Publisher's Note

The Decline and Fall (in the U.S.) of the Public Intellectual

Last week I spoke at my alma mater’s Class Day ceremony, which at Columbia College serves as the central event for seniors, even though Columbia University, of which it’s a part, conducts the formal commencement and awarding of degrees on the next day. I won’t reprise my speech since I’m reluctant to promote a contribution to a genre of public speaking that many people equate with sedatives. (It is available on Harpers.org.) As my fellow Columbia graduate Tom Vinciguerra wrote in Newsday, “The days of memorable, even historic, end-of-academic-year speeches are long gone,” replaced mainly by “throwaway sentiments equally trite and hortatory—e.g., ‘seize the day,’ ‘don’t forget to give back,’ ‘dare to be different.’ ”

I did, however, have an advantage over other commencement speakers, since looming over my speech was President Obama’s address the previous day, in roughly the same location as mine, to the graduating class of Barnard College, also a part of Columbia University. Conflict of interest prevents me from commenting on the specifics of Obama’s talk—or the controversy surrounding his choice of venues—but the president’s appearance did focus my thinking, since I was forced to take a fresh look at academic institutions and the role of what used to be known as “public intellectuals.”

It’s easy to be nostalgic for a time when allegedly great men and women trod the public stage. Indeed, I cited in my speech the historian Andrew Bacevich’s ridicule, in this month’s Harper’s Magazine, of the very notion of there being “golden ages.” But I do recall a time, not so long ago, when formal orations seemed more eloquent, when public figures and intellectuals, some of them connected to academic institutions, dared to say more controversial things and take strong positions against the orthodox thinking of the day.

My exemplar at Columbia was Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American English professor and author, who expressed opinions on many current issues, not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that so marked his life. But there were plenty of others in the ’60s and ’70s, including C. Wright Mills, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Lasch, Michael Harrington, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Father Theodore Hesburgh, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Eugene McCarthy.

Some of these people were freelance intellectuals, some were tenured professors or administrators, some were of independent means. But all shared a commitment to civic debate, which in conformist, consensus-driven America automatically poses dangers to what might otherwise be an orderly and comfortable career. Alexis de Tocqueville noted this get-along-to-go-along spirit, and Sinclair Lewis fleshed it out brilliantly in such novels as “Main Street.” Everyone on my list, whether left wing, right wing, or in between, got in trouble for taking positions that in an argumentative country such as France would be considered necessary and proper.

When I look around, I don’t see anyone of Edward Said’s gravitas, knowledge, or conviction, but then Said was something of a radical in his scholarly way. He dared to step outside his academic specialty of literary criticism to declare his views on history, contemporary politics, and sociology, at some risk to his academic reputation as well as to his safety. (Said defended the Palestinians, yes, but he also defended Salman Rushdie against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa and criticized Yasser Arafat’s dictatorial methods.) Edward Said’s three books dealing with Orientalism, though academically rigorous and dense, were popular successes as well as politically influential.

C. Wright Mills, a sociologist, also wielded considerable influence with his analysis of Castro and the Cuban revolution, Listen, Yankee, and Christopher Lasch, a historian, cast off the confines of his academic discipline with his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism. Today, Mills’s book is out of print; last year, when I spoke to a media-studies class at New York University, not one out of the hundred or so students had even heard of Lasch.

Why is there now a dearth of well-known public intellectuals taking public positions? I suspect it’s partly because of the rise of politically oriented think tanks, whose “fellows’’ and “scholars’’ generally have ideological agendas that conflict with genuine scholarship and independent thinking. Many of these people are superficial pseudoscholars awaiting their next government job or TV talk-show appearance.

As think tanks have gotten richer, universities have had a decline in federal funding, which makes them more desperate to raise private money. Richer donors usually reflect the interests of their class, which doesn’t exactly encourage outspokenness by faculty. A trenchant, contrarian remark by a professor can cause big problems for a university’s development office. Writers outside of academia are in a similar bind: The recent Internet-and-conglomerate-driven decline of publishing has reduced book advances and promotions, especially for mid-list authors. If you want to get your book on prime-time TV or radio, you had better be ready to dumb down your message and round off your edges.

Two other commencement speeches delivered at Columbia this month gave me some hope that this attitude might be changing, at least regarding capitalism and the strangulation of the marketplace of ideas by the national obsession with financial markets. In his talk to Ph.D. recipients at Columbia, the U.S. historian Eric Foner bemoaned the dominance of market ideology: “In the last generation, the values of the market have come to permeate every aspect of our society. The notion that the public good may be measured in other than economic terms has pretty much been abandoned.’’

To which Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s president, added: “In future decades, will we look back and wonder how we could possibly have let public policies be determined in this way?’’ We need more public declarations such as these to enlarge the debate for the benefit of all of us.

Columbia College Class Day Keynote Speech

There was a time when I harbored ambitions of becoming president—to fulfill the dream shared by so many young Americans—so that I might leave my mark on history, bring peace where there was war, free the unjustly imprisoned, outmaneuver the leaders of other great nations, bask in the admiration and affection of my fellow citizens, and have my pick of college and university commencement venues.

But then came a moment of profound disillusionment, a day of reckoning that changed the course of my life. It was sometime in the spring of 1975, late at night, and I was seated in the basement lounge of Carman Hall, studying for my second round of final exams as a Columbia College freshman. I was wrestling with a book—The Marx–Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker—but to be more precise I was wrestling with a particular text within the anthology: Part I of The German Ideology, which Karl Marx apparently wrote alone, without the help of his collaborator Friedrich Engels.

At eighteen years of age, with the Cold War still very much in play, I was certainly aware of Marx’s significance in history and contemporary politics. I also knew from Joseph Rothschild, my wonderful, cheerfully intimidating Contemporary Civilization professor from the previous semester, that I had better pay close attention to texts written by Germans. Rothschild was a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and he understood quite viscerally the power of words written in German, even German translated into English. So I was trying, really trying to understand, but The German Ideology, Part I, was more than I had bargained for. For those of you who have read it, I don’t have to explain that this wasn’t one of Marx’s greatest hits. All those references to Young Hegelians, Old Hegelians (there didn’t seem to be any middle-aged Hegelians)—I had to keep referring back to Tucker’s introduction to reassure myself that this really was the best way to understand the development of Marx’s “ materialist conception of history.” Not even published until 1932, this text, Tucker explained, was, and I quote, “particularly valuable and important to the student of Marxist thought because Marx never again set down a comprehensive statement of his theory of history at such length and in such detail.” Be that as it may, there was no relief from Marx’s bulky prose: I had to face his text alone, if not exactly man to man, then callow man to great man. And I found myself wanting.

True, I’d been an outstanding president of my high school government. But now I had to ask myself: Wouldn’t a future president of the United States—one aspiring to be as well-read, say, as the very well-read Dwight Eisenhower—be able to absorb, synthesize, explicate, and even refute The German Ideology, Part I, no matter how difficult or elliptical the language? Yet what was I to make of this paragraph, for example?

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, orohydrographical, climate and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.

Well, of course!

This was the beginning of my disillusionment—the beginning of the end of my fantasies about holding great office, indeed of achieving greatness in any realm. With my intellectual vanity nearly crushed by this passage, I did what seemed to me the most logical thing to restore some sense of self worth. I went to the dictionary and I looked up orohydrographical. And then I went back to the text—as I know all of you would do—and reread the whole damn thing.

I wouldn’t want you to think that this raw encounter with Marx was negative. On the contrary, disillusionment—the discarding of illusions—is essential to any good education. I looked at my underlining the other day and it confirms that I did get something out of the text. And I will tell you that Columbia, my engagement with The German Ideology, Part I, Professor Rothschild, and his CC successor, Professor Robert Lamb, set me on a course that altered my life forever and for the better.

But back then, on that spring night in 1975, weighed down by turgid text, what I really needed was a beer. Fortunately, things weren’t all deadly, world-historically serious in 1975, just as they aren’t in 2012. And fortunately, for every encounter with Marx there were many more with better stylists and teachers who had more humanistic sensibilities. Once I’d finished struggling with The German Ideology, Part I, it’s likely I walked over to a crowded and noisy bar, known as CDR, located in a basement on 119th between Amsterdam and Morningside, to take the edge off my German/Marxist gloom. Inside, I was likely to run into another German, much livelier than Marx, Professor Karl-Ludwig Selig, Columbia’s resident expert on Cervantes and, as he insisted on pronouncing it, Don Kwiksot. Professor Selig often held court at CDR over multiple pitchers of Schaefer or Rheingold, and if you listened carefully to him above the din you could learn a lot. By now I knew I was supposed to engage deeply with the texts that Columbia was requiring me to read, but Selig made it sound enjoyable. He wanted you to embrace the text, to read it with rigor, but also with pleasure. However, like all of my best professors, Selig insisted that reading text was a fundamentally serious endeavor, that text must be respected. I’ll never forget his remark about the Spectator’s April Fools’ issues, one of which my managing board sneakily published on March 31, 1977. The headline on our lead story was “Kissinger Named Food Services Chief; Pledges Sweeping Reforms of Cafeterias.” Some of us worried that the joke was too heavy-handed—Henry Kissinger was just then the subject of a violent debate about whether he was morally or academically fit to teach at Columbia, and Food Services was embroiled in scandal—but Selig later told our managing editor, Dan Janison, that an alarming number of his colleagues had in fact been fooled. (I wish I could do his German accent but I can’t.) “So many of our faculty are such poor readers of text,” he lamented.

I would not, I vowed, be such a poor reader of text. Nor would I be a humorless or unemotional one. Happily, Marx’s materialist view of history did not kill my interest in history itself or its literary and romantic possibilities. Among my compensations was a mesmerizing history of the lead-up to the Civil War and of the war itself, written by Allan Nevins. Thanks to James Shenton, who had been Nevins’s student at Columbia and subsequently was my professor and mentor, the ordeal of Marx’s prose was more than mitigated by these passages from volume two of Ordeal of the Union, Nevins’s eight-volume masterwork. Here’s Nevins describing Stephen Douglas, a man who badly wanted to be president, and his reaction to the abolitionist Salmon Chase during the Senate debate in 1854 over the Kansas–Nebraska act:

Chase’s attack … seemed to him a dastardly blow because it accused him of selling his honor for the hope of the presidency, because it stigmatized him as a cheat and liar.… Quivering with rage, he rose in the Senate on January 30th to open the formal debate.… Day after day Douglas was in his seat when the session began, and still there when it ended. Week in and week out, his quick, piercing eyes watched every move with tigerish intentness. When a stroke was needed, he was on his feet, tossing his mass of dark hair like a lion’s mane and scowling at his enemies.

