December 16, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST Bankruptcy: Joshua Zeitz writes, “The Bush administration’s Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which the President signed into law in 2005, limited eligibility for Chapter 7 relief to persons earning less than their state’s median income. The bill also capped the amount of home equity a debtor could exempt from his assets at $125,000 if his home had been purchased within the previous 40 months. Effectively, the bill sharply restricts access to Chapter 7 relief and makes it all but impossible for debtors to make a clean start of things.” Since Mr. Zeitz himself says that the act limits Chapter 7 relief “to persons earning less than their state’s median income,” how one squares the eligibility of half the population for such relief with making it “all but impossible” to obtain such relief, I know not. Plus there is the fact that $125,000 probably exceeds the equity most people in the bottom half of earners who have owned a home less than three and a third years have in that home. I hadn’t realized that Mr. Zeitz had such tender solicitude for the financial assets of the top half of American society. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. He writes, “I’m sure we can all agree that people who recklessly accrue debt should be held accountable for their obligations. Mr. Gordon goes a step further, praising the bankruptcy bill for making ‘it harder for millions of middle-class deadbeats to escape paying their entirely scrupulous creditors what they owe them, . . .’ That’s terrific rhetoric, and as I type these words from a neighborhood Starbucks, where Christmas music is being relentlessly piped through the walls, I can’t help but think of a famous Dickensian character who might have made exactly the same observation.” I don’t see a whole lot of substantive difference between “people who recklessly accrue debt” and “middle-class deadbeats.” A deadbeat, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, is “a cadger or sponger; parasite; one who will not or cannot pay debts.” I really don’t think one has to be Ebenezer Scrooge to have little sympathy for most deadbeats. Speaking of which, I might point out that this bill was not rammed through Congress only on Republican votes. It carried with 69 percent of the votes in the House and 74 percent of the votes in the Senate, including those of such well-known scourges of the poor and downtrodden as Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, Evan Bayh, and Joseph Biden. Hillary Clinton was present but did not vote. So it would seem that it was possible to vote for this bill and not think that cake is the answer to an inadequacy of bread in the diet of the poor. I find Mr. Zeitz’s statistic that more than half of all bankruptcies involve large medical bills very interesting. If that is the case, then obviously that needs to be addressed, but from the other end, with thoroughgoing reform of health insurance and hospital charges. I wrote on my ideas on that subject here. Stem-cell research: Mr. Zeitz writes, “It’s amusing that Mr. Gordon writes, at the top of his post, ‘I remember my grandfather saying, “God save us from those who think they are doing God’s work,”’ while at the bottom of his post he writes favorably of Bush’s ban on fetal stem-cell research. Bush ‘forbade the use of federal funds for research that would involve the killing of embryos,’ he writes.” Perhaps because I am not sitting in a Starbucks listening to Christmas Muzak (presumably while paying five dollars for a cup of coffee—an act that indicates a certain clouding of the rational mind), I don’t see what’s amusing here. My grandfather was talking about Prohibition in particular and, in general, the tendency of some people, bent on improving the world, to run roughshod over everyone else imposing their vision while often ignoring the demands of common decency and honor (God’s work being far too important to be held up by such trivia as the law or truth or other people’s property). I used the quote in reference to a woman who presumed to have the right to nullify a presidential election. That has nothing whatsoever to do with one man following his conscience in making a decision. He writes, “a Fox News survey . . . conducted in September found that 63 percent of respondents supported ‘medical research using tissue from human embryos,’ while only 24 percent opposed such research. To put the matter in sharp relief, the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to mention many main-line Protestant and Jewish religious bodies and leaders, and the vast majority of the scientific community, feel that embryonic stem cell research is ethical and useful. A small minority of religious extremists believe otherwise.” A small minority of religious extremists that amount, apparently, to almost one quarter of the population, not to mention the Catholic Church, an organization exceeding one billion adherents world wide. Since Mr. Zeitz describes 63 percent as an “overwhelming majority,” please note, once again, that the bankruptcy bill he opposes passed the House with 69 percent of the votes, and the Senate with 74 percent. When it comes to bankruptcy, it seems that Mr. Zeitz is an extremist by his own definition. Mr. Bush, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, does not seem to cut his policy cloth to suit this year’s fashions when there is a moral issue involved. I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this particular issue, but I admire his willingness to decide based on what he feels is the right thing to do. I might also point out that what I was talking about was the fact that Fredric Smoler mischaracterized what Bush did. He did not “stop” stem-cell research.
December 15, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s heartfelt defense of George Bush is very much in keeping with the holiday spirit—charitable, forgiving, and full of tremendous goodwill. It also glosses over some important and (for Mr. Gordon) inconvenient points.
