| December 18, 9:16 PM | Current issue: January 2010 · Archive |
| Links | Links |
| Scott Horton | Broadcom Prosecution Collapses as Judge Finds Sweeping Misconduct by Federal Prosecutors |
| Mr Fish | A Cartoon |
| Ken Silverstein | Obama Doing For Climate Change What He Did For Health Care |
| Gideon Lewis Kraus |
![[Image]](/media/image/blogs/misc/1968-11-0136-1.jpg)
The lines most cited in Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech were those about evil: “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism–it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” These lines won approbation from both liberals and conservatives. Former Clinton aide Bill Galston praised them as an example of “Obama’s moral realism.” According to neoconservative Bob Kagan Obama didn’t “shy away from the Manichaean distinctions that drive self-described realists (and Europeans) crazy.” . . . I am not a self-described realist, and I am a Chicagoan by birth, yet I don’t care for these lines. While I don’t object to the idea of just war, and have supported the various wars that Obama cited in his speech, and wouldn’t balk at calling Al Qaeda or Hitler evil, I think Obama ventured onto dangerous terrain by invoking the existence of evil as a justification for war. That kind of argument suggests neither moral realism nor prudent idealism, but the crusade-like, messianic foreign policy–pitting good against evil–that got the country into so much trouble during the last administration. –“Speak No Evil: The problem with Obama’s much-lauded Nobel speech,” John B. Budis, The New Republic
Geopolitical rotisserie leagues–isn’t this how WarGames got started? Admittedly, it’s no “global thermonuclear war” or even tic-tac-toe, but it still seems wrong. Like predicting the next Ron Paul, or acting as an apologist for President Obama’s lamentable foreign policy…
From an early age, I have missed the point of things. I noticed this first when the entire class at school seemed to understand that Animal Farm was about something other than animals. I alone sat there believing otherwise. I simply couldn’t see who or what the book was about if not about farm animals. I had enjoyed it for that. Now, the teacher and every other boy seemed to think it was really about Stalin or Communism or something. I looked at it again, but I still couldn’t quite work it out….And allegory. I never got the point of allegory. If it was a choice between algebra and allegory, I knew whose side I was on. When I picked up Moby-Dick, I liked it because it was about hunting whales. And oh dear I just couldn’t concentrate when everyone began to explain, all at the one time, that the whale was a symbol or something, that it stood for… I cannot remember what. –“Missing the Point,” Colm Toibin, London Review of Books
How business school destroyed the American Dream; related: drunk four-year-old wanders neighborhood with stolen Xmas gifts; says mother: “He runs away trying to find his father. He wants to get in trouble so he can go to jail because that’s where his daddy is”; also related: Howard Dean would vote no on healthcare reform, if Howard Dean could vote
Jon Stewart, host of the satirical programme The Daily Show, recently poked fun at a similar suggestion from a congressman that the web was freeing the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?” Unfortunately, critical voices like his are rare. The majority of the media, so cranky when reporting the internet’s impact on their industry, keep producing tear-jerking examples of the marriage of political protest and social media. And what a list it is: Burmese monks defying an evil junta with digital cameras; Filipino teenagers using SMS to create a “textual revolution;” Egyptian activists using encryption to hide from the all-seeing-eye of the Mukhabarat; even Brazilian ecologists using Google maps to show deforestation in the Amazon delta. And did I mention Moldova, China and Iran? These cyber-dissidents, we are told, now take their struggles online, swapping leaflets for Twitter updates and ditching fax machines for iPhones. –“How Dictators Watch Us On the Web,” Evgeny Morozov, Prospect
No gatecrasher jokes, please, because it’s not funny, it’s just not: Arbeit macht frei sign stolen from Auschwitz; but this kinda is: Vietnamese submariners plying the Pacific in last-generation Russian u-boats; woman crossing the ocean in a rowboat likely has nothing to fear
On Tuesday, Federal Judge Cormac Carney (an All Pac-10 wide receiver for UCLA before George W. Bush appointed him to the bench) dropped a bombshell in the Broadcom case pending in a federal court in Orange County, California. Prosecutors had built a case against Broadcom founder Henry T. Nicholas III and CFO William Ruehle based on options backdating. The judge dismissed the charges against them, unleashing a torrent of attacks on the prosecutors who brought the case for potentially criminal wrongdoing. Carney’s choicest words had to do with the prosecutors’ bogus case against an engineer, Dr. Henry Samueli:
The uncontroverted evidence at trial established that Dr. Samueli was a brilliant engineer and a man of incredible integrity. There was no evidence at trial to suggest that Dr. Samueli did anything wrong, let alone criminal. Yet, the government embarked on a campaign of intimidation and other misconduct to embarrass him and bring him down.
