries in the past decade, taking armed forces there as though we had a divine right to do so. We have no such divine right. We never have.
Further, our imperialism is embarrassed by the growing awareness that we are not even the best at very many things any more, or anywhere near it. Our education is near the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world, our illiteracy rates are soaring, our cars are second-rate, we are barely in the running in televisions, stereos, and a dozen other items. Our family structures seem ineffective, and both in politics and in religion we have seen the norm moving steadily away from honesty and toward hypocrisy.
We murder fifty times as many of our fellow citizens as either the Swedes or the British do. We are a superficially religious society, but in 1989 a special edition of Life magazine conducted a survey showing that 70% of our citizens believed in an active spirit of evil they called the devil, and only 40% of them believed in a God. I'm betting that's a far more honest and accurate poll than all the happy-face polls insisting that 90% of Americans "believe in God" (without ever asking people what they mean by the word 'God'). The national mood increasingly favors not empowered citizens, but obedient ones. Well, this list can and will go on, but you can continue it on your own.
A third level of our American Dream has involved our radical individualism, which has led us into another blind alley, as our Lone Rangers have become mostly lonely rangers. There is an interesting medical syndrome that can serve as a metaphor for our predicament today. It is the syndrome in human babies known as the "failure to thrive" syndrome. It means that babies who are left alone without being picked up, held, and touched by others can die. They cannot live as isolated individuals, and neither can we. Our emphasis on individualism and our accompanying dismissal of the responsibilities we owe the larger society are way out of touch with the reality of human life, and we are paying the price for it. Psychological depression is ten times as common now as it was before WWII, and since the 1960s our dominant psychological problems have been narcissistic personality disorders. We too are failing to thrive, both as individuals and as a society.
In the fourth part of the American myth, our equation of financial success with personal value, of wealth and worth, there is really nothing new at all. The American philosopher William James spoke of Success as our "bitch goddess" a hundred years ago. But even then this was not a new observation. The ancient Hebrews worshipped the golden calf, and were scolded for it by their prophets. The prophet Amos accused his contemporaries of making people secondary to profits: of selling the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. Jesus was clear in his own teachings that you can either worship God or money, but not both, and that it would be easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven.
As individuals, we all know this. It isn't news. And talking about it is like sitting by the river, selling river water. Most of that selling river water business has been done by our poets, artists and professional storytellers. When you look back into the first few decades of the 20th century, it is surprising just how accurately the failings of the American Dream were named, and in very famous books, all of which also became movies.
When Arthur Miller wrote "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, he focused on the fact that capitalism is about selling both things and people: that to be a successful salesman you must sell not only your product but also yourself. That is what his character Willy Loman did. He sold himself in pursuit of the American Dream, but on a deeper level he had put his faith in the American Dream to give his life meaning, to make him whole - or, in religious jargon, to grant him salvation. It could not do it, and Willy Loman's suicide was the death of a lost and hopeless soul, abandoned by its god. In the end, at a funeral hardly anybody came to, his eulogy was really summed up in just two phrases: "He was the best-liked," and "He never knew who he was." I am reminded of Jesus's asking what a man gained if he gained the whole world and lost his soul. Poor Willy never even gained the world.
A decade earlier, John Steinbeck wrote his powerful book "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck's variation on the theme of critiquing the American Dream was different from Arthur Miller's, but no less devastating: it is a capitalistic dream achievable by only a tiny percentage of people, he said, whose power and greed will impoverish the overwhelming majority of the rest.
This is even more true today than it was in the late 1930s. During the past dozen years, the gap between the rich and the poor has become a chasm, as we have become a two-tiered society in which the richest 10% of our people control well over 90% of our wealth, a proportion more lopsided than at any time in the history of this nation. The salvation offered by the American Dream is increasingly a salvation available only to the priests and priestesses of capitalism, carried on the backs of an immense number of the masses.
At the end of his book, Steinbeck offered his solution in a form so graphic and powerful it may always fill theaters with sobbing, as it did when I saw it. Here are poor and desperate people who were merely used as dupes by those few who controlled the American Dream, who have been driven against the wall with nothing and no one to care for them but each other. And so the final scene has a young mother whose baby was born dead, now offering her milk to a starving man: a man she did not even know, except to know him as another human being in need.