Bankruptcy: Prior to the passage of the Bush administration’s bankruptcy legislation, most individuals generally filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. Under Chapter 7, most of a filer’s assets and property were liquidated to pay off his debts; once this process was complete, the debtor was excused from paying most of his remaining debt. Under Chapter 13, a debtor was permitted to retain his property and agreed to enter into a repayment schedule to make good on most or all of his obligations. In effect, Chapter 7 allowed debtors to make a clean start, though at the cost of losing their worldly assets, while Chapter 13 bound them to a long repayment schedule.
The Bush administration’s Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which the President signed into law in 2005, limited eligibility for Chapter 7 relief to persons earning less than their state’s median income. The bill also capped the amount of home equity a debtor could exempt from his assets at $125,000 if his home had been purchased within the previous 40 months. Effectively, the bill sharply restricts access to Chapter 7 relief and makes it all but impossible for debtors to make a clean start of things.
I’m sure we can all agree that people who recklessly accrue debt should be held accountable for their obligations. Mr. Gordon goes a step further, praising the bankruptcy bill for making “it harder for millions of middle-class deadbeats to escape paying their entirely scrupulous creditors what they owe them, which lowers (or should lower: interest rates on unsecured loans tend to be very sticky downward) the cost of credit for everyone else.” That’s terrific rhetoric, and as I type these words from a neighborhood Starbucks, where Christmas music is being relentlessly piped through the walls, I can’t help but think of a famous Dickensian character who might have made exactly the same observation. The problem, however, is that the rhetoric doesn’t hold up.
While Congressional Quarterly reported that the number of personal bankruptcy filings rose by over 400 percent over the past two decades, and while the Federal Reserve reported in March 2004 that consumer debt stood at a record $2.12 trillion, most people filing for debt relief are not “middle-class deadbeats.” According to a Harvard study cited by the journal Health Affairs in February 2005, over half of all personal bankruptcies resulted from excessive medical bills relating to an illness in the family. Fully 90 percent of all personal bankruptcies resulted either from illness or from another catastrophic blow to family income, like divorce or job loss. In other words, what the bankruptcy bill does is place in permanent economic dependency a large number of people who did nothing wrong but get sick or lose their jobs or health care coverage.
Mr. Gordon thinks that Fred Smoler’s comparison of George Bush and Lyndon Johnson was “unfair,” but at the heart of the matter, Lyndon Johnson sought to expand the New Deal state in ways that shielded working Americans from the vicissitudes of the economy, while George Bush has tried to erode many of those protections.
Stem-cell research: It’s amusing that Mr. Gordon writes, at the top of his post, “I remember my grandfather saying, ‘God save us from those who think they are doing God’s work,’” while at the bottom of his post he writes favorably of Bush’s ban on fetal stem-cell research. Bush “forbade the use of federal funds for research that would involve the killing of embryos,” he writes.”
Not exactly. The Democratic-sponsored bill that Bush and the GOP Congress opposed would allow research only on stem cells derived from the approximately 400,000 frozen, fertilized embryos at American in-vitro-fertilization clinics that would have been destroyed in any event, as a matter of course. The Democrats propose putting these stem cell lines to good use, but they do not propose destroying—or, as Mr. Gordon writes, “killing”—stem cells that would otherwise have remained viable.
More to the point, a Fox News survey (that’s a nod to Mr. Gordon, who instinctively mistrusts any news outlet whose editorial position he generally dislikes) conducted in September found that 63 percent of respondents supported “medical research using tissue from human embryos,” while only 24 percent opposed such research. To put the matter in sharp relief, the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to mention many main-line Protestant and Jewish religious bodies and leaders, and the vast majority of the scientific community, feel that embryonic stem cell research is ethical and useful. A small minority of religious extremists believe otherwise. These persons are certainly entitled to their beliefs, and many of them have made intellectually defensible arguments against stem cell research. But it is they who lie on the outskirts of general consensus, and it is they who presume to invert Abraham Lincoln’s famous formula for faith-based politics. I have never heard a medical researcher argue that he or she is doing God’s work. And I’ve met a lot of researchers in my time in academia.