Two years later, with violence breaking out in Kansas, Lincoln’s great rival is forced to defend the tinderbox he helped create in the name of saving the union. He’s still trying to have it both ways, popular sovereignty, yes, but at the cost of preserving slavery. Here Nevins attains a brilliant level of insight about Douglas: “Alert in retort, crafty in the manipulation of argument, redoubtable and unscrupulous in attack, he seemed momentarily to sweep all opposition before him; yet he never quite convinced wary men, for his ideas lacked deep sincerity, and his manners had always the touch of the barroom.…  He seemed dazzling—until men could think over his arguments.”

As my late friend, Walter Karp, valedictorian of the Columbia College class of 1955, would have said of Nevins: “No Dead Sentences! Not One Dead Sentence!” Reading Nevins’s book in the College Library one night, I wondered: Could I ever hope to write this well, to know so much and think so clearly? Almost certainly not, but at least I was beginning to know my limits and something about my ambition to expand my limits. Gazing upward at the great Allan Nevins on the shelves of Butler, the scales began falling from my eyes, which is a very important feature of disillusionment. I was beginning to learn how to read.

Which brings me to the point I want to make to you, the class of 2012. I didn’t tell these stories to try to make you nostalgic for a golden age before text became a verb, or to comfort myself in middle age. As historian Andrew Bacevich writes in the current Harper’s Magazine, with reference to Robert Kagan’s new book, all so-called golden ages should be viewed with the greatest skepticism. Kagan’s book argues that postwar American power has engendered a “golden age for humanity” and that the United States is not in decline. Bacevich believes this is a “fairy tale,” as much a fairy tale as so-called American exceptionalism.

However, I do believe there is something exceptional about Columbia College and I hope it’s something you’ll hang on to after I’m finished talking.

Besides being publisher of Harper’s Magazine and writing books, I occasionally review them, including the most complete biography to date of yesterday’s Barnard commencement speaker. To help illustrate my point, let’s do a close reading of one passage from this book [The Bridge] by New Yorker editor David Remnick. We learn that in his senior year at Columbia, Barack Obama took a modern fiction course with Edward Said, who until his death in 2003 was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. My reading of this text leads me to believe that Remnick’s account of Barack Obama’s life was authorized by its subject—that most of what’s in it is there because the president wanted it there. Remnick offers this description of Said and of Obama’s feelings about his English professor: “Best known for his advocacy of the Palestinian cause, and his academic excoriation of the Eurocentric ‘Orientalism’ practiced by Western authors and scholars, Said had done important work in literary criticism and theory. And yet, Said’s theoretical approach in the course left Obama cold.” Remnick then quotes a friend of Obama’s who also took the course: “My whole thing, and Barack had a similar view, was that we would rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism. Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn’t appeal to Barack or me.” According to Remnick, the young Obama referred to Said as a “flake.”

Although I agree that it’s usually better to read the original than a criticism of the original, this is a misreading of Said. Edward Said was many things: a lover of literature, a fearsome and inspiring teacher, a politically engaged public intellectual, a humanist, but most pertinent to this speech, an extraordinarily rigorous reader and teacher of text. On at least one occasion he threw a student out of class for not knowing the definition of a word, and he never went into class less than completely prepared. The last extended conversation I had with him was in his apartment on Riverside Drive: we talked not about Middle Eastern politics, but about Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma and its wily and seductive female protagonist, Gina Sanseverina. “Ah, Gina,” he said with appreciation and feeling, as if he had known her personally.

Although a great many people disliked him for reading too carefully and talking too loudly, to dismiss Said as an eccentric critic mostly interested in theory—more interested in criticizing a text than reading and enjoying a story—is to miss the mark, perhaps for political reasons (if indeed this passage is accurate).

But please stay with me and the closed-captioned text just a little longer. As Said wrote in Orientalism: “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society.” This is what we call context, which is essential to understanding text.

You may know that Said’s three most influential books are Orientalism, Covering Islam, and Culture and Imperialism, all of which deal with Western stereotypes and caricatures of the Orient and of Islam, of Arabs and Persians. As a Protestant-baptized and -educated Palestinian Arab-American who attended British colonial and then American schools, Said was himself decontextualized as an Arab—permanently Out of Place, as he titled his autobiography.

Said’s sense of deracination—of never quite knowing where he came from—is something Barack Obama should know all about. Of course, the president doesn’t have to admit an emotional affinity, which I understand could be politically dangerous. He’s already been forced by too many idiots to waste too much time proving he was born in the United States.

But is it too much to ask of anyone concerned with our Middle Eastern policy to read Said’s trilogy—that is, before they encourage a military attack on Iran by proxies—be they French, Israeli, British, or Saudi Arabian? Wouldn’t it be truly audacious if Barack Obama, class of 1983, had done a close enough reading of the three Orientalism texts—with their subtext of humiliation endured by colonized peoples—to cite them as a reason for his praiseworthy reluctance to move from sanctions to violence? That before he wasted one more life, one more dollar in Islamic Afghanistan, Obama showed some interest in his old professor instead of reading the dubious Robert Kagan? And furthermore, that the president of the United States consider following the fine example of the president of Columbia University and be willing to meet with Iran’s, shall we say, flaky, President Ahmahdinejad? After all, Obama has already visited another religiously intolerant abettor or terrorists and officially anti-Israel head of state, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

But here’s the good and useful thing about reading text in a serious way, considering it both at face value and in context: I suspect that President Obama has read the Orientalism trilogy, but just doesn’t want to advertise it. And my own reporting, my own reading, my own analysis, suggests that he did not, in fact, consider Edward Said a flake—because the grown-up Obama is a serious, intelligent person who attended Columbia College, where he learned how to read past the obvious and the superficial.

My hope is that none of you seniors would shrink from such a reading assignment, or from such a political risk, because of your exceptional Columbia College education—your training in directly engaging the author and never hiding behind someone else’s interpretation of the text or of the writer’s reputation. My advice to all of you today, poet or scientist, is to absorb, to question, to challenge, to refute any author on any subject. Or, for that matter, any politician or commencement speaker.

You may disagree with me that your sovereignty as citizens has been largely stolen by the political and financial oligarchy that I believe rules this country. You may disagree that your Constitution, literally and in spirit, has been gravely violated by the previous and current administrations. That the so-called suspension clause of our founding text, concerning habeas corpus, has been abused, twisted, and stretched.

But I trust that as Columbia intellectuals—mercifully free of received wisdom, resistant to cant, confident in your own skill as readers—you’ll all agree with Edward Said’s summary of your responsibilities and your rights: “The role of the intellectual is to ask questions, to disturb people, to stir up reflection, to provoke controversy and thought.… The role of the intellectual is never to justify power, to always be critical of power, whether it is the power of the weak or the power of the strong … the role of the intellectual is to challenge power by providing alternative models and, also as important, resources of hope.” I would only add that the role of an intellectual is to be prepared to tackle any text.

Thank you and congratulations. I’m deeply honored to be your speaker, so much so that I will join you all here tomorrow morning for President Bollinger’s commencement address.

Tactics and Principle as French Near Vote

It’s presidential-campaign season and once again I find myself impressed by the wealth of choices among the many candidates. There are center-right and center-left candidates of considerable standing, a true centrist candidate independent of the major parties, a far-right candidate who sometimes sounds like a left-winger, and a charismatic far-left candidate who appeals directly to supporters of the far right. Then there’s an acidly articulate Green candidate, who though low in the polls is hardly marginal, and four other fringe entries who seem worthy of attention.

I’m describing the French presidential election, which through the good fortune of dual citizenship affords me full participation. Indeed, I’m more excited about casting a ballot this Saturday at New York’s French Consulate, in my maternal language, than I am about casting it in November in my father’s native tongue.

Unlike voting in New York state, where the Electoral College votes are already pretty much guaranteed to go to President Obama, I feel that my French vote really counts, since France provides for direction election of its president. Moreover, in the French election there are two rounds of balloting, the first permitting the luxury of either a tactical or principled vote. Last time, in 2007, I was dissuaded from a principled, but wasteful, vote for José Bové, the radical environmentalist jailed for leading the “dismantling” of a McDonald’s under construction. Instead, I voted for François Bayrou, the “centrist” whose candidacy was promoted by some of my left-wing friends as a way to break the two-party domination of an overly bourgeois Socialist Party and Nicolas Sarkozy’s increasingly rightist UMP party.

If Bayrou, rather than the Socialist candidate, Ségoléne Royal, had come in second to the favored Sarkozy, he might well have won in the second-round run-off, thus killing two birds with one stone: the hated right-winger and the largely establishment Socialist, thus allowing the rise of a stronger, more authentically “left” party.

As it happened, Royal had more staying power than expected, so Bayrou came in third, and I felt obliged to vote for the losing Socialist in the second round. Since that election, the winner, Sarkozy, has disgraced himself to many on both the right and the left, with his penchant for consorting with the rich and famous (the French call it “bling-bling’’) and his endlessly contradictory strategic maneuvers that one day make him look like a National Front immigrant basher and American-style free trader, and the next a fearless French nationalist who stands up against international finance. I dislike Sarkozy’s sucking up to the Bush family, his implied repudiation of President Jacques Chirac’s refusal to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and his cynical support of Obama’s Afghanistan catastrophe. Also annoying, Sarko has lately been appealing, Nixon-like, to his “silent majority’’ to come scream for him at mass rallies.

This year, however, I needn’t resort to such a tactic because, though Bayrou is back, there is a better than symbolic candidate on the left, the Socialist renegade Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, with Communist backing, is pushing the soft Socialist, François Hollande, to make more aggressive statements against big banks, the superrich, and such American/NATO military interventions as Afghanistan. In many respects a left-wing nationalist—a throwback to the Jacobins of the French Revolution—he also denounces “free trade” and “liberal” economic theory, which he rightly sees as anti-democratic and anti-working class. So Mélenchon can poach on the turf of Marine Le Pen, the ultranationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-European leader of the National Front who wants to restore the franc. For years, Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, have been attracting support from disaffected former Communists by attacking free trade, globalization, and job outsourcing.

But Mélenchon, unlike Le Pen, is no spoiler; although campaigning hard, he’s essentially pledged to throw his support to Hollande if the pro-Europe Socialist makes the first cut with Sarkozy, and has signaled he may run in June for a seat in the National Assembly to advance his Left Front. Mélenchon has also shown integrity by declaring he won’t accept a position in a Hollande cabinet as compensation. For someone like me, Mélenchon presents a principled, guilt-free alternative—or does he?

