So Farewell – for now –
David Howells Petraeus
General, US Army (retired), late Director of the CIA,
Son of Sixtus, sea captain who commanded a Liberty ship for FDR.

I always thought
Your name sounded Latin
But it turns out your Daddy was Dutch,
From Friesland
Where the people have fair hair and ruddy cheeks,
Which gave you one of your many names,
‘Peaches’

You took him at his word
When he said “Results, boy, results!’
That took you from West Point to the ends of the earth
From the Hudson river to the hotbeds of terrorism
Thence to the hotbeds of intrigue
With a PhD and medals in between.

Whenever we saw you on TV
All those badges seemed to weigh you down
Amongst others, they gave you
The Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal
And the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
Both created by executive order of George W. Bush,
the misunderestimated president.

In Mosul in Iraq
They called you ‘King David’
When you became a four-star general
They started calling you ‘P4′
But to your friends
I guess you must always have been
Just plain Dave

When you came back from the wars
Some saw you as presidential timber,
called on the ghosts of Grant, Marshall, Eisenhower
and the inconsolable Pershing (‘Black Jack’)
Who lost his wife and daughters in a fire
But became six-star General of the Armies of the United States

O General! My General!
The parades are over now
Maybe staying fit to fight the phantoms wore you down
Maybe you took off the rear-view mirror once too often
Maybe you needed to share more than you needed to know
Maybe you mixed too much intelligence
Maybe it was the eighty percent solution
Who knows (the rules for living)?

King David saw another man’s wife in the bath
And had to have her,
So the good book says.
‘All feminine claws are sheathed in velvet
But they can still hurt a good deal
if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities’

She was a member of his tribe
They spoke a common language
Yours is Milspeak:
SOP and ROE, IED and HME,
- and ABT:
Please, now,
Anywhere But Tampa.

You sing the body athletic
You run and run and run and run
Your body, we learn in your rule number ten,
is your ultimate weapons system
But Whitman, he sang the body electric
The embrace of love and resistance
No spring fighting season for him
Or winter or summer or fall

They say when you went to the CIA
You were depressed, you were vulnerable.
Senator Feinstein said
Transitioning is a tremendous adjustment
all of a sudden
You had no entourage, no driver,
and had to wash the dishes. You were now
just a man in a blue suit.

General, they’ll say at Langley,
We hardly knew you.
So long, Dave!

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On July 4, 1913 President Woodrow Wilson, who had been inaugurated exactly four months previously, went to Gettysburg to address Civil War veterans gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that decisive battle of July 1863. He was following in the footsteps of one whom he admired intensely: he had once described Lincoln as "the supreme American… a common man with genius, a genius for things American, for insight into the common thought, for mastering the fundamental things of affairs. The whole country is summed up in him" (Arthur S. Link et al. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 8, p. 378).

The first stone for the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC, originally suggested in 1867 and finally approved by Congress in 1911, was to be laid not long after this reunion, on February 12, 1914 — Lincoln’s birthday. On it would be carved in perpetuity his famous address and the words, "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." This encomium accurately pointed to the principle for which the North had fought — to keep the Union whole.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address of November 1863 served military, ideological and political purposes which seem to have been carefully thought out to counter perceived threats that the Union might not be saved, on account of the discontent and apprehension produced by large casualties on both sides (exceeding 250,000 by August 1863), and growing anti-war sentiment in the North. His advisers feared these would cost him the 1864 presidential election.

In requesting "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain," and evoking "the great task remaining before us," Lincoln, on the back of a surge of enthusiasm brought about by the Unionist victory, sought to ensure that the war would be continued without compromise, to bring any wavering consciences back into line, and to promote his own prospects of being re-elected. He did so by injecting into his address ideological elements which were stirring rhetorically, but in political terms characteristically vague: "a new birth of freedom" and the high resolution "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

The actual historical effect of this rhetoric was to sanctify the principle of uncompromising struggle for a perceived righteous cause, with no sacrifice of blood being regarded as excessive. Belief in it ultimately made the conflict the bloodiest internecine war then known to humanity, with a final reckoning of some 620,000 killed. But its conversion into national mythology also ensured that, however high the cost, future office-holders and court historians would still interpret the price as having been worth it.

Theodore Roosevelt (born 1858, in office as a Republican from 1901—1909) and Woodrow Wilson (born 1856, Democrat, in office 1913—1921) were two such office-holders. Both of them, as children, were symbolically and psychologically marked by the Civil War. "u2018My earliest recollection,’ Wilson related in 1909, u2018is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing someone pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war’ (Anthony Gaughan, "Woodrow Wilson and the Legacy of the Civil War," in Civil War History 43 (1997)).

Marks such as these would lead them to argue in later life for the war’s constructive effects in building the modern American nation and state. Speaking in September 1915 to the Grand Army of the Republic at Camp Emory in Washington DC, Wilson would say:

"The nation in which you now live is not the nation for which you fought. [...] You have the satisfaction [...] of looking back upon a war absolutely unique in this, that instead of destroying, it healed; that instead of making a permanent division, it made a permanent union" (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 34, p. 534).

Because Roosevelt and Wilson were brought up in families which suffered internal conflict from having both Northern and Southern connections, they fought divisiveness wherever they might find it, promoting reconciliation and national unity as sacred causes and scolding any who would pursue factious "special interests." In this they were encouraged by an ecclesiastical context which offered a biblical interpretation of the war as "an apocalyptic struggle of the faithful against the forces of evil," in which sins would be remitted from the spilling of blood (Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: The Strenuous Life, quoted in Powell, 2006). The effect of such dogma was to make the concept of a national unity of reconciliation an object of fearful and uncritical reverence, investing it with the organic sanctity of ritual sacrifice.

Although Woodrow Wilson’s first words on his inauguration, on March 4, 1913, were bland in the extreme ("There has been a change of government"), he too would resort most often to powerful, reverential rhetoric, using images of blood sacrifice, to appeal to the American people for support, or to exhort them to the higher task of building a more perfect union — as he did in his own Gettysburg address in 1913.

Like Lincoln, Wilson wished to commemorate the sacrifice of the men who had died on the field of battle. He echoed Lincoln’s appeal that they should not have died in vain, but he did it with much more characteristic organicist rhetoric (and even Crolyean zeal), beginning with a hymn of praise to the union:

"How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, [...] How handsome the vigor, the maturity, the might of the great Nation we love with undivided hearts; how full of large and confident promise that a life will be wrought out that will crown its strength with gracious justice and with a happy welfare that will touch all alike with deep contentment!"

Again echoing Lincoln, Wilson went on to argue that, precisely because of the depth and intensity of the sacrifice of those who fought in the Civil War, the work of building and transforming the unified nation was not yet done, and had to be carried on by future generations, especially those he was addressing:

"These venerable men crowding here to this famous field have set us a great example of devotion and utter sacrifice. They were willing to die that the people might live. [...] They look to us to perfect what they established. Their work is handed on to us…"

"Have affairs paused? Does the Nation stand still? Is what the fifty years have wrought since those days of battle finished, rounded out, and completed?," Wilson went on rhetorically to ask. "Here is a great people, great with every force that has ever beaten in the lifeblood of mankind. And it is secure. There is no one within its borders, there is no power among the nations of the earth, to make it afraid."

But things were not right, the president argued. The great people "is secure in everything except the satisfaction that its life is right, adjusted to the uttermost to the standards of righteousness and humanity." Therefore, Wilson continued,

"The days of sacrifice and cleansing are not closed. We have harder things to do than were done in the heroic days of war, because harder to see clearly, requiring more vision, more calm balance of judgment, a more candid searching of the very springs of right."

The vision that the president was promoting here was one of greater social and moral justice, a cause which had been espoused in the election campaign of 1912 by Wilson, running as a Democrat under his "New Freedom" platform, and by Roosevelt, running as a Progressive under his "New Nationalism" platform.

Both were programs of progressive reform, and the dividing line between them had been thin. It lay partly in the degree to which each envisaged federal government intervention in economic and social life. Wilson’s New Freedom contained a small residue of the classical liberalism which had, in part, informed his early political philosophy: he sought to establish a level playing field for the little man in the economy by smashing monopoly and so ensuring that he could compete. Roosevelt, by contrast, was prepared to embrace monopoly and bring it under the wing of federal regulation.

Both Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s platforms were imbued with evolutionary and Hegelian philosophy. This rejected the American founding ideas of the separation of powers and checks and balances — for being inconvenient to the consolidated power and efficiency required to respond to the industrial, financial and social challenges of the modern era. Instead, with Hegel, they saw the modern state as the embodiment of the will of the people, to be interpreted flexibly and administered efficiently by disinterested experts who would always know best what was in the public interest — and certainly know better than any divisive minority or majority faction.

Wilson’s transcendent philosophy of inclusive national unity necessarily ran counter to the principles of the U.S. Constitution. In order for his vision of the efficient administrative state to be fulfilled, any checks and balances on the exercise of that state’s power had to be destroyed, both ideologically and in terms of enacted legislation. He himself described this as a need to replace a Newtonian, machine vision of national government with a Darwinian, evolutionary vision, in which there would be a "living Constitution," something organic which would change in response to the needs of each epoch and "the sheer pressure of life." Pursuing the Darwinian analogy to argue specifically against the separation of powers, he wrote that "no living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live" (Woodrow Wilson. 1913. The New Freedom. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., p. 47).

He added a crusading tone to these ideas, expanding them with his own vision of the nation as an organic unified whole, led by himself as a "helpless" leader constantly saying that he had no choice but to do what he had to do. Following in TR’s footsteps in the matter of enhancing executive power, Wilson also enforced a presidentially-controlled consensus on members of Congress, particularly those of his own party, the Democrats, in order to introduce and implement progressive legislation. By the end of 1914 he had thus blurred the differences between the 1912 platforms even more, as enduring items of progressive legislation were successively enacted into law.

At Gettysburg on that Fourth of July in 1913, however, the vision was still elusive. Wilson needed to shift the target away from "armies" (not defined), and on to the "evil men" found among "principalities and powers and wickedness in high places." Assuming a Hegelian and pre-Orwellian identification of all with an undivided collective, he went on to ask, "Are we content to lie still?" — before answering in the negative, by implication only, with the words: "War fitted us for action, and action never ceases."

But then Wilson needed to locate his own role as the divinely-appointed supreme leader of the nation in the coming wars for righteousness. He had been chosen the leader of the nation, he said, not by any qualities of his own, but simply because that was his destiny, and the way things had turned out. This echoed the self-righteous remarks he is alleged to have made to a supporter (possibly the Democratic party’s national chairman, William F. McCombs) after his election in November 1912: "Before we proceed, I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States. So it has come about, and here I stand."

The army which he was to command was not made up of the ghostly hosts who had fought on the battlefields of the Civil War, but rather of "the people themselves, the great and the small, without class or difference of kind or race or origin; and undivided in interest, if we (again, the collective, all-embracing "we") have but the vision to guide and direct them and order their lives aright in what we do." For this great army then, the orders of the day were to be "the laws upon our statute books," and "what we strive for is their freedom" (emphasis added). Every day something had to be done to push the campaign forward; and it had to be done "by plan and with an eye to some great destiny."

Here Wilson was already linking his personal crusade to America’s manifest destiny and greatness, which at that particular moment he found in the great national reunion he was celebrating. Yet there was also a hint that the ultimate destiny of his America, as he saw it, would lie in service to humanity and in the waging of the war to end all wars:

"Who stands ready to act again and always in the spirit of this day of reunion and hope and patriotic fervor? The day of our country’s life has but broadened into morning. Do not put uniforms by. Put the harness of the present on. Lift your eyes to the great tracts of life yet to be conquered in the interest of righteous peace, of that prosperity which lies in a people’s hearts and outlasts all wars and errors of men. Come, let us be comrades and soldiers yet to serve our fellow-men…"

As Wilson’s presidency developed, and he became more exposed to international issues, he talked increasingly of the transcendent strength of a unified and undivided nation using its power to spread righteousness in the world. He would never abandon that tone. He would always, and even in the face of division and dissent, which he would not tolerate, seek to enforce and promote his organic vision of the people united with their leader in the righteous — and comradely — service of humanity.

There was a heavy irony to this organicist belief in a unified nation. Because he regarded all societal division, and perhaps even tensions arising out of mere difference, as originating in deliberately divisive "special interests," he found himself obliged to carry out a top-down, coercive integration of a diverse people often having very real and unresolved differences — such as race, class, ideology, and understandable attachments to different countries of origin, some of which were at war with others. These differences could and did generate significant domestic conflict. But his synthetic, Hegelian vision blinded him to their significance, leaving him often bewildered and ultimately unable to deal with the violence and strength of opposition to his plans which, in the real and irrational world, could and did erupt because of them.

From April 1917 onwards, the consequences of coupling this nation-unified-from-above to "irresistible" force, and then pursuing without compromise a perceived righteous cause on the world stage — for the alleged benefit of all humanity — were momentous for the world, harsh for Americans, and fatal for Woodrow Wilson.

Preceded by a half-dozen lesser, more local, armed interventions in foreign countries during Wilson’s presidency, United States participation in the Great War in 1917—1918 was the original act of Wilsonian global interventionism: it left an undying legacy. At home, it was accompanied by war collectivism and vicious suppression of domestic dissent, setting ominous precedents for future witch-hunts, domestic surveillance, jingoistic propaganda, and curtailments of civil liberties. In the ghastly trenches of northern France, 126,000 Americans died.

In personal terms, Wilson in 1919 decided to tour the country, appealing directly to the people over the heads of political opponents who dissented from his vision of the U.S. role in the flawed peace emerging from the 1919 treaty of Versailles. This exhausting public speaking tour finally broke his already precarious health, crippling the last year and a half of his presidency, and hastening his own death. Meanwhile, as ongoing conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East show, the aftermath of Versailles is also still with us.

References and Further Reading

Barber, James D. 1992 (1972). The Presidential Character. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cooper Jr., John Milton. 1983. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press.

Dalton, Kathleen. 2002. Theodore Roosevelt: The Strenuous Life. New York: Knopf.

Dawley, Alan. 2003. Changing The World: American Progressives in War and Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Harris, M. Keith. "Slavery, Emancipation, and Veterans of the Union Cause: Commemorating Freedom in the Era of Reconciliation," Civil War History 53.3 (2007): 264—290

McClay, Wilfred M. "Croly’s Progressive America: Herbert Croly, Political Philosopher," Public Interest 137 (Fall 1999): 56—72.

Pestritto, Ronald J. 2005. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Powell, Jim. 2006. Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy. New York: Random House.

Steigerwald, David. "The Synthetic Politics of Woodrow Wilson," Journal of the History of Ideas 50.3 (July—September 1989): 465—484.

Stuckey, Mary E. ""The Domain of Public Conscience": Woodrow Wilson and the Establishment of a Transcendent Political Order," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.1 (2003): 1—23.

Tuggle, Michael C. 1913.

Yarbrough, Jean M. "The Forgotten T.R.," Public Interest 148 (Summer 2002): 49—70

Richard Wall (send him mail) lives in Portugal, and is currently reading for a PhD in American history at the University of Birmingham, England.

Richard Wall Archives

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Time, mathematics and reality have all been overturned. Welcome to the era of the post-9/11 anti-terrorism TV series.

In a few days the Fox channel will start airing the Sixth Season of 24 in the United States. On its website Fox has a live countdown to the opening night, and advertises that "The Non-Stop Season begins with a 2 NIGHT 4 HOUR PREMIERE on Sunday, January 14th and Monday, January 15th." Just in case you don’t get it, that’s to remind you that 2+4=24. Math ain’t what it used to be.

But first, full disclosure. I am addicted to 24.

In late 2006, I watched a few episodes and found them to be compulsive viewing. The advent on our cable TV service of the Fox channel, showing the Fourth Season, had coincided with the decision by one of the two state channels, RTP2, to air the Fifth Season. I had also been intrigued by a few earlier references to 24 on this website, especially Karen Kwiatkowski’s enthusiasm and Dave Trotter’s warnings about its potentially pernicious effects. Finally, in a sustained high dosage over the 2 days of the New Year weekend, RTP2 broadcast the entire 24 episodes of the Fifth Season virtually non-stop. I had become a 24 junkie.

Aficionados will have no need of explanations, but for the unconverted and unaddicted, here’s some background.

Keifer Sutherland stars as special agent Jack Bauer of CTU, a fictitious but highly plausible federal government agency dedicated to countering the threat of terrorism in America. Each series, of 24 episodes, covers 24 hours in Jack’s life in real time, beginning and ending at 7 a.m. CTU — the Counter-Terrorist Unit — is located in Los Angeles, where most of the action takes place, and the primary theme is that terrorists with "weapons of mass destruction" are threatening the lives of hundreds, thousands or even millions of Americans. They have to be stopped, at all costs, before they can release their deadly toxins/bombs/missiles/dirty nukes on an innocent and unsuspecting consumer populace.

The prevailing atmosphere is one of perpetual anticipatory fear. Characters hardly ever sleep, eat, drink or perform any other of the bodily functions required to enjoy life. Survival — and the future itself — are wholly contingent on stopping the evil terrorists. Instant, all-pervasive surveillance technology is CTU’s principal weapon in this fight, apart from the more conventional stuff such as guns, needles, helicopters and fancy automobiles (24 is wholly sponsored by the Ford Motor Company). And Jack’s cellphone never dies.

The show follows the actions of terrorists and conspirators as well as of Jack’s colleagues at CTU, and usually features a civilian family and a political figure such as a senator or president. This is significant in that it provides the writers and producers (Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran) opportunities to have a go at the pious, cloying sentimentality with which the political shibboleths of democracy, diversity and national security are invoked by hypocritical office-holders. Contemplating a rational course of action, one such office-holder might say, "This will destroy the American people’s faith in their government" or "This will tear the country apart."

The twist is that in this world of total information and constant surveillance, no-one is to be trusted. You never know who has employed or sponsored the terrorists, nor who — whether on the inside or on the outside — is on your side. Polarity — light and dark, good and bad — is the name of the game, but the wires sometimes get crossed, and you don’t know who’s pulling the strings. Yet, in Jack’s words, "You’re gonna have to trust me."

In the First Season (which aired from November 2001) the plot to assassinate black presidential candidate David Palmer is suspected to come "from inside the agency." As if to confirm the suspicion, the bringer of this news, an agency veteran, is assassinated — shot by an unidentified sniper right in front of Jack’s eyes. The agency itself is being watched by its enemies and by some of its own current and former members.

For the government men and women in sharp suits, Jack Bauer himself is a special danger, because he is "a loose canon," a maverick, a man who doesn’t play by the rules. Rivals (in love as well as in the bureaucratic hierarchy) deem him "out of control" and, echoing the venomous wish fulfillment which is characteristic of the show’s villains, let others know of their urgent conviction that he is "going down."

The terrorists, always bad by definition (and foreign, sometimes with a British accent), are also "going down." But like Jack, and for reasons of plot-making, they can never be allowed to do so. They keep popping up like a jack-in-a-box (pun intended), and again like Jack himself, are forever escaping from seemingly impossible situations.

These are the primary plot devices used to sustain the tension. With the end of each episode you are left on tenterhooks, wondering: how are you going to deal with this one, Jack?

That unresolved question is going to get you to watch the next episode — and accounts for the phenomenal success of 24 in its DVD format. This appears to offer the chance to satisfy your craving to know the outcome without having to wait for next week’s show. Jack, Houdini-like, usually extricates himself, and rides again. But since each episode builds to a new climax, with a different and even more impossible conundrum, true gratification is always postponed.

In addition to the clever, suspenseful pace of the show, and the effectiveness of its pyrotechnics, clearly a huge amount of research and creativity has gone into devising 24. So personally I think its success is thoroughly deserved. But what actually interests me is what it may be revealing about American society and the spirit of the times.

Paul Cantor wrote recently about the value of improvisation in television production, and how it contributes creatively to a spontaneous order in the cultural domain analogous to the Hayekian concept of spontaneous order in the economic sphere. This is the apparently chaotic, but perhaps most natural, arrangement of human affairs. In his article, he contrasted such rather rough-and-ready, improvised forms with the romantic or utopian idea of perfectly crafted order and the perfect artifact. With him, I believe that the effects and impact of popular culture, like TV shows, are often underestimated (and often entirely disregarded), because, being imperfect, often improvised, and defying categorization, they are not taken seriously.

An additional difficulty is that such popular artifacts may not be intelligently perceived at the time of their initial appearance. The reason for this is two-fold: first, the viewer has an up-close-and-personal involvement (and take it from me, this is a truly addictive show), which prevents him from establishing the necessary critical distance. Secondly, he or she is often too concerned with the linear narrative (what’s going to happen next) rather than with social, psychological and cultural effects (underlying cultural assumptions and themes).

This state of absorption in the entertainment leaves him or her open to a time-honored technique of television — its power to convey subliminal messages. Which messages you as a viewer see and absorb then depends in part on your preconceptions, in part on your openness to suggestion and how in-tune with the Zeitgeist you happen to be — in short, where you’re coming from. Thus:

• In February 2003 Bill Sardi wondered whether Hollywood scripts like 24, which contain terrorist threats from foreign groups, were being used "to keep American citizens on edge," so that the terrorist threat could be kept alive in the minds of voters, President Bush’s approval ratings improved, and an excuse found for the then-upcoming invasion of Iraq.

• In 2004 Karen Kwiatkowski saw Jack’s bending of the rules as an example of individual enterprise winning out over an ineffective state, whose heavy-footed functionaries use the time-honored excuse that they are "just following orders." This gave the show, in her view, a libertarian cast.

• In 2006 a more jaded Dave Trotter, who no longer watches the whole of every episode as he used to, saw the protagonists’ willingness to use torture as a means, without any moral consideration of the ends to which it is being applied, as a subtle propaganda ploy to get the American public softened up for its future domestic use to enforce politically correct attitudes in the US under a potential "Clinton-analog presidency."

I can see all this and more, and that is part of the show’s fascination. 24 is an explosive cocktail of the war on terror at home (including all its hype), lethal privacy-invading technology, big money mainly in the form of ransom demands and pay-offs, and individual heroism alongside the power and corruption in government. All these evoke strong American traditions and ever-present popular concerns: time (the time is now, and we must make the most of it or die), corruption from within (holders of power are suspect and must be held in check), extortion, blackmail and justice (organized crime and how to deal with it), and fear of contamination from without (alien "others" have forever been coming to upset our demographics, but now they bring an extreme threat to life itself).

Richly overlaid on all this are two layers. The first is deception: nothing is what it seems. The assassin you see may actually have stolen someone else’s identity. This gives a whole new meaning to those perennial organizational precautions: watch your back and cover your ass.

The second layer is nostalgia. LA in 24 is really a new Wild West, except that the corral and the gully have given way to the concrete and glass of office blocks and the parking garage, and gunmen fire from behind pillars and LCD screens rather than outcrops of desert rock. But blood is still spilt, and guns still smoke.

Whether consciously or not, 24 draws on a rich and authentically American film and TV legacy, including series like The High Chaparral (1967), and Fox’s own X-Files (1993), which both suggests and questions conspiracy behind government, as well as movies like Clint Eastwood’s 1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales (for the shootouts, and the tradition of the "honest outlaw" in the Western), and Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men (for political intrigue). Mission Impossible (the TV series and the movies) is also in there (especially for its stolen identity theme), as is an earlier Jack, Harrison Ford’s agent Jack Ryan in the Philip Noyce films of Tom Clancy’s novels Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). There’s also a debt to presidential assassination movies, like Executive Action (1973) and that other excellent Clint Eastwood film, In the Line of Fire (1993). And let’s not forget the dystopian, time-shifted vision of Terry Gilliam in Twelve Monkeys (1995), in which an unknown and lethal virus has wiped out five billion people on earth. Readers will, I am sure, be able to add more to this list.

A favored device in 24 is the reference to the past, particularly the past personal life of the main characters. This "past tense" gives the show some historical depth and perspective, neatly compensating for the hectic speed of the "real time" in which it is filmed. For example, at the breakfast press conference given by David Palmer on the day of the California presidential primary in Season 1, Jack is accosted by an old flame from college days. She hints they she might be open to renewing her friendship with him. He gently puts her down with a reference to his daughter, which both lets her know that he has been married for some time and tells the audience that Jack is a good family man who doesn’t dally with past acquaintance.

24 also has a nice take on the bureaucratic infighting at the heart of government. In Season 5, the agency is compromised and infiltrated, and is itself the victim of a terrorist attack, but still the ultimate threat is none of these — it is the takeover of the agency by another government department, Homeland Security, which has been called in in light of CTU’s manifest inability to defend even itself. Thus, as always, the government solution to government incompetence is to bring in even bigger government.

The Fifth Season also brought the theme of rottenness at the heart of the executive to its high point. The corrupt, conspiratorial US president in this series, Charles Logan (played by Gregory Itzin), who in the final episode is unceremoniously escorted away (presumably into custody) by secret service men, not only has a disyllabic surname, which evokes Nixon, but is also made to look like him. It’s Watergate all over again.

Is 24 a libertarian show? Sometimes I would like to think so. At one crisis point, someone suggests that a particular action or strategy, if pursued, "will damage the integrity of our government." Jack Bauer, quick as a flash, responds: "Our government has no integrity." Hope lights up, only to be dashed down when he adds, "while the current president in still in office." In other words, get a good man into the presidency, and all will be well again with America.

Maybe this is nostalgic wish for another Watergate, but Watergate has been and gone, yet big government today is bigger than it ever has been. 24 does not question the supposed virtues of democratically-elected big government itself, and Jack the maverick is in the end its finest exemplar. I can even hear the calls, "Jack Bauer for President."

If I had to label the show’s politics I would say it is really small c conservative. There’s a strong focus on the solidity and reliability of the family, for example. This conservatism is overlaid with a hefty dose of plausible conspiracy theory (President Logan at one point gives a direct order for a plane full of passengers to be shot down), which in turn reflects the panic and narcosis culture of the cultivated, but unreal, post-9/11 state of permanent emergency.

The main reason for concluding that the show is not really concerned with enlarging the sphere of liberty is its attitude to ends and means. No clearer message emerges from every episode than that the ends justify the means. Torture is portrayed as an acceptable technique for extracting information and forcing confessions — even from the innocent or those not yet proven guilty. Significantly, CTU uses medical torture on its own employees when these are suspected of treason.

Jack’s unorthodox measures, including random and widespread killing, are also not questioned on moral grounds — they justify themselves because they are shown to be effective in a "real-world situation" where there is no time to consider the issues. This is expediency, which in turn breeds a kind of ferocious blood-lust for its own sake: at a key moment in Season 5, when Jack and his girlfriend and fellow-CTU worker Audrey Raines have hunted down and trapped a traitorous former CTU chief, she exhorts him with the words, "Kill him, Jack, Kill him!" — and you can be sure the audience is right behind her.

Finally, the easy assumption of the pervasiveness and reach of the mechanisms of surveillance and invasion of privacy by all the characters has to be deeply troubling to those concerned with the restoration of civil liberty, and there is no suggestion that these mechanisms will ever be reversed. In fact, they are the mainstay of the show, as they are perhaps of any government seeking "total information awareness" — but to what end?

This is dangerous stuff, and if nothing else points to an uneasy emptiness ahead: we are on the road, but we don’t know where we’re going.

But don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the show — for now. "You’re gonna have to trust me on this."

Richard Wall (send him mail) lives in Portugal, and is currently reading for a PhD in American history at the University of Birmingham, England.

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Print of San Juan, Nicaragua, circa 1850

In a period going back to around 1850, five or six generations of Americans have been involved with Nicaragua, a volcanic, earthquake-prone land of forests, lakes and intense blue skies, poor but often beautiful, which is the archetype of the Central American "banana republic," originally so described because it was usually dependent on its fruit-exporting or similar trade. "The possibility of economic riches in Nicaragua attracted international business development," reads the 1850—1868 section of a study archived on the Library of Congress’ website. Among the US citizens who have seriously meddled in Nicaragua’s internal affairs are:

• adventurer William Walker, who made two expeditions to the country in the 1850s and had to be ousted by the US army;
• corporate attorney, US attorney-general and later senator Philander C. Knox, who as secretary of state to President William Howard Taft from 1909 to 1913, in the age of dollar diplomacy, ordered the US Marines in there;
• and, closer to our own times, former National Security Council official Lt. Col. Oliver North (USMC, retired), best known today as a radio commentator.

It is now also nearly 20 years since Ben Linder, a young mechanical engineer from Portland, Oregon, was killed in Nicaragua. He had gone there some 3 years before, fresh out of college, to help in small-scale engineering projects which it was hoped would better the lot of the rural people — most of them still, to this day, extraordinarily impoverished, and disproportionately likely to succumb to disease:

"Nicaragua," according to the country profile on the website of the British government’s Foreign Office, " is …the poorest country in Latin America, with half of her 5.4 million people below the World Bank poverty line. [...] Health services are not readily accessible to a majority of the population. In the more isolated regions of Nicaragua, there are almost no physicians. Government clinics are often empty shells lacking adequate personnel, equipment and medicines. Infectious and parasitic diseases are the leading causes of death. Gastroenteritis and tuberculosis are serious problems. Diseases such as influenza, malaria, typhoid and pneumonia, have returned because of a lack of preventive measures."

The 1980s, when Ben Linder and many other like-minded young idealists were genuinely moved by the opportunity to help less fortunate others in Nicaragua, were the years when the government there was the Sandinista National Liberation Front, led by Daniel Ortega. That government was bitterly opposed by die-hard supporters of the Somoza dynasty, which had ruled and pillaged the country for over 40 years from the mid-1930s onwards. It was also opposed by the US government of Ronald Reagan (1981—1989), which saw the Sandinistas as a dangerously close spearhead of America’s large enemy of the day, international communism.

A 1986 Time Magazine cover featured an unsmiling Ortega in shades and Comandante uniform, stars and all, against a deep red background with the headline "The Man Who Makes Reagan See Red." "48 Hours from Brownsville" could have been the title of a satirical theme-song for the Reagan era’s national security functionaries, who painted poor Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a threat to the United States because it was "only 2 days’ march" from that Texas frontier metropolis.

Out of that fixation came first propaganda, and then active US support for the vindictive army of counter-revolutionaries known by their Spanish name, the Contras, who were coached and directed by the CIA. In its later stages the Contra war was funded, in defiance of the Boland Amendment passed by the US Congress, by the proceeds of under-the-table US government sales of weaponry to Iran, and by arms-for-drugs deals supervised by those same former state officials and their associates. Some of their most ardent supporters, in the run-up to the 2006 elections, have been lining up to warn for over a year of the dire consequences which would follow if the Nicaraguan people re-elected Ortega. They usually forgot to mention that Ortega’s running-mate this time around was Jaime Morales, a former Contra, whose ample residence Ortega had commandeered for himself during the eighties — and held on to ever since, having recently agreed a compensation deal with its former owner.

It was a Contra grenade which, on April 27, 1987, first injured Ben Linder and his two Nicaraguan colleagues, before he was executed by a shot to the head. As with the death of Rachel Corrie, another young American idealist in another place and time, there was an outcry in the international media, and a fierce reaction in America. As British journalist Matthew Campbell points out, few issues ever polarized opinion in the US as much as the Sandinistas. Already in the days of the Reagan imperium, you were "either with us or against us." Elliot Abrahams, then assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, was quoted as saying that Linder simply should have known better than to be in a combat zone. A more forthright Bush the elder, vice-president at the time, said merely that Ben Linder "was on the wrong side."

Some readers may recall that Abrams, heavily implicated in operations in support of the Contras, lied defiantly about this in congressional testimony, finally pleading guilty to perjury in 1991 in order to avoid a felony charge. None of this stopped George Bush the younger in June 2001 appointing the u2018combative’ Abrams to his national security council as director of its Office for Democracy, Human Rights And International Operations, and later, in December 2002, as senior director for Near East and North African Affairs — just in time for the invasion of Iraq. In February 2005 he was appointed deputy National Security Advisor.

Other noted "veterans" of intervention in Nicaragua and the lethal Iran-Contra affair also made it into the Bush/Cheney administration: John D. Negroponte, Otto J. Reich, John M. Poindexter, and later the ill-starred Porter Goss, who recently (May 2006) resigned his job as head of the CIA, apparently for making a hash of it. Little known and never mentioned in the litany of seeming perplexity with which the mainstream media greeted his appointment to that office in 2004, Goss was allegedly involved in Nicaragua in the dying days of the Somoza regime in 1979, as part of the agency’s clandestine efforts to forestall the inevitable by carrying out sundry assassinations, or attempted assassinations, of Sandinista top brass, including Ortega and his brother. The apparently overzealous Goss had been u2018a rising star’ in the company during the tenure of his good friend George Bush the elder in the mid-1970s, even though he had officially left the agency in 1972.

To his credit, CBS journalist Dan Rather took a rather different view of Ben Linder’s death:

Benjamin Linder was no revolutionary firebrand, spewing rhetoric and itching to carry a rifle through the jungles of Central America. He was a slight, soft-spoken, thoughtful young man. When, at 23, he left the comfort and security of the United States for Nicaragua, he wasn’t exactly sure what he would find… But he wanted to see Nicaragua first-hand, and so he headed off, armed with a new degree in engineering, and the energy and ideals of youth… This wasn’t just another death in a war that has claimed thousands of Nicaraguans. This was an American who was killed with weapons paid for with American tax dollars. The bitter irony of Benjamin Linder’s death is that he went to Nicaragua to build-up what his own country’s dollars paid to destroy — and ended up a victim of the destruction… The loss of Benjamin Linder is more than fodder in an angry political debate. It is the loss of something that seems rare these days: a man with the courage to put his back behind his beliefs. It would have been very easy for this bright, young man to follow the path to a good job and a comfortable salary. Instead, he chose to follow the lead of his conscience.

In the Contras’ war of terror, Ben Linder was one of over an estimated 30,000 people killed. During the 1990s, when the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking at the deaths of other US citizens in Central America, attempts in the US House of Representatives to have his death investigated in greater depth came to nothing.

In the International Court of Justice, however, Nicaragua had in 1986 successfully sued the government of the United States, being awarded $17 billion on six counts of damages arising out of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras and direct US military intervention, including the mining of Nicaraguan ports. The US government reacted to this, after the verdict, by withdrawing its earlier declaration accepting the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, dismissed the Court as a “semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t.” So there!

But it was in any case a no-win situation for the Sandinista government. Already at the time of Ben Linder’s death, its earlier efforts to reverse some of the depredations of the Somoza family by (forcibly and too hastily) redistributing the family’s ill-gotten land holdings, and to raise the abysmal levels of basic health care and education, had given way to severe curtailment of civil liberties, the imprisonment of opponents, the channeling of over 80% of government revenues to fighting the war against the Contras, and the reported presence of a raft of Cuban and East German advisers sent as proxies for the Muscovite "evil empire."

The culmination came in the elections of 1990, in which a Unified Opposition Front came to power, strongly backed by the United States government and its favored instrument for such occasions, the National Endowment for Democracy. The front was led by Violetta Chamorro, the widow of the liberal newspaper editor Pedro Chamorro, assassinated in the time of the Somozas. The transition however, was messy. A legacy of outstanding property claims, and successful efforts by many Sandinistas to hold on to some of their own gains of both wealth and power, meant that the new government was not as promptly compliant as the imperial masters in Washington wished and expected. Violetta Chamorro later had to be strong-armed into withdrawing Nicaragua’s World Court claim against the US, on pain of losing ongoing US financial backing.

Her successor as president, Arnaldo Aleman, was so blatantly crooked that he was eventually convicted of embezzlement and corruption, and sentenced to 20 years in jail. Always keen to encourage clean behavior in others, Washington punished many of his equally corrupt associates by revoking their US visas. No doubt the bureaucratic thinking went something like this: if you won’t at least be seen to behave, then we won’t let you or your wives or mistresses visit LA to see your relatives, nor go shopping on Fifth Avenue, so there!

The old enemy Ortega remained. He was still the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. He had stood unsuccessfully in every subsequent election since the 1990 debacle. Consistently, a majority of Nicaraguans said they did not want him back. By around 2002 the realization had no doubt dawned (certainly in the mind of his close associates) that both an image makeover and some deft manipulation of the goalposts were required. It was time to bring Ortega’s skills in political tradecraft up to date.

Ortega made a constitutional pact with the corrupt Aleman, involving fundamental changes to the separation and balance of powers between president and parliament. He was thus able to reinforce the position he had achieved earlier by stashing the parliament and the courts with party men who could be relied on to get him out of trouble in a tight spot, as they did when he was plausibly accused of having sexually abused his step-daughter. The bar was also lowered on the percentage of votes required to win in the first round of any future presidential election (from 40% to 35%). A legitimate potential rival contender for the Sandinista leadership, the popular former mayor of Managua, the late Herty Lewites, was unceremoniously ejected from the party. More controversially, Ortega aligned himself with the Catholic church and supported the outlawing of even therapeutic abortion (in the case where the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life), which had been legal since 1893.

With his image made over by his wife, who dressed him in democratic blue jeans in place of the long-discarded guerilla’s uniform, and a campaign featuring promises of a fairer future enveloped in the new, less violent colors — pink and white (no more red) — Ortega was reported as having achieved a percentage of around 38% of the vote on November 5th. Thus, under the new rules he had himself had a part in devising, he was elected President without having to go to a second round, which he would almost certainly have lost.

International reaction to the election result has been rather muted. Some on the traditional left are hoping that an Ortega government, may yet be able genuinely to "do something" for the people, assisted perhaps by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who, in place of Moscow’s always rather threadbare mantle of fairy godmother to the revolution, brings more practical promises to supply diesel fuel to keep the lights on in Managua. I fear such hopes will be in vain, though it would not take much to lift Nicaragua just a little bit out of the depths of its poverty. Experience tends to show that leaders of governments, whatever their campaign colors, and whether they wear flight suits to land on aircraft carriers, jeans on a donkey, or suits in the UN General Assembly, will never do anything much for the people other than make extravagant promises which they can’t keep.

Those on the traditional right point to new trade and investment opportunities and the supposedly already visible benefits of Nicaragua’s accession to the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA) in 2005, in the form of increased exports of primary agricultural products, particularly to the US. Real estate near the idyllic Pacific coast surfing beaches seems to offer good prospects — for foreign, mainly US, investors. Others say Nicaragua is, regrettably, emulating Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which has become a beach and sex-tourism hotspot mainly for Europeans (the current US government still forbids most of its citizens from going to Cuba, or fines them heavily for doing so. For government, it seems, no simple human or artistic purpose can ever be innocent). Certainly, from a masculine point of view, Nicaraguan womanhood has a reputation for charm and beauty as seductive as that of Cuba, but that doesn’t mean government should start issuing licenses for their exploitation.

Perhaps there is a cynical and dispiriting acceptance that in Nicaragua as elsewhere, politics and government continues to be about power and pelf, and how to keep hold of them at the expense of possible rivals. And this is just one factor preventing anything truly positive and helpful from being achieved by governments.

For all these reasons, Ortega is unlikely to pick up where he left off in 1990 or earlier. Indeed, given the scale and intensity of the corruption and manipulation in recent years, it is possible that watchers and players in Nicaraguan politics have adapted to the time-honored and even more cynical threat of public humiliation, honed to a fine art in Washington by political managers like Karl Rove (Republican) and Rahm Emanuel (Democrat). This is a tough game in which the depredations of those in power, and the ambitions of those out of power, are held in check by dirt — real or concocted — which the other side, or the "new cardinals" themselves, keep ready to be dished to a complicit, scandal-hungry media at a moment’s notice.

No doubt also many other former Sandinistas, like Ortega, have toned down their revolutionary zeal, as they have learned that the political trough doesn’t have to be all yours in order to become fat on it. That indeed was the mistake the Somozas made. They lost it all because, in their increasingly desperate attempts to stay in power, they were fatally prone to using blunt instruments such as robbery, assassination and bombing of their own people. The latter technique rebounded on them spectacularly when the last of the dynasty to hold power, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was shot to pieces and his car blown up in Paraguay in September 1980.

Wreckage of Anastasio Somoza’s car in Paraguay, Sept. 17, 1980

A still only partly declassified US intelligence report describes how "Somoza’s car was hit by a projectile from a rocket-launcher, which blew off the roof and killed any occupant not already dead as a result of the automatic weapons fire which preceded the rocket attack." Greedy tyrants, be warned!

What about the future for Nicaragua? In 2007 and beyond, the context we will have is globalization, biotechnology and wars, both present and future, verbal and real, over natural resources and the environment. Nicaragua has coffee, fruits, forests, and seeds, all attractive to the masters of agribusiness for potential acquisition, genetic modification, and subsequent exploitation as commodifiable intellectual property. It also has coastlines both Atlantic and Pacific, which have long encouraged thoughts of a super-canal to rival Panama’s and facilitate the passage of giant container ships carrying cargoes of manufactures from China. Goodbye lakes and forests, hello oil spills and chemicals! And so, for those coming conflicts, I have a sinking feeling Nicaragua’s role as a rich exploitable resource in the global plantation has already been assigned, with hardly a thought for the still impoverished people who will be required to work it.

