September 7, 2006
Plame Out Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:40 PM EST In his post of October 18, 2005, on the Plame affair, Joshua Zeitz wrote, “When all the facts are on the table, maybe John Steele Gordon and I will have occasion to revisit this question.” The facts would now seem to be mostly all out, so let’s do so. John F. Kennedy once said that in Washington, “where there’s smoke, there’s usually a smoke-making machine.” Plamegate is a classic case of an all-smoke-no-fire Washington kerfuffle. Twenty-five years from now, it will be totally forgotten. A brief review: In July 2003, Joseph Wilson IV, a retired ambassador who had been sent to Niger to see if there was any substance to the report that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellow cake (from which uranium is processed), wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times. In it he claimed that Bush’s statement in the 2003 State of the Union speech saying that Saddam had done so was false and that the Bush White House knew it to be false, because of Joe Wilson’s report. Shortly thereafter, Robert Novak revealed in his column that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. Wilson claimed that his wife’s cover had been blown as an act of revenge by the White House and violated the law against knowingly revealing intelligence officials who are under cover. All hell broke loose in the liberal media. The New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, howled for a special prosecutor, and one was duly appointed. Two years later, a New York Times reporter spent 85 days in jail for contempt for refusing to reveal her sources for a story that was never published. Soon after she was released, she was fired. Shortly thereafter, the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, indicted Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for perjury in his grand jury testimony on the matter. Libby immediately resigned, and the case against him is still pending. That was it. After two years and millions of dollars, the special prosecutor obtained one indictment, and that alleged an ex post facto crime. To the palpable disappointment of the left, Karl Rove was not—in Joe Wilson’s words—frog-marched out of the White House. Now it turns out that Novak got his information from an inadvertent leak by Richard Armitage, then number two at the State Department and no friend of the Bush White House. More, Fitzgerald had known this from the very day he took office. Being an editorial writer, of course, means never having to say you’re sorry. But both the Post and the Times in recent editorials have come as close as editorialists seem able to come to say that they blew it. The Post said that the real fault for outing Valerie Plame lay with her husband, Joe Wilson. So who are the winners and losers here? Surely Joe Wilson is a big loser. His 15 minutes of fame came at the cost of his personal integrity, although there’s not much evidence that he ever had any. His original op-ed article was mostly false, as the report of the 9/11 Commission clearly demonstrated. He has been revealed as a combination showboating publicity hound and political hit man. Another is Richard Armitage. He could have fessed up as soon as he realized what he had done, and short-circuited the whole affair. Instead he did nothing, causing the government to needlessly spend million of dollars and distracting public officials from doing their jobs as they sought to defend themselves against serious, but specious, accusations. His behavior is, perhaps, explainable. If so, he should do so forthwith. Another is Patrick Fitzgerald. Had a regular Department of Justice investigation been carried out, it would have ended with the revelation in October 2003 that Richard Armitage was the leaker and he had committed no crime in doing so, however careless he had been. To be sure, the rabid left would have screamed “Cover-up!” for a few days, but even they would have had to shut up when all the facts were laid out. But once someone is appointed a “special prosecutor” and given a blank check both as to money and time to investigate a case that has gathered great public attention, they seem compelled to spend endless time and endless money searching for something, anything, to justify their appointment. The best that Fitzgerald could do, it seems, was indict a man for lying about a crime that had never taken place. Given the fact that that man, Scooter Libby, is both a lawyer and a total Washington professional, he must surely have known that a cover-up is a dangerous enterprise, and if there is no crime to cover up, why do it? Inevitably, then, one wonders how much evidence there is behind this indictment. Perhaps Scooter Libby is just Fitzgerald’s ham sandwich, indicted to bolster Fitzgerald’s reputation as a hard-boiled prosecutor. I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable from time to time in a democracy with a free press. But perhaps we can at least learn something from it. Let’s start with filing away the whole concept of special prosecutor with other well-intentioned public policy ideas that don’t work in the real world, such as prohibition.
September 6, 2006
Tiger Woods Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST I don’t play golf. If I did, I would have a handicap of about 800, owing to the fact that, as my brother once said after a particularly inept athletic performance on my part, I have “the hand-eye coordination of a blind snake.”