Among other wrongful acts the government,
One, unreasonably demanded that Dr. Samueli submit to as many as 30 grueling interrogations by the lead prosecutor.
Two, falsely stated and improperly leaked to the media that Dr. Samueli was not cooperating in the government’s investigation.
Three, improperly pressured Broadcom to terminate Dr. Samueli’s employment and remove him from the board.
Four, misled Dr. Samueli into believing that the lead prosecutor would be replaced because of misconduct.
Five, obtained an inflammatory indictment that referred to Dr. Samueli 72 times and accused him of being an unindicted coconspirator when the government knew, or should have known, that he did nothing wrong.
And seven, [sic] crafted an unconscionable plea agreement pursuant to which Dr. Samueli would plead guilty to a crime he did not commit and pay a ridiculous sum of $12 million to the United States Treasury.
One must conclude that the government engaged in this misconduct to pressure Dr. Samueli to falsely admit guilt and incriminate Mr. Ruehle or, if he was unwilling to make such a false admission and incrimination, to destroy Dr. Samueli’s credibility as a witness for Mr. Ruehle. Needless to say, the government’s treatment of Dr. Samueli was shameful and contrary to American values of decency and justice.
[MORE . . .]
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.
On December 13, George McGovern published an opinion piece, “With Obama’s Strategy, Afghanistan Looks Like Another Vietnam,” in the Washington Post. He wrote:
I am astounded at the Obama Administration’s decision to escalate the equally mistaken war in Afghanistan, and as I listen to our talented young president explain why he is adding 30,000 troops– beyond the 21,000 he had added already– I can only think: another Vietnam. I hope I am incorrect, but history tells me otherwise.
Joe Klein promptly replied, in his “Swampland” blog at Time, in a piece entitled “McGovern on Afghanistan”:
George McGovern was a world war II hero, a principled politician and absolutely right about the foolishness of the war in Vietnam. He is thoroughly wrong about Afghanistan, though. As President Obama painstakingly explained in his West Point speech, Vietnam is a false–indeed, a facile–anology [sic]. The war in Vietnam was based on lies–the Tonkin Gulf incident–and a false premise, the notion that Vietnam would be the next domino to fall in a communist campaign to conquer Asia. (The total wrongness of this theory was soon demonstrated by the China-Soviet split and subsequent, tacit U.S.-China alliance against the Soviets–as well as a thousand years of tension between the Vietnamese and the Chinese.)
Here’s McGovern’s reply to Klein, emailed to me today. It’s worth a careful read:
The reporter Joe Klein deserves a response to his critique of my objection to President Obama’s decision to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. With the 21,000 the President ordered there earlier plus the 50,000 sent by President Bush, we now have over 100,000 troops assigned to Afghanistan and another 50,000 mercenaries.
I had stated that our growing Afghan involvement reminds me of the Vietnam tragedy. Mr. Klein contends “Afghanistan is different.” I agree that there are differences between the two situations, but there are worrisome similarities.
In each case we have assumed that the complicated political, ideological, ethnic, and nationalistic cross purposes can be straightened out by American troops. It has further been assumed in both Vietnam and Afghanistan that their problems are primarily the responsibility of the US with only token support from other countries.
The people of Afghanistan have occupied a strip of mountainous territory in Central Asia for many centuries. If they are unable to resolve their internal conflicts, how likely is it that even the best soldiers from our distant land can put things aright?
If our country which we all love is to become the world’s policeman, where will we recruit enough troops? Some of our regular army and reservists have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade– longer than WWI and WWII combined. There is a limit to what even superb soldiers like ours can withstand. If we are to play the role of a global police force we should all be involved and that means we should restore the draft and pay higher taxes. We can’t keep using the same soldiers war after war while borrowing money from the Chinese.
Mr. Klein expresses grave concern about tensions and dangers in Pakistan if we were to “abandon the region” by bringing our troops home from Afghanistan.
I am not advocating that we abandon any region of the world (indeed I have long favored normalization of relations including trade and travel with Cuba as I did with China long before that happened). We have competent, fully staffed embassies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to help us keep informed of developments in these countries and to pursue our interests. We also maintain economic aid missions in these countries. We are not abandoning a country simply because we don’t have our army there doing battle.
