.

There are many aspects to the current controversy over use of the “Israel Firster” term. There are people who use the term – continue to use it, resistantly defending its use – and there are those who criticize them for it. The critics claim that adopters of the term are continuing an ages-old anti-Semitic libel against Jews – of disloyalty to their home country because of greater, primary loyalty to their Jewish identity. The people who use the term have accused their critics of “smearing” them with the anti-Semitic label for political ends. Again, there are multiple issues buried in these counter charges – that of anti-Semitism itself, and of disloyalty, or divided loyalty or, as has mostly been expressed, “dual” loyalty – but first I consider the notion of the smear.

The first definition of a smear, in its literal, physical sense is to apply an oily, greasy substance that adheres. Extended metaphorically to its secondary meaning, a smear is an unsubstantiated accusation intended to label and “stick” to its object, sullying its reputation. Note the element of unsubstantiation. There is the additional, more uncertain element of intent.

To criticize, in contrast, is “to consider the merits and demerits of and judge accordingly.” In other words, criticism, in its analytical, intellectual sense, is empirical – evidence based. It is not simply a label applied with sticky fallaciousness, but an analytical discrimination that classifies according to identifying characteristics.

One may use the term smear at will, and many do, but it is not just another one of those misguided, relativistic “one person’s smear is another person’s criticism” cases. The two acts are not the same – they have distinct definitions – and they can be identified and themselves discriminated.

There have been several foci of attention in this current accusatory debate, including those initiated by a Ben Smith piece at Politico and James Kirchick in Haaretz. Another was Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog post responding to an email request from Glenn Greenwald. The email from Greenwald, beginning with a typical, causal and friendly “Hi Jeffrey” and ending with a “Much appreciated” explains that Greenwald is “working on (yet another) piece about the CAP anti-Semitism controversy.” Greenwald is seeking helpful information from Goldberg.

Goldberg himself, given the substance of the request, wryly noted the “much appreciated” sign off. I’ll add to that the “(yet another)” parenthetical. It’s all just one pro – writer, blogger, journalist – seeking assistance from a fellow slogger in the field (oh, you know, “yet another”) in getting some work done. What decent guy or gal would not provide collegial assistance?

However, the specific request was the following:

Hi Jeffrey – I’m working on (yet another) piece about the CAP-anti-Semitism controversy. Could you confirm whether, when you joined the IDF, you took this standard oath:

“I swear and commit to pledge allegiance to the State of Israel its laws, and authorities, to accept upon myself unconditionally the authority of the Israel Defense Force, obey all the orders and instructions given by authorized commanders, devote all my energies, and even sacrifice my life for the protection of the homeland and liberty of Israel.”

Much appreciated -

That is, Greenwald was trying (so he thought) to get the goods on Goldberg, to establish, voila, that Goldberg was/is(?), like Sasquatch caught by flash lumbering through the Bayou – there he is, Ladies and Gentleman, you pays your buck, you steps right up, you get to see him, certified, we got the goods on him – a real live Israel Firster in the flesh.

Goldberg provided his answer in the blog post. He offered other comments in other posts, which prompted other responses from a variety of defenders of the Israel-Firster term, including, from Corey Robin, one exceedingly tedious attempt at clever academic exegesis, of an observation by Goldberg, intended to demonstrate see, we’re not anti-Semitic, you’re anti-Semitic, nyah, nyah.

Focus on Goldberg is significant. Goldberg is a liberal supporter of Israel. (The meaning of the word “support” when applied to Israel is yet another issue embedded in this debate. For my purpose today, I’ll call such supporters of Israel as Goldberg firm supporters.) Critics – indeed, very harsh critics of Israel – consistently identify firm support of Israel with the political right, which identification is an essential ground to this whole debate. Neocon is another popular label. Such as Greenwald will apply that term to any individual who has offered any measure of support at any time to exercises of military force by the United States. The right aids in this identification by the typically fundamentalist belligerence of its own support for Israel. If firm support for Israel can successfully be isolated as a hard right position –  and there has been great success in this effort – then the ongoing campaign against the Israeli position can gain greater strength. If a firm, liberal supporter of Israel can be exposed as an “Israel-Firster,” then the very idea of liberal support for the Israeli position can be dismissed as a phantasm. The Israeli-Palestinian war of historical cases can be drawn only in terms of Israel’s most extreme defenders, while the Palestinian extremes are ideologically white washed, and liberal sense is vanquished from the field.

First, then, I call your attention to Greenwald’s approach to Goldberg, on a personal level. In the past, Greenwald has been consistently vituperative in his treatment of Goldberg, with whom he has no personal relationship. Yet he sends this email dressed in the imposture of a friendly, collegial request for assistance – an email intended to gather the information that will help Greenwald, as he sees it, expose Goldberg as a disloyal American. Now it is true that in the political world – and in the journalistic world, where reporters are always seeking very, very important information, justifying all sorts of behavior for the greater good of the human race and the future of the world – excuses are often made for what is normally considered bad behavior. But in that normal world, Greenwald’s phony smile of an email, with its hateful, destructive intent, is as slimy as a human being gets. That the act he committed with his email was not committed for money or to gain political power is a function only of the interests that motivate his life. The discredit it brings upon him should not be forgotten.

Second, consider that we know from the public record of Goldberg’s service in the IDF decades ago, oath taken or not. There are about 86 countries that permit multiple citizenships in some form, with the details complex and varied. Dual citizenship may easily be argued as prima facie (thought not actually certain) evidence of dual loyalty. The United States does not formally recognize dual citizenship; neither does it restrict or punish it in any way. While there are no records kept of dual citizenships, the 2010 census shows the percentage of foreign-born Americans – people with the potential of being dual citizens, and likely to feel degrees of dual loyalty – to be 12.7%, or about 39 million people. Americans, like people all over the world, feel multiple loyalties, to their religious faith, their families, to causes and ideals separate from the official policies of their national governments. Red meat GOP candidates will almost without fail name God first among their following loyalties to family and country. And if God led them to believe that some other nation or group was in his service rather than their own nation?

Beginning in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2800 Americans fought in Spain on behalf of the Republican cause, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and elsewhere. Most were members of the Communist Party or other leftist organizations. They served without the support of the U.S. government, were treated with suspicion after the war, and in some cases were even prosecuted by the Roosevelt Administration for recruiting volunteers into the Brigade. These volunteers into a foreign army are universally regarded with respect and even reverence by American liberals and the broader left.

Whether Goldberg himself swore the oath in question, it is a matter of the most common sense that any military force would require of its personnel that they pledge allegiance to the fighting force that was entrusting them with weapons and their cause.

Greenwald’s attempt to impugn Goldberg’s full loyalty to the United States is vile and reprehensible on two scores. First, in the convergence of some elements of the American left with reactionary movements and sentiments, Greenwald’s attempt to question Goldberg’s loyalty on the basis of an oath resounds with the questioning of Roy Cohn and others during the McCarthy hearings:

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

Now, the question is from Greenwald, and from those who countenance these questions about the loyalty of American Jews whom they believe to support Israel a little too much,

Are you now or have you ever been too ardent a supporter of Israel?

Of what other ethnic or racial group would supposed progressives permit such questions to be asked without condemnation? And in the matter of the most regressive right political forces in the nation – resisting all identification of their own and others’ racist language and insinuation (see: the current GOP presidential primary race) – though the anti-Semitic history of “Israel Firster” has been well documented – these so-called progressives reach to rationalize use of an offensive term against Jews in a manner they would countenance in no other cultural context.

Just because white supremacists used a term doesn’t mean everyone who employs it is an anti-Semite.

Substitute “racist” for anti-Semite and search left literature world-wide for a similar expression.

“Israel-firster” is admittedly a deliberately crude response, but use of the term should be understood within the context of decades of American Jewish right-wing rhetoric that has largely silenced dissent on Israeli policies by discrediting those who dare to criticize Israel.

Try this substitute:

“Food stamp President” is admittedly a deliberately crude response, but use of the term should be understood within the context of decades of militant black rhetoric that has largely silenced dissent on Welfare policies by discrediting those who dare to criticize their perpetuation of an African-American underclass.

Once again:

He also fails to mention that many of those employing the term “Israel-firster” are deeply concerned about Israel’s future and about regional stability, and are no different from members of the Israeli peace camp – not to mention that some of them are Jewish themselves.

Or

He also fails to mention that many of those employing the term “Food stamp President” are deeply concerned about America’s future and about social and economic stability, and are no different from members of the Nation of Islam – not to mention that some of them are black themselves, e.g. Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, and Alan West.

That some people who consider themselves progressive do not cringe with embarrassment and shame at the incoherence of these ideas and arguments, or, in the case of those like Greenwald, at the depths to which they plunge in their animus toward Israel, would be startling if not for the twentieth century history that records these depths before.

It is always so, though, that misguided, even hateful political manifestations will be betrayed in their nature by the figures who most publically represent them. So when we consider Greenwald’s malign questioning of Goldberg’s loyalty on the basis of an oath he might have made over twenty years ago, we need to consider it in the following final light.

When Glenn Greenwald began blogging in 2005, he espoused opinions about illegal immigration that would not be admired or popular among his current fan base. He has been challenged about these views a sufficient number of times to have posted an explanatory update at his original blog, Unclaimed Territory, six years later. His explanation?

This post was written in 2005, one month after I began blogging. It was recently dug up by some Obama cultists trying to discredit my criticisms of the President ….

That was a 6 yrs ago: 3 weeks after I began blogging, when I had zero readers. I’ve discussed many times before how there were many uninformed things I believed back then, before I focused on politics full-time – due to uncritically ingesting conventional wisdom, propaganda, etc. 

Six years is not a very long time in the intellectual life of a 44 year old man. For Glenn Greenwald and Mitt Romney, however, it is sufficient time to reverse most of their previously, and apparently not very reliably, conceived political views, and to now scorn those who believe some of what they once did, including, for both men, ironically, Barack Obama. Six years is sufficient time for Greenwald to expect not to be held accountable for his views. In contrast, for Greenwald, the twenty-two years since Jeffrey Goldberg may have taken an oath that Greenwald thinks damning is no barrier to setting Goldberg up for a smear of disloyalty (Israel Firster) based upon it.

To repeat and clarify: criticisms are based on evidence analyzed and subjected to judgment. A smear is unsubstantiated. The anti-Semitic history of the term “Israel Firster” has been clearly laid out by numerous sources. The disloyalty (Israel Firster) of no one of significance or party to this debate has been substantiated, only malignly alleged in the hope that the accusation will stick.

These critics of Israel could easily back away from the expression and continue to make their case about Israel-Palestine on the basis of the merits they can gather. That they do not, that they aggressively reassert their claim to the term “Israel-Firster,” – rationalizing it in the face of all evidence – and attack those who object to it – casting themselves as victims (rather like Rick Perry’s and Newt Gingrich’s “war on Christianity) – clearly reflects their likeness to their mirrored opposites. These critics defend their use of the term because they believe that this time it is true. They believe that this time there really are divided loyalties, there really is a cadre of Jews exercising excessive, secretive power while aggressively attempting to suppress any exposure of it. And like all their reactionary forebears (like every GOP reactionary today who plays the card of nationalist loyalty) they forget that the belief they cling to is the belief to which purveyors of anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish power always hold fast – it’s the essential marker of the tradition – that what they believe is true.

And this is the belief, like a ball that is chained to the ankle, drawing one down to the depths, by which they will be known.