December 14, 2006
Whither the Senate? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:35 PM EST Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, was stricken yesterday with bleeding on the brain and is in critical but stable condition this morning after several hours of surgery. His prognosis is uncertain. This would be only a personal tragedy except for politics. If Senator Johnson is unable to continue in office, his replacement until the next general election will be named by South Dakota’s governor, who is a Republican. Presumably (he would be under titanic pressure from his party) he would appoint a Republican. This, in turn, would shift the balance in the new Senate from 51-49 in favor of the Democrats to a 50-50 tie. Thus Vice President Dick Cheney would cast the tie-breaking vote, certainly in favor of the Republicans, and they would then control the Senate for the next two years. This brings up other possibilities. Modern medicine saves many lives that would otherwise be lost (Senator Johnson’s included, let us hope). But it often makes it possible to sustain life, or at least the shadow of life, without restoring a capacity to function. Almost a year ago, for instance, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel was felled by a massive stroke, and he has never regained consciousness. Prime ministers serve at the pleasure of their parliaments, and Sharon was quickly replaced. But Presidents, senators, and congressmen in the United States are elected to fixed terms. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, his wife functioned in many respects as the President, and it wasn’t until the Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted in 1967, almost 50 years later, that the Constitution dealt with the problem of a President who was alive but unable to fulfill the duties of his office. There is still no way to deal with an incapacitated senator or congressman if he or she is unable or unwilling to resign. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota refused to resign after a stroke in 1969, although he was incapable of attending either committee meetings or the Senate as a whole. He remained in the Senate for three years after becoming unable to function as a senator. It would be possible for a comatose senator to be in office for as long as six years and there would be nothing that could be constitutionally done about it. It seems clear that this needs to be addressed. Individual members of Congress could deal with it by writing what would be in effect a conditional letter of resignation, and perhaps some have done exactly that. Otherwise it will require a constitutional amendment. Another matter that requires fixing is presidential succession, although it was partially addressed by the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which established a procedure for appointing a new Vice President if one dies or succeeds to the Presidency. (Had it not been in place, Richard Nixon would have been succeeded by Carl Albert, Democrat of Oklahoma, upon his resignation from the Presidency, not Gerald Ford.) Congress is empowered by the Constitution to designate who shall succeed to the Presidency if there is no Vice President to do so. From 1792 until 1886 it was the president pro tempore of the Senate, followed by the speaker of the House. In 1886 the members of the cabinet, in order of the creation of the various departments, were designated, making the secretary of state second in line. In 1947 it was changed again, making the speaker first after the Vice President, then the president pro tempore, and then the cabinet. New cabinet positions were added to the list as they were created, except for the secretary of homeland security, who is still not in the line of succession. The speaker of the House holds his position by election of the membership, and competition for the immensely powerful job is intense, ensuring that the speaker will always be capable of serving. But for many years now the president pro tempore of the Senate has been the longest-serving senator of the majority party, and the position is essentially honorary. This means, inevitably, that the president pro tempore will be elderly. Right now that is Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who is 83 and has been in the Senate for 37 years. Assuming the Democrats control the next Senate, the president pro tem will be Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who is 89 and has been in the Senate since 1959. Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, was in his late nineties when he served his third term as president pro tempore and was quite incapable of handling the duties of the presidency. While it is unlikely that both the Vice Presidency and the speakership would be unfilled when the Presidency was vacated by death, resignation, or debility, it would only be sensible to make the majority leader of the Senate—the functional equivalent of the speaker of the House—third in line, followed by the cabinet. Meanwhile, may Senator Johnson recover fully and speedily.
December 14, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST Fredric Smoler’s post on the extraordinary sanctimony of those opposed to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s gave me an intense jolt of déjà vu, for it reminded me of a classic instance of that sanctimony that I had forgotten. It was at a dinner party, circa 1967, when, needless to say, the war was the subject of conversation. One of the guests, a young, intelligent woman, not in any way a political crazy, at least by the standards of the time, said matter-of-factly that if she had the opportunity (and, at least she admitted, the courage) she would assassinate President Johnson. No one else thought this statement, that she would murder a democratically elected President in order to end a war that she—in her infinite wisdom and perfect morality—knew to be wrong, was in any way reprehensible. Their only regret, it seemed, was that it was probably not possible to accomplish the deed. I was utterly appalled and said so and was immediately attacked for being out of step with truth and justice. It might be noted that this took place only a few years after another President had been murdered in cold blood. I remember my grandfather saying, “God save us from those who think they are doing God’s work.” This, I think, was an instance of precisely what he meant. Mr. Smoler goes on to compare George Bush with LBJ in a way that is, I think, most unfair. He