Here is the "milk of human kindness" in its most elemental and heart-wrenching form. Steinbeck is saying that the kind of salvation we most dearly need cannot come from the American Dream or from economic success. It comes only from reaching out to the strangers around us and offering them what we have to share. This is river water. Every religion has sold it.
And a decade before John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald offered an even more fundamental criticism of this American Dream in his book "The Great Gatsby," which many have called the greatest American novel of the 20th century. As Steinbeck saw that the salvation held out by the American Dream is an illusion for all but a very few, Fitzgerald saw that even for the very few, it is still an illusion, for it can not save anyone.
Gatsby had it all, and he had nothing of value because he had lost his soul: he had lost his integrity, his authenticity. That is the reward for worshiping false idols, as it has always been. That is the reward for spending a human life in the service of values and ideals that cannot grant life. As Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" ended with a death and a funeral, as "Grapes of Wrath" ended after the death of both a baby and the dream that the baby had symbolized, so "The Great Gatsby" ended with a death and a funeral - a funeral to which nobody came.
The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called "Two Old Men" about salvation, about wholeness, about where the sacred dimension of life is to be found, about the way in which life is given its most enduring meaning. Tolstoy's story is not well known, but it is full of river water.
In this story, two old men decide to go on a pilgrimage to worship God at Jerusalem. On the way they meet a poor family near starvation. One of the old men goes on to the Holy Land the next morning, the other stays to do what he can to help the family. Emergency help becomes long-term aid, as he stays with them for months. He helps them plant crops, cooks meals for them, and spends all his money buying them what they need. Finally, months later, the family has recovered and the old man, his money gone, returns home.
The first man, now back from the Holy Land, swears he saw the other man in Jerusalem, surrounded by a halo-like glow and crowds of admirers. The second man, whose money and energy were spent helping the poor family and who never made it to Jerusalem, just changed the subject. The first old man, you could say, visited the Holy Land as a tourist; the second man had become holy. The first sought the sacred as a separate thing, the second reached out to others, gave of himself, and turned the place in which he found himself into holy ground.
This is like the last scene in "The Grapes of Wrath": someone reaching out to offer the milk of human kindness to a stranger. Like the two old men in Tolstoy's story, Steinbeck's characters found nothing at the end of their journey but people like themselves: alone and in need, with little to share but their humanity. And so they reached out and turned a small spot on this earth into a momentary shrine where kindness overflowed and strangers were nourished. Jesus could not have said it any more clearly, nor could the prophet Amos, nor Mohammad.
This has been the message of the best prophets in all times: that we are the agents of salvation on this earth. And the measure of the gods we serve, the measure of our own spirits, is the measure to which we have overflowed, have reached out to strangers outside of our family, outside of our religion, outside of our race, to share with them the milk of our own human kindness.
This is the river water that is sold by every religion on earth that's worthy of the name. It isn't news. You don't really come here to learn this; you come here to be reminded of it. Perhaps what we come to church for is not the river water. Perhaps, instead, we come to church hoping once more to learn how to be thirsty for it.
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This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 03, 2005 at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Midas and Hephaestos
The Cost of Money
By Davidson LoehrThis is a tough topic, because you already know all the things churches are expected to say about the subject. "Love of money is the root of all evil," "You can either serve God or money but not both," "Don't you be worshiping those golden calves!" - that sort of stuff.
Besides, the U.S. economy is so bad in so many ways that many of you are working your tails off to pay the bills and get the things you want for yourselves and your families. And getting assaulted for wanting money when you come to church is too much like piling on. After all, we want to have some nice things, and most nice things cost money. So talking against money is a little like telling a fish it shouldn't be so attached to water: it's just too much a part of almost everything we do.
And every time I say money isn't as important as we make it out to be, somebody tells me that if money is not important, maybe we don't need their pledge. And we do want your pledges. I ask and expect you to pledge 5% or more of your pre-tax income to this church or any other church you think is worth supporting. Good churches offering honest religion are about the only place in our society where we routinely question the gods we're serving - including the god of money - and ask whether it's worth serving. As many have said, money makes a good servant, but a bad master.