But this summer I have been watching a fair amount of golf on television. It’s a beautiful sport, as there are few landscapes as pleasant as a world-class golf course. And golf is a sport made for television, with its ability to zoom in close to the action, leap about the course, do instant replays, and view the various holes in their entirety from a blimp overhead. Plus there is the wonder of watching a great player make an absolutely impossible shot—and, of course, the occasional dose of schadenfreude when a great player blows a two-foot putt or takes three strokes to get out of a bunker, just like the average duffer.
But I have also been watching golf this summer for the sheer pleasure of seeing one of the ornaments of our age, the greatest golfer who has ever lived and perhaps will ever live, Tiger Woods. The statistics are nothing short of staggering. He has been a professional for 10 years and is only 30, but he has already won 53 PGA tournaments and twelve majors. (Jack Nicklaus had won 33 tournaments and eight majors by the time he was thirty.) This year Tiger has won seven tournaments, including two majors, and has won the last five tournaments he entered. (Byron Nelson’s record of winning eleven consecutive tournaments has stood since 1945. I wouldn’t count on its lasting much longer.) With 53 tournament wins, Tiger is number five on the all-time list, behind Sam Snead (82), Jack Nicklaus (73), Ben Hogan (64) and Arnold Palmer (62). At his current pace, he will be number one in another six years, with years of playing ahead of him.
And then, of course, there’s the money. He has won over $55 million in PGA tournaments. In his last five tournament wins this summer he has been earning prize money at the rate of $2,400 per stroke. And that doesn’t include the vast ancillary income from endorsements, advertisements, etc. (Note to corporations: If you would like to put your logo on a baseball cap and have me wear it, my head rents for a lot less than Tiger’s.)
Watching Tiger Woods play golf is like going to the opening of a new Shakespeare play, reading the latest novel by Charles Dickens, listening to Mozart’s latest opera. It is art in the highest sense. The reason is simple. Asked what his greatest asset as a golfer was, Tiger flashed his incomparable smile, tapped the side of his head, and said, “my mind.”
September 1, 2006
The Drowsy Chaperone Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST Most people who live in New York City rarely if ever do some the things normally associated with the city, other than in the company of people from out of town. I have only been to the top of the Empire State Building, or seen the Statue of Liberty, in the course of entertaining European guests. This week, possibly for the first time in my life, I saw a Broadway show in the strictest sense, i.e., a musical comedy playing in a theater physically located on Broadway—in the course of entertaining two English guests. Maybe the exception proves the rule: The Drowsy Chaperone is a very clever and deeply affectionate send-up of late 1920 musical comedy, so it is, I suppose, more of a meta-musical than the real thing. Most “Broadway” theaters are in fact located on side streets (I was cheating on that one), and The Drowsy Chaperone was written not in Tin Pan Alley, by Runyonesque characters, but by Canadians, presumably while living in Canada. In any event, while The Drowsy Chaperone has a lot of virtues, this post is prompted by a single joke, although one that made me, in the words of one of my guests, laugh like a drain. One of the play’s characters, in the course of working out a scheme to shatter an engagement by finding a would-be Lothario to seduce the bride-to-be, remarks that “We need one of those people who are corrupt but gullible—whaddaya call ’em—you know, a European.” I am not sure quite why I found that so funny, but here are some guesses: First, corrupt but gullible is a witty and engagingly optimistic paradox. We may carelessly assume that integrity and credulity are paired traits, and that the same is true of their reverses, but the joke reminds us that immorality is not the same thing as skeptical intelligence. What about associating corruption and gullibility with Europeans? Americans have a long tradition of defining themselves in opposition to Europeans. In that stereotype we are new, full of hopeful optimism, and not terribly sophisticated. So we of the New World are proverbially brash and moralistic but also idealistic. They of the Old World are proverbially wicked but impressively sophisticated. When imagining national character in this way, Americans and Europeans are normally conceived to possess real but contrary strengths and weaknesses, although that sense of trade-offs is not invariably present. Donald Rumsfeld evoked a harsher and more simple contrast with that gibe about “Old Europe,” juxtaposing Eastern European support for overthrowing a tyranny in Iraq with Western European hostility to that project. But how do Europeans come to be imagined as both corrupt and gullible, rather than simply as corrupt? Don’t we all agree that Americans are the gullible ones? As for corruption, in the 1920s it might have meant sexual corruption—morganatic marriages and the mistress as institution, versus priggish and chaste New World Protestantism. It might also have meant political corruption, where Americans were in fact imagined to be somewhere in the middle: We were, and probably remain, more corrupt (politicians on the take, etc.) than is likely to be the case in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, but less corrupt than in Latin Europe or Ireland. There are words in Latin languages to denote specific mechanisms of political corruption—Transformismo, Caciquismo, etc.