WordPress Boogie-Woogie

William Timberman1 Comment

After being lost in the fog like Brigadoon for more than a month, Dogtown is back. The story is an all-too common one, I’m afraid. In order to resolve some nasty response-time issues, Dogtown’s host, GoDaddy, offered to move everything to a more capable server. When they did, things broke, which gave me the opportunity to learn more about WordPress and MySQL database management than I ever wanted to know.

Thanks to some excellent advice from GoDaddy technical support, though, and the moral support of more savvy friends, it all seems to have come right in the end, and the place is functional again. Apologies to anyone who visited during the dark time — unfettered access to everyone all the time is the intended policy here. Really.

Now, then…what exactly was I doing before the lights went out? There ought to be some half-completed drafts lying around here somewhere….

An Open Letter to Juan Cole

William Timberman

Today Juan Cole has written An Open Letter to the Left on Libya. In it, he urges …the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning that it should support the UN Security Council/NATO/US bombing enterprise in Libya. (Among all these august agencies, it’s hard to know which is wearing the fig leaf — and which isn’t — but I suppose that rounding up all the usual suspects stands a decent chance of including the real actors in this latest morality play put on for us by the rulers of Oceania.)

Since my views make me more or less part of the Left, albeit not a very prominent part, I feel duty-bound to respond:

When I read of the The Responsibility to Protect, I’m reminded of the motto of the old Strategic Air Command: Peace Is Our Profession. There’s a sense in which that motto was perfectly true, and another in which it represented a ghastly moral inversion—Thanatos dressed up as Eros, complete with rouged cheeks and false eyelashes.

I remember too that the Pentagon found Dr. Strangelove insulting. Perhaps it was, but it was also a cry of desperation, which, now I come to think of it, had less to do with H-bombs per se than it did with the men who built and deployed them with such perfectly clear consciences.

I first wrote that elsewhere, for another audience, but it will do very nicely for Juan Cole today, or for anyone else overcome by such well-meaning delusions of grandeur in the future.

Saved from the American Conflagration

William Timberman1 Comment

To be placed in a shrine impervious to Russell Pearce and his bilious followers….

The Declaration of Independence

Except for the abused people referred to as …inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages…, and the people transported here against their will from their homes in Africa, and kept in cruel and abject bondage for generations, a promising beginning.

The Constitution of the United States

An intelligent and remarkably valiant attempt to mix oil and water, which managed to endure for 220 years, more or less. In its later amendments, particularly the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th, some evidence that the promise of the founders might one day be fulfilled.

Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address

The clearest warning we ever got.

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Expiation.

Emma Lazarus’ The Colossus

The promise renewed.

A Tinkerer’s Damnation

William Timberman5 Comments

Originally appeared as a comment on Autonomy for All. Reposted here with minor changes.

Tinkering…. As good a word as any for a dearth of political will. I hate to bash Brad DeLong, who’s one of the good guys, and doesn’t really deserve a snarking, but he’s a classic case of the technocrat who believes in all the seemingly correct policy solutions, yet is left as helpless as the rest of us by the madness of Realpolitik, not to mention the madness of people who wouldn’t recognize realism if it bit them in the ass.

Here’s Professor DeLong, who’s as smart as we make them these days, waxing ironic:

And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now the global market economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of high unemployment and slack demand. We know the cures–fiscal stimulus via more government spending, monetary stimulus via provision by central banks of the financial assets the private sector wants to hold, institutional reform to try once gain to curb the bankers’ tendency to indulge in speculative excess under control. Yet we are not doing any of them. Instead, we are calling for “austerity.”

It may make for decent theater, but irony is hardly the best defense against the limitations of the intellect in situations like the one we all find ourselves facing today. Neither is cognitive dissonance, as in the governor of Wisconsin — Wisconsin, for Christ’s sake — threatening to use the National Guard to shoot public employees who object to being beggared by a nasty right-wing ideologue. Or, if you’d rather read about the problems of furriners, this: The Arab World’s Triple Crisis.

If Professors DeLong and Krugman can’t handle the political implications of our manifold current crises, who can? My answer is that no one can, not and remain unscathed. Our future is no longer strictly a mattter of policies good or bad, and no matter how much we might wish it to be otherwise, the outcome has become unpredictable.

21st Century Partisanship

William Timberman4 Comments

The national coalition of misanthropes which is making war on me and mine clearly believes that honesty is a form of mental retardation. Unfortunately, liberal luminaries like Barack Obama, the Clinton dynasty, Rahm Emanuel, Jamie Dimon, and a glittering host of others in the Democratic Party and its affiliates seem to share that belief. They aren’t my allies. At best they’re placeholders; at worst, they’re part of the enemy’s baggage train.

As many of our disgruntled and downtrodden have already observed, this makes partisanship in the new American century something of a bore — when it isn’t downright dangerous to our future health, well-being and sanity.

So when I call you, and urge you to vote for President Obama next year — which it seems very likely I’ll feel compelled to do — please do consider the subtext.

The Triumphal March of SB 1070 Supporters

William Timberman3 Comments

A guest essay by Stephen Williamson, first published as a DAILY KOS diary on July 24, 2010, and reposted here, in slightly altered form, by permission of the author.


