September 16, 2006
Tony Judt's Liberal-Bashing Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST A friend today steered me to a piece by Tony Judt in the new London Review of Books revealingly titled “Bush’s Useful Idiots.” Judt is a professor of history at New York University and is also director of NYU’s Erich Maria Remarque Institute. A man with a distinguished and interesting career, originally a historian of the twentieth-century French left, he published some attacks on the French Communist party’s influence on French intellectuals. One of these books was published in 1994, which may strike some readers as a tad late in the day for an attack on the French Communist party, but even as late as 1994 that attack earned Judt some snide comments within the academy, where anti-Communism is not a particularly strong passion. More recently he has become a sharp critic of Israel, and of the war in Iraq. Neither of these positions is particularly freakish in the American university system. What is striking about Judt’s newest piece is his venomous attack on . . . American liberals. The people he attacks—people associated with The New Republic, Dissent, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The New York Times—he generally attacks with savagery; when not savage, his tone is contemptuous (the liberals he dislikes are variously described as portentous, shameless, “useful idiots,” etc.). Their sin is to be insufficiently hostile to the war in Iraq, or to Israel. Judt sees liberals who fail to meet his purity tests as fellow travelers of the most detested members of the right: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.” I don’t think that any of my co-bloggers will be persuaded that there is now no difference between American liberals and American neoconservatives, but this sort of “thinking” does ring a bell. More on that below, but first, some other notes on Judt-ism. Judt is scornful of Paul Berman and Peter Beinart, both of whom have recently written extensively on foreign policy in an age of Islamist terror, for opining on their new subject when “neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East.” Such modesty has not much inhibited Professor Judt, when opining on the same subject, but be that as it may. What is more remarkable is the brisk condescension he displays to some of the liberal anti-Communists he once admired: the Pole Adam Michnik and the Czech Václav Havel, men who opposed Communist tyranny from exposed positions within those tyrannies themselves, rather than from the trenches of the faculty dining room in the dangerous days of, say, 1994. In their persistent and excessive enthusiasm for liberal society and rights, Michnik and Havel, along with French figures like André Glucksmann, have now, apparently, committed a grave error, and at its worst, this error can even lead to initial support for the overthrow of genocidal tyrannies like Saddam’s regime. It turns out that “this trend is an unfortunate byproduct of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. . . . A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’—and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name—can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms.” Binary moral and political choices, alas, sometimes exist—but again, be that as it may. What is interesting about Judt’s sneering, jeering, and liberal-baiting is the memory it evokes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. Then, too, it became the fashion to demonize liberals from the left, and for some elements on the left to take only the sketchiest interest in national security, and avoid commitments to any “abstract universalism of rights” when surveying foreign regimes. This is not generally thought to have worked out too well for the left. The Republicans won seven out of the next ten presidential elections, and the three Democratic victories were won by Democrats who were not at the time seen as particularly liberal. That history may not be much of a worry for Tony Judt, an Englishmen writing in a British journal. It should worry Americans, if they are liberals, or anywhere else on the left.
September 16, 2006
Is Plamegate Really Settled? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Has “the White House” been completely exonerated? Karl Rove was not charged with a crime, which is not quite the same thing. Exonerate means to be freed of blame, failure to charge may mean something less. Still, it is unjust to expect Karl Rove to prove a negative, and we can certainly surmise that Fitzgerald did not think he could meet the burden of proof. Then again, I am told—by prosecutors—that good prosecutors raise the bar on the burden of proof when they are dealing with political appointees of elected officials, when there are suggestions, even unjust suggestions, that prosecutors are “criminalizing politics.” So a prosecutor who takes his burden of proof very seriously is possibly more likely to be blackguarded than one who carelessly, capriciously, even maliciously seeks indictments. As a matter of law and logic, Wilson’s op-ed piece could be a tissue of lies, and there could simultaneously be a conspiracy to intimidate future whistleblowers by outing this possible liar’s CIA-employee spouse. Also, it may be that people sought to punish Wilson by outing his wife without breaking the law as written. That would not make their actions, if they so acted, the actions of honorable men. Was Richard Armitage “the leaker”? Novak has always claimed there were two leakers. The other leaker appears to have been Libby. Fitzgerald knew, early on, the identity of the first leaker. It may have taken a while to identify the other. When that identification was made, assume that the leak was not itself a crime. So what? John Steele Gordon noted that Libby is under indictment for “lying about a crime that had never taken place.” But that alleged lying might well be perjury and obstruction of justice, and prosecutors tend to take such things seriously. Such lying is sometimes itself a crime. Under some circumstances—for example, when the lie concerns sexual irregularities—a majority of Americans may have some sympathy for the liar. I am not sure that a lie under the circumstances in which Libby is charged with having lied will evoke as much prurient interest, but neither do I think they will evoke as much sympathy. By the way, I don’t assume that Libby is guilty of a crime. Libby deserves the presumption of innocence. And Fitzgerald deserves the presumption that he has acted with competence, and in good faith.