The following stories are two of the best ever written about wanting money too much or letting work take over your life. Both stories are from the Greeks.
The first one is the most famous, and one you all know: the story of King Midas, who couldn't get enough money. Since he was a king, he didn't have to earn the money, but he still wished it were easier to convert the world around him into gold. So he made the famous wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. This made it tough to eat anything. But the story's tragedy came when he touched his beloved daughter, immediately turning her into a golden statue.
Like all good myths, there are a lot of ways to go with the old Midas story. There are a lot of ways to turn people into statues, to take the life out of their lives, by acting as though their only purpose were to make money. Because then if they can't make money, they're useless.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I read a report estimating that 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health insurance. They haven't got the money for the insurance, and if they can't pay their own way, they're not worth saving, according to our priorities. Seventy years ago, Hitler's Nazis coined a horrible name for people like this. They were called "useless eaters." Useless eaters. You only have a use if you can produce something, and your worth is measured by how much you can earn for others. Only 3,000 people died in the attacks on 9-11, and that has bothered us enough to spend $300 billion a year or so attacking a country that had nothing at all to do with the attacks of 9-11, but whose oil and strategic position we used 9-11 as an excuse to take. And somehow, just mentioning the 3,000 killed on 9-11 still seems to end most objections. Three thousand people is a lot. But the deaths of 18,000 Americans a year due to inadequate health care do not make the front pages. That's coming dangerously close to treating them like useless eaters, don't you think?
It may not feel quite like the King Midas story, but it's closer than you think. Midas's daughter was no longer seen as warm, loving, worth being around, because she had been converted into the lowest form of currency.
Maybe it sounds backwards to think of money as the lowest form of currency - after all, our national currency is based on the gold standard. But it's not the currency in which human worth can really be measured. I've read that if you collected all the raw materials in our bodies, you'd be lucky to sell the whole pile for five bucks. We're just not worth much money. So money can't be the right currency for measuring human worth. Yet when we are valued and our lives are valued primarily by how much money we can make, the chief way in which we're different from Midas's daughter is that we're probably worth a lot less money on the open market than a golden statue.
The Midas story doesn't dwell too much on the other side of the equation, which is that if you want to value people primarily as people, then you probably won't make as much money off of them. They may make more money for themselves, but you won't be able to use them like things.
The story of Midas today isn't often about individuals. It's about attitudes of a whole society, like our society. The performance of our economy has been measured by how well the stock market is doing for so long it may seem that's just how economies are always measured. But they're not. It's quite a drastic change from forty years ago. Then, the health of the economy was measured by how well the majority of Americans were doing. The country took pride in the fact that most people in most jobs could earn enough to buy a house and a car, on just one paycheck, and that almost anyone who wanted to go to college could afford to go without mortgaging an arm and a leg. The health of the economy was measured by how well the middle class was doing.
Now it's measured by how much profit those who own stocks can earn every quarter. And once you do that – think about this – then people are defined in the currency of money. If workers are fired, whether you call it downsizing, rightsizing or firing, the stock prices usually go up. The money that would have gone to pay raises, health insurance and benefits for workers, workers' pensions, that money that would have bought houses and cars and college educations for them and their children – that money is now funneled instead to other people. Not those who earned it, but those who own the stocks. We've lived so long in that world it might seem odd to question it. But you can value people for their humanity or for their earning potential, and when push comes to shove, one of those will shove the other.
Our challenge, and I think it's a religious challenge, is to learn how to establish relative relationships with relative things, and absolute relationships with absolute things, and to know how to tell the difference. Which should be ranked higher: the profits of a few, or the livelihoods of many? Stock dividends, or health insurance and job security for workers? Earning more money, or having richer and more satisfying relationships?
These are religious questions because you cannot separate money from other areas of life. For example, I have read that the leading cause of divorce in our country is not having enough money, and the frustrations, guilt, blame and arguments that come from that. So one cost of valuing profits above people is that we soon diminish the humanity of most of the people around us, probably including ourselves. And that's pretty close to a modern version of the King Midas story.