People of Nicaragua (Photos courtesy of Willem Moors)

The problem, as always, is that revenues from agricultural exports and other projects will be allocated in the first instance to payments of interest on international indebtedness. Nicaragua, like so many poor nations, is locked into the cycle of debt repayment to the international banks. One of the primary roles of US diplomatic representatives in this context becomes that of monitoring the political and economic climate, looking out for and possibly "neutralizing" any looming threats to "stability" — the stability of Wall Street and London banking profits in particular.

In plain language this means, as it has always meant, that they must ensure countries like Nicaragua do not fall behind with their debt payments, and in this role they are merely the blander and more acceptable civilian successors of the former military presence. In Nicaragua, that role would be eminently consistent with the long history of US oversight and intervention in favor of Wall Street. In 1935, at the age of 54 and after he had retired from the US military, Major-General Smedley Butler described his period of service thus:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country’s most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers….I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909—1912."

And so it goes. Even Ortega, according to an Associated Press report a shadow of his former revolutionary self, seems to be bending over backwards to provide reassurance: "His speeches have focused on reassuring skeptics that he plans no radical changes and will embrace free trade, job creation and close US ties."

Ben Linder and Nicaraguan kids

Ben Linder and his memory rest in Nicaragua. His gravestone reads: "Benjamin Ernest Linder, Internationalist. Born July 7, 1959 California, USA. Fell April 28, 1987, San Jose del Bocay Jinotega, Nicaragua. The light he lit will shine forever."

And so it does, in a humble, slightly ironic, but fitting monument to a goodness of heart utterly different to what is represented by the company of rogues, plotters and murderers who infest the services of government.

References and Further Links

Articles

Richard Feinberg, Nicaragua, What’s At Stake. Latin Business Chronicle, July 31, 2006 (the author is Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. Previously, he served as President Clinton’s Latin American expert on the National Security Council).

Richard Feinberg, Nicaragua Elections: Too Close to Call. Latin Business Chronicle, October 16, 2006

Susan Frisbie, The Road to the November Elections. Nicaraguan Developments, Volume 22, No. 3, Fall 2006

(the "neo-missionary" view from the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua (WCCN), a committee to promote social justice).

Lisa Haugaard, Foreign Policy in Focus: Nicaragua. Foreign Policy in Focus, Vol. 2 No. 32, March 1997

Stephen Johnson. Help Nicaraguan Democrats Block "Creeping Coup." The Heritage Foundation, November 7, 2005 (somewhat reactionary but highly knowledgeable commentary, written a year before the Nicaraguan elections).

Stephen Johnson. Ortega’s Comeback: Charisma with an Iron Grip? The Heritage Foundation, November 8, 2006 (Johnson’s more sober post-election comments).

Steven Kinzer, Our Man in Honduras. The New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, Number 14 September 20, 2001 (analysis of the career of John D. Negroponte up to 9/11)

Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen, A Transfer of Power, Sort Of. CounterPunch, July 10—12, 2004

Sergio Ramirez, After Lewites. OpenDemocracy.net, July 4, 2006 (Nicaraguan writer, former vice-president in the Sandinista government)

Sergio Ramirez, Don’t Forget Nicaragua. OpenDemocracy.net, October 11, 2006

Murray Rothbard, Reagan, Warmonger. Libertarian Forum, Vol. XVII, Nos. 7—8, July—August, 1983

Tony Solo, Unicorn Hunting in Nicaragua. ZNet, July 24, 2005 (uncompromising view from the hard left, opposing neoliberal intervention and politics).

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Nicaragua Upside Down, The Independent Institute, November 8, 2006

Books and Book Excerpts

William Blum, 2003 [1996]. Killing Hope. Common Courage Press.

Noam Chomsky. 1992. "Teaching Nicaragua a Lesson," in What Uncle Sam Really Wants. Odonian Press.

Joan Kruckewitt, 2001. The Death of Ben Linder, Seven Stories Press.

David Model, 2005. "President Ronald Reagan and Nicaragua" in Lying for Empire. Common Courage Press.

Murray Rothbard, 1995 [1984]. Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy, Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Movies

Carla’s Song, 1996. Directed by Ken Loach, starring Robert Carlyle and Oyanka Cabezas.

Walker, 1987. Directed Alex Cox, starring Ed Harris.

Website

The National Security Archive’s Nicaragua collection: Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978—1990

Richard Wall (send him mail) is currently reading for a PhD in American History at the University of Birmingham, England.

Cram was one of those Americans born during the War between the States who came of age in the troubled times of the late nineteenth-century, the so-called "Gilded Age" and the crisis decade of the 1890s.

His was a generation afflicted by a restless malaise: impatient with the worn-out legacies of their parents’ culture and the asphyxiating, heavily draped claustrophobia of dark Victorian interiors, some of them sought stimulation in novelty, constant change and perpetual motion for its own sake. They tore down the old with no particular conception of what they wanted to put in its place. In Cram’s own words, "the aim of destruction was sure, but the substitute revelation was murky in the extreme."

Chartres Cathedral

In matters of art and architecture, Cram recognized the need to sweep away the stale constructions of the immediate past: looking back to the early years of the century, he wrote in 1929, "the sterile formulae of the Edwardian era, the last desiccated remnants of the Victorian age, which in itself was the last flare of a tradition and a tendency already moribund, had to be destroyed; there can be small question as to that." But beyond the destruction, he himself sought worth and permanence in the glories of the medieval past, by breathing new life specifically into church and college architecture in America: “We must return for the fire of life to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not.”

Men and women who shared Cram’s belief were "anti-modernists." For them the world that was changing so fast between 1890 and 1930 — especially in the nineteen-noughties and the naughty twenties, was also changing to no good purpose. In the aesthetic realm, the relentless energy of the revolutionary modernists — postimpressionists, cubists, vorticists — was seemingly dissipating into nothing but hunger for the next novelty, itself soon to be discarded.

Oxford

Cram sought to counter this descent into civilization’s abyss by creating artifacts of beauty and permanence that would evoke and preserve the true spirit of those earlier centuries. The tradition he revered and revived was the Gothic architecture which had inspired the builders of the great Christian cathedrals of the Middle Ages like Chartres, and the soaring towers of ancient seats of learning such as Oxford and Cambridge.

Architecture

Today Ralph Adams Cram is hardly known outside architectural circles, but if you travel around the churches and universities of the United States, especially in the North-East, you will everywhere find his architectural legacy, American Collegiate Gothic. At Princeton, perhaps his major achievement in college buildings, he was consulting architect for 22 years, between 1907 and 1929, having been appointed under then college president Woodrow Wilson. A mini-biography on the web describes his impressive record:

McCormack Building, Boston

He was the Campus architect at MIT, Princeton, Wheaton, Sweet Briar, Boston University, University of Richmond and Wellesley Colleges. Major buildings are at Williams, St Georges School, Phillips Exeter School, Blue Ridge School and St Paul’s School.

Great public buildings include the McCormack Federal Building in Boston, a group of delightful public libraries including Fall River, Wakefield, Sturbridge and Roxbury, the Japanese Garden at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California.

Cram designed buildings for the Episcopal, Presbyterian and Unitarian Churches, among others. His work culminated in the great, and still incomplete, Gothic Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Doheny Library, University of Southern California

The Doheny Library, like much of Cram’s work, has lately been undergoing extensive and careful restoration. This is a tribute to Cram’s enduring vision, following an age when much modern architecture was indeed the soulless admixture of reinforced concrete and glass which he had decried in the 1920s as "fatally logical and therefore exceedingly ugly architecture."

Of course, there are those who see such attitudes as reactionary, and would say Cram was out of tune with the inevitable rise of the logicality of modernism. But, in line with the pragmatist philosophy of his age, the issue for Cram was not that his architecture was of universal application, but that it was fitting and true for the purpose at hand: in a centre of higher learning like Princeton he sought to create a built environment which would stimulate the reverence for spiritual and philosophical contemplation which similar Gothic structures had encouraged down the centuries.

Japanese Garden, Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Photo courtesy of Ethan Anthony; Copyright © 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Public Library, Wakefield, Mass.

As Princeton graduate Jane Chapman implies in a recent article, Cram would turn in his grave if he saw what was done at Princeton (and elsewhere) in the 1960s:

Highlights of the [Cram-designed] Graduate College include the imposing Cleveland Tower and the medieval Procter Hall dining hall, but Cram’s vision was not fully realized. In his book, [My Life in Architecture,] he proposed an additional Graduate College quad, including a chapel, in which services would be conducted in Latin. In this, he admitted, he had received "scant sympathy and no support whatsoever."

Cram would have been horrified at what was eventually added to his masterpiece. The New Graduate College, built in 1963, is described on the Graduate School’s Web site as "built in a style that originated at the Bauhaus and has since become synonymous with International Modernism."

The Chapel at Princeton

Princeton, Cleveland Tower

The Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge

Biography

Generally acknowledged as the definitive biographical study of Cram is the two-volume magnum opus by Douglass Shand-Tucci, historian of art, architecture, Boston and New England. Volume 1, Boston Bohemia, 1881—1900 was published in 1995 and volume 2, An Architect’s Four Quests — Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical, in 2005.

Some reviewers of these books have grumbled about their "camp and prolix" style and the poor quality of final editing and production, but it is the contemporary relevance of the issue of homosexuality and Anglo-Catholicism which has generated the most heat. Shand-Tucci’s thesis is that "late nineteenth-century Boston aestheticism and bohemianism served as code words for homosexuality, and that Cram, both formed in and contributing to that cultural model, cannot be understood without taking account of it." Thus says Joseph Goetz, reviewing the first volume in Commonweal, March 1996, who goes on to write, "The vexing question which keeps recurring as one reads this long and fascinating book is, “Who cares?” He answers it himself:

"Shand-Tucci obviously does, for he sees in the very diverse productions of the Boston Bohemians a sensibility charged with homoeroticism which in turn bestows on them a “modernism” hitherto unremarked upon by cultural historians. The author describes Cram’s early masterpiece, All Saints, in Ashmont, Massachusetts, as “voluptuous,” arguing that his buildings were “not only expressive of [Cram's] conscious beliefs and convictions, religious and artistic, but also of his unconscious life.” He likens Cram’s churches to “Trojan Horses in Puritan New England,” but reads into all of Cram’s early work a startlingly contemporary aesthetic."

All Saints’ Church, Ashmont, Massachusetts

Architect Ralph Adams Cram’s first church, designed in partnership with Bertram Goodhue, was All Saints’, Ashmont. A significant landmark in American architectural history, All Saints’ is, of its type, Cram and Goodhue’s masterpiece, and a model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20th century (Source: Douglass Shand-Tucci, quote at Dorchester Athenaeum)

Personally, I am not sure that sexual orientation necessarily implies a greater ability to develop an aesthetic sensibility or produce great and enduring art, and the ancient Athenians would say there is nothing very modern about homoeroticism. As far as Anglo-Catholicism is concerned, Br. Christopher Jenks points out that the role of the homosexual community within it is well documented since at least the thirteenth century. It has long been a source of conflict between the more liberal and inclusive “Catholic,” and the more exclusive “Puritan” wings of Anglicanism. Confirming that this is no big deal, Jenks adds, "Cram’s homosexuality has always been something of an open secret within the Episcopal Church. [...] Furthermore, nobody I knew found [this] at all surprising or out of character. Growing up in Anglo-Catholic parishes in the 1960s I was quite used to hearing people referred to as “confirmed bachelors” or “an elderly gentleman couple. [...] In those pre-Stonewall days the language used was perhaps more circumspect than it is today, but I knew what these terms meant, even as a nine-year old, and I don’t remember anyone ever having to explain them to me.”

What is true is that great and enduring artistic achievement is often produced against convention and against the grain, and this can take many forms (as well as the sexual): rebellion against parental or social norms, feelings of exclusion from an oppressive majority culture on the grounds of "being different" in race, nationality, religious belief, skin color, upbringing, physical deformity or handicap, exceptional mental ability, temperament, and so on. To say this is nothing more than to agree with the editorial team at Amazon.com that Cram was "a complex man."

This complex and talented man, who, before finding success as an architect had been an accomplished writer of horror stories, eventually became a celebrity, on the cover of Time magazine in December 1926. Shand-Tucci traces the influence on him of such disparate figures as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fellow-Bostonians Phillips Brooks and Henry Adams, and Ayn Rand. Some of Cram’s lifelong “quests” may have failed, he writes, but "in each he left a considerable legacy, ultimately transforming the visual image of American Christianity in the twentieth century." A recent lecture delivered by Shand-Tucci at the Boston Athenaeum on the topic of The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram’s Boston can be watched or downloaded here.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the touchy-feely, let-it-all-hang-out sensibility of the Clinton/Bush II years should have spawned a biographical work along these lines. Peter Davey in The Architectural Review, February 1, 2006 describes reading it as "rather like being smothered in a feather boa," an appropriate image for one who reached the height of his fame in the flapper era, but concedes that "this will be the best portrait of Cram for a long time." Jenks agrees, labeling these books "superb, comprehensive biography."

Reducing Government’s Place in our Consciousness

An aspect of Cram which I personally find interesting, at least until the Fascist era came along in the 1930s and unfortunately got the better of his earlier classical liberal instincts, was his belief in the appropriateness of small government and the delegation of political and social authority to the smallest level, the localized. He was also a strong believer in the importance of the family. I will let his own words do the talking. Here is an excerpt from his 1922 lecture series, "Towards the Great Peace:"

As a matter of fact, government has come to occupy altogether too large a place in our consciousness; naturally, for it has come to a point where it pursues us — and overtakes us — at every turn. Democracies always govern too much, that is one of their great weaknesses. Elections, law-making, and getting and holding office, have become an obsession and they shadow our days. So insistent and incessant are the demands, so artificial and unreal the issues, so barren of vital results all this pandemonium of partisanship and change, that the more intelligent and scrupulous are losing interest in the whole affair. And while they increasingly withdraw to matters of a greater degree of reality, those who subsist on the proceeds gain the power, and hold it. At the very moment when the women of the United States have been given the vote, there are many men (and women also) who begin to think that the vote is a very empty institution and in itself practically void of power to effect anything of really vital moment. I am not now defending this position, I only assert that it exists, and I believe it is due to the degradation of government through the very modifications and transformations that have been effected, since the time of Andrew Jackson, in a perfectly honest attempt at improvement.

The best government is that which does the least, which leaves local matters in the hands of localities, and personal matters in the hands of persons, and which is modestly inconspicuous. Good government establishes, or recognizes, conditions which are stable, reliable, and that may be counted on for more than two years, or four years, at a time. It has continuity, it preserves tradition, and it follows custom and common law. Such a government is neither hectic in its vicissitudes nor inquisitorial in its enactments. It is cautious in its expenditures, efficient in its administration, proud in maintaining its standards of honour, justice and “noblesse oblige.” Good government is august and handsome; it surrounds itself with dignity and ceremony, even at times with splendour and pageantry, for these things are signs of self-respect and the outward showing of high ideals — or may be made so; that is what good manners and ceremony and beauty are for. Finally, good government is where the laws of Christian morals and courtesy and charity that are supposed to hold between Christian men hold equally, even more forcefully, in public relations both domestic and foreign. Where government of this nature exists, whether the form is monarchical, republican or democratic, there is liberty; where these conditions do not obtain the form matters not at all, for there is a servile state.

~Ralph Adams Cram, "Towards the Great Peace," 1922, chapter 5

Perhaps, in Cram’s lingering advocacy of "splendor and pageantry" for "august and handsome" government we may discern the fateful origins of his later surrender to the temptingly seductive charms of Mussolini’s "good government" and the "noble aims" of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Never mind. These his later sins may be unpardonable, but for having left us such an effective paean to small government, and his still grandly impressive church and campus buildings, I for one am certainly ready to forgive Ralph Adams Cram at least his earlier sins.

References

Anthony, Ethan. 2007. The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office (New York, W. W. Norton)

Bourne, Randolph, 1913. The Handicapped. The Atlantic Monthly, 1911; revised and collected in Youth and Life, 1913.

Chapman, Jane. 2006. "Great Halls of Learning," Princeton Alumni Weekly web exclusive (issue dated April 19, 2006)

Cram, Ralph Adams. 1922. Towards the Great Peace (Online at Project Gutenberg).

Cram, Ralph Adams, 1929. "Will This Modernism Last?" in House Beautiful (January 1929 issue)

Davey, Peter. 2005. "The Great Goth" (Review of An Architect’s Four Quests) in The Architectural Review, February 1, 2006.

Goetz, Joseph. 1996. Review of Boston Bohemia 1881—1900. (Commonweal, issue dated March 8, 1996)

Shand-Tucci, Douglass. 1995. Boston Bohemia, 1881—1900 (University of Massachusetts Press)

Shand-Tucci, Douglass. 2005. Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests — Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical (University of Massachusetts Press)

Warneck, Stephen. 1995. Ralph Adams Cram. The Man, His Work, and His Legacy at Princeton University.

Additional Links

• HCB Cram and Ferguson, Architects
• Ralph Adams Cram page at Wikipedia

Richard Wall (send him mail) is currently reading for a PhD in American History at the University of Birmingham, England.

~ Dwight Macdonald, A Critique of the Warren Report, 1965

Kingmakers and Rough Riders of the Apocalypse

Kevin Phillips is a former Republican Party campaign manager, prolific author and chameleon-like political commentator. His latest book, American Theocracy (favorably reviewed here by Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University), sparked a much-reported question to President George W. Bush at his press conference in Cleveland, Ohio on March 20th as to whether he believed recent events are portents of the Apocalypse.

In reply, the President embarked on a 4-minute long digression about the war on terrorism and eventually stated, “The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That’s a threat, a serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace; it’s a threat, in essence, to a strong alliance. I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally, Israel.”

In 1898 the 25th president, William McKinley, had stated in his war message to Congress justifying US military intervention against Spain in Cuba, “It is no answer to say that this is all in another country, belonging to another nation, and is therefore none of our business. It is especially our duty, for it is right at our door. [...] The present condition of affairs in Cuba is a constant menace to our peace.”

A reviewer of Phillips’ 2003 book on McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, charges the author with hauling him up from a relative obscurity into the second tier of important presidents just in order to satisfy a personal theory. "His thesis," the reviewer writes, "is that McKinley was an important president, and the thing that makes him important is that he illustrates Phillips’ career-making mega-theory about realignment politics. It’s a campaign strategist’s view of history."

True enough, but what’s wrong with having a theory? And, as the fateful rise of Karl Rove shows, we need to pay attention to campaign strategists’ views of history, however much we may abhor them as persons. Men like Rove are the gurus, gray eminences, cardinals and kingmakers to the modern-day queens, and wield tremendous power and influence behind the scenes.

It was that most original and celebrated of campaign strategists, Mark Hanna (1837—1904), who helped to put McKinley into the White House in 1897, but whose protests were passed over when it came to selecting a running mate for McKinley’s second election campaign in 1900. McKinley chose Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Navy Secretary at the start of his first administration, later Governor of New York and a war hero popular for having led his band of "Rough Riders" into battle in Cuba during the Spanish-American war of 1898. On being overruled in this matter, Hanna is reported to have exclaimed, "there’s only a life between that madman and the Presidency."

As indeed it turned out, when on September 6, 1901 Leon Czolgosz (pronounced "Cholgosh"), an American-born child of Polish immigrants and a self-confessed anarchist, fired two bullets at point-blank range into the 58-year old McKinley as he was receiving visitors in a line at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died on September 14th from a gangrenous infection in the wounds from one of the bullets, which had penetrated his abdomen. Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as the 26th president later the same day.

(Mis)underestimating the President

One of Phillips’ arguments is that much of Theodore Roosevelt’s policy in his first term, in which he retained McKinley’s cabinet team, had been foreshadowed and prepared by McKinley, and that this makes McKinley a neglected and underestimated progressive. Since policies take time to come to fruition across presidencies, and since the ruling classes devoted much effort in the 1890s to their attempts to understand, absorb and neutralize the energy of popular protest — including taking the country into a “splendid little war” in which Roosevelt enthusiastically participated, this in itself is no major insight. But it is important that it be stated, so that we may rescue some historical understanding of continuity and change from the mire of political deception, wishful thinking and jingoist victors’ histories of the period.

Phillips’ argument applies as much to foreign as to domestic policy: for example, the idea of negotiating with Colombia to build a canal so that the US Navy could have faster access to the Far East was conceived under McKinley. Confronted by the Colombian Senate’s rejection of the proposal, action-man Roosevelt seized the necessary land to create the new state of Panama and build the Canal — at significant cost to the American taxpayer and riding roughshod over international law.

Everything Does Not Change Overnight

There is a popular misconception that events like the installation of a new president "change everything overnight." They did not then, and do not do so now, however much people may want or need change. The historically overlooked American pacification of the Philippines was not completed until July 1902, 10 months into Roosevelt’s first term and after three years of bloody conflict. In our time, the Bush II administration’s post 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation was foreshadowed by anti-terrorism laws in the Clinton era following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.

As Professor Brinkley says, Phillips has "a rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change, describing a series of major transformations, and demonstrating the relationships among them." To understand events, we should look at the seeds of those transformations and the links of continuity over the longer term.

That long-term view shows that there are no real differences between the two main parties on issues such as “the war” (then and now) and that, come the election, things do not immediately change for the better. In fact, quite often they get worse, giving rise to that well-known saying that each US president, sooner or later, makes you long for the days of the one who went before.

Unfortunately, political power players today are all too willing to exploit the laziness and cynical inertia of those who have seen through the false dichotomies but do not have the will to do anything about it. They do so, for example, by supplying to a sound-bite and game-obsessed culture the slick presentation of news and elections as passing and fast-moving competitive entertainments, in which the winner takes all — while fundamental political issues remain unresolved. George W. Bush said in that same Cleveland press conference that decisions on US withdrawal from Iraq will be "for the next President."

Read My Lips — The Original Master

Even though McKinley, as the first president to use the phone intensively, was technologically innovative, in his America it was more a question of reinforcing the old political tradition of saying you’ll do one thing and doing something else altogether. That much is amply demonstrated by the stark contrast between what he stated in his inaugural addresses and the policies which were actually implemented under his rule.

"You may be sure that there will be no jingo nonsense under my administration," he said to anti-imperialist former Civil War general and senator Carl Schurz in 1896, following it up in his first inaugural speech in March 1897 with these words:

"We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency."

Would you have guessed from the above that during McKinley’s first term the United States would go to war with Spain over Cuba just over a year later, launching the United States into a century of war and overseas intervention?

The Man in the Mask

McKinley is said to have embarked on his second term in March 1901 intending to focus on domestic policy, but again, you wouldn’t have known it from his second inaugural, filled with echoes of "enduring freedom," invocations of overriding imperial destiny — past and future, and pre-Wilsonian zeal to spread the dream:

The American people, intrenched in freedom at home, take their love for it with them wherever they go, and they reject as mistaken and unworthy the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others. Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas. As heretofore, so hereafter will the nation demonstrate its fitness to administer any new estate which events devolve upon it.

When he came to talk about the independence movement in the Philippines, he said:

The most liberal terms of amnesty have already been communicated to the insurgents, and the way is still open for those who have raised their arms against the Government for honorable submission to its authority. Our countrymen should not be deceived. We are not waging war against the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. A portion of them are making war against the United States. [...] We will not leave the destiny of the loyal millions in the islands to the disloyal thousands who are in rebellion against the United States. Order under civil institutions will come as soon as those who now break the peace shall keep it. Force will not be needed or used when those who make war against us shall make it no more.

At a time when George Orwell was not even in his cradle, McKinley had earlier given a nicely Orwellian designation to his policy towards those he called his "little brown brothers" in the Philippines: he called it "benevolent assimilation." "We come, not as invaders or conquerors," he had told them, "but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights." When the insurrection was eventually suppressed in 1902, this literally devastating policy had cost the lives of an estimated 25,000 rebels, 200,000 civilians, and 4,000 American soldiers.

It is significant that in his own time, and far beyond it into the twentieth century, not many saw through McKinley’s mask of austere, self-effacing affability to the brazen deceptions and shrewd control underneath. He was generally thought of as being "amiably weak." But future Secretary of State John Hay was one who did so: after a visit to McKinley during the 1896 election campaign, he wrote to Henry Adams, "I was more struck than ever by his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the fifteenth century. And there are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him." Adams, himself a tortured spirit of those unsettled times, was to remark perceptively that McKinley was "easily first in genius for manipulation" and described him as "an uncommonly dangerous politician" even before the ruling Republican Party had begun to agitate for war with Spain in the immediate aftermath of McKinley’s electoral victory over William Jennings Bryan.

New American Frontiers

To understand the origins of the Spanish-American war, the contradictions between stated policy and actual events, and above all the nature of the personalities involved, there is no better starting point than Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, first published in 1979 but still a neglected masterpiece, despite valiant attempts to publicize it — by Lewis Lapham of Harpers magazine, who was instrumental in bringing out the new edition in 2003, by the whole editorial team at the The Last Ditch website, which published a comprehensive appreciation of Walter Karp in 2002, and by a number of writers on this website and elsewhere on the web.

As Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in 1893, the reality and the idea of the frontier had always provided the mythology and the escape valve for American expansion. But in 1890, at Wounded Knee, the United States had reached its Western physical limit. This had produced a form of psychological-existential crisis in the American mind:

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West….The frontier is the line of the most rapid and effective Americanization….The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people….The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier….

To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients….What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

~ Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 1893

What Karp demonstrates is that, while from 1895 onwards there was undoubtedly some genuine and comprehensible public concern at conditions in Spanish Cuba, the u2018large policy,’ of effectively expanding the frontier by taking it overseas, was a convenient way of absorbing the severe domestic discontent arising out of the prolonged economic, social and cultural crisis of the 1890s. To this end, Cuba was conveniently close to hand. Added to which, it had long been a u2018desirable object of conquest’ for the American empire: as early as the time of the war with Britain in 1812, members of Congress had agitated for American territorial expansion into (British) Canada, and (Spanish) Florida and Cuba, primarily to secure export markets.

But was the large policy, which has its successors today in preventive war and the goal of securing the frontier of outer space against all possible comers, sufficient to channel and disperse the profound economic and cultural discontent of that troubled end of the century? That is a much larger issue, in which the question of the anarchist assassin’s motivation comes into play: already in 1901 it exercised the minds of those who were debating the state of mind of Leon Czolgosz and deciding his fate.

The Anarchist unmakes what the Kingmaker has made

McKinley, who like many of his successors liked to press the flesh of u2018ordinary people,’ was unfortunate to have been president at a time when some in the anarchist movement saw men and women in positions of executive power, whether elected or not, as symbols of oppressive regal and faceless government, to be removed by force. In Europe, the idea of u2018propaganda by the deed‘ — especially bombing — had penetrated anarchist circles and displaced less violent forms of dissent. Prominent European figures, including King Umberto of Italy and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, had been assassinated by anarchists of this type.

In the US, the fact that those who subscribed to these views were usually immigrants — or the children of immigrants — created a fear of dangerous aliens in the American mind. In 1903, 2 years after McKinley’s assassination, and in the time-honored bureaucratic tradition of devising legislation today to deal with yesterday’s problem, US immigration legislation was revised to provide for the exclusion (and deportation if they were already in the country) of any person "who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining or teaching such disbelief in or opposition to all governments."

Czolgosz, when asked to explain himself at his trial, justified his crime on the grounds that he had done his duty: he did not feel “that one man should have so much service, and another man should have none.”

This sparked a debate about individual moral responsibility. Was the anarchist solely responsible for his actions, or had he been (de)formed by the social, economic and cultural evils of the society in which he lived? Had Czolgosz been driven insane by the inhuman, listless, frustrating conditions of his life? Emma Goldman, who was briefly arrested and quite harshly treated in the aftermath of the McKinley assassination because she was claimed by Czolgosz to have been an inspiration to him, certainly thought so, as her October 1901 article, u2018The Tragedy of Buffalo,’ demonstrated:

“An act of violence is not only the result of conditions, but also of man’s psychical and physical nature, and his susceptibility to the world surrounding him. [...]

That violence is not the result of conditions only, but also largely depends upon man’s inner nature, is best proven by the fact that while thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass quietly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others.

It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly because of a strong social instinct.

It is generally believed that men prompted to put the dagger or bullet in the cowardly heart of government, were men conceited enough to think that they will thereby liberate the world from the fetters of despotism. As far as I have studied the psychology of an act of violence, I find that nothing could be further away from the thought of such a man than that if the king were dead, the mob will cease to shout “Long live the king!”

The cause for such an act lies deeper far too deep for the shallow multitude to comprehend. It lies in the fact that the world within the individual, and the world around him, are two antagonistic forces, and, therefore, must clash.

Do I say that Czolgosz is made of that material? No. Neither can I say that he was not. Nor am I in a position to say whether or not he is an Anarchist; I did not know the man; no one as far as I am aware seems to have known him, but from his attitude and behavior so far (I hope that no reader of “Free Society” has believed the newspaper lies), I feel that he was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul “impractical,” inexpedient, lacking in caution (according to the dictum of the wise);

Anarchism and violence are as far apart from each other as liberty and tyranny. I care not what the rabble says; but to those who are still capable of understanding I would say that Anarchism, being a philosophy of life, aims to establish a state of society in which man’s inner make-up and the conditions around him, can blend harmoniously, so that he will be able to utilize all the forces to enlarge and beautify the life about him. To those I would also say that I do not advocate violence; government does this, and force begets force. It is a fact which cannot be done away with through the prosecution of a few men and women, or by more stringent laws — this only tends to increase it.”

Leon Czolgosz was put to death in the electric chair at Auburn state prison on October 29, 1901. In a gesture heavy with the symbolic desire to purge evil from society absolutely, sulfuric acid was poured over his body to dissolve it. The issues of personal moral responsibility, societal degradation and distribution of wealth and privilege remain as pressing today as they were on that sad day at the turn of the last century.

References

Books

Diner, Steven J. (1998), A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York, Hill and Wang)

Joll, James (1980, 1964), The Anarchists (Harvard University Press)

Johns, A. Wesley (1970), The Man Who Shot McKinley (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.)

Karp, Walter (2003, 1979), The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic 1890—1920 (New York: Franklin Square Press)

Kolko, Gabriel (1995), A Century of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co)

Lears, T.J. Jackson (1981), No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880—1920 (New York: Pantheon Books)

Morgan, H. Wayne (2004, 1970), William McKinley and His America (Kent State University Press)

Phillips, Kevin R. (2003) William McKinley (Times Books — American Presidents Series) Phillips, Kevin R. (2006) American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking Books)

Rauchway, Eric (2003), Murdering McKinley : The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America, (New York, Hill and Wang)

Rosenberg, Emily S. (1982), Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890—1945 (New York: Hill and Wang)

Williams, William A. (1966, 1961), The Contours of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks)

Williams, William A. (1972, 1959), The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.)

Articles

Mark Gado, The Assassination of William McKinley

Lewis L. Gould, William McKinley (Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia)

Wyatt Kingseed, The Assassination of William McKinley

Other Links

Legacies of the Spanish-American War

Mark Trexler, The McKinley Assassination site

University of Buffalo Libraries, The Legal Aftermath of the McKinley Assassination

University of Buffalo Libraries, Anarchy at the Turn of the Century

White House, William McKinley Page

Richard Wall (send him mail) is currently reading for a PhD in American History at the University of Birmingham, England.

~Elia Kazan: A Life (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988)

Kazan on Kazan

No cultural history of twentieth-century America would be complete without a look at the life and work of Elia Kazan (1909—2003). The reputation of this great film-maker, theatre director and writer has divided opinion for over 50 years — for political reasons.

A new biography of Kazan has recently been given a mixed, but broadly favorable review in the New York Times (free log-in required). The book is by Richard Schickel, Time film critic and a friend of Kazan’s who in 1998 was apparently involved in the still controversial decision to bestow on him Hollywood’s lifetime achievement award for that year, and for whom writing it must have been a labor of love.

When it comes to biography, Elia Kazan himself is a hard act to follow. His 1988 magnum opus, entitled just A Life, is not only "arguably the best show-business memoir ever written," but also and quite simply a compulsive read. Despite its enormous length (825 pages in the 1997 paperback edition from Da Capo Press), it is a book which I and many others have found difficult to put down.

He was born Elia Kazanjioglou in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman empire (now Istanbul, Turkey), in September 1909. His father’s family were Greeks from the plain of Anatolia, a people later to be permanently exiled or assimilated, and many of them wiped out, as a result of the war of 1921—22 between Greece and Turkey.

Given the belligerence and vindictiveness exhibited by such states, ever prepared to sacrifice human lives for the sake of their own aggrandizement and perceived strategic interests or, worse still, "national dignity," is it any wonder Elia Kazan never trusted a state in his life?

Kazan was lucky: his family brought him to America when he was around four, before the fateful outbreak of World War One and all the human disasters that followed it in the land of his birth.

Many years later he was to go back there, in the attempt to rediscover his roots and understand the impulses which had lead his forbears to obey the human instinct to act upon the "desperate thrust for liberty" by emigrating to America. Out of this quest was to come a novel, America America, and the now unjustly neglected u2018classic immigrant experience’ movie of the same name.

"I could see what I had to do. I had to go back to Turkey — back to where my family had come from… really look and listen and stay put whenever I found something that aroused me. The more I thought about the early history of my family, the more complex it seemed and the less I found I actually knew about it. I was a kind of tourist in my family’s history. I had not experienced the events or the pressures I proposed to film or write about. I hadn’t been through the crisis of persecution and want, never knew the desperate thrust for liberty that I wished to dramatize. I was a middle-class American boy, a stranger to my own history." (A Life, p. 581)

Kazan’s own life and work can be seen as a thrust for liberty, carried out through a combination of devotion, awareness, application, groveling, cleverness, deception, artistry, technique, guile, toughness, compassion, betrayal and loyalty. He lived the fullest of lives, having been married three times, produced a large family of his own, and achieved both fame and notoriety in the worlds of theatre, film and, late in life, literature.

It’s all there in the autobiography, and if you want a truly engrossing read, and are interested in how the free human spirit survives in the struggle against all that assails it, I recommend this huge book without reservation.

Kazan and the House Unamerican Activities Committee

The autobiography also deals, of course, with the pivotal episode in Kazan’s life, the fateful day of his second testimony to the House Unamerican Activities Committee in April 1952, when (having earlier refused to do so) he finally gave it the names of ex-comrades in the American Communist Party, of which he had briefly been a member in the 1930s.

The fact that he testified brought him instant hostility, which endures to this day: there are those who can never forgive Kazan for what he did — ratting on former colleagues — and who feel that it contaminates his whole work: "One needs to cut through the self-serving arguments and excuses and say what is: Kazan behaved like a scoundrel, becoming an informer in 1952 to save his career in Hollywood and all that went with it." (David Walsh, Filmmaker and Informer). In this camp we find, incidentally, the writer of a truly disgraceful Fox News obituary notice which panders shamelessly to the most mawkish type of sentimentality about those whom the writer has selected as the approved victims of Kazan’s naming of names.

On the other side are those who believe he did the right thing, and for principled reasons. "That he came to understand the evils of the Communist Party and its ideology, and confirmed the names of its American members, who were “loyal” to falsehoods and murderers, makes him not a traitorous “informer,” but an individual dedicated to facts, truth. Elia Kazan should be applauded for such moral heroism." (Joseph Kellard, The Blacklisting of Elia Kazan)

In the middle are those who do not admire what he did, but nonetheless acknowledge the quality of his work, feel that he deserved his lifetime achievement award and are prepared to forgive, if not excuse. Among the most admirable of these — however much he may be criticized for not understanding economics — is the playwright Arthur Miller, whose own refusal to name names in the HUAC’s declining days is often contrasted favorably with Kazan’s u2018ratting.’

Miller and Kazan were personal friends; Kazan directed the first performance of Death of A Salesman in 1949; and the HUAC episode damaged the friendship almost beyond repair. But finally Miller, before he died earlier this year, in an article written in 2000 discussing the origins and motivations for his play The Crucible, showed great sympathy and understanding for Kazan, and it is worth quoting him at length. Here he describes the predicament:

Kazan had been a member of the Communist party only a matter of months, and even that link had ended years before. And the party had never been illegal, nor was membership in it. Yet this great director, left undefended by 20th Century Fox executives, his long-time employers, was told that if he refused to name people whom he had known in the party — actors, directors and writers — he would never be allowed to direct another picture in Hollywood, meaning the end of his career.

…Exactly as in Salem — or Russia under the Czar and the Chairman, and Inquisition Spain, Revolutionary France or any other place of revolution or counter-revolution — conspiracy was the name for all opposition. And the reformation of the accused could only be believed when he gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Only this ritual of humiliation, the breaking of pride and independence, could win the accused readmission into the community. The process inevitably did produce in the accused a new set of political, social and even moral convictions more acceptable to the state whose fist had been shoved into his face, with his utter ruin promised should he resist.

As he laid out his dilemma and his decision to comply with the HUAC (which he had already done) it was impossible not to feel his anguish, old friends that we were. But the crunch came when I felt fear, that great teacher, that cruel revealer. For it swept over me that, had I been one of his comrades, he would have spent my name as part of the guarantee of his reform. Even so, oddly enough, I was not filling up with hatred or contempt for him; his suffering was too palpable. The whole hateful procedure had brought him to this, and I believe made the writing of The Crucible all but inevitable. Even if one could grant Kazan sincerity in his new-found anti-communism, the concept of an America where such self-discoveries were pressed out of people was outrageous, and a contradiction of any concept of personal liberty.

Miller also mentions what a great shock it was for many people to learn that someone of Kazan’s stature, and whom so many admired, had done such an ignoble thing:

Kazan’s testimony created a far greater shock than anyone else’s. …. It may be that Kazan had been loved more than any other, that he had attracted far greater affection from writers and actors with whom he had worked, and so what was overtly a political act was sensed as a betrayal of love.

That more than anything is perhaps the reason why some continue to vilify him.

The benefit of hindsight makes it pretty clear that it is wrong to attribute to Kazan, as one carrying the alleged political weight of celebrity both then and now, a personal responsibility for ruining careers which in reality fell victim to blacklists, witch-hunts and loyalty tests sanctioned by government, establishment and studio bosses. Such tests, which invariably catch and condemn innocents and u2018fellow-travelers’ in their executors’ zeal to eliminate every possible subversive, have never been good for the cause of liberty and freedom of thought. Here’s Miller again:

It is very significant that in the uproar set off by [the 1999] award to Kazan of an Oscar for life achievement, one heard no mention of the name of any member of the HUAC. One doubted whether the thought occurred to many people that the studio heads had ignominiously collapsed before the HUAC’s insistence that they institute a blacklist of artists, something they had once insisted was dishonourable and a violation of democratic norms. Half a century had passed since his testimony, but Kazan bore very nearly the whole onus of the era, as though he had manufactured its horrors — when he was surely its victim.

The Miller-Kazan relationship was the subject of a PBS documentary broadcast in September 2003 (four days before Kazan died), entitled "Miller, Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin," which attracted a lot of comment at the time.

The Heart of an Anarchist

The continuing Kazan/HUAC debate leaves practically no-one indifferent to the life and work of this undoubted man who, in some respects — his fears, his lust for life and the constant need for reassurance — retained throughout his 94 years all the alert and primitive instincts of child and animal.

Like any hunted animal, he tried never to let himself be pinned down: the creative impulse, born of many ambiguities, caused him always to look for the escape route from any enclosed space, almost as soon as he had walked in the door:

"When I was young, a shorthorn buck, my favorite quick line was "I’ve got to go." I’d arrive at a party, immediately feel ill at ease, then, with an "I’ve got to go," disappear. Often I’d not even give that nonexplanation, and I’d never hint at where I had to go or why so suddenly. I’d just vanish. Some years later, when I’d become a middle-aged goat, and if I saw there was no one in the traffic for me, I’d leave abruptly. I’m afraid I still do that. People ask me why I drop out that way and where I go so suddenly. "We missed you," they say. "We had a lot of fun after you left," they say. But that doesn’t prevent me, the next time I’m in tight company, from disappearing just as abruptly. It seems that when I’m in the society of my fellow man, I feel trapped, soon need to get away and do." (A Life, p. 335).

There was no reasonableness about him, and reasonableness is precisely the criterion which does not work when judging him. He was always aware of the terrible ambivalence which underlay his decision to testify: in an interview in 1971 he said of it, “I don’t think there’s anything in my life toward which I have more ambivalence, because, obviously, there’s something disgusting about giving other people’s names.” Yet seventeen years later, in "A Life," he writes: "Reader, I don’t seek your favor. I’ve been telling you only some of the things I was asking myself on the way "down." But if you expect an apology now because I [named] names to the House Committee, you’ve misjudged my character. The "horrible, immoral thing" I would do, I did out of my true self."

In my view, the key to understanding Kazan the artist is to know that he had a need for permanent uncertainty and unpredictability, what he called "an anarchist’s heart." Describing the period immediately following the production of five successful films, culminating in the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, Kazan wrote:

"I became convinced that an artist needs an anarchist’s heart and has to be pulled more than one way at a time. I had to be open to the unexpected….I set out to destroy what I found stifling and replace the predictable with the unpredictable. I courted what would be disruptive. I was more determined than ever to concentrate on my own projects and prepare my own scripts." (A Life, p. 571).

