By H. N. Burdett
Since leaving the United States Supreme Court four years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor has been the honorary chairman of a movement in Nevada urging that judges in that state be appointed rather than elected. The cause O'Connor passionately advocates recalls a fierce debate over that very issue at the 1967 Maryland Constitutional Convention and an appearance by former state governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin before the committee responsible for writing the executive branch section of the draft document.
A member of the panel, Judge Philip Dorsey, an avowed opponent of appointing judges, tried to nail down McKeldin on the question. "Now, Governor, wouldn't you say that the election of judges has worked quite well here in Maryland over many, many years?" Dorsey asked.
"Well, Judge Dorsey," McKeldin responded, "on that matter my answer will be the same as what the Irish cop told the drunk he found leaning against a lamp post, 'Paddy, if you're going to stand here, you're going to have to move on.' "
As the color rose in Judge Dorsey's craggy countenance over the unexpected response, McKeldin elaborated, "There's but one way I can think of to select judges to ensure that they will be of the highest quality." Committee members who had long wrestled for a solution to the judge selection quandary leaned forward in their seats to hear the former governor intone, "Immaculate conception!"
_______________________
National Public Radio is understandably and perpetually concerned about the flow of taxpayer dollars that keep its programming on the air. There are those in the Congressional paranoia caucus who are convinced that NPR is a thinly disguised tub-thumper for the so-called socialist state and would excise its funding quicker than one can shout 'red channels.' Some would eagerly substitute reliably conservative Fox News for NPR and be done with the matter.
The constant fear of having the plug pulled on the most informative, educational and politically unbiased organ within the entire American media spectrum is clearly behind the misguided firing of news commentator Juan Williams.
Sure, Williams's comment about his nervousness when people wearing "Muslim garb" board an airplane was excessive, unfortunate and deserving of a reprimand. But it was hardly in a class with the detestable venom spouted by unmitigated hatemongers who foul the airwaves of one of the few nations where free speech is a constitutional right. I don't know Williams personally, but I know and trust people who do and who tell me he does not have a prejudiced bone in his body.
Over the years, I've admired Williams as a reporter and can recall nothing to suggest that he is biased. Though I'm less familiar with his television news commentary, it is difficult to imagine Williams as a latter day Archie Bunker. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out on the television program Washington Week, Williams is not a reporter, he's an analyst and as such is expected to voice his opinions rather than demonstrate objectivity and restraint.
I can probably count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times I can recall agreeing with the fiesty Krauthammer, who could probably put a neoconservative spin on the recitation of a weather report. But his defense of Williams was honorable and laudable.
The most that Juan Williams deserved from the suits in the NPR boardroom was a slap on the wrists. Williams regretted his remark and said as much over the air soon after it left his lips; to view his momentary indiscretion as a firing offense is over the top and smacks of bending over backwards to demonstrate NPR's impartiality.
There are vultures perched on Capitol Hill who would like nothing better than to swoop down on a moderate news analyst, of all people, as an example of what they perceive to be NPR's bias. The lack of courage on the part of NPR management to defy the forces that would use any excuse to remove this valuable media entity from the airwaves is far more troubling than Williams's political incorrectness. One can imagine Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, those icons of electronic media integrity, pinwheeling in their graves over Williams's treatment.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
TOWARDS MILITARY POLICY SANITY
By H. N. Burdett
Andrew Bacevich, the West Point graduate, former career military officer and Pentagon intellectual who believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was a grievous error, has taken up his pen once again to offer yet another healthy dose of rationality.
In his previous books and articles, Bacevich, who heads the international relations department at Boston University, makes the case that war is armed hostilities between nations and as such cannot be declared and waged against "isms," including terrorism. Therefore, as he sees it, interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of a war against terrorism is a colossal blunder if not a deliberate hoax and the right thing to do is to get the hell out of there.
It would be wrong to label Bacevich a radical pacifist. In the wake of 9/11, he feels the objective should have been a laser focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden and holding him and al-Qaeda accountable for their butchery.
Had the hunt for Bin Laden been formulated as an international police action, with the cooperation of the so-called coalition of the willing, rather than a full-scale military operation, Bacevich would have been supportive.
Moreover, had the obscene amounts of money the U.S. has poured into fighting two countries under the ludicrous rationale that they were threats to United States security because one of them had weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed been spent on a coordinated international police action, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda might by this time have been relegated to history.
The route of perpetual war chosen by the Bush administration appears to have been calculated to ensure long-term Republican domination of the White House and Congress under the hypothesis that horses are not changed in midstream, nor presidents in mid-war. This together with U.S. reliance on oil providing the necessary national security and national interest elements converged to form the perfect storm that swept George W. Bush into the White House for an unlikely second term.
In his latest book, Washington Rules, Bacevich goes beyond the West Asian adventure, courtesy of the United States, to suggest a far different approach to U.S. military policy.
Over the past 60 years, he contends, U.S. military policy and practice have demonstrated troubling "elements of continuity." He has found what he calls "the sacred trinity" -- a policy reflecting "an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism."
Bacevich traces this thinking to the "American credo," expounded before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, in early 1941 by the influential publisher, Henry Luce. Writing in his Life magazine, Luce exhorted Americans to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Luce's manifesto is one that any dictator might pronounce most reasonable, but any leader dedicated to the principles and ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution might rightfully repudiate. Considering what was happening in Europe at the time, with Hitler's war machine toppling country after country, Luce's ringing rhetoric seemed more of a call to arms against an advancing tyrant than standard dictatorial rant.
To ensure that the United States avoids in the future repetitions of lunacies like waging preemptive war against two countries that had nothing to do with the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, while Bin Laden remains at bay, Bacevich calls for "a new trinity."
"The proper aim of American statecraft is. . .not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms," he writes. "Its purpose is to permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a 'more perfect union.' Any policy impeding that enterprise -- as open-ended war surely does -- is misguided and pernicious."
Recalling another early American tradition, the anti-imperial origins of the United States under the banner, "Don't Tread on Me," Bacevich proffers a new military policy based on the principle that this country "does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect." Consistent with this tradition, he outlines a contemporary version as a substitute for the current "sacred trinity":
* First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or to remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.
* Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is America.
* Third, the United States should employ force only as a last resourt and only in self-defense.
"The Bush doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against potential threats even before they materialize -- is a moral abomination," Bacevich says, "the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft."
He adds: "Never again should the United States undertake 'a war of choice' informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history's complexities."
Bacevich suggests that the alternative triad would result in dramatic changes in our national security posture: "Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon's global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense-oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policymakers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following."
Not only should Bacevich's book be placed on Barack Obama's bedside table, it should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of seeking the presidency in 2012 and within the foreseeable future.
Andrew Bacevich, the West Point graduate, former career military officer and Pentagon intellectual who believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was a grievous error, has taken up his pen once again to offer yet another healthy dose of rationality.
In his previous books and articles, Bacevich, who heads the international relations department at Boston University, makes the case that war is armed hostilities between nations and as such cannot be declared and waged against "isms," including terrorism. Therefore, as he sees it, interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of a war against terrorism is a colossal blunder if not a deliberate hoax and the right thing to do is to get the hell out of there.
It would be wrong to label Bacevich a radical pacifist. In the wake of 9/11, he feels the objective should have been a laser focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden and holding him and al-Qaeda accountable for their butchery.
Had the hunt for Bin Laden been formulated as an international police action, with the cooperation of the so-called coalition of the willing, rather than a full-scale military operation, Bacevich would have been supportive.
Moreover, had the obscene amounts of money the U.S. has poured into fighting two countries under the ludicrous rationale that they were threats to United States security because one of them had weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed been spent on a coordinated international police action, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda might by this time have been relegated to history.
The route of perpetual war chosen by the Bush administration appears to have been calculated to ensure long-term Republican domination of the White House and Congress under the hypothesis that horses are not changed in midstream, nor presidents in mid-war. This together with U.S. reliance on oil providing the necessary national security and national interest elements converged to form the perfect storm that swept George W. Bush into the White House for an unlikely second term.
In his latest book, Washington Rules, Bacevich goes beyond the West Asian adventure, courtesy of the United States, to suggest a far different approach to U.S. military policy.
Over the past 60 years, he contends, U.S. military policy and practice have demonstrated troubling "elements of continuity." He has found what he calls "the sacred trinity" -- a policy reflecting "an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism."