The other Greek story isn't as well known, but it's at least as good. It is the story about Hephaestos, whom the Romans called Vulcan. He was one of the Olympian gods – the only god who worked. But he didn't just work. Work was his life. Work absorbed his passion, his love, his spirit. And in the ironic style of Greek wit, they had Hephaestos married to Aphrodite. Well, that's not likely to work! She bore him no children, was never faithful to him, was never even seen with him. He had no passion left for relationships – even a relationship with the most passionate of the goddesses.
Hephaestos didn't work to live, he lived to work. And when we live to work, it's very hard to make room for another human being in our life. It isn't quite like turning them to gold, but the old Greek story comes pretty close. It said that Hephaestos created golden servants to wait on him – robots.
What some interpreters have done with this is to say that this is what happens to those around people who just live to work. Without any energy or interest left for personal relationships, their mates and sometimes children are assigned roles much like the roles of golden servants: doing chores, cleaning, cooking, converting life into a series of duties. I suspect we've all experienced this at one time or other – or that we've done it.
Now this is a hard lesson to go very heavy on today when both the adults in many families must work to pay the bills, and some people have to take more than one job. This can make it feel like we've all been turned into robots, but it isn't fair to throw blame around when people are doing the best they know how to do. The blame isn't on those trying to make ends meet. The blame is on the economic priorities we as a society have adopted, that has taken so much money away from the majority of Americans that 18,000 of us die each year from inadequate health care, marriages end in divorce over the awful fights brought about by not having enough money, laws are changed and politicians and judges are bought to change the laws so those who control the money (and the politicians and media) can simply take it from those who work for it. It isn't a healthy economy. It's a greedy economy rewarding thieves like Kenneth Lay over fourth-grade teachers. But does anyone really want to argue that Ken Lay gave more to our society than an honest fourth-grade teacher?
Where we choose to spend money brings costs that are usually unseen. For example, there is a website you should all check out. It's http://www.costofwar.com And the cost of our war in Iraq runs by as you watch, climbing hundreds and thousands of dollars each second. And you can select a city to see how much of the war's prorated cost will come out of the incomes of that city's residents. That's the cost of money spent on war. In Austin, the war has cost us about half a billion dollars so far. Half a billion dollars spent there that can not be spent anywhere else. Not on education, not on health care, not on art or roads or anything else. Half a billion dollars: nearly $400 for every man, woman and child in greater metropolitan Austin (2000 census put the population at about 1.3 million). The cost of that money is measured in all the other things we can't do with that money, and won't be able to do for years to come.
But as a nation we aren't valuing those things. And the things we value take value away from most of the people in our country and in the world. That isn't just leftist rhetoric; it's simple truth. The cost of our economic priorities is paid in devaluing the common humanity of all the common humans around us, including us. I wonder if you haven't felt some of this in your own lives?
When we exalt profits over people, it means we don't value people as much as we value profits. And if this doesn't sound religious, I don't know what is religious! It is exactly the meaning of the cry from the prophet Amos 2500 years ago that his people were "selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes." How different does our world sound from that? It sounds very, very different than the America I grew up in, forty and fifty years ago.
There is another dimension to the story of Hephaestos and his golden robots that is worth considering. When Hephaestos decided to devote his whole life to work, the other gods rejected his choice. Nobody followed such a silly lead, because they all saw a lot of other options. But a generation later, those in the household of Hephaestos don't know any other way of life, any other set of choices. So they went about their work robotically, they lived to work rather than working to live, because they didn't know there was a choice. And that too feels like it has a lot to say to us today, doesn't it?
For me, this whole subject raises a lot of questions more profound than answers – and more frustrating, too.
Does the money we spend enrich our lives, help us have more fertile experiences, more nuanced appreciation of life, more creative engagement with others, richer relationships where we can truly know and be known? Or does our money buy distractions from human interaction? Do we spend money on distractions to avoid relationships that aren't very rich because we don't know how to relate to others richly?
Money can be a good servant, but it's always a bad master. When you think of the amount of time and energy and passion you spend earning money, do you think it is more like your servant or your master?