For activists in Arizona the fight over SB 1070 has been something between riding a roller coaster and watching a train wreck. If you are wondering what happened to Arizona, the crazy has always been with us. But two years ago we had a Democratic Governor, Janet Napolitano, to veto the worst bills passed by Republican dominated legislature.

AZ Republican elected officials have long been extreme. Russell Pearce and his supporters would like to deport every undocumented  person, all 11 million, from the US. They neither see nor fear unintended consequences. Will it split up families? Too bad! Arguments based on compassion or moderation do not give them pause. Republican candidates are selected in a primary by about 25% of the voters — the hard right.  Pearce is now the AZ Republican mainstream. The Tea Party has gone after conservatives who are not conservative enough, and moderate Republicans office holders  were largely purged from the party by 2006.

When Napolitano was governor and used her veto power, anti-immigration bills had to become propositions and be put to a vote. Anti-immigrant props have won in past years by high margins. Even here in Sedona, considered a Democratic town (registration is very slightly Republican but both Kerry and Obama pulled in about 55% of the vote) past anti-immigration bills got about 70% of the vote.

SB 1070’s passage and response has come in stages. You’ve seen them in the news, but let me recap the situation from the AZ prospective:

(1) “Oh my God! it’s going just as bad as we thought  it would be with Napolitano gone!” SB 1070 passes without a single Democratic vote in the State House or Senate.

(2) Will she or won’t she? She does. Governor Brewer had  conversations with  officials in which they got the impression she knew SB 1070 was bad law and might not sign it. But she’s running for election in November and not signing SB 1070 would have led to a primary defeat.

(3) Passionate opposition to 1070. The AZ Democratic Party condemned the bill in no uncertain terms. So did our local Democratic club. National boycotts are declared. AZ Towns like Flagstaff oppose the bill and plan to join the lawsuit against it. More importantly, none of us had seen the Latino community so uniformly outraged. Illegal immigration has had its Latino opponents, but even so 1070 struck very deeply and very broadly.

(4) The counter attack on critics of the bill. The dominant meme cluster that was recirculated again and again through the AZ MSM. “It’s not as bad as they say. Critics of the bill are enemies of AZ. It’s just like the Federal law. Everybody has to carry identification to drive a car anyway.”

(5)  The triumphal march of SB 1070 supporters. Polls show tremendous support for the bill both in AZ and beyond. The latest Rasmussen poll in AZ: 65% in favor, 27% opposed.  Word goes out to Democrats and Democratic candidates to be very very careful. Obvious attempts are made to slap down those of us vocally opposed to 1070. I’m not ranting against the Democratic establishment. They are not wrong (as far as it goes) about the level of support for 1070 or the damage it can do to Democrats in the upcoming election.

(6) The triumphal M=march of SB 1070 supporters continues but the lawyers take over. Recently there has been a huge if uneven improvement in reporting about AZ and 1070. Both bloggers and the MSM have gotten a better handle on what’s happening here. Knowledge of AZ developments goes national much quicker. We find out about Pearce’s plans next year to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born in the US and the news goes national within the week, not a month or two months later. You are getting good reporting on what’s happening here. But I want to bring up some points that I haven’t seen mentioned or emphasized elsewhere.

SB 1070

(1) The bill is an attack on the whole Latino community. Latino kids and their parents were out with signs the next day. The main reason for their outrage, which extended to the most conservative elements of the community, was the idea of being singled out for racial profiling. But there are other reasons that haven’t been talked about as much. (1) Legal immigrants, illegal immigrants and citizens are very often interconnected in the same family, extended family, and social groups. An attack on illegal immigrants hits your uncle or your dad but not your mom or the guy who cuts your hair. (2) It’s an attack on collective Latino institutions — the newspapers, beauty shops, markets, thrift shops, clothes stores, churches, bakeries, car dealers. Some estimate that up to a third of the illegal immigrants have left already, and Latino institutions have been hard hit. “The aim is to weaken the Latino community politically, not just deport the undocumented. The fears are deep. We are being overrun! The white town has too many new brown faces. Mexicans want Arizona back. They contribute nothing and are sucking our economy dry.”

(2) Self deportation. In AZ we suspect much of SB 1070’s intended impact is what  supporters gleefully call self-deportation. It’s never been clear to us though exactly how much Pearce and crew were counting on self-deportation. The people actually writing the bill are from a professional anti-immigrant foundation. They have been around the track few times and have fashioned a bill they hope is bullet-proof in its constitutionality.They built in a massive amount of preemptive defense, still they knew the bill would be challenged. 1070 was still so far from the mark that they had to immediately amend it after passage. It’s a very odd-sounding bill if you read the details. It’s a thugs’ law, written and passed by thugs, using intimidation and inviting selective and dishonest enforcement. Look at the section making it illegal to block traffic to hire workers who might be illegal. How many times does someone actually block traffic hiring somebody to do lawn work at an informal labor exchange? The aim is to intimidate and provide a legal cover to arrest people. It’s AZ, and for us there’s no question who a jury is going to believe — you or the cop. Pearce himself may sincerely simply want to expel all undocumented folks now in the US. But some SB 1070 supporters are gleeful at the amount of damage it has inflicted on Democrats, the Obama administration, and the even the Federal government by forcing them on the opposite side of a popular bill ginned up by social hysteria. It’s wedge issue time. For many supporters it’s a win win situation, even if the bill is unconstitutional. Anti- administration anti-government side effects of the bill are a big dessert more delicious than the main course.

