December 16, 2007
The Transistor Turns 60 Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:00 PM EST Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the invention of the transistor. Here is my take on it (at Forbes.com).
December 15, 2007
States and Armies in the Eyes of the Times Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:00 PM EST An interesting article in today’s New York Times reports on what the article’s tone and headline (“Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War”) seems to consider an outrageous scandal. Ethiopia has an occupying force in neighboring Somalia, where it recently helped a not-necessarily very popular indigenous government overthrow an Islamist theocracy, and when I read this headline, my first assumption was that the Ethiopian military was grossly breaching international law by forcing Somali citizens to do something like clear minefields in Mogadishu. If you read the Times article, however, you discover that the (elected) Ethiopian government is conscripting Ethiopian citizens of Somali ethnicity into militias, attempting to restore order in a rebellious province (Ogaden). The Times’s article’s lead paragraph is revealing: “The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians—including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations—to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.” Why is this a shocking scandal? Liberal states have often claimed the right to conscript their citizens. Sometimes these citizens are minimally or very imperfectly trained for the war they will face, which may cause a ghastly and unnecessary loss of life, but liberal regimes like the United States, Great Britain, and France have waged some of their major wars by precisely such means. Waging war incompetently makes for tragedy and needless human cost, but the tone of the Times piece suggests not tragedy but crime, and under-training troops is not in the literal sense of the word a crime. Similarly, from a traditional liberal perspective, if a regime does not have legitimacy derived from having won honest elections, it may well lose the moral authority to conscript its citizens—but the government of Ethiopia has been elected and reelected in multi-party elections. I am not sure how honest the last round of Ethiopian multi-party elections (in 2005) are generally thought to have been, but Ethiopia is more of a democracy than are most states on the continent of Africa. The people being conscripted are in this case members of a minority, being ordered to put down an insurgency waged by other members of their group, but the United States (along with almost all other liberal regimes) claims a comparable right, and has at times exercised it. Some of the Ethiopians being conscripted work for international organizations and NGOs, and some are even doctors and teachers (!), but democratic states are invariably accorded the right to conscript their own citizens, independent of employment status. A scene in the admittedly imperfect Saving Private Ryan, in which a very capable Captain of Army Rangers reveals himself to have previously worked as a teacher of expository writing in a Pennsylvania high school, is normally thought to be peculiarly affecting: In democracies, citizen soldiers drawn from all walks of life are the nation in arms, once a liberal ideal. The Times article somehow suggests otherwise, which I think reveals a kind of contempt for the rights of the state, even of a state possessing a degree of democratic legitimacy, as opposed to an NGO or supra-national body. I think the moral hierarchy here revealed—states presumed wicked, NGOs and multinational organizations presumed just, teaching and practicing medicine presumed just, killing anyone presumed unjust—deserves more critical reflection than it seems to receive at the paper of record. We revere the conscript armies in which our ancestors served, putting down rebellion or smashing politics not all that much less attractive than some of the politics practiced by the Union of Islamic Courts, the government the Ethiopians recently smashed in Somalia. Could it be that the Times thinks a relevant fault of the Ethiopian government is the one mentioned first in the paragraph above—being “one of the America’s top allies in Africa”? That may be ungenerous; the government in question has an abundance of faults, although not necessarily more than do the scores of governments with which it shares a continent. But whatever faults it has, conscripting teachers to put down a rebellion is not very clearly one of them. So history certainly changes. For most of the last few hundred years in the West, one of our characteristic sins was to immoderately admire the state, above all in its claim and capacity to monopolize legitimate violence. Now, in some quarters, people who seek to break that state monopoly are regarded very tenderly, and no human association seems to attract less careless admiration than does the democratic state.