September 16, 2006
Where’s the There? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, about Plamegate, “But I don’t see how this month’s coverage exonerates or implicates anyone. To invoke a horridly corny expression, the jury is still out.” If the jury is still out, it seems to me that is only because they are still deciding what to have for lunch. The main matters are settled. 1) It certainly seems clear that Richard Armitage’s more-than-a-little-tardy revelation and Hubris, the book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn revealing him to be the leaker, exonerate the White House completely of the endlessly repeated central charge in this whole matter. And that is of having deliberately conspired to break the law regarding covert CIA operatives in order to do Joseph Wilson an injury for his anti-Bush op-ed article—long revealed as a tissue of lies—in The New York Times in July 2003. 2) It seems equally clear that Karl Rove was not frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs because Karl Rove didn’t break any laws and didn’t initiate any conspiracy, legal or not, to discredit Joseph Wilson. In fact, no one broke the law regarding covert CIA operatives, because Valerie Plame did not meet the definition under the law. And no one conspired to discredit Joseph Wilson because no one needed to. He discredited himself quite thoroughly. Karl Rove surely knows Woodrow Wilson’s greatest piece of political advice: “Never murder a man who’s committing suicide.” 3) And it seems clear that the whole Valerie Plame affair was a gigantic waste of the public’s time and money and a major administration distraction in a time of war. Plamegate has proved to be the Oakland, California, of Washington scandals: there’s no there there. What we need now to lay this sorry episode entirely to rest is a full accounting from two people, Richard Armitage and Patrick Fitzgerald. Armitage has said he was unable to reveal the fact that he was the leaker—which would have brought the whole matter to a crashing end forthwith, saving the country, the administration, and numerous individuals endless trouble—because the special prosecutor instructed him not to talk about his grand jury testimony. That is, to be charitable, nonsense. First, Armitage, by his own admission, realized that he was the leaker in early October 2003, and the special prosecutor was not appointed until December 30, 2003, two and a half months later. Second, while prosecutors can request of witnesses that they remain silent, they are under no legal obligation to honor the request. Richard Armitage was, instead, under a profound moral and ethical obligation to tell the whole truth to the public immediately. Why didn’t he? Fitzgerald knew from the day he took office that (1) Armitage was the leaker and (2) the revelation of Valerie Plame’s employment at CIA did not break the law. He spent two and a half years tracking down a leaker he already knew the identity of and a crime he already knew had not been committed. Why did he?
September 15, 2006
More on Plame Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:25 PM EST I’m well behind in the conversation thread here on the American Heritage blog, but having been chastised by a dear friend for my dereliction of editorial duty (it’s been some time since I’ve posted), I feel compelled to respond to John Steele Gordon’s post of about a week ago concerning “Plamegate.” Mr. Gordon writes that “Plamegate is a classic case of an all-smoke-no-fire Washington kerfuffle.” More specifically, he claims that the columnist “[Robert] 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.” In fact, I don’t know that recent developments in the case make Plamegate any clearer. Quite to the contrary, they muddy the waters. According to today’s New York Times, Novak disputes Richard Armitage’s account of their now-famous interview, in which the then-deputy secretary of state leaked Plame’s identity. According to Novak, Armitage “did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear that he considered it especially suited for my column.” Novak further writes, “He [Armitage] told me unequivocally that Ms. Wilson had worked in the C.I.A.’s Counterproliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband’s mission.” Novak’s description of his conversation with Armitage follows on the heels of other revelations about the case—for instance, that Armitage may also have leaked Plame’s identity to Bob Woodward (which would seem to discredit his claim to have made an inadvertent slip), and that the State Department was well aware of Armitage’s role in outing Plame but kept silent on the matter. Moreover, that Armitage identified Plame as an official with the C.I.A.’s Counterproliferation Division seems pretty serious to me. Now, I’m as confused as Mr. Gordon about the motivations behind the federal prosecutor’s probe. But I don’t see how this month’s coverage exonerates or implicates anyone. To invoke a horridly corny expression, the jury is still out.
September 15, 2006
Thoughts About Ann Richards Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:05 PM EST Amy Weaver Dorning, a friend of and frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com, found herself surprisingly stirred when she learned that Ann Richards had died earlier this week. She wrote the following to us to explain why:
“When I heard that former Texas governor Ann Richards had died on September 13, at age 73, I felt a wave of sadness, like an era had ended. Though I haven’t lived in Texas in 15 years, I still identify with my home state in a powerful way, and Ann Richards’s legacy is emblematic of what I love about being from there. Part of her appeal for me was that she reminded me of so many of the women who had colored my childhood, the kind you don’t often meet in New York or San Francisco, the two places I have called home since I left. My opinionated mother and her friends (Texas ladies though they were) drank beer, smoked, cussed, and loved to joke about men and their various foibles. Ann Richards would have fit right in. This sort of down-home feminist banter got under my skin, and having grown up around these big-haired women allows me rationalize my own occasional excesses, like the need to fill in my sentences with colorful expletives, simply to get my point across. As a native Texan, I figure it is my birthright.