Bacevich traces this thinking to the "American credo," expounded before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, in early 1941 by the influential publisher, Henry Luce. Writing in his Life magazine, Luce exhorted Americans to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Luce's manifesto is one that any dictator might pronounce most reasonable, but any leader dedicated to the principles and ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution might rightfully repudiate. Considering what was happening in Europe at the time, with Hitler's war machine toppling country after country, Luce's ringing rhetoric seemed more of a call to arms against an advancing tyrant than standard dictatorial rant.
To ensure that the United States avoids in the future repetitions of lunacies like waging preemptive war against two countries that had nothing to do with the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, while Bin Laden remains at bay, Bacevich calls for "a new trinity."
"The proper aim of American statecraft is. . .not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms," he writes. "Its purpose is to permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a 'more perfect union.' Any policy impeding that enterprise -- as open-ended war surely does -- is misguided and pernicious."
Recalling another early American tradition, the anti-imperial origins of the United States under the banner, "Don't Tread on Me," Bacevich proffers a new military policy based on the principle that this country "does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect." Consistent with this tradition, he outlines a contemporary version as a substitute for the current "sacred trinity":
* First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or to remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests.
* Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is America.
* Third, the United States should employ force only as a last resourt and only in self-defense.
"The Bush doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against potential threats even before they materialize -- is a moral abomination," Bacevich says, "the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft."
He adds: "Never again should the United States undertake 'a war of choice' informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history's complexities."
Bacevich suggests that the alternative triad would result in dramatic changes in our national security posture: "Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon's global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense-oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policymakers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following."
Not only should Bacevich's book be placed on Barack Obama's bedside table, it should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of seeking the presidency in 2012 and within the foreseeable future.
Monday, October 4, 2010
THERE WERE JUST NO GOOD CHOICES
By H. N. BURDETT
Recently I came across a newspaper column written more than 20 years ago and I lost it a little. I've never counted myself among the hardboiled school that professes to be totally devoid of sentimentality, but neither can I recall the last time a newspaper column has nearly brought me to tears. I now pass it on because if the topic has no special interest or meaning for you, it damn well should. Unless you already know - and I suspect more than a few of you might - I challenge each of you to identify the author, which I'll divulge via mass e-mail after I've felt enough time has passed so that anyone wanting to read it will have that opportunity. HNB
THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL
She had known, ever since she first read about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that she would go there someday. Sometime she would be in Washington and would go and see his name and leave again.
So silly, all that fuss about the memorial. Whatever else Vietnam was, it was not the kind of war that calls for some "Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima" kind of statue. She was not prepared, though, for the impact of the memorial. To walk down into it in the pale winter sunshine was like the war itself, like going into a dark valley and damned if there was ever any light at the end of the tunnel. Just death. When you get closer to the two walls, the number of names starts to stun you. It is terrible, there in the peace and the pale sunshine.
The names are listed by date of death. There has never been a time, day or night, drunk or sober, for 13 years she could not have told you the date. He was killed on Aug. 13, 1969. It is near the middle of the left wall. She went toward it as though she had known beforehand where it would be. His name is near the bottom. She had to kneel to find it. Stupid cliches. His name leapt out at her. It was like being hit.
She stared at it and then reached out and gently ran her fingers over the letters in the cold black marble. The memory of him came back so strong, almost as if he were there on the other side of the stone, she could see his hand reaching out to touch her fingers. It had not hurt for years and suddenly, just for a moment, it hurt again so horribly that it twisted her face. Then it stopped hurting but she could not stop the tears. Could not stop them running and running down her face.
There had been a time, although she had been an otherwise sensible woman, when she had believed she would never recover from the pain. She did, of course. But she was still determined never to sentimentalize him. He would have hated that. She had thought it was like an amputation, the severing of his life from hers, that you could live on afterward but it would be like having only one leg and one arm. but it was only a wound. It healed. If there is a scar it is only faintly visible now at odd intervals.
He was a biologist at the university getting his Ph.D. They lived together for two years. He left the university to finish his thesis and before he could line up a public school job - teachers were safe in those years - the draft board got him. They had friends who had left the country, they had friends who had gone to prison, they had friends who had gone to Nam. There were no good choices in those years. She thinks now he unconsciously wanted to go even though he said in one of his last letters, that it was a stupid fuckin' war. He felt some form of guilt about a friend of theirs who was killed during the Tet offensive. Hubert Humphrey called Tet a great victory. His compromise was to refuse officer's training school and go as an enlisted man. She had thought then it was a dumb gesture and they had a half-hearted quarrel about it.
He had been in Nam less than two months when he was killed without heroics, during a firefight at night by a single bullet in the brain. No one saw it happen. There are some amazing statistics about money and tonnage from the war. Did you know there were more tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1971 than in all of World War II? Did you know that the war in Vietnam cost the United States $123.3 billion? She has always wanted to know how much that one bullet cost -Sixty-three cents? $1.20? Someone must know.
The other bad part was the brain. Even at this late date, it seemed to her that was a quite remarkable mind. Long before she read C. P. Snow, the ferociously honest young man who wanted to be a great biologist taught her a great deal about the way scientists think and the way humanists think. Only once has she been glad he was not with her. It was at one of those bizarre hearings about teaching "creation science." He would have gotten furious and been horribly rude. He had no patience with people who did not understand and respect the process of science.
She used to attribute his fierce honesty to the fact that he was a Yankee. She is still prone to tell "white" lies to make people feel better, to smooth things over, to prevent hard feelings. Surely there have been dumber things for lovers to quarrel over than social utility of hypocrisy. But not many.
She stood up again, still staring at his name, stood for a long time. She said, "There it is," and turned to go. A man to her left was staring at her. She glared at him resentfully. The man had done nothing but make the mistake of seeing her weeping. She said, as though daring him to disagree, "It was a stupid fuckin' war," and stalked past him.
She turned again at the top of the steps to make sure where his name is, so whenever she sees a picture of the memorial she can put her finger where his name is. He never said goodbye, literally. Whenever he left he would say, "Take care, love." He could say it many different ways. He said it when he left for Vietnam. She stood at the top of the slope and found her hand half raised in some silly gesture of farewell. She brought it down again. She considered saying to him, "Hey, take care, love," but it seemed remarkably inappropriate. She walked away and was quite entertaining for the rest of the day, because it was expected of her.
She thinks he would have liked the memorial O.K. He would have hated the editorials. He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just and noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.
Recently I came across a newspaper column written more than 20 years ago and I lost it a little. I've never counted myself among the hardboiled school that professes to be totally devoid of sentimentality, but neither can I recall the last time a newspaper column has nearly brought me to tears. I now pass it on because if the topic has no special interest or meaning for you, it damn well should. Unless you already know - and I suspect more than a few of you might - I challenge each of you to identify the author, which I'll divulge via mass e-mail after I've felt enough time has passed so that anyone wanting to read it will have that opportunity. HNB
THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL
She had known, ever since she first read about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that she would go there someday. Sometime she would be in Washington and would go and see his name and leave again.
So silly, all that fuss about the memorial. Whatever else Vietnam was, it was not the kind of war that calls for some "Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima" kind of statue. She was not prepared, though, for the impact of the memorial. To walk down into it in the pale winter sunshine was like the war itself, like going into a dark valley and damned if there was ever any light at the end of the tunnel. Just death. When you get closer to the two walls, the number of names starts to stun you. It is terrible, there in the peace and the pale sunshine.
The names are listed by date of death. There has never been a time, day or night, drunk or sober, for 13 years she could not have told you the date. He was killed on Aug. 13, 1969. It is near the middle of the left wall. She went toward it as though she had known beforehand where it would be. His name is near the bottom. She had to kneel to find it. Stupid cliches. His name leapt out at her. It was like being hit.
She stared at it and then reached out and gently ran her fingers over the letters in the cold black marble. The memory of him came back so strong, almost as if he were there on the other side of the stone, she could see his hand reaching out to touch her fingers. It had not hurt for years and suddenly, just for a moment, it hurt again so horribly that it twisted her face. Then it stopped hurting but she could not stop the tears. Could not stop them running and running down her face.
There had been a time, although she had been an otherwise sensible woman, when she had believed she would never recover from the pain. She did, of course. But she was still determined never to sentimentalize him. He would have hated that. She had thought it was like an amputation, the severing of his life from hers, that you could live on afterward but it would be like having only one leg and one arm. but it was only a wound. It healed. If there is a scar it is only faintly visible now at odd intervals.