December 15, 2007
Back Talk V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST This discussion began with two examples of politicians being sandbagged by journalists and not putting up with it, to their credit. I agree with Alexander Burns that politicians have to be careful with this tactic, as it can backfire, especially if one lacks the talent for coming up with the right response in real time. Chris Dodd, I think, responded perfectly to the moderator’s unfair question in the debate the other day. It was far better than a justifiably angry response would have been. (By the way, I believe I speak for the entire political nation when I hope that Carolyn Washburn never, ever, again moderates a presidential debate. She may, for all I know, be an excellent journalist. But she was as good at leading these two debates as I would be at quarterbacking in the NFL.) Some people who have considerable political gifts just lack the talent for instant response. Dan Quayle certainly didn’t do a good job responding to Lloyd Bentsen’s nasty jab at the 1988 vice-presidential debate. And in the 2000 campaign, some radio journalist whose political sympathies were not hard to discern—radio’s answer to Dan Rather—asked George Bush who the prime minister of, I think, Tajikistan was. Bush, needless to say, didn’t have a clue, and he fumbled his response. In retrospect, what he should have said, I think, was, “I haven’t the faintest idea and neither did you until you looked it up this morning so you could blindside me with the question.” On the other hand, people with the talent for instant and witty response might not make good Presidents. I’m a great admirer of Groucho Marx and Johnny Carson, but I have my doubts about how they would have fared in the White House. It might be noted that British politics is much more accustomed to witty zingers. Anyone who survives the fiery furnace of House of Commons debate—much rowdier than in Congress, and where the repartee is often very witty and sometimes vicious—long enough to get to high office is going to be good at instant response. I remember Margaret Thatcher being referred to in Parliament as “La Pasionara of privilege” and “Attila the Hen,” both in the I-wish-I’d-said-that category, even though I’m a great admirer of Lady Thatcher. I am glad to see that Alexander Burns is no more of a Hillary Clinton enthusiast than I am. I have long suspected that her lead in the polls over the last few months was mostly because of name recognition. Now that we’re getting down to the wire and the people, not just the punditocracy, are thinking about choices, her lead is evaporating. But her biggest problem may not be her evasiveness and unlikability, but her baggage. The biggest Clinton steamer trunk of all, of course, is her spouse. Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine, has an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the possibility of Clinton’s being appointed to the Supreme Court. There is precedent for this. William Howard Taft, after all, served as Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930, an office he vastly preferred to the Presidency. I find a Bill Clinton justiceship highly unlikely for two reasons. One, Supreme Court justices are expected to shut up on questions that might come before the Court and about what goes on behind the scenes there, and Bill Clinton is not exactly famous for his reticence. Two, I can’t see the Senate—any Senate—confirming to the high court a man who had his law license suspended for five years for “serious misconduct.” So far as I know he has never asked for reinstatement to the bar. Anything can happen, of course, but my guess is that we have seen the high point of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
December 15, 2007
Sherman and Hood Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:15 AM EST On Monday, Christine Gibson’s lead piece for this website commemorated the day General Sherman reached Savannah in 1864. Near the beginning her piece, Ms. Gibson quotes Hood’s reply to Sherman’s request for a truce as Sherman compelled the civilian population to evacuate Atlanta: Hood complained that “the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.”
I have been thinking about this piece since reading it last Monday. One of my fist reactions was that Hood seems to have had a curiously feeble grasp of the dark history of war. When one reads Sherman’s actual note of September 7, 1864, the moderation of its language, and of the measure announced, is pretty striking, given the language of Hood’s response two days later. Here is what Sherman wrote to Hood, provoking the latter’s outrage: “GENERAL: I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south and the rest north. For the latter I can provide food and transportation to points of their election in Tennessee, Kentucky, or farther north. For the former I can provide transportation by cars as far as Rough and Ready, and also wagons; but that their removal may be made with as little discomfort as possible it will be necessary for you to help the families from Rough and Ready to the cars at Lovejoy’s. If you consent I will undertake to remove all families in Atlanta who prefer to go South to Rough and Ready, with all their movable effects, viz, clothing, trunks, reasonable furniture, bedding, &c., with their servants, white and black, with the proviso that no force shall be used toward the blacks one way or the other. If they want to go with their masters or mistresses they may do so, otherwise they will be sent away, unless they be men, when they may be employed by our quartermaster. Atlanta is no place for families or non-combatants, and