One final point: Even if Mr. Klein were right in calling for us to continue waging war in Afghanistan, we can’t afford it. Thanks to the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve built a national debt of 12 trillion dollars. We’re also in the middle of a serious recession. Not a good time for another deepening war.
“President Obama called on world leaders to come to an agreement on climate change, no matter how imperfect,” the New York Times reported today.
The Times also said that Obama “pressed for an accord that would monitor whether countries — primarily China — are complying with promised emissions cuts.” Dean Baker made a good point that should be kept in mind when reading all of the analysis from the climate summit, and about America’s noble effort to save the planet:
Last week, a twenty-seven-year-old murder mystery was solved, grabbing headlines around the world. Former Chilean President Eduardo Frei died under mysterious circumstances in 1982, at the age of 71, as he was busily investigating accusations of human rights abuses including torture and “disappearings” by his successor, General Augusto Pinochet. A week ago Monday, a Chilean investigating judge ruled his death a homicide and charged six individuals as conspirators. The New York Times reports:
An autopsy report blamed septic shock after stomach hernia surgery, but a new autopsy this year by University of Chile pathologists identified two chemicals in his body that attack the digestive system — one that is used in mustard gas and another found in rat poison. ”He was injected with toxic substances, which produced other complications that deteriorated his immune system,” Judge Alejandro Madrid told reporters Monday. ”That was the cause of death.”
[MORE . . .]
From “The Paring Knife at the Crossroads,” by Bernard DeVoto in the April 1939 Harper’s Magazine
For it is quite true that in some goods there is no longer any such thing as quality. I buy a new pocket knife before going to the country every summer, for instance–I have to buy a new one. It has been years since I had one that would keep an edge, and stainless steel, which most of them are made of nowadays, won’t even take an edge. The interesting thing is that stainless steel rusts before the summer is over too, when other steel objects carried in the pocket don’t rust. The same conditions hold for kitchen cutlery. It is practically all made of stainless steel now, which means that it is practically all no good. At approximately twice the price you paid ten years ago you can get a good butcher knife, but you can’t get a good paring knife at any price. True, you can get a paring knife for a nickel and a butcher knife for a quarter, as you couldn’t in grandmother’s time–but grandmother wouldn’t have bought them at any price. They are beautiful of course: the handle is bright green and the blade has been streamlined, air-resistance being a great problem in the kitchen; but they will not cut.
Read the rest of “The Paring Knife at the Crossroads” for free, or read the follow-up from July 1939–“Unrest in the Kitchen” (also free)…
![[Image]](/media/image/blogs/misc/1923-06-0145.jpg)
Hardly anyone noticed this summer when former president Jimmy Carter explained why he had decided to leave the Baptist Church. However “painful and difficult,” wrote Carter in an essay that appeared in the Guardian, his break with the denomination to which he had belonged for sixty years had begun to seem like the only possible response to past opinions expressed and codified by the Southern Baptist Convention. “It was an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors, or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God.” –“The Original Sin,” Francine Prose, Lapham’s Quarterly
More Francine Prose: “Love For Sale: Appraising the relics of a relationship” in the May 2009 Harper’s (free) and “You Got Eyes: Robert Frank imagines America” in the current issue (subscribers only) (SUBSCRIBE!); what Americans know about the Supreme Court; headline: “Going Robe”; the editor of Reason loves socialist, French health care
U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds. In the summer 2009 incident, the military found “days and days and hours and hours of proof” that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. “It is part of their kit now.” –“Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones: $26 Software Is Used to Breach Key Weapons in Iraq; Iranian Backing Suspected,” Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen, and August Cole, the Wall Street Journal
First Things on how pedophilia’s not cool anymore; science: conservatives easier to disgust (via) (related: “What’s grosser than gross”); Washington Post panics, panics over the debt “crisis”; rental Xmas trees; Maria Bamford Christmas Special!
Remember the most convulsive, brain-ripping climax you ever had? The one that left you with “I could die happy now” satiety? Sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes twice as gigantic because they’ll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices. Sexbots will heighten our ecstasy until we have frothy, shrieking, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms. They’ll offer us split-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes– this will all be ours when the Sexbots arrive. –“Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm,” Hank Hyena, h+ Magazine
Jack Bauer and the Cheney Doctrine meet a mysterious bearded man caught delivering suspicious packages:
I have an article in the January issue of Harper’s called “Shopping for sweat: The human cost of a two-dollar T-shirt,” which looks at the apparel industry in Cambodia. That country promotes itself, with the help of major apparel companies that source from there (like Gap Wal-Mart, Nike and Target) as a model apparel producer. Two years ago, USA Today published an article about how the country had “position[ed] itself as the sweatshop-free producer in a fiercely competitive global clothing market”; Cambodia, a Levi’s executive told the newspaper, “is a special country.”