I believe Elia Kazan was one of twentieth-century America’s greats, a talented artist who worked magic with actors, introduced many future stars, and left an enduring movie legacy which is a visually fine and poetic body of work. Of course it is uneven in quality: it both benefits and suffers from the ambivalence and the inner personality conflicts which afflicted him. That in turn is what produces the fierce diversity of opinion, and very likely too the fact that people are still writing books and articles about him today.

Elia Kazan’s Movies — a Personal Anthology

"I ain’t a-crawlin’ for no damn government!" — Miss Ella in Wild River

The very early black and white film A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945), starring Dorothy McGuire, was Kazan’s first major film. It was based on the classic novel by Betty Smith and has a special place in many moviegoers’ affections, in part surely because of the iconic status of the novel. It is beyond being dated: it has all the melancholy nostalgic charm of a social era which has completely and utterly disappeared, so that it is now almost a documentary. Kazan himself described it as "mushy," a "photographed stage play set in a designer’s cleaned-up tenement." He was gratified at its success: "I was a success, it seemed, a great success," and yet, always the doubter looking over his shoulder for trouble, in the very next sentence he wrote: "Or was I a failure, a great failure? Or was it both?"

In 1951 Kazan directed Vivien Leigh and a smoldering Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, the screen version (also in black and white) of his earlier highly successful theatrical production of Tennessee Williams’ play. It was partially cut at the time of its release, at the instigation of the Legion of Decency which, in the name of "the preeminence of the moral order over artistic considerations" wanted the film to show that the married couple, Stella and Stanley, could never be happy together again after the way he had behaved. "Which," writes Kazan, "was contrary to Tennessee’s intention and his goal of u2018fidelity.’" Today we can see the full director’s version on DVD: over 50 years after it was made, it is still as dramatic a cinema experience as you are ever likely to get. Highly recommended.

On the Waterfront (1954), remains the best known and most publicly acknowledged of Kazan’s movies (it won eight Oscars), but artistically it is not his best. Made in the aftermath of his HUAC testimony, the film at the very least can be read as an unconcealed plea for the right of the main character Terry, played by Marlon Brando, to choose to rat on the vicious and corrupt leadership of his longshoremen’s union. In the film, "his decision to testify is portrayed as an act of courageous whistle-blowing, not betrayal or cowardice." (Jacob Weisberg, Blacklist and Backstory). Lindsay Anderson, the British critic and film director, once famously described it as "a Fascist film." Here’s Kazan himself speculating on the reasons for the film’s box office success:

"My guess is that it’s the theme, that of a man who has sinned and is redeemed. But how can that be? After all, Terry’s act of self-redemption breaks the great childhood taboo: Don’t snitch on your friends. Don’t call for the cop! Our hero is a "rat," or for intellectuals, an informer. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone in the audience, not given our villains, those whom Terry was fingering. Which is proof that Budd Schulberg [the screenwriter] touched a deep human craving there: redemption for the sinner, rescue from damnation. Redemption, isn’t that the promise of the Catholic church? That a man can turn his fate around and by an act of good heart be saved at last? There are gut reasons like that for the success of the great hits. They touch a fundamental hunger in people. Yes, that a man can, no matter what he’s done, be redeemed…" (A Life, p. 528)

The success of On the Waterfront was followed in 1955 by the classic Cain and Abel story, East of Eden, based on the latter part of John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name and introducing the actor James Dean in the first of the three big films he made during his short life. Dean overacts in the film, and by Kazan’s account behaved like a prima donna on the set, but the result, a cinematic portrayal of the story of Cal’s enterprising but ill-fated attempts to gain his father’s affections, is unforgettable and still very moving.

Kazan regretted the creation of the Dean legend, the essence of which was "that all parents were insensitive idiots, who didn’t understand or appreciate their kids and weren’t able to help them." Yet the old dualism was again in play: it was Kazan himself who had cast Raymond Massey, "the old-timer who’d played Lincoln enough times to establish a franchise" as the hardened father character, and had encouraged right to the end the spontaneous animosity which erupted between Massey and Dean:

"I didn’t conceal from Jimmy and Ray what they thought of each other: the screen was alive with precisely what I wanted; they detested each other. Casting should tell the story of a film without words; this casting did. It was a problem that went on to the end, and I made use of it to the end." (A Life, p. 535-6)"

Wild River (1960), a film beautifully photographed in fully saturated colors, starring Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, is set in the 1930s in the Tennessee Valley. It describes the lead-up to the successful attempt by the then recently established Tennessee Valley Authority to buy up the last piece of privately-owned land it needs in order to close the great dam which will tame the wild river once and for all, thereby preventing the disastrous flooding which has taken place in earlier years at great cost in human life and damage to property.

The land in question is an island owned by an old lady, Miss Ella Garth, who is holding out with her family and faithful (but soon to be enticed away) farm laborers against what she sees as the dastardly intrusion of the federal government. Clift, as the TVA agent, makes repeated and initially unsuccessful attempts to talk to her on her island, with a view to discussing its compulsory purchase. On his first visit, when he announces "I’m from the TVA," she simply gets up and walks away. Next time around, frustrated, he says to her "You’ve got to talk to me." She snaps back at him, "Why should I talk to you? You’re from the federal government, aren’t you?" Later on, in a declaration of stubborn independence at his insistence that the river needs to be tamed for the common good, she says to him, "I like things running wild. I’m agin’ dams of any kind…and I ain’t a-crawlin’ for no damn government!"

Montgomery Clift as Chuck, and particularly Lee Remick as the stronger female character Carol, play the love scenes in an understated way which today would be regarded as u2018tame,’ yet her passion for him is conveyed with a surprising intensity.

Kazan wrote:

"I’d conceived this film years before as a homage to the spirit of FDR; my hero was to be a resolute New Dealer engaged in the difficult task of convincing "reactionary" country people that it was necessary, in the name of the public good, for them to move off their land and allow themselves to be relocated. Now I found my sympathies were with the obdurate old lady who lived on the island that was to be inundated and who refused to be patriotic, or whatever it took to allow herself to be moved. I was all for her. Something more than the shreds of my liberal ideology was at work now, something truer perhaps, and certainly stronger. While my man from Washington has the u2018social’ right on his side, the picture I made was in sympathy with the old woman obstructing progress.

Perhaps I was beginning to feel humanly, not think ideologically. The people in my life for whom I’d felt the deepest devotions were three old-fashioned women: my grandmother, my mother and my schoolteacher … I no longer had a taste for liberal intellectuals. I always knew what they were going to say about any subject. I simply didn’t like the reformers I’d been with since 1933, whether they were Communists or progressives or whoever else was out to change the world. I’d only believed I should like them. I’d followed the crowd, which during those years was going that way.

The film that resulted from all this is one of my favorites, possibly because of its social ambivalence. Jean Renoir’s famous phrase, "Everyone has his reasons" was true here. Both sides were "right." Wild River is also a favorite of certain French film critics [....] Skouras (the studio director) had an opposite view and treated the film deplorably, jerking it out of theatres before it had any chance to take hold and booking it thinly across the country. It was not exhibited in Europe until I staged a stormy scene in [the studio director's] office and shamed him. I hope the negative is safe in one of Fox’s vaults, although I’ve heard a rumor that it was destroyed to make space for more successful films. This would not surprise me. Money makes the rules of the market, and by this rule, the film was a disaster." (A Life, p. 596f.)

One of my personal favorites is Splendor in the Grass (1961), the bittersweet and visually beautiful 1961 movie which introduced the young Warren Beatty and also starred the divine Natalie Wood. It was the first film by Elia Kazan I ever saw. Pat Hingle plays the Beatty character’s father larger (and above all louder) than life: this makes his suicide in the wake of the Wall Street crash all the more shocking. The whole film taught me that seemingly remote historical events, as well as fundamental life choices, could have tragic personal consequences.

Here is what Kazan himself had to say about Splendor in the Grass:

"[The] story is about a simple struggle of right, wrong, and social disgrace, of what is practical in life and what is best for property and family. It is not my favorite of films, but the last reel is my favorite last reel, at once the saddest and the happiest. Natalie, just released from an institution and declared sound again, visits her old love — Warren — in the hope that their relationship might be revived. She discovers that he is married, leading a life that’s far reduced from the station his father had envisioned for him, with a rather plain wife who is beginning to raise a family.

What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill [Inge, the screenwriter] had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as the joy." (A Life, p. 605)

America America (1963), shot in black and white and having an unknown Greek actor in the lead role, is a film in a category of its own. The film was nominated for several Oscars, including best director. Kazan wrote in 1988 that "it is now my favorite of the films I’ve made, but early in 1963, when I was editing it… I had doubts about its worth." This great immigrant movie, the location shooting of which was monitored every day by a Turkish censor (to ensure that u2018national dignity’ was upheld) and at times, disruptingly, by the secret police, did indeed represent Kazan’s finest achievement as his own master:

"…during my experience of making America America, particularly in those months when I was overseas directing it and making all decisions every day, I’d felt totally myself in a way I never had before. In the making of that film, all activity had started from a directive I gave, and each day’s program was based on my wishes. That was what I wanted to be, the unchallenged source. I recognized that from now on I’d only be able to work that way." (A Life, p. 660)

It is perhaps significant that Kazan’s major success after making this film was a written work: The Arrangement, which was made into a movie in 1969. In 1972 he self-financed another controversial film, The Visitors, with a screenplay written by his son Chris Kazan on a Vietnam war theme. It has achieved a certain cult status as well as notoriety, Kazan once again being attacked for not following the rules in making it and for choosing a subject-matter — a GI informing on atrocities carried out by his colleagues — which recalled the controversies of 1952. But by this time the major movie successes were behind him.

There is also a bittersweet irony in the fact that in 2001 America America was deemed “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Too bad that Warner Brothers have not yet seen fit to issue it on DVD in the US or the UK: at the time of writing it appears only to be available in these markets as a prohibitively expensive second-hand VHS tape.

Kazan’s last film, made in 1976, was The Last Tycoon (available on DVD), which starred Robert de Niro in a movie version of the Scott Fitzgerald novel, scripted by Harold Pinter. Critics judge it a disappointment. Once again he introduced a new acting talent (Theresa Russell), and it is still a movie worth seeing, but there were enduring disagreements about the quality of the script and the suitability of Robert de Niro and Ingrid Boulting in the lead roles.

Overshadowing all the bad press, however, was the film’s personal significance. Kazan was aware that he was making his last film:

[The screenwriters] had provided me with nothing to shoot for an ending. This is the worst possible situation, because it means that something is wrong earlier in the story. I had to make something up.. and I did. I also had a hunch that it would be the last shot I’d make in my life, and perhaps for that reason the ending I devised said more about me and my feelings than it did about the film’s hero.

I asked Bobby [Robert de Niro] to walk slowly down a deserted studio street. He came to a stop at the side of a sound stage whose great rolling door was wide open… He hesitated for a moment, then he walked slowly off into the dark of the unused stage. The gloom enveloped him and he disappeared. It was the end, the fade-out of the film I was making and the end for me and my time as a director. … It was all over, and I knew it. (A Life, p. 781).

Elia Kazan was an outsider to the last.

References

Books

• Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: Destruction of a City, Newmark Press (October, 1998)
• Elia Kazan, A Life (Da Capo Press paperback, 1997) (originally published 1988)
• Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan, A Biography, HarperCollins (November 2005)

Articles

• Sandy Carter, Kazan and the Oscars and Us, ZMag, March 25, 1999
• Roger Ebert, Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan dies, Chicago Sun-Times, September 23, 2003
• Joseph Kellard, The Blacklisting of Elia Kazan, Capitalism Magazine, March 7, 1999
• William Mandel, None Without Sin — Not Even PBS, September 19, 2003
• Arthur Miller, "Are You or Were You Ever…", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
• Michael Mills, Elia Kazan, Moderntimes.com, 2005
• Robert C. Tracinski, Elia Kazan Should Be Honored Because of His Testimony, Capitalism Magazine, September 29, 2003
• Michael Ventura, Some Sins Don’t Die, Austin Chronicle, October 17, 2003
• David Walsh, Filmmaker and Informer, World Socialist Website, February 2005

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

67"The links of meaning are always more relevant than those of time. For this reason, events that took place fifty years ago stand out vividly in my memory, whereas I can’t remember what I did last week."

71"The one thing any ambitious outsider seeking recognition in an alien society cannot tolerate is to be trapped in an enclosure where the gate is locked and he doesn’t have a key. The freedom to chose my next step is what I live by. Anything that threatens this freedom throws me — still! — into a fury."

72On insecurity: "I’ve never felt totally secure, even when I was most successful and every author wanted me to direct his new play. I’ve thought affluence uncertain and praise temporary. I am obsessively aware that money in the bank leaks, that it shrinks. I don’t trust the state — whatever state. Do you? Really? I fear authority. I don’t believe that those who exercise it will continue to be friendly. I trust authority — to be unfriendly. I feel I will be apprehended as much for my thoughts as for past deeds and omissions."

124"It’s our way with artists that when they become famous for their work, they’re made an authority in fields outside their ken — politics, for instance."

126"When the irritations, the problems, and the conflicts that existed before [an artist's] big success are eased and removed, when the struggle is (apparently) over and one lives behind a permanent Don’t Disturb sign, it soon becomes evident that these troubles, now put behind, were the source and the genesis of the talent that brought on the success. Fame and money [insulate the artist] from the discomforts and challenges of the earlier years but, at the same time, "save" him from those abrasions that were the source of his "genius." There’s a price for everything."

128 On his leaving the Communist party: "What they (the Communists) blamed most was my character. I was an opportunist who’d do anything to get to the top. I’ve been accused of this many times by many people. The fact is that I do have — call it elitism — strong feelings that some people are smarter, more educated, more energetic, and altogether better qualified to lead than others. I also believed than and believe now that a person’s agreeing with me politically is not a guarantee of his or her artistic talent."

131"The (Party) Man from Detroit had been sent to stop the most dangerous thing the Party had to cope with: people thinking for themselves."

139On the importance to him of the inner life: "My intense life has always been the one within me. From the day I was aware of who I was and what my fate was to be (outside general society) I wished I were someone I was not — an American for instance. What I did not dare do in my life I did in my daydreams. Even now, as I walk the street, I find myself involved in unspoken dialogue with someone who exists only in my mind. I live a twenty-four hour movie, one in which I play many parts, some heroic, some defiant, some terrified, some amorous (X-rated). I’m not always the hero, but always bolder than I am in life."

160 On moving from New York to Hollywood: "I’d come to detest the "Los Angeles area" as the airline people call it. I hated the phony buildings, the fumes of heat rising from the macadam by day and the damp cold of the region at night. I hated the look of the people, their suntans were like what a funeral director’s assistant applies to the faces of the dead to make them look healthier than when they were alive. I hated the traffic and the trees, the restaurants and the stores, and I missed the New York Times. In years to come, although I was to work there several times for extended periods, I never found what there was about Hollywoodland to like."

"What I missed most….was the Group I’d been part of, and the people in it. [...] It came over me again how important it was to my sense of life and my sense of humor to be close to comrades in art, people who had the same hopes and the same values I had and aspired to the same goals. Yes, to my surprise I missed the Group — not the organization, not all the personnel, not the leadership; simply the fact and the feeling of being together and united and living in harmony with people you liked, instead of the disharmony and indifference I felt around me in California.

[...]

It had needed the Group to break up for me to find out how important it was to me — and to them too, not as a theatre so much as way of life."

161"It is a unique man…who can sustain the fever of his dreams when he has money to eat regularly. Perhaps this was a hangover from my old Communist-days motto: "Only trust the working class."

191On always being ready to run: "I come from a family of voyagers; my uncle and my father were transients, less from disposition than from necessity. They were slippery, had to be. Raised in a world of memories, they grew up distrustful of fate. "Don’t worry," my uncle used to say, "everything will turn out bad." He knew that no matter how well things appeared to be going, a fall was ahead. Neither man was analytical. The habit of years had become instinct. Like deer who crop the grasses and, as they raise their head to chew, look one way and then the other for predators, my people lived ready to run. This instinct was in me at birth."

245On the effect on him of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:" "I was overwhelmed by [the play] on that second reading, cried and had other emotions of a most personal kind. Perhaps it was because I’d just seen my children and felt my loss of them keenly. Perhaps it was because I saw no solution ahead for me, so was sympathetic to the man who was addicted to alcohol. Perhaps the figure of his ramrod wife reminded me of everything unyielding I admired about [my own wife]. This, I saw, was the first piece of material offered me that made me think about my own life and my own dilemma. [...]"

I realized that I’d never directed a play that meant anything personal to me. My career up to then had been that of a mechanic, an able technician. Doing plays that meant very little to me, I’d gained the reputation of a myth. It was the triumph of the disconnected."

246"All my life, whenever I’ve committed myself to a job, I’ve immediately wondered how I could get out of it."

251On his reaction to the frontiersman’s individualism of Bud Lighton (producer for the Fox movie studio): "Lighton made films one by one to satisfy himself. Each film he made contained the same themes, the same values. He had convictions, felt them strongly, talked about them constantly. They dealt with individual standards, never politics; with courage and decency, privileges and responsibilities. He was against the New Deal of Roosevelt, believed that a real man would not accept relief, that it amounted to pity. He despised the East Coast, its ideology and the civilization there. He was for the frontiersman, who lived on a large tract of semiwilderness and asked no favors of his neighbor or of nature, the man who lived where he couldn’t hear his neighbor’s dog bark. Lighton despised communism but despised "liberals" even more."

"This was the first time in my life that I disagreed with a man’s politics but loved the man. Suddenly political choice seemed less important. Bud aroused something more fundamental in me. Call it pride and individualism, speaking out on your own, asking no favors, fearing no one, enjoying courage in the face of adversity. When I listened to him, my left-wing positions seemed provincial, my convictions shallow. He appealed to that other, more conservative side of my ambivalent self…"

258On differences over shooting an emotional scene in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: "What Bud was saying to me, in effect, was that it is better to arouse an audience to wonder than to show them the plain truth of what is happening. I recalled a bit of old theatre wisdom: When the actor cries, the audience won’t. It is better for an audience to ask itself, "I wonder what she’s feeling now: I wonder if she’s crying." In this respect, too, less is more."

260On being addicted to work: "I realize now that work was my drug. It held me together. It kept me high. When I wasn’t working, I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do. This is general in the film world. You are so absorbed in making a film, you can’t think of anything else. It’s your identity, and when you’re done you are nobody."

273On the dissipating and dislocating effects of success: "And Orson Welles, the most talented and inventive theater man of my day: What an ass he seemed in the posh restaurants and hotels of Europe’s capitals, and how sad later, in financial desperation, making TV commercials. I was to watch with an awful pain how lost Tennessee Williams was as he shuttled around the bright spots of the world. The money his great success brought him allowed him to live in a way that squashed his talent. He would have been better off living in his native South, the part of the world where he was uncomfortable, even outraged, because he felt he was an outsider."

299On why artists are different: "Artists are different from other people, and they do behave differently. I’ve already expressed my opinion that vanity — one of the seven deadly sins — is often a spur to creation in a filmmaker. Now consider the seven deadly virtues for the artist. Here are seven: Agreeable. Accommodating. Fair-minded. Well-balanced. Obliging. Generous. Democratic. You don’t agree with my choices? How about these: Controlled. Kind. Unprejudiced. Yielding. Unassertive. Faithful. Self-effacing. And for good measure: Co-operative. They are all deadly — for the artist. They add up to what is suggested by "nice guy," "sweet", "pleasant," "lovable," "on the side of the angels." None of which an artist is, should be, or ever has been. If he seems that way, he is concealing his true nature. He should better be a disrupter, on the side of the devil. In the years ahead, every time I was a nice guy, cooperative, and yielding to the point of view of others, I had a disaster."

322 On art as an expression of the individual personality, not a collective: "I came to the conclusion that artists should not have partners [in production]. If they’re any good at all, what they should produce is a piece of personal expression, theirs uniquely.

Nor was the theatre… a collective art. A fine artistic production expresses the vision, the conviction, and the insistent presence of one person. It is best when undiluted by artistic cooperation, when it is not characterized by any of the seven (or more) deadly virtues…. An acting company is best when it’s trained by its director (a benign tyrant) for a specific purpose: his production. [...] The great theatre works I’d hear tell about were finally the product of a single artist, an individual who was his own man, a visionary with a special vision and a dominating ego. It had always been thus and it always would be."

336 On the bonds between himself and Tennessee Williams: "There was a bond between Williams and me. What the gay world — then still largely closeted — was to him, my foreignness was to me. We were both outsiders in the straight (or native) society we lived in. Life in America made us both quirky rebels."

[...]

"There was another unspoken sympathy that bound us. Just as I was, and have been all my life long, Tennessee seemed to be waiting all the day through for the morning to come, that time when he’d be safely alone. The first hours of the day were the dearest ones for this man, his openhearted time. Mornings were when he worked, the only time he could, it seemed, and work was why he lived. He was to write in his Memoirs: "Mornings! It sometimes appears to me that I have lived a life of morning after morning, since it is and has always been the mornings in which I’ve worked." And then: "Work, the loveliest of all four letter words, surpassing even the importance of love — most times." He also wrote of his most persisting and terrible fear. "An artist dies two deaths," he wrote, "not only his own as a physical being but that of his creative powers which die before his body does." Did he seek to prove to himself every morning that he was still alive?"

348Speculating on the inner conflicts of Tennessee Williams, when directing "A Streetcar Named Desire": "What a struggle it must have been for Tennessee to face his homosexuality in a society where it was thought shameful. There had to have been an early anguish in his way of life and a separation from the "normal" society around him.

[...]

Was there something of the Puritan guilt there, that he’d betrayed the moral standards of his people, that the way he behaved when he was most "himself" was sinful?… I wondered if the inner conflict I was scratching for was that of the gentleness of his true heart against the violent calls of his erotic nature? Was that clash the source of his gift? The play was certainly as autobiographical as I’d guessed. But I couldn’t think of him as a Puritan fighting a "baser" nature. I’d had considerable experience with the Puritan character — my beloved wife — and its outstanding characteristic was the compulsion to pressure others to do right. There was none of this in Williams; he went his own way and gave others the same space. He was not Arthur Miller; he had no need to teach. "The only unforgivable thing," Blanche says in Streetcar, "is deliberate cruelty to others — of which I have never been guilty." Art would never have written that."

353 On directing the Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire:" "When I finished work on his play, I was full of admiration for Tennessee, especially because he’d found his story in his own life’s struggles; the man had used his personal contradictions and the memory of his pain to make it. When I considered him, I saw that the true artist must have the courage to reveal what the rest of mankind conceals. [...] He thought it an artist’s duty to deny nothing and avoid self-favoring. He should not apologize for anything, never beg for pity, be pitiless with himself. After this experience, I saw every play and every film that I worked on as a confession, veiled or partly exposed, but always its author’s self-revelation."

353-4On how he came to become a writer, and the genesis of America America: "I’d never thought of becoming a writer, believing (as I still do) that I have no gift for prose. But I did believe that I have an ear for dialogue, for speech under stress, and it was because of Williams that I thought I might someday dramatize the history of the people in my family. I didn’t write America America until many years later, but it was because of Tennessee that I came to believe that, in time, I might. I began to recall the events of my earliest days in Turkey and in the enclave of Anatolian Greeks on Manhattan’s 136th Street, to remember the stories my grandmother told me, and to value as dramatic material my parents and that most eccentric lot, my uncles and aunts. It was because of Williams that I began to look at my life, see it as drama, and think that I might someday become some kind of dramatist myself."

363-4 A self-assessment as a theatrical director: "In time I had to confront some facts. I am a mediocre director except when a play or film touches a part of my life’s experience. Other times my cleverness and facility will not overcome my inadequacies. When I rely on mechanics, I do only what a good stage manager should be able to do. I am not catholic in my tastes. I dislike Beckett — his work. I am not an intellectual. I don’t have great range. I am no good with music or spectacles. The classics are beyond me. I enjoy humor and the great clowns, but I can’t make up jokes or amusing bits of byplay and visual humor. What I need I steal. I have no ear for poetry. I have a pretty good eye but not a great eye. I do have courage, even some daring. I am able to talk to actors; I don’t fear them and their questions. I’ve been able to arouse them to better work. I have strong, even violent feelings, and they are assets. I am not shy about ripping the cover-guard off my own experiences; this encourages actors to overcome their inhibitions. I enjoy working with performers; they sense this and have been happy as well as successful with me. This is useful."

364-5 On theatre: "Something special has happened in the theatre; movies and television have taken over most of the traditional ground. What we see today on the screen, large or small, cannot be matched on a stage by any realistic stage production. Naturalism has been made redundant. This is not a setback; it’s an invitation to the imagination. [...] Our most imaginative theatre work today is in dance and in our musicals. [...] Facts no longer interest us. See the Today show if you want facts; wait for the seven o’clock news. But theatre as an event of the free fancy, one that involves its audience totally in a flight of the imagination, will exist always and I believe become less "realistic"," and so, like painting and dance, more of an art. Wonder is our need today, not information."

367On Arthur Miller: "Art was not a writer who made up stories. His material had to be experienced; he reported on his inner condition. Art had to go through a crisis; that would provide him with material for a play. He had to have that living connection with a subject before he could make a drama of it. [...] At his best he is true to what happened to him. Out of experience came his good work, conceived in ambivalence and his own confusion and resolved in pity and a recognition of terror."

369On the perils of middle age — for men and women: "As the years pass — and I’m braving the wrath of my women friends — men always begin to look elsewhere for rejuvenation, poor things. Their penises, barometers of their continuing vitality, become less cooperative. This awakes anxiety. Men also search elsewhere for fresh entertainment — we have our geishas too. And for spiritual reassurance… But perhaps what they come to need most of all is hope. Desire, Tennessee Williams said, is the opposite of death. In desperation we do what we can.

It’s more difficult for women. They have the same needs — rejuvenation, entertainment, reassurance, hope — that men have. Most women have not been able to find relief and help as readily or as easily. I’ve noticed the faces of wives who, impelled by their notion of duty and even more by their fear of being abandoned (so many middle-class wives have confessed to me that they fear their husbands will find out what they really think — an unguarded mumble in their sleep — and quit them), do their duty all their lives through, preserving their real thoughts in silence and their deepest desires unfulfilled. The faces of these good creatures acquire a wistful aspect, a dreamy look, as they fade back permanently from life and the hope of solution. They live in a fog of neglect and longing. An experienced hunter can always tell when women like that are on the slippery edge and ready to tumble off. They are equally ambivalent with men. In time their children become more important to them than their husbands, but the day comes when the children leave home too. Then they face the final fact: They are alone."

370On his u2018womanizing’: "The affairs I’ve had were sources of knowledge; they were my education. For many years, in this area and only in this area, I’ve used the lie, and I’m not proud of that. But I must add this. My "womanizing" saved my life. It kept the juices pumping and saved me from drying up, turning to dust, and blowing away, like some of my friends. The life-in-hazard that I lived kept me curious, interested, eager, searching, and in excellent health. I struggled with the impossible; how it make it all work together without shaming myself. I failed. But I did not settle for a solution which would have choked me to death.

As always, there was a price. I led a double life and became a double person. It marked me."

381"Film…is now the language of mankind"

381-2 On the night atmosphere in New Orleans: "New Orleans was full of the music I love. In my nocturnal wanderings, I got to meet a number of the jazz musicians.. After dark the city was full of pulsing sound. I’d walk down a street lined with u2018joints’ out of which jazz flooded into the soft night air. In New Orleans, on Panic on the Streets, I learned the importance of music in film….often it’s as important as anything except the sequence of pictures that will tell the story."

404On seducing Marilyn Monroe: "People talk of the technique of seduction as if it’s an art. In my experience it consisted of listening, paying attention, affording true sympathy, and letting some time pass; that is to say, being human and not pressing…. I’m still surprised at how quickly women will empty the most intimate secrets of their lives into a sympathetic ear."

407On Marilyn Monroe: "The girl had little education and no knowledge except the knowledge of her own experience; of that she had a great deal, and for an actor, that is the important kind of knowledge. For her, I found, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life’s experiences. What she needed above all was to have her own worth affirmed. Born out of wedlock, abandoned by her parents, kicked around, scorned by the men she’d been with…, she wanted more than anything else approval from men she could respect…. But there was a fatal contradiction in Marilyn. She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth, yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate of her was her own."

425"Molly (Kazan’s first wife) could never accept the proposition that some disorder is inevitable in life, even preferable. She wanted a firmly controlled existence… Increasingly, I wanted a less ordered life. [...] Nothing I’d seen of the world told me that relationships endure except by slow, gentle dissolution. They endure by shrinking; then there’s no conflict."

429 On directing Marlon Brando in "Viva Zapata": "I was telling him not to play the scenes with his wife in the kind of romantic love stupor American actors pretend…. Our kind of romantic love (if it is romantic, if you can call it love) is a product of our middle class. Zapata’s social concerns are his real concerns.

This wasn’t hard for Marlon to understand. He was that way in life…. What I described for the peasant Zapata was very close to the way Marlon lived his life. For both of them there were deeper needs than "romance.""

438On the aftermath of the Legion of Decency censorship issue over A Streetcar Named Desire: "The article Molly had rewritten for the New York Times had made me a cultural hero again, but I felt dissatisfied with what she’d done. I thought it temperate and reasonable and balanced, whereas my feelings were intemperate, unreasonable, and probably unbalanced. I’d made the film, worked like a demon and a slave, only to be forced to submit it to the will of a proud conspiracy, led by the gluttonous Pope of Fiftieth Street and the men who worked under his guidance to win his approval — "The Powerhouse" it was justly called."

455Recalling Darryl F. Zanuck’s comments on Washington: "He told me that he’d had a good deal of experience in Washington during the war, and "the idea there is not to be right but to win.""

458On his ambivalence regarding testifying to the House Unamerican Activities Committee: "Why had I posed as a left-oriented liberal for so long? Why had I tried so hard and for so long to stay in good with my old comrades when I no longer believed in anything they stood for? Answer: I’d been trying to stay in good with all sides, to be liked by everyone, to have it all, left, right and center, just as I’d managed to have both Broadway and Hollywood, commercial success and artistic eminence" (and, it may be added, his wife and a string of mistresses).

485"The only genuinely good and original films I’ve made, I made after my testimony. The ones before were professionally adept, not sufficient praise — that word "adept" — for a man as hungry for excellence in achievement as I was. The films after April 1, 1952 were personal, they came out of me, fired by what I’ve been describing. They’re films I still respect."

487 "I’d been selected as the number one blacklist target of "all right-thinking people" and was the frequent object of attacks by liberal columnists in newspapers I read every day."

488On his desire to make a waterfront (New York harbor) film: "I was.. determined to show my old "comrades," those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives as they were not. I’d come back to fight."

489On the making of "Waterfront:" "The more serious and more concerned men of the waterfront’s work gangs had read what Budd [Schulberg, the screenwriter] had been writing about their struggle, particularly his pieces in Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine. Surprised that they knew the writer who’d done the articles, they were grateful for Budd’s honoring of the "waterfront priest," Father John Corridan, a man who’d made it his parochial duty to support the reform element in the corrupt union."

493/4"Men [of the waterfront] all respected [Budd] for what he knew and who he was, a writer who was with them in every way…. I would always remember that this was the way to prepare a screenplay — not to observe at arm’s length and scribble notes, but to make yourself one of the people in whom you’re interested and to make the essential story of that place and time your cause. My first impression had been that Budd was working cleverly as an investigative reporter, but then I saw that his interest was not a tactic of the trade but passionate and true, and that he saw the grim tragedies and grotesque humor of that place as great stories are seen, with compassion for the victims and devotion to the just. Budd had made himself more than a writer engaged to prepare a screenplay. He’d made himself a champion of humanity on that strip of shore. It was a great lesson for me, one I would not forget."

500"When critics say [about On the Waterfront] that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing, they are right. That transference of emotion from my own experience to the screen is the merit of those scenes."

504On the success of the play Tea and Sympathy (Spring 1953): "The most satisfying thing in the theatre at the climax of a serious play is not applause but that awed silence that comes when the audience is deeply moved. There is nothing so eloquent and so heartening. When we had that, I knew we were going to run a long time."

530"Here’s a question: Am I two-faced? The answer has to be: "Certainly, sometimes." I’ve made a great practice of getting along, just as most of you have, by concealing negative feelings about people… And I ask myself, haven’t I had enough of choking down memories that make me uncomfortable? Isn’t discretion a false solution? If I write about my life at all, I have to write as I feel about…the actors I’ve worked with."

531On making frank comments about others in his autobiography: "I don’t know what the answer is. Only the result, which will certainly be that everyone who feels hurt, exposed, or shamed by what I’ve written about him or her will be furious. So what can they do — punch me in the nose? I’m too small and too old for anyone to go after me that way. Am I sorry to have hurt the memory of men I’ve just said I liked? A little — or else I wouldn’t be writing all this, would I? But mainly I’m glad I have the power, the time and the memory to tell the truth about my own life. That is what experience means to me; let the chips fall where they may. I don’t know why I’ve lived through all that I’ve lived through, except for the privilege of telling it all as I believe it to have happened. People have been complaining for years that I’ve remained silent in the face of intolerable provocation. Now that I’m speaking up, I must say it feels good."

533"Don’t you get tired of hearing people who live with their mouths pressed to the tit of the film and TV industry complaining about their lack of artistic freedom? What did they think the rules of the game were? Money is magic, very simple. When On the Waterfront was filling theatres, my "artistic position," as it’s called, changed overnight, as if by magic, I could have even had my offices at the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank repainted any color I chose."

534On being given a free hand by Warner Brothers to cast and make the film East of Eden: "Being an Anatolian, I knew that all this beneficence was as temporary as anything else in life, including life itself. It would last as long as I brought in the money. A few years later, after two box office busts in a row, I no longer had final cut. After another losing effort, I couldn’t get backing at all."

563 On Baby Doll: "I thought we made a nice film. Many people said it seemed like a European movie, an artistic cousin to the films of Pagnol, a director I admired. I didn’t think Baby Doll was a masterpiece, but it was an original.

It took Cardinal Spellman to make it famous. The darned old fool came back from Korea, where he’d been conducting mass for the boys at Christmas, stood in the pulpit of St. Pat’s cathedral to tell about his experiences and how self-sacrificing our soldiers were, then said, quote, "What did I find when I came home? Baby Doll!" He went on: "I was anguished by the news that Baby Doll was about to be seen in theatres everywhere. The revolting theme of this picture is a contemptuous defiance of the natural law." And so on. He forbade Catholics to see the film, "under pain of sin." He said it was everyone’s patriotic duty — yes, he actually said patriotic! — to boycott the film.

All this from a power broker who played the market, consorted with politicians, promoters, and real estate speculators, a wheeler-dealer priest, a drinker, a bully who wore a mask of kindliness and who was called by Catholics who were ashamed of him "the Sammy Glick of the Catholic Church." But he did have power, as I would find out."

566 From the People’s World review of A Face in the Crowd: "When two stool pigeon witnesses before the Un-American Committee conspire to produce one of the finest progressive films we have seen in years, something more than oversimplification of motives is needed to explain it. Both Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay, and Elia Kazan, who directed it, did not hesitate to betray what both believed in before the witch-hunting House Committee. But they must have learned something during their days in the progressive movement, and motion picture audiences will be the beneficiaries. A Face in the Crowd is a hard-hitting exposé of the television industry and the way a hillbilly guitar plucker can be built up to be a national menace. The film will help to educate the film audience into an understanding of how public opinion is manipulated in the US and for what purpose. Whether it is the residual understanding Schulberg and Kazan retain from their days in the progressive movement, or whether it is a guilty conscience (or both) that has prompted them to give us this picture, we should be grateful for what they have done."

571 On his need for uncertainty and unpredictability, quest and growth: "I became convinced that an artist needs an anarchist’s heart and has to be pulled more than one way at a time. I had to be open to the unexpected."

572 On the compunction to work: "In those days I had no tolerance for idleness. I always had to be doing something or else I’d begin to rattle."

582 "..indifference to her appeal, a heavier sin by far than infidelity."

583 "You mustn’t scorn me for my aversion to poetry. It’s another time, isn’t it? We talk by pictures now, and a well-chosen photograph often tells it all, faster and better. We simply listen less and suspect words because they’ve been used so treacherously. We are drowning in advertisements for products, mostly lies. But we know that an unposed picture, a simple snapshot, tells the truth. Remember Joe McCarthy whispering in Roy Cohn’s ear?"

583 "I am part of the picture era."

592 On refugees: "A refugee can’t afford pride. He must save his life. He can’t afford to be angry at anyone, because he isn’t provided with the weapons he would need in a fight and has lost the habit of courage."

"When you train yourself to choke down your feelings, you get so you no longer can feel. When someone who works in the arts can’t feel, he works from craft, not emotion. He stops being an artist and becomes a technician. But that was not what I wanted to be."

593 On being true to himself: "Speak now, I said to myself, release your true feelings before it’s too late. Be yourself. Take your place in the world. You are not a cosmic orphan. You have no reason to be timid. Respond as you feel. Awkwardly, crudely, vulgarly — but respond. Leave your throat open. You can have anything that the world has to offer, but the thing you need most and perhaps want most is to be yourself. Stop being anonymous. The anonymity you believed would protect you from pain and humiliation, shame and rejection, doesn’t work. Admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit pettiness, even that; admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to you, respond with your true, uncalculated response, your emotions. The best and most human parts of you are those that you have inhibited and hidden from the world.

Work on it…."

595 "I’ve long since relieved myself of shame about any of [my life]. I feel the truth is rarely told about how most of us live — not until some terrible disaster breaks out and, in the case of public figures, newspapers uncover secrets. Until then a glossy front of hypocrisy prevails; the public face is the only face. [...] What’s told about our own lives doesn’t correspond to what we prefer to believe. I have no special shame in revealing more about my life than a biographer would."

596 On Wild River: The film that resulted from all this is one of my favorites, possibly because of its social ambivalence. Jean Renoir’s famous phrase, "Everyone has his reasons" was true here. Both sides were "right." Wild River is also a favorite of certain French film critics [....] Skouras (the studio director) had an opposite view and treated the film deplorably, jerking it out of theatres before it had any chance to take hold and booking it thinly across the country. It was not exhibited in Europe until I staged a stormy scene in [the studio director's] office and shamed him. I hope the negative is safe in one of Fox’s vaults, although I’ve heard a rumor that it was destroyed to make space for more successful films. This would not surprise me. Money makes the rules of the market, and by this rule, the film was a disaster."

602 On casting Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass: "When Natalie was first suggested to me, I backed off. I didn’t want a "washed-up child star." But when I saw her, I detected behind the well-mannered "young wife" front a desperate twinkle in her eyes. I knew there was an unsatisfied hunger there."

606 On always backing off: "I’ve acquired contradictory reputations over the years: aloof and social, secretive but open-faced, agreeable or cantankerous, concerned, indifferent, generous, cheap, given to unannounced appearances and to sudden disappearances. The reputation I’d rather not have picked up is for being a betrayer of trust. I haven’t liked that. I believe it unjust.

But there are reasons for it. Like many of you, I’ve worn the friendship mask; I often look friendlier than I feel. But then, when I have what I sought, the mask would clatter to the ground, and what I truly am would be revealed. From time to time, I do what no one is prepared for, then someone is hurt or insulted or abandoned or simply puzzled. I let people come skin-close, until they trust me entirely and feel sure that I like them. But when the need is eased, the production opened, the seduction completed, I back away, suddenly become cool and remote, and those I’ve lured close don’t know what happened. For years I declared myself an ardent liberal in politics, made all the popular declarations of faith, but the truth was — and is — that I am, like most of you, a bourgeois. I go along disarming people, but when it gets to a crunch, I am revealed to be a person interested only in what most artists are interested in, himself. I come on as a guy you can trust, searching-surviving get-alongnik, who doesn’t like to be crossed, never forgives an insult, and despite the ready smile, is angry a lot of the time — or at least looks angry, for reasons that are never quite clear. So I can’t blame people for what they think of me."

610 "I am not catholic in my tastes, and my talent’s range is not wide. It has, on occasion, been deep — within my limitations. I like only what I like."

612 On architecture: "A building of any kind expresses not only the requirements and perhaps the character of a client but also the architect’s feelings about the culture of his day. We can see in the pyramids, the complex of buildings at Delphi, the cathedral at Chartres, St. Peter’s in Rome, a Mayan temple in Guatemala, and the twin towers of our World Trade Center how different those cultures are and what are their basic values."

614 On death: "Death tells a secret: at the moment of death a person learns the bad news about his life. Or comes to see what was most important to him that he ignored.

Have you read Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich? If you have, you’ll remember the question that is the story’s theme. Ivan Ilyich, as he dies, begins to believe that "he had not spent his life as he should have." It occurs to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses that he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing and the rest false. "All you have lived for," he says to himself, "and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you."

616 "What greater gift can we give each other than encouragement when it’s most needed? And support?"