He was a biologist at the university getting his Ph.D. They lived together for two years. He left the university to finish his thesis and before he could line up a public school job - teachers were safe in those years - the draft board got him. They had friends who had left the country, they had friends who had gone to prison, they had friends who had gone to Nam. There were no good choices in those years. She thinks now he unconsciously wanted to go even though he said in one of his last letters, that it was a stupid fuckin' war. He felt some form of guilt about a friend of theirs who was killed during the Tet offensive. Hubert Humphrey called Tet a great victory. His compromise was to refuse officer's training school and go as an enlisted man. She had thought then it was a dumb gesture and they had a half-hearted quarrel about it.
He had been in Nam less than two months when he was killed without heroics, during a firefight at night by a single bullet in the brain. No one saw it happen. There are some amazing statistics about money and tonnage from the war. Did you know there were more tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1971 than in all of World War II? Did you know that the war in Vietnam cost the United States $123.3 billion? She has always wanted to know how much that one bullet cost -Sixty-three cents? $1.20? Someone must know.
The other bad part was the brain. Even at this late date, it seemed to her that was a quite remarkable mind. Long before she read C. P. Snow, the ferociously honest young man who wanted to be a great biologist taught her a great deal about the way scientists think and the way humanists think. Only once has she been glad he was not with her. It was at one of those bizarre hearings about teaching "creation science." He would have gotten furious and been horribly rude. He had no patience with people who did not understand and respect the process of science.
She used to attribute his fierce honesty to the fact that he was a Yankee. She is still prone to tell "white" lies to make people feel better, to smooth things over, to prevent hard feelings. Surely there have been dumber things for lovers to quarrel over than social utility of hypocrisy. But not many.
She stood up again, still staring at his name, stood for a long time. She said, "There it is," and turned to go. A man to her left was staring at her. She glared at him resentfully. The man had done nothing but make the mistake of seeing her weeping. She said, as though daring him to disagree, "It was a stupid fuckin' war," and stalked past him.
She turned again at the top of the steps to make sure where his name is, so whenever she sees a picture of the memorial she can put her finger where his name is. He never said goodbye, literally. Whenever he left he would say, "Take care, love." He could say it many different ways. He said it when he left for Vietnam. She stood at the top of the slope and found her hand half raised in some silly gesture of farewell. She brought it down again. She considered saying to him, "Hey, take care, love," but it seemed remarkably inappropriate. She walked away and was quite entertaining for the rest of the day, because it was expected of her.
She thinks he would have liked the memorial O.K. He would have hated the editorials. He did not sacrifice his life for his country or for a just and noble cause. There just were no good choices in those years and he got killed.
Monday, September 13, 2010
A MENCKENIAN WITH RESERVATIONS
By H. N. Burdett
As a reconstituted young bachelor I was once urged by a friend we'll call Bud to have dinner with his sister, we'll call her Bianca, which Bud foresaw as the launching of one of those proverbial matches conceived in Paradise.
The ink was not yet dry on Bianca's diploma certifying erudition with highest honors in comparative literature from one of the Three Sisters, though the identity of the specific sibling has slipped from memory.
In Bud's view, Bianca's chosen field of study had prepared her for naught other than perhaps a career in the teaching trade -- for which she had revealed nary a scintilla of inclination -- or wedded bliss with someone of my ilk.
As a newspaperman aspiring to evolve into a novelist, my ilk back then was highly in doubt. Thus Bud's matchmaking could be construed as either an abiding and touching faith in my potential, or an act of utter desperation; I have never been able to determine which, though if had to venture a guess...
At the time, I had recently emerged from a six-month hibernation, writing my first novel, which was not bad; that is to say, it was not merely bad, it was colossally atrocious.
There is little I can recall regarding that initial dinner with the alluring Bianca, other than what I will here relate.
My physical location and culinary preferences in those days suggest that the meal must have been consumed in my favorite restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. The most probable venue to which I was known to repair for the ritual preliminary bout to the evening's Main Event shifted between three eateries every two to three months, making it difficult to be precise even in this respect. Recently liberated from perhaps the most ill-matched marriage consummated on this planet, if not the entire galaxy, I was anxious to test S. J. Perelman's theory that the music of love is not the distant strains of a romantic violin but rather the triumphant twangs of a bedspring.
It may be conjectured with a degree of confidence that there was the involvement of a bottle or two of Chianti, which perhaps by city ordinance was a required staple of all meals partaken within that precinct. I further assume that I ordered veal, either marsala or Parmesan, for I was nothing if not a culinary eclectic, and as I place the episode in question it occurred well prior to my memorable though short-lived liaison with a pulchritudinous Washington animal rights lobbyist. The formidable persuasive powers of the latter clamped a tight lid on my voracious appetite for calf's flesh, though not too long after that fateful night we called it a day my guilt level faded with every swallow of each tender morsel of that ambrosial repast, relegating my career as a vegeterian to the cobwebbed cranial recesses where reminiscences of the unlikely and inexplicable reside.
What I do recollect with cinematic clarity about that garlic-scented evening of endless promise and heart-hammering anticipation was my Mensa short-listed's choice of a conversation starter delivered with wide-eyed innocence that Bambi himself might have envied, "I understand that you are a resolute Menckenian."
At Bianca's husky-throated words, there was the abrupt but unmistakable burst of the bubble of carnal certainty. An icicle formed at the root of my spine, shot upward and metastisized. The pervasive chill had less to do with Mencken, whose work I admired as much as I now appreciate, but rather with the suggestion that I might have been "resolute" about anyone or anything.
During that time, I was open for exploration of everything, declining to accept even the concept of face value. There were no indisputable facts, the very idea of which I equated with stagnation, with the waving of the white flag to the omnipresent forces of Ignorance. I could readily identify with E. B. White's internal struggle: awakening each morning conflicted between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world, making it difficult to plan his day.
The notion that I was a committed devotee of Henry Louis Mencken was a not uncommon error among those aware that I was a friend of the journalist and historian Gerald White Johnson, whose crystalline insights, genuine cordiality, plain-spoken profundity and Job-like patience had a tranformative impact that I doubt could be learned even had I been more attentive from any religious or higher education institution through which I passed.
Johnson had many years before I met him indeed been lured by Mencken to depart his beloved native North Carolina and join the staff of the Sunpapers of Baltimore.
While Johnson remained a thoughtful and unreconstructed progressive throughout his life, Mencken could no more be pigeon-holed ideologically than he could be persuaded to sign a petition for the Temperance Union. His not infrequent tirades against the social experimentation of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal were no more robust than his puncturing of the pomposity of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover conservatism.
I have never considered mysef a Menckenian, either resolute or restrained. Though I have often enough been amused and entertained by HLM's irreverence and in awe of his industriousness and versatility, I am troubled by anyone who saw anything remotely positive in Adolf Hitler, even, as it was with Mencken, when the appeal lasted not much beyond the blink of an eye.
The Sage of Baltimore's misguided belief that Hitler might be the savior of the land of his ancestry had a short run. That it had legs to stand up at all, much less run, in the mind of such a world-class iconoclast, a mind that could penetrate the shrewdest of mountebanks and detail their poses and posturing with seeming ease, makes Mencken's attraction to Der Fuhrer all the more befuddling.
Even so, I found myself defending Mencken in print against allegations of anti-Semitism after the latter's diary was published some years after his death, as decreed in his will. I did so in a newspaper review of the diary and felt no necessity to apologize for it, nor do I to this very day.
In scribbling his daily thoughts, Mencken could not have used more intemperate language to characterize either Jews or African Americans. I find this especially disgraceful from a man who wrote with such masterful command, always finding the right word apparently even while writing on a newspaper's deadline. He simply cannot be excused for sinking to such subterranean depths, no matter that these were ostensibly his most private thoughts. In fact, he suspected full well that his diary would one day be published and made elaborate arrangements for this to happen, doubtless as assurance that he would not be forgotten well beyond his parting 'this earthly vale.'
Despite HLM's usage of some of the most inflammatory words extant to describe persons of certain religious beliefs and racial origins, I remain unconvinced that he was a bigot or a racist. I am well aware that his diary offers a wealth of evidence to the contrary, but my feeling was then and remains that Mencken judged people individually rather than by the color of their skin or what or whom they worshipped.