Despite this pleasing reputation, the labor situation in Cambodia is as bad as in other cheap labor havens. According to a 2008 survey, apparel workers there get paid an average of 33 cents an hour, lower than anywhere in the world but Bangladesh.
Yesterday I discussed the the Jeppesen DataPlan case involving the extraordinary renditions program. As that case was being argued, Justice Department lawyers also appeared before the chief district court judge in San Francisco, Vaughn R. Walker, in a parallel case. In Shubert v. Obama, four Brooklynites are suing with claims that they were subjected to illegal surveillance under a Bush Administration program that directed data-mining in collusion with internet service providers and telecommunications firms. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant for precisely the activities that the Bush Administration undertook, making warrantless surveillance a felony. As we now know, Bush Administration lawyers could be found to sanction this, but senior figures in the department threatened to resign—and some apparently did resign—over the blatant criminality of the program.
The Shubert suit was originally filed in the Bush years, but the Obama Justice Department “inherited” the case and has pursued tactics identical to those of its predecessor. (As Mike Isikoff notes, the Holder Justice Department even used the same words in opposing the suit.) The case marshals a great deal of data to establish what went on, including the testimony of engineers who witnessed the installation of “black boxes” by the NSA providing the physical capacity for the warrantless surveillance, and a series of scientific papers discussing technical aspects of the program. There is no doubt that other nations around the world already know in great detail how this system works, and indeed some have duplicated it to spy on their own citizens. There is also no doubt that the spies and terrorist organizations that are particular targets of the program have a good understanding of the program. In claiming “state secrets,” then, the government’s principal object must be to keep it secret from the American public.
![[Image]](/media/image/blogs/misc/1923-06-0148.jpg)
Observers of financial services saw unbelievable prosperity and apparently immense value added. Yet two years later the whole industry was bankrupt. A simple reason underlies this: any industry that pays out in cash colossal accounting profits that are largely imaginary will go bust quickly. Not only has the industry– and by extension societies that depend on it– been spending money that is no longer there, it has been giving away money that it only imagined it had in the first place. Worse, it seems to want to do it all again. What were the sources of this imaginary wealth? First, spreads on credit that took no account of default probabilities (bankers have been doing this for centuries, but not on this scale). Second, unrealised mark-to-market profits on the trading book, especially in illiquid instruments. Third, profits conjured up by taking the net present value of streams of income stretching into the future, on derivative issuance for example. In the last two of these the bank was not receiving any income, merely “booking revenues.” How could they pay this non-existent wealth out in cash to their employees? Because they had no measure of cash flow to tell them they were idiots, and because everyone else was doing it. Paying out 50 per cent of revenues to staff had become the rule, even when the “revenues” did not actually consist of money. –“Innumerate Bankers Were Ripe for a Reckoning,” Martin Taylor, Financial Times (via)
Physicists: Great authors (Hardy, Melville, Lawrence) have “unique word” curves, and pull their works from a “meta book”; related: Graham Greene parodies himself in contest, wins second prize; Cornell gives the Internet Archive 80,000 books; a vampire writes on vampire films; “I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article on Our Sex Life”
I guess I would use my son’s word: cool. It was cool to work in the White House. All the internal investigations are over with, no finding of wrongdoing, no finding that I misled Congress. (Editor’s note: A 2008 Department of Justice investigation was referred to a federal prosecutor and remains ongoing.) So I’m gratified by that, but I’m certainly not surprised by it. But anyway, it creates impressions. And yeah, it takes some time to work through that. And that’s what I’m trying to do now. Sometimes that can be a little bit discouraging, quite frankly, given that you’re looking at partner in a major firm, Harvard Law School graduate, general counsel to a governor, counselor to the president, secretary of state, state supreme court justice, attorney general of the United States. I’m proud of that record. I don’t believe my life’s work should be solely defined by four years in the White House and two years as attorney general. –“Alberto Gonzales: What I’ve learned,” interview by John H. Richardson, Esquire
Christopher Hitchens in defense of foxhole atheists; see also: Jeff Sharlet in the May 2009 Harper’s, “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military”; and, finally, with Oral Roberts dead, it’s time to revisit MC 900 Ft. Jesus: “Truth Is Out of Style”; “Killer Inside Me”; “The City Sleeps”; “If I Only Had a Brain”