The French do not universally love their political system. Many would no doubt agree with the headline on a recent Economist editorial saying that France is “in denial,” with all the candidates “completely” ignoring the “grimmer” “fundamentals” of high public debt and public spending and undercapitalized banks. Eric Chol, editor of Courrier International, calls the current race a perpetuation of “a big farce: the myth of the omnipotent president of the republic,” who, like Charles De Gaulle, can change society through sheer personality. After the election, writes Chol, “Reality will soon quickly reassert its rights,” a reality that includes a well-ensconced European Union backed by a powerful lobby of free traders, plutocrats, and pro-American supporters of NATO.

All this is relative: Not even the candidates of the “right” propose rolling back France’s excellent national health-care system, or devolving centralized government power to France’s “départements” à la American states’ rightists. But the cleavage over American-style capitalism as applied in Europe, NATO, and Afghanistan is sort of thrilling.

So I detoured to Paris on Saturday just to soak up the atmosphere. Over drinks at the Odessa Café, in Montparnasse, I encountered stirrings of disillusionment with Mélenchon, whom my friend, Guy, called idiotic for letting slip his possible run for the National Assembly a week before the presidential balloting—a concession before the vote and almost the same day of his final mass meeting in Marseilles. Another friend, Jean-Philippe, jokingly predicted a Mélenchon-Sarkozy runoff. The polls indicate Hollande is just ahead of Sarkozy, with a surging Mélenchon placing third.

After some good Bordeaux, my choice did not seem simple; things got worse the next day when my Air France hostess reminded me of the risk of helping the right with a vote for the hard left. What if Hollande didn’t reach round two and Le Pen sneaked by both leftists to face Sarkozy, as her father did in 2002 to face Chirac in an all-right finale?

I could abstain, like the left-wing intellectual Michel Onfray, who hates people like Sarkozy and Hollande with their admiration of aspects of American capitalism but objected this week, in a widely publicized essay, to Mélenchon’s supposed tolerance of Cuban, Iranian, and Chinese “dictatorships.’’ But I can’t stand Sarkozy, so maybe I’ll go for the safe vote and save my principles for another day.

Shredding the U.S. Labor Force Is a Bipartisan Project

Presidential candidates are once again crisscrossing the Midwest, making believe they’re dreadfully upset by the plight of the working class. The leveraged-buyout mogul, Mitt Romney, sheds crocodile tears in factories, while the Bible-flogging Rick Santorum offers Christian salvation to stanch the wounds of the underpaid and unemployed. To borrow a phrase from Santorum, it’s enough to make you throw up.

“I spent my life in the real economy,” blathers Romney. “I understand why jobs come and go.” Does he ever! Romney’s practice of loading companies with debt, firing their workers, and selling the disassembled assets to profit already wealthy people like himself has very much become the “real” economy of the United States.

Santorum, for his part, apparently believes that banning abortion and restoring prayer to public schools will cause new steel mills to open in Youngstown, Cleveland, and Chicago. In 1962–63, before the Supreme Court ban on prayer in public schools, I recited the Lord’s Prayer every day alongside my first-grade classmates at the Palm Beach Gardens Elementary School, and I don’t remember any of us getting credit for “job creation.”

As usual, the media reports these campaign stops—the earnestness of the politicians and the anger of the voters—with straight-faced credulity, as if the politicians meant what they said and the voters were able to take revenge on unresponsive candidates. And, as usual, the same reporters let Obama and the Democrats get away with their shallow pose of union solidarity and blue-collar sympathies.

Must we reprise the record yet again? In 2008, Obama and Hillary engaged in much the same pantomime during their Ohio primary contest, each claiming to care more than the other about industrial decline and shrinking factory employment. The only difference between then and now is that Obama’s campaign criticized the Clinton administration’s 1993 drive to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA is now believed to have caused at least 700,000 net job losses (”displaced,” in the jargon of the Economic Policy Institute), but the number is likely much higher (based on the Labor Department’s granting of aid eligibility to the estimated 2.5 million people it says have been harmed by trade agreements since 1994).

Eager to knock out Hillary Clinton, Obama’s campaign published a flyer headlined “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals,” an exaggerated claim from a member of the Chicago political clique that did so much to pass NAFTA. Nevertheless, Obama pledged in a debate with Hillary Clinton to “renegotiate” NAFTA and “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to get “labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”

At the same time, however, Obama dispatched his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee to reassure the Canadian government that he didn’t mean a word of his pledge. Once in office, he was true to his secret promise: The new president dropped his hammer and stopped talking about reforming NAFTA. Since then, the two parties have closed ranks in their anti-tariff orthodoxy (the only exception was George W. Bush’s temporary imposition of tariffs on imported steel in 2002), passing three more free-trade agreements certain to eliminate more jobs.

It’s worth recalling that for Bill Clinton to pass NAFTA he required the unstinting support of his putative enemy, then House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich, and in 2000 turned to Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert for crucial help in passing permanent normal trade relations with China, an even more damaging trade agreement for American workers.

Dissent on “free trade” (which in U.S. terms really means investment guarantees and labor price fixing) from such farsighted politicians as former Senator Fritz Hollings (D., S.C.) and former Senator Byron Dorgan (D. N.D.), both Democrats, usually goes unremarked in the press, but this is not entirely the fault of journalists and their editors. To have a debate you need debaters, and the most interested parties, the dwindling private-sector American unions, have mostly given up arguing.

Three years ago I wrote that Obama and his auto czar, the banker turned buyout expert Steven Rattner, were in the process of “liquidating the United Auto Workers even as they liquidate the American auto industry.” Happily, it appears I’ve been proven at least partially wrong, since General Motors has staged an impressive comeback, though how much of it was due to Japan’s disastrous earthquake remains to be seen. Still, as Mitt Romney correctly noted, the GM “restructuring” under government auspices wasn’t so different from what firms like Bain Capital do: layoffs, plant closures, wage reductions, and the elimination of dealerships. Incapable of organizing foreign-owned plants, the UAW has seen its membership continue to plummet, from about 460,000 members in April 2009 to about 376,000 today.

Meanwhile, NAFTA continues to create casualties in the unionized industrial sector. In October 2010, the Autolite sparkplug plant in Fostoria, Ohio, where once more than 1,000 mostly UAW members toiled, closed its last integrated production line and moved it to a new plant in Mexicali, Mexico, where 600 or so workers are paid about $1.80 an hour for a forty-eight-hour week. The last time I checked, there were eighty-six survivors making the ceramic part of the spark plug in Fostoria.

At the time of the move, Autolite was a subsidiary of Honeywell corporation, whose chief executive, David Cote, appeared next to Barack Obama, just after his inauguration as president, to promote business–government cooperation and passage of the stimulus bill. Of Cote and other CEOs present at the White House, Obama said, “These are people who make things, who hire people…. They are on the front lines in seeing the enormous problems in our economy right now… and I’m grateful that they’re here today to talk about why it’s so important that we act… in order to get the economy back on track.”

Nevertheless, Obama enjoys the unwavering support of unions, especially the UAW, which since the GM bailout has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. So compromised is the UAW by Obama’s patronage that it even broke ranks with other major unions and endorsed the administration’s U.S.–South Korea free-trade agreement, another guaranteed job killer.

In this topsy-turvy world, it’s no wonder that American workers, unionized or otherwise, are angry, and reporters don’t know what questions to ask. I might have used a different word than “liquidation” to describe what’s being done to the UAW and the American working class. Maybe “emasculation” is more to the point.

The Uses of a Long G.O.P. Contest (for the Democrats)

Gingrich’s response has been to issue a sort of pre-presidential signing statement, which may be the weirdest document to emerge from the recent GOP bloodletting. Driven by an unquenchable lust for votes in Iowa, the former House speaker endorsed the “Marriage Vow Pledge,” the brainchild of the Christian moralizer Bob Vander Plaats, who heads the right-wing evangelical group The Family Leader. But Gingrich didn’t just promise to “uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse”; he also felt it necessary to pledge his “respect for the marital bonds of others.” Isn’t this a little odd? Once you’ve signed on to the former precept, doesn’t the latter go without saying? Gingrich’s no-straying promise strikes me as insincere, just like the signing statements so popular with former President Bush and now with President Obama, which in essence say, “I’ll sign this bill into law, but I reserve the right not to respect or enforce it.”

Then again, no poaching on married women—since one wife should be the maximum allowed—might be evidence of Gingrich’s tactical genius. The elephant in the Republican confessional (Gingrich is a convert to Catholicism, while Rick Santorum was born into it) is Romney’s Mormonism, which to many Southern Baptists and some other Protestants is a fake Christian sect based on blasphemy. It’s hard enough for Bible-thumpers to tolerate the Mormon belief in two sacred texts—the King James Bible and the Latter-Day Saints’ own Book of Mormon—but what really bothers the Protestants is the suspicion that some of Romney’s co-religionists still secretly “respect” the former Mormon practice of polygamy, officially disavowed by the church in 1890. It’s not for no reason that Mitt needs to advertise his exclusive marital relationship. The seven other wives hidden out back in the guest house would make excellent material for Jon Stewart, not to mention the scriptwriters for the “anybody but Romney” crusade.

Things could get even funnier as the Republican campaign drags on. For example, if Romney’s Mormonism gets more attention, his agents might opt for even lower humor and begin questioning Gingrich/Santorum’s loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, just as antipapists questioned whether ‍John F. Kennedy would exhibit divided loyalty between Rome and Washington.

Still, I wonder, is the Republican infighting really so ridiculous, or even that useful for the Democrats? After months of televised debates and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of advertising, at least we have some notion of where the various factions of the American right stand on the issues. Put aside the nonsense and you recognize that you’re witnessing a genuine argument.

Romney, representing the remnants of the former Republican establishment, is fighting an intra-party proxy war against factions that want to repeat the Goldwater revolt of 1964. In those days Romney’s liberal Republican father, George, urged the party to reject the Tea Party of his day, the Goldwater puritan/libertarians, while his son feels obliged to appease them. At the party’s most extreme end, the antitax, antigovernment faction so hates Romney’s old-fashioned ideas about government and taxes—his bland acceptance of Social Security, Medicare, and the minimum wage—that they prefer to see Barack Obama re-elected rather than accept a possible eight years of centrist Romney, whom they view as a socialist. Better to promote a new champion in 2016.