“Dorothy Ann Willis Richards was born in September 1933 outside of Waco and spent most of her life in central Texas. Her parents, Cecil and Ona Willis, hailed from nearby towns of Bugtussle and Hogjaw, and the family eventually moved to Waco so Ann could attend high school and, later, Baylor University. That’s where she met her future husband, David Richards, a man with political aspirations and ambitions. They would have four children together, host many a Democratic political fundraiser, and make some important allies before they were divorced in the 1980s.
“I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin when Richards began her national political ascent from Dallas housewife (she once said her biggest fear was that her tombstone would read ‘She kept a really clean house’) and low-level politico to major player. It all started with her unforgettable speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention and culminated with her election as the second female Texas governor in 1990. Of course, the only line from the convention that has survived is the one about the senior George Bush being born with a silver foot in his mouth, but it was her bawdy sense of humor, her thick Texas accent, and her flamboyant personal style that catapulted her into the American consciousness.
“Nobody had seen anything like her—a smart, funny, and straight-talking woman politician who wanted to make some changes and throw the good-old-boy network on its, ahem, ass. She was open about her divorce and her stint in rehab for alcoholism, both touchy subjects in a conservative state. Her run for governor against the oil man Clayton Williams turned into a battle of the sexes, and she played it to the hilt, getting the majority of the female vote. Her inauguration was a time of celebration, especially for women, and she dubbed her administration the ‘New Texas.’
“My friends and I loved her straight-shooting feminism, despite the fact that her politics seemed pretty middle-of-the-road to a bunch of idealistic college students. We weren’t so interested in women getting jobs at the statehouse as in opposing the Gulf War, which was breaking out just as she took office. Plus, her beefing up of the state prison system and later support of the North American Free Trade Agreement did little to endear her to diehard liberals. But of her nearly 3,000 appointments, some 46 percent were female, 15 percent were black, 20 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were Asian-American. Her predecessor, GOP Gov. Bill Clements, gave more than 80 percent of his appointments to Anglos and men. Plus, had any of us known who would be booting her out of office in four years (George Bush II), we would have probably worshiped her unreservedly.
“By Ann’s second year in office, I had moved to New York to attend graduate school, but with my entire family still in Texas, I traveled home often, and paid more attention to the politics and goings-on there than I did in my new home state. Admittedly I probably exaggerated my Texan-ness at that time, partly out of homesickness, but mostly because it got me attention and set me apart from all the East Coast Ivy League types I was now spending time with. That and the fact that my libation of choice was Wild Turkey (I still shudder). Even if I didn’t agree with all of her policies, I was proud of Ann Richards and followed her career. I even pinned the July 1992 cover of Texas Monthly magazine—the famous one with Richards astride a white motorcycle in a white leather outfit—to my cubicle wall at a magazine where I was interning. The cover line, in huge font, reads ‘White Hot Mama: Ann Richards Is Riding High. Can She Be the First Woman President?’
“Of course, that never came to be, with George Bush’s path to the White House taking shape after he ousted Richards before she could serve a second term. I lost track of Ann during her post-governor years as a lobbyist and political consultant. I’m sure that until her death from esophageal cancer, she continued to be the most noticed person everywhere she went, with her silver hairdo, her crinkly megawatt smile, and her trademark ‘Hi, how ya’ll doin’?’ In his public statement of mourning for his former rival, President Bush said, ‘Texas has lost one of its great daughters.’ This daughter of Texas couldn’t agree more.”
September 15, 2006
That’s Rich Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:35 AM EST On September 10, Frank Rich wrote a column in The New York Times about a photograph he said was “shocking” and “taboo.” “It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn,” he wrote, “taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.”
The photograph was not published with Rich’s column, and if that was all you read, you might have expected to see people laughing uproariously and pouring champagne. In fact, as you can see here in Slate, the picture does show a group of people on the Brooklyn waterfront with the World Trade Center burning in the background, but there is nothing lighthearted or insouciant about it—certainly nothing surprising. Rich knows a grand total of zero about the people in the picture, so he builds a fantasy around them and then bases a column on that fantasy (or half a column, I should say, since the second half is just his usual auto-rant).