In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness… The current scandal has disrupted, if not shattered, this image of perfect control. Scandals that aren’t out of tune with a celebrity’s image are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from: after images of Kate Moss snorting coke surfaced, her bookings fell, but, over time, they went up. Revelations that Michael Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling barely dented his appeal, since the story reinforced the image of him as a fierce competitor. But scandals that conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc. And it’s hard to think of a scandal that’s more discordant with an image of focus and discipline than this one. Woods’s alleged cavorting with Vegas waitresses and celebrity groupies, his woeful “sexts” and voice mails, his driving his S.U.V. into a tree: all these things make him look weak and discombobulated. Some have speculated, optimistically, that this may humanize the Tiger. But that’s exactly the problem: what was so amazing about Woods was precisely that he wasn’t like the rest of us—that he wasn’t weak or distracted. –“Branded a Cheat,” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker
Advice from science: for wedded bliss, share chores; to lose more weight, turn off the TV; to save money, be born first; and if you’re ugly, you’ll be happier in some godforsaken cowtown; also: mammoths may have roamed only 7,600 years ago; professional skeptic the Amazing James Randi now amazingly skeptical of global warming; and no one in Copenhagen (where Naomi Klein is protesting) is talking about population control (by Andrew C. Revkin, who’s taking a buyout as the Times cuts its budget); 50 reasons why global warming is not natural; and, in Chicago, a baby beluga
The Holder Justice Department continued its quest to keep the Bush Administration’s program of extraordinary renditions out of the public eye with oral argument before the en banc Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. So far the district court bowed to the government’s request to toss the suit out of secrecy concerns, while an appeals court panel saw through the government’s threadbare arguments and reversed, ordering the case to go to trial. The government responded by asking for the entire court of appeals to look at the question.
The “state secrets” doctrine is legitimately invoked to protect military and diplomatic secrets essential to the nation’s security. In this case, Justice Department lawyer Douglas Letter argued, “We are not asking you to do anything radical here.” But that was only the first in a series of whoppers he produced as the argument proceeded. This case revolves around Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc., of San Jose, a Boeing subsidiary, which played a focal role in the renditions program. This was disclosed when a number of employees at Jeppesen, correctly convinced that the company was asking them to engage in a criminal enterprise, blew the whistle. Jane Mayer then published a comprehensive exposé of Jeppesen’s role in the program, under which individuals were “snatched” around the world, taken to black sites, and frequently tortured and abused for periods of months or years. So when the government talks about “state secrets” you have to remember that they are no longer “secret.” What it’s really talking about is immunity from suit or accountability for wrongful acts. Listen to Glenn Greenwald’s interview with plaintiff’s counsel Ben Wizner on just this point here.
From the October 2009 Harper’s Magazine.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The Last Book Party,” appeared in the March issue.
It was northern California in the warm, early spring, and we had been at war in Iraq for years, and the bright protest marches—which had begun in self-congratulation at City Hall and ended in heirloom produce and unpasteurized chèvre at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market—had faded from memory, and a great many people who might in another era have cared about illegal foreign wars or grave threats to civil liberties had been outraged into apathy by the unrelenting malevolent ineptitude of their government and had again become preoccupied with their live-work loft spaces and the vesting schedules of options and how best to “monetize eyeballs.” And whereas their forebears, in a bygone time, might have been found in Golden Gate Park scoring grass from which seeds and twigs had to be charily picked, our contemporaries were pleased to take the state of California up on its gracious proposition of Compassionate Use and relieve their chronic white-collar neck pain with top-shelf industrial-grade medical marijuana, purchased semi-legally and with post office–like convenience in the shabby boutiques increasingly blacking out shop windows all over town. What seemed clear was that the federal government had at some point become a distant and obdurate entity, and yet California, in its generous cannabinoidal dispensation, had achieved an almost alarming level of sensitivity to its subjects’ sense of well-being. So I decided to leave San Francisco for the mountains, or rather the nearer-by hills, where the people were growing this state-sanctioned marijuana and were apparently making a lot of money doing so, and I thought I’d stay around a while and try not to make any enemies.