AJA

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• Existential Threats and Slanted Arguments (sadredearth.com)
• Putting Israel First: The War Party’s Achilles’ heel (middleeastatemporal.wordpress.com)
• Jeffrey Goldberg pushes false neocon smear scrubbed by Washington Post (alethonews.wordpress.com)
• Key West: The Accepted Use of ‘Israel Firster’ Signifies Increased Tolerance for Anti-Semitism. (tabletmag.com)
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• From the People Who Brought You Richard Nixon & George W. Bush (sadredearth.com)

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Who has a shorter memory than the perpetual loser? Over and over the perpetual loser performs the same self-defeating act. Again and again, the loser fails, and failing, finds cause for failure in the inadequacy of others. Charlie Brown runs, as he has run countless times before, for the football Lucy holds to the ground, and which she withdraws yet again, at the ultimate instant, just before Charlie’s flailing kick. Upending himself, he falls to the ground, and cries out in despair, “How long, O Lord.”

Lucy, analyzing Charlie’s unknowing allusion to scripture, offers the final verdict.

“All your life, Charlie Brown. All your life.”

And you thought Peanuts was all sweetness and Christmas specials.

If you are a self-described liberal or progressive anticipating the 2012 presidential election, then you need to beware. For Lucy is coming and she brings her football with her. The same Puritopians who helped elect Richard Nixon president and who practically gave the 2000 election away to George W. Bush, now want to persuade you that the reelection of Barak Obama is not a momentous and meaningful prospect.

Here is Glenn Greenwald, one of the more popular voices of Puritopia (and neither liberal nor progressive anyway) sounding the meme:

Watch the Soros video yourselves. Apparently for the lawyer Greenwald, nuance is like the exculpatory evidence that refutes appearance and shows the defendant innocent. If a mainstream journalist distorted events like this, Glenn Greenwald, blogger, would burn his ass. But who made George Soros the arbiter, and that isn’t even the point.

In 1968 white segregationist George Wallace ran as a third party candidate against Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon, declaring that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties. The meme may have been that of a racist Southern governor, but the belief was adopted by that era’s version of the Puritopian – the most extreme elements of the antiwar left, who refused to forgive Humphrey for his loyal service to Lyndon Johnson and thus withheld from him their support. In September 1968 Humphrey was 18 points behind Nixon in the polls. He made moves to mollify his Democratic critics, and by just before the election, he was only 2 points behind. He lost the popular vote by a mere 500,000 votes. Significantly, while Nixon won 86% of the registered Republican vote, Humphrey won only 74% of registered Democrats. Democratic division before and after the ’68 convention caused many McCarthy, Kennedy, and McGovern supporters to withhold their votes from Humphrey.

It is so recent, we need not review the events of 2000 and the direct link between the candidacy of Ralph Nader and the loss of Al Gore to George W. Bush, after Nader conducted his campaign on the claim that the two major party candidates were “Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” First, then, consider, in just the broadest terms, how different would be the history of the contemporary United States had Hubert Humphrey gained the presidency in 1968 rather than Nixon. Watergate and the following twenty-four year Democratic exile from shaping the national direction are the broadest strokes. Here, in contrast, is a detail, a dot, that broadens to a wide swath across the canvass: in 1972, Nixon appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court. Rehnquist served for thirty-three years, nineteen of them as the third-longest serving Chief Justice in history.

Rehnquist was still on the court in 2000 and was part of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that gave the 2000 election victory to Bush over Gore. One Puritopian deliverance of the presidency to the GOP played a role thirty-two years later in another.

Imagine, again, in just the broadest terms, the changed history of the United States had Gore rightfully gained the presidency. Almost certainly, there would have been no Iraq War. There would have been no Bush tax cuts. These are the two largest contributors to the national debt. Observe Bush’s appointments to the Supreme Court – young men likely to serve as long as Rehnquist.

From 1968 until Obama’s election in 2008, Republicans held the presidency for 28 out of 40 years. Had Humphrey and Gore been president, the numbers would have been reversed. When we speak, as all on the left do these days, of the thirty-year decline in middle-class financial security, earning power, and wealth, and the obscene increases in riches and plutocratic power among the wealthiest Americans, this is a democratic decline concurrent with the rise of American conservatism and its access to presidential power.

When the Puritopians speak of no difference between the parties, they are like interplanetary probes scanning an alien planet. They cannot see the trees for the forest. Because the two parties both espouse capitalism and run candidates subject to the same human foibles and who play by the same corrupting rules they are given as brokers of power, Puritopians want to pull the ball away. They obscure in their every resentful, rageful blast against the system the individuals who would have jobs under democratic governance, with union protection, and growing earnings, enabled to love and marry and serve as they choose, living under the protection of law and agency enforcement that would uphold their rights in difference, and work to protect their water and their food.

Remember how you felt, if you were around, the night Richard Nixon won, and every day of his presidency. Remember the fallen hopes of December 2000, and the years that justified their fall. Listen to these GOP candidates when they speak. Imagine the country you will face on November 6 of this year if one of them wins. Try to persuade yourself it will be no different from the country you wake up to tomorrow, or the one that Barak Obama will continue to try to develop as of that post-election day, especially with a Democratic congress. Do you think the GOP and Tea Parties and conservatives hate him so much because he is no different from them? They know. How can you not? And who is it who tries to persuade you to diminish the circumstances of your own life out of rage against an imperfect world and system that can never deliver to you all you wish it could?

Has this belief that there is no difference between the parties gained the results its adherents hoped for before? In 1968? In 2000? Is the country better for it? Did we smash the system, start all over, make it all better? Or did we only hand power to those who made it worse?

If you wish for some kind of revolution, that dismantling of the system and believe in starting all over, then I can say nothing to you.

Do you think some third party candidate will win in November? Who? Really? Come on.

Do you think, well, we didn’t make it happen in 2000, or with Nader 04 and 08, but we’ll make it happen one day, we’ll get it done? Well, then, my friend, you believe in the hard work of slow change, and sometimes faster, and the gradual betterment of a human and imperfect world. Instead, then, of believing all your effort the invisible, wondrous cause of an outcome, someday, of successive defeats, and all the dispiriting losses that follow from them, why not work along the way to feel that change a little bit each day, even though there will always be so much more to do?

It is a far better thing to be disappointed in your president, if that’s how you feel, than to despise everything he stands for. You can work with the former. With the latter you can only talk idly again about leaving the country. Or, worse, you can do it – after just handing it over.

If Obama loses in November, Glenn Greenwald will still be writing for Salon (probably, or if not, some other publication). He’ll still be shuttling between the U.S. and Brazil. He’ll get to rage against another perfidious president and the same old rot – but, really, you know, rather worse.

And you, progressive, liberal, mon semblable, mon frère – what will be the prospects of your life on the day New Gingrich or Mitt Romney takes office? How will fare the poor, the uninsured, the working man and woman, the retired, the immigrant, the gay, the different, our environment? How better will we manage the American role in the world? Will you really feel no different?

How many times do we have to do this? How many times do we have to play this game? Because I’m telling you, Glenn Greenwald is kneeling with his ball in his hands. He’s whispering, “I’ll hold the football, and you come running up and kick it.” And he’s smiling.

AJA

Related articles

• Why Newt Gingrich Is Like Richard Nixon (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• The GOP’s Long, Sordid History of Shameless Hostage-Taking (alternet.org)
• Bile as Argument (sadredearth.com)
• The Matter of Glenn Greenwald (sadredearth.com)
• Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas (sadredearth.com)

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UPDATED BELOW

There are breeds of argument that always startle me for their smug, tendentious presumption.

Here is one, frequently made, this time by Robert Wright, that rests the continued –  literally – existence of a nation on the parsing of translations and the assurances of theocratic tyrannies. (I assure you, said Mr. Hitler, after the Sudetenland – shaking hands, and with smiles all around – I’m done.)

Actually, the Iranians aren’t a nation whose leaders have set themselves that “strategic goal [of eliminating Israel].” They are a nation with a crackpot president who (a) isn’t the country’s supreme leader and doesn’t have the power to order an attack on Israel; (b) did say ”the occupying regime must be wiped off the map” (or “vanish from the page of time”–the translation is disputed); but (c) later said he was referring to eliminating the Zionist form of government, not the people living under it; and (d) said the way to achieve this was to give Palestinians the vote–and that if they opted for a two-state solution rather than a single non-Zionist state, that would be fine, too; (e) also said that Iran would never initiate military hostilities with Israel.

One can just imagine any Israeli prime minister, with the missiles completing their brief trajectory, crying out at the pending annihilation of the Jewish nation, reconstituted again after two thousand years, “But he used the passive voice!”

And they promised, too.

You can read here a chronology – far lengthier than Wright’s consideration – of the anti-Semitic and genocidal pronouncements of Iran’s “crackpot president.”

This is followed by that other popular argument of presumption, the disbelieving assertion of an antagonist’s unwillingness to act in a morally and sensibly proscribed manner.

Could [Ehud] Barak really think that, even if Iranian leaders had said they would launch a first strike, they’d actually do such a thing? To believe that, you would have to believe that the Iranian regime is literally suicidal, since Israel’s nuclear retaliatory capacity is very robust (not to mention the fact that the event wouldn’t exactly go unnoticed by America). Does Barak really believe the Iranian leadership is crazy?

We know, of course, from history -  even recent history – that governments, regimes, and leaders never make cataclysmic strategic mistakes. It isn’t as if countries have in the past ever attempted to conquer half the known world, killing tens of millions along the way, including their own citizens, setting out to wipe off the map entire groups of people, only to have their efforts backfire with disastrous consequence. Why that would be crazy!

Says Wright,

Barak isn’t as alarmist as some. He concedes in the Times Magazine piece that “Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel.” For example: “An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40^th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West.” Got that? Two of the reasons the Iranian regime wants the bomb are (1) to launch an attack that would be literally suicidal; and (2) to ensure its survival. (No wonder Israelis think the Iranians are crazy!)

It is not as if- or maybe it is  – Wright himself is among those people who have argued that while the U.S. set out to diminish the presence of Islamist terrorists in the world by going to war in Afghanistan, it actually increased their numbers. Nations may, according to Wright himself, follow courses of action that are contradictory to their aims and seeming best interests.

But in the case of Israel, Wright simplifies what the nature of the Iranian threat is to Israel.

Here is a less extreme and simplistic scenario, from Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, launches a cross-border attack into Israel, or kills a sizable number of Israeli civilians with conventional rockets. Israel responds by invading southern Lebanon, and promises, as it has in the past, to destroy Hezbollah. Iran, coming to the defense of its proxy, warns Israel to cease hostilities, and leaves open the question of what it will do if Israel refuses to heed its demand.

Dennis Ross, who until recently served as President Barack Obama’s Iran point man on the National Security Council, notes Hezbollah’s political importance to Tehran. “The only place to which the Iranian government successfully exported the revolution is to Hezbollah in Lebanon,” Ross told me. “If it looks as if the Israelis are going to destroy Hezbollah, you can see Iran threatening Israel, and they begin to change the readiness of their forces. This could set in motion a chain of events that would be like ‘Guns of August’ on steroids.” Imagine that Israel detects a mobilization of Iran’s rocket force or the sudden movement of mobile missile launchers. Does Israel assume the Iranians are bluffing, or that they are not? And would Israel have time to figure this out? Or imagine the opposite: Might Iran, which will have no second-strike capability for many years — that is, no reserve of nuclear weapons to respond with in an exchange — feel compelled to attack Israel first, knowing that it has no second chance?