This is dangerous territory. We have a word for people who sell themselves for money, and it isn't a nice word. And when people are simply owned by money – I think of some of the Asian workers who are reportedly chained to their work stations, but also of people here in Austin working two jobs to make ends meet – when people's lives are nearly defined by the need to work in order to survive, isn't that a kind of slavery? Is that the cost of valuing profits over people? The enslavement and prostitution of our bodies, our spirits, and far too much of our lives?
I don't have your answers. I struggle with these issues too, not always successfully. But I can offer you some questions that might be useful:
- What's the cost of the money you're earning?
- What's the cost of the money you're spending?
- What aren't you spending it on?
- Are you working to live, or living to work?
- What are you serving with the days and years of your lives?
- Does it serve the best parts of you?
- Or put it this way: If you were to die this month and in your eulogy you were defined by what you have spent the major energies of your life pursuing, would you be proud of having lived that life?
- What would you like to do about it?
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 02, 2005 at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
America, Wake up
The Corporations Will Eat Your Soul
By Davidson LoehrYou may know the story of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion wanted to cross a swift river, and asked a frog to carry him on his back. The frog asked "How do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as you get on my back?" "Well," answered the scorpion, who was good with words when he wanted something, "then I wouldn't be able to get across the river." "Well," said the frog, "then how do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as we're across the river?" "Oh," said the scorpion, "because I'll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?"
This convinced the frog - apparently, frogs are easy to convince in stories - so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when, to his great surprise, the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog's back. Very soon, the frog felt himself becoming numb. Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask "Why?" "It's just my nature," said the scorpion, as they both sank into the river and drowned. "It's just my nature."
Of course, the story was never really about scorpions. It was meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people whose nature, like that of scorpions, is to destroy others even if it destroys them too.
I think the reason this is such a frightening story is because a person like the scorpion, a person who lacked even basic compassion, isn't quite human.
One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die. Think of those android-type men in the "Matrix" movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in "Lord of the Rings," or the governor of California as the "Terminator," that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed.
I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly's 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created from spare parts. For nearly two centuries, the Frankenstein monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman, giving it life and immense power without a soul, then living to see it turn on us, as the monster even killed Frankenstein in the end.
There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past decades. The "Terminator," "Total Recall," Darth Vader in "Star Wars," the casual indifference to life in "Pulp Fiction," the powerful forces of greed and destruction in "Lord of the Rings" - you can probably each think of another half dozen.
When I was growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." For me, it was a movie about the difference between real people and pathological people. You probably know the story. A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead planet and wound up on this one.
It operated under a simple program. When a human fell asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking their body, looks, even their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place. You could hardly tell the difference. They looked the same, had all the same memories. But they had no soul. They had no compassion, no feeling for anyone. The squeals of a dog getting hit and killed by a car in the road twenty feet away didn't even make them care to look.
Life didn't matter to them. Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their kind. Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything. Then if the cosmic winds are right, they may blow across the galaxy and suck the life out of yet another planet. I've met a half dozen people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms of real people versus Frankenstein monsters. In both cases, they were persons lacking humanity, lacking the concern for others that makes them frightening and dangerous persons.
When humans act like this, we think there's something fundamentally wrong with them. Theologians call them evil, novelists call them monsters or body snatchers, and psychologists call them psychopaths. Since psyche means soul, the word really means people with sick souls. Here's a list of psychopathic traits I recently read. Psychopaths are:
- Irresponsible
- Grandiose, self-absorbed
- They lack empathy
- They won't accept responsibility for their destructive actions
- They are unable to feel remorse
- They're finally quite superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no connection (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 57)
I can see you making a mental list of some of your ex-friends….
Now what is this about? Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions whose nature is to destroy, even if it also destroys them? What on earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon?
It's a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world. That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.
But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of both societies and real people.
You'll think I've badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation. So let me try and persuade you.