Rich’s remarks were based on the assumption that the people in the photograph were somehow ignoring or shrugging off the disaster across the water. But as is pointed out here the photograph shows nothing of the kind; it’s all supposition on Rich’s part. In fact, a couple of the people in the picture have gotten in touch with Slate to say that they “were in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day,” and were “in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.” Far from being friends, two of them had never met the other three before. (For the photographer’s inconclusive account of the picture and its aftermath, see this).
Yet even if the people in the picture had been reading magazines or talking about tennis, it wouldn’t have meant they were insensible to the importance of the event in front of them. Rich is mistaken in his interpretation of the photo, but much more so in his assumption that it’s “shocking” to hear that people went about their business on September 11 instead of gnashing their teeth and rending their garments. Just about everyone who was in the New York area at the time can recall instances of this. On my walk home through Manhattan on that warm evening, I saw people shopping, eating in sidewalk cafés, playing games in the park, and doing dozens of other routine activities. Why am I supposed to be shocked? Here, as usual, Rich makes the mistake of assuming that his readers are as naive as he is.
There’s a lesson to be learned from this, besides the obvious one that Frank Rich is as sharp as a pair of nursery-school scissors. Photographs can be an enormous help in the study of history; that’s the idea on which American Heritage was founded. But they can also be deceptive, especially when you approach them with preconceptions.
When our staff was compiling our December 1999 issue, which contained a picture for every year from 1900 to 1999, the photograph we chose for 1952 showed a crowd in Platteville, Wisconsin, listening to a speech by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. I can’t find a copy of the picture online, but I do recall that when we were considering that photo for inclusion, half of our editors thought it conveyed everything about McCarthy and his supporters and the spirit of the times in a single image—the perfect historical photo. And the other half of us thought it looked like any other crowd of white people in the 1950s looking at something.
Then there’s Edward Steichen’s famous photograph of J. P. Morgan. It seems to sum up everything we know about the man: bold, ruthless, determined, impulsive, with an insatiable thirst for domination. In fact, as our fellow blogger John Steele Gordon explained in our pages in 1989 (scroll down to near the end), the reason for Morgan’s angry expression is that Steichen had asked him to pose in an uncomfortable position. Moreover, writes Gordon:
“Over the eighty-six years since the portrait was taken, many people have wondered how Steichen got Morgan to pose for him with a dagger in his hand, given all the weighty overtones of cut-throat capitalism that conveyed. In fact, the ‘dagger’ is only the reflection of light off the arm of the chair Morgan was sitting in.
“As Steichen explained, ‘It is not only photographers who read meanings into their photographs.’”
Indeed it is not. We all project our preconceptions into pictures and find things that aren’t there; that’s a natural human tendency. We all look at pictures and make up stories about them. And there’s nothing wrong with that—just as long as you don’t base an entire newspaper column on your mistaken analysis.
September 14, 2006
Oslo Anniversary Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST The “Today in History” section of this website noted yesterday that it was the anniversary of the Oslo Accords, when Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat seemed to agree on the first steps toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a wonderful moment, of course, and it capped a period in which almost everyone who took an interest in the matter “knew” what had to be done: There would be a two-state solution. Most people also “knew” what that solution would look like: The states’ borders would look more or less like the 1967 borders, Jerusalem would be finessed, possibly by some sort of shared sovereignty, the Palestinians would renounce the right of return, and there would probably be limitations on the armaments of a Palestinian defense force. Only the Palestinians and the Israelis refused to see what was so obvious. At Oslo, what everyone “knew” seemed to come true. The inevitable compromise had come.
One nasty shock in the year 2000 was the discovery that Yasir Arafat, anyway, did not think that compromise was inevitable, or did not think he could survive the admission that compromise was inevitable. Which meant that peace was not, for now, possible, and that what everyone “knew” simply wasn’t true. This was so unpleasant a discovery that a very large number of observers denied it, and continue to deny it. The situation may change—the compromise may come, on the lines so long predicted—but for now, at least one of the actors is simply unwilling. The current Palestinian government is unwilling to make a peace. The most it will concede is a truce. It will not concede that the other state, the one that now exists, has any right to exist.
No one knows what to do about this. Some people, though, are willing to acknowledge the problem, others deny its existence, and the first group of people tend to be Americans, the other foreigners. Over the long run, the issue that may most sharply divide Americans and European elites is the fact that the bulk of American elites, and the majority of non-elite Americans, seem to be willing to face the fact that one of the two parties to the dispute is not presently willing to make that compromise. This difference between American and foreign opinion is not easy to explain, although many have tried, most recently by attributing American eccentricity to the malign power of the pro-Israel lobby.