I have no desire to send them North if you will assist in conveying them South. If this proposition meets your views I will consent to a truce in the neighborhood of Rough and Ready, stipulating that any wagons, horses, or animals, or persons sent there for the purposes herein stated shall in no manner be harmed or molested, you in your turn agreeing that any cars, wagons, carriages, persons, or animals sent to the same point shall not be interfered with. Each of us might send a guard of, say, 100 men, to maintain order and limit the truce to, say, two days after a certain time appointed. I have authorized the mayor to choose two citizens to convey to you this letter and such documents as the mayor may forward in explanation, and shall await your reply.” It is worth noting that the most valuable civilian property Sherman threatened to expropriate was property in human beings, human beings his troops had made free. In any case, Sherman had, to a degree that seems startlingly mild by most past and future standards, brought the cost of the war home to some of the voters of the Confederacy. His subsequent burning of most of what remained of Atlanta—Hood had burned some of it when he evacuated the city on September 1, and Sherman spared the city’s churches and hospitals—helped Lincoln win the 1864 presidential election, arguably one of the crucial events in the creation of liberal modernity. If it was a crime, it was a crime at least somewhat extenuated by its outcome. The burning of Dresden, 80 years later, may or may not have saved enough lives to justify the lives there ended, but the burning of Atlanta may have been indispensable in achieving a morally urgent end. Had Hood and Sherman not burned Atlanta, it is conceivable that McClellan might have won the 1864 election. Near the end of her piece, after recounting the foraging, looting, and reprisals that Sherman’s men committed on their march to Savannah, Ms. Gibson writes that “As for Sherman, history has yet to reach full agreement on whether he was an ingenious hero or a shameless sadist.” My sense is that relatively few if any competent historians have thought Sherman a shameless sadist. The question that remains open is whether Sherman’s conscious decision to bring some of the cost of the war home to the Southern electorate that had demanded it was a grievous crime. The notion that it was a grievous crime requires the assumption that civilians should never be the intended victims of war, no matter how vile their cause, nor how guilty they are of having begun a war, nor what means their own troops have used to prosecute a war, nor how relatively mild the cost military action intends to impose on them. There is indeed much to be said in favor of this assumption. There may also be something to be said against it. It may be relevant to recall that wholly exempting enemy civilians is not how the Allies won either world war, or how the United States defeated the Confederacy, and that while the victors in those three wars might have been victorious without the direct and indirect measures they took against enemy civilians, such hypothetical restraint would almost certainly have protracted all three wars, perhaps very considerably increasing their toll, and might even have lost one or more of them.
December 14, 2007
Back Talk IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes some good explanations for why confronting the media can backfire. “My first and perhaps unthinking response,” he writes, “is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side.” I think this is definitely part of the reason why press-bashing can hurt candidates. In my previous post, I described the way Hillary Clinton’s evasiveness has recently begun to undermine her campaign. Her tendency toward obfuscation was bound to cause some self-inflicted damage at some point, but I doubt the damage would have been quite so severe if her campaign hadn’t treated the media with such unremitting hostility. After months of getting stonewalled, misled, and insulted, reporters finally saw Clinton bleeding, and they jumped all over the story. I’d offer another partial explanation, though, for why candidates harm themselves by attacking the press. Sometimes, as in Ronald Reagan’s case, candidates go at their journalistic interrogators because they are getting treated badly. But in other cases, candidates knock the media because they don’t want to give honest answers to fair questions (again, see: Clinton, Hillary). When this happens, the public is often smart enough to see what’s really going on. When a candidate acts slippery or mean, voters can tell—even without the help of a grudge-holding press. Voters can distinguish between fair treatment and unfair treatment, and when candidates respond resentfully to reasonable questions, they don’t like it. I’ll add that candidates can respond to unfair treatment in more than one way, and the best way to swat away a nasty question isn’t always to get nasty back. For evidence of this, I offer this clip of Christopher Dodd speaking in yesterday’s Democratic debate. Dodd was asked, bizarrely, whether his run for president was motivated by a desire to clear his family name, which the moderator said was tarnished by his father’s 1967 censure in the Senate. This was a totally unfair question, based on cheap armchair psychoanalysis of the candidate. Dodd’s response, however, was graceful and direct, and it garnered the applause of the audience and his fellow candidates. If Dodd had trashed the moderator, he would have been justified in doing so, but he would not have demonstrated the same kind of maturity and decency he showed yesterday.