(3) State Enforcement of Federal law. SB 1070 relies on a federal law written 70 years ago that is seldom enforced. And what was happening in 1940? Germany was invading Norway and Poland, occupying Paris. The Nazis were bombing England. It’s in response to all this — the fear of German and Japanese agents, spies and propagandists — that the law was passed. Two years later the US interned 150,000 Japanese residents — talk about ethic or racial profiling. And the Supreme Court said that was just fine. The law passed in a fearful period and was modified not by being rewritten, but by practice, an evolving interpretation of when and how to enforce it. State enforcement ignores 70 years of legal precedent.  Will the police use racial profiling?  Of course, they could barely stop if they wanted to.  But they are being taught how to frame their arrests so they can’t be attacked for profiling.

(4) Arizonans, like the rest of the population, have had it with illegal immigration. The situation with illegal immigration reminds me of the welfare debate years ago, where Americans had simply not signed off on permanent welfare for the able bodied. If the problems with illegal immigration are not fixed humanely, they will be fixed inhumanely. At the time outrageous lies and exaggerations about welfare queens and benefit theft flooded the media, and trying to clear the air didn’t have much impact because the American people were fed up with the welfare system. They are fed up now with illegal immigration.

And so the current nonsense and lies. Governor Brewer’s citing of headless bodies.The non-existent Southern Arizona crime wave. Claims that illegals are hardened criminals. The conviction that we’re being overrun, even as the undocumented population has dropped precipitously. Facts don’t  get through. At some level they don’t matter. So what if ninety-six of those arrested for being here illegally have no prior record. Doesn’t matter. A widespread complaint is that they are not paying taxes. Of course they are, although most don’t earn enough to pay federal or state income taxes because the least good jobs in the country don’t pay very well. Arizona relies almost entirely on sales tax anyway, and immigrants are paying the same taxes as everybody else.

Will they racially profile?  Of course they will, they could hardly avoid it. The law as originally passed authorized racial profiling — it just couldn’t be the only reason. Consider that Sheriff Joe is most popular voter-getter in the state. Are the supporters racist? My sense it that they are largely people who can’t identify with folks who are not like them. It’s nationalism or tribalism as politics. There is a vast ocean of resentment and fear among white Arizonans about perhaps no longer being the majority or the clear “winners”. There are rivers of resentment flowing through generations, among family and social groups. One far right friend told me his father had been unfairly replaced by an incompetent black woman from his job as an accounting teacher because of federal law. The resentment is passed down from one generation to the next. His whole family moved to the far right largely because the government is for “them” not us. As Rachel Maddow put it, they see it as a zero sum game.

Illegals are the problem? They are mostly rural folks leaving dire poverty and the dimmest prospects and coming to the US without permission to take the least good jobs at the lowest wages. That’s the illegal part of “what part of illegal don’t you understand”. These folks are being combined emotionally and politically with violent drug and people smugglers and the vast carnage going on right on the other side of the border.

(5) AZ opposition to SB 1070. It’s primarily liberals, progressives, most Democrats, civil rights groups. The usual suspects. I’m deeply embedded in Democratic and liberal circles, but what I actually hear most, outside those circles, is objections to 1070 from people who have a relationship with undocumented immigrants or their families, sometimes going back decades. Employers, co-workers, friends, fellow church members. Sometimes years have passed and they have never asked people whether they are here legally or not. And they are not about to. It would be a personal betrayal.  What I’m seeing is some version of Harvey Milk’s insight that anti-gay measures would meet opposition from the friends and families of people who were gay. There is not as often a family connection, but still that is where the non political opposition to 1070 rests. It’s personal loyalty. The other thing that’s very odd is lack of ethnic tension. I’ve seen a lot of different interethnic situations, but here the Mexican and Anglos get along well. Again, they are mostly undocumented, rural people keeping their heads down and working their butts off. The odd thing is they have a good reputation; even the stereotyping is positive. And yet we have the social hysteria that is overriding everything else.  The other opposition to 1070 comes from compassionate people who just don’t like persecuting people who have basically done no wrong.

(6) Far right extremists. The Tea Party is strong here. It may have astroturf money, but it’s a mass movement. (I’m glad we are done with the MSM nonsense about who they are– they are far right wing Republican conservatives.) They are not stupid, they have picked up new issues before, as they once did abortion, that weren’t part of their original tool box. They have found what they think is new branding and a new tool box, and are convinced they can ride the free floating anger and skepticism about the federal government to power. If you look at page after page of tea party portraits on the Phoenix-based Tea Party web site what do you see? White folks, mostly older. But what you see beyond that is attitudinizing– adopting hats, posture, clothes that would lead you, and them, to believe they’ve always been here in Arizona. That this is their land, whereas in fact most people in Arizona are relative newcomers with roots elsewhere. As I understand it, many undocumented immigrants have been in the state longer.  Far right extremists need to make it clear that they are the legitimate residents of Arizona, not latinos. The Tea Party and the Republican right collects them together and validates that emotion.