629 On his imported Greek star of America America, Stathis Giallelis: "I brought the boy to America, made him speak English all day, encouraged him to find an American girlfriend — the best way to learn a new language. I found him devoted, honest, and loyal; all you had to do was look at him and you believed the story; he was too amateurish to contrive. It was to be not a characterization but a fact; this young man was it. [...He] may have been hurt by his sudden importance; after my film, he went on trying to be an actor in America but never learned to speak English without a noticeable accent and didn’t have the patience to train himself. He was good boy, but was also what Greek mothers call sons they’re proud of: a rooster…[...He'd been spoiled in every way..] Most Greek men are mother spoiled."

658/9 On America America, his immigrant movie, and the genius of one of his collaborators, Manos Hadjikakis: "America America is now my favorite of the films I’ve made, but early in 1963 …I had doubts about its worth. Then when I needed luck, I got it. Manos Hadjikakis came my way from Athens and bolstered me… He was .. a genius.

Manos was not only a composer, he was a dramatist, and his sense of where the drama was, how to reinforce it, how to join various episodes so they’d have the most effect, surpassed my own. He also had the most overwhelming joy in working and in his work; it was easy for him, and once he started, he was like all the other geniuses I’ve known, a compulsive hard worker. He’d earned his success the hard way. The old saying that genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration underestimates the importance of relentless effort. But work doesn’t describe what these men do. There is a blacking out of everything else in their lives; it’s all secondary — love, greed, pleasure, family. The work experience is what they want from life. They don’t know how to "unwind," nor do they want to.

Necessarily there is an intense selfishness and arrogance about the men called geniuses, and there was about Manos. I’ve been called arrogant and selfish and self-centered, and I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a genius, but I’ve borne the accusationu2014if that’s what it isu2014and my answer is “Why not?” What’s more important, who’s worth more among us? Let the common man put up and suffer. A person of talent who can function with that talent is the finest thing on earth and the only answer to the old question: Who is man and why is man and what is man supposed to be? Manos did not tolerate any interference with how he wanted what he’d composed to sound. His musicians were terrified of him, and again, why not? So were Toscanini’s. It helped the end result.

Men called geniuses have been the joy of my existenceu2014but I didn’t know them as geniuses. All those I’ve known and worked withu2014Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, Marlon Brandou2014have a joyous intensity in work and have passed it on to me. They are blessed. Along with all the other sparks, they all have great laughs. Laughing comes easy for them because life is what they want it to be; they are what they want to be, doing what they want to do. They don’t question their worth. They no longer respond to disapproval. Manos never, not once, showed any hesitation about what he wanted or what I’d think of it. He did wonderful things for my film at a time when the film most needed that contribution.

All the above is skipping over the essential question: Are these people born with the divine gift or do they acquire it? Granted they work harder than others, granted that their lives have usually been richer and therefore better soil for growth, granted that there is some special eagerness about them and usually an especially strong energyu2014granted all this, how does the phenomenon called a genius come to be?

I don’t know. But this I have noticed about people with mysterious gifts: in many cases, a wound has been inflicted early in life, which impels the person to strive harder or makes him or her extrasensitive. The talent, the genius is the scab on the wound, there to protect a weak place, an opening to death; that’s how it came to be. These are our heroes, those who have overcome what the rest of the race yields to with self-pity and many excuses. When I’ve worked with men and women who came successfully out of misfortune, I’ve found that they have strength that is extraordinary, and their strength is a gift to me. So it’s been, not only with Manos, but with other talented composers and with the actors and particularly the actresses I’ve worked with. Their precious gifts, for which they paid in pain, have made me successful when I was successful. I’ve relied on their talent; it’s the essence of what I’ve needed most from the rest of the race."

660 On being the u2018unchallenged source’ (his own master): "..during my experience of making America America, particularly in those months when I was overseas directing it and making all decisions every day, I’d felt totally myself in a way I never had before. In the making of that film, all activity had started from a directive I gave, and each day’s program was based on my wishes. That was what I wanted to be, the unchallenged source. I recognized that from now on I’d only be able to work that way."

665 "What is so terrible in our society is that people like ourselves (actors and theatre people) are only rarely in control of their own lives and destinies. We don’t do what we want to do. We do what we think we have to do. Or what’s worse, what other people want us to do, what "they" — whoever "they" are — want us to do."

670 On JFK: "Kennedy was hardly a statesman; he was a politician of the new breed, media made, as Roosevelt had been, but with more clout because the equipment he used was better. Like all the great show business personalities of his time, he had fine writers to meet every occasion, whether a speech or a quip. One never knew how much he said was his. This technique became the politics for our day. Sock it to them! Jack was in a line that would go onto Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he made what he said seem his own."

708 On excessive emotionalism in acting performance: "An actor [should not] behave on stage as if he knows his character is pathetic or tragic. He must not be constantly nudging the audience to observe how pitiful he is and how deep his pain. The great thing in life, when you detect that a person is in a tragic situation, is watching what he does to conceal his pain and to contain it. Often what people do is surprising and characteristic. Then the audience will see sorrow and courage, humor and honor, simultaneously. That is the essence of the life in the plays of Chekhov. In the production I’m discussing…I [would have preferred] more humor and verve and less self-indulgence, self-pity and self-awareness. I detest emotional stripteases."

712 On Lee Strasberg’s inability to confess error after a disastrously ill-prepared theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in London: "The one thing Lee should have done he could not do: tell the truth about what had happened. The company.. had been gathered in a haphazard way, had not had the time or the space to rehearse the delicate play properly, and the fault was his. Lee would have gained respect by admitting the truth. But he never allowed himself to be held accountable for anything, always stood on the very treacherous ground of a man who was never wrong. What a burden to shoulder!"

720 On the immigrant boy-adapter experience: "Arriving in this country from a land where his people had existed in terror, an immigrant boy without the language and accompanied by a family of adults, foreigners who lived here in suspicion and fear and never gained secure positions in this society — such a boy became convinced that to survive on the streets and in the schools, to be accepted, he must do whatever was necessary to gain the favor of the powerful people around him, be they adults or kids his own age. This became my technique in life, doing whatever I had to do to gain the tolerance, the friendship, and the protection of the authority figures in my own life. I developed into a child-person and, inevitably, into an adult who, I’m embarrassed to confess, did whatever it was necessary to do and became whoever it was expeditious to become to get by. I created a non-self. I wasn’t anybody definite; I was many different people, depending on the circumstances. I was an adapter, taking on any color, yielding to any pressure, so long as I was accepted by those stronger than I and was therefore safe. That is what, decades later, I had to try to throw off by great effort, and with considerable pain.

This need, to get along by pleasing the authority-figures in my life — the ruling class of Anglo-Saxons, for instance — to show appropriate signs of liking and respect for them no matter what I truly felt, had an inevitable concomitant: resentment. As I tried to please those I thought had power over me, I resented them. As I yielded to pressures, some imagined, some real, I would be planning how when the day came, I’d turn the tables and have my revenge. I’d play up to those strong ones, reassuring them of my fidelity and admiration while, in a curious simultaneous way, I hated them because they had power over me. I’d play all sides, be all things; join a Boy Scout troop and, not too many years later, the Communist Party, neither of which I gave a damn about. All my moves came from the same need, to be in good with the power people, whether the kids on my block or the actors in the Group who were already Party members. I had only to find who and what it was most useful for me to serve."

733-4 On self-discovery during a visit to Greece in 1965: "I saw that my background (as an Anatolian Greek) had made me ideal for show business, where the basic interest is to please others — the audience, the critics, the moneymen, the playwrights, and the producers. It was perfectly natural for me to obey these cardinal laws: Please those who pay. Don’t say what will offend those in power. The native Greeks were not as shrewd as those of us who’d come from Anatolia: we were the clever ones, and our cunning taught us to be servile to the strong. Those born in Greece, particularly those who’d been there for generations, had a fearlessness close to arrogance, which I envied.

I was a man who’d spent his entire adult life working in the theatre and in films — that is, Hollywood — pleasing those with the power to give me jobs. Now, having sat for some time in …Paris, and being presently in a room with a view of the Acropolis, which still spoke of the public liberties of the fifth century B.C., I suddenly found that the change in my cousin reflected a corresponding change in me. In that year of 1965, I’d found joy, not from a good notice on Broadway or a new conquest who "responds," but from a more central thing: I was now my own boss, doing what I wanted, saying what it pleased me to say. I’d finally paid myself the respect that came from believing that my own material was worth investing the time of my life in, and possibly that what I felt and what I’d gone through were important and that people would listen.

This had never happened before. I had always lured people to pay attention to other men. Implicit in what I was now doing was this: that I considered myself, at least for myself, more worthy of attention than anyone else. It was the most confident thing I’d done in my life, this writing, and it would change the course of my life."

747 James Baldwin on Kazan’s book The Arrangement:

"The tone of the book does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition but on something older than that: the tale told by a member of the tribe to the tribe. It has the urgency of a confession and the stammering authority of a plea. Kazan is talking, trying to tell us something and not only for his sake… but for ours. u2018I don’t like my life! How have I become what I have become? These men who cried, America America!, as the century died, had come here looking of freedom and all they found was the freedom to make as much money as possible.’ This is not the official version of American history but that t very nearly sums it up can scarcely be doubted by anyone with the encourage to look into the faces one encounters all over this land, who listens to the voices, hearing the buried uneasiness, translating itself hourly into a hatred of all that is strange or vivid, into a hatred, at last, of life."

818-819 Reflecting on the death of his second wife from cancer at the age of 48, and the deaths of other close friends: "I knew that their spirit had been, bit by bit, torn down, fragmented, and destroyed. They’d been left without those essential defenses that night have protected them against a surrender of hope. So I came to my own theory about what brings on a mortal disease, a notion..that doctors will consider foolish or, at best, half-baked. But they should be cautious about challenging speculation. They’ve not found the cause — or a reliable treatment — for cancer or for high blood pressure or for the disintegration of a heart due to "stress."

I’ve seen it demonstrated in person after person close to me… There is a vital core in a human being where his or her self-esteem lives. When that core is crushed, the person may not let it be seen because of pride or fear or ignorance or bewilderment, but a terrible thing has happened: that person’s body defenses have been rendered ineffective and have given yup guarding the body and resisting disease. That’s the road to the grave.

The flesh and the spirit are interdependent. Something mysterious and devastating happens in a person when he or she, consciously or unconsciously, doesn’t care about continuing as him- or herself. The soul passes the message on, and the body’s protective force — the immune system, it’s called — surrenders the body to the malignancy, which has waited for this opening. The human organism is one piece, and its core is what used to be called the spirit, sometimes the holy spirit, for it is indeed holy. That is what has to survive, and when it doesn’t, we don’t survive."

822 On death and memorials: "When the dead person had [sic] achieved some importance in theatre or films, I’m sometimes asked to attend a memorial service and speak. Generally I refuse — graciously, I hope. I don’t like memorial services. If praise is the purpose, it should have been offered while the person was alive."

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

A lot has been written about Altman and his films, so I do not intend here to do any in-depth analysis. I have no doubt that his movie-making over 40 years has by now been the object of plenty of psychobabble, and countless learned dissertations at Film or Cultural Studies departments in universities throughout the land.

I will simply put my cards on the table. I like Altman’s films, even the bad ones (in parts): unlike much of the fantasy-world fare which regularly tops the charts at the box-office but cannot sustain even a second viewing, they are thought-provoking, funny-melancholic and complex, and repay repeated viewing. Being also intrinsically American, they are especially interesting to one who, like me, is a keenly interested outside observer of 20th-century American culture and history, well-disposed to its founding libertarian traditions.

So I feel it is right and proper today that, having reached the milestone of 80 years, Altman should be fawned over, called yet again the Big Daddy of American art cinema, and have another media moment in the California sun.

He was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to a Catholic family of German origin.

Freelance writer Stephen Lemons, in an August 2000 article in Salon on the 25th anniversary party for Nashville, describes the adolescent Altman as "a cutup and hell-raiser — to the degree that his parents shipped him off to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., during his junior year of high school." Joining the US Army Air Force from there in 1945, he saw active service at the tail-end of World War II as a bomber pilot in the Pacific.

When he came back he was at a loose end. He tried acting. He tried out a crazy scheme for tagging dogs. He ended up back in Kansas City in 1947 and, at age 22, started out on a life of film by making documentaries for a firm which made industrial shorts, the (now defunct) Calvin Company. From the mid-1950s, after he had written and directed a teen exploitation movie called The Delinquents, he worked in television, first at the invitation of Alfred Hitchcock, on the show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and later on several regular TV series, the best-known of which were “Bonanza” and "Combat."

Altman began directing feature-length movies in the 1960s, after leaving TV. But he would not achieve fame until the relatively late age of 45, with the controversially satirical film M.A.S.H., set at the time of the Korean war but clearly intended to refer to Vietnam, which came out in 1970.

"M*A*S*H," as the website of the Directors’ Guild of America tells us on the occasion of a 2003 award to Altman, "featured a sprawling cast of largely unknown actors, so naturalistic that you might assume that they are purely improvising, except that the arching nuances and comic timing hit all too perfectly. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould’s characters embody Altman’s split perspective on America, full of anti-authoritarian cynicism and swaggering braggadocio. They are neither the accidental heroes, nor the slow-witted innocents of traditional combat films. They are wise-cracking revolutionaries, smart enough to see through the charade and insanity of war. In general, it is not a fixed disdain for authority that Altman expresses in his films. Instead, he simply combines an outsider’s view with a little wit and lets the absurdity of the establishment reveal itself."

M.A.S.H. introduced several enduring Altman hallmarks: the lack of linear plot, the unifying theme achieved through a device (in this case the surreal announcements over the field hospital’s PA system), the overlapping dialogue, the director’s paternalism and love-hate relationship with his cast, and the feel of creative, ad-hoc improvisation which can be both so inspiring and so infuriating in all of his films. It also offered up that enduring triple nemesis of modern Puritanism: sex and drugs and rock’n'roll. As Lemons says, it fed audiences "all of the major characteristics of an Altman film: rabid anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, black humor (the blackest), sacrilege, delight in decadence, adolescent sexual escapades, hypocrisy revealed and casual drug use."

Altman’s next big success was Nashville (1975). Famously given a rave review in the New Yorker 4 months ahead of its opening by that renowned critic, the late Pauline Kael, for many this film is emblematic of America in the 1970s, maybe even the pinnacle of Altman’s achievement. In the first of two reviews, eminent film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

"Robert Altman’s Nashville, which was the best American movie since Bonnie and Clyde, creates in the relationships of nearly two dozen characters a microcosm of who we were and what we were up to in the 1970s. It’s a film about the losers and the winners, the drifters and the stars in Nashville, and the most complete expression yet of not only the genius but also the humanity of Altman, who sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience. Sure, it’s only a movie. But after I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It’s that good a movie. [...]

This is a film about America. It deals with our myths, our hungers, our ambitions, and our sense of self. It knows how we talk and how we behave, and it doesn’t flatter us but it does love us."

It is also interesting to note in passing that, even 30 years on, users of the invaluable Internet Movie Database (ImdB) continue to comment in uncommonly large numbers on this movie. One very recent comment makes the point that, "Altman’s slice of Americana has lost none of its punch… Despite being made in the Watergate and Vietnam era…. the film is even more relevant today in this age of celebrity-worship and apathetic, gutless American media who believe missing suburban wives are more pertinent and crucial to this nation’s well-being than questioning facts and our leaders’ motives for waging a needless, costly war."

The next Altman movie on my list is Streamers (1983). Even in the many surveys and articles on Altman available on the Internet, this cinematic adaptation of an intense and close-atmosphered anti-war stage play by David Rabe, set in a basic-training barracks before a group of recruits is sent out to Vietnam, is given little attention, coming from a period in which Altman is regarded as having been generally in the doldrums. It is not available on DVD. Nevertheless, it is as intense an Altman experience as you are ever likely to get, and I strongly recommend it, even if you feel the need for a strong drink afterwards.

From the IMdB: Streamers is about the truly dramatic consequences of censored communication. It’s a gripping, demanding, powerful and very satisfying film that leaves your head spinning and your heart racing.

It is only fair to mention that there are also strongly negative user comments on this film: one writer calls it a u2018lengthy, lethargic and lackluster Altman lecture.’

This divergence of views highlights the undoubted truth that both Altman the person and his work provoke extreme reactions. It is almost impossible to remain indifferent. As he is loved, so he is also detested: loved by many fans and by the circle of distinguished and well-known actors whom he has regularly allowed to improvise and be themselves in his movies; loved by the professional critics who wax effusive about America having its very own auteur and art cinema director (and yet cannot resist, many of them, the mean pleasure of pulling the man down by gloating over his relative failure at the box-office); detested for his forthright liberal and anti-war opinions by the faux-patriots for whom America can do no wrong, and an object of puzzlement for those who want to go to the movies for nothing too difficult such as actually having to think, but merely to be distracted and carried along by a fanciful and morally simple yarn, preferably involving good guys taking out dark, evil monsters.

Such conflicting reactions were also in evidence in relation to The Player, which came out in 1992 and was hailed at the time as Altman’s u2018comeback.’ This film is oddly unsatisfying and oddly fascinating at the same time, perhaps because it portrays an anti-hero, an unsympathetic and amoral main character who literally gets away with murder, but with whom we nevertheless are drawn to sympathize because he is dealing with the enemy within — within himself and within the vicious, back-stabbing Hollywood milieu, which is portrayed here with a savage bitterness born of intimate familiarity. There is also a strong implicit condemnation of the abject superficiality and pretentiousness of the cult of celebrity, allied with an ironic and paradoxically mischievous delight in it. Like all addictions, you love it and can’t get enough of it, at the same time as you hate what it does to you and want to be rid of it.

Speaking personally, I also find the character played by the usually elegantly attractive actress Greta Scacchi unsympathetic and annoying: she plays a supposedly mysterious and u2018difficult’ artist who is resisting — and yet not resisting — the charms of the anti-hero. It has to be admitted there are times when the deliberate ambiguities and occasional longueurs of an Altman script get to even the keenest of fans.

This movie has the dubious distinction of having attracted the ire of Murray Rothbard, who was disturbed by what he called the nihilism of the u2018New Left’ cinema, which led directors like Altman to show that life is evil and meaningless, rather than to provide happy endings as Old-Left cinema did (Rothbard wished in 1992 that Altman had u2018stayed away forever’). Personally I think Rothbard comes down too hard on Altman, based on this one movie: it is easy to agree with him that what Altman portrays is not a pretty sight. But it is wrong, in my view, to attribute nihilistic intent to the director.

No such reservations apply to the bitter tragi-comedy of manners and life in Los Angeles, Short Cuts (1993), one of my favorite films of all time. It is based on the short stories of the late Raymond Carver (1938—1988), and portrays a set of characters whose lives overlap in strange and unexpected ways. It is a melancholy film, in that its linking theme is the incidence of death, both physical and of the soul, and our common helplessness in the face of it. "The most representative plot," writes Doug Thomas in the editorial review on Amazon.com, "deals with a group of friends (Buck Henry, Fred Ward, and Huey Lewis) who decide to keep fishing even after discovering a body in the river. The story works as a morose comedy and a flag holder for the movie: the inability to take the correct action. [...] A huge and talented cast twists in the wind, bumping into moments of truth, sex, and passion. Some even come out all right in the end. The accidental nature of life — a common theme in many Altman films — has never been so maddeningly persistent, or absorbing. The score by Mark Isham, with songs sung by Annie Ross (also a cast member), fuels the moodiness, as does the opening number in which Medfly helicopters spray the town to the tune “Prisoner of Life.”"

Short Cuts, at 3 hours longer than usual even for Altman, could be the object of a review unto itself. I will limit myself to saying that this in particular is a film which repays concentration and revisiting: the first time around, you are likely to miss a lot, on account of the wealth of detail, the initial confusion of the overlapping stories and coincidences, and indeed moments of irritation, embarrassment or intense personal drama, as in the argument about marital infidelity between the characters played by Matthew Modine and (a nude) Julianne Moore.

1994′s Prêt -A- Porter (Ready to Wear) was slammed by many critics, and once again, viewer opinion is harshly divided. The film, which is a shaggy-dog story, actually contains some delicious moments (particularly those involving the scenes between Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren), some fine acting, and for anyone who has experienced — or better still, worked at — the Paris Fashion Shows, it is a brilliant, witty and sexy satire, evoking all that is worst in their superficiality and pretentiousness while meditating on (and causing us to reflect sadly on) the amorality of human betrayal for the sake of — not much, in the end. As with "Short Cuts," a lot of unnecessarily prurient attention has focused on scenes involving nudity. If such scenes cause some viewers difficulty, the short answer is that they should not be watching Altman movies, as they will only be made angry and indignant by seeing those scenes out of context.

An interesting group of Altman-directed movies, uneven, some say bad, others say terrible, came out in the second half of the 1990s. Kansas City (1996), a Depression-era pseudo-gangster movie which has just been re-released on DVD in the US, is a flawed but interesting tribute to his home town, and is dominated by the improvised jazz soundtrack. The Gingerbread Man (1998), starring Kenneth Branagh and Robert Duvall, was a John Grisham adaptation generally reckoned not worth viewing after its opening 15 minutes, yet even this thriller has its moments, and there are fans who like it. Cookie’s Fortune (1999), described as u2018a drowsy Southern comedy’ and starring Glenn Close, was a mediation on life in a small Southern town, and my personal favorite of this group, Dr. T and the Women (2000), starring Richard Gere and Farrah Fawcett, performed the brilliant reflexive trick of having Gere, who has played many Don Juan roles in his time, take the main part of Dr. T., a gynaecologist with a failed marriage who cannot cope with (his) women. And surely only Altman could succeed in having the ever-lovely Farrah Fawcett dance totally nude in a fountain in the middle of a Dallas shopping mall!

All this led up to Altman’s biggest box-office success in years in 2001, the u2018English country house’ 1930s period piece, Gosford Park. I had mixed feelings on first viewing this lavishly decorated film, with once again an all-star cast — all the usual mixed feelings: it was too long, had no real plot, and was at times irritating; but it improved tremendously on second viewing. I think this has everything to do with expectations. We have become so conditioned by Hollywood mainstream fare to expect moronic, fast-paced, shoot-em-up action, posturing instead of acting, and platitudes instead of thought, that when a thought-provoking cinematic experience such as Gosford Park comes along, many are simply too impatient and unskilled at knowing how to absorb and appreciate it, and so react not just with indifference, but with active hostility at having had their own limitations shown up and having been, in their own estimation, cheated.

One reviewer has put this issue succinctly: "Director Altman does NOT make films for everyone. He often makes films for the ‘Advanced’ film-goer. His work is often disjointed and overlapping to an extent that it requires one to actually pay attention to the goings-on rather than to spoon-feed the answers to the audience. Couple this with his tendency to allow the plot and the character to meander, evolving slowly over the course of the film, and you often get a movie that is distinctly ‘un-Hollywood’, which can turn some film-goers off. I would recommend that you allow yourself to watch [an Altman film] without any preconceived ideas of how a movie is supposed to be."

So finally to The Company, a 2003 documentary project on the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago suggested to Altman by Neve Campbell, an actress who trained from childhood with the National Ballet School of Canada but was obliged to give up ballet on account of repeated injury. Most critics were unsure of what to make of it, and many of the usual complaints were in evidence in the reviews — that it lacks plot, is neither one thing nor the other or, for one writer, is "a sloppy, ill-focused ramble through the rehearsal process of a top-drawer company." I watched this documentary rather defiantly, in a comfortable movie theatre in which there cannot have been more than half a dozen patrons, as if to prove that, when it comes to Altman, all this doesn’t really matter. Preconceptions about what a movie should be are indeed to be left at the door. Games can be played with the director’s conscious or subconscious references to earlier work, like the ballet which must go on despite (or perhaps in harmony with) a dramatic thunderstorm, echoing the shattering tornado at the end of Dr. T and the Women. "Pleasurable," the word used by the Washington Post’s critic, just about sums it up. I also feel that The Company is a neat, evocative return to the documentary form in which Altman started out, albeit that its effortless sophistication and the luxurious restraint of its sensuous and vulnerable atmosphere now reflect a maturity gained through a lifetime of movie-making.

Conclusions

Altman’s films are about damage and about excess, about calling out the inner demons and enemies within, and the diagnostics and therapies we choose — or choose not — to apply in order to cope with, limit or reverse them. Unsurprisingly, they often show the dark side of the psyche, the working out of addictive behavior, the apparent survival of those who "get away with murder," a concept which still jars with a common sense of moral justice, even in these morally befuddled times. They can therefore be profoundly disturbing to those who are afraid to delve into the corresponding depths of mind and soul, or tell themselves that they would just prefer not to have their inner demons exposed.

In contrast to that other great American cinematic master, Woody Allen, who deals in neuro-comedy to touch many of the same subject-matters — psychological vulnerability, love and death, the obsession with celebrity, and the often vacuous nature of urban and suburban inner life, Altman deals with them in a psycho-tragic way which, more than with Woody Allen, offers a ray of hope in the possibility of a radical change when the personal cataclysm finally happens, as it so often does at the end of his films: Dr. T., physically whisked up high into the sky by a tornado, finds himself set down on earth again having to deliver a child somewhere in the Mexican desert. The dysfunctional couples in Short Cuts are all given a second chance by the freak coincidence of an earthquake at a key moment of moral decision.

As he celebrates his 80 years, Robert Altman’s cinematic activity is undimmed. One new movie, Paint, is currently being filmed, while the 2006 title A Prairie Home Companion starring Altman regulars Lyle Lovett and Lily Tomlin as well as Meryl Streep, is in pre-production. When asked about retirement, his oft-quoted rejoinder has been along the lines of "You’re talking about death, aren’t you?" I doubt that even mortality will push this hell-raiser off our screens, because, as both M.A.S.H. and Nashville have shown, his work is enduring. In the meantime, as perhaps the temporary occupant of the White House might care to note, a suitable postscript to Altman’s substantial filmography on this his 80th birthday might be that "no inner demon has been left behind."

Links and Further Reading

Articles

• Lemons, Stephen: Robert Altman, Salon.com — August 15, 2000

• McKay, Brian: Robert Altman: A Lifetime in 90 minutes or Less! Hollywoodbitchslap.com — April 23, 2003

• Self, Robert T.: The Modernist Cinema of Robert Altman, Senses of Cinema — December 2004

• Sterritt, David, Altman, Christian Science Monitor — February 8, 2002

• Usborne, David: Robert Altman: My Films are always the Director’s Cut, Independent — May 14, 2004

Books

• Keyssar, Helene, Robert Altman’s America, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000

• Kolker, Robert Phillip: A Cinema of Loneliness : Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

• Self, Robert T., Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality — Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Other Resources

• Robert Altman: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library

• Website: Ward, Christopher: Altman’s Annex

Selected Film Reviews

• Nashville (1975):

Roger Ebert, first review in Chicago Sun Times, January 1, 1975

Roger Ebert, second review in Chicago Sun Times, August 6, 2000

• The Player (1992):

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times, April 1992

• Kansas City (1996):

Hull, Christopher: Kansas City — Filmcritic.com, 2004

• Cookie’s Fortune (1999):

Sragow, Michael: Altman’s Fortune — Salon.com, June 3, 1999

• Dr. T. and the Women (2000):

Danks, Adrian: I Don’t Think We’re in Dallas Anymore — Senses of Cinema, March/April 2001

Dawson, Tom: Robert Altman on Dr. T. and the Women — Channel4.com, 2000

• The Company (2003):

Applebaum, Stephen: Robert Altman on The Company — Channel4.com, 2003

Hunt, Mary Ellen: The Company — Critical Dance, January 2004

Kipp, Jeremiah: The Company — A Film Review — Filmcritic.com, 2003

Quinn, Anthony: The Company — The Independent, May 7, 2004

Thomson, Desson: u2018Company’ — Altman’s Dance Film with Legs, Washington Post, January 23, 2004

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

The Challenges of Ivan Illich

In a thoughtful and interesting review of the book, Christopher Shannon wrote that "the essays assume a familiarity with Illich quite rare among readers under the age of 50," but "for those who read Illich 25 years ago and wonder what happened to him, this collection is a good place to start."

Much better indeed than the smugly self-referential and mean-spirited put-down published in the New York Times by way of an obituary, and a good complement to the large number of more thoughtful and intelligent tributes and recollections published since then. Particularly good among these were the obituary in the Guardian and Aaron Falbel’s In Memoriam in Peacework.

Who Was Ivan Illich?

Because of his apparent retreat into silence and the official neglect of his work over the last 30 years, many of today’s readers may not even know who Ivan Illich was. For many of those who did know and were influenced by his work, the obituary notices and tributes jolted the memory, and left many wondering what had happened to him since the heady countercultural days of the books which made him, for a time, a global intellectual celebrity: Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973) and, above all, Medical Nemesis (1975).

With these books Illich generally subverted and questioned the holiest trinity of modernity’s sacred cows: school, technological and developmental progress, and the medical establishment.

His fundamental argument, widely admired in some quarters and ridiculed and caricatured in others, was that once our institutions developed beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived. The end result of this paradoxical counter-productivity was schools which make people dumb, complacent and unquestioning; hospitals which produce disease; prisons which make people violent; travel at high speed which creates traffic jams; and u2018aid and development’ agencies which create more and more u2018needy’ and u2018underconsuming’ people.

Paradoxes

Part of the problem is that Illich’s work does not come easily. His erudition and the fiery complexity of his style and thought make it difficult to unravel the many threads in his polemics. The other part of the problem is that undermining long-inculcated certainties in people’s lives tends to create anxiety in them, especially when the critique of those certainties rings true, but they do not know what to do about it. Too often the response is simple denial.

The fact is that he was in himself a succession of paradoxes:

• He was a highly trained Roman Catholic priest who had studied at the Gregorian University in Rome and was expected to go far in the Church, yet he fell out with the powers in that Church, incurring the disapproval of the Vatican.
• He was a polymath who craved simplicity, and increasingly came to see and appreciate it in the customs and institutions of earlier, vanished times and places less touched by the ravages of u2018progress.’
• He was a polyglot, speaking any number of languages, but could not abide the sloppy use of any one language, firmly resisting what one writer has called u2018the cultural devastation of impoverished language.’ As a result, he seriously discombobulated eager but inarticulate new arrivals who showed up at his missionary training center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the late 1960s, and later complained about the u2018self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages in South America and Southeast Asia, always shocks me when I visit an American college..’
• He never wore a watch, believing it needlessly forced an artificial structure on our lives, but was always asking how much time he had before he had to catch a plane or give a lecture.
• He was a traveler at jet-age transportation speeds who advocated the measured speed and humbler energy efficiency of the bicycle.
• He was, in his own words, a u2018wandering Jew and Christian pilgrim’ — born of a Sephardic Jewish mother and a Christian Dalmatian (Croatian) father. For his part-Jewish ancestry in 1941 he was expelled from Vienna, his birthplace and home, by the National Socialist state.

Small wonder therefore that, even in death, Illich has been both praised and abused. To this day people having difficulty making him out, and those who have had particularist, factional expectations of him, such as feminists and coercive environmentalists, have emerged sorely disappointed from the revelation that, despite his trenchant criticisms of the status quo, he was not partial to their cause.

Thus it is that he has been described with a bewildering variety of names: radical, reactionary, leftist, conservative, Marxist-lite, anarchist, liberation theologist, prophet, guru, convivial guru, teacher, dreamer, thinker, philosopher, non-conformist, critic of institutions, intellectual sniper, and man of mystery — even u2018libertarian.’

Maybe he was all of these things, but another friend, Lowell Levin, writing about him after his death, expresses the opinion that all these seeming contradictions were u2018really set up to turn our minds around. [Illich] despised linear thinking, and worked to rid us of it whenever and however he could."

The Roman Catholic priest

Ivan Illich was, first and foremost, trained to be a priest. An important truth which some commentators are now starting to perceive is that, despite his break with the Church, he never let go of the austere personal discipline this training had given him. It informed all of his work, and indeed his attitudes to life and death.

He came to the United States in the early 1950s, to work with Puerto Rican immigrants at Incarnation Parish in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Here already he viewed the task of ministering to parishioners’ needs not as trying to improve or uplift them, but as u2018presence’ — being with them and helping them u2018to sustain their traditional liturgical and devotional practices in their new environment.’

I believe Illich’s increased concern, later in life, with the just measure of things, and with the appropriate ways of suffering and dying, and how the modern world has sought to control, manage and sterilize these so that most Westerners are damagingly isolated and protected from them in their day-to-day existence, should also be seen in the light of his own priestly training, and his awareness that suffering and pain have traditionally always been seen as a part of life. They cannot simply be willed away by a Promethean impulse to sanitize and control everything and everyone.

The Critic of Institutions, and the Tyranny of Good Intentions

Influenced by those he had met during his time in New York, and subsequently at the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico, Illich had begun to write polemical essays from the late 1960s onwards. They appeared in Saturday Review, the New York Review of Books and similar journals. An early collection was published in 1970 under the title Celebration of Awareness — A Call for Institutional Revolution.

The book’s title was faddy, but the content was explosive. Illich always had a knack for catching the reader’s attention with his opening lines, and those of its second chapter were telling:

"The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts."

One has only to think of the confessedly counterproductive US Air Force food drops in Afghanistan in late 2001 to realize the prophetic truth of this remark.

"Each chapter in this volume," Illich wrote in the foreword, "records an effort of mine to question the nature of some certainty. Each therefore deals with deception — the deception embodied in one of our institutions. Institutions create certainties, and taken seriously, certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination. It is always my hope that my statements, angry or passionate, artful or innocent, will also provoke a smile, and thus a new freedom — even though the freedom come at a cost."

Those statements were soon to become more focused, with blistering effect, on the institution of school, and later on the medical establishment.

On Education and Learning

Many reckon Deschooling Society to have been Illich’s best work. It certainly placed him firmly in the limelight of educational and learning theory, and has had a lasting influence which can be seen in the work of such as John Taylor Gatto, Joel Spring and John L. McKnight (who worked with Illich), the homeschooling movement in general, and many others. Here is the opening paragraph:

"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."

Deschooling Society was primarily a call for disestablishment — not only of school, but of the institutions which we believe do us good simply because we have come to believe — falsely — that they necessarily embody and fulfil the original stated purpose of the beneficial function we attribute to them.

Our failure is that we have abdicated to the u2018experts’ who work in those institutions our personal responsibility for thinking and acting in our own lives.

Their failure is the failure to consider the unintended consequences, the elements of human action and human nature which foil all best-laid plans and systems, especially the well-intentioned ones.

Illich would have argued, however, that we cannot and should not even attempt to plan, program and control life in this way: instead, we should relish and prepare ourselves for the surprises that life brings.

In a graduation speech he gave in Puerto Rico during his time as vice-rector of the Catholic University, he said:

"Education implies a growth of an independent sense of life and a relatedness which go hand in hand with increased access to, and use of, memories stored in the human community. The educational institution provides a focus for this process. This presupposes a place within the society in which each of us is awakened by surprise; a place of encounter in which others surprise me with their liberty and make me aware of my own. The university itself, if it is to be worthy of its traditions, must be an institution whose purposes are identified with the exercise of liberty, whose autonomy is based on public confidence in the use of that liberty.

My friends, it is your task to surprise yourselves, and us, with the education you succeed in inventing for your children. Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to receive further surprises. I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life — that is to say, in death itself."

On Health, Medicine, Life and Death

In 1974—5 Illich set his sights on the medical establishment which, in the now famous opening words of Medical Nemesis, had "become a major threat to health." The book upset and disturbed many a doctor, and caused many medical students to pause and seriously consider what they were doing.

"A professional and physician-based health care system which has grown beyond tolerable bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical changes which outweigh its potential benefits; it cannot but obscure the political conditions which render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and to shape his or her environment. The medical and para-medical monopoly over hygienic methodology and technology is a glaring example of the political misuse of scientific achievements to strengthen industrial rather than personal growth. Such medicine is but a device to convince those who are sick and tired of society that it is they who are ill, impotent and in need of technical repair."

Public health professional Alex Scott-Samuel comments:

"Ivan Illich was well ahead of his time in identifying and classifying the health hazards of the u2018medicalisation of society.’ …He used medicine as an example of his general thesis that industrialisation and bureaucracy were appropriating areas of life previously regarded as personal. In particular, he identified how drugs and other medical technologies remove personal responsibility for suffering and create dependence on health care, which itself has a wide range of hazardous side effects."

Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, in commenting that Illich’s radical polemic of 1975 has by 2002 become almost mainstream, adds:

"Health, argues Illich, is the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain and sickness. Technology can help, but modern medicine has gone too far — launching into a god-like battle to eradicate death, pain and sickness. In doing so, it turns people into consumers or objects, destroying their capacity for health….

Illich sees three levels of iatrogenesis (doctor-induced disease). Clinical iatrogenesis is the injury done to patients by ineffective, toxic and unsafe treatments… Illich points out that 7% of patients suffer injuries while hospitalised….. Social iatrogenesis results from the medicalisation of life. More and more of life’s problems are seen as amenable to medical intervention. Pharmaceutical companies develop expensive treatments for non-diseases…

Worse than all this.. is cultural iatrogenesis, the destruction of traditional ways of dealing with and making sense of death, pain and sickness. "A society’s image of death," argues Illich, "reveals the level of independence of its people, their personal relatedness, self-reliance, and aliveness." For Illich, ours is a morbid society…."

I believe Illich would have derived little satisfaction from the many facts of 21st-century life which provide ample confirmation of the validity of his theories: antibiotic-resistant strains of disease, hospital-induced illnesses and deaths, the barrage of Viagra and Cialis ads which plague e-mail inboxes and the studied media sanitisation of the death and long-term destruction being wrought in the Middle East, even on America’s own soldiers.

On the Rain Dance of Development

Illich fundamentally mistrusted the goals of infinite progress and economic development as implemented by aid agencies and the like, and especially ideas such as u2018sustainable development,’ which he felt was just one more mechanism of artificial control, leading mainly to a mushrooming of self-perpetuating international bureaucratic organizations.

Statistical arguments for the impossibility of achieving universal living standards based on the indices prevailing in the US and other u2018developed’ economies, let alone anything approximating to them, are liberally sprinkled throughout his work. He best summed up his views on this in 1981:

"Development based on high per capita energy quanta and intense professional care is the most pernicious of the West’s missionary efforts — a project guided by an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control over nature, and by an anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service. The hospitals that spew out the newborn and reabsorb the dying, the schools run to busy the unemployed before, between and after jobs, the apartment towers where people are stored between trips to the supermarkets, the highways connecting garages form a pattern tattooed into the landscape during the short development spree. These institutions, designed for lifelong bottle babies wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium, begin now to look as anomalous as cathedrals, albeit unredeemed by any aesthetic charm."

— Vernacular Values (Shadow Work) — 1981

Illich was also intensely critical of the notion of the u2018developed’ world’s institutions catering to u2018underdeveloped’ people’s needs. Implicitly he criticized the consensus which emerged in the US in the late 1950s and 1960s that "most people are needy, these needs give them rights, these rights translate into entitlements for care, and therefore impose duties on the rich and powerful." In his unpublished essay entitled u2018Needs’ (1990), he wrote:

"No matter where you travel, the landscape is recognizable; all over the world it is cluttered with cooling towers and parking lots, agribusiness and megacities. But now that development ends — earth was the wrong planet for this kind of building — the growth projects rapidly turn into ruins, junk among which we must learn to live. Twenty years ago, the consequences of growth worship already appeared u2018counterintuitive’; today, Time (magazine) publicizes them with apocalyptic cover stories. And no one knows how to live with depletion, pollution, the breakdown of various immunities, rising sea levels and annual wanderings of fugitives in the range of millions. Simply to address these issues, one is caught in the impossible dilemma of fostering either panic or cynicism. But even more difficult than to survive with these u2018environmental’ changes is the horror of living with the habits of needing which four decades of development have established. The needs that the rain dance of development kindled not only justified the despoliation and poisoning of the earth, they also acted on an even deeper level. They transmogrified human nature. They reshaped the mind and senses of homo sapiens into those of homo miserabilis. u2018Basic needs’ may be the most insidious legacy left behind by development."

Illich and the Philosophy of Technology

Carl Mitcham, perhaps the foremost philosopher of technology of our times, and former director of the Science-Technology-Society Program at Pennsylvania State University where Illich also taught in his later years, was an important influence on him and has written eloquently of their friendship. He also clarifies the nature of Illich’s thinking in the last decade of his life:

"He increasingly questioned the notions of environmental responsibility and the new ideology of life. Calls for environmental responsibility were, he argued, just another excuse for advancing a technological management of the world, and even pro-life movements gave too much ground to science, when they defined human life as originating with a conception that could not be directly experienced. What was at work in history was a counterproductivity writ large. [He] fingered [this] with a Latin phrase, corruptio optimi quae est pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst. Contemporary attempts to better the human condition ultimately undermined their own ends. In the face of such temptations, one must seek out new forms of asceticism, silence, and withdrawal."