Assuming he becomes the nominee, Romney will endure humiliation from the radical right at the Republican National Convention, just as George H.W. Bush was forced to permit Pat Buchanan’s militant speech in Houston in 1992. And again, the liberals will laugh at Republicans’ disarray. But do the Democrats offer a salutary alternative? What does Obama’s lack of primary opposition contribute to the debate? For now, all the serious criticism of Obama’s status-quo politics—his failure to reform anything important—is coming indirectly from the Republican right. Rick Perry called Romney’s private-equity work “vulture capitalism” while Gingrich calls it “exploitive.” Ron Paul alone delivers trenchant critiques of the war in Afghanistan and the brewing war against Iran. You can even argue that Mitt Romney is at least as strong a defender of Social Security as Obama. Although Romney says he wants to repeal “Obamacare,’’ he created essentially the same plan for Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, hypocrisy reigns in both parties about the capital-gains tax. (The president’s new proposal to increase it to 20 percent is purely symbolic because it can’t be passed.) While pundits and leftists bemoaned the unfairness of Romney’s 13.9 percent overall federal tax rate, no one bothered to point out Romney’s personal debt to Obama and the Democrats. Obama campaigned in 2008 for an increase in the capital-gains rate, to 25 percent from 15 percent, to restore some fairness to a system in which hedge-fund and private-equity partners claim their personal earned income as capital gains instead of ordinary income taxed at 35 percent. But once in office, with a solid Democratic majority in both houses, Obama let the whole thing drop, no doubt because of opposition from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd. Baucus and Dodd raised a lot of money for their party from private-equity and hedge-fund partners. Why upset the people who pay for the campaigns?

It’s too late to launch a Democratic primary campaign, but for the country’s sake I hope the Republican nomination fight drags on to the bitter end, and that Obama gets a run for his money.

How Christopher Hitchens Flip-flopped and Fell From Grace

In the outpouring of accolades that followed the death of Christopher Hitchens, I confess I joined in, trying my best to claim some of his journalistic legacy. Because the obituaries failed to mention his service as the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, of which I am the publisher, or that his landmark book The Trial of Henry Kissinger originated as two long pieces in the magazine, I boasted of his relationship with Harper’s on our website.

Then I read Glenn Greenwald’s online critique of Hitchens’s hasty canonization. As Greenwald noted, much of what Hitchens wrote after his post-9/11 lurch from anti-establishment left to imperialist right—cloaked though it was in the costume of liberal, humanitarian interventionism—was “repellent.” Greenwald asserted that a misapplication of “death etiquette” had given Hitchens an unmerited free pass. “Ironically,” wrote Greenwald, “Hitchens was the last person who would honor the etiquette rules being invoked on his behalf.”

My feelings about Hitchens—after he embraced the stupidity of invading Iraq—were confusion and disappointment. So disorienting was Hitchens’s conversion to war hawk that I hardly knew what to say, either in private to him or, for that matter, in public.

It was on Phil Donahue’s short-lived MSNBC TV show that I witnessed the beginning of Hitchens’s depressing decline. As a long-time critic of U.S. and Bush family policy in the Mideast, I had exposed much of both Bushes’ self-justifying and often false anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda. So I was recruited for Donahue’s September 12, 2002, segment on W.’s escalating campaign to invade Iraq. Against me were slotted, first, a Bush I P.R. man, Sig Rogich, and second, a Bush II promoter, Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. Going one on one against Rogich, with Donahue clearly on my side, was relatively easy. But I thought the second round of the show would be even easier, since Lowry and I were joined by my traditional ally Hitchens.

This was the same Hitchens who had written of the imminent first Gulf War, in Harper’s in January 1991, that George H.W. Bush’s supposedly principled enthusiasm for the “cause” of “liberating” Kuwait was merely a rebottled realpolitik—a continuation of the disastrous divide-and-rule policy initiated in 1972 by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Since then, Hitchens argued, “The Kurds have been further dispossessed, further reduced in population, and made the targets of chemical experiments. Perhaps half a million Iraqi and Iranian lives have been expended [during the Iran–Iraq war] to no purpose on and around the Fao peninsula. The Iraqis have ingested… Kuwait. The Syrians, aided by anti-Iraqi subvention from Washington, have now ingested Lebanon. The Israeli millennialists are bent on ingesting the West Bank and Gaza. In every country mentioned… the forces of secularism, democracy and reform have been dealt appalling blows. And all of these blunders will necessitate future wars.”

The latest casualty, Hitchens claimed, was American democracy: “The Gulf buildup had… brought the renewal of a moribund consensus on national security, the disappearance of the… [post Cold War] ‘peace dividend,’ and re-establishment of the red alert as the preferred device for communicating between Washington and the people.” The elder Bush’s “cause was yet another move in the policy of keeping a region divided and embittered, and therefore accessible to the franchisers of weaponry and the owners of black gold.” This was Hitchens at his best, and also his most prescient, since these observations applied almost perfectly to the next Iraq buildup, eleven years later.

But by 2002, on the Donahue show, Hitchens was pushing an altogether different analysis: Suddenly the Bushes were credible and he was credulous, not to mention disingenuous, as when he called me an “isolationist” who believed “quite honorably, that what happens in the rest of the world is not our concern and we only make things worse by intervening.” The first half of his criticism of me was false, but the second half was largely true: I, like the old Hitchens, thought that America’s military interventions since World War II had been largely toxic.

I fended off Lowry’s media-trained distortions, but what could I do when my old acquaintance started spouting the same nonsense—albeit more elegantly—as the right-wing belligerent? When I challenged the view that Saddam was building atomic weapons by saying, “The Bushes just can’t help themselves; they’ve just got to keep making it up,” Hitchens responded, “I’ve met the guy who claims to have been Saddam Hussein’s nuclear technician…. I’ve interviewed him carefully. I think that most of what he says is true, and I think he’s a believable witness.”

Hitchens was referring to Khidir Hamza, whom the CIA had branded a fraud, but to the new Hitchens, this branding somehow enhanced Hamza’s reputation. Before I could say “realpolitik,” Lowry was Hitchens’s new best friend: “Liberals and progressives, with the exception of Chris Hitchens,” he said, “seem to have a soft spot for right-wing dictators when they [are] Arab right-wing dictators.”

After the Donahue show, I only saw Hitchens one more time—at the Harper’s Christmas party that year. In spite of everything, he still made me laugh with his arch, classically educated English sense of humor. At our next televised confrontation, he predicted, “we would be armed with tridents.” I wondered, briefly, if his attitude was all a pose.

I’ve heard it suggested that Hitchens switched sides for the “money”—that there’s simply more to be gained on the right than on the left and that even a deeply dedicated leftist can get lonely and tired, always out in the cold, always at a remove from power. My theory is that he went mad as he consumed huge amounts of alcohol. Booze is mind-altering and it may well have damaged his impressive powers of reasoning. But I can’t pretend to understand.

Better that Hitchens’s close friend Martin Amis have the last word on the man’s political evolution. Influenced perhaps by Hitchens, Amis himself turned nasty and narrow-minded toward Muslim political culture and “Islamofascism,” especially after the London tube bombings. But in his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, Amis distanced himself from Hitchens’s violent, regime-changing passions through his protagonist, Keith Nearing. At one point, with the Iraq invasion looming, Keith muses about the relative horrors of old age versus war: “Actually, war was more terrifying—and just as unavoidable, it seemed, for human beings…. He sat with The Times trembling in his hands. This was avoidable (or at least postponable). Why was no one identifying the true casus belli?… American presidents, in wartime, are always reelected. There would be regime change in Baghdad, in 2003, so that there would be no regime change in Washington, in 2004.”

Meanwhile, Keith’s brother, Nicholas, “who supported [invading Iraq], tried to instill in him some courage about the Mesopotamian experiment, but Keith, just now, couldn’t begin to bear the thought of flying iron and mortal flesh, and what happened when the hard machine met the soft.”

More than 100,000 corpses later, I think Amis had it right.

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

We at Harper’s Magazine deeply regret, on a personal and professional level, the death of Christopher Hitchens. Christopher was a friend to me and to the magazine for many years, especially during his time as Washington Editor from 1987 to 1992.

Lewis Lapham and I would surely concur that some of Christopher’s best work was written for Harper’s. Among our proudest collaborations were “The Case against Henry Kissinger,” which ran in two parts in 2001 and was published as a book later that year, and his brilliant analysis of President George H.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.

Journalism and politics aside, Christopher’s sense of humor was perhaps his greatest weapon, and I will personally miss his irony, generosity, and resilience of spirit.

We extend our condolences to his family and friends.

President Obama Richly Deserves To Be Dumped

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

As it happens, Moyers’s remarks anticipated the trenchant question posed in an interview by another prominent liberal, Barbara Ehrenreich, just after billionaire Michael Bloomberg and mayors of other cities cleared public spaces of Occupy Wall Street protesters: “Where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘Go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?” Well, yes, particularly if your principal occupation is shaking down bankers and brokers for campaign donations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

By now it should be obvious that the system, and the Democratic Party, run Obama, not the other way around. Under this arrangement, the president carries out his duties as pre-eminent party functionary—fundraising being at the top of his list of responsibilities—and defers on legislation, leaving it to corrupt Democratic barons such as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), devoted friend of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and banking crowd, and sworn enemy of reform.

As Ron Suskind’s book “Confidence Men” confirms, there was never any question of doing things differently. Describing the then president-elect’s choice of economic advisers, he notes, “Obama, after all, had selected for his top domestic officials two men [Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner] whose actions [in the Clinton Administration] had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.” These anti-reform appointments did not go unnoticed by party regulars, even though they were ignored by Obama groupies. “I don’t understand how you could do this,” Suskind quotes Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) saying to Obama. “You’ve picked the wrong people!”

The “wrong people” included Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago, and his replacement as White House chief of staff, William Daley; both of these advisers were four-star generals within the Chicago Democratic machine who cut their teeth in Washington during the campaign to pass that job-killer North American Free Trade Act and who later worked for investment banks. But Obama’s hypocrisy in Osawatomie, Kansas, set a new standard in deception. Among other things, his speech blamed “regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this [the unfettered sales of bundled mortgages], but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all. It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.”

What’s truly breathtaking is the president’s gall, his stunning contempt for political history and contemporary reality. Besides neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in the debacle of 2008, he failed to point out that derivatives trading remains largely unregulated while the Securities and Exchange Commission awaits “public comment on a detailed implementation plan” for future regulation. In other words, until the banking and brokerage lobbies have had their say with John Boehner, Max Baucus, and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly opposes a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that reduced outlandish speculation by separating commercial and investment banks. In 1999, it was Summers and Geithner, led by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (much admired by Obama), who persuaded Congress to repeal this crucial impediment to Wall Street recklessness.

And then there’s Afghanistan. Obama should be condemned for escalating this grotesquely expensive, destructive, and self-defeating war. Thoroughly discredited by analysts on both the left and the right, the Afghan madness seems to bore liberals who once would have marched against Vietnam. I suggest they watch the brilliant new documentary “Hell and Back Again” to enhance their knowledge of the war’s casualties. The pitiful story of Marine sergeant Nathan Harris ought to make them furious at our commander in chief; shouldn’t it also spark an intra-party revolt?