December 14, 2007
Back Talk III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.” Alexander Burns replies that “confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.” If this is true, why is it true? Why does attacking the despised media fail? My first and perhaps unthinking response is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side. Press assaults on Clinton and Blair, for example, were immoderate, amazingly persistent, and in the long run effective, and more effective because essentially unchallenged. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, none of them right-wing papers, long exulted in Clinton-baiting, just as in the U.K. the distinctly left Guardian and the Mirror were pretty savagely anti-Blair. It is logically possible that this is because Clinton and Blair were uniquely odious men, but it seems more likely that they were gifted politicians who had aroused the envy and malevolence of journalists nominally sympathetic to the parties they led. They were simultaneously attacked by the press controlled by their avowed enemies, for example The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in this country and the Telegraph in Britain. When the press consistently depict itself as the hero/victim of modern politics rather than one of the often abusively powerful, criticizing it is understandably hazardous. In a more general sense, modern politicians as a class have remarkably few friends in the British and American press, and in some cases too few avowed enemies. I have the impression that in the old days, the press was seen as controlled by rich men with obvious political loyalties, so you could discount hostile coverage from the predictable sources and rely on partisan support from your own side. The modern press is more likely to affect neutrality, so its attacks are less readily dismissed as mere partisanship. Since the press’s motives, while sometimes very ugly, are more complicated than mere partisanship, it is harder to counterattack the press.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:20 PM EST A footnote to John Steele Gordon’s post this morning is that in 1980, when Ronald Reagan attracted national attention by snapping at a moderator, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!,” the future President was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy. In the 1948 film State of the Union, Spencer Tracy plays an idealistic presidential candidate whose less scrupulous backers try to co-opt his campaign. In a climactic moment, as someone tries to interrupt one of his speeches, Tracy exclaims, “Don’t you shut me off. I am paying for this broadcast!” There’s an MSNBC clip noting the similarity between the two moments here. My guess is that Fred Thompson’s performance yesterday was intended to inspire comparisons with Reagan. I don’t think Thompson pulled it off as well as Reagan did. I think Mr. Gordon is right that confronting the media can work in candidates’ favor. But in reply to his query about why candidates don’t do it more often, I’d answer that it’s also a risky business. If it’s done in an excessively self-righteous way, or by a candidate who’s not a particularly deft performer, it can come off as obnoxious or evasive. Consider Alan Keyes’s performance in yesterday’s debate. He rants about how the media wants to silence him but doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that the American people don’t want to hear him either. Keyes ends up looking (appropriately) like an egomaniac without an actual policy agenda. A less obviously botched media showdown took place in July, when Hillary Clinton faced off with Chris Matthews at a forum with organized labor. Matthews asked Clinton whether she would approve of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. Clinton, recognizing this as an attempt to draw her into a dispute about her husband’s presidential pardons, replied by demanding that Matthews ask “a question that’s really about the people in this audience, and not what goes on inside Washington.” Matthews snarked back: “Okay, so we’ll leave that as a non-answer.” It was a sloppy exchange on both sides, as you can see here. Initially, many believed that Clinton won the point against Matthews. The audience, at least, fell for her performance. Looking beyond how it played with a group of Clinton’s natural supporters, though, this exchange might very well have reinforced concerns in the general public about Clinton’s trustworthiness. A dispassionate observer, harboring no special affection for Clinton, might (appropriately) conclude from the exchange that the New York senator has something to hide. What’s more, you can only dodge questions for so long, as Clinton found out here. In answering a tricky question about illegal immigration, she flip-flipped and accused the moderator of “playing gotcha.” But she looked ridiculous, and she exposed herself to scorn from a distrustful public and attack from an insulted press. Confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:05 AM EST At the apparently rather bizarre Republican presidential candidate debate in Johnston, Iowa, yesterday, Fred Thompson scored points when he wouldn’t give a yes-or-no answer to a non-yes-or-no question. The moderator wanted a show of hands from those who “believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity.” Thompson asked for a minute to explain his position and when the moderator refused to give it to him, he flatly refused to answer the question. In focus groups where the participants had meters recording their positive and negative reactions, the meters went off-the-chart positive for Thompson. The American electorate obviously like displays of backbone from candidates. Ronald Reagan’s candidacy surged in 1980 after he made his famous “I am paying for this microphone!” remark when a moderator tried to cut him off. In 1988, George Bush took on Dan Rather (link—scroll down) in an interview where Rather kept trying to ask have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet questions about Iran-Contra, and he also saw a surge in support. Since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.