Despite the rhetoric of the Drug Enforcement Administration and other anti-pot scolds, much of the decriminalized marijuana that is sold at local “cannabis clubs”—at least in the neighborhood where I then lived in San Francisco—can be traced not to Levantine assassins or shiftless Mexicans but to some bearded men and pajama-draped women just a few hours northeast, sitting in the street at the unpatrolled dead end of a six-mile tether of steep county-maintained road. I had come up here, to Washington, California, in Nevada County, because it was as proximately remote as one could get and I had heard that some of these people were growers—pot is almost certainly the county’s largest cash crop, as it is for most of the region—and furthermore I had heard that there was a smart young postmaster who might be able to point me in their direction. When not sitting in the road, the people live in weathered stone dens and tin-roofed shacks that huddle along the peeling shale banks of the South Yuba River. Half a mile of sugar pine and incense cedar above these homes, Highway 20 loops down from Truckee on its way to the bed-and-breakfast districts of historic Gold Country. The hundred-odd citizens of Washington switchback out of the canyon and head west into “Big Town” only when they have no other choice. Big Town is Nevada City, a village of 3,000 people in the sunlit uplands between Lake Tahoe and the Bay Area, and it bumbles along expensively with former hippies made good, or at least wealthy. The residents of Nevada City—who trade in generically mystical trifles and refurbished Victorians—tend to think that the people up in Washington who sit in the road and glower at strangers are a gang of crank addicts and murderers.
Some of them might indeed be crank addicts and murderers, but that is mostly not the case. (The crank-cookers bivouacked by the river were run out of town some years ago by Campground Don.) The people glowering in the road between the Washington Hotel and the Trading Post are just hard up: pensionless hippies and veterans and assorted itinerants here for miscellaneous reasons. But they all have, as the saying once went, turned on and dropped out, indeed dropped out with crowning success, and they regard the outside world with suspicion. “If you don’t smoke pot when they offer it to you,” warned a squinting gentleman named Tiedye Bob, “they’re going to think you’re a narc, and they won’t talk to you. There are a few things you’re going to have to do to get people to talk to you around here: smoke their pot, tell ’em their pot is the best you’ve smoked, and be seen talking to the old-timers.” The chief importance of the canyon’s old-timers is that they do the job of appearing connected to something more solid than their own vagrancy. Of chiefer importance is marijuana. In Washington there is not much to do and nobody to keep you from doing it. But here marijuana provides as much of a footing as it does an escape. Pot, in ways both obvious and unexpected, connects Washington to what’s beyond the canyon—those who consume it and, more important, the government that equivocally permits its use. If either antagonist in California’s pot controversy got its way—that is, if pot were fully legalized or once again criminalized—it is hard to imagine not only how the residents of Washington might fill their days but also how they would think of themselves.
Tim Fernholz of the American Prospect wrote me an email complaining about an item I wrote yesterday, which questioned the motives of those attacking Matt Taibbi’s piece on Obama in Rolling Stone. The critics (including Fernholz), I wrote, “seem to either not like him [Taibbi] personally or perhaps they just can’t bring themselves to face what’s obvious by now, namely that if you’re a liberal Democrat, the Obama years are going to be a huge disappointment.”
Fernholz wrote to say: “You don’t need to do any amateur psychology to divine my motives for writing about this story: It’s not because of some personal beef I have with Taibbi, who I don’t know and whose previous work I’ve enjoyed, or some special affection I have for the Obama administration (if you bother to read my work, especially on economic policy, much of it is criticism of the administration). The reason I’m criticizing Taibbi’s story is because I think the story is wrong. Is that so hard to understand?”
The Salt Lake City Tribune tells the tale of Helen Rappaport, a Utah woman who went shopping at Costco shortly before a Sarah Palin book signing event at the store:
While going through the check-out lane, again with no wait, she told the clerk she forgot to get some grape tomatoes, which she loves, so she would be right back. That’s when the bells went off.
The clerk told her they had no tomatoes that day. No tomatoes? At Costco? As she was leaving, she noticed a man with a store manager’s name tag and asked him why they had no tomatoes. He informed her the store did have tomatoes, but they were taken off the shelves for a few hours.
It turns out that Palin had been pelted with a tomato at an earlier stop on her book tour and the management at the Costco was determined it wouldn’t happen here.