I urge people who haven’t given up on politics to examine the career of Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein founded the Dump Johnson movement in 1967 and, against all odds, persuaded Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to launch a Democratic primary challenge against the incumbent president over the issue of Vietnam. His example, I hope, might inspire someone to challenge another Democratic incumbent who has forfeited the trust of the people.

You may say it’s too late, that Obama is impregnable. Consider Gene McCarthy’s obscurity on November 30, 1967, when he announced his insurgent crusade. At the time, many Americans confused him with Senator Joe McCarthy (R., Wis.), the notorious communist hunter, and in January 1968 a Gallup poll showed him winning just 12 percent of the votes in a presidential election. But on March 12, McCarthy nearly beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. The opposition was galvanized, Robert Kennedy jumped into the race, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election, and American democracy was revived.

Granted, there are big differences between 1968 and 2012 — for one thing, there’s no military draft to frighten the young — but the great issues are the same: an immoral war and a merciless money power. Moreover, high unemployment and the dominance of Wall Street do frighten the young. They need a tribune.

In November 1967, before he announced his candidacy, McCarthy told an audience of college students, “There is deep anxiety and alienation among a large number of people…. Someone must give these groups entrance back into the political processes. We may lose, but at least in the process of fighting within the political framework, we’ll have reduced the alienation.” Two days later, in remarks that would have pertained just as well to the current Occupy Wall Street movement, he said, “Party unity is not a sufficient excuse for silence” and Vietnam was “not the kind of political controversy which should be left to a children’s crusade or to those not directly involved in politics. It should rather be taken up by adult political leaders and activists in America.”

Are there any adults left in the Democratic Party?

The Progressive, Sensitive, Rational Governor Romney

I’ve been reading up on former Governor Romney, and I like what I’m learning, about both his passion and his powers of observation.

Here’s an emblematic excerpt of a speech he delivered to editorial writers following a cross-country tour: “The America I saw was not America the Beautiful…. Instead, I saw the other face of America — the America of ugly streets and rotted buildings; the America of congestion, illiteracy, and want; the America of shattered expectations and rising fury.”

The language gets more powerful as his view of things gets worse: “This is the America where children grow up like weeds in a jungle, untended and undisciplined… this is the America where children enter school without being able to say a single word — and where they leave school after eight, ten, or twelve years with only a third-grade education…. [T]his is the America where a young man or woman cannot even hope to go to college, where a family cannot even hope to own a home, where a would-be small businessman cannot get capital. This is an ugly America and an angry America.”

But Romney does not live by eloquent rhetoric alone; he also analyzes the underlying evils afflicting the United States. In another speech to journalists, Romney echoes President Eisenhower’s celebrated decrying of the “military-industrial complex” by himself decrying the creation of “a new and dangerous power concentration,” such that “our war machine has become permanent.”

According to Romney, “much of our economy has grown dependent upon war and preparation for war.” America, he declares, “must reverse the tendency to rely too heavily on military might in the struggle for men’s hearts and minds around the world.” In the end, he says, “military power is not the export which will make the world safe for freedom.”

However, Romney has deeper philosophical concerns about what is happening in the country. “The growth of excessive power is a fundamental and imminent danger in our society,” he writes. “Unfortunately, we have lost our understanding and fear of power. This constitutes an added hazard. For when anyone questions the magnitude of private power in industry, in unions, or in government, he immediately is confronted with specious arguments that people blindly accept as valid.”

One reason for this current blind acceptance of dogma is political extremism, which in times of crisis can seduce voters into closing their eyes and their minds. Romney is unequivocal in his denunciation of extremism within his own Republican Party, which he compares to the anti-immigrant Know Nothings of the 1840s and 1850s: “When extremists infiltrate our party and attach themselves like parasites to our leaders and even become leaders themselves, our party is discredited in the eyes of those whose support we must win. It is more essential that we repudiate and eliminate these few from our ranks than to see our cause fail.”

Romney is nothing if not open-minded, for this very successful businessman acknowledges that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the devil himself to many of Romney’s wealthy allies, “correctly recognized that by the late 1920s industrial, financial, and agricultural power had become excessive.” Roosevelt, he writes, “found it necessary to lead a peaceful revolution by creating a countervailing economic power” in the form of stronger labor laws and empowerment of unions, which corrected “indefensible abuses in American industry.”

To my mind, Romney sounds like someone a liberal like me could wholeheartedly support. But there’s a catch. The progressive, sensitive, and highly rational Romney I’m quoting is George Romney, not his son, Mitt, and George, as well as his brand of enlightened Republicanism, has been dead for quite some time.

Nevertheless, his ideas and his spirit live on in out-of-print books such as the former Michigan governor’s own collected speeches and articles, The Concerns of a Citizen, Brock Brower’s Other Loyalties, and the late Clark Mollenhoff’s George Romney: Mormon in Politics.

I picked up these volumes recently because they bear reading: They tell us of an alternative and principled conservatism still very much alive in 1968, when George Romney ran for president, and they might be useful to voters who want to know more about Mitt Romney’s background and potential as a national leader. If the old adage holds that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then Mitt shouldn’t look so threatening to liberals.

Granted, Mitt has been pandering, sometimes shamelessly, to the right-wing extremists in the Tea Party. But there’s a certain pathos — even something admirable — in watching someone try to reason in the face of massive irrationality. A visiting American friend, long resident in Paris and out of touch with U.S. politics, watched the Tampa Tea Party debate in September and said he “felt sorry” for Mitt as he labored to appear sane among mad people. Indeed, Romney’s defense of Social Security against Rick Perry’s mindless “Ponzi scheme” prattle should have reassured liberals.

Mitt’s father was unusually prescient (his popularizing of the “compact” car when he ran American Motors was remarkable), but he wasn’t always right. Well into 1967, George Romney, at the time the front-running Republican presidential candidate, was recycling the same old establishment nonsense that it was “unthinkable that the United States withdraw from Vietnam.”

Significantly, however, it was his shift against Vietnam, in August of that year — his admission that he’d undergone “the greatest brainwashing that anybody could get” from the Johnson administration and the Pentagon — that eventually drove him out of the race in favor of Richard Nixon.

Brock Brower wrote in 1968 that Romney “stood for all the upright things that no voter wants in a downright Presidential aspirant,” but maybe 2012 will be different. I want to cheer when I read, “Poverty — not race — is the common denominator of the people of the slums,” and again when George Romney tells the National Conference of Editorial Writers that “it is more important to provide decent homes than to subsidize candidates seeking national office.”

The question is: What did Mitt learn from his father? That serious, principled people can’t get elected to national office? That running from your greatest political achievement (the legislation providing universal health care in Massachusetts, passed when Mitt was governor) is a winning electoral strategy? That appeasement of radical ideologues is beneficial to party and country?

I don’t know, but I’d feel better if the Romney running for president was named George.

An Architect’s Optimism; The U.N.’s Pessimism

As I left the United Nations General Assembly last month, having just heard Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s plea for recognition of a Palestinian state, I noticed Elie Weisel, the Nobel laureate and death-camp survivor, surrounded by admirers.

The Romanian-born writer was lending his moral support to the Israeli prime minister in the middle of an audience of diplomats, U.N. staffers, and members of the public who had just shown themselves — with numerous ovations — to be largely pro-Palestinian, so I was curious to hear his reaction.

What, I asked Wiesel, had he thought of Abbas’s dramatic and defiant appeal for statehood? “I didn’t hear any of it,” he told me. “The earphones with the [simultaneous] translation didn’t work where I was sitting.”

Was this dialogue of the deaf symbolic evidence of the U.N.’s impotence, or was it merely an unfortunate technical malfunction caused by worn-out equipment? No doubt this non-functioning device had contributed to the lack of communication between the Arabic-speaking Abbas and certain Jews seated in the General Assembly’s balcony. The headquarters of the world body, on the East River, are undergoing a sorely needed five-year, $2 billion restoration and renovation, which eventually will include replacing the “ear cups” and aging copper wires connecting them that are now being eaten away by time and mice.

But the failure of translation in Wiesel’s General Assembly balcony seat is also a metaphor for the larger question of whether the U.N. needs to be spiritually and politically renovated — whether the very idea of world governance in the service of peace has any hope of succeeding in the twenty-first century. Appearances can be misleading, but I didn’t feel very optimistic after the Netanyahu-Abbas confrontation.

Such pessimism pains me. I love the idea behind the U.N. but I also love its physical embodiment, dubbed “”a workshop for peace” by Wallace K. Harrison, the Rockefeller family lead architect who managed the team of egotists that made of the U.N. a masterpiece of functional, modern design. The day I spoke with Wiesel, Harrison’s modernist jewel was looking pretty tarnished, its lack of luster most strikingly visible in a large stain — caused by rainwater — on the white wall that looms above the Visitors Lobby in the General Assembly building.

More pertinent to the theme of U.N. deterioration and weakness was the easily overlooked memorial, about 60 feet from where Wiesel and I were standing, to Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator for Palestine assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by a militant Zionist group. Sixty-three years later the Israeli-Arab deadlock seems more intractable than ever. While Abbas’s application appeared doomed either to burial by committee or a U.S. veto in the Security Council, Netanyahu seemed utterly confident in his opposition to Palestinian aspirations, alternately mocking the U.N. (“a theater of the absurd”) and cynically stoking American fears of terrorist attack in perfect English. That his speech was rhetorically brilliant, that it contained significant truths mixed in with its many half-truths and conflations, did not make it any more inspiring to those who hope for a lasting settlement.

For optimism I had better luck last week when I spoke with Michael Adlerstein, the assistant secretary general responsible for the U.N.’s new makeover. Having toured the construction site in a hard hat and orange vest — walking through the gutted offices, common spaces, and council chambers, whose mostly Scandinavian designs I much admire — I wanted some reassurance that the old ideals and glamor of the U.N. would at least live on in its interior décor. Adlerstein the architect didn’t disappoint me:

“The portions of the compound that the public has seen for the past sixty years, that are remembered in the Cary Grant movie [North by Northwest] and are seen by the delegates, deserve full restoration. When they come back in 2014 they will find that all the character-defining features are the same, the fonts are the same — they’re all still stainless steel — the paneling is the same, the batons are the same. . . . The big feature, the glass curtain wall [facing the East River], will look exactly the way it did in 1952.” The Delegates Lounge, a wonderful place to drink and conduct interviews amidst a cacophony of foreign languages, “will still be this beautiful room with huge glass walls facing north and east and with huge tapestries on the walls.” New furniture and curtains are to be donated by the Dutch mission, although it remains to be seen whether the widely ignored smoking ban will finally be enforced.