Only a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable new book of only 167 pages by a Canadian law professor named Joel Bakan. The title of the book is "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power." He also made a movie of the interviews he conducted in writing the book, and that movie, called "The Corporation," is playing to sold-out and standing-ovation crowds in theaters all across Canada right now, where it has become a national phenomenon. I spoke with the film's promoters last week, who said they are now arranging a tour of more than 200 cities in the U.S. for the movie, beginning on June 4th in San Francisco, Calif., with Austin, Tex., tentatively scheduled for July 29th, at a location still to be determined.
The author explains the nature, the character and the danger of large corporations in a few pages, and I'll try to reduce it to a few minutes. But make no mistake: this is like a horror movie. Even though there is some hope at the end, I want to scare you.
Corporations formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of people in order to give the corporation more power than any single business could have. Very early, laws were passed saying investors had no real liability for whatever dastardly deeds the corporation did. This gave the corporation limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money. It's something you can't imagine ever wanting to do with a person, isn't it?
And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the only purpose of a corporation was to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.
By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the corporation into a person, a legal person, and even spoke of it in that way. And in 1866, lawyers representing this newly-created "person" won a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that, as a legal person, corporations were entitled to be protected by the 14th amendment for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws." These provisions of the 14th amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves after the War Between the States. But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed slaves, and almost exclusively to protect corporations - even when they make slaves of workers all over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country. I am betting that not many of you knew that. Until a few years ago, I didn't know it either. Isn't that odd, that we didn't know that?
Since being christened as persons, corporations have done what any person would do: they have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their aims, and buying influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents when they can. It isn't seen as evil, just doing business, just their nature.
And what are their aims? You might say that it depends on the corporation, that they are free to do whatever they want. That's not true. If the corporation sells stocks, its sole legal purpose, under U.S. laws, is to make as much money as possible for its stockholders. The corporation can pretend to care about society or the environment, as long as the money they spend makes more people want to buy their products and so increases profits for stockholders. But they may not, legally, spend money for social good unless they really aren't interested in social good, but only in profits.
Milton Friedman, who had been regarded as a second- or third-rate economist until he was adopted as the official economist of the greediest kind of capitalism, calls making money the corporation's only moral aim. He compares little acts of apparent social conscience to car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell cars. "That's never really about the girls," he points out, "it's just a trick to sell cars." Likewise, a corporation can donate to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if it will sell more of their product. They can't do social good for the sake of doing social good.
Peter Drucker, perhaps the oldest living guru of corporate character, says if you have a CEO who wants to do social good, fire him fast!
And there are laws supporting this perspective. Ninety years ago, when Henry Ford was becoming astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making too much money. So in 1916, Ford "cancelled the stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong to make obscene profits." (Bakan, p. 36)
Two of his major investors, the Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that profits belonged to the stockholders, not the company, and the court agreed with them, establishing a precedent that still rules. Corporations exist as persons only to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders. Even if it harms people. (Yes, the Dodge brothers then started their own car company.)
In a 1933 Supreme Court judgment, Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the obvious connection, when he stated that corporations were "Frankenstein monsters" capable of doing evil.
The author cites another famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning and badly disfiguring all five of them. During the trial, a report was introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on impact, killing the car's occupants. In fact, about five hundred people were being killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu style cars were being planned. He figured that each fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. The engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires. (Bakan, pp. 61-63)
While the jury made a huge award, it was later reduced by 3/4, and GM appealed the case. In support of GM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of "cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making." The jury's decision, they said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use cost-benefit analysis to make the most profitable decisions. (63) The corporation's legal makeup, its nature, requires executives to make only those decisions that create greater benefits than costs for their stockholders. Executives have no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might have negative consequences for the corporation. (p. 64)
Do you see what has happened here? This person we created through our own laws, by following its legal nature, can and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit.
Now let's jump to a very different area of society, one you might not think is even related to corporations. It's the subject of our armed forces, what they are really serving, and what our soldiers are really dying for.
Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI's most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.
"I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."
Given that speech, and Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.
Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.
On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch]. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.
In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.
"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." (p. 95)
And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation's profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)
NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.
There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you. I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.
Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.
And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction." (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.
And now we're at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.
Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.
This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.
I can't write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it's just its nature.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Free Musings has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Free Musings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Posted by fm on November 01, 2005 at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)