I mentioned in a post yesterday that liberal bloggers tend to exempt President Obama for blame over the failures of his administration. Some times it’s said that Obama inherited a gigantic mess and it’s not fair to expect him to quickly solve the country’s problems. But most presidents inherit a mess (admittedly not often as big as the one handed off to Obama) and the man did run for president. If the job was too big for him, he shouldn’t have placed his name in nomination.
Even less convincing is the argument that Obama can’t get anything done because of a weak Democratic congress. Fine, it’s a lousy congress, but the president sets the tone and signals his priorities. As I noted yesterday, Obama was a big backer of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) when on the campaign trail (when he needed union votes). He’s barely mentioned it since taking office, and so that central demand of labor has gone nowhere. That’s not all the fault of Congress.
John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the December 16, 2009 Providence Journal.
Following President Obama’s war speeches at West Point and Oslo— two breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic liberal reform— I’ve got only one question: Have the liberals who worshipped at the altar of “change you can believe in” had enough?
![[Image]](/media/image/blogs/misc/1968-04-0036.jpg)
Thank God for partisan gerrymandering. I owe my many terms as your member of Congress to the fact that our beloved district is rigged. After the 2000 Census, members of my party in the state Legislature drew the borders of my district to avoid the neighborhoods of people likely to vote against me, with limbs going out to rope in likely voters. The district goes down the highway, veers away at a right angle, wriggles through a parking lot and down an alley, flares out to take in an apartment complex and then shrinks again to avoid a suburb. Some people think the district looks like a boa constrictor that swallowed a porcupine. Others think it looks like Bart Simpson squashed by a steamroller. I think it’s beautiful. I’m writing you now, my dear constituents, because, after the 2010 Census, my friends in the state Legislature, if they retain the majority, have promised to redraw the lines of our beloved district to give me an even safer seat, if that can be imagined. Some of you will be assigned by the Legislature to other newly gerrymandered districts. Not that I’ll notice. Unless you’ve given me more than $10,000, I wouldn’t know you from Adam.–“Dear Nobodies: a congressman writes to his constituents: ‘Thank God for gerrymandering,’” Salon
Also by Michael Lind: “Washington Meal Ticket: How to buy a senator’s smile,” in the August 1998 Harper’s (subscriber only); nausea, queasiness, and the contradictions of American politics: Jim Shea, Hartford Courant: “If you think you are sick of Joe Lieberman now just wait until you get sick”; Joe Klein, Time, 2009: “The war in Vietnam was based on lies–the Tonkin Gulf incident–and a false premise, the notion that Vietnam would be the next domino to fall in a communist campaign to conquer Asia….Afghanistan is different”; Joe Klein, Time, 2008: “The war in Afghanistan — the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win — has become an aimless absurdity….a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the ‘Taliban.’” (Are we all just baboons at war? the video evidence)
It is fitting that the hidden costs of fame should be exacted from Mr. Woods almost precisely 50 years after the publication of a book, “Celebrity Register,” that presented a new picture of social standing in modern America, one in which talent and achievement had been subordinated to publicity. In order to record this transformation, the project’s editor-in-chief, Cleveland Amory, put a team of 20 researchers and writers to work, and four years later they fashioned a colossal volume; its 864 oversize pages were divided into two columns of names, each with a photo and a mailing address (usually a home address)— 2,240 celebrities in all, beginning with the baseball slugger Hank Aaron and ending with the ballet dancer Vera Zorina. “The word ‘Celebrity,’ in our present ‘Celebrity Society’ covers a multitude of sins,” Mr. Amory wrote in a prefatory note. “It does not mean, for example, accomplishment in the sense of true or lasting worth— rather it often means simply accomplishment in the sense of popular, or highly publicized, temporary success.” –Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times
A magazine that outsources its fact-checking is reminiscent of a senator passing a bill without reading it, or of hiring someone to teach you how to be a father
In a city as sprawling and as proud of its architectural grandeur as Chicago, such an emphasis on size seemed only fitting. Everything surrounding my father’s office was big, and the men working with him rested in that shadow. The office was on the second floor of a two-storey building, just around the corner from a fast-food Greek takeout restaurant and a strip mall better suited to the suburbs, and yet less than a quarter of a mile away stood the Sears Tower and a dozen other skyscrapers whose shadows were literally cast over the office and road every afternoon. Size was paramount in a city like that, and if the immigrant men working with my father had to share only one word in common, it would have certainly been ‘big’. What else could they say about the city they now found themselves in and about their dreams, and all the things that threatened to derail them, except that they were big?–“Big Money,” Dinaw Mengistu, Granta