Wright closes with video of Trita Parsi, in which Parsi,

who just published a book called A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran

reshapes Israeli existential concerns, as focused on a loss of “maneuverability,” –  power, essentially; the power of Israel to protect itself, existentially – as a result of which it would be unable to “invade Lebanon or bomb Syria.” So as Wright selectively and presumptuously presents the case, not only are Israeli concerns about the Iranian nuclear threat outlandish on their face, but they are false and manipulative. Nothing manipulative at all on Wright’s part in citing as his authority the president of the National Iranian American Council, who has long made the case, against all evidence, of Iran’s willingness to engage.

Wright is developing a habit of these less than straightforward appeals, in closing, to authority. In a recent post on the “Israel-Firster” slanders, in which he took what is by this point a predictable position attacking those who rightfully object to the term, Wright in all pretense of ingenuousness offered this:

Is it anti-Semitic, or even anti-Israel, to call the Israeli occupation a moral abomination? I’m not Jewish, so I always feel awkward weighing in on the question of what constitutes anti-Semitism. Instead I turned to someone who is not only Jewish, but is also an Israeli who served in the occupied territory as a lieutenant and is still in the Israeli army reserve.

Now, of course, the issue is not whether one is anti-Semitic because of how one feels about the Israeli presence on the West Bank; it is whether the expression “Israel-Firster” is anti-Semitic in pedigree and aspersion. So Wright has distorted the issue. He also offered not the testimony of, at least, some wise man of Israeli or Jewish culture, but of the co-director of Breaking the Silence, a group guaranteed, in the honest gentile’s search – he only wants to know – to return to him the opinion he already holds. And so it does.

In the case of Parsi, here is what Sohrab Ahmari has to say:

Predictably, Israel and American Jews with an interest in U.S. policy are subjected to the harshest criticism. Israel’s perception of the Iranian threat, Mr. Parsi says, has long “resembled prophesy more than reality,” impelling the Jewish state to frame its conflict with Iran’s clerical regime “as one between the sole democracy in the Middle East and a theocracy that hated everything the West stood for.” Mr. Parsi rejects that perception.

….

Quick to ascribe irrationality and bad faith to opponents of engagement, Mr. Parsi is charitable when it comes to examining the motivations of the Iranian side. But he must frequently sift the obviously belligerent content of the theocrats’ statements to find signs of goodwill—signs invisible to unsophisticated “hawks” and “elements on the right” in the U.S.

Ahmari closes,

Mr. Obama’s engagement policy failed not because of Israeli connivance or because the administration did not try hard enough. The policy failed because the Iranian regime, when confronted by its own people or by outsiders, has only one way of responding: with a truncheon.

In the contention between the United States and Iran, Parsi is not a champion of U.S. interests or intentions. And he is the person Robert Wright offers as support for his own unsympathetic view of Israel’s much more dire concerns.

All just for the record.

UPDATE

I’m blogging on the fly while we travel and neglected to make the following point. Wright has just begun accepting comments on his Atlantic blog, as has Jeffrey Goldberg. As is the case with any blog that is antagonistic to Israel’s position vis a vis the Palestinians, Wright’s is drawing the comments of anti-Semites. It will ever be so. Blog hosts may rightly disavow responsibility for the opinions of their commenters, and even adopt the broadest view of moderating (deleting) controversial expressions. However, I would never permit a clearly racist or hateful comment to go unchallenged on this blog. Wright is engaging his commenters. Why has he not rebuked the commenters below, who have gained many more likes since I made these captures?

AJA

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• Perspective (Oh, Yeah) on Israel and the U.S. (sadredearth.com)
• Framing Israel (sadredearth.com)

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Making our way through the Andes, writing and connecting as I can. Preparing some posts for the coming days.

Mountains and clouds – always a road to wonder.

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Let a hundred blogs bloom: let a hundred schools of condign retribution contend.

Something like that. Mao was so ahead of his time in so many ways. In this blooming bloggery, stars arise, tall stalks that reach for the sky. Lesser plants, leaning toward the light, bend in their direction. They lean toward Glenn Greenwald. What is it that attracts? We’ve done some analysis already, multiple times. Still the hothouse humidly blushes. Very recently, I considered Greenwald on Christopher Hitchens soon after the latter’s death. But while Hitchens has been dead over a month now, the influence of influential writers influences on: only a week ago, John R. MacArthur of Harper’s, having already written this of Hitchens, was led by the very same Greenwald post to reconsider and offer in follow up this. How much did MacArthur understand of the rhetorical display to which he responded? Would his deepened insight, once again, change anything? We can only wonder. Nonetheless, we should understand, shouldn’t we?

In the following guest post, cross-posted by Reilly at counter-dominance, the Greenwald post on Hitchens is analyzed yet again, in more precise rhetorical terms, offering even deeper insight into deceptive strategies Greenwald tends to repeat, and some of which, as I will argue in the next day or so, have become a standard M.O., among one school of the Hundred Flowers, in argumentative misdirection.

***

Greenwald’s self-display

The post-mortem of Christopher Hitchens’ public persona is well over and whether or not there’s an Eternity where Hitchens now resides doesn’t change the fact that, for the rest of us, his afterlife lasted about six days. During that time his body of work was autopsied, his psyche was dissected and his character was examined by an impromptu convention of socio-political pathologists-cum-morticians who vied to prepare his legacy for final viewing. It was an undertaking of competing persuasion — an open casket filled by various writers with carefully directed words, the words establishing the significance of what those authors believed should remain, the remains thus becoming a concentration of certain valuations, and the valuations, like pallbearers, leading the respective processions to their opposing destinations; praise or censure, tribute ordenunciation, encomium or vituperation.  It was a classic demonstration of epideictic rhetoric and, as is the nature of the epideictic – I display for the audience this person’s virtues – or – I expose to the audience this person’s vices – these writings, even in the cases when both commendation and condemnation were mixed to some degree, were presented straightforwardly.  Regardless of their conclusions or their ability to persuade that is the one element these writings had in common;  the authors engaged the subject directly, whether through sentiment, feeling, intellect, or reason.  In short they were honest in their approach, however influenced by point of view.  The substance and merit of the arguments these writers put forth about Hitchens — whether positive or negative – doesn’t interest me.  All of that ground has been covered and I don’t intend to exhume Hitchens for further appraisal, nor will I attempt to resurrect the battle over posthumous perception.

There was one piece of writing during that six day period which I will address.  It was forensic in nature rather than epideictic, or, more accurately, it was a manufactured forensic within which there was an epideictic.  Unlike the aforementioned pieces of writing, this one was the opposite of straightforward.  In fact it was so thoroughly dishonest from premise to particular that one would need to scour the work of right-wing pundits to find its equal.  I’m speaking of the article “Christopher Hitchens and the Protocol for Public Figure Deaths.” written by Glenn Greenwald and published on his blog at Salon on December 17.
Right from the title Greenwald apprises us of the injustice that he’s compelled to tilt against; a “protocol” which is inhibiting criticism of Hitchens upon his death, a protocol which has its roots in the “unhealthy conflation of appropriate post-death etiquette for private persons and the etiquette governing deaths of public figures.”  In order to illustrate this protocol, Greenwald spends about one third of his article recounting Ronald Reagan’s funeral and the media’s handling of that spectacle.  In order to prove a parallel situation at work with Hitchens, Greenwald, well…does nothing.  The inference is supposed to be enough.  If you’re looking for concrete instances of “etiquette-based prohibitions on speaking ill of the dead”  directed towards Hitchens you won’t find any.  Greenwald offers no hyperlinks but an abundance of hyperbole:

Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration…

Hitchens’ champions don’t just want him to be loved, but beloved, and not simply beloved but universally beloved, and not measured as a mere writer, but beatified as a literary saint.  They don’t want only to memorialize him but to enshrine him.  They’re not satisfied with a degree of admiration, they want unalloyed admiration. Greenwald is firing rounds of fully loaded language, but who is he aiming at?  Not the un-cited and unspecified admirers of Hitchens.  And not Hitchens himself.  Greenwald’s aiming at his readership.  He’s discharging bursts of smoke and emotion to cloud the field and obscure the figure of the straw man he’s created.

Nor should anyone be deterred by the manipulative, somewhat tyrannical use of sympathy: designed to render any post-death criticisms gauche and forbidden.

Nothing defuses loaded language and exposes vague accusation more efficiently than the question mark:  Who were these manipulative tyrants who suppressed criticism under the guise of sympathy?  And why wouldn’t they deserve a link, or at least one quote?

But demanding in the name of politeness or civility that none of that be balanced or refuted by other facts is to demand a monopoly on how a consequential figure is remembered, to demand a license to propagandize….

Who made these demands?  Where are the links and the quotes?  Did this happen on the internet?  Demands for politeness and civility on the internet generally get nothing but a chuckle and a pejorative or a pile-on of derision, as they should.  Certainly nobody would take that seriously, let alone pretend that it was an oppressive force or actual obstacle.  If these demands were made by one or more of the establishment media stars then why not identify the person or persons?  If Greenwald could produce a quote from Judy Woodruff about Reagan’s funeral, and if, as he states, the same “protocol” was at work in Hitchens’ case, then why couldn’t he produce a quote about any of his claims listed here?

I could go on citing the exaggerated and misleading language meant to angry up the reader’s blood with righteous indignation — “But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions…” – and the weasel words — “There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins.” – meant to insinuate rather than demonstrate, but there’s no need to hold up each soiled garment one by one.  There are other points to be made.

Besides the biased, emotion-laden language, the over-the-top melodramatic phrasing, and the caricature of phantom demands in these passages, there’s also an underlying current of victimhood.“Nobody should have to silently watch…” lamented Greenwald in that first quote.  Indeed nobody did have to silently watch, least of all Greenwald who is firm in his view of the influence that the blogosphere in general exerts on political discourse and opinion, and even more adamant about the measurable effects generated from his own personal platform.  Greenwald’s colleagues at Salon, Alex Pareene and Michael Lind, certainly didn’t “silently watch”; they both wrote stinging criticisms of Hitchens.  And although Greenwald couldn’t point to a single example of pro-Hitchens protocol enforcement, he did manage to link to criticisms of Hitchens from three other bloggers; Corey Robin, John Cook, and Aaron Bady.  The pretense of victimization, like the other manipulative elements I mentioned, all have the same source –Greenwald’s self-indulgence in pursuing a forensic argument based on a false premise and a fictional injustice rather than straightforwardly offering an epideictic of his own.  The wasted word count between the Reagan conflation and the sophistry-stuffed straw man would have left him plenty of room for unrestrained criticism.  But maybe that’s the problem since most of the space Greenwald actually dedicates to criticism of Hitchens is filled with words borrowed from others.  Maybe he just didn’t have all that much to say.   After all Greenwald does remark that he “rarely wrote about (Hitchens) because… there was nothing particularly notable about him.”  Strangely though, he contradicts that when he admonishes his readers that to have a public discourse without criticizing Hitchens is to “insist that (his) actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant.”  And in one of the quotes above, Greenwald refers to Hitchens as“a consequential figure.” Perhaps there’s a protocol for public figures who are not “particularly notable” when alive but become immediately significant after death.
One of the the authors Greenwald chooses as a prop for criticism-filler is George Orwell, although Greenwald can hardly be singled-out for that.  On the internet left, whether blogger or commenter, it is absolutely impossible to go to the Orwell once too often.  There are so many Orwell quotes, so many references to Animal Farm and 1984, and so many invocations of the term “Orwellian” that now when I run across them my jaw goes slack and my eyes glaze over – Homage to Catatonia.  There’s Orwell-the-political-Nostradamus, Orwell-the-incorruptible-truth-teller, and most often, Orwell-the-validator-of-whatever-point-I’m-making-now.  That’s the one Greenwald opts for, so he pulls a passage from the sacred text of Orwell and clubs Hitchens over the headstone with it.  I have no problem with that but I do have to wonder (I guess I’m not immune from the phenomenon) what Orwell-the-essayist would have to say about Greenwald’s unsupportable and intellectually dishonest piece of writing.