Not even Mencken's passing infatuation with Hitler categorizes the Sage as an anti-Semite. It was certainly a mistake and a terrible one for which Mencken does not deserve a pass. But I feel his praise for Hitler was rooted in his love for Germany rather than hatred of Jews. Mencken soon, though not soon enough, understood that Hitler was an abomination, a genocidal tyrant more likely to be remembered as a lightning rod to bring shame and humiliation on the land of his ancestors than as the Aryan Moses.
There were doubtless other dents in Mencken's armor, but none as deep and permanent as his brief attraction to Hitler and the Third Reich.
To this day, Mencken's more rabid detractors continue to use his fidelity to Germany and all things German, which silenced his iconoclastic voice through two world wars to present a prima facie case that he was not only anti-Semitic and racist but anti-American as well. Utter nonsense. In nine well-chosen sentences, HLM digs the grave and buries this misguided hogwash, to wit:
One man likes the republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober, pious and faithful to his wife. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the Cathedral at Chartres. Another because Roosevelt could not leave his job to his son. Another because living here, he can read the New York Journal.* Another because there is a warrant for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
Not only do I hold up these as the last words on charges that H. L. Mencken was un-American, but as an in-the-face response to those who would support the resistance by the super wealthy, who only too happily sign exorbitant checks for their country club dues, to raising their taxes. Taxes, after all, are dues for living in arguably the greatest country in the world. One can only imagine what Mencken might have written about the asininity of a nation slashing taxes for the extremely well-heeled while fighting preemptive wars financed by borrowed funds that our children and grandchildren will be forced to ante up long after the perpetrators of these unnecessary wars have gone to their just reward.
*Alas.
As a reconstituted young bachelor I was once urged by a friend we'll call Bud to have dinner with his sister, we'll call her Bianca, which Bud foresaw as the launching of one of those proverbial matches conceived in Paradise.
The ink was not yet dry on Bianca's diploma certifying erudition with highest honors in comparative literature from one of the Three Sisters, though the identity of the specific sibling has slipped from memory.
In Bud's view, Bianca's chosen field of study had prepared her for naught other than perhaps a career in the teaching trade -- for which she had revealed nary a scintilla of inclination -- or wedded bliss with someone of my ilk.
As a newspaperman aspiring to evolve into a novelist, my ilk back then was highly in doubt. Thus Bud's matchmaking could be construed as either an abiding and touching faith in my potential, or an act of utter desperation; I have never been able to determine which, though if had to venture a guess...
At the time, I had recently emerged from a six-month hibernation, writing my first novel, which was not bad; that is to say, it was not merely bad, it was colossally atrocious.
There is little I can recall regarding that initial dinner with the alluring Bianca, other than what I will here relate.
My physical location and culinary preferences in those days suggest that the meal must have been consumed in my favorite restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. The most probable venue to which I was known to repair for the ritual preliminary bout to the evening's Main Event shifted between three eateries every two to three months, making it difficult to be precise even in this respect. Recently liberated from perhaps the most ill-matched marriage consummated on this planet, if not the entire galaxy, I was anxious to test S. J. Perelman's theory that the music of love is not the distant strains of a romantic violin but rather the triumphant twangs of a bedspring.
It may be conjectured with a degree of confidence that there was the involvement of a bottle or two of Chianti, which perhaps by city ordinance was a required staple of all meals partaken within that precinct. I further assume that I ordered veal, either marsala or Parmesan, for I was nothing if not a culinary eclectic, and as I place the episode in question it occurred well prior to my memorable though short-lived liaison with a pulchritudinous Washington animal rights lobbyist. The formidable persuasive powers of the latter clamped a tight lid on my voracious appetite for calf's flesh, though not too long after that fateful night we called it a day my guilt level faded with every swallow of each tender morsel of that ambrosial repast, relegating my career as a vegeterian to the cobwebbed cranial recesses where reminiscences of the unlikely and inexplicable reside.
What I do recollect with cinematic clarity about that garlic-scented evening of endless promise and heart-hammering anticipation was my Mensa short-listed's choice of a conversation starter delivered with wide-eyed innocence that Bambi himself might have envied, "I understand that you are a resolute Menckenian."
At Bianca's husky-throated words, there was the abrupt but unmistakable burst of the bubble of carnal certainty. An icicle formed at the root of my spine, shot upward and metastisized. The pervasive chill had less to do with Mencken, whose work I admired as much as I now appreciate, but rather with the suggestion that I might have been "resolute" about anyone or anything.
During that time, I was open for exploration of everything, declining to accept even the concept of face value. There were no indisputable facts, the very idea of which I equated with stagnation, with the waving of the white flag to the omnipresent forces of Ignorance. I could readily identify with E. B. White's internal struggle: awakening each morning conflicted between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world, making it difficult to plan his day.
The notion that I was a committed devotee of Henry Louis Mencken was a not uncommon error among those aware that I was a friend of the journalist and historian Gerald White Johnson, whose crystalline insights, genuine cordiality, plain-spoken profundity and Job-like patience had a tranformative impact that I doubt could be learned even had I been more attentive from any religious or higher education institution through which I passed.
Johnson had many years before I met him indeed been lured by Mencken to depart his beloved native North Carolina and join the staff of the Sunpapers of Baltimore.
While Johnson remained a thoughtful and unreconstructed progressive throughout his life, Mencken could no more be pigeon-holed ideologically than he could be persuaded to sign a petition for the Temperance Union. His not infrequent tirades against the social experimentation of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal were no more robust than his puncturing of the pomposity of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover conservatism.
I have never considered mysef a Menckenian, either resolute or restrained. Though I have often enough been amused and entertained by HLM's irreverence and in awe of his industriousness and versatility, I am troubled by anyone who saw anything remotely positive in Adolf Hitler, even, as it was with Mencken, when the appeal lasted not much beyond the blink of an eye.
The Sage of Baltimore's misguided belief that Hitler might be the savior of the land of his ancestry had a short run. That it had legs to stand up at all, much less run, in the mind of such a world-class iconoclast, a mind that could penetrate the shrewdest of mountebanks and detail their poses and posturing with seeming ease, makes Mencken's attraction to Der Fuhrer all the more befuddling.
Even so, I found myself defending Mencken in print against allegations of anti-Semitism after the latter's diary was published some years after his death, as decreed in his will. I did so in a newspaper review of the diary and felt no necessity to apologize for it, nor do I to this very day.
In scribbling his daily thoughts, Mencken could not have used more intemperate language to characterize either Jews or African Americans. I find this especially disgraceful from a man who wrote with such masterful command, always finding the right word apparently even while writing on a newspaper's deadline. He simply cannot be excused for sinking to such subterranean depths, no matter that these were ostensibly his most private thoughts. In fact, he suspected full well that his diary would one day be published and made elaborate arrangements for this to happen, doubtless as assurance that he would not be forgotten well beyond his parting 'this earthly vale.'
Despite HLM's usage of some of the most inflammatory words extant to describe persons of certain religious beliefs and racial origins, I remain unconvinced that he was a bigot or a racist. I am well aware that his diary offers a wealth of evidence to the contrary, but my feeling was then and remains that Mencken judged people individually rather than by the color of their skin or what or whom they worshipped.
Not even Mencken's passing infatuation with Hitler categorizes the Sage as an anti-Semite. It was certainly a mistake and a terrible one for which Mencken does not deserve a pass. But I feel his praise for Hitler was rooted in his love for Germany rather than hatred of Jews. Mencken soon, though not soon enough, understood that Hitler was an abomination, a genocidal tyrant more likely to be remembered as a lightning rod to bring shame and humiliation on the land of his ancestors than as the Aryan Moses.
There were doubtless other dents in Mencken's armor, but none as deep and permanent as his brief attraction to Hitler and the Third Reich.
To this day, Mencken's more rabid detractors continue to use his fidelity to Germany and all things German, which silenced his iconoclastic voice through two world wars to present a prima facie case that he was not only anti-Semitic and racist but anti-American as well. Utter nonsense. In nine well-chosen sentences, HLM digs the grave and buries this misguided hogwash, to wit:
One man likes the republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober, pious and faithful to his wife. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the Cathedral at Chartres. Another because Roosevelt could not leave his job to his son. Another because living here, he can read the New York Journal.* Another because there is a warrant for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
Not only do I hold up these as the last words on charges that H. L. Mencken was un-American, but as an in-the-face response to those who would support the resistance by the super wealthy, who only too happily sign exorbitant checks for their country club dues, to raising their taxes. Taxes, after all, are dues for living in arguably the greatest country in the world. One can only imagine what Mencken might have written about the asininity of a nation slashing taxes for the extremely well-heeled while fighting preemptive wars financed by borrowed funds that our children and grandchildren will be forced to ante up long after the perpetrators of these unnecessary wars have gone to their just reward.