writes, “George Bush, although like Johnson a President who prosecuted an unpopular war, did not ram through any Civil Rights Acts; he instead managed to cut taxes on the richest among us and make it harder for very poor people to get out of the clutches of their less than scrupulous creditors. He did not set up Medicaid, he rather managed to stop medical research that was in the long run likely to free uncounted numbers of people from great pain and disability. But despite the injustice of the comparison, I am struck by how orgiastic sanctimony and exultant indignation now seem to be a durable part of our political culture.” Tax cuts: It is, of course, the received wisdom of the left that cutting marginal tax rates on “the rich” is a terrible thing to do, with absolutely no economic effects other than to make the rich richer. The fact that every time this has been done, in the 1920s, the 1960s (by a Democratic administration and Congress), the 1980s (by a Republican President and a Democratic House), and the 2000s, the economy immediately responded in highly positive ways is simply ignored. The unemployment rate in 2003 was 6 percent, the highest in nine years. Today it is 4.5 percent, the lowest in six years (and, except for 1999 and 2000, the lowest since the 1960s). And, of course, the Bush tax cuts have not simply been for “the rich.” (Since “the rich,” by definition, are only a small part of the population, how could tax cuts just for them have so often been politically possible, let alone a winning strategy?) Almost 70 percent of American families own their own homes (as do more than 40 percent of “the poor”). The tax cuts on capital gains have or will benefit many of them. Over half of American families own stocks and bonds in their own name. They all benefit from the cut in capital gains taxes and from the cut in taxes on dividends. The tax cut on dividends has caused a surge in dividends with all sorts of positive benefits for the economy. (For one thing, profits are an accounting concept; dividends have to be paid with real money. For another, they make equities a much more attractive investment relative to bonds, giving investors more diversified opportunities. For a third, retained earnings—out of which dividends are necessarily paid—are not taxed at all; dividends are, increasing government revenues.) Bankruptcy: Mr. Smoler says that the new laws “make it harder for very poor people to get out of the clutches of their less than scrupulous creditors.” Maybe so, I don’t know. But they also make it harder for millions of middle-class deadbeats to escape paying their entirely scrupulous creditors what they owe them, which lowers (or should lower: interest rates on unsecured loans tend to be very sticky downward) the cost of credit for everyone else. Medicaid and (I assume) stem-cell research: No, he did not set up Medicaid, but he did add a large drug benefit for Medicare recipients, one that is costing much less than estimated, thanks to utilizing market forces and significantly lowering annual medical costs for millions of seniors. It is less than fair to omit that relevant fact. As for stem-cell research, he did not “stop medical research . . . likely to free uncounted numbers of people from great pain and disability.” He forbade the use of federal funds for research that would involve the killing of embryos. Stem-cell research is going on all over the world. States are funding many projects, as are privately funded organizations. I doubt that his decision has slowed down research in this promising (if probably overhyped—the more promising the more overhyped is usually the case) area by so much as a mile per hour. George Bush made his decision, a very difficult one, according to his best moral judgment. Mr. Smoler, had it been up to him, would have come to a different decision. Fair enough. But his implicit argument—that George Bush came to a different conclusion about what is right and wrong than Fredric Smoler would have, and therefore George Bush is wrong—seems to me to be an instance of the very moral sanctimony that Mr. Smoler so rightly deplores in others. The pope may be infallible in matters of faith and morals, but the rest of us can only try our best to do right as God gives us to see the right.
December 13, 2006
Aaron Asher's LBJ Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST Today’s lead piece on AmericanHeritage.com, an article from the November/December issue of American Heritage, is an account by Aaron Asher, a New York editor and publisher, of his meetings with Lyndon Johnson. In 1969 Asher, passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, reluctantly publishing LBJ’s memoirs as a condition of accepting a better job and a doubled salary. This is, I think, a charming piece of writing, although its very even tone leaves me uncertain about how much irony inflects Asher’s story of the remarkable sanctimony that seems to have been part of him in the late 1960s and early 1970s—and, as I remember those times, was part of a lot of us. Asher begins by noting that he “had once admired [LBJ] as the man who had pushed through the legislation that for the first time since Reconstruction enabled all eligible African-Americans to vote. I respected him as the leader whose Medicare legislation fulfilled the early promises of the New Deal, as the President who wanted to fight a war on poverty. . . . But the escalation of his other war had overwhelmed my earlier admiration.” This is worth thinking about. The younger but clearly adult Asher weighed up the passage of, among other things, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—which Johnson had rammed through Congress, and which ended a few centuries of de jure racial domination in America—against Johnson’s necessarily violent attempt to stop a tyranny from conquering 16 million people, and found that his detestation of the latter enormity “overwhelmed” his approbation for the former achievement. At the time, of course, the American intervention in Indochina was more commonly described by people at least a little like the younger Asher (I was one of them) as a genocidal war. In the wake of that war’s loss, when real genocide was practiced in Cambodia by one of the forces we had been fighting, or later on, when an authentic genocidal war was waged by a Hutu government on the Tutsi, and by Saddam Hussein on the Kurds, or by a Serbian government on Bosnian Muslims, or by a Khartoum government in Darfur, the ease of that tag “genocidal” looks at least a little odd.