All well and good, as is the plan to convert the thirty-nine-story Secretariat building from 80 percent private offices to 80 percent open work spaces, an environmentally logical redesign that will let copious natural light flow across the floors. The cantilevered portions of the Conference Building, which hold the Security Council Chamber and hang over FDR Drive, will be reinforced with blast-proof steel. However, sadly, because of post-9/11 (and post-bombing of the Baghdad U.N. mission) thinking that still prevails inside the U.N. hierarchy, there are no plans to reopen the outdoor gardens or the East River promenade to the general public.

Adlerstein wishes it were otherwise: He considers Oscar Niemeyer to be the “heart and soul of the architectural team” that originally designed the U.N., because the Brazilian not only had “the courage to take on Le Corbusier [main designer of the Secretariat] but also the skills to foresee . . . the growth of the General Assembly and the need to preserve the lungs, the North Lawn, of the U.N.” If “the terrible situation in the world where everyone has to hide” begins to change and “peace breaks out,” says Adlerstein, his team will be “providing all doors with doorknobs” (for doors that have been locked for years) to permit staff to easily leave the building. Like everyone else, diplomats need fresh air and a place to negotiate informally.

And what of the currently denuded Security Council Chamber, where all I saw to identify the famous room was the circular pit that holds the famous table for the five permanent and ten non-permanent members? Wasn’t it time to make provisions for a larger, more democratic Security Council? Adlerstein says he encouraged such a discussion by “notifying many members of the Security Council,” as well as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, that “this was the opportunity, if there was going to be reform, and it could be done now in a way that would be very economical.” However, “I was told quite strongly by all parties that architecture will not manage reform . . . that reform will happen when reform happens, and that it’s based on politics.”

That’s too bad. Alive and well at 103, Niemeyer sent word to Adlerstein that he’s not taking on any new commissions.

Some Liberals Finally On To Obama’s Betrayal of Liberalism

As a self-proclaimed independent journalist normally content to attack politicians from outside the establishment, I’ve found it very lonely criticizing Barack Obama these past three years. Before then it was easy to be at odds with power, since the Bush nightmare rallied all sorts of disparate foes of the administration.

But with Obama’s arrival in the White House, ordinarily skeptical liberals thought they had found their redeemer, a genuine reformer with leftist instincts who, even better, was the son of a black African father and a liberal white mother. It didn’t matter what Obama’s actual record was — how (or if) he voted in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate, who his political sponsors or donors were, or what sort of people he expressed admiration for in The Audacity of Hope. Because he said he opposed the invasion of Iraq, wanted to reduce corruption in Washington, would close Guantánamo, would rein in Wall Street’s recklessness and would “renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama was a dream come true.

So when I began challenging the assumptions about Obama’s progressive potential, months before the 2008 election, people who had once joined me in raucous denunciations of Bush started looking at me funny, their voices turning testy, their faces tense. I recall a prominent academic I know recoiling from me and placing a protective hand on his wife when I contradicted his excited chatter about an Obama presidency. Another time a prominent left-wing editor went so far as to defend Obama’s sponsor, the thuggish and reactionary former mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, by lamely insisting, “He’s better than his father.”

Now, as the “first black president” almost daily moves further to the right, I’m still usually alone, but I am beginning to feel a tiny pulse on the liberal end of the spectrum. It began in June with Obama’s fake withdrawal from Afghanistan and from an unlikely source. If Obama worship was once epidemic in the U.S., it was virulent in Britain and France. But here was an Englishwoman, Jemima Khan, better known for her glamorous looks and ex-husband than her political writing, finally calling out Obama on his outrageous doubletalk.

“Alhamdullilah!” (Arabic for “Praise to God”), she wrote in Britain’s Independent newspaper. “President Obama is finally withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Except he’s not — only those he deployed in the ‘surge’ of 2009; 68,000 will remain, double the number sent by his predecessor, George Bush.” Khan knows something about Middle Eastern and Islamic politics, having lived for years in Pakistan with Imran Kahn, an opposition politician and former cricket star. And she got to the heart of the matter about America’s mad, counterproductive occupation of Afghanistan. Noting that U.S. drone bombs had killed roughly one al-Qaida leader for every 10 Pakistani civilians, she wrote, “There comes a point when you have to ask: What is more dangerous, terrorism or counter-terrorism? The irony of the ‘war on terror’ is that the U.S. can win it only when it stops fighting it.”

Now, she lamented, many Pakistanis hate America at the same time that the war’s supposed objective — says Obama, “to defeat al-Qaida” — has been shredded. As the astute Khan pointed out, “more safe havens exist and terrorists operate now outside of Afghanistan, from Peshawar to Sanaa.”

Granted this was only one column in one Western paper. But Obama soon angered a broader audience. His concessions to the Tea Party during the debt-ceiling fight at last roused economist and columnist Paul Krugman to near-fury in the New York Times. Calling the deal “a disaster” for the economy, he slammed Obama for “folding” in the face of “blackmail.” Krugman said: “He surrendered last December, extending the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.”

Even the deeply conflicted Nation magazine began to remark on Obama’s increasingly spurious liberal credentials, though not quite with its full-throated institutional voice. In a signed “comment,” the estimable William Greider argued that “people who adhere to the core Democratic values Obama has abandoned need a strategy for stronger resistance,” which “would not mean running away from Obama but running at him — challenging his leadership of the party, mobilizing dissident voices and voters, pushing congressional Democrats to embrace a progressive agenda in competition with Obama’s.”

Perhaps Greider had heard the apparently impromptu statement of Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) at a press conference on July 27 during the debt-ceiling battle: “I say we have to educate the American people at the same time as we educate the president of the United States. Because the Republicans, Speaker [John] Boehner [and] Majority Leader [Eric] Cantor, did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The president of the United States called for that. And my response to him is to mass thousands of people in front of the White House to protest this.” And Conyers hadn’t yet heard the president’s Sept. 8 “jobs” speech in which he called for “modest adjustments to health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid.” We can just imagine how modest.

Things died down a little in August after the “compromise” to lift the debt ceiling. But Obama just won’t stop insulting liberals; indeed, there doesn’t seem to be any concession to the right that his chief of staff, Chicago’s first brother William Daley, can’t persuade him to make. On Sept. 2, Obama stuck it to the liberals once again when he said he was backing off from a stricter air-pollution standard, supposedly to save jobs. Environmentalists were predictably upset and expressed their feelings of betrayal. The journalist and activist Bill McKibben called the decision “flabbergasting,” adding, “somehow we need to get back the president we thought we elected in 2008.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

The Hangover

A video interview with Viceland about where we’re heading now that the 9/11 memorials are over:

The Sad Legacy of Sept. 11

For weeks I’ve been dreading the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and not because I fear another attack. As a New Yorker who works below 14th Street, I’m reluctant to revisit the unhappy images I witnessed on that paradoxically lovely, cloudless day: the vast plume of smoke blowing eastward over my office building when I emerged from the Bleecker Street subway station around 9 a.m.; the thousands of dazed and ashen office workers tromping uptown in the middle of Broadway like refugees from a 1950s horror film; the soldiers armed with automatic weapons patrolling intersections; the constantly repeated television images of the two towers collapsing into rubble, people burned and crushed to bits—these are things I would prefer not to dwell on.

But I’ve also been dreading this anniversary because of its predictable narrative as related by a placid media and opportunistic politicians: America the victim, an innocent nation violated by evil aliens who “hate our freedom” and our fundamental goodness. In this version of the 9/11 story, Osama bin Laden was a single-minded monster leading a foreign “ideology” called “terrorism,” the purest distillation of an anti-American fervour that contained no political motive beyond an ambition to destroy the “American Way of Life.” Bin Laden, according to this scenario, spent all his waking hours rereading and resenting the celebrated declaration in 1630 by the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, our first founding father, that “we shall be a City upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us. . . .” It seems that Winthrop’s reference to Matthew 5:14—”Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid”—was so offensive to the radical Islamist bin Laden that he organized four suicide squads just to knock the whole shining city off its self-righteous, exceptionalist perch.

We don’t have to sympathize with bin Laden or even to understand his messianic thinking to know how wrong-headed and misleading our public recounting of 9/11 has become. Lost in the purity of America’s martyrdom are basic political realities: that bin Laden was a wealthy and well-connected Saudi Arabian, a former CIA asset, and America’s stalwart, only somewhat covert ally in the anti-communist jihad that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s; that bin Laden felt betrayed when the Saudi monarchy allowed American troops—in his view, infidel agents of the devil—to use its sacred soil as a staging ground, in 1990-91, to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait; that bin Laden, already a very violent terrorist suspect, was somehow never apprehended in the 1990s—not even for questioning—because of the Saudi regime’s double game of protecting extremists while pretending to co-operate with Americans in the guise of “moderate Arab ally.”

Why don’t we lament with equal passion each anniversary of 2/26? Because the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, in 1993, should have led, eventually, to the arrest of bin Laden in Sudan in late 1995 or early 1996, after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia. George W. Bush ought to have listened more attentively to the warnings of his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, in 2001, but the Clinton administration’s decision to prevent the CIA from grabbing Osama in Khartoum—before he decamped for Afghanistan and greater feats of mayhem—remains the emblematic failure of American “intelligence” and foreign policy in the decade leading up to 9/11. Of course, either Clinton or Bush could have severed, or at least loosened, the Gordian knot that ties the White House to the House of Saud and its oil wells—thus removing bin Laden’s casus belli—but such daring logic rarely figures in the high councils of American leadership. The nearly 3,000 dead at ground zero, the Pentagon, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, were not martyrs to American freedom; they were victims of American foreign policy, just so much collateral damage resulting from the thirst of U.S. businessmen and politicians for Middle Eastern petroleum and influence.

John O’Neill, the FBI’s one-time director of anti-terrorism in New York, was quoted after 9/11 by two French authors saying that “all the answers, all the keys to dismantling Osama bin Laden’s organization can be found in Saudi Arabia.” This is likely still the truth. Unfortunately, O’Neill quit the FBI in frustration over what he said was Saudi pressure on Washington to squelch his investigation of al-Qaeda inside the kingdom of the Fahds—then went to work as security director of the World Trade Center, where he died on 9/11. The photograph of Saudi King Abdullah handing Barack Obama a valuable gold medallion on the president’s state visit to Riyadh in 2009—a symbolic “gift” to be sure—suggests that America’s meddling Middle Eastern policy will continue to discourage future John O’Neills from doing their jobs or the governing elite from learning any lessons.