Besides commandeering the sword of Orwell to use against Hitchens, Greenwald enlists Hitchens himself as shield against more of those phantom etiquette crusaders.  In an update to his piece, Greenwald writes:

The day after Jerry Falwell died, Hitchens went on CNN and scorned what he called “the empty life of this ugly little charlatan,” saying: ”I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.” As I said, those demanding that Hitchens not be criticized in death are invoking a warped etiquette standard on his behalf that is not only irrational, but is one he himself vigorously rejected.

Evidently he thinks Hitchens is proving his point, but what Greenwald unwittingly demonstrates is the falseness of his entire premise.  Falwell was much more widely known by the public and also commanded a much greater access to mainstream media venues, especially cable news programs.  If there does indeed exist “etiquette-based prohibitions” and an enforced “protocol” for public figures which bar criticism of them after their deaths, then why was Hitchens able to go onto CNN and say what he said the very day after Falwell died?  The answer of course is that Greenwald’s formulation is a complete fantasy.  And let’s say this much for Hitchens; at least when Falwell died Hitchens was straightforward enough to engage in no-holds-barred public vituperation of him.  The same can be said of the aforementioned Alex Pareene and Michael Lind as well as Alexander Cockburn and others with regard to Hitchens after his death.  Only Greenwald felt the need to rail about nonexistent constraints rather than engage the subject fully and directly.

What motivated Greenwald is purely speculative but interesting nonetheless.  Perhaps he looked out through the narrow view of his twitter window, saw a few flashes and concluded there was a media shower across the entire sky.  Or perhaps a couple of fellow bloggers shook the word “hagiography” under his nose and it acted on him like catnip (yes, maybe that’s why it’s called a buzzword.)  Or perhaps he’s guilty of the same behavior he so easily accuses others of – being slothful.  But one thing is certain, Greenwald’s analysis is inept to the point of embarrassing.

To summarize the media treatment of Reagan’s funeral as the product of “…an unhealthy conflation of appropriate post-death etiquette for private persons and the etiquette governing deaths of public figures.”  and to conclude that “extremely politicized tributes” were “shielded from refutation or balance by the grief of a widow and social mores that bar one from speaking ill of the dead.”  is to misconstrue the forces at work by a proportionality that’s almost dumbfounding.  Reagan’s treatment wasn’t due to social mores or etiquette or taboo or the feelings of a loved one, it was a living, breathing demonstration of political/media hegemony or, more commonly, cultural hegemony.  No one needs to be a Marxist, or to have read Gramsci, to grasp this in our day and age.

And the cultural hegemony with regard to Reagan was solidified long before his death.  These two statements by Greenwald: “That week forever changed how Ronald Reagan — and his conservative ideology — were perceived.” and “Though he became more popular after leaving office (like most Presidents), it was that week-long bombardment of hagiography that sealed Reagan’s status as Great and Cherished Leader.”, have no basis whatsoever in reality.  They are, like almost everything else in this article, unsupported and unsupportable.  Greenwald cites a Gallup poll about Reagan’s polling numbers while he was in office but those numbers aren’t proof of his claim.  Gallup’s retrospective job approval ratings for Reagan show him at 71% approval in February 1999.  He slides down to 66% in February 2000, and then rises to 73% by March of 2002.  Gallup’s next available poll shows Reagan back down to 71% in 2006 (two years after his funeral) and then up to 74% in 2010.  So, unequivocally, it wasn’t the funeral week that “forever changed how Ronald Reagan — and his conservative ideology — were perceived.” , and it wasn’t “that week-long bombardment of hagiography that sealed Reagan’s status as Great and Cherished Leader.”  If we look again at the first graph, we can clearly see what transpired.  In November of 1993 Reagan had a 52% approval rating.  By February 1999 he had a 71% approval rating and since then, as we’ve just seen, his ratings have fluctuated by going down no more than 5 points and up by no more than three.  Obviously the six years between 1993 and 1999 were what “forever changed” how Reagan was perceived.  And even those on the margins of political awareness – let alone a professional pundit – could probably be able to figure out why.  That was the period during which Clinton was besieged by the right with the blessing and active cooperation of the “liberal” media.  That was the period during which the “culture wars” were elevated to primacy in our political universe with the active participation of an establishment media intent on valuing “real Americans” over “elites”.  And all of that was tied together by an active, consciously intended campaign by the GOP to lionize Reagan and make him look, in retrospect, as if he had been the embodiment of cherished American virtues – virtues, they would have us believe, that Clinton lacked and that the country had by then somehow lost.   And it worked, but it took years — not a week.  That week was the expression of the hegemony already fully created, not the cause of it.  It’s an insult that Greenwald tried to pass this off as analysis.  What we don’t need is another pundit, whether from the mainstream media or from the blogosphere, who thinks he can twist history for his own convenience.   In Hitchens’ case Greenwald invented societal forces that didn’t exist.  In Reagan’s case he trivialized the ones that did.  He had to elevate the first and diminish the second in order for both to occupy the same fabricated construct.

This isn’t the first time Greenwald has used that tactic. In his post The Libya War Argument he begins not with Libya but with the Iraq war and the reaction of “war advocates” in 2003 after Baghdad fell to American troops and Saddam Hussein was captured. He states that:

war proponents, given pervasive hatred of Saddam, dared anyone to question the war in the wake of those emotional events and risk appearing to oppose Saddam’s defeat. That tactic succeeded in turning war criticism in the immediate aftermath of those events into a taboo…

It’s undeniable that criticism of the Iraq war was delegitimized and treated with contempt after these two events, but It wasn’t “war proponents” — some faction of society — that celebrated Baghdad’s fall and Saddam’s death and turned criticism into taboo, it was the full power of political/media hegemonic enforcement. Then in order to draw a correlation from that to the Libyan war Greenwald writes:

And now, in the wake of the apparent demise of the Gadaffi regime, we see all sorts of efforts, mostly from Democratic partisans, to exploit the emotions from Gadaffi’s fall to shame those who questioned the war…

And as proof of these “efforts” Greenwald offers…(I’m not making this up)…a tweet from Think Progress and a blog entry from Balloon Juice.

Just as in the Hitchens piece, Greenwald diminishes the actual societal forces at play on one side and invents forces by elevating trivialities on the other side, so that both conform to his narrative. And again as in his Hitchens post, Greenwald, writing from his influential platform over which he has complete editorial control, strikes the pose of victim on whom “demands” are being made even as he spends most of his word count on conflation and inference rather than directly addressing an argument, and even though the oppressive forces he tilts against are little more than other people’s opinion.

I don’t know what motivates Greenwald to engage in this type of rhetoric. But I do know that reason and critical thought don’t rely on inference, unproven assertion and loaded language. And I also know that Greenwald doesn’t illuminate our reality with this kind of work – he concocts his own. Then he stands above it to rail about the elements that he himself has contrived.

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• In Their Own Words: Glenn Greenwald, Armatya Sen, John Gray (sadredearth.com)
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• Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas (sadredearth.com)
• Prosey BUTTONS!: Shorter Glenn Greenwald: The Klan Has Important Points to Make! – http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2012/01/shorter-glenn-greenwald-klan-has.html (friendfeed.com)
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• Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism (sadredearth.com)

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Several days ago, a late reader of my post “Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas” sent me an insulting private email. Since this is a blog with a public commenting apparatus, I am always struck when people choose to insult me privately rather than offer counter-arguments and insult in the public forum. I have considered this phenomenon in the past. There is, in part, I think, recognition, in the mere insult, that a boundary is being transgressed, a level sunk below, and the consequent concern that the comment will be deleted. The private email ensures, at the very least, that I will receive the verbal shiv, because, as I said before, the writer “imagines the whispered remark the more deeply wounding insult, like a blade inserted at close quarters.” The writer also probably imagines the unlikelihood that the victim will make the insult public, and thus be challenged to defend his form of argument. People are free to imagine whatever they like.

The writer, Robert Pentangelo, wrote the following:

By the way, you neocon apologist, since you finally ascertained that the Bush administration got it wrong on Iraq:

1.  Where are your blogs condemning them for their lies and manipulations?
2. Where are your blogs  condemning Snitch for his continued war mongering AFTER you in your brilliance finally figured out the truth.

You are the dishonest bullshit artist, not Mr. Greenwald.

The first point to make is that Pentangelo wrote in response to a post that was not a defense of the Iraq War or a criticism of Glenn Greenwald’s own position on the Iraq War, but a criticism – as just about always when I write about Greenwald – of the manner in which Greenwald argues: its dishonesty and its, technically speaking, nature as bullshit. In my post, in fact, I highlighted how Greenwald’s deceptive argument, purporting to serve as resistance to some prohibition against speaking ill of the dead, specifically Christopher Hitchens, and as some sort of consideration of the “protocol for public figure deaths,” was actually the latest of Greenwald’s frequent exercises in personally trashing anyone who, as he did, supported the Iraq War, but who has either not recanted his support or, like Greenwald, simply, conveniently built a public career on never acknowledging his former support in the first place. There will be another post on this tomorrow. Pentangelo, an apparent Greenwald fanboy, continues in the manner of his hero by ignoring the subject of the post and wants to focus, instead, on Iraq. As there is always someone wrong on the Internet, for the Pentangelos and Greenwalds there is always still someone out there who thought differently from them (well, not, actually, Greenwald) on Iraq and who has not yet been reviled as lower than a snail’s ass. They cannot rest.

Penatangelo wonders where are my blogs condemning the Neocons and Bush administration for their “their lies and manipulations” on Iraq. Apparently one of those for whom the mouth is to off more readily than the bother is to research, Pentangelo seems not to know that the Iraq War began in March 2003 and I did not begin to blog until November 2008. For the first year of my blogging, the focus was on my travels in Indian Country. I haven’t skewered the Kennedy  administration for the Bay of Pigs yet, either, but I’m sure I’ll get caught up. Anyone who has read this blog knows where I stand in relation to the Bush administration, and, for instance, on still lively issues during the life of this blog such as torture.

But this is not about me, though the Greenwald’s and Pentangelos will always personalize the issues in ad hominem attack rather than honest consideration of ideas. (This, by the way, is not ad hominem, because the very issue is the person and how he argues, and I am offering idea and illustration in support of my claim.) Greenwald himself even offered a recent defense of the procedure.

Is it really “a sign of decency” to refuse to view any political ideas as not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but as a reflection of the person’s character? Obviously, there are many political disagreements — most — which can and should be conducted in perfectly good faith without the need for personal animus. Conversely, though, aren’t there some political views so repellent and sociopathic that “a sign of essential decency” is to make it personal, rather than refusing to do so?

Of course, nearly everyone will think that of course there are views so repellent we need to make them personal – Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, and George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Christopher Hitchens, George Soros, Saul Alinsky and, yea, Barry Obama. For among the corrupting influences on the right of the American political scene whom Greenwald may be said to simulate, Newt Gingrich is one. It is Gingrich more than any public figure in American politics who originated – consciously, purposely originated – what became known as the “politics of personal destruction.” It was Gingrich who engineered the GOP ascent into the congressional majority by determining that the loyal, collegial opposition would be henceforth enemies of America. The clarion call of the far right fringe – the John Birch Society – would become the everyday thrust of mainstream political attack. Are there “any political ideas” Greenwald asks that are “not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but … a reflection of the person’s character?” Sure, we will agree. But if “repellent and sociopathic” begin at Hitchens and, might I float, Glenn Greenwald, what room does that leave for Saddam Hussein and Bashir Assad – spawn of Satan? Is that even worse?