In any event, the following anecdotes show Asher charmed by Johnson and sometimes impressed by him, but also describe a few episodes of what seems to me, at this remove, to be unreflecting self-righteousness, although a self-righteousness almost everyone I knew at the time displayed on a remarkable number of occasions. I cannot tell whether Asher is quietly amused, or even a little appalled, by this quality of his younger self, or whether he thinks that younger self was simply a creature of its time and place, or whether he thinks that younger self was admirably stringent. So I shall not speculate about his intentions, but merely note that if disproportion is the soul of comedy, the spectacle of one of the country’s better editors repeatedly (if silently) condescending to one of the country’s greatest Presidents is not without comic possibilities. The emotions—the orgiastic sanctimony, the exultant indignation—that Asher made me remember have in recent years been displayed by many of the people I know, and in many of the people I read, nowadays against President Bush, but a few years ago against President Clinton. The comparison, I think, is a limited one. Looking only at the former, George Bush, although like Johnson a President who prosecuted an unpopular war, did not ram through any Civil Rights Acts; he instead managed to cut taxes on the richest among us and make it harder for very poor people to get out of the clutches of their less than scrupulous creditors. He did not set up Medicaid, he rather managed to stop medical research that was in the long run likely to free uncounted numbers of people from great pain and disability. But despite the injustice of the comparison, I am struck by how orgiastic sanctimony and exultant indignation now seem to be a durable part of our political culture. War memoirs have been described by Samuel Hynes, both an author of one and a brilliant analyst of the genre, as an old man looking back in wonder at the younger man he had been and puzzling over how that younger and now vanished self had once done and thought and felt certain things. I wish I knew whether this modest antiwar memoir was animated by that same curiosity—but I cannot tell.
December 12, 2006
On Max Boot Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 PM EST Today’s lead article on AmericanHeritage.com is adapted from Max Boot’s book War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today. The article begins with American victory in Iraq in 1991, which was achieved at astonishingly small cost in American lives, and involved the defeat of a large, well-equipped, and veteran Iraqi Army. How did this happen? As Mr. Boot tells the story, “The answer may be found in the wholesale transformation wrought in the 15 years since American soldiers had stumbled, dazed, defeated, and demoralized, out of the jungles of Vietnam.” On this account, the American Army was seen as “the bumblers who had been defeated outright by the Vietnamese,” but in the Gulf War a better-trained American army of superior recruits, equipped with weapons of unprecedented quality, especially precision-guided munitions, routed the Iraqis. There are other ways to tell this very small part of Mr. Boot’s long, in my view largely accurate, and genuinely interesting story. For one thing, American soldiers had not been “defeated outright” by the Vietnamese, who arguably never won a battle against them, and those American soldiers did not stumble out of Vietnam; they left an independent South Vietnamese government in control of most of its territory, territory it was able to very effectively defend in the following year. It was also a government the American Congress refused to support when it was subsequently assailed by North Vietnamese armor supported by fighter bombers, and if you incline toward the most sinister interpretation of the 1972 peace agreement, it was already half-abandoned and half-betrayed by the Nixon Administration. If this way of telling the story rings a bell, it should; it has been recounted on this blog before. I have no quarrel with Mr. Boot’s account of the excellence of the American force that fought in Iraq, but his implication seems to be that the American force that fought in Vietnam was defective in ways that would have made a victory over Iraq unlikely or hideously expensive, on account of its demoralization and its other asserted defects: On the strength of later remarks, Mr. Boots seems to suggest that the American Army that fought in Vietnam was also grossly mutinous, toxically racially divided, drunken, and drug-addicted, qualities that by clear implication marred its combat proficiency. There were indeed problems with the American Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are problems in most armies. Zhukov’s World War II army was undoubtedly drunken, and it was in its own way racially divided, as was Wellington’s army, and as was Grant’s. Eisenhower’s army was known to drink, and had much worse interracial violence than the American army suffered in the early 1970s (and in the late fall of 1944 had what were considered serious problems with morale, including significant levels of desertion). None of these forces did too badly against armies that were—to put this politely—as combat-experienced as Saddam Hussein’s. As Mr. Boot points out, there were other problems in the volunteer force of the mid-1970s, but some of those problems, as well as some of the earlier ones, seem likelier to have been the consequence of perceived defeat than the cause of that perceived defeat. Morale did suffer after the American army that fought in Vietnam got the idea that it was not going to be fighting until the war was won. Had Grant’s army, or Eisenhower’s, been told that it had been defeated, or that it was marking time until a negotiated agreement could be reached, morale would probably have suffered pretty significantly. Sometimes demoralization causes defeat, but the