—which have migrated into the technical language of political analysis. They have a word for it, you can imagine the American dowager sniffing, and we do not, although of course we do have words for it—boss rule, machine politics, etc. Still, there are differences between political cultures, and they matter. In what sense, though, have we ever imagined wicked old Europeans to be gullible? Aren’t we, in our virtuous trumpeting of our innocence, the gullible ones? Yes and no. The Yankee trader, who can sing the silver out of your pocket and leave you puzzling over a wooden nutmeg, is an old type in our folk comedy, and it is an American who can proverbially sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge. Mulling over the problem of an American stereotype of gullible Europeans, however, I remained stuck for a couple of minutes. I’m still uncertain, but this is what I think may make that joke work, at least for me: The Drowsy Chaperone is set in the late 1920s, when a lot of Europeans had already swallowed the preposterous Mussolini, a fair number of them had swallowed Hitler’s hysterical ranting, and a lot were also taken by Lenin’s dicta. Americans are proud of hardheaded common sense, in politics and in other things. It is now the fashion to scorn us for our susceptibility to cretinous idealism about international politics, a trait sometimes dubbed Wilsonianism. But as far as susceptibility to deadly idealisms—a special sort of gullibility—I am not sure we compare too badly with the last century’s Europeans. Of course, the writers of The Drowsy Chaperone are Canadians, and the joke may have been intended to mock American conceit and chauvinism. If so, the joke, rather intriguingly, works both ways.
September 1, 2006
The Passenger Pigeon Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:10 PM EST On September 1, 1914, as the newly born World War I raged in Europe, there was another, more quiet death in the Cincinnati Zoo. That day Martha, the last passenger pigeon on earth, breathed her last and fell lifeless to the bottom of her cage.
Many animals that have gone extinct at the hands of man were never numerous. The ivory-billed woodpecker, now perhaps rediscovered, was always greatly restricted in both numbers and habitat, as were Bachman’s warbler and the dusky seaside sparrow. But others, such as the Carolina parakeet—America’s only native parrot—and the giant auk of the North Atlantic, were once common.
The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), however, was more than common. John James Audubon, riding the 55 miles between Henderson and Louisville, Kentucky, in the autumn of 1813, reported that a flock of passenger pigeons flew overhead the entire day, spreading from horizon to horizon. He estimated the number of birds at a billion. Another flock in Ontario in 1866 was a mile wide and three hundred miles long, numbering perhaps as many as 3.5 billion birds, all racing ahead at 60 miles an hour.
And yet the last wild passenger pigeon was shot in 1900, only 34 years later, and one of the world’s greatest natural wonders—the avian equivalent of Niagara Falls, Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon—was gone. How could such a thing have happened?
The answer lies in the peculiar habits of this singular bird and the emerging technology of the nineteenth century. Larger than a mourning dove, slate blue above and russet below, the passenger pigeon was not only the most abundant bird on earth, it was also the most social. It nested often a hundred pairs to a tree, and the nesting grounds could be a mile wide and 80 miles long, each pair laying a single egg. Like many pigeons, the parents would feed the squabs till they were butterball fat and then abandon them. The squabs, too fat to fly, would flutter to the ground and wander around, learning to feed themselves before taking to the air. With millions of fat squabs unable to fly, the local predators—foxes, coyotes, weasels, and bobcats—would have a field day. But the sheer number of birds assured that only a tiny fraction of the whole would be taken. Once the squabs were gone, the passenger pigeon flock would not nest in the same area again for years, perhaps decades. No one knew where they would nest the following year.
But while the natural predators could only wait for the pigeons to show up, once the telegraph and the railroad were in place, human beings could converge on the bonanza of squabs wherever it was located and exploit it to the hilt year after year. One man reported firing his 12-gauge shotgun into a tree of nesting pigeons and having 18 of them fall dead to the ground. With nets, squabs by the hundreds of thousands could be rounded up, killed, gutted, and defeathered, and packed in barrels to be rushed to market.