Illich had first set out what he saw as the need for simpler, more balanced goals in Tools for Conviviality (1973). Contrary to those environmentalists who wished to claim him for themselves, Illich was rational and sober in his assessment:

"Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage, for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends."

In a key section of the book, Illich lays out his objection to "overprogramming," which occurs when centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point and require highly programmed operators and clients. In this situation, "more of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed" and "the combination of widely shared information and competence for using it, [which] is characteristic of society in which convivial tools prevail" is gradually lost. When this happens, people start to demand to be managed and skill-trained, defer to experts for solving their own troubles (and then too readily blame them when that policy inevitably fails), and lose interest in what goes on around them:

"Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed." — Silence is a Commons’ (1983)

Self-government and the just measure of proportionality

This theme of personal autonomy and a certain austere self-government runs like a silver thread through Illich’s work. I use u2018austere’ in the sense to which Illich refers in Tools for Conviviality, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas u2018austerity’ is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness.

Illich wrote, "I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships."

It was to this task, and to an exploration of the historical, religious and mythical beginnings of modern institutions, that I discovered Illich had devoted the latter part of his life. Far from disappearing, he had produced a substantial body of work after his period of celebrity in the early 1970s.

The Archaeologist of Modernity

In fact, he had embarked on a fantastic intellectual and spiritual journey through the history of ideas, going back into medieval times and even earlier, becoming a surprising u2018archaeologist of modernity’: one who, concerned with the long-term adverse effects on the human spirit of the underlying assumptions of our technocentric age, sought to trace the origins of the ideas which had brought that age into being, and which he had so sharply critiqued in his books.

Some have argued that in this journey back in time Illich was turning into a reactionary. I believe this is too simplistic an interpretation. His abiding concern, which is hardly even conservative, was that modern, man-made institutions, in alleviating or mending certain problems of life in the past such as disease and poverty, should not end up swamping the free human spirit and our relationships with each other. Such deadly control materializes when those institutions and the often well-meaning endeavours of their officers become ends in themselves, rather than means to a finer end.

Philia — The Gift of Loving Friendship

More than this, I also discovered the more intimate value of the later, less well-known material: the often intensely personal accounts of how Illich, through the practice of an involved, understanding and loving friendship, had inspired certain individuals to self-realization and self-reliance, against the hostile backdrop of what he himself called u2018managerial fascism’ — the bureaucratic-managerial culture which has increasingly taken the management of people’s lives away from them, entrusting it to state-approved and accredited educators, carers, and experts.

Illich would not have denied the sincerity of many of those professionals, but typically he would have said that (a) their ministrations were not for him, nor for any self-respecting, whole human being and (b) it was the most sincere and the best-intentioned who ended up doing the most harm — because of the generally unobserved perversity and ultimate irrationality of the underlying dynamics of the institutions in which they u2018serve.’

This subtle and invasive process, driving humanity to ever-increasing control and artificiality in life, ultimately leads many people (today increasingly defined as users or consumers of services rather than autonomous human beings) to a sincere belief that alienation — giving away control over the whole of their own lives to others — is not only in their best interests, but that they need and are entitled to it.

And so are the sheeple led to the slaughter.

Literacy and Communication

Illich’s sometime collaborator and friend Barry Sanders, co-author of ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, has described a revealing incident where Illich hammered home to an audience his wariness of technology and his concerns about the death of books and reading.

"At one point during a talk in Maine, in the midst of Ivan describing his mistrust of electronic technology and in particular his terror of e-mail, a young man leapt to his feet and shouted out, u2018But, Mr. Illich, don’t you want to communicate with us?’ Ivan immediately shouted back, u2018No. I have absolutely no desire to communicate with you. You may not interact with me, nor do I wish to be downloaded by you. I should like very much to talk to you, to stare at the tip of your nose, to embrace you. But to communicate — for that I have no desire.’ Illich taught one to be fearless — on stage or in the audience."

While Illich was no doubt right about how impersonal electronic communication can be, I think with a little bit of coaxing he might have come to see that a form of technology — the world wide web of the Internet — does have benefits in terms of creating and linking communities of like-minded individuals all over the world. Indeed he himself had used the expression u2018learning webs’ back in 1971, as a chapter title in Deschooling Society, in which he speculated u2018whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning.’ Even some of his very words are prescient:

"I intend to show that we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find the time and the will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to the world."

"What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching."

Deschooling Society — Chapter 6

Of course, as with any technological instrument, the Internet can be and is abused. Perverts and paedophiles can also meet online. The subsequent instinct to regulate and institutionalize it, however, in order to prevent such abuse, is fatal, and we should resist the understandable impulse, in this sphere of life as in every other, to satisfy our call for u2018something to be done about it’ by controlling and restricting the thing to death.

The solution, Illich would say, is all about proper discrimination, about proportion and the just measure of things: we should educate ourselves, our children and our students to use the tools and mechanisms available to us in a moderate, discriminating, wise and justly proportioned way, not allowing them to take us over and become ends in themselves, and always remaining vigilant of their tendency to create dependency and addiction. "The truth of beauty and goodness is not a matter of size, nor even of dimensions or intensity, but of proportion," he wrote in his 1997 essay, u2018The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr.’

Conclusion — A Bridge Too Far

Ivan Illich was a holy man and prophet. Like all prophets, in his life and work he attacked and punctured many manifestations of absurd human pretentiousness, for which he will never be forgiven — from the inflated, thoroughly modern, managerial-bureaucratic ego imbued with the virtuous notion of doing good to others through service to the state, to political and social engineers, to techno-geeks addicted in perpetuity to the latest wizardry.

He also inspired many others to live, to love, to find their calling and, again in his own words, to u2018cultivate conspiracy’ — in the Latin sense of conspirare, to breathe together in life — for which, in my estimation at least, he will never be forgotten.

Reading him can be electrifying and inspirational, yet the task of disentangling the many strands in his life and work, and the influence he has had, is like trying to comb the head of Medusa. Having had the presumption to embark on it and get this far, I beg the reader’s indulgence for my realization, in the end, that an essay such as this cannot do it justice.

So I strongly recommend you try out some of the links below. They lead to a large volume of available material on, and by, Ivan Illich. Because so much of it is warm, personal recollection, it not only fills the gaps which the rather threadbare official record has left, whether consciously or otherwise, but helps to show how the memory and soul of Ivan Illich lives on in the lives and work of his friends, colleagues and collaborators.

Ivan Illich, a man who belonged to many nations and yet to no particular nation, was a turbulent priest in the global village. He disturbed the sheep, who mostly just want a quiet life, offended the shepherds, who believe in their own righteous virtue and selflessness, and he set many a passer-by on fire.

The gnomes may have silenced him for a time, but more likely, it seems to me, he himself finally decided to retreat into a more personal sphere where, like Albert J. Nock before him, who also was once ordained a churchman (in the Episcopal Church) but gave it up, and also believed in u2018doing the right thing‘ for liberty, he could mingle and thrive in a community of scholars and the "fellowship of fine minds in all parts of the globe."

I am convinced that this fellowship and that community will not only keep the memory of Ivan Illich alive for a long time to come, but will continue to provide a place of conversation and encounter u2018in which others surprise me with their liberty and make me aware of my own.’

January 2, 2005

Links and References

Books by Ivan Illich — a Selection

• Celebration of Awareness (1970)
• Deschooling Society (1971)
• Tools for Conviviality (1973)
• Energy and Equity (1973)
• Medical Nemesis (1975)

Articles by Ivan Illich — a Selection

• Education without Schooling: How It Can be Done, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 15 N 12 — January 1971
• Vernacular Values, CoEvolution Quarterly — April 1980
• Silence is a Commons, CoEvolution Quarterly — Winter 1983
• The Shadow That the Future Throws (PDF), 1989
• Brave New Biocracy — Health Care from Womb to Tomb, NPQ Vol. 11 N 1 — Winter 1994
• Hospitality and Pain (PDF), 1987
• The Sad Loss of Gender, 1990
• Needs (PDF), 1990
• To Honor Jacques Ellul (PDF), 1993
• Death Undefeated, British Medical Journal 311, 1995
• Health, The Aisling Magazine — Summer 1995 (an extract from u2018Brave New Biocracy’ above)
• Text and University (PDF), 1991
• The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr, Resurgence 184 — 1997
• The Cultivation of Conspiracy (PDF), 1998

Articles and Books about Ivan Illich

• Anonymous, Ivan Illich, Online (WikiWiki Web) — undated
• Anonymous, Ivan Illich — Obituary, The Daily Telegraph — December 5, 2002
• Berger, Peter L., Remembering Ivan Illich, First Things, Issue 131 — March 2003
• Bishop, Jordan, Ivan Illich, 1926—2002 (PDF), The Karl Polanyi Institute, Montreal — undated
• Brown, Jerry, A Voice for Conviviality, Utne magazine — March-April 2003
• Carey, Christopher T., Ivan Illich Died for Your Sins!, Online (author’s website), April 2004
• Cox, Harvey: A Prophet, a Teacher, a Realistic Dreamer, National Catholic Reporter — December 20, 2002
• Daniels, Anthony, Ivan Illich, 1926—2002, The New Criterion Vol. 21 N 5 — January 2003
• Eyres, Harry, A Prophet of Conviviality, Resurgence, Issue 221 — 2003
• Falbel, Aaron, In Memoriam Ivan Illich, 1926—2002, Peacework (the journal of the New England section of the American Friends Service Committee) — February 2003
• Gavillet, André, Sciences Sociales: L’Héritage d’Ivan Illich, Domaine Public #1543 (Switzerland) — January 10, 2003 (in French)
• Hoinacki, Lee and Mitcham, Carl, The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection, State University of New York Press — July, 2002
• Hornedo, Braulio, Iván Illich. Hacia una sociedad convivencial, IvanIllich.org — Summer 2002 (in Spanish)
• Levin, Lowell, He lived his own Testimony (PDF), Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health #57 — 2003 (includes 3 other articles on Illich and medicine)
• Mitcham, Carl et al., Remembering Ivan Illich, Whole Earth — Spring 2003
• Pacquot, Thierry: Ivan Illich Obituary (PDF), Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2003
• Sanders, Barry, Illich and Literacy (PDF), Notes for a Lecture at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA., March 2004
• Scott-Samuel, Alex, Less Medicine, More Health: A Memoir of Ivan Illich, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health #57 — 2003
• Shannon, Christopher, The Death and Rebirth of Ivan Illich — A Call to Christian Conspiracy, Christianity Today (Books and Culture) Vol. 10 N 2 — March-April 2004
• Smith, Mark K., Ivan Illich, Online, last updated November 19, 2004
• Smith, Richard, Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health #57 — 2003
• Todd, Andrew and La Cecla, Franco: Ivan Illich — Obituary, The Guardian — December 9, 2002
• Zyp, Hank, Ivan Illich — Brilliant Critic of Western institutions — Witness — Obituary, Catholic New Times, May 2003

Related reading

• Botsford, David, Ivan Illich and the Deschooling Movement (PDF), The Libertarian Alliance (Educational Notes), 1993
• Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, 1954 and English translation, Vintage Books, New York — 1967.
• Falbel, Aaron, The Computer as a Convivial Tool, Mothering Magazine — 1990
• Falbel, Aaron, Learning? Yes, of course. Education? No, Thanks, Growing Without Schooling (#92) — 1996
• Farenga, Patrick, The Education Emperor Has No Clothes: Ideas For Nurturing A Culture Of Learning, CreativeLearningCommunities.org (online), 2000
• Gatto, John Taylor, The Underground History of American Education, Oxford Village Press, NY, 2001
• Gatto, John Taylor, How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why, Harper’s Magazine — September 2003
• Gottfried, Paul, After Liberalism, Princeton University Press — September 2001
• Guardian Lead Editorial, Medical Massacre, The Guardian — March 5, 2001
• Mitcham, Carl: Thinking Through Technology (Epilogue), University of Chicago Press — 1994
• Monke, Lowell, Confronting Technology — A Bibliography, Online, updated to May 2002
• Reimer, Everett, School is Dead — An Essay on Alternatives in Education, Penguin — 1971.
• Spring, Joel, A Primer of Libertarian Education, Black Rose Books — July 1998

Other Resources with links to more articles by and about Ivan Illich

• Thinking After Illich, University of Bremen — Friends of Ivan Illich web archive
• Ivan Illich — Writings on the Web, Preservenet.com

Appendix: Ivan Illich in his own words — a selection of quotes

On u2018environmental justice’:

"Everyone knows about the issues: people in the industrial system not only need, but also consume and use up, nature. Further, they leave behind, not only their s__t and dead bodies, but also poisonous mountains of ashes. Trash is not an occasional side effect, but an essential trait common to all forms of modern technology. Progress, then, might be better understood and gauged according to the ways nature is consumed rather than by looking at the increasing distance between wealth and poverty. Questions of social justice may actually be a distraction, hindering thought about real solutions. It’s true that the average American and European exhaust nature with an intensity hardly imaginable to the poor of the world. And those who gather to discuss such matters are altogether atypical — they are experts. Being such, the protection of nature obligates them to exploit nature — through sophisticated travel and meeting facilities — far beyond the public average. But these kinds of consideration may be a smokescreen."

~ The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr — 1997

On improvement schemes promoted by politicians:

"The aim to make life better — vulgarly understood as the politician’s promise to continually raise the standard of living — has played havoc with the search for the appropriate proportionate, harmonious or, plainly, good life. The quest for such a life is easily written off by some academic intellectuals as overly simplistic or even irresponsible. To cut through the verbiage of their prose, I see that only sober, unsentimental vernacular rhetoric can possibly demonstrate the ultimate character of complex mathematical modeling or related systems management. All such conceptual schemes are incompatible with the pursuit of faith and love. These abstract artefacts, typical of our time, are much more subtly and intimately powerful as obstacles to the understanding of revealed truth than any historic res bellica or res mechanica."

~ Philosophy, Artefacts, Friendship — 1996

On economic development and underdevelopment:

"No matter where you travel, the landscape is recognizable; all over the world it is cluttered with cooling towers and parking lots, agribusiness and megacities. But now that development ends — earth was the wrong planet for this kind of building — the growth projects rapidly turn into ruins, junk among which we must learn to live. Twenty years ago, the consequences of growth worship already appeared u2018counterintuitive’; today, Time (magazine) publicizes them with apocalyptic cover stories. And no one knows how to live with depletion, pollution, the breakdown of various immunities, rising sea levels and annual wanderings of fugitives in the range of millions. Simply to address these issues, one is caught in the impossible dilemma of fostering either panic or cynicism. But even more difficult than to survive with these u2018environmental’ changes is the horror of living with the habits of needing which four decades of development have established. The needs that the rain dance of development kindled not only justified the despoliation and poisoning of the earth, they also acted on an even deeper level. They transmogrified human nature. They reshaped the mind and senses of homo sapiens into those of homo miserabilis. u2018Basic needs’ may be the most insidious legacy left behind by development."

The idea of development entered Western political discourse through the Inaugural Address of Harry Truman in 1949. Truman sounded altogether credible when he advocated the need to intervene in foreign nations with u2018industrial progress’ in order to u2018raise the standard of living’ in the u2018underdeveloped areas.’ He did not mention revolution. His aim was to u2018lighten the burden of the poor.’ And this could be accomplished by u2018producing more food, more clothing, more materials for housing and more mechanical power.’ He and his advisors saw u2018greater production as the key to prosperity and peace.’

When Truman spoke, poverty — in terms of a market economy — was still the common lot of the overwhelming majority in the world. Surprisingly, a few nations appeared to have overcome this fate, thereby stimulating the desire in other to do the same. Truman’s common sense led him to believe that a universal law of progress was applicable, not only to isolated individuals or groups, but also to humanity at large through national economies. Thus he used the term u2018underdeveloped’ for collective social entities, and spoke of the need to create u2018an economic base’ capable of meeting u2018the expectations which the modern world has aroused’ in people all over the planet.

Twelve years later, Americans heard that u2018…people in huts and villages of half the globe struggle to break the bonds of mass misery [...] we pledge to help them to help themselves [..] we pledge this, not because we seek their votes, but because it is the right thing.’ Thus spoke John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address. The statement symbolized an emerging consensus in the US that most people are needy, these needs give them rights, these rights translate into entitlements for care, and therefore impose duties on the rich and powerful."

"Progress reveals its face when it is understood, basically, as a revolt against necessity."

~ Needs (unfinished manuscript) — 1990

"Development based on high per capita energy quanta and intense professional care is the most pernicious of the West’s missionary efforts — a project guided by an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control over nature, and by an anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service. The hospitals that spew out the newborn and reabsorb the dying, the schools run to busy the unemployed before, between and after jobs, the apartment towers where people are stored between trips to the supermarkets, the highways connecting garages form a pattern tattooed into the landscape during the short development spree. These institutions, designed for lifelong bottle babies wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium begin now to look as anomalous as cathedrals, albeit unredeemed by any aesthetic charm."

~ Vernacular Values (Shadow Work) — 1981

Later views on health and responsibility:

"Physicians are taught today to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. They have become the socially responsible professional manager not of a patient, but of a life from sperm to worm. Physicians have become the bureaucrats of the brave new biocracy that rules from womb to tomb."

"Health and responsibility have been made largely impossible from a technical point of view. This was not clear to me when I wrote Medical Nemesis, and perhaps was not yet the case at that time. In hindsight, it was a mistake to understand health as the quality of "survival," and as the "intensity of coping behavior."

Adaptation to the misanthropic genetic, climatic, chemical and cultural consequences of growth is now described as health. Neither the Galenic-Hippocratic representations of balance, nor the Enlightenment utopia of a right to "health and happiness," nor any Vedic or Chinese concepts of well-being, have anything to do with survival in a technical system.

"Health" as function, process, mode of communication; health as an orienting behavior which requires management — these belong with those post-industrial conjuring formulas which suggestively connote much, but denote nothing that can be grasped. And as soon as health is addressed, it has already turned into a sense-destroying pathogen, a member of a word family which Uwe Poerksen calls plastic words, word husks which one can wave around, making oneself important, but which can say or do nothing.

The situation is similar with responsibility, although to demonstrate this is much more difficult. In a world which worships an ontology of systems, ethical responsibility is reduced to a legitimizing formality. The poisoning of the world is not the result of an irresponsible decision, but rather of our individual presence, as when traveling by airplane or commuting on the freeway, in an unjustifiable web of interconnections. It would be politically nave, after health and responsibility have been made technically impossible, to somehow resurrect them through inclusion into a personal project; some kind of resistance is demanded.

Instead of brutal self-enforcement maxims, the new health requires the smooth integration of my immune system into a socio-economic world system. Being asked for responsibility is, when seen more clearly, a demand for the destruction of sense and self. And this proposed self-assignment to a system stands in stark contrast to suicide. It demands self-extinction in a world hostile to death.

Precisely because I favor those renunciations which an a-mortal society would label suicide, I must publicly expose the idealization of "healthy" self-integration.

To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity. Then to impose on them responsibility for their own health is to add baseness to the insult."

On Health — a manifesto for u2018hygienic autonomy’:

Let us look at the conditions of our households and communities, not at the quality of "health care" delivery; health is not a deliverable commodity and care does not come out of a system.

I demand certain liberties for those who would celebrate living rather than preserve "life":

• the liberty to declare myself sick;
• the liberty to refuse any and all medical treatment at any time;
• the liberty to take any drug or treatment of my own choosing; the
  liberty to be treated by the person of my choice, that is, by
  anyone in the community who feels called to the practice of
  healing, whether that person be an acupuncturist, a homeopathic
  physician, a neurosurgeon, an astrologer, a witch doctor, or
  someone else;
• the liberty to die without diagnosis.

I do not believe that countries need a national u2018health’ policy, something given to their citizens. Rather, the latter need the courageous virtue to face certain truths:

• we will never eliminate pain;
• we will not cure all disorders;
• we will certainly die.

Therefore, as sensible creatures, we must face the fact that the pursuit of health may be a sickening disorder. There are no scientific, technological solutions. There is the daily task of accepting the fragility and contingency of the human situation. There are reasonable limits which must be placed on conventional u2018health’ care. We urgently need to define anew what duties belong to us as persons, what pertains to our communities, what we relinquish to the state.

Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the path of the flattening out of human experience.

I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today, with equal importance, to the art of suffering, the art of dying.

~ Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb — 1994

On the paradox of atmosphere (in connection with the closing down of CIDOC in Cuernavaca in 1976)

[I am certain] that a hospitable atmosphere invites institutionalization by which it will be corrupted.

~ The Cultivation of Conspiracy — 1998

On gender:

"At the end of the 20th century, the modern myth of sexual equality has finally triumphed completely over the complementarity of gender, in which the plurality of cultures — distinct ways of living, dying and suffering — was rooted. The reign of vernacular gender marked a profoundly different mode of existence than what prevails under what I call the regime of economic sex. They are male/female dualities of a very different kind: Economic sex is the duality of one plus one, creating a coupling of exactly the same kind; gender is the duality of two parts that make a whole which is unique, novel, nonduplicable.

By u2018economic sex’ I mean the duality that stretches toward the illusory goal of economic, political, legal and social equality. Male and female are neutered economic agents, stripped of any quality other than the functions of consumer and worker.

By u2018complementary gender’ I mean the eminently local and time-bound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances that prevent them from saying, doing, desiring, or perceiving u2018the same thing.’ Together they create a whole which cannot be reduced to the sum of equal, merely interchangeable parts; a whole made of two hands, each of a different nature."

~ The Sad Loss of Gender — 1990

On the eco-systemic way of thinking (coercive environmentalism):

"I cannot conceive of a metaphysical ecology. I have neither the heart nor the brain to let a Green Khomeini become something tangible for me.

… in the ecological discourse, ecology is no longer the [ancient and time-honoured] correlation between living forms and their habitat, and between one another. Rather, it signifies a cybernetic system of separate entities that defines, regulates and sustains itself as a unity. Life is now equated with the system and is the abstract fetish that overshadows it.

The self-regulating system of life thus becomes the model for opposing industrial destruction.

…This idea of life leads to an administrative-intensive ecology. In an attempt to come to grips with Nemesis, man expands his measureless presumption to the management of the cosmos!

It is a very seductive idea; it simplifies everything; it makes us certain of life. In the name of nature, ecology idolizes Promethean man."

~ The Shadow that the Future Throws — 1989

On the u2018implosion of science fetishism’ in the university, which has caused "the collapse of literature into deconstructive fetishism, the collapse of biology into genetic engineering, the collapse of language studies into communications and, most critically, the vanishing of science into engineering."

On his explorations into the past:

"I cannot be careful enough in the choice of my words to avoid being misunderstood. …I speak about what has been, I try to describe what has been forgotten, because I hope that I may in some way recover its essence without giving up the enormous beauty and wealth of the bibliophilia of my nurture in youth and pleasure in my adult teaching. My argument is not a lamentation, but a cautionary tale. The new scribal product has decisively distanced later generations from lectio divina, which can only be practised today as a form of heroism by small circles of committed friends."

"Our academic faculties are split between those who would assign to the university the task of higher information management and facility of communications, and those who treasure the university mainly as the milieu of freedom allowing us to create niches of intense face-to-face inquiry, controversy and conversation."

~ Text and University — 1991

On speaking clearly and articulately, and not mumbling:

"In most cultures, we know that speech resulted from conversation embedded in everyday life, from listening to fights and lullabies, gossip, stories, and dreams. Even today, the majority of people in poor countries learn all their language skills without any paid tutorship, without any attempt whatsoever to teach them how to speak. And they learn to speak in a way that nowhere compares with the self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages in South America and Southeast Asia, always shocks me when I visit an American college. I feel sorrow for those students whom education has made tone deaf; they have lost the faculty for hearing the difference between the desiccated utterance of standard television English and the living speech of the unschooled. What else can I expect, though, from people who are not brought up at a mother’s breast, but on formula? — on tinned milk, if they are from poor families, and on a brew prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the enlightened? For people trained to choose between packaged formulas, mother’s breast appears as just one more option. And in the same way, for people who were intentionally taught to listen and to speak, untutored vernacular seems just like another, albeit less developed, model among many."

~ Vernacular Values (Shadow Work) — 1981

On death:

"The ability to die one’s own death depends on the depth of one’s embodiment. Medicalisation spelled dependence, not disembodiment. Disembodied people are those who now think of themselves as lives in managed states — like the RAM drive on their personal computer. Lives do not die; they break down. You can prepareto die — as a Stoic, Epicurean, or Christian. But the breakdown of life cannot be imagined as a forthcoming intransitive action. The end of life can only be postponed. And for many, this managed postponement has been lifelong; at death, it is an uninterrupted memory. They know that life began when their mother observed a foetus on the ultrasound screen. A life, they were then anobject of environmental, educational, and biomedical health policies. Today, it is not sophisticated terminal treatment but lifelong training in misplaced concreteness that is the major obstacle to a bittersweet acceptance of our precarious existence and subsequent readiness to prepare for our own death.

When this situation is widespread, one can justifiably speak of an amortal society. There are no dead around; only the memoryof lives that are not there. The ordinary person suffers from the inability to die. In an amortal society, the ability to die — that is, the ability to live — no longer depends on culture but on friendship. The old Mediterranean norm — that a wise person needs to acquire and treasure an amicus mortis, one who tells you the bitter truth and stays with you to the inexorable end — calls for revival. And I see no compelling reason why one who practises medicine could not also be a friend — even today.

~ Death Undefeated — 1995

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

I.
The Prolific Iconoclast

Professor
Noam Chomsky is a fierce critic of US wars and foreign policy,
and a brilliant analyst of the propaganda and psychological mechanisms
through which the liberal-bureaucratic establishment achieves
public consent and endorsement of the aggressive actions of the
state. For this he is intensely admired in some quarters, and
detested and reviled in others. Between the extremes of the uncritical
campus adulation and the vicious ad hominem abuse to which
he is sometimes subjected, there are genuine critiques to be made
and refreshing doses of the unvarnished truth to be found in
his
voluminous output over the years.

Chomsky
has published a large number of books dealing with world events
and American foreign policy, since his first collection of political
essays, American
Power and the New Mandarins, came out in 19691.
In this book he rightly and tellingly criticized the ostensibly
value-neutral approach of the managers of the United States’ war
on Vietnam and their apologists, pointing out that all statements
of action under declaredly objective and neutral intent are in
fact a power-serving and often cynical defense of the status quo
and of a particular, dominant ideology.

After
more than 30 years this book is still, for me, the quintessential
demolition job on the pretensions of social scientists and bureaucratic
state managers to moral neutrality in the analysis of foreign
policy and cost-effectiveness in its execution. They put noble
rhetoric to work to justify aggressive war-making against comparatively
defenseless peoples, involving experiments of unknown cost with
novel, lethal technologies and long-term destruction of essential
sources of life on earth. "Throughout
history," writes Chomsky in u2018Selective
Memory and a Dishonest Doctrine,’ "even the harshest
and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions
of noble intent — and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and
independence."

Chomsky’s
most recent work on world affairs, Hegemony
or Survival — America’s Quest for Global Dominance
(2003) necessarily and unsurprisingly deals with similar dispensing
of death and destruction in the name of the national security
state. By now, some 35 years later, it is on a larger, wider and
more existentially alarming scale, as weaponry has become more
lethal and sophisticated, and US war-fighting strategists dream
of instantly zapping potential earth-based foes from outer
space.

The
book is highly readable, and I recommend it for an up-to-the-minute,
consciously polemical review of US global policy in the light
of the 2002 National
Security Strategy. The only slight reservation I have about
Hegemony or Survival is that it is in places marred by
a tone of caustic irony. This jars with Chomsky’s life-long commitment
to an idealistic, humane conception of man’s freedom and dignity,
based on a positive conviction of innate human potential and creativity.

But
judge for yourself: excerpts are online at the author’s
own website, and supplementary material for the book is also
online in the 2003 Guerrilla
News Network interview and as part of the thought-provoking
American Empire
Project website developed by Tom
Engelhardt and Steve Fraser. This site also features the highly
recommended The
Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnston.

A
wealth of other Chomsky material from the intervening years can
also be found on the web: two of the best summaries of these resources
are the Chomsky Archive
(particularly the links to books,
both excerpted and complete) and the Noam
Chomsky Resources page.

My
own long-term favorites are two early books which encapsulate
the essence of Chomsky’s political writings. In addition, despite
the fact Chomsky has tended to downplay the connections between
his politics and his work on language, they help us to understand
what links his writings on politics, media and society to his
academic work in linguistics. They are the interesting slim volume
Problems
of Knowledge and Freedom (1972), and the 1973 collection,
For
Reasons of State.

II.
Knowledge and Freedom

Problems
of Knowledge and Freedom contains the Bertrand Russell Memorial
lectures which Chomsky delivered at Cambridge University in 1971,
the first entitled u2018On Interpreting the World,’ which deals with
language and meaning, and the second u2018On Changing the World,’
dealing with socio-political theory and foreign policy.

The
first of these lectures explored the themes of u2018How do we know
what we know, specifically in the context of language, and how
do we know what rules, or syntax, govern our use of that language.’
Chomsky writes, quoting Bertrand Russell:

If…man’s
u2018true life’ consists u2018in art and thought and love, in the creation
and contemplation of beauty and in the scientific understanding
of the world,’ if this is u2018the true glory of man,’ then it is
the intrinsic principles of mind that should be the object of
our awe and, if possible, our inquiry. In investigating some
of the most familiar achievements of human intelligence —
the ordinary use of language, for example — we are struck
at once by their creative character, by the character of free
creation within a system of rule.

~
Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, 1971,
page 46

This
is the Chomskyan guiding principle. Today, at 75, he maintains
with remarkable consistency the intellectually and morally compassionate
approach which this principle implies, coupled with, in my view,
a notable humility in the face of the infinite nature of the task
involved in the quest for knowledge and understanding of the world.
He himself has said that the philosophical predilection for innateness
is really nothing new, and places its origins several hundred
years back in time, with philosophers such as Descartes.

I
believe his overriding concern — the innate or hard-wired
element of Chomsky, if you like — has always been a curiosity
about the intrinsic workings of the human mind. The resulting
quest to critique process and understand structure lies at the
heart of his worldly activities in both linguistics and political
commentary. The political aspect came into play because of a strong,
but ultimately secondary, interest in freedom and what makes it
possible. This was derived from cultural, ethnic and educational
influences during his upbringing and youth in the 1930s and early
1940s.

Add
to this a perceived moral responsibility to make productive use
of the restless intellect with which he was endowed, a profound
bias against discrimination and coercive aggression in any form,
and a willingness to admit mistakes (or maybe sometimes not to),
and you can see why I am inclined ultimately to give him a place
in a long line of maddening, fearless, enquiring, dissenting rationalist
philosophers. Bertrand
Russell is his most immediate and conspicuous predecessor
in the great realm of philosophical enquiry and, perhaps not coincidentally,
in the ranks of anti-war activism.
A large
photograph of Russell is on the wall in Chomsky’s
office at MIT.

This
explanation also helps to account for the inconsistency and uncertainties
(some say the vacuum) in Chomsky’s output when it comes to matters
of political and economic substance. The fact is that as an individual
he doesn’t have the answers as to how to change the world (who
does?), even if he has thought a lot about it, and even though
has been able brilliantly to expose the humbug and hypocrisy underlying
academic and bureaucratic apologias for American and other imperial
adventures. What he said about Russell in his second 1971 lecture
applies as much to Chomsky himself in 2004:

"Russell’s
approach to this range of topics (libertarian socialism, the
power of the centralized state and how to achieve real freedom
or democracy) seems to me eminently reasonable, and —
after half a century of tragedy — as remote as ever from
any likelihood of achievement."

~
Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, page 53

III.
Linguistics and the Language Instinct

Chomsky
made his name in the field of linguistics, despite the fact that,
by his own admission, he came into the field almost by accident,
because he had a teacher with whom he shared political interests.
Many commentators pass over this area out of dumb respect for
specialization, or because they judge it too complex and arcane,
but in my opinion it needs to be generally understood. What follows
is a necessarily simplified, layman’s view of this topic, whereby
I hope to show that this field, and Chomsky’s contribution to
it, are not as mysterious as they are sometimes made out to be,
and that they are relevant to his worldview and to his political
writings.

In
his academic
work in linguistics, Chomsky developed the conviction of innate
human potential and creativity into an extensive theory. In place
of earlier, empirically-based theories, he developed and consolidated
the idea — more philosophical than linguistic — that
there are intrinsic (even biological) qualities of mind which
enable us to generate rules of grammar and use of language without
having first had to learn them all.

In
so doing, Chomsky countered the mechanistic conception that we
start out like a completely blank sheet of paper on which environmental
factors — instructors, social engineers, culture —
work their influences and totally shape the resulting human being.
This was forcefully put in his essay entitled u2018Psychology and
Ideology,’2 a rightly celebrated
demolition of then highly influential behaviorist arguments of
B. F. Skinner, whose best-known work was, notoriously, entitled
Beyond
Freedom and Dignity (1972).

Generative
grammar and the innateness of the
language instinct have established a strong institutional
presence, particularly in American higher education, but there
is by no means universal agreement on the merits and qualities
of Chomskyan theory in this domain. Debate continues as to what
exactly he did or did not draw from significant precursors such
as Zellig Harris,
and similar issues are raised in relation to Chomsky’s influence
— or lack of influence — on those who have come after
him. Some, like Geoffrey
Sampson of Sussex University, simply accuse Chomsky of building
his theories on sand. Many
other linguists have debated and contested the implications
of Chomsky’s work.

By
temperament and belief, I personally sympathize with the Chomskyan
preference for nativism, but I can see that empirical factors
like culture and environment clearly play a role, even in language
acquisition: this does not actually negate the potential or actual
truth of a theory of universal intrinsic generative capability
in the human mind. The truth is that after nearly 50 years of
the u2018Chomsky linguistics revolution,’ and several refinements
of the original theories, the key issues in this hundreds-of-years-old
debate (nature vs. nurture, innate capabilities vs. environmental
influences, a priori knowledge vs. empirical findings)
are as alive and unresolved as ever.

What
is more, the issues have acquired a new and even greater urgency
in an age when prospects of cloning and biological
engineering or control of human beings loom on the horizon,
potentially making a total mockery of human dignity and freedom.
I suspect Chomsky would say (and I would agree with him) that
this disturbing prospect makes it all the more important to fight
for and elucidate our intrinsic humanity, against those who would
enslave us by turning us all into machines with varying degrees
of responsiveness to external stimuli, or to instructions received
via subcutaneously implanted microchips.

Concern
with how human dignity and freedom are achieved, and maintained,
moves us into the realm of philosophy of mind and an understanding
of system and process. It is in these areas that the legacy of
Chomsky will, I believe, be substantial and enduring. Eminent
linguistician Sir John Lyons made this assessment in his 1970
study:

"What
(Chomsky) is saying is that the most important reason for being
interested in the scientific study of language, and more especially
in generative grammar, is that it has a contribution to make
to our understanding of mental processes."

~
John Lyons, Chomsky,
1970

IV.
The Analysis of Mental Processes, and Its Uses

Chomsky
is generally regarded as a man of the political left, and his
early and continuing sympathy with left-libertarian and anarchist
ideas still no doubt alienates those who reflexively place themselves
on the political right. Of late the liberal, humanitarian interventionist
left has turned against him as well, principally on account of
his anti-war views. Like many opponents of war, he has managed
to upset people of both right and left, and not surprisingly in
the post-9/11 looking-glass world, he is also dubbed anti-American
and anti-Israel.

Chomsky’s
views on Israel have not changed since the 1940s, but nevertheless
attract much hostility. Prior to 1948 he supported the idea of
forming a democratic state for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine,
rather than a Jewish state. This was not a mainstream position
among Zionist Jews, but was still considered acceptable in debate.
Today in the US, however, any such talk of a democratic secular
state is considered anti-Zionist, despite the fact it still has
adherents in Israel itself, where discussion of these issues is
probably now more candid and open than in the United States.

The
root cause of hostility to Chomsky does not lie in any labels
such as u2018left’ and u2018right,’ and apologists for government everywhere
consistently accuse the opponents of the state’s exercise of the
territorial monopoly of violence of being unpatriotic. It comes
down to his outstanding ability and undoubted willingness, in
the interest of speaking truth to power in the field of intervention
in other countries and the domination of subject peoples, to dissect
the psychological processes which underlie the propaganda and
the machinations of the apologists of state power — whatever
political or ethnic quadrant they hail from.

In
his article entitled "Does
Noam Chomsky Hate America?" (contrary to what you may
read elsewhere, Chomsky does not hate America), Anthony Gancarski
writes:

"Chomsky
would be the first to agree that, in terms of effecting real
political change, it doesn’t matter what we say. … [He adheres]
to the u2018investment theory’ of politics, which holds that all
meaningful, high-stakes political action amounts to battles
between ever-shifting u2018coalitions of investors competing to
control the state’ and its u2018monopoly of violence.’"

What
those coalitions of u2018investors’ (the gangs of power-seekers) and
their sycophants dislike, more than anything, is for their intentions
and their propaganda to be shown up for what they are: and in
my opinion Chomsky’s primary skill lies in doing just that, in
the psychological work of analyzing and unmasking underlying structures
and processes. Somewhat ironically in the light of his general
hostility to all
things postmodern, his innate ability to understand process
has made him a master of the deconstruction of language and texts,
enabling him to expose the unquestioned assumptions and inconsistencies
they contain. Because of his early anarchist sympathies, he has
exercised that skill above all in deconstructing the language
of the aggressive managerial state and its apologists in academia
and in the mass media.

It
is hardly surprising therefore that the mainstream media today
regard Chomsky as a dangerous man to have around for interviews
and debates. In my opinion he has attracted so much hostility
precisely because of his effectiveness in these psychological
domains, and because he applies a morally consistent approach
to the examination of disturbing foreign policy issues and events
which many would rather not know about, or simply cannot deal
with. Others reject that approach because it counters their particular
social or political agenda. On this latter topic, I strongly recommend
the indispensable 1988 book which he co-authored with Edward Herman,
Manufacturing
Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(revised edition 2002).

V.
Critiques of Chomsky

There
are many critiques of Chomsky, some of which are valuable. I have
discussed those which apply in the field of linguistics. Other
areas which I consider below are economics, politics (the differences
between u2018right’ and u2018left’ libertarianism in particular), and
conspiracy theory. Finally, I take a look at the so-called anti-Chomskyites,
who have developed very unpleasant forms of Chomsky-bashing into
a fully-fledged journalistic and online pastime.

V.i
Chomsky’s Economics

James
Ostrowski has made the best overall critique of the utopian nature
of Chomsky’s ideas in his January 2003 article entitled "Chomsky’s
Economics." He writes:

"Economics
requires study and systematic thinking about the implications
of action, choice, and ownership in a world of scarcity. It
is a science that delineates the limits of how far the human
mind can wander when thinking about what society can and should
be. This is one reason that intellectuals, even great ones,
take such pains to avoid studying economics, and instead latch
on to fantasies like socialism and syndicalism."

He
also quotes Chomsky as once having said, "There are supposed
to be laws of economics. I can’t understand them." This pinpoints
a seemingly willful ignorance when it comes to economic matters.
I do not find this surprising in the context of Chomsky’s intellectual
interests but, as the passage of time has demonstrated, it of
course limits the application of his ideas to the real world,
and to bringing about any substantive changes to that world.

V.ii
Chomsky and Libertarianism

First,
a brief explanation. The description u2018libertarian’ is claimed
by both u2018left-libertarians’ and u2018right-libertarians.’ Left-libertarians
and left-anarchists, including Chomsky, see libertarian socialism
(or non-aggressive, non-violent anarchism) as the true legacy
of classical liberalism, while anarcho-capitalists and libertarians
of the right, because of their focus on economics, tend to see
u2018libertarian socialism’ as a contradiction in terms: for them,
libertarian is diametrically opposed to collectivist, and socialism
is by definition collectivist.

Part
of the problem lies in what left and right define as u2018socialism.’
However, it is sufficient to understand that the tussles between
left and right over the legitimate use of the words u2018libertarian’
and u2018socialist’ tend to generate misunderstandings and to confuse
the issues. In fact, there is much common ground between left-
and right-libertarianism, principally the opposition to state
power and to war. Chomsky has acknowledged this in the past:

"I
find myself in substantial agreement with people who consider
themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues; and
for some years, was able to write only in their journals. And
I also admire their commitment to rationality — which
is rare…."

~
Noam Chomsky, in an interview
entitled "Noam Chomsky on Anarchism," December 1996

In
the same excerpt, however, Chomsky goes on to say, "…I do
not think they see the consequences of the doctrines they espouse,
or their profound moral failings." Here he is referring to
the alleged inability of anarcho-capitalists to admit that concentrations
of private power (as found, for example, in large American and
multinational corporations) can be as bad or worse than the coercive
power of the state. As far as Chomsky is concerned, this is the
additional and vital humanistic element in his preferred, leftist
form of anarchism, as opposed to right-anarchism or anarcho-capitalism.