(7) What next? There is currently a race for governor in Arizona. Terry Goddard, the current Democratic Attorney General, is the personification of intelligence, competence and professionalism. He recently received the distinction of being selected as the outstanding AG by his fellow Attorney Generals. On the other side we have Jan Brewer, a mediocre conservative opportunist, who is leading Goddard by 20 points. If Goddard continues with his current conventional campaign he is going to lose badly. The AZ Democratic Party has a decent ground game here. It’s a well organized party. I’m a member, but I’m a member because I’m convinced that the AZ Democratic Party is a decent organization. Full time paid OFA organizers who work between elections is something we only dreamed about a few years ago, yet we have them in Arizona. You are going to see more of a fight here than you might expect. The ground game will turn out Democrats despite the enthusiasm gap.  It does look, however, like the wave of righteous anger may very well prevail.

ACORN and the Roman Church: A Sermon on Hypocrisy

William Timberman6 Comments

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the 42nd anniversary of his assassination

This is a tough subject for an Easter morning, even if you aren’t religious. It isn’t that people haven’t done a lot of thinking about our unfortunate double standards, they have. It’s just that — to me at least — almost all of it seems incomplete. I suppose I ought to read more post-modernists, since they seem to be the current experts in the morphology of meanings unmoored from their original foundations.

My difficulty with post-modernism up to now has been its confidence, bordering on arrogance, that it’s found a sure way through the veil. (It doesn’t help, either, that some of the conclusions of individual pomos seem to me to be true but irrelevant — and that’s putting it as kindly as I can.) In any event, when I look at two parallel stories like the sad vilification and destruction of ACORN, and the Church’s even sadder defense of priestly pedophilia, where the noun in each case is portrayed as being so much more important than the verb, I find myself scratching my head. Why isn’t it obvious to many more people that there’s a double standard lurking in the difference between the conclusions drawn about ACORN, and those about the Roman Church hierarchy?

The simplest answer, I suppose, is that a cultural institution often defines its own limits, and its own distinctiveness, by what it chooses to lie about. Unless the concept of a single God is defended, if necessary at the point of a sword, the Church is just one more merchant of abstractions. If His rules aren’t held to be inviolable, no matter how often they’re violated, the Church is just another costume drama. Likewise, if a society doesn’t defend its own cultural institutions, no matter how iffy their original provenance, it ceases to be what it is. (The Church, The South, The Senate.) People are well aware of this, which is why attacks even on corrupt institutions make them extremely nervous, and rightly so. Why should they be expected to welcome the threat of chaos into their beliefs, let alone into their lives?

If there was anything unique about the United States early on, it was the promise that here our government wouldn’t invest in propping up institutions simply because its people were familiar with them, but would instead invest in the stewardship of change, would do its best to create and defend a space in which institutions which developed nasty habits — such as using our children as unpaid prostitutes — could be done away with more or less quietly and replaced with something more suitable.

Needless to say, that project never came to complete fruition, and probably never could have, given human nature, but we did have a pretty good run at it. Even today, many of our simplest souls still consider themselves the masters of their own destiny to an extent which would be inconceivable anywhere else in the world.

ACORN got the axe because it was new, and because it exposed the founding lie of a more established institution — our government. And what lie was that? I hear someone asking. The one about democracy, the one about the truths we hold to be self-evident. That lie. The Church didn’t get the axe because anyone who actually had an axe had been welcomed into the fold long ago.

I suspect that this time, if we’re patient and humble, we may finally get to see the Holy Contradictions implode. The Church has been around a long time, longer than any of us, which may make it as hard as ever for anyone to declaw its predators, but that unhappy fact shouldn’t stop us from trying. Whether the Church has finally worn out its welcome or not, there’s no reason for any of us outside its doors to be polite. On the contrary.

I’d put it this way. If Jesus died for our sins, so did Martin Luther King. On this Easter Sunday, I think that a reverence for the truth should compel us to admit that of the two institutions in question, ACORN in recent days has done a far better job of honoring their sacrifice than the Roman Church has done.

(An earlier, and somewhat more typo-ridden version of this post was first published as a comment on this OpenLeft Diary by Paul Rosenberg.)

A Dime-Store Apocalypse

William Timberman10 Comments

Since anyone who’s wandered this far into Dogtown already knows that I’m less than optimistic about the future of the United States, and knows how I came to be that way, I don’t suppose it would do my arguments any harm to admit that I’m not as confident in them as it might seem — certainly not as confident as, say, William Kristol is in his. I know very well that there are optimists on the left who look at the same evidence I do and come to very different conclusions. Even though I disagree with them, I don’t ignore them. I read Krugman as well as Chomsky, and I listen to enthusiastic Organizing for America volunteers when they attempt to make a plausible case for their enthusiasm. Yes, I still think that the country is headed in the wrong direction, but I try not to demand that others share my misgivings, or foreclose the possibility, however remote it may seem to me at this point, that we may yet find a way to set things right.