The language, the terms of the debate, is so excessive, so broadly cast that once you determine to use those nets, the stock is quickly depleted. It happens every time.

I’ll suggest to Robert Pentangelo that he try to argue any issue in American politics without sputtering out “neocon” like a “you know” tic. That he is probably too old for the resort to “Snitch.” (Hitchens, Hitch, Snitch,.Get it? Ha!) That if he calls someone dishonest, he actually point out a dishonesty – a determinable truth and a misrepresentation of it – and, if a “bullshit” artist, he offer up the turd, with a clear analysis of its properties. It’s dirty work, but some of us have to do it. Until then, he doesn’t engage in any kind of worthwhile argument at all. He merely serves as an object lesson.

AJA

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Before the Law. Waiting for Godot. Meeting Marshak.

Anticipating the week ahead…

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The perfect bitter loss.

Except for 0-2, the Los Angeles Clippers led EVERY SECOND of the game last night UNTIL the Minnesota Timberwolves tied it with a three pointer at what turned out to be (with a .6 second correction) 1.5 seconds remaining. This three pointer AT THE BUZZER won it.

(Courtesy of friend Barret, our seats were far below this camera and midcourt. Friend Brandon, a Clippers fan from Minnesota, couldn’t lose.)

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The full range of Ron Paul’s reeking extremism was exposed yesterday by The New Republic.

Ron Paul has recently suggestedthere was only a “total of about eight or ten sentences” of “bad stuff” in the newsletters that he regularly used to publish under his name. This assertion was patently false: As TNR has shown, the newsletters contained dozens of statements marked by bigotry and conspiratorial thinking. In light of Paul’s continuing evasions about the newsletters, and with hopes of clarifying the matter definitively, TNR is now making more of them available.

In almost countless selections from Paul’s newsletters from the 80s and 90s we get the odor of every crackpot conspiracy that litters the field of international and American politics, from global banking cabals and Branch Davidians to AIDS and the violent threat of a black underclass. But to any clear-eyed observer with a nose for political garbage none of this surprises. The contours of Paul’s thought have always been clearly drawn. None with any claim to sound political analysis and judgment could fail to catch the whiff of such foul political detritus, and any public voice who has actually touted the contribution of Paul to the national discourse – from Andrew Sullivan, who endorsed him, to Glenn Greenwald who has consistently promoted him, to Robert Wright who hailed his “greatness” – well deserves the loss of our decent respect for his opinions. What’s the worth of thinkers who so mistake the biggest turds along the way for fool’s gold?

All this constitutes the most fundamental kind of public irresponsibility – the reckless fouling of social trust and the civil union with the wildest imaginings of human conspiracy, betrayal, and degradation among one’s fellows. And we shouldn’t believe for a moment that such uncritical accusation serves at all in recognizing the actual instances in the world of those human flaws: Ron Paul would ignore, for instance, in his foreign policy, every human degradation around the world, in every other society, in his praise of the human disconnection he promotes as libertarianism. It is just that disconnection, too, of one human being from another, in mutual care and support against the burdens of life, in alliance for the betterment of our human condition, that is the essential irresponsibility of libertarianism. Of whatever human ill found in the life of another, the libertarian’s angry, defensive cry is always, “I am not responsible.” That is to say, in two, divergent senses of that word, I did not cause your condition; neither am I obligated to expend myself to improve it. In either case, I am not responsible.

No wonder, then, that at one of the earlier GOP debates Ron Paul could respond to a hypothetical about the medical care that might be provided an uninsured person – avoiding the full statement in implication of his ideas – that “this idea that we have to take care of everybody…,” and the supportive audience would actually cheer the notion of letting the person die.

There are, for the libertarian, few more unloaded and provocative words than that of responsibility. The libertarian is so challenged by the word, in effect, as to suffer a kind of cognitive disability in the face of it. Libertarians, and the Tea Party conservatives who converge with them in this area of thought, frequently cannot distinguish responsibility as obligation, responsibility as the holding of another in one’s care, and responsibility as guilt, the last of which is what libertarians will always fear is impugned in any discussion of common responsibility, and all of which is always, as government policy, a tyrannical burden upon them. From one of Paul’s newsletters:

Justice Brandeis said that the most important Constitutional right the Founding Fathers gave us was the “right to be left alone.”

While traditional conservatives reject this right to privacy that Brandeis proposed in an early legal paper and much later Supreme Court dissent, libertarians love to cite it. Timothy McVeigh did so at his trial. Ignore for today that Brandeis as a crusading social advocate and firm believer in government regulation of private enterprise, represented in his intellect and public career nearly everything the libertarian disavows. Overlook that Brandeis wrote “let” alone, not “left” alone, and that one could tease out a treatise on a subtle and profound distinction, accordingly, between uninterfered with and isolated. This returns us to my statement, in my first in this four-part series of posts on libertarianism, of cranky libertarian essentialism: “leave me the fuck alone.”

As I wrote in “The Reactionary Libertarian,” the libertarian rejects the ethical entailments that naturally arise from the expanding technological and communicative ties of modernity. In this, too, citation of Brandeis is a sham, as Brandeis wrote, along with Samuel Warren, in that original Harvard Law Review article,

Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society.

Brandeis recognized an evolving world; libertarians are time-stuck, dispositionally resistant to change. In a sparsely populated agrarian society, a rural and wilderness culture, it is easy – one might even say natural – to conceive, as the ground of our social existence, the physical isolation and the separable moral agency of each individual, for him or herself, and unencumbered (mostly, literally, physically) by the  press of the lives of others upon us. In the modern world – human technology, like human beings, being a part of nature – it is distinctly unnatural. It is, against all the challenges that face us, irresponsible.

AJA

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From my recent Geronimo post, we’ve had a brief discussion in the comments section about John Ross, Chief of the Cherokee at the time the Great Removal (in contemporary terminology, “ethnic cleansing), or Trail of Tears, and Andrew Jackson, and who should really be on the $20 bill. One of the actors in the segment of We Shall Remain that told the Cherokee story, it was noted, is Wes Studi. Studi actually is Cherokee, though he has played Indians of varied tribes, including in the fierce performance that made his reputation, the Huron Indian Magua in Michael Mann‘s The Last of the Mohicans.

Mohicans is one of Hollywood’s most finely accomplished adventure stories, a film of refined aesthetic vision coupled with invigorating popular appeal. It is one of the most kinetic films ever made. It achieves its energy not with the now standard quick cuts and explosions but with nearly non-stop movement. This last scene represents most of of what the film is – a depiction of almost ceaseless flight and pursuit. Along the way, the film very naturally, with no didactic intent, captures the historic reality: a continent warred over, during the French and Indian War, by foreign powers, the colonials already emerging as a distinct community and culture, and the native peoples ensnared in a contest for power in which they surely would be among the losers. The stunning landscape that forms the backdrop for all the action offers a vision of the magnificent continent at stake. Click on widescreen. Turn up the sound.

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Sometimes posts pretty much write themselves.

In 1975 Caitlin Flanagan’s mother and father, who was then chair of the Berkeley English department, hosted a dinner party for Joan Didion, a Berkeley alum back as a one-month Regents Lecturer. Flanagan, then only 14, was of course expected to attend. She is unforgiving.

From “The Autumn of Joan Didion,” subtitled “The writer’s work is a triumph—and a disaster.”

I don’t like writers. I like Carly Simon and Elton John and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I like getting out of Berkeley altogether, driving through the Caldecott Tunnel and going to the Sunvalley Mall, where they have a food court, a movie theater, birds in cages, a Macy’s, a J. C. Penney, and a Sears. I am trying to make a life very different from the one I’m growing up in, which is filled with intellectuals and writers and passionate ideas about long-dead people. I’m growing up with people who take a dim view of America (many who come to dinner parties at our house hate America), but I love America, a place whose principal values and delights are on display at the Sunvalley Mall.

Flanagan was nonetheless won over, for a time. She had her reasons.

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…. Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

Elsewhere:

Didion is the writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse, the one that follows us into adulthood: the desire to retreat to our room, to close the door, to spend some time alone with our thoughts and our feelings….When we learned that each time she finished a novel she had done so back in her old bedroom at her parents’ house—the one she had painted carnation pink during her first year at college, and that had green vines growing up over all the windows, so that the light was filtered—we all imagined writing novels and finishing them in just that way. That’s who we all wanted to be—someone’s star student and someone else’s star daughter, the ingenue who didn’t have to carry the picture but without whom it would be flat and lusterless. We were the ones who wanted to provide—or be—“colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.”

Shall we fear being the living material of other people’s fantasies? Perhaps.

Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore.

That’s the aesthetic complaint. There is the person, too, and the adopted daughter, Quintana, long troubled, now dead, subject of Didion’s latest book, Blue Nights.

Quintana’s parents wrote her into existence in myriad places, and always managed to present themselves as the parents of the century, but off the page she was a deeply troubled person, whose demons ranged from a chronic overuse of alcohol to a variety of mental illnesses, including manic depression. In other words, she should have fit right in, but she didn’t fit right in, because the Didion-Dunnes had one of those insular, deeply interdependent, and mutually reinforcing marriages that children have an impossible time breaking into.

Didion reports that the central demon of Quintana’s life was a fear of abandonment. “How,” she writes plaintively, “could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?” A cursory reading of the Didion-Dunne canon provides a partial answer. In The White Album, Didion saw fit to quote liberally from her own psychiatric evaluation (as an outpatient she was treated over a lengthy period). The diagnosis included that she had emotionally “alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings.” In thrall to “an underlying psychotic process,” her contact with reality was “obviously and seriously impaired.” This period lasted from 1966 to 1971, a fact that takes on a different complexion when you realize that Quintana was born and adopted in 1966.

Both of Quintana’s parents worked constantly, left her alone with a variety of sitters—two teenage boys who happened to live next door, a woman who “saw death” in Joan Didion’s aura, whatever hotel sitter was on duty—and they left her alone in Los Angeles many, many times when they were working. The Christmas Quintana was 3, Didion planned to make crèches and pomegranate jelly with her, but then got a picture in New York and decided she’d rather do that, leaving her child home. (She was there because the movie was “precisely what I want to be doing,” Didion wrote defiantly, although she admitted that it was difficult for her to look into the windows of FAO Schwarz.) She balanced ill health and short deadlines by drinking gin and hot water to blunt the pain and taking Dexedrine to blunt the gin, which makes for some ravishing reading, but is hardly a prescription for attentive parenting. Where was Quintana when Didion was living at the Faculty Club, or finishing her novels at her parents’ house, or bunking down in the Haight? Not with her mother.

That’s the indictment: Didion and Dunne were selfish, self-involved writers, bad parents. It goes on like that until – what’s that? – the regretful, nostalgic close.

It is not the close, not today, anyway.

In 2004, Ms. Magazine published “Back to the Kitchen, Circa 1950, with Caitlin Flanagan,” by Hillary Frey, in which Frey traces Flanagan’s career and how she

quickly made her name in The Atlantic as a contrarian critic of modern domestic life.

There was one essay in particular: “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement: Dispatches from the nanny wars.”

In that essay, two years in the works, Flanagan argued that “liberated,” upper-middle-class women have built their careers on the backs of the poor immigrant women who provide so much in-home child care in this country.