The
problem with this approach, as critics have pointed out, is that
it produces seemingly arbitrary support for coercive or aggressive
state action, in situations where state action is deemed the lesser
of two evils. Chomsky believes that in such situations the state
can and should act as a restraining influence so as to check "the
ravages of an unconstrained corporate-capitalist system,"
a typical expression which he used in a recent
interview. It is for this reason that he has been called u2018the
coercive anarchist.’ Joe Peacott writes in "Chomsky’s
Statism":

"Chomsky
bases his support for the federal government on his contention
that private power wielded by corporations is much more dangerous
to people than state action, and that government can, and should,
protect its defenseless citizens against the depredations of
the capitalists. While the power of private corporations in
the United States is truly awesome and oppressive, this power
exists because these businesses are supported by the state,
a point that Chomsky concedes."

One
can see why Julian
Sanchez begins his article "Two Cheers for Chomskyism"
with the words, "Libertarians are not supposed to like Noam
Chomsky." Chomsky rather unthinkingly dismisses the (right-)libertarian
vision laid out in, for example, Murray Rothbard’s For
a New Liberty as "a world so full of hate that no
human being would want to live in it, … a world built on hatred,"
something "not even worth talking about … a special American
aberration, it’s not really serious." And yet, as Sanchez
points out, he is "a hell of a lot closer to [right-]libertarians
than he or his groupies dare admit." Is this not because
the ultimate objection is not to capital itself, but to the corporatism
under which some capitalists cozy up to the state, contriving
monopolies, subsidies, and other distortions of the true free
market, while others simply take possession of the apparatus and
offensive capability of the state to rig the markets in their
favor?

The
end-result of all this is that all one can say about Chomsky’s
form of politics with any certainty is that he is more often anti-state
than not. This is hardly satisfactory for anyone looking for a
clear and positive political stance, or a straw man to knock down,
but is comprehensible when you realize that Chomsky would probably
much rather not adopt any particular political stance, and I suspect
does not much care whether he is judged an anarchist or not, or
whether he understands the laws of economics: his ultimate interest
is in process and structure. Empirical facts are of course important
to him, but like any true polemicist, he is selective in his choice
of those facts. That he is still criticized for this is indicative
of the extent to which the belief in desirability of objective
neutrality and balance in socio-political analysis still prevails.
Chomsky implicitly condemns this idea in all his work: for him,
supposed objectivity and balance mask underlying ideologies of
dominance and discrimination.

V.iii
Chomsky and Conspiracy Theory

Another
common grouse against Chomsky is that he refuses to countenance
anything but the official versions of the stories of the JFK assassination
and 9/11 (and, it appears, Pearl
Harbor). One can argue that this is a political choice, but
I believe it is of a piece with his general preference for innateness
over empiricism, coupled with a need to ensure a minimum level
of personal security in his professional life, in other words
plain survival for one who is consistently challenging conventional
assumptions.

While
Chomsky at one time was apparently interested in investigating
the JFK assassination, he rejected this possibility and adopted
the official position that u2018a lone nut did it’, mainly on the
grounds that the investigation of all possible alternatives would
not lead anywhere useful. This position conveniently avoids conflict
with the powers that be — conflict that Chomsky would probably
see as unnecessary and fruitless. For this, he has been heavily
criticized. Michael Parenti writes in connection with the JFK
assassination:

"Chomsky
is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence
has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted
with the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered….

The
remarkable thing about [those] on the Left who attack the Kennedy
conspiracy findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the
critical investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly
pointed this out in exchanges with them and they never deny
it. They have not read any of the many studies by independent
researchers who implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the
president and in the even more protracted and extensive conspiracy
to cover up the murder. But this does not prevent them from
dismissing the conspiracy charge in the most general and unsubstantiated
terms."

~
Michael Parenti, Dirty
Truths, chapter 3

Others
see Chomsky’s refusal to delve into deeper truthseeking as part
of the u2018left
gatekeeper’ phenomenon, one of the manifestations of which
(beyond those cases involving fear of potential offense to financial
sponsors) is psychological denial. August West, writing in his
2002 article entitled "Left
Denial on 9/11" on why the left seems so eager to accept
official reality, states:

"Denial
lies at the heart of this unusual Left reaction. Many activists
have looked at the questions, thought about the answers for
a bit, and retreated in horror in the face of implications.
If the government had foreknowledge and let the attacks happen,
or worse, actually took part in facilitating them, then the
American state is far more vicious than they could have imagined.
And if so, what would happen to them should they vocalize this?
Needless to say, this would greatly raise the stakes of political
action well beyond the relatively superficial level that even
many leftists operate at."

They
are not alone. There is a widespread consciousness, even on the
Internet, that if as an
investigative journalist, for example, you stray beyond certain
limits, you are getting into the realm of serious risk to life
and limb.

V.iv
The Anti-Chomskyites

And
so I come to the anti-Chomskyites. Most of their material would
be unworthy of serious comment, were it not for the baneful influence
they wield on current public opinion in America and the venomous
nature of their personal attacks on Chomsky. Among these are the
material put out by former leftist and now neoconservative writer
David Horowitz, who accuses Chomsky of having a u2018sick
mind,’ well-known torture advocate Alan
Dershowitz, and Harvard professor Werner Cohn, who variously
tag Chomsky with the worn-out labels u2018anti-American’ and u2018anti-Semitic,’
and much else besides. Werner Cohn’s 1995 book, Partners
in Hate, additionally smears Chomsky with the charge of being
a Holocaust denier by association. These smears must be especially
ironic and galling for Chomsky who, as an adolescent, experienced
at first hand the genuine and truly lamentable anti-Jewish prejudice
which afflicted America in the 1930s.

David
Horowitz has recently co-edited a collection of Chomsky-clobbering
essays called "The
Anti-Chomsky Reader," a title designed to echo and counteract
the "Chomsky
Reader" of 1983. A weblog has also sprung up, called
"Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite,"
which advertises itself as being "dedicated to the permanent
and total discrediting of the work of Noam Chomsky and his fellow
travelers."

Some
of this criticism and commentary is abusive, and has little worth
other than to discredit those who convey it or to pander to the
prejudices of fellow warmongers. Most of it, however, is couched
in terms of the prevailing ideological medium of the new world
order: the war on terrorism. It does not take a genius to see
the origins and motivations of such dogmas. Unconditional, jingoistic
flag-wavers, of the u2018my country right or wrong’ variety, for whom
the only freedom of expression permitted is freedom of the kind
of speech they like, are among those who take most unkindly to
having their mental processes analyzed and their assumptions exposed,
whether those assumptions be hypocritical, as they often are,
or genuinely well-meaning. Unfortunately, in the latter case,
they may be even worse in their effects than the barefaced lies
and hypocrisy which are the order of the day in the politics of
the war on terrorism.

VI.
Conclusions

Libertarians
are sympathetic to the plight of intellectuals and academics who
are either denied tenure or ostracized for their opinions. Noam
Chomsky has been fortunate in that he is not in that situation,
and Julian Sanchez half-jokingly describes him as u2018the tenured
anarchist,’ but he has on occasion been close to much worse: as
biographer Robert Barsky notes, he was at one time threatened
with the possibility of lengthy jail terms, Richard Nixon had
him put on an enemies list, he had one of his books (Counter-revolutionary
Violence) effectively suppressed by its American publisher and,
despite the enormous world-wide audiences for his talks and books,
he has historically been distrusted and shunned by the US mainstream
media.

As
for all his worries and outbursts at the depredations of the capitalist
system Chomsky, as a purveyor of ideas and best-selling author
and, in the overblown blurb-speak of the New York Times, u2018arguably
the most important intellectual alive,’ is, dare I say it, the
living embodiment of a free market success story in book publishing.
People want to hear what he has to say.

The
fact remains that, because of the consistency of his anti-war
views, his unflinching commitment to rationality, and his unwillingness
to compromise, Chomsky is nonetheless a lonely intellectual3.
Long ago he was already aware of this:

"Since
the dominant voice in any society is that of the beneficiaries
of the status quo, the u2018alienated intellectual’ who tries to
pursue the normal path of honest enquiry — perhaps falling
into error on the way — and thus often finds himself challenging
the conventional wisdom, tends to be a lonely figure."

~
Noam Chomsky, "The Function of the University in a
Time of Crisis" in For Reasons of State (1973),
p. 91

Finally,
given the climate of fear which has come to prevail in the wake
of the events of September 11, 2001, it is no accident that Chomsky’s
polemics have been in much greater evidence over the last 3 years,
possibly more so than at any time since the late 1960s and the
end of the Vietnam war. As the deluge of pseudo-patriotic flotsam
generated by government fear-mongering for the war on terrorism
has risen, so Chomsky, despite his age, has re-emerged —
in print, on the net and via the spoken word — to identify
and demolish the myths of the national security state, and once
again to try to turn the tide
of propaganda and falsehood.

Additional
Links and Further Reading

• Robert
  F. Barsky, A
  Life of Dissent, MIT Press, 1997, and also online
• Gene Callahan,
  Private-Property
  Anarchists and Anarcho-Socialists: Can We Get Along? AntiState.com
  — January 22, 2003
• Kevin
  Carson, Once
  a Whore Always a Whore: Horowitz, Chomsky and the Neoconservative
  Ideology, AntiWar.com — July 23, 2002
• Guerrilla
  News Network, Hegemony
  or Survival — the GNN Chomsky Interview (2003)
• Chris
  Knight, Noam
  Chomsky: Politics or Science, What Next? Marxist discussion
  journal, Issue 26 (2003), pp. 17-29
• Peter
  Marshall, Demanding
  the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, especially chapter
  36 u2018The
  New Right and Anarcho-capitalism‘, London, Fontana Press,
  1993
• Wendy
  McElroy, Anarchism:
  Two Kinds, Mises. org — December 13, 1999
• Keith
  Preston, Conservatism
  is Not Enough, The Idyllic — July 24, 2003
• Keith
  Preston, Canning
  Reactionary Leftism, The Idyllic — September 21, 2003
• Mark R.,
  Where Noam will
  not roam: Chomsky’s limited dissent, online, undated
• Julian
  Sanchez, Is
  Capitalism Coercive?, online at author’s website, undated
• Joseph
  Stromberg, Social
  Science, Camelot and other evils of the American half-century,
  LewRockwell.com — July 11, 2002

Endnotes

1. This link
   goes to the recent (2002) re-edition of American
   Power and the New Mandarins, with foreword by Howard
   Zinn .
2. The essay
   ‘Psychology and Ideology’ is reproduced in Chomsky’s For
   Reasons of State (this link goes to a new edition, published
   in 2002).
3. Arundhati
   Roy wrote an interesting article around a year ago entitled
   “The
   Loneliness of Noam Chomsky.”

August
17, 2004

Richard
Wall (send him mail) has a
Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School
of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal,
where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard
Wall Archives

But OK, nobody’s perfect. Libertarians should be grateful that Michael Moore has learned some lessons from past mistakes and, for his movie Fahrenheit 911, which opens in the US on June 25, has apparently taken extra care to check and double-check his facts.

"Moore has done a wonderful thing" wrote Llewellyn H. Rockwell, commenting on Fahrenheit 911 in his article on May 22 entitled "Training Wheels and Fighting Words," and the anonymous author of a June 2 article entitled "Michael Moore gets distribution deal: just the ego-boost he needs" writes in similar vein:

"Let’s be clear, Michael Moore is undertaking a glorious assault on the Bush administration and the neo-conservative establishment — and the world owes him a huge debt of gratitude for working so hard to such a noble end…"

"And yet…" the same author goes on:

"And yet, the more one sees of him, the more one suspects that Moore’s primary obsession isn’t politics or war or truth or injustice, and the more one wonders whether his primary obsession might not actually be himself.

A more precise diagnosis might be that Michael Moore is suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder."

And he gracefully concludes:

…whether or not one accepts the diagnosis of Moore as someone suffering from acute Narcissistic Personality Disorder, one can certainly be glad that he is aiming the force of his personality in the right direction. Whyever he does what he does, let’s be glad that he does it."

There are dissenters in the ranks of liberty.

"I don’t care for Moore’s infantile version of liberalism, so I don’t read his books or watch his movies. … In the meantime, Moore is becoming what I so despise about many professional athletes — a multimillionaire whiner."

Thus Charley Reese in "Lots of Mistakes," on LewRockwell.com on May 11. A week later Thomas DiLorenzo’s May 19 piece "Moore-onomics" lambasted Moore’s leftist notions of responsibility:

"In the end, after misdiagnosing nearly every social and economic problem that he writes about, incorrectly blaming them on capitalism, Moore proposes bigger and bigger government and higher and higher taxation — socialism — as a sure-fire cure-all for America’s ills. Talk about Stupid White Men."

Turning yet again to the supposed cures for America’ ills, I agree with James Ostrowski when he writes in his article "Laughing With/At Michael Moore" of August 8 last year:

"In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore tries and fails to explain why America is so violent. I give Bowling for Columbine one thumb down and the other thumb up. (Can I do that?) I knew the movie’s flaws going in and discounted them. I had heard Moore exploited a frail Charleton Heston so when he did so, I was prepared. It was despicable, but on the plus side Michael Moore illustrates once again the mindset of the leftist. They love humanity but treat individual human beings badly."

Just so, and there are no excuses for treating individual human beings badly, however much you believe the outcomes of their upbringings and beliefs to be undesirable or wicked.

I leave the last words to Andrew Anthony in his long interview for the Observer just a month ago, well worth reading in full, which is entitled "Michael and me"

"Moore, the king-sized millionaire, walking testament to American consumption, is a master of making himself appear the little guy.

"I ask if he worked out how to be a better employer.

"’I just think I’m a better person,’ he says, his head bowed in theatrically solemn contemplation, ‘because I’m always struggling to be a better person. I’m a highly flawed individual, as we all are, and because I was raised by Jesuits, I’m constantly, “What is it about me and what I can do to be better?’

"It is doubtless to this mission that he refers in Stupid White Men, when he writes: ‘If you’re white, and you really want to help change things, why not start with yourself?’

"What I think, after my short time in his company, is that Moore is a man you would not want as an opponent, but also one you’d think twice about calling a friend. Though a talented film-maker and a clever showman, a populist who knows how to play the maverick, he is too often both big-headed and small-minded. In his desire to be seen as the decent man telling truth to power, he is too ready to blame those less powerful than himself for his shortcomings. He was justly revered in the Palais, but out on the street no one had a kind word to say about him. At Cannes, Moore may have been the star but he was not, it seems, the man of the people."

The moral of all this? Don’t miss Fahrenheit 911, take on board all that is good and right and timely about it, but resist the temptation, in the inevitable flood of celebrity adulation which will follow, to abandon all trace of critical discernment regarding its author. He is rightly acclaimed now, but that gives him no monopoly of wisdom.

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

And what does a Brit know about America? For some, it’s not so long ago that the hapless Governor Thomas Gage of Massachusetts was directing British fire at Americans, giving history a little push in the process. And according to others, the scheming Queen of England is still trying to recover sovereignty over the colonies of British North America which George III u2018carelessly lost’ in 1776. And what about all that post-9/11 talk of the u2018presidential’ Mr. Blair? Spare me, please: these are aberrations.

The answer lies in my having read, 30 years ago, u2018a great and seminal work,’ in Murray Rothbard’s words: Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy The State. The companion essay at the end of that book, Nock’s On Doing the Right Thing, had the merit for me of marrying the British moral compulsion to u2018do the right thing,’ or individual responsibility, with the principle of the inalienable right to liberty enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence.

The short answer, however, is that I once saw a fine movie called Blaze.

Most of the movies I watch are American. That’s a fact of life in the global multiplex, because most movies are American anyway. America rules the world, and has done for quite some time. For once, I am not talking about the empire, nor about the great leaders, nor even Pax Americana in its 21st-century version, also known as "pre-emptive war."

I’m talking about exports of popular culture (what used to be called subculture). The fast food. The soft drinks. Time management. The pharmaceuticals. The gasolina-guzzling SUV. Rock and roll. Madonna. The planes. The Boeing 707. The shuttle. The film stars. Natalie Wood. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Fred Astaire. The mafia. Frank Sinatra. The media. CNN. The X-Files. The directors. Robert Altman. Elia Kazan, a Greek from Constantinople who made wonderful movies but whom Hollywood did not have the grace to forgive for being the first to shop its communists to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Steven Spielberg. The software. This keyboard.

And Blaze Starr, the nom de guerre of a New Orleans stripper, born 1932 in a mountain cabin in West Virginia, where she was christened Fannie Belle Fleming, and lived to tell a tale in a part-fictional and romanticized Hollywood movie to which she herself contributed as production consultant and in which she has a small part1.

The main character in this movie is three-time Louisiana governor Earl K. Long (1895—1960), younger brother of Huey. The individualist, maverick appeal of the film lies in the fact that he is portrayed as being his own man, a latter-day Rhett Butler of politics, not giving a damn about what people thought, and being thoroughly unconventional (as well as what the British would call u2018very naughty’) in an office where it was the done thing to be sober, correct and u2018proper.’

The movie, which has an excellent, well-constructed script, had me laughing out loud at the wit and wisdom of "Uncle Earl," excellently played by that gentleman-prince of actors, Paul Newman. It seems to me absolutely fitting — and a confirmation that the movie must have got at least something right — that Winnfield, Louisiana, the Long birthplace where it was partially filmed, has a sign on the side of an old building in the town which says, "Welcome, Paul Newman."

Where politics is concerned, let alone entertainment and sexual dalliance, one should not expect honest truth. This movie thoroughly mixes politics with the scandalous liaison between state governor and stripper. Indeed it plays on the analogy between political power and sexual conquest which Oliver Stone used to such good effect in his excellent u2018dirty presidency’ movie, Nixon, in which he has Chairman Mao ask Henry Kissinger, who’s on the state visit to China with the president, what his secret is for having so many women. Kissinger replies that power is a great aphrodisiac, and Mao lewdly chuckles.

In Blaze, Earl Long is shown in the last year of his life, in his tender affair with Blaze, and how it affects and is affected by politics. His colorful escapades into the glittering New Orleans nightlife (in our first glimpse of him as he gets out of his governor’s car on Bourbon Street we hear that "it’s a fine night for prowlin’"), alternate with his worry that he is going to lose the election for governor, and that if he does so his baby will no longer love him because he will become a has-been. Blaze tries to reassure him, telling him that he will still have status: he will be, after all, an ex-governor. Earl whips back in an instant, "I don’t want to be an ex-governor. I ain’t ex-governor material."

The popular and media image of Earl Long (the u2018crazy governor’) has not surprisingly focused to excess on this final year, 1959-1960, a time which was traumatic for him because it was when one of the main and most disturbing events of his life occurred — his breakdown and temporary committal. The movie, good as it is in my opinion, only strengthens this focus, and it has also come in for some flak for not telling things exactly as they were.

It never ceases to amaze me that some people expect objective veracity in a movie (as if such a thing were indeed possible), and get upset or angry when a constructive fiction is used to portray an aspect of character, a revealing element of a story, or a timeless philosophical or moral truth which is not in accordance with their own particular interpretation, or the way they would like the world to be.

I can accept that those who knew and loved or hated the real life people portrayed in a film, and even those who have researched them, will find things which can be faulted. But surely, they are not looking at the movie on the right terms. All art, including cinema, is interpretation. Even biography, however faithful to the historical record and possibly to the personality of the man or woman whose life it describes, is not the same as the real thing.

Yet it is a sign of the times that those who criticize a movie for distortion, for not being true to life, or for being in some way dangerous or unfair, seem unable to grant that viewers have powers of discrimination and judgment of their own, or to make a critique of the interpretation rather than of the so-called facts or events portrayed.

To all those I say, you have a choice: don’t watch it. But freedom in this context means letting others watch it and allowing them to make up their own minds, and accepting that some will like it and some will not.

Intelligent criticism will also perceive and accept that, whatever the flaws in a work of art, it almost invariably has something to say about the life and times of the period in which it is made (much more than about the period which it describes).

In any event, the good and bad opinions of Blaze mean that it passes my u2018diversity test.’ That is to say, it meets Oscar Wilde’s dictum that "diversity of opinion about a work of art means that it is new, complex and vital." It is above all a movie which pays tribute to a sense of unabashed fun, not least in the spirited performance by Lolita Davidovitch as Blaze and in Paul Newman’s bravura performance as Earl — an epic and exuberant portrayal of "a scoundrel of a politician that y’all are gonna love," as one reviewer puts it.

I also feel that a great deal of care has gone into the detail. At key points we see evocative images, photographs on the wall or TV images: in one scene, Earl pours from a bottle of wine with the label "Dixie" on it. In a scene in Blaze’s room, a black and white TV shows a headshot of JFK campaigning. In the log cabin where Blaze (Belle) was born, when she goes to visit her mother, FDR’s portrait hangs (albeit that he is by then long dead). In the state capitol and elsewhere, Dwight Eisenhower’s portrait oversees the proceedings. Finally, when Blaze first visits the governor’s mansion, she sees a photo on the wall, and asks Earl who it is:

Earl replies: "That’s my brother Huey. A great man. Could have been president of the United States."

When Blaze asks why he wasn’t, Earl says, "Back in 1935 he ran into a small problem…"

Blaze: "What small problem?"

Earl: "A bullet. God rest his soul."

It is salutary to remember that by 1959 Earl Long, who at one time assisted the campaigns of his more flamboyant elder brother, had been around as a politician for a very long time. He first came to power as lieutenant governor of Louisiana in 1936, a year after Huey Long’s assassination. He then effectively inherited the Long political machine which Huey had methodically built up. In 1939 he assumed the governorship for a short time when his scandal-ridden predecessor resigned. Although defeated for re-election in 1940, he twice again served as governor, from 1948 to 1952 and from 1956 to 1960. The Louisiana Secretary of State’s website has a useful small summary entry on the political accomplishments of his career, part of a complete historical series on the governors of Louisiana.

In an absorbing article, which I strongly recommend, Webb Williams describes how most people have swept aside those political accomplishments because of the events of that final year, specifically the breakdown and the affair. He quotes noted author and New Orleans columnist Jason Berry’s distillation of the whole ironic story:

"Here was a man who had a psychotic breakdown on the floor of the Louisiana legislature, bounced between two mental hospitals in less than a month, got himself sprung out — only to cavort with a young woman who literally symbolized sin. That man then announced his candidacy for Congress! And he WON! He won the House seat in a hard-fought election during the dog days of the summer of 1960, in the middle of Louisiana, the Pentecostal heartlands! Not until Bill Clinton survived impeachment would a politician prevail over such epic damage in the national media, where headlines had called Earl u2018the crazy governor.’"

Jason Berry has also written an interesting account of the background to his play "Earl Long in Purgatory" in which he implies that, in the final analysis, Long was a foretaste of things (politicians) to come: "With the passage of time I have come to see Earl Long not as an aberration but a precursor, a forerunner casting a long weird light on the state of things to come." In another article, entitled "Long remembered," he has evoked the memories of Jay Chevalier, a composer and bandleader who played on the hustings in the 1960 election for the governorship, in which Long was defeated, and also took a small part in Blaze. The unanimous opinion of those who knew and have researched Earl Long carefully is that he was not crazy, but was under severe pressure and possibly suffering at times from an illness which today might well be cured.

Official or media labeling of someone as crazy (or out on a limb, or having base motives, or being a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, and more) can so easily be used as a way of stifling genuine and necessary dissent, or that which no-one wants to hear, particularly where whistleblowers are involved.

This is the understated lesson for our own times, which Berry’s comment hints at. Earl’s opponents’ used his liaison to try bring him down — attacking both his then controversial political program, which included civil rights for blacks, and his own integrity — by dubbing him crazy (and a few other choice politically incorrect epithets) and therefore unfit to govern. Perhaps what they truly resented was not even his avowed eccentricity, but rather his typically Longian, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is attitude, and acute ear for sanctimonious heifer dust. Or maybe the fact that most often he was having a good time and they were not.

We hear in a recording played after the movie’s end-titles a simple and appropriate epitaph in Earl Long’s own words: "I’ve got one language, and that’s the truth." Even though we know that Earl can be a shameless political twister, we are still prepared to grant that his really is the language of truth.

Williams goes on to say, in connection with the matter of the truth or falsehood of the characters and events portrayed in the movie:

Long was never really a ladies’ man, but after Blanche (his estranged wife) had him committed in Galveston and Mandeville, he openly flaunted his friendship with Blaze. It seems, however, that he was more out to embarrass his wife than anything else. Longtime friend, Senator B.B. "Sixty" Rayburn of Washington Parish, doubted that Earl was in love with the woman. "I think he just had his problems and, evidently, Blaze was real nice to him — kindness helps anyone when they’re kinda’ down and out." Her book [on which the movie is based] included a disclaimer that it was a "novel," which by definition is a work of fiction.

Strangely enough, I feel that the movie, despite playing the affair with Blaze for all it is worth, does bear this out. Sure, there is the humorous side to it, at its best in the memorable scene where Earl, self-described as "the most powerful man in the South," having just been driving around the countryside garnering votes in the governor’s automobile with its personalized number plate (LA-1 in bold red letters on a white ground), makes effective use of his cowboy boots, keeping them on while in bed with Blaze, for "better traction."

But almost immediately we are treated to a tenderness in Blaze’s character which goes beyond the mere raunchiness. In one of many circular references which are a hallmark of this film, that same tenderness is echoed in a slushy scene near the end in which, standing atop the Baton Rouge state capitol built at Huey Long’s command nearly 30 years before, he offers Blaze an engagement ring.

That tenderness appears again in the closing hotel room scenes, after Earl, in an amazing political comeback, has won election to Congress, to the seat which he is destined never to occupy because he dies a week after the election. Finally, the political message meshes with the personal as we see the lonely figure of Blaze, all dressed in black, climb the vast steps of the capitol building to pay her last respects. Earl is lying there in state in the Art Deco marble halls — fittingly almost imperial in their dynastic pomp and splendor.

In the US, this movie is being re-released on DVD in April 2004. I strongly recommend it as a breath of subversive fresh air and a source of delightful, irreverent one-liners, and not least for the vicarious satisfaction of hearing Newman growling Earl’s abuse at "those bums in Washington." And for the soundtrack too: in the end-titles, Randy Newman sings his haunting song "Louisiana 1927" as the camera pans away from the top of the capitol building over the water and an almost unending horizon:

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tyrin’ to wash us away…

This article is Part 2 in a series on "The Longs of Louisiana." Part 1 was published on LewRockwell.com in December 2003 and is entitled The Rebellious Spirit of Huey Long.

Earl K. Long Bibliography

Kindly supplied by Michael S. Martin, Assistant Professor of History, University of Louisiana-Lafayette

• Kurtz, Michael L., and Morgan D. Peoples. Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics. Southern Biography Series. Ed. William J. Cooper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
• Liebling, A. J. The Earl of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.
• McGuire, Jack B. Uncle Earl Deserved Better. New Orleans: Good Reading Books, 1995.

Links referenced in this article

• Jason Berry, In Search of Earl Long, Gambit Weekly (New Orleans), June 2002
• Jason Berry, Long Remembered, Gambit Weekly (New Orleans), March 2003
• Shea Booten, Blaze Starr, A Stripper from the Past
• Gail R. Chaddock, A Bush Vision of Pax Americana, Christian Science Monitor, September 2002
• Victor Fleming, Sam Wood (directors), Gone with the Wind, Warner, 1939
• Who is Fred Astaire, and why is he so important, FredAstaire.net
• Mel Gibson (director), The Passion of the Christ, 2004
• Don Hazen, Bushspeak, Alternet.org, June 5, 2001
• Elia Kazan, Filmography, Internet Movie Database
• Logitech Keyboards
• Earl K. Long — Rantin’, Ravin’, & Singin’ — Audio Clips (MP3 format)
• Microsoft Windows
• T S Mills, North American Colonies to 1783, Military History at Regiments.org, 1996
• Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy The State, Free Life Editions, 1973 (1935)
• Secretary of State, Louisiana, Earl Long
• Ron Shelton (director), Blaze, Touchstone Pictures, 1989
• Blaze Starr and Huey Perry, My Life as told by Huey Perry, Pocket Books, 1989
• Oliver Stone (director), Nixon, Walt Disney Pictures, 1995
• Arthur Bernon Tourtelot, Lexington and Concord, W.W. Norton & Company, 1963
• Lawrence M. Vance, The Bases of Empire, LewRockwell.com, March 2004
• Richard Wall, The Rebellious Spirit of Huey Long, LewRockwell.com — December 2003
• Webb Williams, Uncle Earl — Crazy About the Northshore, Inside Northside magazine, Oct-Nov. 2003

No commercial endorsement of any product or service is hereby expressed or implied.

Other Links and References

• Smiley Anders, Uncle Earl’s antics recalled in insider’s book, The Advocate, July 2003
• Jim Beam, Stage production has Uncle Earl stuck in purgatory, AmericanPress.com, April 2003
• Joe Bob Briggs, A Review of Blaze Starr’s Book, 2002
• Greggory E. Davies, biographical note on Earl Long, Winnfield Parish
• Pees a Wee Galatas, Earl K. Long — Rantin’, Ravin’, & Singin’, undated
• Michael S. Martin, "Earl K. Long and the Media, May-July, 1959," in The Age of the Longs, 1928—1960, Vol. VIII of the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2001.
• Michael S. Martin, Earl K. Long and the Media, May 26—July 21, 1959, Louisiana History 40 (Spring 1999).
• Annette Womack, reprint of 1938 article on Earl Long, in Winn Parish Enterprise-News-American, 1998

1. The part played by the real Blaze Starr is that of a character called Lily. Perhaps it is seeing too much coincidence in the name to note that Blazing Star is the name of a flower of the lily family, which grows in the American grasslands.

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

~ Political Science professor Kenneth Minogue,
writing in The Times Literary Supplement (UK), January 1999

1. The Science of Society

Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline — sociology — as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals. Strictly speaking, however, psychology is the study of the mind.

At the same time, the profound influence of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902—1979), who condemned utilitarianism and individualism1 and sought to create a firm barrier between the disciplines of sociology and economics, ensured that many of those same academic sociologists have suffered from a truly woeful inability to understand fundamental economic principles.

This policy of seeking separation in a holistic doctrine was always an attempt at self-justification for a discipline which many felt had no core, even some of its own practitioners. It was a defense both against those who would argue that sociology, precisely because it had no core, was not an academic discipline worthy of the name, or had nothing to study because, in Margaret Thatcher’s so-1980s phrase, “there is no such thing as society,” and against the charge that, if sociology was to amount to anything at all, it had to be effectively “the study of everything.”

I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification. But please bear with me, as we will presently come to the more inspiring realm of liberty, and perhaps to a word or two of wisdom.

None of the navel-gazing and nitpicking over method and raison d’être which goes on in social science faculties the world over would matter, were it not for the fact that social scientists are commonly drafted into the service of the state, and rewarded by it for coming up with solutions which are based on removing the responsibility for life’s decisions from the individual and endowing an interest group or lobby (often the ever-expanding bureaucracy) with the powers to make those decisions on the individual’s behalf.

It is hardly surprising that these are generally solutions based on the “stronger-doses-of-the-same-medicine” approach: there are vested interests at stake in perpetuating the client-provider relationship inherent to the protection culture, and in reinforcing the bureaucrat’s belief in his identity and role as the "public servant" who fixes the very problems which the sociologists have often themselves been subsidized by government to identify. More often than not such problems are the result of earlier and excessive bureaucratic intervention in economic and political life

Conservatives have for these reasons often opposed the very idea and discipline of sociology, accusing it of filling the universities with leftists. I would say the bigger problem for liberty is that Parsonian structuralist sociology bred a generation of group-minded statists: both in methodology and outcomes, that sociology has tended to holism (seeing something as always being bigger than the sum of its parts) and collectivism (the principle of giving the group priority over the individual).

2. Agency and Manipulation

An unfortunate corollary of this emphasis on "the science of society" is the conscious and subconscious tendency to attribute the power of agency to collective entities. This is an occupational hazard also for practitioners of the intermediate discipline of social psychology, which studies and interprets things like the behavior of crowds and the nature of prejudice.

In their eagerness to establish and analyze “social facts”2 and, like Talcott Parsons, to attribute to “social forces” the power to explain human action, many social scientists have wrongly ascribed the human characteristics of volition, purpose and action to states, and then to organizations and supra-national bodies like the European Union or the United Nations.

Such thinking is also found in the cultivated artifices of what the sociologists call the "political entrepreneurs" — those who seek to manipulate "identity politics" by getting individuals to align themselves with the aims and interests of the particular group — occupation, industry, sector, political party, ethnicity, religion, sect, gender, nationality — which those propagandists or lobbyists of the cause in question are representing or promoting for their particular purposes (usually influence, control and state funding, but in the worst case also conquest and extermination).

In my opinion, the word entrepreneur is misused here: they should more accurately be dubbed political manipulators. It is the groupthink manipulators who knowingly give us the pat phrases of war propaganda like “We have liberated Iraq” and “We’re going to smoke him out,” in the process eradicating individual identity and responsibility and replacing them with the mass-minded anonymity of the collective:

“When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country — when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis” — we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors.”

~ Parker T. Moon, Imperialism and World Politics, 1947

3. Methodological Individualism Battles the Groupist Mindset

There is, in the more ancient disciplines of political economy and philosophy of knowledge, an ample literature of methodological individualism, refuting these forms of collectivist thinking and reminding us that only individual human beings can have those characteristics of agency.

It is far beyond my present task and intention to review all that literature: in the Austrian school alone, there is a long and distinguished inheritance of methodological individualism stretching back through Rothbard and Mises to Carl Menger. But I would like to reserve a special mention for Lorenzo Infantino’s Individualism in Modern Thought: From Adam Smith to Hayek3.

This book has been trenchantly reviewed in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (Vol. 2 n 1 — Spring 1999) by Kenneth Macintosh, who also reminds us that “before adopting the term ‘praxeology’ to designate the most fundamental of the sciences of human action,” Ludwig von Mises himself had referred to this discipline as “sociology.” He dropped it in favour of praxeology only because the term sociology had been adopted by others, like Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, who used it to describe a completely divergent methodology and theoretical outlook. Professor Infantino is also mentioned in a concise and elegant article by Piero Vernaglione (which is online, in Italian, undated).

For the rest, methodological individualism is admirably served by this eloquent quote from Butler Shaffer’s article entitled The Individual and the Collective, “Only the individual is able to generate thoughts, to be creative, to reproduce, to sense pleasure, to love, and to have transcendent experiences,” and by two key passages from Ludwig von Mises:

“First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. A collective operates always through the intermediary of one or several individuals whose actions are related to the collective as a secondary source. It is the meaning which the acting individuals and all those who are touched by their action attribute to an action, that determines its character. The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning (the interpretation or opinion) of those concerned that discerns in the hangman’s action an action of the state.”

~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 44

“The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus. On the other hand the application of the basic ideas of collectivism cannot result in anything but social disintegration and the perpetuation of armed conflict. … every variety of collectivism promises eternal peace starting with the day of its own decisive victory…”

~ Human Action, p. 152

To read Mises is frequently to find a statement of the blindingly obvious, which yet seems to have little force or persuasiveness in the mainstream of public opinion and accepted scholarship. This is perhaps testimony to the power and reach, and also the easy comfort, of the groupist mindset. But it is also testimony to the seemingly obvious fact that the way you approach a subject influences the conclusions you are going to reach about it: as William H. Peterson has so admirably put it in his autobiographical article Discovering Mises: A Turning Point, if you ask the wrong questions, it’s fairly certain you will get the wrong answers.

It is when people are comfortable, complacent in their beliefs, and above all feel that the presence of more powerful forces absolves them of all personal responsibility for what happens and even for their own actions, that the debate on individualism and groupism heats up: the groupists then start to attribute only base, narcissistic and merely egotistical or self-interested motives to those of libertarian temperament who think, act and interpret the world from a morally principled individualist standpoint. In doing so they set up a political straw man which they can later easily knock down.

On the opposite side, some individualists allow themselves to get angry at the elements which constrain them, especially moral authority. In between we find not just the bureaucrats and the well-intentioned: worst of all are the self-righteous busybodies, many of them absolutely and irritatingly sincere, who would interfere in our lives and tell us how to think and behave on every issue under the sun.

Typical of the first, dismissive attitude is this comment by Thomas Fleming:

“[For libertarians] only self-seeking individuals exist, and the “common good” is a term invented by fascist oppressors. This is the only answer they have for any social question, from drugs to pornography to fast food…. My advice to them is to find another planet where they can all live in solitary caves, where they can snort coke and watch porn videos to their hearts content. Their ideas are irrelevant, not just to present circumstances, but to the human condition.”

~ Thomas Fleming, “Libertarian u2018Liberties,’ The Rights of The u2018Right,’ and Other Absurdities” in Chronicles Magazine — June 4, 2002

Typical of the second attitude is the "leave-me-alone," "anything goes," value-relative individualist, who is a libertine or life-style libertarian rather than a principled one. Pierre Lemieux, in an interesting article entitled “The Individualist Sentiment,” has called this type the narcissistic individualist: this attitude, which is not true libertarianism, does indeed approximate to that of egotistical self-centeredness and atomism which the opponents and belittlers of libertarianism so often criticize.

Also typical is the libertarian interventionist, whom Joseph Stromberg has christened the “liberventionist” and Isabel Paterson the “humanitarian with the guillotine” — he who, in a startling contradiction in terms and a total abandonment of principle, would use coercion and pre-emptive war to enforce a good intention — or, to put it more graphically, to enforce a variant of affirmative action with depleted uranium bombs.

Mises again should have the last word on this:

“According to the doctrines of universalism, …holism, collectivism, … society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends…. In order to safeguard the flowering and further development of society it becomes necessary to master the selfishness of the individuals and to compel them to sacrifice their egoistic designs to the benefit of society.

This is the philosophy which has characterised from time immemorial the creeds of primitive tribes. It has been an element in all religious teachings. Man is bound to comply with the law issued by a superhuman power and to obey the authorities which this power has entrusted with the enforcement of the law.”

~ Human Action, p.145-6

4. Principled Liberty, not License

The fact is, as Alexis De Tocqueville and Ludwig von Mises both remind us, it is axiomatic that if humanity is to enjoy anything more than the life of Mises’ primitive tribe, then there is such a thing as society, and living in society involves sacrifices and constraints on individual behavior. Such constraints are properly the province, not of the coercion of one group or nation by another, nor of the mass by an elite, nor of government (whether said to be acting on behalf of an oppressed minority, for a supposed common good, or even for a noble concept), but rather of the force of moral law.

It is the customary terminology of political debate, and the identity politics practiced within it by the manipulators, allied to the sheep-like willingness of ordinary people to let themselves be distracted or carried along, which obscures these axiomatic or praxeological realities:

Of course, there will always be individuals and groups of individuals whose intellect is so narrow that they cannot grasp the benefits which social cooperation brings them. There are others whose moral strength and will power are so weak that they cannot resist the temptation to strive for an ephemeral advantage by actions detrimental to the smooth functioning of the social system. For the adjustment of the individual to the requirements of social cooperation demands sacrifices. These are, it is true, only temporary and apparent sacrifices, as they are more than compensated for by the incomparably greater advantages which living in society provides….

~ Human Action, p. 148

True liberty therefore, which is a responsible liberty, is not license:

“In the liberal opinion the aim of the moral law is to impel individuals to adjust their conduct to the requirements of life in society, to abstain from all acts detrimental to the preservation of peaceful social cooperation and to the improvement of inter-human relations…. Liberalism is rationalistic. It maintains that it is possible to convince the immense majority that peaceful cooperation within the framework of society better serves their rightly understood interests than mutual battling and social disintegration. It has full confidence in man’s reason.”

~ Human Action, p. 157

5. The Mechanisms and Consequences of Groupism

Fanatics and extremists of all stripes would say, and have forever said, that such belief in rational choice is hopelessly idealistic and “irrelevant to the human condition,” especially today, “post-9/11,” an era I have heard called the age of theocratic terrorism. But such prejudiced labeling serves merely to describe the means of coercion and control. The end has always been the same: to plunder and control "the other," while all the while putting it about that the plunder is really in the best interests of the plundered.

I am one who fights such pessimism, deception and marginalization of the other. I write this because I partake of the passionate anger which animates the style and content of true libertarian and anti-war websites and publications, and the revulsion at the calculated cultivation of the groupist sentiment, operationalized in engines of inter-ethnic aggression and war. This is a struggle to enable the spirit of human liberty to flourish against a darkening backdrop of growing authoritarianism, in which all that is offered by the mouthpieces of the powers that be (the criminal gangs if you prefer) is endless conflict, war and decline — personal decline, and therefore societal decline as well.

Here is Alberto Benegas of the Argentine Hayek Society:

“Planning and authoritarian systems arise directly out of those atrabilious (*) conceptions which seek to treat the individual as one who lacks personal motivation and who must bend before u2018the will of society,’ as represented by the apparatus of the state, which has to segregate the u2018socially maladjusted’ because they do not accept the detailed objectives drawn up by those who happen to be taking their turn to be in charge of it.”

~ Alberto Benegas Lynch, Ingenieria Social y Sociologia (Social Engineering and Sociology), Agencia Interamericana de Prensa Económica (AIPE) — November 2002 (Spanish-language PDF document)

[*atrabilious (New Oxford English Dictionary): originally: "affected by choler adust, one of the four supposed cardinal humours of the body." Now: "melancholy, hypochondriac; acrimonious, splenetic."]