Ours is a country of 300-odd million, after all, with immense, if not limitless resources, and a history of re-inventing itself as the need arises, even when the terrible cost of that reinvention is obvious at the outset to almost everyone likely to be involved in bringing it to pass. Why bet against all of that?

I don’t. What I do bet against is the idea that the superiority of our own age will allow us, unlike our less fortunate ancestors, to avoid breaking any crockery in the process. One of the advantages of being old at this moment in history is that being old makes it easier to see that the stability of the United States and the global Pax Americana in which I and my contemporaries grew up has for the most part been an illusion. Even the parts of it which were demonstrably real, such as our unprecedented domestic prosperity, were also indisputably the consequence of a unique set of political and economic circumstances which were — and are — fundamentally unsustainable.

Hardly anyone in the governing or managerial classes of the United States believes this. They argue, as people in power always argue, that their own success is evidence of a certain permanence in the world that they govern. Malthus believed that we would all starve to death, they argue, and he was wrong. The atomic scientists who put that famous clock on the cover of their Bulletin believed us to be facing a nuclear Armageddon, and they were wrong. Perhaps the peak oil, global warming, and species extinction doomsayers are also wrong.

Perhaps. I don’t consider myself a Nostradamus or a Cassandra, but you don’t have to be either to be aware that our rulers are by definition the custodians of the status quo. Whatever their virtues or vices, even the most rational of them have steadfastly opposed any substantive changes in the institutions which they currently control, and have refused under any circumstances to concede their own impermanence as a class. They seem to have forgotten that the more brittle a thing is, the more easily it can be broken. They wouldn’t think of asking themselves why the Roman Church still has popes, but France no longer has a king. Mind you, I don’t expect them to be anything other than they are, but I see no reason not to point out that, as a class, they’ve never, ever been the ones to ask what the future will bring.

150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln spoke clearly to anyone who would listen about what was coming, and what it was likely to cost, long before anyone else accepted it as inevitable. When it did finally come, his foresight had helped him to acquire the power to do something about it. We have yet to find our Lincoln. He may very well be waiting in the wings somewhere, however unlikely it may seem at the moment. I certainly don’t know, and if anyone else does, he’s been keeping the knowledge to himself. The one thing I do know is that we ought not to look for our deliverance to any of our current elected officials, nor to any of our judges, generals, envoys, think-tank pundits, or malefactors of great wealth. To all intents and purposes, we are — and most likely will remain — on our own.

Still, the optimists are right about one thing. Whether our own Lincoln is on his way or not, Jeremiahs are a dime a dozen these days, at least on the Internet. Having had my say, and added my own sour note to the chorus, I have to admit that it can’t do much harm to look at ideas and enterprises which work against the current darkness, and attempt to assess what, if anything, we might expect from them. Hoping these days may seem a far drearier, and far less audacious task than prophecy, but when all is said and done, the future has its own devices. While none of them is likely to match the elegance of our rhetoric, neither do they have anything to fear from our prophecy. If that thought doesn’t always inspire hope, it ought at least to counsel a little humility.

—————————–

When I was seven or eight, my grandmother would often take me shopping with her on Saturday mornings. No matter where we went, or what she bought, she always made sure that at the end of the outing we found ourselves at Woolworths. It was just about my favorite place on earth at the time, not only for the sights and the smells — the candy and popcorn mixed in with perfume and soap — but also because of the way its treasures were displayed. The slanted display cases, open at the top, with glass partitions between each item, and prices and descriptions on little metal-rimmed paper flags sticking up above them were at just the right height for me. I could not only look, but touch — I could pick things up and examine them, look at the prices, count my money, and make my choices without attracting any attention from adults, unless I dropped something, or needed them to answer my questions.

And what treasures were there to be examined — wax mustaches and lips, glossy black and red, tiny little wax bottles filled with sweet syrup you could bite the top off and drain in a single sip, paper packets of sour, fruit-flavored powder, row upon row of lithographed tin toys from Japan, which either shot sparks or rolled around in circles when wound with a key, or both. Choosing among them was always difficult, even when I had enough nickels, dimes and quarters to make sure that I’d go home happy no matter what choices I made.

There was also the lunch counter, invariably our final stop of the day. I’d perch myself on the stool next to my grandmother’s, and the paper shopping bags gathered in a circle on the floor under her, and order what I always ordered, a pimento-cheese sandwich on white bread, with a handful of potato chips — not a bag, a handful — accompanied by a soda in one of those classic flared glasses with the Coca-Cola logo around the middle, and two straws. I’d savor the tangy cheese, blow bubbles in the glass with one of the straws (the other was always kept for later) and watch the orange juice fountain, or try to figure out what kinds of pies were in the glass case at the end of the counter. It was a simple paradise, this — a dime store, and an indulgent grandmother — but I’ve never found another to equal it.