perception of defeat is also a very likely path to demoralization. One of the less attractive episodes in recent military analysis is the insistence by the French officer corps that demoralization in the ranks caused the defeat of 1940. Modern research strongly suggests that this was a self-exculpatory lie; very bad strategy, very bad luck, and several other weaknesses are now thought to have caused that defeat, but not peculiarly bad morale in the ranks. As it happens, I have known a few men who commanded small units in Vietnam, and a few who fought in the ranks, and none of them blamed the outcome of the war on the defects of the men they commanded or fought beside. I am uneasy about any post-hoc accounts that exhibit a tendency even remotely similar to that displayed by the Vichy officer corps and shift the search for prime causes from defects of civilian leadership and military strategy toward alleged defects in the lower ranks. How would the American Army of the mid-1960s, or the late 1960s, have done against Saddam Hussein’s troops, had they fought over the same terrain in which they later waged the 1991 Gulf War, in an impossible world in which they had been comparably armed? My guess is, very well indeed. While Mr. Boot points out that the American army of 1991 had a vast technological superiority over its enemy, Western armies have very consistently done well against non-Western armies for a long time, even when equivalently armed, and Arab armies have since 1948 exhibited significant defects in maneuver warfare. I am not sure how well the American army of 1991 would have done in a protracted guerrilla war, and Mr. Boot makes no claims for its capacities in such a context. But I am pretty sure that the defects of the American army in Vietnam were defects of strategy. I fear that the morale of any American army that is told that it stumbled out of Iraq dazed and defeated may not stay rock-solid either, and if that happens, my guess is that the fault will again be bad strategy.
December 12, 2006
In Defense of Wikipedia Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST Yesterday I taught Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, still thought to be one of the greatest films ever made. I was uncertain about what my students would make of it, since some current undergraduates are put off by subtitles, and for that matter by black-and-white films. Film courses taught by people with doctorates in the field have largely replaced student-run film societies, and that, combined with the VCR and DVD having killed off revival houses, means that fewer current undergraduates have a sense of the films they “ought” to have seen. They certainly have less deference toward what I was taught to revere as the film canon. I was fairly certain my students would be able to make some sense of the thing—they were watching it as the capstone to a course on the First World War—but I did not expect that too many of them would have ever heard of Jean Renoir, or know much in advance about a movie I had been taught, by student film buffs, to revere.
Big mistake. Some knew as much as I would have known almost 40 years ago, and others knew more. They knew more because they’d Googled the film and its director. They were admirably cautious about the accuracy about what they had found—they realize that Wikipedia can be unreliable—but in this case their fears seemed groundless, and in any case they had also looked up scholarly articles in databases to which the college subscribes.
This made me think a bit. I own three or four books on Renoir because almost 20 years ago I agreed to talk to a student film society about The Grand Illusion, and I did not want to embarrass myself. I bought the books and read them; I hadn’t had time to go the library. A generation ago, there was no other way to find out too much about anything, unless you happened to know an expert in the field, which usually meant you had a job working in a university. There was always the Britannica, but if you needed more, you went to a university library; if you were short of time and extravagant, and lived in a large city or a college town, you went to a bookstore, and shelled out. If you did not have access to the university library or the college bookstore, you were out of luck. As for yet more specialized knowledge, a lot of scholarly articles were inaccessible unless you attended a fairly rich university. The Internet has changed this to a degree that has still not quite sunk in for me.
The now traditional complaint about Internet research is that there is no gatekeeper—no board of credentialed editors—so there is too much garbage on the Net and no way to know what any assertion or interpretation is worth. But that’s a tricky one. Yesterday, wasting 20 minutes in my office, I read e-mails on an alternate history e-list to which I subscribe following a debate about Churchill’s decisions in 1940 and 1941. A number of the contributors, none of them, as far as I know, professional historians, were quoting John Charmley, a professional historian, and in my opinion an ominously biased interpreter of the questions being discussed. But Charmley has a university job, and has published a dozen books, which means he is well past the gatekeepers. Wikipedia on Renoir sounded less polemical, and less dangerous to use, without a degree in the field. More importantly, you do not have to be anywhere special to use it. It fills in the background no one is nowadays imagined to have. My students were reminded of something I had said in passing several months before, that Norman Angell had published, in 1913, The Great Illusion, deprecating the chances of anything like the First World War ever happening. Most of the time, pop futurists writing columns and pseudo-books tell you that the world is changing profoundly and for the better, very fast, and that some gizmo or piece of software is doing it. They are generally wrong. But not always.