Another explanation seems possible. A couple of days ago I had reason to look up a quotation. I wondered who had said, “Facts are stubborn things,” a line I had used all my life, ignorant of its origin. It turns out to be John Adams, in December 1770, in his Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trial: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
American political culture, often ridiculed for an inability to understand the limits of the possible, an alleged trait in turn blamed for sundry foreign policy disasters, turns out to be, at least on some occasions, a little less naive than that ridicule suggests. And other political cultures seem a bit more naive than we sometimes take them to be.
September 13, 2006
Posters of World War II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:55 AM EST The “Editor’s Picks” section of this website’s homepage today links to a National Archives exhibit titled “Powers of Persuasion: Poster Art From World War II.” All of the posters are American, and all of them have that period quality that will make them oddly goofy to some observers and extraordinarily moving to others. The most powerful, for my money, is the still-famous one showing a solitary merchant seaman drowning by moonlight: two eyes stare accusingly, while a muscular wrist and hand point at the viewer, and the caption reads “Someone Talked.” An infinitely sillier one has a pretty and very wholesome blonde saluting from behind a typewriter; the caption reads “Victory Waits on Your Fingers: Keep ’Em Flying, Miss U.S.A.” Smaller print notes that “Uncle Sam Needs Stenographers.” That one was new to me. Images of Rosie the Riveter had a vivid second life courtesy of late-sixties feminism, but that perky patriot-typist vanished in the mists of time, until the National Archive found her and stuck her up in cyberspace. Not all war poster art had so wholesome a view of American womanhood. A couple of years ago I gave a talk at a gallery mounting a war poster show, and received a poster for my pains. I selected a small one showing a woman in a slip standing near a tenanted bed, with her hand in the man’s trouser pocket, apparently assuming the fellow to be asleep. She is mistaken, for he is leering with one eye, telling her “Just Be Sure You Put 10 Percent of It in WAR BONDS!” It is more a thought by Preston Sturges than by Frank Capra. At this remove it usefully reminds the viewer that the people whose husbands, sons, and brothers very literally burned fascism out of their enemies’ hearts were not as wholly naive and sentimental as their posterity often seem to suspect. There are no similar color posters from the Civil War; we didn’t yet have the printing methods to produce them. Posters from the First World War were everywhere, a vital means of communicating with a population that included a lot of marginally literate people, none of whom had radios. Second World War posters, while ubiquitous, were in a sense wholly unnecessary. By the 1940s most Americans could read and had access to radios. We nonetheless produced a lot of posters, perhaps because we had learned the drill in 1917-1918 and posters were now part of the cultural repertoire of a mass industrial society at war. If so, our cultural repertoire diminished very quickly. There were very few war posters during the Korean War, and none that I remember from Vietnam. Maybe television killed them off, or perhaps those wars were not waged in the same spirit of collective endeavor. The war poster had a peculiar, very brief, and unsuccessful revival in the wake of 9/11. As a first dissident gesture against the administration’s war on terror, the images from the posters of the world wars were reworked by antiwar artists, who kept the original images and altered the texts. These artists clearly thought they had found a brilliantly subversive medium, and they were equally clearly wrong. A significant majority of the American people initially supported the war despite those semiotic subversions and turned against it a couple of years after the would-be-transgressive posters vanished. That deliberate transgressive gesture also seemed ill-calculated. Inverting the meanings of images of wars against fascism and militarism risked implying that the role of the American people at war had been similarly inverted, and that we were now the fascists and militarists. As the American people turn against the war, it is nonetheless unlikely that they will adopt the judgment implied by that inversion. So there are two mistakes we should avoid: We should not assume that the population that originally assimilated the World War II posters was foolishly innocent, and we should not assume that our own “knowing” use of images is as brilliantly sophisticated as we sometimes like to imagine. The failure of those transgressive posters suggests that affection for World War II posters almost never involves the pleasures of camp. Rosie the Riveter, with that bared bicep, polka-dot bandana, and blue work shirt, quite humorlessly assured the viewer that “We Can Do It!” Looking at that poster, one remembers that we could, and did. If we cannot now, or ought not, we probably will not thank anyone who too gleefully points it out.