But delineating the failures of the Clinton and Bush Administrations to anticipate or prevent 9/11 doesn’t explain the apparently bottomless well of self-pity, vengeance, and rage on display these past 10 years. To combat “the terrorist threat” and respond to public outrage over bin Laden’s attack, presidents Bush and Obama have prosecuted two major and disastrous wars, authorized “targeted assassinations,” severely damaged the historic right of habeas corpus, and curtailed civil liberties by engaging in illegal surveillance and entrapment of “potential terrorists” on a scale not seen since the height of anticommunist paranoia during the Cold War. The torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and the prisons at Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force Base are stains on the American soul, while the FBI’s grossly unconstitutional practice of enticing Muslim-Americans into fictional “terror plots” is a scandal that deserves much greater exposure. How can we understand all of this anti-libertarian, “un-American” activity? Such angry, costly, and ultimately self-defeating overreactions can only be traced back to the wounded innocence that makes up so much of the American psyche.

In fact, Americans should long ago have got over their sense of “exceptionalism,” their deep belief in their well-meaning sanctity. Slavery and the genocide against the Indians might be a good place to start a re-examination of American “innocence.” I lost any notion that such a thing existed when I watched the nightly television reports about American bombing and napalming of Vietnamese civilians; I lost it again when I finally read up on the poorly taught history of America’s brutal colonial war in the Philippines, the original counter-insurgency that introduced the American use of “waterboarding” to extract information. Graham Greene said it best in his Vietnam novel, The Quiet American: “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

The ongoing legacy of 9/11 appears to be more of the same: more killing in the name of saving lives, more repression in the name of defending liberty, more camouflaged Christian piety in the name of freedom of religion, more hypocrisy in the name of “American” values of truth and justice, more massacres of the English language (terrorism is a tactic not an ideology) in the name of straight talk. I don’t think it’s the legacy Americans deserve, and it is certainly the wrong memorial for the dead of 9/11.

Goodbye to Fostoria, Ohio: A Small Town in the Middle of Everywhere

The jobs went south — to Mexicali, Mexico — after the NAFTA liberalizations of the 1990s. New owners have come and gone, the last U.S. employees are awaiting redundancy, and only a very few money men have profited, handsomely.

“When I went to Fostoria, in September 2009, long freight trains still rumbled through town regularly on the railroad lines that made the city, despite its modest size (population 13,441), such an attractive place to build a factory in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the trains weren’t stopping to pick up much and the chamber of commerce was reduced to promoting its advantages for rail photography enthusiasts. No train buffs — or anyone else — were in evidence downtown, where Readmore’s Hallmark Books and Gifts was advertising a closing sale. Vast empty parking lots abutting shuttered factories and businesses — Fostoria Industries, a maker of specialty ovens; the Thyssenkrupp Atlas crankshaft plant; the GM dealership — testified to the declining fortunes of what Fostoria’s boosters had dubbed ‘A Small Town in the Middle of Everywhere!’

But while factory after factory had closed down, the Autolite plant seemed impregnable — not just because of Bossidy’s pledge in 1993 but also because the plant was churning out vast quantities of spark plugs with stunning efficiency — as many as 1.2m a day on 13 production lines operating over three shifts. It couldn’t last with so many plants heading to Mexico and, after passage by Congress of permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, the even cheaper labour of China. In January 2007 Autolite announced plans to build the plant in Mexicali, and in August said it would begin to lay off 350 of the plant’s 650 workers.”

Read the rest of the piece at Le Monde diplomatique.

A Pinch of Sympathy with My Disgust

So my joke goes: Just how low would we have to go to provoke Murdoch into trying to halt our use of his license? There are plenty of possible punch lines, but the most realistic is that lower for Murdoch could only mean better, so any such legal action is inconceivable.

Still, I confess to some ambivalence about the publisher dubbed the “Dirty Digger” by Richard Ingrams, the former editor of Britain’s Private Eye magazine. I’ve generally hesitated before seconding critics who asserted that Murdoch was destroying journalism. For one thing, it didn’t sound so implausible when people said that Murdoch was a genuine newspaperman who couldn’t bear to close a paper — even big money losers — because he so enjoyed running them. For another, I appreciated that unlike such newspaper monopolists as the Newhouse family and Gannett, Murdoch seemed to relish competition.

Even now, I retain a tiny bit of sympathy for the Digger as the “respectable” press bays for his blood. For The New York Times to run four stories about Murdoch last Friday was excessive, and seemed to be intended as revenge against Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for having launched a local New York section to compete with the Times’s Metropolitan section.

One is usually more likely to get an accurate recounting of an event by reading The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Financial Times than by reading the Murdoch-owned Sun, The (London) Times, or the New York Post. But in the grand scheme of things, are Murdoch’s frauds really worse than those committed by the “serious” dailies?

The Digger’s 1983 publication of the forged “Hitler Diaries” in the (London) Sunday Times was an embarrassment (shared by Newsweek) that nearly destroyed the reputation of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. But The New York Times’s publication of Judith Miller’s and Michael Gordon’s fairy tales about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear-weapons program hastened the destruction of an entire country, with the lives of more than 100,000 people.

Strangely, Murdoch has become quite respectable in recent years. Courted by American presidents as well as British prime ministers, he turns up at all sorts of mainstream conferences, like the World Economic Forum in Davos and Allen & Co.’s media/money festival in Sun Valley, Idaho. I have friends who have worked directly for Murdoch and appear genuinely to like him, even, in the case of one of them, after he was fired. Some say that Murdoch “loves” not only newspapers, but also those newspaper people who share his “anti-establishment” contempt for social propriety. The head of his British newspaper division, Rebekah Brooks, is “a kind of favorite daughter” to the Digger, says The New York Times.

Increasingly, though, I’ve come to think that Murdoch doesn’t love anything or anybody. Fox News’s right-wing populism is phony — it’s a three-ring circus, not a serious political movement — and Murdoch is happy to back such “liberals” as Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama if he thinks he can get something out of them.

Marvin Kitman’s cover story in last November’s Harper’s Magazine described how in the 1990s Murdoch corrupted the Federal Communications Commission, through lobbying then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in his drive to make the Fox Network the grotesque and profitable creature it is today. This is normal behavior for a media baron, but Kitman’s article makes it clear that for Murdoch it was all about money, not ideology.

And when it comes to getting the dirt, Murdoch turns out to be an arch-hypocrite, even by his own degraded standards. Before she exhibits too much filial affection for her surrogate father and boss, Ms. Brooks should consider Tonice Sgrignoli, a New York Post reporter who posed as the relative of a passenger who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800, off Long Island, in 1996. Sgrignoli, who used to work for me as the Harper’s copy-desk chief, was merely adhering to Murdoch/News of the World operating procedure, doing whatever it took to get a human-interest story about the real victims’ relatives by sneaking inside their private gathering.

Yet when the police arrested her, the Post’s editor, Ken Chandler, mounted a tepid defense: “The Post apologizes if there was any inappropriate behavior.” Sgrignoli left the paper not long after.

However, the worst of Murdoch is revealed in his decision, supposedly to appease public and parliamentary outrage over the phone-hacking scandal, to kill the News of the World, 168 years old and with the largest circulation in Britain. The closing threw hundreds of people out of work for doing what their avaricious master taught them to do — so that Murdoch can make even more money through buying all of Sky Broadcasting. So much for his “love” of newspapers and buccaneering journalists.

Murdoch’s son James was quoted as saying that the tabloid’s habit of infiltrating murder victims’ phones, if true, was “inhuman” and that the News of the World’s image had been “sullied by behavior that was wrong.” For fake contrition — for pure cynicism — you can’t go lower than that. I only wish that, for his scurrilous behavior, I could take Rupert Murdoch to court.

—

For more on the News of the World scandal, read Marvin Kitman’s blog post, “As the News of the World Turns.”

DSK and the Typical American Ignorance About France

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the French divorce rate is lower than America’s (43 percent compared with 49 percent, says Divorce magazine) and that reported rapes, say the United Nations’s latest statistics, were 16.6 per 100,000 in France, compared with 28.6 per 100,000 in the U.S.

Social life in France still revolves around the family, and while I can’t cite statistics to prove it, I know that French children tend to stay closer to their parents. Indeed, meals and weekends “en famille” can become oppressive for someone used to Anglo-Saxon informality, fluidity, and anomie.

As it happens, I’ve shared a conference platform with Dominique Strauss-Kahn and once interviewed him. I didn’t like him much: He was obviously bright but too obviously cynical to be an attractive politician. Moreover, I found it preposterous for a former IMF chief to be running for president as a member of the Socialist Party. Essentially a free-market economist, DSK representing the French left would have insulted authentic leftists everywhere.

But something about the virulence of the attacks on Strauss-Kahn — the blatant anti-Frenchness of it all — makes me wish for a different resolution than the one splashed all over the Daily News and the New York Post. After all, he’s innocent until proven guilty.

Isn’t he?

Head-examining After the Osama bin Laden Killing

To be fair, there may also be people in President Obama’s Cabinet who need to have their heads examined. Hillary Clinton best expressed the administration’s increasingly delusional thinking when she suggested that bin Laden’s execution will help the war effort: “In Afghanistan, we will continue taking the fight to al-Qaida and their Taliban allies. . . . Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today it may have even greater resonance. You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. But you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaida and participate in a peaceful political process.”

That’s a great idea, especially the “peaceful political process” that surely would ensue when Hamid Karzai and his warlords started settling scores with Mullah Omar and his warlords around a conference table. As for the Taliban, it has little interest in al-Qaida’s international aspirations and will also “continue taking the fight” to America to rid Afghanistan of foreign occupation. I want to believe that Clinton is sane enough to read this sort of information in her intelligence reports (or at least in the newspaper), but then she also says that Pakistan is a “democracy.” Maybe the secretary of state had her hand over her mouth in the famous Situation Room photo because Obama’s national-security team was really watching “Patriot Games,” with Harrison Ford. It is a very exciting movie.

Of course, there’s nothing new about U.S. leaders playing tough-guy jingoes and justifying our history of “extra-judicial” killings. It’s no coincidence the CIA gave bin Laden the code name Geronimo, since America’s Wild West culture long ago concluded that the only good Indian is a dead Indian (though at least the real Geronimo was taken prisoner). And it’s clear that our justice system is so degraded by 9/11 and its aftermath that putting bin Laden on trial was probably a political and practical impossibility. Since the CIA used him in the 1980s to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, imagine the character witnesses his lawyers might have called.

Even if there were a few courageous members of Congress to make the case for simple justice, or for prompt exit from Afghanistan, the gibberish gushing from the media would have made it impossible for them to be heard. What can we possibly learn from the bin Laden affair when even the serious press functions as facilitator for self-interested politicians? The best example of this appeared in The New York Times, the day after the government admitted that Osama was unarmed and that he didn’t use one of his wives as a shield, contrary to the previous day’s version in the “paper of record.”