December 11, 2006
A Footprint on the Sands of Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST It was one of those accidents so common in wartime. A Spitfire, descending through clouds over Lincolnshire, England, on December 11, 1941, collided with an Oxford trainer flying from another airbase at about 400 feet. While the Spitfire pilot was able to push back the canopy and jump from his doomed plane, there was not enough time for his parachute to open before he hit the ground. He was killed instantly. He was John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was 19 years old. He was buried at a nearby cemetery two days later with full honors, his coffin carried by the fellow pilots of his squadron. His commanding officer wrote his parents, who lived in Washington, D.C., to offer his condolences and to thank them for their son’s sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Except for one thing, that would have been the end of it, just one more young life snuffed out by war. With those who loved him now gone too, John Magee would today be forgotten, just as so many of those who died in that now-long-ago war are forgotten. That one thing that gave him a measure of immortality is a poem, a sonnet. He wrote it a couple of months before he died and included it in a letter he sent his parents, noting laconically, “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” After his death, his parents showed it to the poet Archibald MacLeish, then the librarian of Congress, and he included it, in February, 1942, in an exhibition of poems called “Faith and Freedom.” From there it spread far and wide, and it is known today to probably every pilot in the English-speaking world and many millions more besides. Today it is, without a doubt, the most famous poem ever written about the joyful sense of power and freedom that can be experienced only in the cockpit of a responsive and eager aircraft like the Spitfire. When the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986, President Reagan ended his now famous speech to the nation on the tragedy by referring to Magee’s great poem. “We shall never forget them,” he told us, “nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.” The poem, of course, is “High Flight”: Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
December 10, 2006
Realism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST At seven or so this morning I heard a loud noise from the other room, as if something had fallen from a height to the floor. I went out and looked and saw nothing, but a couple of hours later a better-faith effort revealed a few books had tumbled six feet from a shelf, one of them Brian Bond’s The Pursuit of Victory. Bond is one of the best of military historians, and having just taught one of his books (The Unquiet Western Front), and thus being filled with renewed admiration for him, I started reading around in The Pursuit of Victory. In his chapter on World War II, Bond points out that while German and Japanese efficiency in exploiting conquered economies was in many cases very impressive—more impressive than anyone seems to have realized until the mid-1990s—the viciousness and intensity of German and Japanese racism squandered the results of even clever looting. Does it make sense to say that this cost the Axis the war? On the one hand, a less brutal and arrogant Japan could have had many more willing allies among the subjects of the European empires it smashed, and Hitler could probably have had a lot of more willing subjects in the portions of the Soviet Union he controlled. Less mad racism would certainly have gotten more food and resources out of Soviet territory and recruited more puppet troops. On the other hand it is hard to imagine Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan behaving very differently in this particular respect. Peculiarly vicious racism and other forms of profound irrationality were at the very core of those regimes. Had they possessed a different attitude toward their subjects, they would not have been who they were, and a Germany that could have behaved so differently in victory would not have been Nazi Germany. Had such a regime defeated Stalin, it would not have created that nightmare world that seems the worst of possibilities. Could Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have concealed their natures a bit longer, long enough to win? In both cases, victory disease made masking their true natures seem unnecessary, and necessity eventually made masking their nature impossible, so upon reflection, their elemental nature made the historical outcomes very likely. Character is sometimes fate. This made me think a bit about the word realism, as it has been bandied about in the wake of the report of the Iraq Study Group. Realism can mean praiseworthy willingness to face unpleasant facts. It is an unpleasant fact that imperialism sometimes pays, at least for a while. When Peter Liberman published Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies, a book that informed Brian Bond’s chapter, academics usually chose to ignore that unpleasant fact. Liberman is generally described as a realist political scientist, and for a good reason. In the case of the Iraq Study Group, it is an unpleasant fact that constructing a sturdy and attractive democracy in Iraq may not be a wholly promising project, and the Iraq Study Group’s willingness (in some quarters, even possible eagerness) to acknowledge that fact in its report has been styled “realism.” On the other hand the Iraq Study Group seems to think that the United States may be able to discover common interests with Iran, Syria, and the current leadership of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, vicious secular tyrannies, brutal theocracies, and unabashed millenarian terrorists may not think they have many common interests with the United States, in which thought they may be absolutely correct. Realism means acknowledging that fact too. It is an oddity of our times that the claim that if we abandon Iraq, we may well reach a promising modus vivendi with Iran, Syria, and Hamas is nowadays styled “realism.”