Twenty-five years later, when it came time to take a child of my own on weekend excursions, the dime-store paradise of my childhood had vanished. Woolworths was still in business, but only just, so my daughter and I found ourselves playing Pac-Man in noisy video-game parlors, visiting the toy store at the shopping mall, and eating lunch in a local hamburger palace already threatened by a McDonalds and a Taco Bell less than a block away. Raising children doesn’t ordinarily leave you much time for nostalgia, but these dismal replacements for the remembered happiness of long-ago Saturdays with my grandmother often depressed me, and made me wonder if my eight year-old daughter might one day come to blame me for the poverty of her childhood experiences.

Ah, earnest parenthood. Earnestness in general. A recent conversation with my now grown daughter revealed that her memories of our Saturdays together aren’t so different from my own memories of those Saturdays many years before with my grandmother. As it turns out, the dime-store apocalypse of my parental fears was part of a set of cultural references which, for all of my reliance on them, have simply been replaced by others, just as my daughter and her generation will inevitably replace me.

It would be nice to think that every apocalyptic scenario is as inconsequential as the disappearance of Woolworths. Whether it is or not, contemplating such a thing in the abstract can be as misleading as reflecting on a vanished paradise. The future belongs to those who’ll inhabit it, and whatever else you believe, it would be foolish to believe that they aren’t at least as well-equipped to confront what they’ll face as those of us who’ve already had our wrestle with things now past and gone. As Bob Dylan once said: …he not busy being born is busy dying. What he didn’t say is that it’s often difficult to tell which is which, something that everyone who writes about weighty matters like End Times ought to keep in mind. In my own future, brief as it may turn out to be, I intend to do exactly that.

I Didn’t Vote for Binyamin Netanyahu

William Timberman5 Comments

We — and the world — now have Israel’s answer to President Obama’s June 4th address in Cairo. Yesterday, November 3rd, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the non-binding resolution shown below. The vote was 344 Aye, 36 Nay, 22 Present, and 30 Not Voting. (For those who would like to see it, the complete roll call is here.)

111TH CONGRESS

1ST SESSION H. RES. 867

Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ in multilateral fora.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN (for herself, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, and Mr. ACKERMAN) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs

RESOLUTION

Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ in multilateral fora.

Whereas, on January 12, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed Resolution A/HRC/S–9/L.1, which authorized a ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ regarding Israel’s conduct of Operation Cast Lead against violent militants in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009;

2

Whereas the resolution pre-judged the outcome of its investigation, by one-sidedly mandating the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ to ‘‘investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by . . . Israel, against the Palestinian people . . . particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression’’;

Whereas the mandate of the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures;

Whereas the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ included a member who, before joining the mission, had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public letter on January 11, 2009, published in the Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions ‘‘war crimes’’;

Whereas the mission’s flawed and biased mandate gave serious concern to many United Nations Human Rights Council Member States which refused to support it, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Whereas the mission’s flawed and biased mandate troubled many distinguished individuals who refused invitations to head the mission;

Whereas Justice Richard Goldstone, who chaired the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’,

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told the then-President of the UNHRC, Nigerian Ambassador Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, that he intended to broaden the mandate of the Mission to include ‘‘all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after’’, a phrase that, according to Justice Goldstone, was intended to allow him to investigate Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians;

Whereas Ambassador Uhomoibhi issued a statement on April 3, 2009, that endorsed part of Justice Goldstone’s proposed broadened mandate but deleted the phrase ‘‘before, during, and after’’, and added inflammatory anti-Israeli language;

Whereas a so-called broadened mandate was never officially endorsed by a plenary meeting of the UNHRC, neither in the form proposed by Justice Goldstone nor in the form proposed by Ambassador Uhomoibhi;

Whereas, on September 15, 2009, the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ released its report; Whereas the report repeatedly made sweeping and unsubstantiated determinations that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead;

Whereas the authors of the report admit that ‘‘we did not deal with the issues . . . regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and secondguessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers ‘in the fog of war.’ ’’;

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Whereas in the October 16th edition of the Jewish Daily Forward, Richard Goldstone, the head of the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’, is quoted as saying, with respect to the mission’s evidence collection methods, ‘‘If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.’’;

Whereas the report, in effect, denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense, and never noted the fact that Israel had the right to defend its citizens from the repeated violent attacks committed against civilian targets in southern Israel by Hamas and other Foreign Terrorist Organizations operating from Gaza;

Whereas the report largely ignored the culpability of the Government of Iran and the Government of Syria, both of whom sponsor Hamas and other Foreign Terrorist Organizations;

Whereas the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from what it called the ‘‘Gaza authorities’’, i.e. the Gaza leadership of Hamas;

Whereas, notwithstanding a great body of evidence that Hamas and other violent Islamist groups committed war crimes by using civilians and civilian institutions, such as mosques, schools, and hospitals, as shields, the report repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon that claim;

Whereas in one notable instance, the report stated that it did not consider the admission of a Hamas official that Hamas often ‘‘created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against [the Israeli military]’’ specifically to ‘‘constitute evidence that Hamas

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forced Palestinian civilians to shield military objectives against attack.’’;

Whereas Hamas was able to significantly shape the findings of the investigation mission’s report by selecting and prescreening some of the witnesses and intimidating others, as the report acknowledges when it notes that ‘‘those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of or conduct of hostilities by the Palestinian armed groups . . . from a fear of reprisals’’;