In her estimation, estimation, while moms in designer suits run off to office jobs that fuel their feminist-inspired narcissism, tiny loved ones are being raised by women from far-flung places, who have come to America only to pull down less than minimum wage from their stingy female employers, toil without job security or pensions and suffer various forms of emotional and physical abuse at their hands as well.

Not long after this polemic appeared, Flanagan openly declared her pet peeves to The New York Observer: “feminism and homophobia.”

Many critics of Flanagan’s article saw the concern for immigrant nannies as a pretext for an attack on feminism.

There was no way to see an article containing the statement “when a mother works, something is lost” as anything but an attack on working mothers. Scores of moms took notice.

As The Observer reported, The Atlantic received “an extraordinary number of letters” in response to the piece. To be sure, Flanagan’s piece contained a chilling, vindictive and scornful message: Women of a certain class who choose to work are selfish, overextended whiners who care more about their fragile egos than their children, whose formative years are witnessed not by their mothers, but by their paid-for surrogates.

Flanagan is a self-described anti-feminist, one who “was virtuously willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her children,” so it’s not surprising to read her beating up on professional working moms. In her first piece for The New Yorker, she described feeling deserted by her own Feminist Mystique-reading mother at age 12 when her mom took it upon herself to find gainful employment outside the home.

“I was miserable,” writes Flanagan. “To my thinking, my mother’s change of heart constituted child abandonment, plain and simple.”

Despite the fact that “almost as soon as my mother began working, she cheered up,” Flanagan could only see that she’d been “dumped by Mom.”

But wait … Isn’t Flanagan a working mom? Apparently, she doesn’t think so.

In an interview posted on The Atlantic’s website about her “nanny wars” piece, Flanagan mentioned a conversation about evening business meetings she’d had with a working mother — “one with a real job, not a writer!” she said.

The Atlantic website tells us of Flanagan, further, that she

is at work on Girl Land, a book about the emotional life of pubescent girls.

I don’t know. You put it all together.

AJA

Related articles

• The Didion-Dunnes as Generation-Specific Awful Parents (theawl.com)
• The Autumn of Joan Didion (longform.org)
• Reading Reading Reading (nancyrommelmann.typepad.com)
• Blue Nights – Joan Didion (booklolly.wordpress.com)
• You: Books of The Times: ‘Blue Nights,’ by Joan Didion – Review (nytimes.com)
• Things Fall Apart: Joan Didion’s ‘Blue Nights’ (Review) (popmatters.com)
• Writing about painful things is how Joan Didion keeps going (arts.nationalpost.com)

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It is a kind of intellectual zone defense  to respond to accusations of bad behavior by noting that others are sometimes bad too. Political parties should rise and fall on the basis of the their own incoherence and mendacity, and the contemporary GOP, reaching new depths since the 2010 elections, will be recorded for its own. One need only review the mostly successful attempts by newly elected GOP governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio to mask ideological animus as budgetary policy and voter suppression of the poor and minorities as protection of the electoral process.

The latter instance we have seen in South Carolina’s Voter ID law, which the Justice Department quashed on the basis of disparate impact that even the state’s own statistics support. Still, South Carolina plans to challenge the Justice Department’s decision in court. Tellingly,

Gov. Nikki Haley called the voter ID law a “very important and pressing issue,” though, when asked, she did not name any instances where voter fraud could have been prevented by a law requiring a DMV-issued photo ID.

And who will be representing South Carolina in its legal challenge?

Fighting on their behalf will be a former DOJ official who claimed that the Civil Rights Division is opposed to protecting the civil rights of whites and who defended the Bush-era politicalization of the division by Bradley Schlozman as an effort to “diversify.”

South Carolina has hired former Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates, who defied DOJ’s instructions and testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Republican-led probe into the infamous New Black Panther Party case, a spokesman for the South Carolina attorney general’s office told The State newspaper.

Former colleagues said that Coates had an ideological conversion after an African-American woman was chosen over him as deputy section chief in July of 2000. Schlozman, who was found to have hired lawyers for their conservative credentials and referred to liberals as “commies” and “mold spores,” called Coates a “true member of the team.”

One further point for now is to note how the libertarian-styled instincts of the GOP to oppose “intrusive” government always lose their salience when the government is state rather than federal and the intrusion disenfranchises those not part of the GOP’s voter base.

Related articles

• South Carolina Voter ID Law Blocked (theroot.com)
• South Carolina Cultural Terrorist Voter ID Law Bocked (culturalhealth.blogspot.com)
• South Carolina Voter ID Law Ruled Discriminatory By Justice Department (alan.com)
• The ongoing effort to disenfranchise poor, black voters (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Libertarian Delusion (sadredearth.com)
• Tea Party Bolshevism (sadredearth.com)

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I said in “Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism” that libertarianism is a disposition claiming an offense, a cranky warning to other people to bugger off. I closed by characterizing it as a rejection of modernity. This is so of most contemporary American conservatisms, but the libertarian rejection is different, not simply conservative in the original sense of the word, but radical, in the first sense of that word. David Hume points the way.

A few weeks back, Amartya Sen, writing in The New Republic on Hume, in “The Boundaries of Justice,” wrote,

In the early days of the increasing globalization in which Hume lived, with new trade routes and expanding economic relations across the world, Hume talked about the growing need to think afresh about the nature of justice, as we come to know more about people living elsewhere, with whom we have come to develop new relations:

Again suppose, that several distinct societies maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions. History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue.

The remark is of interest in itself, and also helps us to understand the general idea of justice, and its particular application to global justice, that can be seen to be part of the Humean line of analysis. But it can also be used to illustrate Hume’s general arguments for the need to interrelate ethics and epistemology, and moral reasoning and human sentiments. [Emphasis added]

“The need to interrelate ethics and epistemology”: the more we know of other people and their lives, the more widely our affective connections range, the greater grow the boundaries of our moral sentiments and our sense of justice. In one respect, this is a commonplace taught to children: try to understand others, to see the world through their eyes, and comity will grow. But this is actually consequential to something prior – what brings us to know of - not yet even know – others in the first place. Hume refers to “new trade routes and expanding economic relations across the world,” which certainly conforms to our contemporary notion of globalization. People have differing and strong reactions to that word depending upon what is intended by it, whether economic, social, political – or technological, which enables all those others.

Back in 2009 and 10 I engaged in a series of blog debates with the proprietor of the ShrinkWrapped blog. It was a notable failure at manifesting anything other than what we see in the left-right political division all around us. Shrink himself was always friendly and a gentleman. He is also a libertarian. Among his many readers who participated in the comments, a few identified their libertarian position; most others, though not taking on the label, were clearly, in their antipathy to government and their rage at liberals, representative of and sympathetic to the Tea Party eruption then taking place. Among the many acrimonious debates I had with ShrinkWrapped’s readers, a few central issues stood out. One revolved around this very subject of Hume’s, how the moral bonds among people grow “in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions.”

Attempting early in the debates to provide some larger philosophical groundwork for our discussions, I penned one night (tapped out, really – ah, technology) what I labeled my “Principia Liberalis.” There were, conveniently, twenty-five of them. This was number twenty-one:

Technology increases affective connections, which are loosened by the distance that technology narrows. The greater the affective connection, the greater the sense of mutual moral responsibility. Notions of discrete and separable, autonomous individuality, neither responsible to nor the responsibility of others, are irreversibly challenged by population density and technology, and the increased effect of human actions on other humans. It is necessary to define what core autonomy need be protected, as an essential human good, but earlier stages of political relation, of individuals to each other, and of individuals to the commonweal, will not be recovered.

What Sen identifies as Hume’s consideration of expanding “economic relations” I attributed more fundamentally to technology. There is also the vaguest suggestion in my principle that, of course, this effect of technology is not an automatic universal good – there would be little science fiction without our recognition of all the potential evils cooked into technology. I did also observe that

earlier stages of political relation, of individuals to each other, and of individuals to the commonweal, will not be recovered.

There is little if any evidence of any ability on the part of humans to control the advance of technological transformation in their lives. Libertarians pretend they can reverse it. I emphasized in Hume above the following:

History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments.

This “natural progress of human sentiment” – in the sense of its expanded range – is a consequence of the natural progress of technology. We cannot care about people we do not know, and it is harder not to care about people we do know – of whose challenges we are cognizant and to whom we are not prevented by barriers of distance and time from bringing aid. “History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct,” writes Hume – for most of us, but not the libertarian, who will assert his disposition to be the recoverable, true nature of the world against all evidence to the contrary.

In his recent controversial New York Review of books piece on Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (about which I’ll have something to say next week) Mark Lilla identifies libertarianism as not a form of conservatism, but a “mutation of liberalism.” If so, it is a mutation that terrifies the neighbors and that even the parents reject in horror. What libertarianism also, now, exemplifies is another category Lilla offers, that of the “restorative” (in contrast to the “redemptive”) reactionary. By simply choosing to ignore the effect of technology on human society, the libertarian excitedly proclaims once more the advent of the eighteenth century. He does not simply reject modernity but blindly ignores the constituents of it.

AJA

Related articles

• The Libertarian Delusion (sadredearth.com)
• Republican Reactionaries and the Strange Change in Lamar Alexander (firedoglake.com)
• Republicans for Revolution (arunwithaview.wordpress.com)
• John Quiggin: Conservatives and Reactionaries (delong.typepad.com)
• The Reactionary Mind (3quarksdaily.com)
• Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism (sadredearth.com)
• the reactionary mind (eyeofthestorm.blogs.com)
• Hipster-libertarianism (tmtio.wordpress.com)
• More on How Occupy Wall Street and Liberals Will Lose (sadredearth.com)
• How Occupy Wall Street and Liberals Will Lose (sadredearth.com)

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It wasn’t ‘t even what you thought it was when you thought it was it.

From “Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster’,” Time Literary Supplement

James Campbell reviewing The Letters Of Ernest Hemingway, Volume One: 1907–1922 and Hemingway’s Boat: Everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson

Of Ernest Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory:

“When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people?”

Gregory’s mother (and Patrick’s) was Pauline Pfeiffer, whom Hemingway had taken up with in 1926, leaving Hadley with their three-year-old son John. In 1937, when Patrick was nine and Gregory six, he deserted Pauline for Martha Gellhorn. Gregory, who was writing the day after his twenty-first birthday, as if having waited until the age of entitlement, called his father a “cocksucker” and a “gin-soaked abusive monster”.

“God have mercy on your soul for the misery you have caused. If I ever meet you again and you start piling the ruthless, illogical and destructive shit on me, I will beat your head into the ground and mix it with cement to make outhouses.”

As for “filial respect”, he scarcely needed to make the point that it was dead, but did so anyway, perhaps in the service of pressing home another: “It’s gone Ernestine dear, it’s gone!”

Even Hendrickson cannot say whether “Ernestine” was another of Gregory’s fancies, or if the bark had a surprise bite. Five years earlier, Hemingway had begun writing The Garden of Eden, in which his and Mary’s transsexual role playing is rendered in light fictional coating. David and Catherine of the novel (published posthumously in 1986) are not far removed from Ernest and Mary. A year after responding patiently to Gregory’s fury, he wrote in Mary’s journal: “She loves me to be her girls [sic], which I love to be”.

The focus of Gregory’s present anger was a minor incident which took place on September 30 the previous year, and a major one twenty-four hours later. Hearing that Gregory had been charged with causing a public disturbance after entering a cinema in Los Angeles dressed in women’s clothing, Pauline flew down from San Francisco to attend a court hearing on October 1. Between touchdown and the commencement of court proceedings, she suffered a ruptured blood vessel, caused by an undiagnosed tumour, and died on the operating table. The “Ernestine” letter is cited by Hendrickson as part of an extensive, compassionate examination of Gregory’s history. In 1995, by then a qualified doctor and the father of five children by three women, Gregory underwent gender realignment surgery and became Gloria. In his memoir Papa (1976), he wrote of his father’s attempt to blame Pauline’s death on his transgressive habit: “I believed him”.

via Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster’ | TLS.