December 11, 2007
Cleverness from PBS Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:55 AM EST There’s a funny video making the rounds online. It’s taken from a PBS series, Vote for Me: Politics in America, and it’s a send-up of political advertising, past and present. The authors take some of the attack lines Federalists used against Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and combine them with old film footage to turn them into a twenty-first-century negative commercial. “Female chastity violated. Children writhing on the pike and halberd,” a narrator intones. “It happened in France, but it could happen right here in America if Thomas Jefferson is elected President.” See the video here on YouTube. The ad is an effective satire partly because it so closely resembles real attack ads and partly because the attacks it repeats seem so ludicrous in retrospect. But in 1800 the Federalists really did level these charges and more against Jefferson. “God—and a Religious President” versus “Jefferson—and no God” was the choice John Adams’s supporters gave America. Americans chose Jefferson despite these slurs. It is unclear what divine consequences this choice had. As funny as it is, the PBS clip is also a little depressing, since it’s a good reminder that negative, personal elections are probably here to stay. It would be nice, though, if videos like this one had the effect of reminding us just how silly and transient so many electoral controversies are. If we look back on the election of 1800 and see that it was ridiculous to charge Jefferson with fomenting Jacobinism, just imagine what Americans in 2100 will think of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. Actually, for a send-up of that crowd, we don’t need to wait for 2100. Just see here and here. If you liked the PBS video, these are worth your time.
December 9, 2007
The Rape of Nanking Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:35 PM EST Today, December 9, is the seventieth anniversary of the day the Japanese Imperial Army arrived outside the walls of the city now known as Nanjing, which in 1937 was the capital of China. The Japanese demanded surrender within 24 hours, and on the tenth of December began to bombard the city. The city fell on the thirteenth, which is when the events still known as the Rape of Nanking began. Respectable Japanese estimates of the numbers of civilians and prisoners of war killed in the course of the subsequent Japanese atrocities—rape, murder, theft, and arson—range between 100,000 and 300,000, while current Chinese estimates range between 200,000 and 400,000. Estimates of rapes run between 20,000 and 80,000, many of them public rotation rapes followed by murder and mutilation of the victims. A number of the allegations about Japanese behavior are significantly uglier than what has just been noted, but they are available in almost any account of the massacre, for curious people with very strong stomachs. Disputes about the massacre are legion, with some Japanese politicians and schoolbook authors still denying that anything startling took place. In 1982 a Japanese government banned mention of any massacre in Nanking from textbooks, on the grounds that the alleged events were not established historical facts. This was wholly indefensible, but problems of definition are legion. A number of different estimates use a time frame of six weeks for the atrocities associated with the Japanese army’s entry into the area, but historians dispute what precise territory should be considered the scene of the crime. If you exclude the suburbs, the numbers go down; if you consider the six counties making up the Nanjing Special Municipality, the numbers go up. Still, no respectable estimate goes below six figures. The massacres are rarely mentioned at any length in most modern books I read recounting the origins of the Second World War, or by my students, when they enumerate the causes of American entry into the Second World War, but rising American determination to stop Japanese aggression in Chine spiked sharply when news of the massacres reached the United States. It is more common than it used to be to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner, leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war, and it’s much less common than it used to be to hear about what moved American opinion to push Japan so hard. Japanese rightists explain government-backed Chinese interest in the Rape of Nanking as a cynical excuse for mobilizing nationalist sentiment. This may be true, but Japanese inability to face the fairly recent past is at least as remarkable as widespread Chinese interest in a crime of such magnitude. What is more remarkable yet is that although the numbers murdered in Nanking may be the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima bombings, no phrasemakers describe the horrors of the twentieth century as those of “the age of Auschwitz and Nanking.” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” however, has become a familiar yoking of crimes. The politics of historical memory has in recent decades been a popular topic in my profession. Oddly enough, the people who profess the greatest interest in it seem likeliest to have the most imprecise and wispy memories of the Rape of Nanking.
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