From the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine. Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 was published last spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
My father was a hunchback. He had an accident on his bicycle when he was a child, which ended with his falling into a coal cellar, a fall of thirty feet from the sidewalk. There was an irony in this in that his family was in the coal business and he himself became the coal baron of the large industrial city where he lived, the foremost city in America for making shoes and beer. He had been an athletic daredevil of a kid, and he stayed athletic despite his injury. He was also a stoic. When the accident happened, and he fell to the stone floor far below, he lay there for hours, twelve years old, and then picked himself up, with a broken back, somehow got back up to the street, and walked across the city to his house, where he told no one what had happened. He walked with a broken back all the way home, where the only person who noticed that something was wrong with him was his older brother. He was made to go to a doctor, who put him in bed and put him in a tight corset, a torture chamber my father refused to wear. So the story went. My father never talked about the accident, not once. His refusal to keep the corset on, so the story goes, resulted in his hunch and his stunted growth. He had the large fine hands of a tall man, and a large handsome head, on his shortened body. He remained a gifted athlete, as I said, excelling at handball and golf, quick hands, good eyes, fast of foot. I used to marvel at the dozens of custom-made suits he had, which stylishly disguised the hunch. Once, when I was in Paris, eighteen years old, and tempted to buy a motorcycle, but needing money from home to do so, my uncle who had heard about this pleaded with me not to. My father, he said, would never bring it up, but his childhood accident would mean he would be terribly concerned for me. The bike I was thinking of buying belonged to a friend. Before I could buy it, I crashed on it, riding as a passenger behind my friend, with a beautiful girl squeezed in between us, three on a bike, a Triumph, going far too fast, all of us drunk, around Place de la Concorde, and slipping out of control on the wet cobbles at 4:00 a.m. Pardner, don’t get on a motorcycle with drink in you.
I rode an Italian road-racing bicycle in New York City in 1966 that when I wasn’t riding it hung on two spikes driven into the front hall whitewashed brick wall of my house on East 93rd Street. Tom Avenia, an Italian in Harlem, an Italian American in unwelcoming Harlem, sold me the bike, an all-chrome Fréjus. His shop was the shop for serious bicycles. I bought the Fréjus for its beauty. I rode it to sit on beauty and go fast. But it didn’t go fast enough. And the drivers in New York were dangerous. They weren’t used to bicycles sharing the street with them and didn’t always like it and sometimes made it clear with their cars that they didn’t like it by aiming for you. My beautiful Fréjus was swift, but the streets were pocked with potholes and the cars were unfriendly. To go fast on two wheels was the point. To go fast on two wheels is the point of life, isn’t it? So I began to think about going even faster.
I was in Europe meeting with a crowd of academics and NATO officers when Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo. I had the impression that his speech was followed closely and received very well, but also that there was some anxiety over whether Obama’s conduct would match his words. That was particularly the case among those committed to the North Atlantic alliance—a military organization that has been the cornerstone of U.S. security efforts since the conclusion of World War II, and which today seems struggling for a purpose. Obama did not articulate a purpose for the alliance in his speech—it would indeed have been the wrong place and time for such a step—but he did begin to lay the foundations for that.
In the fantasy world of the American right, Europe is a zoo of the frivolous and feckless, filled with naïve pacifism and disrespect for America. In the real world, Europe cannot be profiled simply, but it has a complicated love-hate relationship with America and substantial concerns about its own security in a transformed threat environment. Europeans long for the America they came to love at the close of World War II, a nation prepared to act selflessly and in a principled way, and a nation that understood its position as a leader among nations it respected. They long for an Atlantic ally that is committed to lead and not act alone in half-baked military escapades. That is the Europe that picked Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize, out of a hope and expectation that he would forge renewed bonds of common purpose in seeking security—not because of any actual accomplishments in peace-making.
You’ve reached the bottom of this page, but there are over 250,000 more pages on this site—every issue of Harper’s Magazine back to June 1850. Subscribe TODAY for as low as $16.97 and gain immediate access to the site along with your print subscription.
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?
register your subscription for web access
NEED HELP?
visit our online helpdesk
READY TO RENEW?
SUBSCRIBE TO HARPER'S
and read every article we've ever published
| January 2010 THE CHURCH OF WARREN BUFFETT
SHOPPING FOR SWEAT
MY PAIN IS WORSE THAN YOUR PAIN
Also: Charles Bowden, Ralph Ellison, and Francine Prose on Robert Frank's Americans |