As The Times explained it, “haste” had led to “discrepancies” in the official account. “But the episode also reveals the pressures as the White House, intent on telling a dramatic story about a successful operation, sought to manage a 24-hour news media ravenous for immediate and vivid details.” Oh, those dreadfully ravenous reporters, forcing counter-terrorism chief John Brennan and his bosses to invent things that never happened. Perish the thought that there was a political or P.R. motive in the telling of the bin Laden “take out” tale. Anyone that cynical should have his head examined.

But of all the fantastical media stories on the rubbing out of bin Laden, the most preposterous concern the Pakistani government. One minute they’re our loyal allies; the next they’re perfidious coddlers of evildoers. Recalling the words of Capt. Louis Renault, in the film “Casablanca,” Gen. Ashfaq Parvaiz Kayani, the Pakistani army’s chief of staff, was “shocked, shocked” not only that America invaded his country’s air space uninvited but also that bin Laden was hiding under his very nose. Let’s be honest: The only plausible explanation for the raid’s “success” is that the U.S. finally agreed to pay the Pakistanis more in cash or in kind than they were getting from bin Laden himself or his friends in Saudi Arabia.

What’s more, the nearly $450 billion already spent on Afghanistan in America’s Terrorist Games has been a complete waste of money— exactly the sort of self-defeating expenditure that terrorists like bin Laden have hoped to provoke.

Sadly, American justice and candor— the old-fashioned Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford variety— lie at the bottom of the ocean with Osama bin Laden’s corpse.

Blindness Toward War Easy for Americans

The MOMA exhibition devotes an entire wall to 50 prints by Dix titled “Der Krieg” (“The War”). These terrifying pictures — the hideously wounded, a skull invaded by worms, monstrously disfigured faces, the dead and the living dead — confront the viewer with the fact that war’s impact stretches far beyond physical damage to buildings and flesh. Dix’s genius is in depicting the destruction of the human spirit that results from decisions made by politicians who never experience the direct effects of war. I applaud Rolling Stone magazine for publishing photos of Afghan civilians murdered by leering American soldiers (also Paris Match for its photo of two Libyan soldiers torn to pieces by NATO bombs), but Dix’s prints surpass photojournalism in their emotional reach.

Nowadays, with wars often waged from on high or from very far away by pilots, sailors and computer programmers who never encounter their victims, it’s easy to be blind. Phony talk about “targeted” and “precision” bombing, “no-fly zones,” “protecting civilians” with air strikes and “limited” war designed to prevent “massacres” (as opposed to the actuality of overthrowing the West’s favorite “reformed” Arab dictator to stabilize Libyan oil exports and boost Sarkozy’s low poll numbers) is intended to hide the horror of war. There’s no such thing as a wholly “just” war and certainly not a “clean” war.

Nevertheless, there is a paradox in Dix’s work and life that might help indifferent Americans empathize with the victims of war. Although Dix (a machine-gunner in the Kaiser’s army) was celebrated as an “anti-war” artist, he remained ambivalent about the organized killing that such statesmen as Obama and George W. Bush prefer to euphemize in slogans like “the war on terror.” In 1961, nearly four decades after “Der Krieg” appeared, Dix said that “the war was a horrible thing, but still something powerful. . . . Under no circumstances could I miss it!” Elsewhere, he said he had wanted to “experience everything very precisely. . . . Hence I am no pacifist. Or perhaps I was a curious person. I had to see everything myself.”

In justifying the attack on Gadhafi’s forces, our president piously declared that “some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”

Perhaps without knowing it, Obama has presented a wonderful opportunity to educate the citizenry, and with a patriotic justification to boot. From now on, all Americans should proudly open their eyes to atrocities committed by their armed forces abroad. For a little recent history, they could begin by traveling to Hanoi, Panama, Baghdad, Kabul and Benghazi. They would surely be edified by what they found, and maybe a little wiser.

Revisiting a Hallowed Gymnasium with its Star Novelist

Wideman hadn’t passed through the stately, arched entryway and brick facade of his old home gym since 1979, and he took me on a tour around the rectangular interior of the 1920s building, its walls decorated with photographs of former Penn greats. Eventually, we came across a black-and-white blow-up photograph of a player wearing number 10, shooting a free throw. It was John, so I stepped back and studied the 69-year-old man as he crouched down to contemplate his 21-year-old image. Did he remember the moment or the game? Not at all. “I see him, but it’s like another person altogether,” he said.

Once inside the cavernous arena — like the nave of a cathedral in which the parishioners surround the mass in intimidating proximity to the priests and altar boys — certain people had no difficulty recognizing the present version of Wideman. Stan Pawlak, a Penn basketball standout who was three years behind Wideman, was analyzing that night’s game for the local ESPN radio outlet and greeted John warmly. Then Ed Bergman, also from the class of ’63, embraced his friend, though he had bad news about another classmate, Darryl Dawson, who had died. At half time, Bergman talked to me about the challenges Wideman faced in the fall of 1959: “Imagine what it was like for John to be one of about 10 black male students in the incoming freshman class, and the other nine were mostly from prep schools.”

Wideman brought it into stark perspective: Philadelphia was better than some places, he said, but racism was then so openly toxic in America that Penn “didn’t want to embarrass me, so we didn’t play in the South. The farthest south I played was probably Annapolis.”

In the course of the uninspired, not very noisy game between two middling teams (Penn beat my alma mater, Columbia, 64-54), Wideman recounted other things with the subtle irony that informs his conversation and his best writing: for example, playing what he flattered himself to be tough defense against Columbia’s Fred Portnoy without knowing that Portnoy was involved in a point-shaving scheme and easing up. Whether or not Philip Roth borrowed Portnoy’s name for his famous novel, Wideman enjoyed the notion that he might have, as he riffed about Palestra lore.

What’s different now? “In the day,” he remembered, “the [tobacco] smoke hung so heavy over the court; you didn’t realize that you were having trouble breathing because of it.”

Somehow, “What was your greatest moment in sports?” seemed the wrong question to ask a former Rhodes Scholar and two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner, so I imagined the answer for myself. In his senior year, when Wideman was captain and all-Ivy League, Penn went 19-6, shared the prestigious Big 5 title with Villanova, but, disappointingly, finished behind co-champions Princeton and Yale in the Ivy League.

On Jan. 5, 1963, however, Penn beat Princeton and its sophomore phenom, Bill Bradley, 65-62, in a game that must have rocked the Palestra to its raucous core. At 6 feet 5 inches, the future NBA star, U.S. senator and presidential candidate scored 26 points with 16 rebounds. A characteristic Bradley performance, but I wish I’d been there to see the future author of “Philadelphia Fire,” at 6 feet 2 inches, playing small forward, score 16 and grab 10 rebounds in a winning effort.

It’s worth knowing that Wideman covered Bradley so well in the second half that Bradley finished only 6 for 19 from the field.

A Country with Chicago in Charge

Nevertheless, there is a destructive ideological part of the Daley appointment and Emanuel’s ascent, despite their non-ideological devotion to power. Emanuel and Daley were two of the three principal Clinton lobbyists in the campaign to pass the corporate-backed, anti-labor North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, and Daley helped push through the even greater killer of U.S. jobs, Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China, in 2000. Both are former employees of investment banks, which have a burning interest in “free trade” and cross-border investment deals facilitated by “free trade.” Obama has already reneged on his Ohio presidential-primary pledge in 2008 to reform NAFTA and has let drop the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act.

His naming of Daley is the final nail in the coffin of his 2008 campaign alliance with unions. Between them, NAFTA and PNTR have sent millions of good-paying American factory jobs out of America, so it’s pertinent to ask what Bill Daley will bring to the table on behalf of U.S. workers.

So far, as Ralph Nader notes, the signs are all anti-blue collar. No doubt it’s Daley’s idea for Obama to speak at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters on Feb. 7, instead of making its president, Tom Donahue, cross Lafayette Park to plead his case at the White House. Chances are, Obama won’t be dropping by AFL-CIO headquarters next door to discuss raising the minimum wage.

I Won’t Hug This File — I Won’t Even Call It My Friend

I am even more offended, however, by the online sensibility and its anti-democratic, anti-emotional affect. Partisans of the Internet like to say that the Web is a bottom-up phenomenon that wondrously bypasses the traditional gatekeepers in publishing and politics who allegedly snuff out true debate. But most of what I see is unedited, incoherent babble indicative of a herd mentality, not a true desire for self-government or fairness.

Can it be seriously argued that popular government in America — with our two-party oligarchy, 90 percent-plus re-election rates, and money-laundered politics — has progressed in the age of the Internet? Has WikiLeaks’s disclosure of Afghanistan documents moved us any closer to withdrawal from that country? Would America be any less democratic without e-mail?

Somehow, the passion that drives successful political crusades is attenuated when it’s reflected on the computer screen. All those millions of eyeballs glued to Facebook do not a revolution make, or even a reform movement. The energy devoted to the Net is an astonishing waste. This is time that obviously could be better spent talking to a friend or a child, reading a good book, or marching in a political demonstration.

The writer Frederic Morton notes that “you can’t download a hug,” but Mark Zuckerberg apparently thinks that you can. To see how empty is the “social” promise of Facebook, read Zuckerberg’s recent interview in the Financial Times, which is all about making more money: “Every industry is going to be rethought in a social way — you can remake whole industries.”

Meet the new boss dressed in a T-shirt — the hierarchy and the “business model” are as top-down as they ever were — and just because he’s 26 doesn’t make “Zuck” any more attractive than the old boss. Now, even the World Wide Web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, protests in Scientific American that the “egalitarian principles” of the Web are being “chipped away” by Apple, Facebook and Google.

Among the most insistent Internet salesmen in my world is Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University. In keeping with the “democratic” Web, he promotes so-called “public journalism,” which some editors take to mean journalism ordered up by readers instead of assigned by editors.

Tom Frank gently mocks Rosen in this month’s Harper’s Magazine for being too easy on Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of a content mill called Demand Media. Rosen objected — in his blog. But what really made him mad was that “Frank could only write that because he is not writing on the Web. . . . Were he writing on the Web he would have to link to my interview” with Rosenblatt, which would show how “misleading” were Frank’s “characterizations.”

Since we at Harper’s are not free content/free traders (you have to pay to read the magazine online), we asked Rosen to write a letter to the editor. His reply: “Harper’s has decided it doesn’t want to be part of the Web, and for that reason I don’t want to be part of Harper’s. Which is sad, all around.” Now, there’s the democratic spirit at work.