*Alas.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
HUMOR IS SERIOUS BUSINESS
By H. N. Burdett
Insomnia in the wee, small hours of the morning is a personal affliction of relatively recent vintage. There are books at my bedside to ensure that, should they occur, such hours will be spent more productively than tossing and turning them away.
In preparation for slumber interruptus, volumes by E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Joseph Epstein are within easy reach. Anything more challenging would have the effect of caffeine at a time when sleep is required, not stimulation.
At 4 a.m. on a recent morning, the old grey cells were up and running and annoying the hell out of the rest of my contentedly dormant self. I listlessly reached for one of my most beloved of all books: the one that shows the aforementioned Mr. White at his typewriter on the front cover, apparently taking dictation from a dachshund.
There's a dachshund who answers to the name of Tribbie in my family. She is owned by my daughter and grandson. In recent months I have been infused with inspiration not only by Tribbie, but also by a papillon who answers to the name of Penny, as well as by a veritable herd of felines who answer to no names, or anything else, but were nonetheless christened, respectively, Mowie, Conan, Cal and Ellen.
The aforementioned felines and canines do not so much get along as tolerate one another, that is for the most part. Their truce is an uneasy one. Tribbie and Penny not infrequently feel compelled to defend their downstairs territory against all enemies foreign and domestic, bewhiskered creatures all, with impressive ferocity. The barking ones, for reasons unknown to me, are not allowed upstairs in my daughter's house; it may have something to do with their voracious appetites and the need to protect the purring ones from near certain starvation.
Cal and Tribbie sometimes wrestle. When I first witnessed one of their contests, I was horrified to mistake it for a life and death struggle. But rather than blood, I observed a kind of camaraderie. I can never figure out who wins these matches, or even who may be the better wrestler. To the combatants, such calculations miss the point, which, I take it, is, mere exercise.
But I digress. Let's see, I believe I was expounding upon The Essays of E. B. White, which I selected in an effort not to waste three or four hours of insomnia. On the back dust cover of this particular volume, there is a quote from the author himself, his spot on characterization of the essayist as "a self-liberated man (I envision Joan Didion wincing), sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest."
To double down on my assurance that should my reading ploy succeed I might return to much needed rest with a smile of contentment, I found White's wonderful piece titled, "Some Remarks on Humor" and was particularly taken with the following passage:
Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of a situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.
Reflecting upon that dollop of wisdom, any chance of stealing a couple of more hours of overdue rest was totally negated. Whenever I re-read a few of White's pieces (as with peanuts, it's hard to stop at one), I invariably conclude that he has already written everything worth writing. But then I have virtually the same invariable conclusion whenever I read Shakespeare and Saul Bellow. In the intimidating shadows of those giants, I pick up my pen and audaciously scratch out my own take on the world and its foibles. The gods must be in stitches.
Insomnia in the wee, small hours of the morning is a personal affliction of relatively recent vintage. There are books at my bedside to ensure that, should they occur, such hours will be spent more productively than tossing and turning them away.
In preparation for slumber interruptus, volumes by E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Joseph Epstein are within easy reach. Anything more challenging would have the effect of caffeine at a time when sleep is required, not stimulation.
At 4 a.m. on a recent morning, the old grey cells were up and running and annoying the hell out of the rest of my contentedly dormant self. I listlessly reached for one of my most beloved of all books: the one that shows the aforementioned Mr. White at his typewriter on the front cover, apparently taking dictation from a dachshund.
There's a dachshund who answers to the name of Tribbie in my family. She is owned by my daughter and grandson. In recent months I have been infused with inspiration not only by Tribbie, but also by a papillon who answers to the name of Penny, as well as by a veritable herd of felines who answer to no names, or anything else, but were nonetheless christened, respectively, Mowie, Conan, Cal and Ellen.
The aforementioned felines and canines do not so much get along as tolerate one another, that is for the most part. Their truce is an uneasy one. Tribbie and Penny not infrequently feel compelled to defend their downstairs territory against all enemies foreign and domestic, bewhiskered creatures all, with impressive ferocity. The barking ones, for reasons unknown to me, are not allowed upstairs in my daughter's house; it may have something to do with their voracious appetites and the need to protect the purring ones from near certain starvation.
Cal and Tribbie sometimes wrestle. When I first witnessed one of their contests, I was horrified to mistake it for a life and death struggle. But rather than blood, I observed a kind of camaraderie. I can never figure out who wins these matches, or even who may be the better wrestler. To the combatants, such calculations miss the point, which, I take it, is, mere exercise.
But I digress. Let's see, I believe I was expounding upon The Essays of E. B. White, which I selected in an effort not to waste three or four hours of insomnia. On the back dust cover of this particular volume, there is a quote from the author himself, his spot on characterization of the essayist as "a self-liberated man (I envision Joan Didion wincing), sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest."
To double down on my assurance that should my reading ploy succeed I might return to much needed rest with a smile of contentment, I found White's wonderful piece titled, "Some Remarks on Humor" and was particularly taken with the following passage:
Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don't have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of a situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.
Reflecting upon that dollop of wisdom, any chance of stealing a couple of more hours of overdue rest was totally negated. Whenever I re-read a few of White's pieces (as with peanuts, it's hard to stop at one), I invariably conclude that he has already written everything worth writing. But then I have virtually the same invariable conclusion whenever I read Shakespeare and Saul Bellow. In the intimidating shadows of those giants, I pick up my pen and audaciously scratch out my own take on the world and its foibles. The gods must be in stitches.
Monday, August 30, 2010
DEFINING FEMINISM IN AMERICA
By H. N. Burdett
Palin Envy may be pushing and shoving its way into our national consciousness. It is high time.
An epidemic of laryngitis seems to have overtaken women of progressive persuasion who mainly sit in silence on the sidelines as Sarah Palin puts her brand on feminism. Her long-running road show is at very least a cash cow for the less than righteous right.
Perhaps the decision to ignore Palin reflects the fact that liberal Democrats are perfectly content with two extremely competent women in the roles of Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State. An attitude of let them fume, flail and fumble, while we're the grown-ups intent upon leading by example.
Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are hands down the most mocked -- and dare we say despised? -- contemporary American political figures, after Palin, of course. Then again, it depends on who is doing the mocking and despising.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister dissect with near surgical precision the Palin conundrum and the urgency for progressive Democrats to find or create their very own version of the Sarah phenomenon.
Traister is the author of the forthcoming, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women." Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel.
The two feel that what the Democrats need is nothing less than: "A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals' shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female who unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women."
Holmes and Traister then introduce the proverbial rub: to achieve this goal would "require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin." There are grave doubts that such a party exists.
A lesson from the women's liberation days of the 1960s was that all women did not sing from the same hymnal regarding feminism. The Betty Freidans and Gloria Steinems spoke to one audience of women, Phyllis Schlafly to a quite different one. Schlafly was an army unto herself.
As the antichrist of liberal feminism, Schlafly had a collection of bumper sticker punchlines that resonated more with the male-dominated power structure than they reflected common sense -- even on no-brainers such as equal pay for equal work (which, incidentally, remains perhaps the most basic and yet elusive goals of the women's rights movement). But how could the logic and fairness of this issue, which even on its worst days never drew a convincing counter-argument, compete with Schlafly's full-throated concern that equal rights for women would lead directly to unisex public restrooms?
Gender equality enthusiasts naively postulated that the justness of their cause guaranteed that the women's movement would be a political monolith. Schlafly was equally determined to prove that this was an absurd misreading of the minds of American women. As much as so many women believe their most fundamental right is to have control over their own bodies, Schlafly presented the argument that no husband could ever be guilty of raping his wife because marriage implies sexual consent.
Furthermore, Schlafly can hardly be accused of the crime of inconsistency. She has through the years demonstrated remarkable fidelity to the conservative playbook: opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she feels will, among other things, deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows, as well as opposition to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and Arms Control. For good measure, she believes -- and I'm not making this up -- that Congress should impeach Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for casting the deciding vote to abolish the death penalty for minors.