September 11, 2006
On September 11 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 PM EST Like John Steele Gordon, I was not in the city on 9/11. I was driving up to work, listening to NPR, which cut off while I was on the Major Deegan, just over the city line. I remember thinking that this had happened once before, when I had been driving up to work during the first attack on the World Trade Center, which had knocked NPR off the air. Then I put that thought out of my mind, until I learned of the attack perhaps half an hour later—my girlfriend called from Manhattan, before the phones packed it in. The bridges and tunnels were soon closed, and I only got back to the city the following evening. I did not know anyone who died in the attack; the son of someone I knew was killed, but I had never met him, also someone from whom I had rented a summer house, and similarly had never met. They were both people of whom I had heard a fair amount, and they became much more vivid after they had been murdered. John Steele Gordon reprinted what he wrote at the time, and I shall take the same liberty. This is part of what I wrote, a week or so later, in a publication called First of the Month: “A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches at NYU’s Gallatin school was fascinated to see some of her very hip undergraduates singing ‘God Bless America’ in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined 72 hours before. Maybe it helped to be able to smell the fires that were still consuming the dead—you could do this from Washington Square Park. At a college a bit over the city line, where the dead could neither be smelt nor, apparently, fully imagined, white ribbons instead signaled solidarity with those ‘faculty and students of color’ who felt unsafe in the face of American racist violence. “If one was in a jaundiced mood, that latter use of white ribbons was an implied assertion: ‘six or seven thousand murdered in an instant, among them the hundreds who died trying to save the others, the many more left grieving for them—well, how dare those thousands seek to dislodge our faculty and students of color from the pinnacle of the most piercing victimhood? What spurious moral claim do the dead and their mourners have the audacity to press, given the fears of these purer victims, who can sense the lynch mobs massing behind the dorms?’ But while there were no lynch mobs behind the dorms, within a couple of days, when around the country some people were murdered, and others were being harassed, it seemed less delusional, and the politics less mad. Solidarity with people one knows, who may need it, rather than with those already beyond all aid, was not an obviously foolish or wicked response—except that ‘feeling unsafe’ remained a less dreadful thing than being unsafe. One felt that latter condition ought to have excited more sympathy than seemed to be the case. “And after all, the people under the rubble were not beyond all hope within 36 hours, nor were their survivors. But concern (let alone just anger) for the dead, the missing and the bereaved seemed pretty perfunctory in the teach-ins, and in the faux-Left organs of opinion. The rhetorical sequencing became drearily predictable: a rather terse acknowledgement that this was an awful thing, then a long and leisurely trawl through the reasons why the country to one degree or another might have deserved it—or been imagined to have deserved it, by people who weren’t entirely crazy to think so. “From the faux-Left’s paladins, the Chomskys and the Pilgers, there was stronger stuff, or perhaps the argument was simply made with greater clarity: the awful thing done to us was not nearly as awful as the awful things we regularly did to them, to the Iraqi or Sudanese or Palestinian or Afghan or Vietnamese children: tu quoque, with bells on. Our direct victims were computed to total millions in these increasingly ingenious calculations, so six thousand, the initial number given for the American dead, wasn’t after all a very big deal; certainly not a big enough deal to rethink the dystopian narrative that has passed for history in this sturdy tradition. “At home, you generally had to hunt a bit to find this stuff—although it did at least break the surface in a couple of distinguished national magazines. Abroad, such tones could be detected in less obscure places. In the U.K., two quality dailies, the Guardian and the Independent, ran rather a lot of it. Two examples, selected from an embarrassment of riches, must suffice, one from the Guardian and the other from The New Statesman. The Guardian’s Charlotte Raven, insisting that ‘anti-Americanism’ remained irreproachable, compared the U.S. to ‘a bully with a bloody nose,’ which was a pretty simple extended metaphor: the World Trade Center was our nose, and the blood, less imaginatively, was our blood. Since a bully with a bloody nose is normally considered a very cheering sight, an outmatched but plucky fellow drubbing his tormentor against the odds—Tom Jones thrashing Flashman at Rugby—Ms. Raven’s laconic expression of distress over the dead seemed imperfectly convincing. “Over at The New Statesman, the leader writer conceded that while bond traders might be thought to have as much of a right to life as Iraqi or Palestinian children, we should remember that the bond traders, unlike the children, had been given a chance to vote for Ralph Nader but had declined to do so (at least in sufficient numbers to retain a strong argument against being crushed, asphyxiated or incinerated). While it seems that the actual social composition of the labor force at the World Trade Center was unknown to The New Statesman’s editorialist—she presumably wrote without having seen the color Xeroxes taped to the mailboxes and lamp posts all over town—one cannot be certain that among the scientific socialists at The New Statesman, those immigrant busboys, waiters, custodial staff and file clerks might have been a price worth paying for a crack at entombing or immolating a few bond traders—omelettes, eggs, etc. But this reaction was the harsher end of respectable printed opinion in North Western Europe. What was more common was what we heard at home, as well: We must seek to learn why we are so hated, and mend our ways. Complicity in violence done to the Islamic world, we are told, is consistently high on the list; if we cease to so offend, we shall cease to be hated . . .” Looking back on that, it seems irritable, but little if any of it seems wrong to me. It seems important to realize that while we may be hated because of our war in Iraq, we were also hated before that war began, by many of the same people. We are often reminded that Le Monde then editorialized “We are all Americans now.” So they did, although a lot of people had other reactions. Palestinians were filmed dancing in the streets, and a major Greek newsroom apparently broke into high fives when the news came through. Within a very short time the French reading public made a bestseller of a book arguing that we had ourselves blown up the towers. That remains a minority view, but a fair amount of comment over the last few years in effect suggests that people were so angry over our invasion of Iraq that they blew up the World Trade Center. In the long run, I do not think that implied argument is going to be very persuasive.