December 9, 2006
The Birchers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST Josh Zeitz’s lead piece on the website today, “The Right Wing Takes Off,” begins by noting that today is the forty-eighth anniversary of Robert Welch, Jr.’s founding of the John Birch Society, and traces the rise—such as it was—and fall of the organization. Josh notes that the Birchers reached their height in the early 1960s and became “something of a joke” in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, but he concludes that some of Welch’s “views were closer to the American center than almost anyone would have imagined in 1958.” Josh argues that “upwardly mobile white citizens resented taxes and government regulations even as they welcomed the extensive federal defense spending that fueled the burgeoning local economy. From these grass roots, the Birchers helped build one of the foundations of the mainstream Republican ascendance of later decades.” I am not sure that resentment of government regulation is what inspired the eventual deregulation of the American economy. My memory is that the process began under Carter, and was elite-led rather than populist-inspired, a key figure being Alfred Kahn, Carter’s head of the Civil Aeronautics Board and later chief adviser on deregulation. I have the impression that the crucial influence was the work of academic research, some of it historical, and done from the left, some of it economic, revealing that the regulated, who could sometimes use regulation to keep out economic competition, rather than consumers, were often the beneficiaries of government regulation; this was the theory of regulatory capture. One of the boys from my high school was at that time working for Kahn, and I may recall a self-serving account of the origins of the movement from a tenth-reunion picnic, but it may be relevant that the boy was the son of a trade union leader, a keen Democrat, a graduate of Harvard Law and the Kennedy School. He thought the Birchers were a joke. But I do remember the Birchers. I remember being taken by my parents to see a concert at the local high school, one where Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were singing. A picket line had been thrown up by the Birchers, who shouted at us as we crossed. They handed out literature, one piece of which I took, and I remember reading that the singers had been part of something called the Fair Play For Cuba Committee. This must have been in the very early sixties. The Birchers were not yet a joke, but neither were they particularly alarming, other than to a child; I had never before seen adults scream in public, and I have a vivid memory of one man with a contorted face shouting at us. My father, a Truman Democrat and not a particularly timid man, took my hand and hauled me past the picketers. I remember him saying that evening that he would not have attended the concert if he had not heard that the Birchers were picketing it; he cared little for that sort of music and less for Cuba, but he disliked the Birchers thinking they could dissuade any American from doing anything, and he went to spite them. A couple of years later the Birchers were indeed a joke. A handful of boys in the high school had founded the Teenage Republicans, and one of them tried to set up a chapter of Young Americans For Freedom. They were the sort of Irish-American kids who thought William F. Buckley a great wit and a thrilling gentleman dandy. They read National Review, and they were a tiny minority in the school; out of 1,200 or so students they numbered something like 8, and they were the ones who found the Birchers amusing: The Birchers were cranks’ cranks. The looniest bits of the agenda—Welch’s conviction that Eisenhower was an agent of the Communists, that Ronald Reagan was an agent of the Communists—were what struck people at the time, and were by a long chalk the most distinctive thing about the Birchers. Goldwater was not a joke; these boys idolized Goldwater. But the Birchers were goofy. They were imagined as little old ladies from Pasadena, or nuts of some other variety. That is why I’m not sure that time vindicated Robert Welch in any significant way. I do not think he truly prefigured the forces that subsequently changed our political history. I think the 1964 Civil Rights Act changed electoral demography for a generation and produced the Republican majorities, and presidential victories, by shifting control of the South, and I think this was reinforced by a perception of rising crime, and in 1968 and 1972 by some irritation at the antiwar movement. I think stagflation seemed to discredit the Keynesian consensus, that supply-side theories were offered to justify painless tax cuts by not requiring proportional cuts in federal expenditures, that disenchantment with the powers of the state—the result of failures in social policy and Vietnam—probably did a lot more than convictions about the intrinsic wickedness of high taxes and an interventionist state. I think anti-Communism got a small boost from the invasion of Czechoslovakia and a larger one from the invasion of Afghanistan and the crackdown on Solidarity. I think the Iranians who seized our embassy did a lot more to elect Ronald Reagan than anyone else did. The cultural and social conservatives who began to exert such force in Republican primary politics did not, I think, have anti–big government views originating in detestation of the New Deal. Being in the right place at the right time counts for a lot in politics, and winning the Republican nomination in the middle of the hostage crisis was the right place at the right time. Similarly, I think it is hard to imagine George Bush being re-elected without 9/11, or elected the first time without the intervention of the Supreme Court and distaste for Clinton’s behavior; I do not think Bush’s views on the proper role of the state were decisive in getting him even as close as he came to an electoral victory in 2000. For that matter, starting in the late 1970s, tax revolts and some rolling back of the state occurred in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe; this was a broader trend than can be associated with the inspiration of the Birchers. But this is instinct, and memory, not historical research.
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