Related articles

• Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson: review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter returns to author’s Cuban home to mark 50th anniversary of his suicide (dailymail.co.uk)
• New Book: Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson (repeatingislands.com)
• Author: “The Paris Wife” (walkietalkiebookclub.wordpress.com)
• WATCH: Inside Hemingway’s Cuba Home (huffingtonpost.com)
• Book Review: To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway (chalkthesun.wordpress.com)
• Glimpses of Hemingway (nytimes.com)
• “Can we ever really know Ernest Hemingway?” (salon.com)
• The Slow Crack-Up (online.wsj.com)
• Op-Ed Columnist: A Farewell to Macho (nytimes.com)

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Yesterday’s post on Geronimo put me in mind of John Ford‘s Cheyenne Autumn. The excerpt from We Shall Remain noted how within only several years of Geronimo’s capture he had transformed in the American consciousness from demon savage into the iconic fierce warrior. (The U.S. special forces operation that killed Osama bin Laden was code-named “Geronimo.”) John Ford spent much of a notable film career making Westerns that failed to represent the historic truth of European settler and Indian relations and that produced much great iconography mythologizing the U.S. government role. Cheyenne Autumn, at the end of his long career, and not one of his better films, was instantly recognizable as a kind of penitential self-corrective.

What strikes me about the following scene, decades after I first saw the film, is the dated character of even its political correction. It is painful to watch Cheyenne Indians, nonetheless, still portrayed by ethnically Hispanic and Mediterranean actors (cheekbones, noses, swarthy foreignness). The superfluous sign language, indicative of racial authenticity, and the authenticity of which I have no idea, is nonetheless simplistically rendered and hokey. Amid the didactic dialogue about the white man’s callous duplicity and Ford’s always stunning Monument Valley compositions, even the mise en scene and staging are creaky. Notice how the Major at one point stalks off, and a bit later, when he might have been on his horse and away already, he is just steps away in stride to be approached for a last appeal. The dashing of his cigar to the ground is cartoonish. At the end of the scene, Richard Widmark‘s conflicted Archer, takes a few unconvincing and stagy steps after the departing Cheyenne – with one last weak, despondent fall of his right leg – when we can see he was never really going after them, just to transparently embody his ambivalence.

The scene offers one essential and powerful line: “We are asked to remember much. The white man remembers nothing.”

• Northern Cheyenne Reservation Hosts Cleveland Middle School Students (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Geronimo Living Strong (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• How We Lived On It: Geronimo (sadredearth.com)
• CineFile: Let There Be Light (sadredearth.com)

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Just over three years ago, Julia and I were present for the aftermath of a blessing ceremony – the participants and witnesses of which had been Apaches only – on the San Carlos Apache reservation. “The purpose of the ceremony,” I wrote at the time, “was to prepare the land for the installation of a memorial to be unveiled on February 17, 2009, the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Geronimo, who died in captivity, a prisoner of war, finally, for 23 years, at Fort Sills, Oklahoma, where he is buried.”

Here is the ending of episode four of the PBS documentary We Shall Remain, a history of Native Amerian “seen through native eyes.” Julia and I witnessed first hand and repeatedly how controversial Geronimo remains among Apaches. Of course, I recommend the whole episode and the entire five-part series, which can be viewed online. For now, if you have another thirteen minutes, the beginning of episode four will give some idea of how and why Geronimo became the vengeful warrior of renown.

Related articles

• Geronimo’s Great-grandson Reacts (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Vanity Fair Looks at Geronimo and His Legend (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Apache Leader Jeff Houser on Use of Geronimo’s Name (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• San Carlos Apache Tribe Seeks Apology from President Obama (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Know the Real Geronimo, Through Literature (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Fort Sill Apaches Win Trust Lands in New Mexico (abcnews.go.com)
• Geronimo Living Strong (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)

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One of the signatures of the fallen human state is how precipitously and flat seemingly reasonable people can land on their cogitative rears. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on ourselves. You watch me, friend. I’ll be checking you.

For now, we have Ron Paul. In addition to certain strains of the disaffected young, neo-Nazi white supremacists, homosexual-hating pastors, Andrew Sullivan, and Glenn Greenwald, we Tuesday got Robert Wright at the Atlantic in a post titled – honestly – “The Greatness of Ron Paul.” Wright likes Paul’s ideas on foreign policy, and it is one of the characteristics of falling in like with a libertarian idea that all sound judgment and reasoning depart on the wings of one’s unfettered liberty.

It’s certainly true that Paul’s hawkish critics are using his weirder ideas and checkered past to try and make non-interventionism synonymous with creepiness. But, whatever their success, Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.

Let’s note immediately that it is this rather measured endorsement that nonetheless merits for Wright the “greatness” in his title. Imagine if Paul actually became president and achieved something. There would be nowhere left to go but godhead. But notice how quickly Wright moves beyond “weirder ideas and checkered past.” I don’t need to fully itemize that past here, from John Birch Society speeches to the representative conspiracy-mongering. Yet Wright easily elides all this for love of Paul’s ideas on foreign disengagement.

Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul’s critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, “Why wouldn’t it be natural that they’d want a weapon? Internationally they’d be given more respect.”

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

No one who knows anything about foreign policy, or negotiations for that matter, needs to be told that framing circumstances and disputes from the perspective of one’s adversary is basic work for the professional policy, state department, and strategic analyst. It is how a nation best develops its own strategies and tactics, how it seeks opportunities for resolution – though, with exceptions, candidates running for president, especially pro forma GOP hawks, are none of these kinds of people. However, seeing matters through the eyes of the adversary does not mean agreeing with how the adversary thinks and thus legitimizing, for instance, Iranian strategic desires simply because one can, as a “thought experiment” conceive them as the Iranians might. Unless one is the kind of relativist more often these days found on the far left, all strategic ambitions are not equal simply because nations have them and can mutually understand them. Does Ron Paul – does Robert Wright – think the Iranian theocratic tyranny the moral equal of the world’s liberal democracies? If yes, then there is no basis on which to feel justified in opposing any ambition Iran might have, or North Korea, or the Soviet Union when it still had strategic ambitions. If no….

This is another variation of “one nation’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” – more of the same reasoning that led the dregs of the anti-imperial left, in opposition to the Iraq War, actually to champion the Iraqi insurgency. This is, far from the moral achievement Wright conjures, the complete loss of critical and moral faculties.

Wright, like others, is taken with Paul’s wish to end the imperial breadth of U.S. military forces and interests around the world – but like all libertarian ideas it is absolutist and crude: simply withdraw, from everywhere, quickly, with no discrimination among regions, circumstances, interests, consequences. From the imperial aftermath of the Cold War, retreat reactively to an eighteenth century injunction to “avoid foreign entanglements.” This is not a guiding principle by which to lead a nation in the twenty-first century. It is standoffishness masquerading as political philosophy, a crank’s tantrum as national policy. Let’s just all leave each other the fuck alone.

Absolutist ideas, crude analysis, simplistic solutions – what Paul represents in all his considerations. Elsewhere at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has made himself something of an expert student of the Civil War, presents the following video from 2007 of Paul discussing the war on Meet the Press.

The magnitude of the historical errors and misconceptions Paul peddles in a mere minute four is staggering. All but one of the states of the Confederacy had seceded before Lincoln took office, and the Confederacy was declared a mere seven days after. Lincoln, in fact, made a proposal of compensated emancipation to the Border States and Delaware, a slave-holding state that remained in the Union. None were willing to accept it. The comparison to Great Britain is a mockery of historical analysis. Great Britain’s slaves were held in overseas colonies – an abstract moral challenge to be met from afar – not within the nation and yearly corroding the mutual moral regard and civil ties of English men and women. Paul says of the aftermath of the war that it

lingered for a hundred years, I mean the hatred and all that existed.

Does Paul believe that the hatred for black Americans – the disenfranchisement, the discrimination, the beatings and lynchings – that followed the Civil War was caused by the Civil War? And why is Paul even discussing the Civil War? Do we know what ideas Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney entertain about the Civil War? In just over a minute, Paul provides that answer too, that Lincoln didn’t care about freeing the slaves (yes, Paul is one of those, too), but

he did this just to enhance (sic) and get rid of the original intent of the Republic.

In fact, Ron Paul does believe that the first policies instituted to wrest the American republic from its “original intent” and the people began with Lincoln and the Civil War, and that there is a lineage of subsequent proto and quasi-socialist progressive policy intended to “nationalize everything.”

I mentioned the other day, in “Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism,” that the second prong in libertarian philosophy, after opposition to centralized government, are its corollary conspiratorial perceptions, the manner in which its adherents close-read history and the world and come to see figures in the carpet. Among those public figures most prominently praising Paul these days (but not, mind you, in typical litigator’s casuistry, endorsing him) is crypto-libertarian Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is not himself explicitly a peddler of conspiracy theories, but he argues in a manner that appeals to the conspiratorially minded: he broadly labels those with whom he variously disagrees and hyperbolically reviles them for what he insinuates is their common purpose against true American interests. Just the other day, in a rabid twitter exchange with many among the growing numbers he has repelled with his ugliness, of which this is a small abstract, Greenwald endorsed an ally’s demonization of Obama supporters as people who would defend the president even if he “raped a nun.” Rather than accede to the flurry of objections to such a “metaphor,” Greenwald doubled down. Beyond correctly rejecting the metaphor label, he declined to defend the claim as merely an extreme illustration offered for effect and chose, instead, to advance the claim as literally true.

The tenor, then, of Ron Paul and libertarian support wavers between gurgling discontent and ideas elementarily conceived. For more of the latter, Greenwald recently recommended, terming it “brilliant,” a shoddy essay by Matt Stoller that praises Paul for his

opposition to war, the Federal government, and the Federal Reserve.

The essence of the essay by the former “senior policy advisor” to ex Rep. Alan Grayson is to retail the libertarian gold-standard of American conspiracy constructs – the concerted effort from Lincoln through Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt (Teddy is bypassed) to

centralize[ ] authority in the Federal government.

and develop

state control over finance and mass mobilization of social resources for warfare.

Of course, if one were to defend the sine qua non minimum libertarian belief in central government responsibility – to provide for the common defense – it would be difficult to conceive it without “state control over finance and mass mobilization of social resources for warfare”: unless, that is, the Pauls, Greewalds, and Stollers imagine, rather, the corporate boards and CEOs dukes and lords agreeing to tithe their rents and harvests in return for another Magna Carta, and their employees in their militia motley then hoisting muskets in the “campus” quads.

In arguing that libertarianism is some kind of unanswerable challenge to liberalism, Stoller tells us that

what connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing.