And Butler Shaffer again:

All political systems are dependent upon the generation of mass-minded thinking, to persuade each of us to lose our sense of individuality and responsibility in the collective herd. We condition our minds to accept identities for ourselves, to think of ourselves not as self-directed, self-responsible beings, but as members of various groups, whose interests are not only mutually exclusive, but antagonistic. Whether we identify ourselves by race, religion, nationality, lifestyle, ideology, economic interests, gender, geography, or any other category, we put ourselves into a state of conflict with others. Political systems then promise to protect us from “them,” and most of us are too dull to recognize that our alleged “protectors” are the very ones who induced us to play the games that now threaten us!

~ Butler Shaffer, The Individual and the Collective, August 2002

6. Beyond Identity: Don’t Be Fooled by Appearances

Identity was traditionally a personal attribute, and personality psychologist Erik Erikson (1902—1994) is generally regarded as having fathered the expression “identity crisis,” in the context of personal human development (he was talking about the ontological uncertainties facing the adolescent self). The term has, however, migrated into common parlance and, as with sociology generally, into the snare of attributing personal characteristics to groups.

More than this, as Rogers Brubaker, sociology professor at UCLA in California, has set out in his interesting paper “Beyond Identity,” the concept of identity became both method and object, something used by both analysts (the sociologists) and practitioners (the political manipulators and lobbyists). To understand this, consider just the following common uses of the word: identification, categorization, self-comprehension, social location, commonality, connectedness, groupness and, last but not least, that wonderful German word Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl — the feeling of belonging together.

However, in today’s world of entertainment, which is already becoming tomorrow’s real world, we have something beyond even this: the potential for political manipulation of the complete uncertainty in our perceptions of the identity of others, whether it be the "stolen identities" of the 9/11 hijackers, an eventual biological clone, or something I have mentioned before in connection with the movie Mission Impossible II: the theatrical device whereby one person can be made to adopt, or morph into, a plaster cast-like mask which makes that person identical to an "enemy:" thus, a mask of the hero is superimposed on the face of the bad guy’s accomplice to trick the bad guy into shooting down his own man. This is a neat symbol for the widespread and time-honored use of the tactic of deception by the secret services of every state.

The same device is used in numerous episodes of the X-Files TV series. Certain (usually evil) characters have the ability to morph their faces into those of, in particular, heroes Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, generating serious but deliberate perceptual confusion in the mind of the viewer and of the real character involved. This is indeed the mainstreaming of paranoia, as Paul Cantor has described in his enormously enjoyable book on the significance of popular culture, particularly the X-Files, Gilligan Unbound.

Small wonder then that the social scientists are seeking to go beyond identity both as a methodological tool and as a pragmatic concept. This was the theme of a fascinating debate which took place at the end of 2003 in the pages of the sociological journal “Ethnicities,” which describes itself as “aiming to achieve a critical nexus between the disciplines of sociology and politics with respect to debates on ethnicity, nationalism and identity politics.”

On one side of the debate was Rogers Brubaker, whom I’ve already mentioned. He argues for a re-interpretation of identity which is “neither individualist nor groupist.” On the other side was professor Craig Calhoun of NYU, New York (also president of the US Social Science Research Council), who defends the "variability of belonging" in an increasingly cosmopolitan world.

Lest this all sound a bit dry, I should say that all debates of this sort seem to partake of a tacit assumption among participants that they should try to maintain objectively value-neutral positions. This avoids having to commit to an ultimate choice between opposing methodological approaches or philosophical standpoints. In our age of value-relativism and even nihilism, these may appear to be equally valid, but of course, in logic and practice, they cannot be so: the search for value-neutrality almost inevitably ends up being an argument in favor the status quo, which usually rests on relationships of power and control rather than of ethical conduct and voluntary co-operation.

Once the doomed quest for value-neutrality or "unified theory" is discounted (again Mises is an invaluable guide on this), we can actually derive considerable benefit from these debates. They pitch interesting analytical ideas into the ring, out of which real alternatives may grow to the crude binary oppositions which so inflame people’s passions when antagonistic group-mindedness rules, such as: "us" and "them," Israeli vs. Palestinian, Hindu vs. Moslem, insiders vs. outsiders, freedom fighter vs. terrorist, good vs. evil, etc.

For example, consider the notion of overlapping circles of belonging, by opposition to a rigid and prioritized hierarchy of affiliations: you belong to a nation, to a profession, to a religion, to a community, to a political group, to a group of a few who share your values and ideals. Your belonging to such groups or interests is not uniform, and the people you meet in the course of the activities of the groups are not necessarily the same, yet the circles of belonging overlap and interact. It is in that overlap and interplay that we may find those possible alternatives which enable peaceful, voluntary exchange and co-operation between individuals to take place, rather than in the politically-engineered tension and conflicts between propaganda-inflamed groups.

7. Cosmopolitanism: Citizens of the World

The academic debate also helps to publicize the activity of others in related fields, such as, in this case, the interesting work of professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago. She, in her article entitled Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism for example, is eloquent in defense of an ancient notion of cosmopolitanism, the citizenship of the world — not, as many fear, as some form of preparatory indoctrination for world government, but rather as education for understanding others according to Stoic principles:

“We should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings. The idea of the world citizen is in this way the ancestor and source of Kant’s idea of the u2018kingdom of ends,’ and has a similar function in inspiring and regulating moral and political conduct. One should always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every human being.”

Martha Nussbaum is not without her opponents, and it is as well to remember the caution expressed by early American sociologist William Graham Sumner, who wrote: “If the social doctors will mind their own business, we should have no troubles but what belongs to Nature. Those we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is, that the friends of humanity should cease to add to them.” Yet I still feel, after a brief first acquaintance with her work here, that she is one of a few writers and thinkers in the academic mainstream who may be helping to rehabilitate the fundamentals of moral philosophy and principled liberalism.

But then again who knows? Initial impressions can be deceptive, I could be wrong, and there are those who might say that cosmopolitanism is a Faustian pact, designed to deprive people of their loyalty to national identity. The paranoia strikes home: might she secretly be an NWO agent in disguise?

8. The Getting of Wisdom

So where does this leave us, and what should we do? I like to think one answer lies in the adoption of a certain humility, an acceptance that the more we know, the more we realize there is more to know, together with an awareness that all order is transitory. This sentiment was admirably expressed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps Germany’s greatest ever playwright and philosopher (who, incidentally, was home-schooled). In August 1772, Goethe, who later was to have his own battle with Satan, wrote the following to a young schoolboy in Frankfurt who had asked him for advice:

To see the world properly we should not think it is worse or better than it is. Love and hatred are closely connected, and both distort our vision. The thing to do is to look at everything as attentively as possible, to inscribe all things in our memory, never to let a day go by without learning something. Then to apply oneself to those branches of knowledge which give the mind a definite direction, to compose things, to determine values — that is what we have to do now. At the same time we must not want to be something that strives to become everything; and, especially, we must not stand still and rest more often than the weariness of mind and body demands.

Words of wisdom indeed, from a man who was at the time only 22 years old!

References and Links to Further Reading

Alic, Margaret, William MacDougall, Gale Encyclopaedia of Psychology

(*) Benegas Lynch, Alberto, Inginieria Social y Sociologia, AIPE (Agencia Interamericana de Prensa Económica) N 16 — November 4, 2002 — PDF, in Spanish

Boeree, C. George, Gordon Allport, 1998

Brubaker, Rogers, Neither Individualism nor Groupism, Ethnicities 3, 4 — Fall 2003 (**)

Brubaker, Rogers, Ethnicity without Groups, Archives of European Sociology, 18, 2 2002

(*) Brubaker, Rogers, Beyond Identity, Theory and Society 29 — 2000

Calhoun, Craig, Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary, Ethnicities 3, 4 — Fall 2003 (**)

Calhoun, Craig, The Variability of Belonging, Ethnicities 3, 4 — Fall 2003 (**)

Callahan, Gene, Carl Menger: The Nature of Value, Mises.org — October 17, 2003

(*) Franssen, Maarten, The Not-so-Trivial Truth of Methodological Individualism, online, undated

Gordon, David, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, Mises.org

(*) Hazlett, Thomas W., Carl Menger: Ivory Tower Iconoclast, The Freeman — May 1977

(*) Heckathorn, Douglas D., The Paradoxical Relationship between Sociology and Rational Choice, The American Sociologist — 1997

Hoppe, Hans Hermann: Economic Science and the Austrian Method, Mises.org

Hülsmann, Jörg-Guido, Introduction to Mises’ Epistemological Problems of Economics (especially pp. 12—13 and p. 18 “u2018anti-economists’ prevail” and p. 21 “subjective value not quantifiable”)

(*) Infantino, Lorenzo, Individualism in Modern Thought, Routledge, September 1998

Infantino, Lorenzo, Ignorance and Liberty, Routledge, December 2002

Jones, Reilly, Epistemology, personal website page, 2001

(*) Lemieux, Pierre, The Individualist Sentiment, Arms, Law & Society , No. 5, p. 1—18 — Spring , 1996

Long, Roderick, Two Cheers for Modernity, Free Radical, undated

Long, Roderick, Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues, LewRockwell.com — August 28, 2003

(*) Macintosh, Kenneth H., Infantino: Individualism in Modern Thought: From Adam Smith to Hayek, book review — QJAE, Vol. 2 n 1, Spring 1999

(*) Mayer, Christopher, Sumner’s Forgotten Classic, Mises.org, September 5, 2003

Mingardi, Alberto, Mises in Italy, Mises.org

Minogue, Kenneth, How Civilizations Fall, The New Criterion, Vol. 19, No. 8, April 2001 (comment: a blistering attack on militant feminism as a cancer on the body of culture and civilization).

Miscellaneous, Sociologists on Government, online, undated

Mises, Ludwig von, Extracts from “Epistemological Problems of Economics”:

(1) The Program of Sociology and the Quest for Historical Laws

(2) Sociology and Economics: Some Comments on the History of Economic Thought

Mises. Ludwig von, Human Action — Scholar’s Edition, Mises Institute

Mises, Ludwig von, On the Rejection of Methodological Individualism, in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Mises.org

Mises, Ludwig von, The Chimera of Unified Science in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Mises.org

Nussbaum, Martha, Rules for the World Stage, Newsday — April 20, 2003

(*) Nussbaum, Martha, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, online, undated

Peterson, William H., Discovering Mises: A Turning Point, Mises,org — November 2003

Pettigrew, T., A Tribute to Gordon Allport, Journal of Social Issues, Fall 1999

Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr., Libertarianism and the Old Right — May 12, 1999

Salerno, Joseph T., Carl Menger: The Founder of the Austrian School, Mises.org, undated

(*) Shaffer, Butler, The Individual and the Collective, LewRockwell.com, August 20, 2002

Shaffer, Butler, The Ego and his Own, LewRockwell.com, September 27, 2002

Smith, Barry, A Unified Theory of Truth and Reference, Logique et Analyse 43, 2000 (published 2003)

Snyder, Jeffrey, A Nation of Cowards, The Public Interest, Fall 1993

Sperber, Dan, Methodological Individualism and Cognitivism in the Social Sciences, personal web page, 1997

(*) Vernaglione, Piero, L’individualismo metodologico dei libertari, online, undated — in Italian

Watkins, John, Methodological Individualism, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, III, 1952-53, p. 186

White, Tom, Egotism, the Western Thing, LewRockwell.com — February 2, 2004

Notes:

(*) Links to articles marked with one asterisk are also provided in the body of this article.

(**) At least until March 31, 2004 several issues of this journal, including the 2003 volume 3 number 4 which contains the Brubaker-Calhoun debate, can be viewed online through the website of the journal’s publisher Sage Publications, after free registration.

Endnotes

1. Of the individualist 19th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer, Talcott Parsons famously and rather dismissively used as the first words of the introduction to his major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937) the words of Professor Brinton: "Who reads Spencer nowadays?"
2. The expression "social facts" is the legacy of Emile Durkheim, one of the grandfathers of sociology, and his book The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895).
3. From the Amazon.com editorial summary: "This text aims to present a comprehensive survey of methodological individualism in social, political and economic thought from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Exploring the works of such figures as de Mandeville, Smith, Marx, Spencer, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Hayek, Popper and Parsons, the study underlines the contrasts between methodological collectivism and methodological individualism. The analysis offered here also reveals the theoretical presuppositions behind the collectivist and individualist traditions and the practical consequences of their applications. Infantino concludes in favour of individualism. This work touches upon issues in social and political theory, intellectual history, political philosophy, political economy and sociological theory."

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

Seasick, 1912

Vintage scenic postcards, with their sentimental potential for nostalgia through the evocation of locality and family in days gone by, are eminently collectible. There is a lively global market in these and other types, such as the humorous, the saucy or the themed postcard, and a host of specialist websites dealing in them today.

The nostalgia is two-fold, reflecting the dual nature of the picture postcard as both photographic record and written communication. The pictures show us the costumes, the buildings and the artefacts of the world as it was around 100 years ago or more. The communication (where legible) is, generally speaking, mundane and ordinary; but where family ancestors are involved, it opens a particularly fascinating window on to where they travelled, their preferences, interests and inclinations, and some of their day-to-day concerns.

These things I discovered when chance put into my hands a family collection of used and unused postcards, some with pictures and some without, dating back to 1880. The collection includes a particularly fine set of picture postcards, by photographer Irving Underhill (1872—1960), of views and buildings of New York City in the golden era of the picture postcard — by common convention the years between 1907, which saw the introduction of the “divided back” postcard with space for both writing and address on the same side, and 1915.

Sky Line, New York City, 1912

This period was a window of free-market and technological opportunity for the printed postcard industry. The two functions of the picture postcard — conveying something by visual means (a photographic record or a cultural/humorous message), and making fast communication possible at a cheap price, had come together with the abolition of the state’s postcard printing monopoly in 1898 and significant advances in lithographic printing processes to ride on the crest of the wave of a burgeoning popular obsession.

Konstanz, Germany (undated)

Many cards were printed in Germany and imported: “the lithography processes there were so advanced that cards were spectacular. Postcard sending and collecting became a mania, and this collecting frenzy was only slowed by World War I, which cut off the supply of the quality-produced cards from Germany. Every home had its postcard albums, and communication by postcard was the norm.”1

The rather jaded routines we have sometimes been through — the race against time trying to make sure that the postcard we send home while on vacation arrives before we ourselves get back, and the nagging resentment at obligation — had not yet taken hold. When the postcards were used for writing rather than bought as souvenirs, the conventional sentiments expressed were not the much caricatured and unrealistic “Wish you were here,” but rather simple messages of reassurance to loved ones, such as “I am well” or “I finally arrived safely.”

It would not last. Although war was the immediate cause of change, the technology to perform these functions in different ways, more efficiently and in more personalized forms, was already catching up: the telephone, which had been introduced in the late 1870s, was spearheading a shift from written to verbal communication for routine matters. The advent of the Brownie box camera, in 1900, would eventually lead to mass-market DIY souvenir photography. Today we have digital cameras, which can be plugged into any computer after taking the pictures, which can then be e-mailed to the other side of the world in minutes or seconds. Instant digital picture messaging by cell-phone is also with us, even if still in its early days.

None of the above have extinguished the postcard, but they have required it to adapt and create niches for itself: for example, for those in a hurry, or not equipped with any camera, or whose eye is simply engaged by a card, there are beautiful scenic postcards available, often taken by professional photographers; for those cases where photography is not permitted, such as museums and galleries, there are exquisitely produced artistic postcards.

In the 1880s, however, the plain postcard without a picture played a vital role in day-to-day communication. The example below, posted August 4th, 1880 from Hanau in Germany, was sent by a merchant in Norway to one of my great-grandfathers, apparently seeking news of a shipment of Canary Islands almonds. The plain postcard such as this truly served for practical communication, a cheap and effective alternative to the already well-established telegraph service (which dated from around 1844), at a time when telephone service was in its infancy and not generally widespread, and was also very expensive. It was pre-printed with the correct postage, so all that was required was to write the message on the back and the name and address on the front, and there were several postal deliveries each day. It was the equivalent of today’s e-mail or plain text message.

Plain Postcard sent from Hanau, Germany to Porto, Portugal, August 4, 1880

Another great-grandfather, who was a Methodist minister in Portugal, travelled widely to church conferences and meetings. In 1901 he found himself in the US for the Jubilee of the American YMCA, which had been founded in Boston 50 years earlier by intrepid mariner Thomas Valentine Sullivan. Here he received routine news from home by postcard: since it was the custom for cards to be stamped at both the sending and the receiving ends, the example shown here tells us the date it was posted (Porto Central, June 2nd) and the date it was received at Boston (Back Bay Station, June 14).

Plain postcard sent from Porto to Boston, June 2, 1901

It was in all likelihood also during his time attending the Jubilee that my great-grandfather would have visited Mount Tom in Holyoke, Mass., where the YMCA had a camp or cottage. Here he acquired a souvenir card of the Mt. Tom Railroad2, which had been inaugurated in 1897 and on which people rode up in trolley cars to the resort, to view the Connecticut River Valley.

Souvenir Card – Front

Souvenir cards like this were a variety of the Private Mailing Card, a type of postcard which can be dated to the period beginning 1898, when the US Postal Service’s monopoly on the printing of postcards was broken by an Act of Congress. In 1901 the description was abbreviated to “Post Card” (two words) but, as with the original plain cards, only the address was allowed on the stamp side, and space was left around the image for any message from the sender.

Souvenir Card — Reverse

Even though souvenir cards could be and were written on and mailed, it seems to me that their primary function was to serve as a photographic memento — of a town or museum visited, of a work of art or a feat of engineering, or of a pretty or distinctive scene — as the postcards produced by museums and art exhibits still do today. Many cards were therefore purchased not to be used, and that is why there are probably at least as many unused postcards in the collections as there are used ones: they are generally in better condition, because they have not been stamped, defaced and crumpled in the mail, but have been stored away, often in elaborately-designed postcard albums which the golden era collectors prized for this very purpose.

The postcards in the Irving Underhill collection, which are all unused, fit into this category. They were almost certainly purchased as a souvenir of a later visit to New York, perhaps around 1915. A good example of such a card is this 1912 print of Wall Street, published by “The American Art Publishers Company” of H. Finkelstein & Son (this card, like many others, bears just the plain mark on the reverse “H. F. & Son,” with a brief description of Wall Street).

Irving Underhill’s Wall Street, 1912

Other cards were published by the “Success Postcard Company,” but many of these are from a later period. After the US entered World War I, cards printed in Germany were no longer imported. The industry in Germany collapsed, and never recovered. From 1915 onwards postcards were supplied mostly by printers in the United States, who sought to save ink by not printing to the edge of the card and leaving a white border around the image. For collectors, this makes it possible to date postcards which are later than 1915, but still from the pre-Depression era, with at least some degree of accuracy, as they often carry no indication of printing date. Here is a typical example of the “white border” type:

Irving Underhill — Pennsylvania Railroad Station, New York City

I have created a web-based gallery of most of these Irving Underhill postcards, including the white-bordered ones, to enable readers of this article to view them online. The gallery page contains a two-page index of thumbnails: clicking on the individual thumbnail will bring up a larger scan of each postcard, underneath which are to be found navigation buttons to take you either to the next or previous picture, or back to the index. Take a trip through cyberspace to quieter times and, as the saying goes: Enjoy!

List of links referenced within this article:

• Information on Postcards and other Collectibles
• The Architecture and Development of New York City (Columbia University, NYC)
• Eastman Kodak “1900-type” Brownie Camera, 1900—1901
• A Brief History of the YMCA Movement
• Northeastern University Libraries (Archives and Special Collections Department): Historical Note on the Greater Boston YMCA, founded 1851
• The story of the Mount Tom Railroad (part of the Catskill Archive)
• A Postcard History from the Smithsonian Institution
• Web Gallery of Irving Underhill Postcards — early 1900s

Notes

1. Ray Boas, A Brief History of Postcards, undated online article
2. If this link should take you to the Catskill Archive main page, click on the link at the bottom entitled "New! Railroad Extra is back" then click on the picture of the locomotive, then scroll down to "Stories" and finally click on the link to "Mt. Tom and the Mount Tom Railroad" about half way down the list.

Richard Wall (send him mail) who writes from Estoril, Portugal, has British, Portuguese and Norwegian ancestors. His Norwegian ancestor mentioned in this article, Danchert D. Krohn, originally of Bergen, Norway, lived from 1841 to 1906, emigrating from Norway to Portugal in the late 1860s to work as a merchant and port wine shipper.

Legend has it that in 1875 he went back to Norway to choose a bride, found her, was married within a fortnight. The couple returned to live the rest of their lives in Portugal. Descendants of this fortunate union’s five daughters are spread far and wide, but particularly in Norway, Portugal, Germany, England and the United States, in places as disparate as Florida, Maine, New York, Colorado and lately Philadelphia. The firm he co-founded, Wiese & Krohn of Oporto, still bears his name, and produces port wine to this day.

The Portuguese ancestor mentioned here, Rev. Alfredo H. da Silva, was a much-revered superintendent of the Methodist church in Portugal. He lived from 1872 to 1950.

Richard Wall Archives

Perhaps it is a waste of energy to get worked up about what is in the end a dance to the music of the spinmeisters in the corridors of power, but there are moments when righteous indignation needs to be expressed, and this is one of them.

Lord Hutton’s ostensible brief was to examine, as an impartial and hitherto respected judge, the circumstances surrounding the death, in July 2003, of chemical weapons expert and microbiologist Dr. David Kelly — a suspicious and premature death which the government and the press had swiftly labelled a suicide.

His report in fact does nothing of the sort. Most fundamentally, it begins by accepting the government version of events, namely that Kelly committed suicide. From that dubious starting-point, which is at least as unproven as any plausible alternative explanation (such as murder), the rest is a combination of careful, selective omission of evidence submitted to the inquiry and a liberal application of whitewash. Office-holders and servants of the British government who are still alive are exonerated in their handling of the affair, but not the dead public servant David Kelly himself, who was employed by the UK Ministry of Defence (i.e., War), nor his messenger, reporter Andrew Gilligan, nor Gilligan’s bosses at the BBC, who are censured for effectively failing to meet, as Peter Oborne writes, "impossibly high thresholds for checking information."

Top bosses at the BBC, including popular director-general Greg Dyke, have done the honourable thing and resigned, prompting media hyperbole to the effect that the BBC faces its "biggest ever crisis" and talk of a mortal threat to "the last great open platform for hard investigative reporting."

Even if it does have some excellent programming and indeed, on occasion, some excellent hard investigative reporting, the BBC is not an open, independent platform. It is a state broadcasting company which has carefully cultivated an image of impartiality and objective reporting, but in fact it is owned and controlled by the government and funded by taxpayers’ money. This means that it has generally always been submissive to the government of the day, and broadly speaking has tended to pursue a liberal-managerial and politically correct line. A great deal of effective reporting can be accomplished within this framework, and a great deal of propaganda may also be put across as impartial and objective reporting, but it is quite clear, on either of these counts, that showing up the machinations of the government spinmeisters for the despicable expedients that they are is not included in the list of permitted activities.

In June last year BBC radio reporter Gilligan caused particular upset to the then government press secretary, Alastair Campbell, by coming very close to the substantive truth of how intelligence reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been doctored by government to convey a more threatening message to the public than the intelligence information actually warranted. As so often happens with the discovery of truth, Gilligan had stumbled almost accidentally on a highly sensitive vessel for conveyance of that truth, in the shape of Kelly. For Campbell, I surmise that the situation would in all likelihood have been perceived not only as threatening, but also as irritating in the extreme: none of the minions involved were behaving as they should. So, in Campbell’s none too sweet-smelling phraseology, this meant that "Gilligan had to be f***ed." Having been decreed this ominous fate Gilligan, as far as I know, is still alive. What, I wonder, was the verbal prescription concocted in these nether regions for the way-out-of-line David Kelly?

In earlier times such attitudes as Campbell’s would have been regarded as inadmissible in a public servant, and an outcome to a judicial inquiry such as we have seen with the publication of the Hutton report would have been considered a public scandal. Oborne labels it, accurately, a disaster for British public life. That it is generally not so regarded, or that there is possibly not even any general awareness of all its implications, and that there is now a chorus of official voices (including, most prominently, Blair and Campbell) saying "it’s time to move on," is a reflection of the manipulative skill of the government information managers, the dumb and disinterested acquiescence of much of the mass of the populace, and the smug self-satisfaction of the power-holders. More interesting still, Oborne’s article implies that the prime motive in the very selection of Lord Hutton was presentational calculation: a public appearance of impartiality and gravitas was secured in his person; at the same time, the "astonishing extent to which the Northern Irish judge has followed the Downing Street line" ensured that no boat would, finally, be rocked. Or, to do some real mixing of metaphors, a u2018safe pair of hands’ dealt satisfactorily with a hot potato.

The whole government information machine is dependent on this calculationist ethic and is built on the manipulation of such appearances. The media circus ensures that what is discussed is not the substance of the matters in hand, but only, as in some form of gladiatorial competition, the winners and losers in what is seen as a political game of tactical manipulation. Thus an electoral decision turns on tactical errors or tactical successes — something as superficial as a man’s (or woman’s) hairstyle and “grooming,” or a misjudged on-screen temper tantrum. The masters of spin (in the US it is presidential adviser Karl Rove) manipulate such “electoral factors” in the background. These are grey people, with a touch of the sinister about them, rarely in public view.

Although such techniques are by no means the monopoly of any single political party, they first came to prominence in Britain in 1997 with the election of Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” guided by his then eminence grise, Peter Mandelson: a party judged previously to be unelectable was turned around (and obtained a landslide victory) because the smart brains in it focused entirely on the methods of getting elected (i.e., they consciously said “forget the issues, focus on the mechanism”). Since then, by the way, the resulting government has presided over a huge increase in taxation, “created” all sorts of “facilitator”-type jobs in the public sector, and put British troops into war zones on at least 4 if not 5 occasions (Kosovo/Serbia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq) in the name of “liberal imperialism.” That’s before we even consider the rise in violent crime.

New Labour thus greatly reinforced an already existing tendency for the UK to become a managerial state, in the Gottfriedian sense of the term. That is to say, it is a country where a group of governmental managers have appropriated the vocabulary and outward appearance of liberal welfarism and the protection of rights to perfect a form of government in which substantive content (real life issues) at all times takes second place to securing and keeping hold of power. Their hubris is unbounded, for they do it, they say, for our benefit. They know what is best for us (and, so it seems, for a good deal of the rest of humanity as well).

The problem with this is that the rulers of such states and their servants, the bureaucrats, are indeed concerned not so much with ends, purposes and substance, nor with a search for what is best, but rather with perfecting the mechanisms and forms required in order for them, as managers, to be able to continue to manage and to stay in control. In such a context the successful manipulation of information by government is a key bureaucratic function, rewarded by power and position when it is "successful" on its own terms. Peter Oborne cites apparent reports that Mr. Blair is anxious for John Scarlett, the intelligence bureaucrat who in his u2018eagerness to ingratiate himself’ with the government, cooperated perhaps too closely with the spinmeisters, to become the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

Oborne rightly warns that we should not get too solemn about all this. So, as an antidote to the sickening sycophancy of most of the predictably superficial media coverage of the Hutton report’s publication, I strongly recommend the Telegraph article on this question by Boris Johnson, the editor of the Spectator. True to form, he has a rightful and at the same time entertaining blast at the creepy "Prime Minister, beaming his chipmunk grin," who "asked everyone to believe in what turned out to be a fraud."

On a more serious note, and in a key passage, Johnson pinpoints the nature of the liberal-managerial philosophy of governance: presentation, u2018textual negotiation’ and u2018grip on language’ is all. Substance is truly secondary:

"The intelligence chiefs — principally John Scarlett — were in constant textual negotiation with Downing Street, and the protests of their juniors were ignored. On September 20, an unnamed MoD official felt obliged to write a further letter of complaint. u2018The draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by the evidence available to me … what I wish to record is that it has NOT been established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.’

His words were unheeded. It is extraordinary, reading the Hutton inquiry evidence, to see the grip that Downing Street exercised on the language of what purported to be an intelligence document."

Johnson concludes:

"Public and Parliament were presented with justifications for war that (a) did not reflect the opinions of those who knew most about Iraqi weapons; and (b) had been in key ways embellished by Alastair Campbell. Neither of these staggering facts would have come to light, had it not been for Andrew Gilligan."

Small wonder that those smugly celebrating a tactical victory display unseemly haste to bury the real issues. But questions which are awkward for the government remain unanswered, and in the sound and fury of the barrage of UK media coverage of this propaganda circus, there are significant details which will not go away.

First, while Lord Hutton has carefully avoided criticizing the mechanics of government spin by that time-honoured cop-out of all bureaucrats, “it’s not in my job description” or “it’s beyond my remit,” little reported amongst the general condemnation of the BBC and the ensuing round of resignations at the top is the fact that he has now been called before a select committee of members of parliament to be grilled on the whole question of how these judicial enquiries are conducted.

Secondly, serious questions need to be asked, and may well re-emerge, if the coroner presiding over the inquest into the death of David Kelly reopens it (or is permitted to do so). US-based freelance writer Jim Rarey, who has investigated the Kelly affair at great length and whose articles are online, wrote earlier this month (on January 19th, before publication of the Hutton report):

"If, as expected, Lord Hutton’s report on the u2018circumstances’ surrounding the death of microbiologist David Kelly claims he bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his wrist, it will rank as one of the clumsiest cover-ups in recent memory.

If that is Hutton’s finding, Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Gardiner almost certainly will be forced to reopen the inquest that was cut short by appointment of the Hutton inquiry. [...]

The major thrust of the Hutton inquiry, and the media coverage, has been who or what drove Kelly to u2018suicide.’ That is likely to be the thrust of Hutton’s report as well.

The evidence that it was more likely murder than suicide is contained in the transcripts on the website of the Hutton inquiry. The media has no excuse for ignoring it and if Nicholas Gardiner does not reopen the inquest you can color him part of the cover-up."

Finally, there are signs that many ordinary people are very angry, and will not take the government’s “tactics” lying down. A spontaneous demonstration outside the BBC following Greg Dyke’s resignation brought together at least 800 employees with the message “Cut the crap — bring back Greg” and a statement by BBC4 interactive editor Kate Bradshaw: “Everyone is outraged and sad. The government has successfully manipulated the BBC and damaged it in the process.”

Conclusions

Much has been said and written of late about popular skepticism and mistrust in relation to “the official version of events,” and belief in conspiracies. I believe it is not because it is official per se that we mistrust the official version of events. We mistrust the majority of individuals who are in official positions because as persons they have demonstrated by their consistent amoral (and sometimes immoral) behaviour over time that they are not to be trusted.

The main reason for this is that we in the Western u2018liberal democracies’ have a culture of social interaction which is focussed on the means and not the ends: for example, as I have mentioned above, the architects of New Labour in 1997 studied the mechanics of gaining power and focussed primarily on the effective manipulation of those mechanisms, in the process devaluing discussion of issues and policies — perfectly rational behaviour in the light of Labour’s earlier “unelectability,” but the problem with it is that the baby (the moral consequences and effects of decisions or non-decisions regarding those issues) goes out with the bathwater. The result is that we have no gurus, only managers: once in power, the mission just becomes self-perpetuating. There is no ulterior goal other than management of one’s strategic position or, as recent UK news has shown, devising ever more sophisticated ways of increasing the taxes which those managers will administer and out of which their salaries and index-linked pensions will be paid.

And so it continues: functionaries of the managerial state study when to release bad news or adverse statistics so that they will be “buried” by another, more dramatic story. The substance of the bad news or adverse statistics is of no significance to them other than for its value in promoting or hindering their immediate objective of holding on to power, or winning a turf or budget allocation war. Occasionally, like Jo Moore, the minor UK government official who described September 11, 2001, as a “good day to bury bad news,” they get caught out, and there are howls of self-righteous protest, as if this were the exception and not the default modus operandi of those who make it their business to run the political machines and keep them lubricated (I mean here the ‘civil servants’ as well as the politicians).

I think the problem with official versions of events is not so much with absolute truth (if there ever can be such a thing). More likely, we are being told partial, selective, shaded truths because it is partial, selective, shaded truths which suit the motivations and purposes of those individuals (the version managers) who design and deliver them. Those purposes, contrary to most theorizing about conspiracy, are not disguised or hidden: more often they are out in the open for those who care to read (of course I accept that many don’t bother, or can’t). Equally often they are not interesting in substance, merely technical or mechanistic.

Finally, I do not think there is a general “culture of mistrust.” This is a handy device to use to explain away truths which may be unpalatable to power. Yes, some individuals do not trust others, and too much trust can lead people to be tricked and deceived, but for most of those engaged in day-to-day social interaction there is a culture of friendliness and being well-disposed to others, which is reflected in plain dealing and voluntary exchange. What we have could better be described as a culture of cynically paternalistic exploitation and opportunism by the political and bureaucratic managerial classes: most of the time, people are either too lazy or too disorganized to do anything about this. But when the bureaucratic managers and whitewashers go too far, is it surprising that the people turn and say to them “We know your sort. And this time, you cried wolf once too often.”

Lord Hutton may well rue the day he came out of unblemished obscurity.

Links

• The Hutton Report — online version
• Boris Johnson, The BBC was doing its job — bring back Gilligan — Daily Telegraph, January 29, 2004
• Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor, Awkward questions still not answered by inquiry — The Guardian, January 29, 2004
• Peter Oborne, A Disaster for British Public Life — The Spectator, January 31, 2004
• Greg Palast, Waging War on the BBC — Alternet, January 29, 2004
• Jim Rarey, The Murder of David Kelly — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (David Kelly and Victoria’s Secret), Part 4 (David Kelly, The Baha’i, and Masons) — October-December 2003

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

I can imagine parties of today’s schoolchildren being trooped around the building, "the tallest state house in America," there to be subjected to a mind-deadening statistical barrage about how much sand, gravel, limestone, brick, tile, marble, bronze, granite and ornamental iron was used in its construction.

They will also be shown the 35-foot high sculpture in the gardens, on which stands the statue of one who is described on its pedestal as "Louisiana’s greatest son," Huey Pierce Long (1893—1935). As governor of the state in 1930, he was the man responsible for commissioning this huge phallic symbol of a structure, erected to a height of 450 feet in double quick time (14 months) to his unambiguous command: "Build it big and build it quick."

He never did have much time. In September 1935, not even five years after its construction began, he was to be shot in the corridors of that very same building. He died two days later, on September 10th, aged 42. On his deathbed he is reported to have said, "Don’t let me die, I have got so much to do."

As with JFK, assassination puts a convenient lid on all that was yet to be done and what might have been, and allows the state officially to mourn, love and eulogize one of its own. Meanwhile those who suspect foul play and cover-up develop conspiracy theories, and those who had it in for him gloat, first privately and then more brazenly as time goes by, that "he got what was coming to him." Over time a consensus emerges, literally cast in stone, that whatever his faults, "he did a lot for Louisiana."

Or did he really? When superlatives are used for propagating state mythology into the future like this, sooner or later someone is bound to call a halt and say: stop all this golden boy stuff! Camelot was rotten! The pied piper had feet of clay!

The Dictator of Louisiana?

Actually Huey Long has had a bad press for most of his after-life in American political history. It began on September 11, 1935, the very day after he died, with a subtly vicious obituary notice in the New York Times, then as now the mouthpiece of the establishment’s party line. Taking his own words ("If Fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag") out of his dead mouth and twisting them into a parody of his original meaning, the paper used them to tar him as a dictator in his own patch, comparable to his worst contemporaries — Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini.

"What he did and what he promised to do are full of political instruction and also of warning. In his own State of Louisiana he showed how it is possible to destroy self-government while maintaining its ostensible and legal form. He made himself an unquestioned dictator…. In reality, Senator Long set up a Fascist government in Louisiana. It was disguised, but only thinly. There was no outward appearance of a revolution, no march of Black Shirts upon Baton Rouge, but the effectual result was to lodge all the power of the State in the hands of one man. If Fascism ever comes in the United States it will come in something like that way."

~ The New York Times, September 11, 1935

Paradoxes

This is just one of the infinite number of paradoxes and contradictions surrounding a man who openly believed in using the machinery of state for economic intervention in pursuit of social and political ends, spending in the process money which he had to take from others, and yet has been hailed as a champion of the little man, enfranchiser of the poor and the disadvantaged, defender of those with anti-war views and of the Constitution, and sharp critic of the price-fixing contained in the New Deal and of monopolistic concentration in restraint of trade. The story of Huey Long still exerts a surprising fascination.

Born in the "piney woods" of Winnfield, Northern Louisiana, he grew up poor. At 16 he began to work as a travelling salesman. In 8 months in 1914 he completed a law degree in New Orleans (normally a 3-year course) and then set up his own law practice, at the age of 21. Still in his twenties he entered public office first as a railroad commissioner, then as chairman of the Public Services Commission.

He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924, but was successful four years later, running on a similar platform of unabashed state intervention — including road construction, free textbooks for all, greater state support for public schools, and increased taxation on the oil corporations, particularly Louisiana’s biggest, Standard Oil. From 1930 to 1935 he had a seat in the US Senate as representative of the Democratic Party. A month before he was shot, he had announced his intention to run for President in 1936, against the incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Political Machine

The main reason why Long has had a very bad press over the years is the focus on the means he used to consolidate his political power, which brought him a raft of enemies. With the natural gift of cleverness, his proverbial razor-sharp wit, and claimed affinity with the common man, he learned to use and abuse those time-honoured methods for ensuring the absolute supremacy of a political machine: filling virtually every local government post with his own stooges, clamping down on any freedom of expression to criticize what he did, and not hesitating to beat up and silence any who ventured to do so. In 1934, in his overthrow of the old regime of local government in New Orleans, he would resort to even more violent methods, at one point sending in the national guard in his (successful) attempt to oust the "old regular" mayor and replace him with one of his own. Not surprisingly, this permanently soured his relationship with the city.

That, incidentally, did not prevent the dual-purpose road and rail bridge over the Mississippi in New Orleans, completed in December 1935 and only recently widened, being named the Huey P. Long Bridge.

As a consummate political animal, he was in fact in no way exceptional in his use of the political means, as history shows. He was innovative, however, in his use of mailed circulars, automobile stumping, radio speeches, sound trucks, and cruel personal invective designed to appeal to perhaps the baser sentiments of those among the people who were not sitting in the halls and offices of power. What was exceptional, in that it came as an unpleasant surprise to established Louisiana political interests in the late 1920s, was the speed and effectiveness of Long’s consolidation of power: all their theory and prior, untroubled experience indicated that a young populist from the backwoods could be expected to be thoroughly naïve about practical politics, promising the earth to the people and delivering not much. Huey Long was not like this, and they could not forgive him for his uppitiness.

The End of Ideology?

His canny use of the political means is not, however, the only reason for his continuing bad press. It also extends to the ends — his strategies and schemes for dealing with the social problems he identified by redistributing wealth. Details of his schemes are widely available on the Internet and links to them and some of his speeches1 are provided at the end of this article.

Throughout the nearly 70 years which have passed since his death — and this is another of the fascinations of the Huey Long story — the officially sanctioned disapproval of his political tactics, always considered by the liberal press to be at the very least "anti-democratic" (others, like the NYT obituary writer, did not mince their words, and as we have seen, called him a Fascist) has been used to overshadow and smother the actual issues raised by his career, his achievements and his plans, and discussion of their (possible) merits and (very real) defects.

There are three main reasons why discussions of the actual issues surrounding Long’s political career have been effectively suppressed: the first is that his tactics were no different to those used by many "successful" politicians who enlarge the power and scope of government. To criticize them too openly would expose others, possibly in the anti-Long camp, who used — and continue to use — similar methods.

The second reason is that by attributing only base motives to the man it is possible to discredit the substance of those points on which he might actually be right, or be telling the truth. In Huey Long’s case, he was right about certain forms of tyranny which may result if a ruling oligarchy’s disposition to seek ways of keeping the majority of the people in ignorance, poverty or nowadays fear, goes unchecked for a long enough period of time.

A typical example of this is the views of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, which have long held sway (and can be heard briefly in a clip from an interview for Ken Burns’ 1986 well-regarded PBS documentary film on Long). He actually denied to Long any recognition that his views or aims had ideological content, seeing him as being interested only in the means — power and money. In other words, this view (which is still widely held) could be called the cynical view that Long the politician merely made promises to help poor people because poor people represented the largest number of votes.

The inconsistency (or beauty) of this approach is that if you accuse a man of having no ideology, it is difficult to attribute to him any impact on the minds of men, either way. In other words, his ideas were the far-fetched notions of a power-crazed maniac. Therefore, disregard them.

Thirdly, as is generally recognized, and despite enormous fiscal cost which would burden the state for years to come after his demise, he had actually delivered on many of the promises he made to the people in the form of improved roads (or roads, period), free textbooks for all, etc., hoisting the state of Louisiana out of what some have described as a near-feudal condition and laying the foundations for modernity.