Whereas even though Israel is a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press, the report of the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ erroneously asserts that ‘‘actions of the Israeli government . . . have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions . . . is not tolerated’’;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations Human Rights Council endorse its recommendations, implement them, review their implementation, and refer the report to the United Nations Security Council, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations General Assembly for further action;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations Security Council—

(1) require the Government of Israel to launch further investigations of its conduct during Operation Cast Lead and report back to the Security Council within six months;

(2) simultaneously appoint an ‘‘independent committee of experts’’ to monitor and report on any domestic legal or other proceedings undertaken by the Government of Israel within that six-month period; and

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(3) refer the case to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after that six-month period;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations General Assembly consider further action on the report and establish an escrow fund, to be funded entirely by the State of Israel, to ‘‘pay adequate compensation to Palestinians who have suffered loss and damage’’ during Operation Cast Lead;

Whereas the report ignored the issue of compensation to Israelis who have been killed or wounded, or suffered other loss and damage, as a result of years of past and continuing rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in southern Israel;

Whereas the report recommended ‘‘that States Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 start criminal investigations [of Operation Cast Lead] in national courts, using universal jurisdiction’’ and that ‘‘following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted’’;

Whereas the concept of ‘‘universal jurisdiction’’ has frequently been used in attempts to detain, charge, and prosecute Israeli and United States officials and former officials in connection with unfounded allegations of war crimes and has often unfairly impeded the travel of those individuals;

Whereas the State of Israel, like many other free democracies, has an independent judicial system with a robust investigatory capacity and has already launched numerous investigations, many of which remain ongoing, of Operation Cast Lead and individual incidents therein;

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Whereas Libya and others have indicated that they intend to further pursue consideration of the report and implementation of its recommendations by the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and other multilateral fora;

Whereas the President instructed the United States Mission to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva to vote against resolution A–HRC–S–12–1, which endorsed the report and condemned Israel, at the special session of the Human Rights Council held on October 15–16, 2009;

Whereas, on September 30, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the mandate for the report as ‘‘onesided’’;

Whereas, on September 17, 2009, Ambassador Susan Rice, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, expressed the United States’ ‘‘very serious concern with the mandate’’ and noted that the United States views the mandate ‘‘as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable’’;

Whereas the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ reflects the longstanding, historic bias at the United Nations against the democratic, Jewish State of Israel;

Whereas the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ is being exploited by Israel’s enemies to excuse the actions of violent militant groups and their state sponsors, and to justify isolation of and punitive measures against the democratic, Jewish State of Israel;

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Whereas, on October 16, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 25–6 (with 11 states abstaining and 5 not voting) to adopt resolution A–HRC–S–12–1, which endorsed the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ and condemned Israel, without mentioning Hamas, other such violent militant groups, or their state sponsors; and

Whereas efforts to delegitimize the democratic State of Israel and deny it the right to defend its citizens and its existence can be used to delegitimize other democracies and deny them the same right: Now, therefore, be it

1 Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

2 (1) considers the ‘‘Report of the United Nations

3 Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ to be

4 irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consid

5 eration or legitimacy;

6 (2) supports the Administration’s efforts to

7 combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, its

8 characterization of the ‘‘Report of the United Na

9 tions Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ as

10 ‘‘unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable’’,

11 and its opposition to the resolution on the report;

12 (3) calls on the President and the Secretary of

13 State to continue to strongly and unequivocally op

14 pose any endorsement of the ‘‘Report of the United

15 Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’

16 in multilateral fora, including through leading oppo

17 sition to any United Nations General Assembly reso-

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1 lution and through vetoing, if necessary, any United

2 Nations Security Council resolution that endorses

3 the contents of this report, seeks to act upon the

4 recommendations contained in this report, or calls

5 on any other international body to take further ac

6 tion regarding this report;

7 (4) calls on the President and the Secretary of

8 State to strongly and unequivocally oppose any fur

9 ther consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Na

10 tions Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’

11 and any other measures stemming from this report

12 in multilateral fora; and

13 (5) reaffirms its support for the democratic,

14 Jewish State of Israel, for Israel’s security and right

15 to self-defense, and, specifically, for Israel’s right to

16 defend its citizens from violent militant groups and

17 their state sponsors.

I have two questions for President Obama: Now that Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Government of Israel have responded to your speechmaking, what will you do? What can you do?

The Gospel According to Vince Lombardi

William Timberman54 Comments

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing — Vince Lombardi

Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I hate football metaphors, and I’m none too fond of football coaches either. It may be because I went to high school in the late Fifties, when every coach seemed to be a survivor of Iwo Jima, with a white sidewall haircut, a whistle around his neck, and an exaggerated idea of the value of military discipline in ordinary life. Also a sadist. Also an ignoramus. Kind of like Vince Lombardi.

Playing left tackle for one of these guys, as I did, was enough to turn me into a life-long Jacobin. I suspect that there were a lot more of us Jacobins than conventional wisdom admits, but at this point in my life it’s hardly worth arguing, except to say that I’m now an Arsenal fan, and have no idea whether the Green Bay Packers or the Dallas Cowboys still exist, let alone which of them is actually America’s Team.