Those who feel Schlafly is an anomaly even among conservative thinkers, should try reading her literary descendants: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (when she resumes writing, which she surely will) and Michelle Malkin. That formidable trio would have been regularly skewered when Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins were alive and well. These days Rachel Maddow pretty much has to set the record straight alone.
Meanwhile, though there may be two distinct ideological groups who think of themselves as feminists, the hearts and minds the Maddows and Coulters are even more driven to win and keep are those of the men who control the levers of power, from boardrooms to courtrooms to legislatures and governors' offices, as well as major political party platforms and coffers.
Not too long ago, the grievances presented by liberal women did not at all jibe with the world as most men knew it. Any number of men who considered themselves proudly liberal could readily associate themselves with the womanifesto of the '60s -- basically, equality in both the workplace and at home. But there was virtually always a line that these same men did not want crossed. Whether it was a more equitable division of household chores, changing diapers, or something else, it was almost always there.
Progressives cheered to the rooftops Barrack Obama's call for change in the 2008 election. The response was overwhelming. But the change that could not be predicted was how Palin, in Holmes's and Traister's words "an anti-choice, pro-abstinence socialist-bashing tea party enthusiast," is positioning herself to become "the
21st century symbol of American women in politics." While the arguments they pose are understandable and reasonable, they may be missing the point.
Sarah Palin is easily the most visible woman political figure stumping the nation today, it would require neither very much paper nor ink to recount that her actual achievements -- Governor of Alaska, defeated nominee for Vice President of the United States -- pale when compared with those of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
As two of the three most powerful officeholders in the United States and, thus, the world, the Mesdames Pelosi and Clinton are making their mark. While Palin prattles on about the evils of tax-and-spend Democrats who refuse to cut taxes but can't resist funding any cockamamie social program that will plunge the country into ever greater indebtedness, Pelosi keeps steering the Obama administation program through the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton keeps mending overseas fences the Bush administration with its neoconservative cohorts toppled recklessly and regularly.
The more success Ms. Clinton and Pelosi have in their respective endeavors, the more they will be demonized by the well-greased and oiled GOP smear machine -- Clinton as a ruthless combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Therese Defarge and Pelosi as "a San Francisco liberal," right-wing vernacular for the vilest, most depraved members of the most contemptible of all species.
The latter characterization is particularly amusing considering that Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi was born and reared in Baltimore's Little Italy which resembles Haight-Asbury about as much as Manhattan compares with the crater of the moon. But nothing rouses the contempt of an opponent more certainly than success and Pelosi's record for steering Obama administration legislation through the House of Representatives nearly matches Tiger Woods's string of successes on the fairways before his fall from grace.
Hillary Clinton is regarded by the GOP as the personification of evil, despite her ability to work productively with some of the more conservative members of the U.S. Senate when she represented the State of New York in that august body. But Mrs. Clinton remains a convenient punching bag for rightists, in no small measure because she happens to be married to none other than the devil himself. It matters little to the disloyal opposition that Madame Secretary is making headway in restoring the global goodwill in which the United States spent more than 200 years investing before the Bush administration squandered it in only eight years.
With the American economy still on the ropes and unemployment -- when those who have given up even looking for work are counted -- above 10 per cent, the mood of the electorate can best be gauged by the as yet unknown quantity of the staying power of the Tea Party, the dissidents that Palin leads spiritually if not officially.
There remain legitimate questions regarding whether the tea-baggers can outlast their historic aberrant forebears, the Liberty League and the John Birch Society, whose notoriety was at least equally fearsome but relatively short-lived.
The durability of the Tea Party hangs by a tenuous thread that nevertheless will require significant change to unravel. Unless there is a dramatic economic and employment upward surge within the next two months, the Democrats can expect to take a pounding in the midterm congressional elections -- if for no other reason than they are there and have not yet fixed what was broken.
That a Republican majority bears at least equal responsibility for the damage, through waging a costly preemptive war, through borrow and spend profligacy and through slashing taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, may be irrelevant.
It requires a greater degree of political sophistication than voters generally demonstrate to comprehend that without the overly maligned economic stimulus packages and choosing instead the Republican option of continuing to cut taxes for the deserving wealthy and allowing the market to seek its own level with as few rules and regulations as possible would likely have had us digging out of a considerably deeper hole.
The misguided machismo which perpetuates the myth that only men are capable of running the country, compounded by the belief that the nation would be in better shape had we just left everything alone and done nothing about the economy,brings to mind the immortal question Will Rogers once posed: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't stupidity get us out?" A return to the conservative agenda would be a supreme test of that kind of thinking.
If the most inspiring leader for a back-to-the-future platform two years hence turns out to be Sarah Palin, with her Twitter wisdom ("Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree. . ."), the Republican party is in real trouble, and maybe even the country.
Palin Envy may be pushing and shoving its way into our national consciousness. It is high time.
An epidemic of laryngitis seems to have overtaken women of progressive persuasion who mainly sit in silence on the sidelines as Sarah Palin puts her brand on feminism. Her long-running road show is at very least a cash cow for the less than righteous right.
Perhaps the decision to ignore Palin reflects the fact that liberal Democrats are perfectly content with two extremely competent women in the roles of Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State. An attitude of let them fume, flail and fumble, while we're the grown-ups intent upon leading by example.
Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are hands down the most mocked -- and dare we say despised? -- contemporary American political figures, after Palin, of course. Then again, it depends on who is doing the mocking and despising.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister dissect with near surgical precision the Palin conundrum and the urgency for progressive Democrats to find or create their very own version of the Sarah phenomenon.
Traister is the author of the forthcoming, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women." Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel.
The two feel that what the Democrats need is nothing less than: "A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals' shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female who unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women."
Holmes and Traister then introduce the proverbial rub: to achieve this goal would "require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin." There are grave doubts that such a party exists.
A lesson from the women's liberation days of the 1960s was that all women did not sing from the same hymnal regarding feminism. The Betty Freidans and Gloria Steinems spoke to one audience of women, Phyllis Schlafly to a quite different one. Schlafly was an army unto herself.
As the antichrist of liberal feminism, Schlafly had a collection of bumper sticker punchlines that resonated more with the male-dominated power structure than they reflected common sense -- even on no-brainers such as equal pay for equal work (which, incidentally, remains perhaps the most basic and yet elusive goals of the women's rights movement). But how could the logic and fairness of this issue, which even on its worst days never drew a convincing counter-argument, compete with Schlafly's full-throated concern that equal rights for women would lead directly to unisex public restrooms?
Gender equality enthusiasts naively postulated that the justness of their cause guaranteed that the women's movement would be a political monolith. Schlafly was equally determined to prove that this was an absurd misreading of the minds of American women. As much as so many women believe their most fundamental right is to have control over their own bodies, Schlafly presented the argument that no husband could ever be guilty of raping his wife because marriage implies sexual consent.
Furthermore, Schlafly can hardly be accused of the crime of inconsistency. She has through the years demonstrated remarkable fidelity to the conservative playbook: opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she feels will, among other things, deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows, as well as opposition to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and Arms Control. For good measure, she believes -- and I'm not making this up -- that Congress should impeach Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for casting the deciding vote to abolish the death penalty for minors.
Those who feel Schlafly is an anomaly even among conservative thinkers, should try reading her literary descendants: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (when she resumes writing, which she surely will) and Michelle Malkin. That formidable trio would have been regularly skewered when Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins were alive and well. These days Rachel Maddow pretty much has to set the record straight alone.
Meanwhile, though there may be two distinct ideological groups who think of themselves as feminists, the hearts and minds the Maddows and Coulters are even more driven to win and keep are those of the men who control the levers of power, from boardrooms to courtrooms to legislatures and governors' offices, as well as major political party platforms and coffers.
Not too long ago, the grievances presented by liberal women did not at all jibe with the world as most men knew it. Any number of men who considered themselves proudly liberal could readily associate themselves with the womanifesto of the '60s -- basically, equality in both the workplace and at home. But there was virtually always a line that these same men did not want crossed. Whether it was a more equitable division of household chores, changing diapers, or something else, it was almost always there.