September 11, 2006
September 11 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:20 AM EST I was not in New York City on September 11. I was about to leave for the train when a friend called.
“Turn on the television,” she said. “You’re not going to the city today.”
I watched events unfold with the same fascinated horror as the rest of the country. Fortunately Marketplace, the public-radio business news program that I do occasional commentaries for, called from Los Angeles and wanted me to do a commentary, to be recorded over the phone for broadcast that afternoon. Here is what I wrote on that September 11:
“The beating heart of world capitalism will beat again, and soon.
“The New York financial market—a potent and emotional symbol of American power—has been struck before. In 1863 the draft riots, sparked by opposition to the Civil War, engulfed the city from downtown to its northern edge, then in the east forties. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died in the three days of looting, fire, and lynching. But as soon as order was restored—by army regiments rushed in from Gettysburg—the banks and the stock exchange reopened. Business went on.
“In 1920, a deliberate attack on Wall Street itself resulted in an explosion in front of the Morgan Bank. Hundreds of pounds of cut up iron chunks, intended as people killers, were hurled throughout the neighborhood, and awnings as high as twelve stories up burst into flame. Forty were killed and dozens injured. Had the bomb exploded a few minutes later, when lunch-hour crowds would have thronged the corner of Wall and Broad, the death toll would have been in the hundreds. But the next day, the Morgan bank, and the stock exchange across the street, were open for business, their shattered windows boarded up, their courage intact.
“New York City is a tough place, both when it comes to dishing out misfortune and when it comes to absorbing it. And no part of this city is tougher than its oldest part, where people have come for three hundred and fifty years to seek their fortunes. Too many hearts have been broken there, and too many dreams fulfilled, to be more than momentarily shaken even by an outrage of the magnitude of this attack.
“We New Yorkers will bury our dead—however many they may be—comfort our wounded, plan our revenge. But most of all, New York will go on.
“It will go on doing what New York does best, buying and selling, searching for opportunity, reaching for the stars.
“Two thousand years ago, St. Paul said, ‘I am a citizen of no mean city.’ On this terrible day, millions of New Yorkers know exactly what he meant.”
Shortly after I recorded the commentary, reports began to come in about the death toll among New York’s firemen, amounting to not far short of 10 percent of the entire force. One of them, the father of six, turned out to be a neighbor of mine, although I had never met him.
I was in the next day, in order to do a long-scheduled interview with CBS-TV. The interview was supposed to be about something else entirely but of course was about the horrendous events of the previous day. As I had time, I walked over from Grand Central to the CBS studios on far West 58th Street, and the city I had known since birth was eerily quiet. It was like Christmas morning—no traffic, no stores open, few people on the streets—except the weather was the same glorious blue sky and warm air of early fall that it had been the day before. As I crossed the various West Side avenues I could see to the south the pall of smoke and dust that still hung over lower Manhattan.
I went for lunch to a club I belong to and learned there that three members had not made it out of the South Tower. Today their names are memorialized on a plaque, next to the ones honoring those who fell in the two world wars.
This morning—another perfect September day—I relived that morning by watching the CNN.com streaming of their live coverage of 9/11. It was fascinating to watch, both for the immediacy of it and for how calm, professional, and, on balance, accurate the reporting was, based on what we know now.
For the historian, perhaps what is most amazing is the enormous volume of primary source material that there is available on this singular day in American history compared with what is available on the nearest earlier equivalent, December 7, 1941. We have a few minutes of film of Pearl Harbor—I imagine we’ve all seen it a thousand times—but we have uncountable hours of tape, both professional and amateur, of 9/11. It will keep historians busy for decades, even as the consequences of that day play themselves out in world history.