Even so, I’d have to be a fool not to acknowledge that in America, football metaphors — and coaches — are always relevant. Lombardi may have been a man of few words, but in the quote above, there’s little doubt that he wasn’t talking just about football. He was also talking about life, and if he was confused about which was which, his confusion has come to be a very American confusion. As subjects of our post-war empire, we’re inclined to believe — you might say that we’re afraid not to believe — that once the inessential adornments of compassion and altruism have been stripped away, reality is essentially brutal.

We should reconsider. As a philosophy of football, particularly for a coach in the professional leagues, who’s constantly in danger of losing his livelihood if he loses too many games, Lombardi’s laconic Summa Theologica undoubtedly has some merit. As a philosophy of life, or of politics, it’s about as useful as a sledgehammer in a watchmaker’s toolkit.

This, unfortunately, hasn’t prevented it from being adopted by the leadership of both major American political parties, with consequences which it now seems that even they can’t escape. What will happen to them — and to us — once our electoral process has been reduced to a perennial War of Assassins, and what’s left of our democracy has been replaced by an empty recitation of principles which no longer govern anyone’s behavior? This is a question worth asking. In fact, in the context of our present politics, it may be the only question worth asking.

Is anyone asking it? Certainly not the Republicans. They already have their answers — all of them — and no matter how deep and abiding their unhappiness, they’re unlikely to look for new ones. The Democrats are a different story, although at the moment it appears that their traditional story, in which they appear as the defenders of the downtrodden, will soon be coming to an unhappy end.

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Rahm Emanuel doesn’t look like a football coach, and he certainly doesn’t act much like one, except for the apparent delight he takes in bullying people, but like Karl Rove before him, he appears to be as uncritical in his worship of victory as Vince Lombardi ever was. In his days as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he fashioned himself into the first and foremost champion of the idea that power, not policy, was the real concern of a political party, and that getting Democrats elected was the only legitimate goal of the Democratic Party.

Most Democrats agreed that he had a point. In the Spring of 2006, it was already painfully obvious from the outcome of the previous three elections that the Democratic Party had become tragically adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and that something drastic had to be done about it. Opinions varied about what that something should be.

As Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, with his fifty-state strategy, took the position that a systematic effort should be made to strengthen the party even in states where at the time it wasn’t competitive. The rump of the Clinton mafia — Emanuel, Terry McAuliffe, and James Carville — argued that Dean’s strategy was a waste of resources, that money spent in organizing and opening offices in red states would be better spent in targeting swing states, where independent voters held the key to electoral success.

After the successes of the 2006 election, the supporters of Dean’s fifty-state strategy congratulated themselves that they’d made their point, but by 2008, it was clear that the old ways were back in force. Barack Obama made effective use of of the fifty-state strategy, but only at the expense to the party of converting its attempts at building a viable infrastructure in red states into a de facto cult of the personality. Under the influence of Rahm Emanuel and others, he also abandoned the strategy in states such as Alaska, North Dakota and Arizona as November drew closer, and as polling results indicated that he couldn’t overcome his natural disadvantage in those states. After the election, Howard Dean was shown the door, and the cult of Obama — Organizing for America — replaced the fifty-state strategy. It may seem a churlish question, especially when posed by a more or less loyal Democrat, but it has to be asked: How does this process serve democracy?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. Political parties may be first and foremost instruments of power, but in a democracy, they are also — or ought to be — the organized focal point of communications between the people and its elected representatives, the conduit through which needs influence policy.

When the leaders of a victorious party, as Rahm Emanuel did in 2008, smugly tell their internal critics that you can’t make policy if you can’t get candidates elected to office, what they leave unsaid is that a political party represents nothing if it doesn’t represent a consensus on fundamental political principles, serves no purpose if it doesn’t develop policy ideas which express that consensus, and cannot legitimately govern if it gets its candidates elected on the basis of propaganda rather than an honest and detailed statement of where it stands on the issues of the day.

If a party leaves voters and its own rank and file ignorant of its actual policy preferences, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether its propaganda is true or false. The fruit of its victory will inevitably be — must inevitably be — a government which sees itself and its large donors as its only legitimate constituency, and forces the rest us to endure the spectacle of elected representatives who spend more time picking drapes for their offices than they do studying legislation, and are more adept at drilling holes in the bottom of the ship of state than they are at manning an oar.

I have just two questions for fellow Democrats who are puzzled and dismayed that they voted for a presidential candidate who, after more than nine months in office, hasn’t kept, and doesn’t look likely to keep, any of his major campaign promises. What is our victory worth now? Is it could be worse an answer we’re willing to accept for as far as we can see into the future?

According to the available sources, the Obama campaign spent between 700 and 800 million dollars getting him elected. If we want to gauge the future of our democracy, we should ask ourselves where any of us is going to come up with that kind of money. There may come a time when a presidential candidate can be persuaded that populism trumps a billion dollars, but that time hasn’t arrived yet, and certainly won’t arrive so long as our party leadership believes that winning is the only thing, and we are content to let them believe it.