And while modern day Republicans like to pretend that Abraham Lincoln has anything but remotely to do with them, we know his true lineage, and Stoller clarifies the point anyway:

a long tradition of antiwar Democratic Presidents who took America to war.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, young again and without his Viagra, we have here Bob Dole speaking of “Democrat wars.” While focusing on the monetary threads in the carpet that look like the Virgin Mary crying, Stoller, like Dole at his most good-Republican-cloth-coat basic, ahistorically ignores the causes of war. But we already know that Paul thinks Lincoln only fought the Civil War not to preserve the union and reject slavery, but to nationalize monetary policy. And Stoller, attempting to shoehorn the crank of Paul’s mad libertarian monetary notions into a threadbare line of argument, offers this hodge podge on FDR:

And finally, we come to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Fed is a bit more complex, because he did centralize monetary authority using wartime emergency powers, but he did so in peacetime. FDR abrogated gold clause contracts, seized the domestic supply of gold, and devalued the currency. He constrained banks with aggressive regulation and seizures of insolvent banks, saving depositors with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He also used the RFC to set up much of what we know today as the Federal government, including early versions of disaster relief, small business lending, massive bridge and railroad building, the FHA, Fannie Mae, and state and local aid. Eventually, the government used this mechanism to finance college and housing for veterans with the GI Bill. Since veterans were much of the population right after World War II, effectively this was the first ever near-national safety net. FDR also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).

Later, this New Deal financing apparatus was used to finance the munitions industry and America’s role in World War II. At one point, the RFC owned eight war material producing subsidiaries, including the synthetic rubber industry. Importantly, FDR had the Fed working for him. The Fed kept interest rates pegged at an interest rate set by Treasury, and used reserve requirements to manage inflation. This led to a dramatic drop in inequality, and unemployment sank to 1% during World War II. In 1951, the Fed, buttressed by what Tom Ferguson calls “conservative Keynesian” corporate leaders, broke free of this arrangement, under the Treasury-Fed Accord, leading to the postwar monetary order. That accord is where the vaunted “Federal Reserve Independence” came from.

Give this man a chalkboard, a sweater, and some spectacles, and we need miss Glen Beck no longer.

The point is supposed to be that centralized government provides both the social contract that liberals love (of which Stoller provides what should be an inspiring brief account) and funds and organizes the wars it hates, and that this is Paul’s unanswered challenge to the coherence of liberal philosophy. It just may be that – if you are Katrina vanden Heuvel and your position on war can be reduced to you are “opposed” to it, in which case you think it “good” Ron Paul is on the political scene. But in offering a construct in which modern liberalism is defined internationally only by opposition to the Vietnam War, and all uses of American military might since, Stoller simplifies liberalism, reducing it only to its most disempowering strain over the past four decades.

Further, Stoller, like all those on the left who entertain what are misconceived as the ideas of Ron Paul, mistakes him profoundly. He and others conceive Paul, in his wishing to end the post World War Two American imperium, to be a voice of enlightened international relations. He is, on the contrary, a reactionary isolationist for whom any primitive considerations of the world scene are a byproduct of the most reductive social conceptions – conceptions that would destroy every element of the enlightened American society in which liberals believe. If one is above all stirred by conspiratorial imaginings or driven by bilious incontinence at all concentrations or exercises of power, one may find in Paul a representative. But for any liberal to think Ron Paul a subject of serious consideration is an inclination of utter foolishness, a political delusion in which the thinker has lost in disgruntlement all understanding of what liberalism is.

AJA

Related articles

• David Frum on the Personal Irresponsibility of Ron Paul (delong.typepad.com)
• Ron Paul and Cranky Libertarianism (sadredearth.com)
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Glenn Greenwald, considering Christopher Hitchens and George Packer and aiming the gun at his own head.

Is it really “a sign of decency” to refuse to view any political ideas as not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but as a reflection of the person’s character? Obviously, there are many political disagreements — most — which can and should be conducted in perfectly good faith without the need for personal animus. Conversely, though, aren’t there some political views so repellent and sociopathic that “a sign of essential decency” is to make it personal, rather than refusing to do so?

Armatya Sen on David Hume - tell it to the relativists.

Great harm has been done to contemporary decision theory and the theory of rational choice by the presumption that reasoning can be given a role only if it is able to resolve every decisional problem. Indeed, understanding the incompleteness of our ordered information about the world, or stopping at incomplete—but articulate—orderings of alternative courses of action, is an integral part of human reasoning. The large subject of learning to rely on partial resolution, which is quite crucial in modern social choice theory, clearly has Humean antecedents. The usefulness of reasoning is not dependent on its being able to solve every problem at hand.

This understanding, which is still inadequately appreciated in decisional analysis, was championed already by Hume more than a quarter of a millennium ago. And I should add here that even the Hobbesian insistence on the need for a sovereign state for the possibility of saying anything coherent about justice, which allegedly makes any contemporary statements on “global justice” to be a “chimera,” closely relates to the assumption that no idea of justice can be viable unless it is able to resolve every putative claim of injustice. In this “all or nothing” view, we cannot seek an enhancement of justice through preventing famines, genocides, or gross subjugation of women in the world until a global sovereign state starts functioning and can meet all the institutional needs of a globally just world. This is indeed a far cry from Hume’s understanding of the gradual enlargement of “the boundaries of justice” in the world. And that understanding remains critically relevant as we try to remove patent injustices that plague our world.

John Gray vs. Francis Fukuyama: are we there yet? Probably.

The idea of progress and the idea of utopia may seem to be at odds. Progress is open-ended, many like to think, while utopia signifies a condition of static perfection. Actually both presuppose an end to conflict and change of any fundamental kind.

Utopias need not be fixed and immobile. Marx refused to speculate on the precise nature of a communist future. But never doubting that the basic causes of human conflict would be removed forever along with capitalism, he was still a utopian thinker.

Follies and delusions

While constantly urging the necessity for change, believers in gradual progress also assume that fundamental conflicts will wither away. Along with Marx, they imagine a radical alteration in human existence as a consequence of which the recurrent struggles that have shaped human life throughout the ages will be no more.

In different ways utopian thinkers and believers in gradual progress both look forward to an end to history as it has always been.

….

For believers in progress it must be a dispiriting prospect. But if you can shake off this secular myth you will see there is no need to despair. The breakdown of a particular set of human arrangements is not after all the end of the world.

Surely we would be better off if we put an end to our obsession with endings. Humans are sturdy creatures built to withstand regular disruption. Conflict never ceases, but neither does human resourcefulness, adaptability or courage.

….

Without the faith that the future can be better than the past, many people say they could not go on. But when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.

The task that faces us is no different from the one that has always faced human beings – renewing our lives in the face of recurring evils. Happily, the end never comes. Looking to an end-time is a way of failing to cherish the present – the only time that is truly our own.

Related articles

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• Of Hume and Bondage (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)
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• Living in the present. (learningfromdogs.com)
• Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas (sadredearth.com)
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• 9/11/11: Chomsky Nation (sadredearth.com)

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Here’s the thing about Ron Paul – he’s not an outlier. I don’t mean that every libertarian is as bad as the worst of what is on the record of what Ron Paul has published in his name or believes or may privately feel. I mean that libertarianism by nature – which is to say the nature of the people who find their self-expression in the libertarian attitude – leads to Ron Paul. Libertarianism is a cranky political philosophy and those who espouse it have a foolish tolerance for, if they are not themselves, cranks. Look at Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan, the latter of whom, of notoriously unsound judgment, explicitly did endorse Paul, as did, ahem, Stormfront. No, Paul does not endorse Stormfront. The founder of the white-supremacist neo-Nazi organization endorsed him. And this does not give Ron Paul or his supporters pause. Cranky is as the crank does.

What is the essence of libertarian crankiness? One can rhetorically and philosophically elevate the core expression by articulating it as a fundamental distrust of centralized government, or belief in an original, natural and unfettered personal liberty, but the cranky expression of the same ideas is “leave me the fuck alone.” I do not mean to diminish the feeling by going so basic on us. Any strong personality accustomed by individual nature to going his own way as he determines that way best to be, among whom I will tell you I number, will know the feeling of “leave me the fuck alone.” One has to be clear, though, that that is a feeling and not a philosophy. There has to be a basis in ideas for determining how to respond to what one might reactively consider an albatross around one’s neck. It might be someone attempting to wrestle you to the ground; it might be someone in real need – assuming, for it to make a difference, that you even accept another’s need as any sweat off your back.

That latter consideration points to the crank in crankiness, i.e.

a person who unshakably holds a belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false.^[1] A crank belief is so wildly at variance with those commonly held as to be ludicrous to many. Cranks characteristically dismiss all evidence or arguments which contradict their own unconventional beliefs, making rational debate an often futile task; this is the essential defining characteristic of the crank: being impervious to facts, evidence, and rational inference.

Of course, this is a claim that most – maybe nearly all – people will make about some of those with whom they passionately disagree. The only basis for distinguishing among these claims, to separate the supportable from the insupportable, is “facts, evidence, and rational inference,” which we all together have to judge. There ain’t no referee in a bottle. Far be it from me (actually, not) to suggest that whether a person’s political beliefs regularly induce the affinity of neo-Nazis, theocratic bigots, and conspiracy theorists should play any role in developing these judgments.

The crank core in the crankiness of libertarians is found, ironically, in a quality they share with Marxist-Leninists and their heirs – disregard for the empirical evidence against the programs they espouse. This apparently remarkable claim about Marxist-Leninism seems so because of the rhetorical apparatus that Marxists have used through history to claim the label of science for Marx’s analysis. (Beware of “sciences” founded in language.) However, Marx argued that communist revolutions would arise in industrially developed capitalist economies that had arrived at a decadent terminus.

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. (Critique of Political Economy)

This has been a much argued point in Marxist history and philosophy owing to the fact that not a single communist revolution has ever occurred under these conditions. But ideologues, even those claiming the mantle of science, will never be deterred by empirical evidence to the contrary. They will account for results that deviate from the predicted in any way but that which alters the underlying premises. The ideology must stand. Disconfirmation bias must rule: one raises the evidentiary bar for the claims one opposes. Here, for instance, is Glenn Greenwald on Ron Paul.

 …even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits. (Emphasis Greenwald’s)

Characteristic of Greenwald’s disingenuousness is this disavowal of endorsement of Paul for president while otherwise praising Paul’s political positions and arguments – in a manner one otherwise would in supporting a candidate – as superior in truth-telling to those of any other candidate.

…his candidacy generates important benefits.

Would the benefits include that of Paul’s actually winning the presidency? If so, why not endorse him? If not – if there is a more holistic consideration to be made of Paul, his positions, and his political philosophy, a consideration that would, comprehensively, make another candidate superior to Paul as the next president of the United States, would it not behoove an honest discussant of ideas to articulate this more comprehensive truth?

Greenwald proceeds to say,

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

Well, we know in reading Greenwald that we get a great deal of his loathing, but he immediately after these words argues that President Obama has committed such “heinous” acts that – if Greenwald’s arguments have any meaning at all (a questionable hypothesis at this point) – he himself would seem to be so “beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising” him. So, working through the convolutions of Greenwald’s unendingly contradictory and unfailingly slippery arguments, one is left with two approaches, which are not alternatives: weigh the bad one can find in any candidate against that of any and all others, and consider the coherence of the political philosophies and the values of the national visions they present.

The unseemly nature and appeal of many of Paul’s positions and supporters is now near the top of the news. What then about the coherence of the political philosophy? It is two-pronged, but it offers a unified field. One prong is the simplistic opposition to “centralized government” and any enforced tie to one’s fellow human beings. The other is the corollary conspiratorial perception. What unites the two is the crank’s cranky antagonism to the humanistic and systematic developments of modernity.

I’ll explore that next, in part by considering what Greenwald described as Matt Stoller’s “genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party.” We’ll get deep in the cranky.

AJA

Related articles

• WarLord: The Reid Report: Should Glenn Greenwald have to own the Ron Paul blue plate special? http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/12/should-glenn-greenwald-have-to-own-the-ron-paul-blue-plate-special/ thanx @karoli Paul’s positions on issues like military int (friendfeed.com)
• Arguments vs Associations (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
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