Progressives cheered to the rooftops Barrack Obama's call for change in the 2008 election. The response was overwhelming. But the change that could not be predicted was how Palin, in Holmes's and Traister's words "an anti-choice, pro-abstinence socialist-bashing tea party enthusiast," is positioning herself to become "the
21st century symbol of American women in politics." While the arguments they pose are understandable and reasonable, they may be missing the point.
Sarah Palin is easily the most visible woman political figure stumping the nation today, it would require neither very much paper nor ink to recount that her actual achievements -- Governor of Alaska, defeated nominee for Vice President of the United States -- pale when compared with those of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
As two of the three most powerful officeholders in the United States and, thus, the world, the Mesdames Pelosi and Clinton are making their mark. While Palin prattles on about the evils of tax-and-spend Democrats who refuse to cut taxes but can't resist funding any cockamamie social program that will plunge the country into ever greater indebtedness, Pelosi keeps steering the Obama administation program through the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton keeps mending overseas fences the Bush administration with its neoconservative cohorts toppled recklessly and regularly.
The more success Ms. Clinton and Pelosi have in their respective endeavors, the more they will be demonized by the well-greased and oiled GOP smear machine -- Clinton as a ruthless combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Therese Defarge and Pelosi as "a San Francisco liberal," right-wing vernacular for the vilest, most depraved members of the most contemptible of all species.
The latter characterization is particularly amusing considering that Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi was born and reared in Baltimore's Little Italy which resembles Haight-Asbury about as much as Manhattan compares with the crater of the moon. But nothing rouses the contempt of an opponent more certainly than success and Pelosi's record for steering Obama administration legislation through the House of Representatives nearly matches Tiger Woods's string of successes on the fairways before his fall from grace.
Hillary Clinton is regarded by the GOP as the personification of evil, despite her ability to work productively with some of the more conservative members of the U.S. Senate when she represented the State of New York in that august body. But Mrs. Clinton remains a convenient punching bag for rightists, in no small measure because she happens to be married to none other than the devil himself. It matters little to the disloyal opposition that Madame Secretary is making headway in restoring the global goodwill in which the United States spent more than 200 years investing before the Bush administration squandered it in only eight years.
With the American economy still on the ropes and unemployment -- when those who have given up even looking for work are counted -- above 10 per cent, the mood of the electorate can best be gauged by the as yet unknown quantity of the staying power of the Tea Party, the dissidents that Palin leads spiritually if not officially.
There remain legitimate questions regarding whether the tea-baggers can outlast their historic aberrant forebears, the Liberty League and the John Birch Society, whose notoriety was at least equally fearsome but relatively short-lived.
The durability of the Tea Party hangs by a tenuous thread that nevertheless will require significant change to unravel. Unless there is a dramatic economic and employment upward surge within the next two months, the Democrats can expect to take a pounding in the midterm congressional elections -- if for no other reason than they are there and have not yet fixed what was broken.
That a Republican majority bears at least equal responsibility for the damage, through waging a costly preemptive war, through borrow and spend profligacy and through slashing taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, may be irrelevant.
It requires a greater degree of political sophistication than voters generally demonstrate to comprehend that without the overly maligned economic stimulus packages and choosing instead the Republican option of continuing to cut taxes for the deserving wealthy and allowing the market to seek its own level with as few rules and regulations as possible would likely have had us digging out of a considerably deeper hole.
The misguided machismo which perpetuates the myth that only men are capable of running the country, compounded by the belief that the nation would be in better shape had we just left everything alone and done nothing about the economy,brings to mind the immortal question Will Rogers once posed: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't stupidity get us out?" A return to the conservative agenda would be a supreme test of that kind of thinking.
If the most inspiring leader for a back-to-the-future platform two years hence turns out to be Sarah Palin, with her Twitter wisdom ("Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree. . ."), the Republican party is in real trouble, and maybe even the country.
Friday, August 27, 2010
THE PRESIDENT FACES FRIENDLY FIRE
By H. N. Burdett
The soft-spoken, sweet-talking Bayou country sage, James Carville, famously counsels, "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil!"
Barrack Obama may or may not be going under for the third time, though he's undeniably swimming against a treacherous tide. But Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can't seem to find an anvil, only the end of George W. Bush's frayed rope.
It's hard to think of a single constructive idea the minority has contributed to the achievements of the first year and a half of the Obama administration: extending health care to from 16-32 million relatively poor Americans; meeting Obama's August 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and the flawed but nonetheless enacted economic stimulus package and financial reform.
Even the GOP rages against the Obama program are flaccid and wobbly, delivered half-heartedly, as though rather than earnestly challenging they are just going through the motions. The right-wing blowhards of the airwaves are equally unsubstantive, only noisier.
No matter. The same so-called liberal media the foghorns of the right routinely bellow against are doing their job for them. The disloyal opposition has the luxury of at least temporarily sitting back, shutting up and enjoying the show. As if the Becks, O'Reillys and Limbaughs are about to let that happen.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, reviewing Jonathan Alter's tome, The Promise, President Obama's Year One, in the New York Review of Books, feels it "confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team. . .and it's a flaw that has been visible from the start."
Rich homes in on Obama's obsession with meritocracy which facilitated his own meteoric rise from community organizer to Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to the presidency, leaving mere mortal politicians to ponder whether he really does put on his pants one leg at a time as they do.
Recalling the administration's tardiness in responding to the BP oil spill, Rich recounts the White House endlessly repeating that energy secretary Stephen Chu is a Nobel laureate, as though credentials trump performance or lack thereof. And there's the droll observation that not only is Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag a Princeton summa cum laude with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, but his spokesman, Ken Baer, has a Ph.D. from Oxford. Facts that would impress only another thumb-sucking elitist.
Perhaps Obama felt that after eight years of Bush administration bumbling incompetence, high brain wattage would blind the public into faith and trust in its successors. Progressives are now learning that the smartest guys in the room can screw up as royally as the least engaged, and can be equally annoying, to wit, Timothy Gaithner and Lawrence Summers.
Indeed Gaithner and Summers are properly pole-axed as the foxes in Obama's chicken coop by John B. Judis in The New Republic.
While it has been argued that Gaithner's serial tax delinquencies should have disqualified him for secretary of the treasury, he has managed to intensify public disdain by his defense of the TARP initiative, his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, and his indifference to AIG paying back their Wall Street creditors with taxpayers' money.
Meanwhile, Summers's reprehensibly imperious attitude as the top White House economic adviser about the inferiority of the judgments and opinions of his colleagues compared with his own, as well as his exaggerated concern over losing the confidence of business interests, have invited questions as to whether he has been helping or hurting the Obama administration.
While some Democrats see Obama's possible Waterloo in his single-minded persistence to pass health care restructuring "while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs," Judis insists that "the real damage was done earlier."
"What doomed Obama politically," Judis writes, as though the president's political demise is fait accompli, "was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms." Here Judis is quick to point out that had John McCain been elected, the all-too-apparent cluelessness the GOP presidential nominee exhibited on the campaign trail with regard to economics and financial issues indicated he most probably would have fared even worse than Obama has.
Judis goes on to correctly explain that populism is non-ideological, noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each found ways of using its appeal during an economic downturn.
If during times of high unemployment and a weak economy, the president fails to adopt populism, the opposition will, Judis asserts. "That's what (Jimmy) Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late '70s," he points out. "And that's what happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barrack Obama and to the Democratic party he leads."
A litany of Obama actions that have driven progressives bananas is offered by Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation. The list ranges from backing away from inclusion of single payer insurance, the key to true health care reform, to reneging on the president's promise to fight for "a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming --an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. . ."
Musing upon the horrific George W. Bush legacy, with which Obama still contends and doubtless is fated to continue struggling against throughout his presidency, Alterman says: "Think about the Mineral Management Service, where chaos, corruption and incompetence competed with genuine malevolence to empower BP to ignore so many safety rules before the oil spill. Now multiply that by virtually the entire government regulatory structure, and you have some idea of the kind of mess left by Bush and Cheney to the Obama administration."
Judis stresses that the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter is "the specter hanging over Obama's presidency." Readily acknowledging that Obama has already accomplished more in the first 20 months of his administration than Carter did during his entire presidency, he adds, "But there is a disturbing political resemblance between the two presidents." Both ran inspired campaigns, positioned themselves above the partisan quarrels and scandals of their Republican predecessors, and initially raised the possibility of creating a "transformational" presidency. But Carter failed and Obama is failing to connect with large segments of the electorate.
PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times database that won a Pulitzer for fact-checking the 2008 presidential campaign offers another way of evaluating the progress of the Obama presidency. It catalogued and tracked a total of 502 promises Obama made during his campaign. One year later the analysis showed he had already kept 91 of them, made progress on another 285, "broken" 14, and was "stalled" on 89. Moreover, PolitiFact singled out 25 of Obama's most significant campaign promises; of these, in his first year 20 already have been "kept" or are "in the works." For a president who has yet to reach the halfway mark of his first term, that's hardly chopped liver.
Progressive dissatisfaction with Obama has less to do with the quantity of his accomplishments than their quality. More often than not, Obama settles for half a loaf. One of his political mentors puts it this way, "Sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you settle for a ham sandwich." The White House mess will have to expand exponentially to accommodate the stockpiling of the president's ham sandwiches.
Obama constantly invites criticism from those who feel he relinquishes too much in the pursuit of his cockeyed quixotic dream of bipartisanship, which will become reality only when there is ice-skating on the Styx.
A one-term fate for the president is the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway soothsayers, who will never be accused of harboring foolish consistencies that Emerson tells us are hobgoblins of small minds.
But, as a former media colleague constantly used to remind me, you don't top chicken salad with chicken feathers, or something close enough to that. And Republican ammunition, no matter which candidate ultimately fires it, is reduced to belching the Methuselian cant of tax cuts for the rich, borrowing to cover government's bills and turning the tab over to our kids and grandkids to pay, and pulling the rug from under social programs.
The drumbeat for retrogression is less likely to produce a Republican bandwagon than induce an enormous collective yawn. With such a dog-eared, wrinkled and yellowing message, the GOP must pin its hopes on the messenger. That messiah has yet to surface, though there are more than a few aspirants itching to be so anointed.
If Barrack Obama can manage to dodge those frequent barrages of friendly fire, he may not only win re-election, he could even transform the Rushmore Four into a quintet.
The soft-spoken, sweet-talking Bayou country sage, James Carville, famously counsels, "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil!"
Barrack Obama may or may not be going under for the third time, though he's undeniably swimming against a treacherous tide. But Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can't seem to find an anvil, only the end of George W. Bush's frayed rope.
It's hard to think of a single constructive idea the minority has contributed to the achievements of the first year and a half of the Obama administration: extending health care to from 16-32 million relatively poor Americans; meeting Obama's August 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and the flawed but nonetheless enacted economic stimulus package and financial reform.
Even the GOP rages against the Obama program are flaccid and wobbly, delivered half-heartedly, as though rather than earnestly challenging they are just going through the motions. The right-wing blowhards of the airwaves are equally unsubstantive, only noisier.
No matter. The same so-called liberal media the foghorns of the right routinely bellow against are doing their job for them. The disloyal opposition has the luxury of at least temporarily sitting back, shutting up and enjoying the show. As if the Becks, O'Reillys and Limbaughs are about to let that happen.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, reviewing Jonathan Alter's tome, The Promise, President Obama's Year One, in the New York Review of Books, feels it "confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team. . .and it's a flaw that has been visible from the start."
Rich homes in on Obama's obsession with meritocracy which facilitated his own meteoric rise from community organizer to Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to the presidency, leaving mere mortal politicians to ponder whether he really does put on his pants one leg at a time as they do.
Recalling the administration's tardiness in responding to the BP oil spill, Rich recounts the White House endlessly repeating that energy secretary Stephen Chu is a Nobel laureate, as though credentials trump performance or lack thereof. And there's the droll observation that not only is Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag a Princeton summa cum laude with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, but his spokesman, Ken Baer, has a Ph.D. from Oxford. Facts that would impress only another thumb-sucking elitist.
Perhaps Obama felt that after eight years of Bush administration bumbling incompetence, high brain wattage would blind the public into faith and trust in its successors. Progressives are now learning that the smartest guys in the room can screw up as royally as the least engaged, and can be equally annoying, to wit, Timothy Gaithner and Lawrence Summers.
Indeed Gaithner and Summers are properly pole-axed as the foxes in Obama's chicken coop by John B. Judis in The New Republic.
While it has been argued that Gaithner's serial tax delinquencies should have disqualified him for secretary of the treasury, he has managed to intensify public disdain by his defense of the TARP initiative, his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, and his indifference to AIG paying back their Wall Street creditors with taxpayers' money.
Meanwhile, Summers's reprehensibly imperious attitude as the top White House economic adviser about the inferiority of the judgments and opinions of his colleagues compared with his own, as well as his exaggerated concern over losing the confidence of business interests, have invited questions as to whether he has been helping or hurting the Obama administration.
While some Democrats see Obama's possible Waterloo in his single-minded persistence to pass health care restructuring "while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs," Judis insists that "the real damage was done earlier."
"What doomed Obama politically," Judis writes, as though the president's political demise is fait accompli, "was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms." Here Judis is quick to point out that had John McCain been elected, the all-too-apparent cluelessness the GOP presidential nominee exhibited on the campaign trail with regard to economics and financial issues indicated he most probably would have fared even worse than Obama has.
Judis goes on to correctly explain that populism is non-ideological, noting that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each found ways of using its appeal during an economic downturn.
If during times of high unemployment and a weak economy, the president fails to adopt populism, the opposition will, Judis asserts. "That's what (Jimmy) Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late '70s," he points out. "And that's what happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barrack Obama and to the Democratic party he leads."
A litany of Obama actions that have driven progressives bananas is offered by Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation. The list ranges from backing away from inclusion of single payer insurance, the key to true health care reform, to reneging on the president's promise to fight for "a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming --an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. . ."
Musing upon the horrific George W. Bush legacy, with which Obama still contends and doubtless is fated to continue struggling against throughout his presidency, Alterman says: "Think about the Mineral Management Service, where chaos, corruption and incompetence competed with genuine malevolence to empower BP to ignore so many safety rules before the oil spill. Now multiply that by virtually the entire government regulatory structure, and you have some idea of the kind of mess left by Bush and Cheney to the Obama administration."
Judis stresses that the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter is "the specter hanging over Obama's presidency." Readily acknowledging that Obama has already accomplished more in the first 20 months of his administration than Carter did during his entire presidency, he adds, "But there is a disturbing political resemblance between the two presidents." Both ran inspired campaigns, positioned themselves above the partisan quarrels and scandals of their Republican predecessors, and initially raised the possibility of creating a "transformational" presidency. But Carter failed and Obama is failing to connect with large segments of the electorate.
PolitiFact.com, the St. Petersburg Times database that won a Pulitzer for fact-checking the 2008 presidential campaign offers another way of evaluating the progress of the Obama presidency. It catalogued and tracked a total of 502 promises Obama made during his campaign. One year later the analysis showed he had already kept 91 of them, made progress on another 285, "broken" 14, and was "stalled" on 89. Moreover, PolitiFact singled out 25 of Obama's most significant campaign promises; of these, in his first year 20 already have been "kept" or are "in the works." For a president who has yet to reach the halfway mark of his first term, that's hardly chopped liver.
Progressive dissatisfaction with Obama has less to do with the quantity of his accomplishments than their quality. More often than not, Obama settles for half a loaf. One of his political mentors puts it this way, "Sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you settle for a ham sandwich." The White House mess will have to expand exponentially to accommodate the stockpiling of the president's ham sandwiches.
Obama constantly invites criticism from those who feel he relinquishes too much in the pursuit of his cockeyed quixotic dream of bipartisanship, which will become reality only when there is ice-skating on the Styx.
A one-term fate for the president is the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway soothsayers, who will never be accused of harboring foolish consistencies that Emerson tells us are hobgoblins of small minds.
But, as a former media colleague constantly used to remind me, you don't top chicken salad with chicken feathers, or something close enough to that. And Republican ammunition, no matter which candidate ultimately fires it, is reduced to belching the Methuselian cant of tax cuts for the rich, borrowing to cover government's bills and turning the tab over to our kids and grandkids to pay, and pulling the rug from under social programs.
The drumbeat for retrogression is less likely to produce a Republican bandwagon than induce an enormous collective yawn. With such a dog-eared, wrinkled and yellowing message, the GOP must pin its hopes on the messenger. That messiah has yet to surface, though there are more than a few aspirants itching to be so anointed.
If Barrack Obama can manage to dodge those frequent barrages of friendly fire, he may not only win re-election, he could even transform the Rushmore Four into a quintet.
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