Under such ruthless exploitation, the number of passenger pigeons began to fall sharply. Then, as the flocks got smaller, a strange thing happened: The pigeons just stopped breeding. Apparently, passenger pigeons needed the fellowship of millions of their fellows to stimulate nesting and breeding behavior. When a flock fell below a critical—and very large—number, reproduction ceased and the population crashed. The last sizable wild flock was destroyed by hunters in 1893.
Most of the country’s major natural history museums have stuffed specimens of the passenger pigeon that you can go and see. And you should, if only to get a glimpse of what our ancestors, without meaning to, took from us. But while you can see the individual specimens, you cannot see the skies darkened by them in their countless millions or hear the roar of a billion pairs of wings. The still beautiful birds behind glass in museums are only the palest shadow of what they were in life. As the great naturalist Aldo Leopold explained, “There will always be pigeons in books and in museums but they are dead to all hardships and to all delights. They cannot dive out of a cloud, nor clap their wings in thunderous applause. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather, they live forever by not living at all.”
September 1, 2006
In Defense of John Brown Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST Fred Schwarz writes that while “people [who] used persuasion, law, and direct action to restrict, expose, and nullify slavery as far as it was possible” were heroic, their heroism is irrelevant to the business of judging John Brown: “John Brown, by contrast, achieved nothing at Harpers Ferry, and he did it at the cost of many lives and much increased bitterness.” He concludes that Brown “was not a hero. He was just a crazy fool.”
What about the argument that the raid on Harpers Ferry provoked the war that brought slavery to an end? Fred argues that “The raid does seem to have heightened the already severe sectional conflict, and it may have brought civil war five or ten years sooner than it otherwise would have occurred, but if so, it’s unclear whether this was good or bad. He “suggest[s] very tentatively that the North was industrializing much faster than the South and developing new weapons as well, so a war that began in 1865 or 1869 would probably have ended much quicker.”
One can argue the contrary: Gatling’s 1861 version of a machine gun could already fire 200 rounds a minute, and Michael Kelly invented pretty good barbed wire in 1868. Sunken lanes defended by muzzle loaders were hard enough to take with nineteenth-century offensive weapons; given a few more years and some modest luck, Confederate generals could have made the Potomac as gorily famous as the Somme.
That observation does not seem to me to be an adequate response to Fred Schwarz’s post. Neither does pointing out a possible contradiction in his argument (I am not sure how Brown can simultaneously have accelerated the war by perhaps a decade and achieved nothing). I think the problem is that John Brown seems both a kind of monster and a greater and more tragic figure than Fred Schwarz’s account allows. In an age of terrorism, a terrorist in a just cause is not an easy man to defend. Still, a partial defense seems to me to be necessary.
What about the Pottawotamie Massacre, where Fred Schwarz notes that Brown killed proslavery settlers in cold blood? It seems to some degree relevant that the massacre was part of a very ugly fight that Brown’s side did not begin. (Brown himself was provoked by both the earlier Lawrence raid, and by Preston Brooks’s assault on Charles Sumner, on the floor of the Senate.) So Brown was a terrorist who used terror against men who had employed it first, and in a vicious cause, the worst cause for which Americans have ever fought. At Pottawotamie, he murdered five or six men—the accounts I have seen vary—but spared a 16-year-old boy who was not a member of a political society that employed violence in that worst of causes. This is modest forbearance, although more than many modern terrorists show. Does that forbearance to any degree soften our judgment of Brown as a terrorist? I think it does, although I am not sure how much.
In an age when murder of civilians is frequently and joyously done, usually with the conviction of utter righteousness, Brown is an embarrassing hero, but it seems important to acknowledge that he was a hero to an impressive collection of nineteenth-century Americans. So while I do not know what an adequate response to Fred Schwarz’s argument would be, I do know that on May 28, 1863, the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first black unit in the United States Army, paraded in review in Boston singing “John Brown’s Body.” And I know that in 1881, at Harpers Ferry, Frederick Douglass observed that John Brown “had practically illustrated a truth stranger than fiction,—a truth higher than Virginia had ever known,—a truth more noble and beautiful than Jefferson ever wrote.” And as Douglass said on the same occasion, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”
|