September 10, 2006
Teaching History After 9/11 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 AM EST There was another New York Times story this week on the teaching of history. This time it wasn’t about the Chinese Communist party revising the subject but on an American version of the process. We are coming up on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the Times was reporting that 9/11 is affecting the way American history is being taught. There was one linkage between Chinese and American trends: less history of the nation state, more what the Times called the “global context.” There is apparently more interest in the history of terrorism, on Muslims in America, on “international cultural contacts and exchanges,” and on what the Times called “the turbulent history of civil liberties in the United States.” That last is certainly praiseworthy, although I was a bit surprised to see the trend described as particularly new, since it was going pretty strong when I was taught American history in high school, in 1968-1969, and seemed conspicuous in the curricula of the colleges and universities I have attended or taught in since. The Times also reports a renewed interest in empires, and that seems right, going by the new books showing up in the college bookstore up the block. Again, the question of whether the United States may be an empire does not seem quite as novel as the Times suggests, if you started paying attention to this business in the late 1960s. The Times also reported, shrewdly enough, that not all changes in historical fashion are pointing in the same direction. In particular, a trend toward internationalizing American history abuts another, a renewed interest in American exceptionalism. Based on a quotation from a historian at Rice, this interest in American exceptionalism does not look much like the version I remember from high school, when it denoted a boast of relative freedom from the political vices of wicked old Europe. In those days, an interest in American exceptionalism meant debating things like why there was no socialism in America, and on the palmier days, whether we might indeed be, or become, a shining city on a hill. Nowadays, by contrast, the gent from Rice suggests that “the appalling crudity and brutality involved in the settlement of Virginia back in the 17th century does take on a new relevance. . . . I think all those episodes of majoritarianism run amok do begin to fall into a pattern that has to make us wonder: What is it about American culture that puts us into this position time after time?” This is pretty dispiriting stuff. The appalling crudity and barbarism involved in the settlement of Virginia were very real, although scarcely unique to American history. American carelessness about civil liberties in the wake of successful terrorism is also real, but again, scarcely unique. Shameful acts—torture of suspects—remain shameful when we commit them; they are not, however, plausibly represented as crimes Americans are peculiarly, even uniquely, prone to commit. In any event, we do seem to be going in a direction different from the one the Chinese are taking. They are removing enemies from the teaching of history. In at least one classroom at Rice, we are instead, it seems, becoming the enemy. This suggests that the effect of 9/11 on the teaching of history may be less striking than the Times is suggesting. Civil liberties may well be in significant peril, but it looks as if in the classrooms, as well as in the airports, some of the authorities are rounding up the usual suspects.
September 9, 2006
China’s Revisionist History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:30 PM EST The New York Times last week reported that Shanghai’s new world-history textbooks for high school students have dropped wars, revolutions, and political history generally, but are heavy on “economics, technology, social customs and globalization.” There is only one mention of Mao, in a chapter on etiquette, only one sentence on Chinese Communism, and revolutionary socialism gets less attention than the information revolution. Mao, the Long March, the Rape of Nanjing, and other imperialist depredations are taught only in junior high school. There is no mention of coups, popular rebellions, or Chinese resistance to the Mongol conquest. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, formerly or nominally-Communist elites in Europe have generally played the nationalist card when ideological fervor waned, and for a couple of decades the Chinese Communist party seemed to be doing the same thing. Not any more. The Chinese Communist party may well be in the throes of a legitimacy crisis, but at least in Shanghai it is discarding the nationalist card rather than playing it. This suggests that the party is either very confident about its position—and thinks it does not need to bolster its legitimacy by invoking a vision of China humiliated until the Communists made her again respected—or possibly that the party is aware of the hazards of mobilizing xenophobic nationalism. A nationalist mood could make it hard for Chinese elites to back down during a crisis over Taiwan, or make compromises with the United States or Japan during a trade dispute difficult. Nationalism can be turned against an undemocratic regime, if it is accused of failing to defend the nation with sufficient vigor; that pattern is visible in contemporary Arab politics. Maybe the party is experimenting with the notion that China is ready to join a post-nationalist future, the one trumpeted, with imperfect conviction, by various European elites. What becomes of the teaching of national history if you are a post-nationalist? After all, a lot of history is about conflicts with other nations. A lot of political history is also about a heroic vision of national particularity, even uniqueness. Political history, and the history of wars and rebellions, requires enemies. If they want to damp down all the risks, the Chinese Communists cannot take the road endorsed by some American academics, and substitute for stories about duels with foreign foes a heroic story of conflicts with wicked reactionaries within the nation. After all, the party tried that one for over 50 years, during which time it presided over scores of millions of deaths. The lesson from Shanghai (and parts of Europe) seems to be that a history without heroes—and without enemies—may mean barely any history at all. A couple of days after reading this newspaper article, I attended a reunion of my father’s World War II infantry division. At the end of the dinner, a man with a luxuriant false moustache bounded to the front of the room shouting “Bully! Bully! Bully!” A couple of hundred people in their eighties recognized the act before I did—this was a Theodore Roosevelt impersonator. For more than a half hour, a lawyer who made a hobby of entertaining veterans’ groups did a more or less comic monologue in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, and as far as I could tell, the octogenarians got every joke and recognized every exaggerated mannerism. At the time, I wondered how many of my undergraduates would recognize a T.R. impersonator before the man identified himself—or even after. Then I wondered how many of my colleagues would recognize the references and mannerisms. Finally, I wondered how Chinese yet unborn will behave if asked to spend 65 days in a frozen forest, entangled with enemy armored divisions. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that if you want people to ever act like heroes, it is probably a good idea to give them some.
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