Suppression of the substance of debate on these issues should not surprise us, for here we enter into another paradox: since the state itself was and is active in the business of seizing and actively redistributing wealth, it always was much easier for the state to smother any real debate on these issues by focusing on Long’s "fascist" political methods, condemnation of which was palatable to a much broader constituency — in fact to nearly everyone under the sun.

Fiscal conservatives thought him profligate and irresponsible, the established corporations (including the media) rightly felt that he wanted to take from them, and assorted Communists and Socialists thought him dangerously naïve, believing that he had no idea of the strength and viciousness of the forces of the system of business concentration he was taking on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, very little has been made of the fact that when confronted by the good advice that his economic schemes would be impracticable and perhaps impossible to implement (despite the fact that they were not as radical as is often suggested), Huey Long is said to have responded quite reasonably that he would have to call in people to help him work things out.

It is in this context of economic policy, particularly at the local level of what is good for Louisiana, that the legacy of intractable argument is even stronger, because it vehemently opposes those who believe in the beneficent power of government against those who believe that government intervention will by its very nature have nefarious political and economic consequences.

Economic intervention, political intervention

These substantive arguments remain topical today, and so keep re-surfacing and re-emerging in new ways. A Baton Rouge business magazine article from June 2002 entitled "Ghost of Huey Long Lives" complains that, at the end of a recent legislative session, "taxes ruled, big business took it on the chin and the people got a chance to "tax the wealthy" at the ballot box," showing that argument still rages between the inheritors of the pro-Long (interventionist) and anti-Long (non-interventionist) factions over what is best for the state:

Business and the wealthy are easy targets but are responsible for most of the jobs in the state — the lifeblood to government, quality of life and the entire economy. If someone has no job, he or she can’t pay taxes and their family doesn’t eat. Does discouraging new business growth help the poor get jobs?

So why would you want to send a message to those in business and those with money that “you’re easy pickins and we are coming after you?” I think that would drive many of them out of the state — and keep others away. When the poor are the only ones left, who will we tax then?

Inevitably, policy dead-ends identical to these, and their advocacy in combination with ruthless power tactics, brought Huey Long into conflict with established interests of the left and right, both public and private, but particularly with corporate interests. In Louisiana at least, those in control of such interests had for years successfully carried on a policy of political intervention in the machinery of state in pursuit of economic and corporate ends, very much geared to maintaining a comfortable and privileged status quo. As T. Harry Williams was to write in his 1969 biography of Long:

[Educational and other services] were poor for the additional reason that the ruling hierarchy was little interested in using what resources the state had available to provide services and was even less interested in employing the power of the state to create new resources so that more services could be supported…. A woman who was a member of the caste described its psychology frankly: “We were secure. We were the old families. We had what we wanted. We didn’t bother anybody. All we wanted was to keep it.”

~ T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, Bantam, 1969

Of Liberty and Prosperity

The fact is that neither the old conservative "hold on to it at all costs" option nor the "tax tax tax, spend spend spend" option of the populist are conducive to true free markets, to the flowering of individual liberty or to freedom of expression.

Restrictive practices, business concentration, cartels, monopoly power, bidding for "licenses" to operate, lobbying for government subsidies and price or tariff controls are, ipso facto, constraints on the operation of open competition and free markets, and thus reduce both economic freedom and, ultimately, the general prosperity, often preventing outsiders — those without access to membership of the respective monopoly or concentration — from even earning a decent living. Protests against this state of affairs often lead to the suppression of dissent through barely plausible but deceptively reassuring arguments that "national interests" are at stake.

On the other hand, increased state spending to pay for socially ambitious programmes has to be funded from somewhere, and leads to the populist zeal of campaigns to "soak the rich," "clobber the greedy corporations" and increase taxation. Since historically this all goes hand-in-hand with the personal enrichment and growing delusions of grandeur, not to say of immortality, of those who control the distribution of such booty, these policies also require the suppression of dissent regarding the real prospects for the promised collective good which is held out as the ultimate end of such intervention, leading in the long term to the reduction and even elimination of political freedom.

It is in the arguments that these camps use against each other, and in those which they consciously exclude from discourse, that those who strive for human liberty, moral responsibility and financially solid economic well-being find the gaps where political and economic labels such as "left and right" and "laissez-faire vs. dirigiste" are plainly inadequate. It is in those sometimes narrow gaps also that we find the true reasons for the continuing fascination and relevance for political history of the brief but eventful career of Huey Pierce Long.

Assassination conspiracy theory: the silencing of a troublesome prophet?

Was Huey Long assassinated because he was too likely to succeed in his fight against those he called the "a handful of financial slave-owning overlords who make the tyrant of Great Britain seem mild"? He was killed just about a month after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

Consider for a moment not just this case, but also that of another Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy (shot while on campaign in Los Angeles 33 years later), the shooting which left candidate George Wallace paralysed in 1972, and the disappearance of John Kennedy Jr., whose plane crashed into the Atlantic in July 1999, it having emerged subsequently that he had discussed plans for declaring himself a presidential candidate in 2000. Would you not be inclined to agree that conspiracy buffs are fully entitled to believe that declaring yourself a candidate for the presidency of the United States, unless you know and cultivate the right people, can be seriously inimical to your survival?

Long was shot outside what is now the Speaker’s office in the state capitol building which he had caused to be built. He was wounded and taken to the hospital. His shooting was blamed on an alleged lone gunman, Dr. Carl Weiss, who was said to bear a personal grudge against Long’s attempts to unseat his father-in-law, Benjamin Pavy, from a judgeship, or perhaps as a result of an alleged racial smear. That remains the official story to this day. Weiss was killed on the spot in a hail of bullets from Long’s bodyguards.

New evidence which emerged in 1991 suggested that Weiss had been unarmed, that a gun had been planted on him to make him look like the lone assassin, that Long was shot by accident rather than design (a bullet fired by one of his bodyguards at the "assailant" apparently ricocheting into Long), and that this latter version of the story had been deliberately covered up.

This new and somewhat implausible version of events does not quell quite legitimate speculation that powerful interests might well have wanted to stop Long in his tracks in his incipient presidential campaign, which gave all the appearance of having the potential to succeed. In this connection some have also charged that proper attention was not given to all Long’s wounds: competent top surgeons may have been prevented from getting to him in time, the doctor who was on hand did not carry out a test for blood in the urine, and fatal damage to the kidneys was accordingly overlooked.

For those who might be interested in greater detail on the assassination and cover-up this is well documented on the Internet, in particular on two websites to which links2 are provided at the end of this article. One of them is called "The Lone Conspirators" (motto: "Only the Paranoid Survive"), and another is a personal website where three main possible theories and various threads of evidence are explored.

Of Diagnoses and Cures

It is rather an axiom of libertarian, anti-state theory that politicians — especially those who show skills in manipulating the mechanisms of power rather than in delivering on substantive policies, are a bunch of crooks interested only in feathering their own nest and accumulating as much power and pelf as possible while in office. Many politicians who have convinced themselves of their good intentions understandably get quite upset by the accusation, because of course it is largely true.

The unspoken danger of this approach is that sometimes you may also throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So are we left with anything more today of Huey Long than the image of the colorful demagogue with wacky notions of economics and a couple of monuments or structures named after him?

I believe we are left with much more than this, but that this has been obscured, because the real issues of freedom, moral responsibility and financially sound economic well-being have not been issues on which those in power, right down to the present day, have encouraged open debate, let alone helped people to think for themselves.

Instead, they have concocted a diet of entertainment, propaganda and easy money precisely so that little thought will be generally given to who is pulling the strings. This has permitted the size and reach of government to be enlarged exponentially since Huey Long’s days, and the continuation of precisely that use of political intervention to secure economic advantage against which he fought. As a result, despite the huge material progress which has been made, many of the disparities and distortions at which Long pointed an accusing finger are still in place and, certainly in times of increased intervention by government in the economy and in the private lives of citizens, have even become exacerbated.

In such a climate, Huey Long’s ideas for forcibly transferring wealth from one group of the population to another continue to have a strong appeal, however misguided they may be as a remedy for the ills he diagnosed, and however much history may have shown that forcible transfers of this kind, based on completely arbitrary judgments as to what is a living wage or a minimum value of a homestead inevitably lead to tyranny by the oligarchy which decides on how the wealth is the distributed. None of those difficulties of practical implementation diminish the liveliness of the spirit of rebellion and idealism in Huey Long’s vision, which was based on a defence of the underdog and his revulsion at the suffering and poverty which he saw around him in Louisiana as he grew up.

Controversial Senator William "Wild Bill" Langer of North Dakota, himself a popular politician accused of diverting moneys to social welfare schemes, said in a speech in 1941:

I doubt whether any other man was so conscious of the plight of the underprivileged or knew better the ruthlessness of those in control. And it was because Huey Long knew how to fight, knew how to fight fire with fire, knew how to combat ruthlessness with ruthlessness, force with force, and because he had the courage to battle unceasingly for what he conceived to be right that he became an inspiration for so many in their own fight for a square deal, and the object of such relentless persecution on the part of his enemies.

The fight he waged was such a desperate one that even in death he has not been immune from attack. So we find that 5 years after his body had been lowered into the grave — that grave which will forever be a shrine for those who love decency, honor, and justice — attempts are still being made to besmirch his character.

This is not fooling the farmer, the worker, the small businessman; it is not fooling the child who can read today because of the free textbooks that Huey Long obtained; it is not fooling the citizen who can vote today because Huey Long abolished poll taxes.

These people know from Huey Long’s life that, as they fight for the better things, there will always be the inspiration that fighting with them in spirit will be that tearless, dauntless, unmatchable champion of the common people, Huey P. Long.

Conclusion

The Huey Long story is a genuine tale of the 20th century, an epoch which began with the first machine age and the entrenchment of inflation-generating fiat money (for those non-economists like myself who might appreciate a reminder of what I am talking about here, that is money printed by government as legal tender which is not redeemable and which lacks economic value). These were the advance guard for the harsh forces which would achieve victory when the human obsession with the means and mechanisms of things, rather than with the ends of life, came to dominate almost every area of human existence.

Thus it is that we now pay attention not to the insidious fact of inflation itself, but to changes in the rate of inflation. We have mobile phones, but still we often fail to communicate: without even having exhausted the novelty of a gadget’s multiple functions, we are left with an unsatisfied human need to say and hear meaningful things, all the while using the gadget for its own sake, just because we happen to possess it and it is the latest thing. Likewise we may be induced to discount and deny the energy and life in Huey Long’s true and rebellious spirit, because we are told that he used disapproved, anti-democratic, populist and "fascist" methods.

In an era when the current President’s off-the-cuff remark that things would be so much easier if he were a dictator, supposedly said in jest, is actually not funny at all, many of the problems Huey Long identified, and the original reasons for his substantive rebellion and revolt, remain.

Notes, References and Links

Acknowledgements

For permission to reproduce some of the images contained in this article I am indebted to the following:

• Governor’s Mansion, Baton Rouge — Joy Fisher, USGenWeb Penny Postcard Collection
• Composite Huey Long Postcard — Richard Moody, Vintage Postcards for Collectors

Selected Book and Video about Huey Long

• T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, Bantam, 1969
• Ken Burns, Huey Long, PBS, 1986

Selected Additional Internet Links

• For more immediate and instantly accessible background, there is an excellent summary of Huey Long’s life available to read on the web at Teaching History Online, which helpfully explains the main factors which would later be of key significance in framing his political and social attitudes.
• Hodding Carter and Gerald K. Smith, Huey Long as Demagogue — The Free Republic, February 13, 1935, pp. 11—15
• Dick Eastman, Comments on Populists in "The Giant Killers" Series — undated.
• Excerpts from Huey Long’s Autobiography, 1933
• Darrel A. Plant, A Review of T. Harry Williams "Huey Long" — undated
• The Doctor’s Lounge, New Orleans In The Thirties, 1979
• Teaching American History In Louisiana, The Truth Will Bury Huey Long, Louisiana State University. Digital library scans of a 1934 anti-Long political leaflet.
• US Senate official biography of Huey Long
• Greg Wells, Corporate Influence on the Media and the Perception of History — undated

1. Speeches and Books by Huey Long

• Speech on the u2018Share Our Wealth‘ program (audio version available)
• Senate speech, The great and grand dream of America, April 29, 1932 (scroll down to item #2.)
• Speech u2018Every Man a King‘ — February 23, 1934
• Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long, 1933
• Account of Senate Filibuster — June 12—13, 1935
• [Extract from US Senate records: Huey Long spoke for fifteen hours and thirty minutes, the second-longest Senate filibuster to that time. As day turned to night, he read and analysed each section of the Constitution, a document he claimed the president's New Deal programs had transformed to "ancient and forgotten lore." ]
• The u2018Second Autobiography,’ My First Days in the White House (excerpts), published posthumously in 1935.

2. Assassination conspiracy theory:

• Matthew Wittnebel, Huey Long: Perfect Candidate for Assassination, or Mistaken Murder, The Lone Conspirators
• Three theories on the assassination and cover-up

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

That’s why I cannot accept the following statement: "Any attempt to understand the war on Iraq must begin with the profound psychological shock caused by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001." Thus writes Thomas Powers in his latest article in the December 4, 2003, issue of the New York Review of Books, entitled The Vanishing Case for War.

No-one disputes that profound psychological shock of 9/11. I can even go part of the way with Powers and accept that there was a "complete lack of public warning before the attacks" (my emphasis). This is true regardless of which explanation you are inclined to accept for the events of that day.

You may believe the official legend that from deep within a cave, thousands of miles away, a bearded man with a publicly declared grudge against some aspects of the imperial behavior of the United States and other Western governments over the last 80 years masterminded the whole operation, including the movements of 19 hijackers (for the purposes of the legend, necessarily Muslim hijackers) who naturally detested freedom.

Or you may take the increasingly fashionable line that the US government — or more precisely the Bush II administration — allowed 9/11 to happen by incompetence and failure at multiple levels of its over-bureaucratic apparatus, too prone to fatal inter-agency squabbling and in-fighting to do its job of protection as it should.

Or you may subscribe to the "conspiracy theory" that some of the highest-placed "servants" of the federal government, by deviousness and obstruction of the efforts of some brave but powerless junior FBI people, acted in complicity with the rapacious designs — some of them openly declared years before — of assorted war hawks, neoconservatives, neoJacobins, or a combination of any of these.

All these interpretations (and more) have their adherents, the "bearded man in a cave guiding evil hijackers" explanation being the one which still carries the sanction of "high officials," the federal government in general, and, to their eternal shame, the mainstream media in the US.

We should not be surprised. The official explanation is good enough, it seems, for many millions, including Britney "I’m a Slave for You" Spears ("Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens"). Not, patently, because anyone is able to determine that it is objectively true, but mainly because it is what the government says, and it is plausibly consistent with the diet of short-term TV news and celebrity non-events which is fed to the populace by the presenters and pundits (u2018experts’) who daily invade viewers’ homes, and with whom they have accordingly become very familiar. Because the experts are presented to the viewer as being authoritative in their field, the viewer is subtly intimidated into feeling uneasily presumptuous if their reliability is in any way to be questioned.

As it would be if any deeper investigation were to take place, or indeed if ordinary people, instead of denying and saying "How could you believe such a thing," would allow themselves to think, and to exercise discriminating judgment for themselves.

Television is not conducive to this, because instead of focussing on issues, or even offering a genuine difference of possible explanations, the visual medium distracts us by momentarily tweaking our instincts for sympathy or revulsion, as in contemplating how somebody looks on screen, e.g. "Wasn’t that mug shot of Michael Jackson in police custody just awful? Poor guy…he really must have something wrong with him."

A similar principle is at work when the violence of the effects of a bombing is shown: we are overcome by the natural revulsion we feel. In the moment (and news TV is rarely permitted to go beyond the moment) this prevents us from adopting the critical distance required to enable us to understand the historical context of the event.

Such effects are judiciously used by the controllers of news television (in the UK at least, the word "controller" is even in their job title). One rather more sinister effect of TV self-censorship is that dissident views do not get air time, because, in questioning the official versions of events, such views clearly do not help people to remain "faithful in what happens."

There is a generalized fear of pursuing the vast and detailed physical evidence of 9/11 to any radical conclusion which would put in jeopardy the many comforting underlying psychological assumptions about the very nature of most people’s day to day existence. That fear is judiciously cultivated by the media through alternating doses of more violent incidents (done of course by terrorists, usually of the Al Qaeda brand) and unspecified threats of same, interspersed with glamorously-packaged injunctions to fear not, go out and have fun, feel good — and spend as usual!

The evident truth is that the events of September 11, 2001 — whoever caused them to happen — were a catalyst for actions that persons of power and influence had long been pressing for the US government and military to take, and for other actions that were already either at an advanced stage of planning or had already been prepared for, such as the invasion of Afghanistan. Also among those planned actions was, at some stage, the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It is for these reasons, and not even because I have anything new to offer on 9/11, that I feel I have to take issue with Thomas Powers, even as to his title "The Vanishing Case for War," which presupposes that at a given moment there may have been a case. I do so as follows:

Any attempt to understand the war on Iraq must begin not with the reactions to the events of Sept. 11th, but at the very least with the following three episodes, dating from 1991, 1998, and 2000 respectively:

1) The invasion and conquest of Iraq was a measure which had been contemplated in US foreign policy and military circles at least since the Gulf War of 1991, after which a decision was taken not to press on to Baghdad. In their joint article for Time Magazine on March 2, 1998, entitled "Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam," George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft stated:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq".

2) In 1998 President Clinton was strongly urged to invade Iraq. The PNAC (Project for a New American Century’s) "letter to President Clinton on Iraq," which can be viewed at this link, says in part:

"The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts" (my emphasis throughout).

Signatories to this letter were the following, most of whom are or have been persons of power and influence, members of or advisers to the current US federal government: Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, and Robert B. Zoellick.

As a footnote to this, it is also instructive to contemplate that on the very day of the attacks, the first instinct of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (signatory to the 1998 letter, as we have seen above) was to direct his staff to find ways of starting a war against Iraq almost immediately, at a moment when certainly no evidence that the attacks originated from or were sponsored by Saddam’s Iraq had been made public (even if it had existed). In fact, a generalized clamour was growing at that moment along completely different lines, namely to the effect that "Osama did it," Osama was hiding cowardly in a cave, and Osama had to be smoked out.

As reported by CBS news on Sept. 4th, 2002: "CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 ploughed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq" (see the full article at this link).

3) A few of the signatories to the Clinton Iraq letter were contributors to the PNAC September 2000 report entitled "Rebuilding America’s defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" (link to PDF document). Here they had already advocated, even before the presidential elections of that year, that the United States should take military control of the Gulf region — whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not.

"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Another phrase in that report — "a new Pearl Harbor" — has already passed into the history books following September 11. For the new century then about to begin, the report advocated the strategic transformation of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination, a process which would require huge increases in defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually." It went on to say that "the process of transformation would be a long one," unless there were some "catastrophic and catalyzing event, a new Pearl Harbor."

It does not take a genius to see that 9/11 was the new Pearl Harbor, and that military spending has since that time risen by leaps and bounds. For Iraq alone the current official bill is $87 billion. “Since September 11, 2001, the president has requested, and Congress has approved, over $110 billion in increases in military spending and military aid” states Bill Hartung in his February 2003 The Hidden Costs of War, quoted by Jamey Hecht, who also writes that according to the Defense Department’s own website, the total Defense Budget authority for FY2004 is $399,683,000,000.

What indeed is the true cost of war, and who is going to pay?

And so I come finally to the sickening question of WMD, which is actually the interesting part and main focus of Powers’ NYRB article.

Huge sums of taxpayers’ money, notably to produce the David Kay/Iraq Survey Group u2018there’s probably nothing there’ report, and essayistic efforts of the kind that Powers undertakes, have been expended in trying to answer the futile question "Were there or were there not WMD or plans for WMD in Iraq?" — as if the response could actually resolve the question of whether there was or not a case for war.

All this is so much of a smokescreen.

For apart from the wider issue that such weapons are a threat and a danger to humanity wherever they may be (I certainly do not buy the argument that it would be easier for a terrorist to obtain such weapons in an authoritarian state, or in one which is on the "axis-of-evil" blacklist rather than in a more open country like the US), this type of argument betrays cynical indifference to the documented fact that certain Western states, which are awash with WMD, have been eager to supply all sorts of unpleasant weaponry (including WMD) to all sorts of unsavoury regimes when it suits them.

Included in the suppliers are the world’s largest arms-dealing states — the US, Germany, France, and Britain — and included in their client lists, just for starters, was Saddam’s Iraq. Some states, especially smaller regional powers like Israel, are both big clients and big suppliers, often acting as intermediaries or surrogates in delivering weaponry to officially banned-for-export states such as China or Iran.

So of course there were WMD in Iraq. And of course there will be WMD elsewhere in the future, including in places "where they shouldn’t be."

It is almost elementary to remark that in international relations, states will by their nature and constitution (on grounds of national defense) seek to match and neutralize the power of any other state which they perceive as a potential or known threat. This is particularly true nowadays at the regional level, because we no longer live in the nervously stable world of global MAD (mutually assured destruction) which was the US vs. SU (United States vs. Soviet Union) Cold War arrangement, but rather in a unipolar world where the US is the biggest and beastliest bear of all, but elsewhere there are a lot of very hot regional and potentially MAD powder-kegs. Has everyone forgotten the global anxiety which arose in 2001/2 when India and Pakistan, their original Western suppliers now panicked into restraining action, were threatening to unleash a nuclear holocaust on each other?

I mentioned earlier that I could go along with Powers’ remark that the force of the people’s reaction to September 11 came in part as a result of the complete lack of public warning. There are strong reasons to doubt, however, whether the federal government intelligence agencies and a substantial number of officers of federal and local government were taken totally by surprise.

The documentation of the prior warnings has become almost too voluminous to mention. It is known and has been widely reported that extreme anxiety about possible attack pervaded intelligence circles in the summer of 2001. These crystallized in the presidential intelligence briefing of August 6, 2001, in which the CIA warned the president, among other things, that terrorists linked to bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. As reported at USNews.com in May 2002, "It was also widely known in U.S. government circles that al Qaeda had plotted to hijack planes in the past and crash them into CIA headquarters, the Eiffel Tower, and other symbols of the West. But U.S. officials insisted there was no warning that terrorists were about to use the airplanes as missiles aimed at targets in the United States."

The list of urgent prior warnings from intelligence agencies of other countries, including Russia, Israel, France, and Germany, has been extensively documented in the press and on the Internet. It is a long and troubling one, but its practical effect is clear: the situation in Iraq and the world today represents the results, not of any response to a surprise attack, nor even of any action to solve the real foreign policy problems highlighted by 9/11, but rather the coming to fruition and seizing of an opportunity to implement projects and plans for global political and military dominance which had begun to be laid down at least 10 or 12 years ago, most of them published at least a year before September 11, 2001.

I have a final niggle with Powers when he writes: "Going to war was not something we were forced to do…."

Who are "we"? Use of the word "we" in a context like this assumes a uniform collective identity and purpose which simply does not obtain. For what it’s worth, many Americans (presumably to be included in the "we"), as well as many people of many other nationalities, were opposed to the United States government and military invading and occupying Iraq. Those same people were equally opposed to the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime. That in no way means that in order to solve the one wrong you had to commit another wrong. It was ever thus: two wrongs do not make a right.

So I say in my final words to Mr. Powers: Not we, and not in our name, and please: begin at the beginning.

Selected References:

• Robert Higgs, What’s So Special About Those Killed By Hijackers on September 11, 2001? — LewRockwell.com, September 13, 2003
• Gary North, The Unasked Question of 9-11: What Was the Motive? — LewRockwell.com, September 13, 2001
• Bette Stockbauer, Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ and the Project for the New American Century — AntiWar.com, June 18, 2003
• Steven Yates, 9-11, the Foreknowledge Question, and Why We Do Not Trust Big Government — LewRockwell.com, June 8, 2002

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

Lawyers are better placed than I am to comment, but these charges seem novel to me. "In the commission of an act of terrorism" has an air of PATRIOT act about it, while "use of a firearm during a murder" seems curious, implying that he was a very naughty boy to be even carrying a gun: I wonder idly how this charge would have been different had he used, let’s say, a box-cutter or a knife.

As I recall (it happens I was in the United States at the time), the sniper episode lasted about three weeks: unless there’s a mistake in the reporting, the phrase "within a three-year period" presumably has to do with earlier unexplained shootings in other locations that the prosecutors seek to attribute to the sniper pair.

Insane? Premeditated? Take your pick. Or maybe it’s both. Investigative follow-up on sniper affair has been swept under the rug by numerous mass media diversions, not least the pious concerns about the nature, timing and proceeds of the literary endeavours of the policeman in charge of the manhunt, Charles Moose — endeavours for which he has apparently given up his job. These developments, naturally, had nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged ineptitude on his part.

John Allen Muhammad (prior to 1985, John Allen Williams), the older accused sniper, is a Gulf War veteran who claims, with a strong semblance of plausibility, that he worked for one or more federal government intelligence agencies. It is reported that he will plead not guilty to the charges made against him.

It is common to attribute episodes such as these to the phenomenon of blowback, when government — in this case the military and u2018intelligence’ arms of government — have their own covert operations machinations blow up in their faces. But, as William Norman Grigg points out in an excellent 1997 article on the 1993 WTC bombings entitled "Enemies and Assets," in which he quotes Frdric Bastiat: government "concocts the antidote and the poison in the same laboratory, and then devotes half of its resources to destroying the evil it has done with the other half."

As so often when government is involved, there is a raft of coincidences, contradictions, and unanswered questions surrounding this man and his many journeys. They are too numerous for me to go into here, and are well documented on the Internet. Numerous postings in the Liberty Forum cover this topic, and California radio presenter Dave Emory has speculated at length on the possible connections between John Allen Muhammad, the intelligence agencies, and the Muslim organizations targeted in the US Customs’ Operation Green Quest, based largely in the same Virginia and Maryland beltway area where the snipers killed.

However, in my opinion the best summary of the strange connections and unanswered sniper-related questions is to be found at a website called "Center for an Informed America" (geddit?) where webmaster Dave McGowan issued a special bulletin dated October 31, 2002 entitled "The DC Snipers." Recommended reading for everyone who wishes to pierce the media fog surrounding this story, not just for u2018conspiracy theorists.’

The insanity defense is controversial. The most celebrated instance in recent times is the case of John W. Hinckley, Jr., the man who shot President Reagan on March 30, 1981 and who continues to this day to be detained in a mental hospital, St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. After his acquittal, many states reviewed the scope of the insanity defense: some abolished it altogether while others defined it much more restrictively.

Hinckley’s case won’t go away. It gets regular periodic airings in the press whenever judicial hearings take place at which he tries to obtain greater freedom on the basis that he is no longer insane (the next hearing is scheduled for November 3, 2003).

The official story, which is as implausible as any other, centres on a supposed delusional obsession of this u2018lone nut’ with the actress Jodie Foster. The assassination was to be performed as final proof of his love for her, leading to triumphant conquest, marriage and life in the White House for ever after. Prior to this, she had signally failed to respond to his charms, let alone show any sign of interest. When asked in court what her relationship with John Hinckley was, her reply was "I have no relationship with John Hinckley."

A forum thread at FreeRepublic (yes, I know) contains many of the newspaper articles from the time, and one post there describes this story as an u2018interesting set of symptoms from a Freudian standpoint, as it more or less recreates the basis of the Oedipus complex (kill Dad and marry Mom),’ going on to note u2018one other tidbit for the skeptics — Joanne Hinckley’s nickname was Jody.’

Much of the material relating to the background of his case has been ruled inadmissible (effectively suppressed), including some of Hinckley’s u2018letters to Jodie’ (which Jodie?, one might well ask). There is little doubt that Hinckley did fire six shots, but there are doubts in relation to events immediately after the shooting, such as the possible evidence of the presence of a second gunman located above street level, first noticed by reporter-on-the-scene Judy Woodruff, then of NBC. (If you’re going to assassinate, u2018triangulation’ — shooting from three different angles — is always a better bet than relying on the u2018one shot, one kill’ technique, in which John Allen Muhammad was supposedly trained by the US Army at Ft. Lewis).

There is more: for example, the fact that Reagan was most likely saved from death by an ordinary policeman (not one of his secret service agents) who jumped in front of Hinckley’s gun just as he opened fire; and the remarkable dilatoriness of the secret service agents in getting the president to hospital — they later said they u2018got lost’ (in Washington, their very own patch??, on what should have been a 5-minute journey by ambulance?).

This too is a story where coincidences, contradictions and unanswered questions have been swept under the rug, but here there has been a much greater willingness of the part of the media to tar any doubters with the u2018conspiracy theorist’ brush and dismiss this story as u2018old news’ — also a favourite tactic of u2018lap-dog Republicans,’ as some of the abusive posts at the above-mentioned forum at FreeRepublic demonstrate. Given the zeal with which all this debunking is done, one is naturally led to ask the key questions: why, and to whose benefit?

I have argued in earlier articles that we should not rush to dismiss conspiracy theories. u2018A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda,’ wrote Murray Rothbard. As with the snipers, there is a great deal of information circulating on the Internet to back up every kind of theory in relation to the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt, but it is harder to find. Here is a useful summary, thanks to the information on Dave Emory’s u2018For The Record’ website (FTR#244):

• The San Francisco Chronicle reported on March 31, 1981 that John Hinckley was a former member of the National Socialist Party of America. He was expelled for being so violent that his fellow-Nazis suspected him of being a government agent. In October of 1980, arrested at Nashville (Tennessee) airport as then President Jimmy Carter was due to arrive, Hinckley had a .38 caliber pistol and two .22 caliber handguns in his possession, along with 50 rounds of ammunition. Interestingly, this former resident of Dallas, Texas, had purchased the weapons at Rocky’s Pawn Shop, on the very street on which President Kennedy had been assassinated.
• The Nazi party to which Hinckley belonged had been founded by the American neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, whose Arlington (Virginia) name and address were in Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book at the time of his (Oswald’s) arrest. Hinckley had attended a memorial march to commemorate Rockwell (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1981.) One wonders to what extent some of these u2018coincidences’ were intended to send a message (conspirators love symbolism).
• John Hinckley Sr., had apparently been a significant contributor to George Bush’s primary campaign, when Bush Sr. was challenging Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party nomination.
• The night after the Reagan shooting, John Jr.’s brother, Scott Hinckley, was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush (George W.’s brother and, like "Dubya" and George Sr., a petroleum industry professional.) (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1981.) Scott was, at the time, an executive with the Hinckley family’s independent oil company, Vanderbilt Energy, under investigation by federal authorities at the time for alleged overpricing and facing heavy fines (San Jose Mercury, April 1, 1981, p. 24A, and San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1981.)
• Hinckley Sr. participated in a Christian Evangelical organization that had served as a front for US intelligence in Central America, employing former members of Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza’s National Guard to inform on El Salvadorian refugees in Costa Rica. A number of the refugees were liquidated after being identified as guerrilla sympathizers by the group’s operatives (National Catholic Reporter, April 23, 1982). The group had also functioned as a front for US intelligence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War (Christian Century Magazine, July 4-11, 1979.) Today, the group is in Iraq.
• Hinckley Sr.’s participation in this group, the latter’s connections to U.S. intelligence, and the closeness of the Bush and Hinckley families (add the absolute coincidence that they have colonial-era ancestors in common) should be evaluated in light of the fact that George Sr. had been head of the CIA. Hinckley Jr. was eventually represented by Greg Craig, of the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams, one of the most powerful law firms in Washington D.C. (San Francisco Examiner, April 1, 1981, p. A12.) The Williams firm’s previous clients included former CIA director Richard Helms, Robert Vesco (also connected to U.S. intelligence), Jimmy Hoffa and John Connally. Incidentally, Craig also represented President Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial, and the father of the Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez. With the assistance of the law firm (and a pliant media establishment) Hinckley’s documented Nazi connections were magically transformed into the u2018obsessional delusions’ of this u2018lone nut’ (San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1982).

Consider the pattern of events and explanations surrounding March 30, 1981: a fanatic with a lot of guns, the planting in the public mind of an idea of obsession (fascist connections transformed into love/hate), magic bullets, and the unaccountable stand-off on the part of those who are supposed to protect.

Consider the pattern of events and explanations surrounding September 11, 2001: fanatics with a lot of box-cutters, the planting in the public mind of the idea of an obsession (u2018they hate our freedoms’), magic pilots, and the unaccountable stand-off on the part of those who are supposed to protect.

Consider finally that much of the relevant information on the JFK assassination has been hidden away and cannot be released until 75 years after the event — in the year 2038, when it is fairly certain that most of the participants in that drama will be dead, and that we shall probably never get answers to the many irregularities and inconsistencies in the official version of events on September 11, 2001.

Is it any surprise that so many reach the conclusion that somebody, somewhere has plenty to hide?

Welcome to the world of Washington, DC, where shooters have insanity in their veins. Asked to comment, one temporary resident on a 4-year assignment there said, "I’m keeping quiet. There are too many leaks in this town. I’ve tried to get plumbers in to fix them, but ever since a previous occupant of my house gave those guys a bad name, all you can find here are fixers and pushers. It’s insane! I can’t wait to get back to the ranch."

Links and Further Reading

1) D.C. SNIPERS

• Bill Sardi, Ineptness By Law Enforcement Goes Unexplained In Wash-DC Sniper Case — LewRockwell.com, October 27, 2002
• Christopher Manion, Liberal Justice Means More Murders — LewRockwell.com, October 28, 2002
• Alex Tizon, Sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad’s meltdown, Seattle Times, Nov. 10, 2002 (Google cached page)
• Richard Wallace, Sniper — Police Swoop, The Mirror (UK), October 27, 2002

2) HINCKLEY

• Anonymous, Hinckley — Hit Man for the Shadow Government — undated
• Peter Baker, Two Definitions of Duty — Washington Post, May 15, 1998
• N. Blumberg: The Afternoon of March 30 (a documentary novel) — WoodFIREAshes Press, 1984
• Murrah’s Genealogy
• Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaikin, George Bush, The Unauthorised Biography — Chapter 17 (online book)

3) THE INSANITY DEFENSE

• John P. Martin, The Insanity defense — a closer look — Washington Post, February 27, 1998
• Carol A. Valentine, The Insanity of the Insanity Defense — Human Events, September 1981

4) MISCELLANEOUS

• Bill Straub, Leader of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ regrets loss of integrity, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 15, 2002

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

~ Robert Burns (1759—1796)

George Monbiot, The Age of Consent — a Manifesto for a New World Order, Harper Collins, 2003

Ian Angell, The New Barbarian Manifesto — How to Survive the Information Age, Kogan Paul, 2000

Twenty years ago I taught myself how to write a computer program. That was in the new morning of personal computing, when innovative computers still carried u2018Made in England’ or u2018Made in USA’ tags. Their inventors were hailed as the gurus of the information age, ushering in a bright new future (if you were optimistic), or perhaps a brave new world (if you were pessimistic).

Ok, I wrote the program in the simplest of languages, BASIC, but it gave me and the firm I was working for the business information we needed, something the rudimentary off-the-shelf software of the day could not provide.

Writing a program is an object-lesson in forestalling and adjusting for the unintended consequences of one’s definitions, instructions and calculations: computer programs have to do what they set out to do, and do it in the background. Even then, as all computer users know to their cost, bugs and security loop-holes (literally) have a habit of appearing, long after the software has u2018gone gold’ (that’s the moment when software houses like Microsoft issue a supposedly final version for retail distribution).

Mantra-wielding manifesto-writers in search of the ultimate catchy sound-bite to describe our post-modern age and remedy its ills could well do with some of that discipline. Here are two interesting but quite different writers who both have a fondness for applying labels. For one, we are in an u2018age of coercion’ and need to move into an u2018age of consent.’ For the other, we are in the u2018information age,’ which is also u2018an age of rage’ and u2018an age of resentment,’ and we need techniques to survive it. They have both chosen the word u2018manifesto’ — a prescriptive programme of political action and reform — to describe their challenging, in-your-face books on the future of the world.

George Monbiot, sometimes described rather disparagingly as an eco-socialist, is a regular writer and weekly columnist for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. Some of his excellent articles have been linked to from the LewRockwell.com daily page (one in connection with the anthrax scare in 2001, the other, in July 2003, entitled America is a Religion).

The media, and the politicians in power, have consistently portrayed the anti-globalization protests of the last few years as being u2018mindless’ and u2018pointless’ attempts to overthrow the present world financial system. With his new, far-reaching book The Age of Consent, Monbiot seeks radically to change that image, and give meaning and purpose to the u2018global justice movement’ (the new and more positive-sounding designation for the u2018anti-globalization’ protests and demonstrations).

He outlines specific institutional measures to bring about a global democratic revolution and thereby capture globalization for all the world’s people, rather than merely overthrow it. At the book’s close, he invites the reader who agrees with his prescriptions to act, and not get left behind by merely sitting back and agreeing with him.

Ian Angell, who sometimes describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, is Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a management guru in great demand on the public speaking circuit, especially with major corporations when they want to shake up their personnel.

In apparent stark contrast to Monbiot, his book The New Barbarian Manifesto, first published 3 years ago, outlines a neo-Nietzschean future in which enlightened self-interest and technology-led personal and corporate security will ensure that the world belongs to the free-ranging u2018new barbarians’ and to the global corporations which employ them.

The new barbarians are an elite of highly mobile and affluent knowledge-workers able to flee not only the rage of anti-globalization protestors and others, but also to find hot-spots of dynamic innovation — smart regions or go-it-alone city-states — where they can escape the constraints of interference in their lives by any government or taxing authority anywhere. At the close of his book he urges his readers to become new barbarians, and not get left behind by remaining in place. Only the most savvy and nimble-footed will prosper. Those who remain in situ will be kept under surveillance, regulated, and taxed out of house and home.

What’s in a Manifesto?

A manifesto actually implies three things: an assumption that the status quo is faulty (producing u2018undesirable’ results), describing what is wrong, and outlining principles and policies for what has to be done to make things right. Predicting how they will be does not really come into the equation, except perhaps — and here’s the rub — through the intervention of wishful thinking.

Conventional wisdom has it that the easiest thing to do is to criticize and say what’s wrong, but doing so does not necessarily mean that the critics come up with the right solutions — if they come up with any at all.

In fact these three activities — extrapolation from history, describing the present situation and making prescriptions for the future — are very different and perhaps equally difficult arts, but they are often muddled up by the wishful thinking of those who would forcibly transform their plans and schemes for the world into reality, rather than create the conditions for the spontaneous or voluntary principles of human action, and then wait for those principles to make themselves felt — as in the operation of true free trade or a true free market.

Indeed those who, infused with a passionate indignation at the sufferings of others, have a programme to implement, will tend to argue that justice, or more often ideological goals masquerading as moral goals like justice — cannot wait for the normal operation of a humanity which is inherently fallible and originally sinful: they’ll say the future must be shaped to their mould, things must be done, and done now! And they, the philosopher-guardians, know best!

This is dangerous and unwise, and leads straight to fascism. For in their urgent desires as men and women with a missionary zeal to right every wrong, they will succeed only in committing different or even greater wrongs to others.

It is hardly surprising therefore that we the humans are almost always on the receiving end of two outcomes of ideological programmes and actions, both undesirable and inimical to freedom.

The first outcome is the unintended consequences of intervention. Objectively worse outcomes are achieved — in Burns’ inimitable words, grief and pain in place of the promised joy. What is even more tragic is that more often than not the grief and pain derive from humane people with good intentions (but this is not always so: in an age where consent is manufactured by increasingly sophisticated state propaganda, we need to be constantly on the look-out for the proverbial heifer dust, as u2018WMD,’ u201845 minutes,’ and u2018they hate our freedoms’ remind us).

The second outcome is the inevitable call for even greater intervention to deal with the problems caused by the earlier, unsuccessful intervention, which was never fully thought through in the first place.

New world order, or chaos? Utopia, or Dystopia?

At first sight u2018manifesto’ appears to be more appropriate as a label for Monbiot’s book, because it is more prescriptive. It is mainly an improvement scheme consisting of interlocking proposals for changing the way the world’s existing supra-national institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the discredited World Trade Organization and the UN General Assembly and Security Council) are organized. As such it has a slightly old-fashioned air about it. It is also specifically designed to counter the charge that those who criticize the existing order of things have failed until now to suggest concrete alternatives.

His proposed system has been described as a utopia, based on the consent of all the governed, while Ian Angell’s vision has been seen as the opposite — a dystopia, based on the rage of all the ungovernable; rather than being a manifesto, Angell’s much more descriptive book is more accurately to be labelled a guide or handbook for would-be high-flyers, as implied by the subtitle on the dust-jacket: "How to survive the information age."

It has more of an air of futurology about it, and its racy exploration of the millennium spirit of the times and of the consequences of technological and economic change is highly entertaining, as well as at times seriously disturbing.

Yet neither of these two little summaries do full justice to either writer, and what is interesting is that they have so much in common: they both see and understand the structural problems and the increasingly severe, violence-inducing dissatisfaction with the existing order amongst ordinary people, which leads to societal breakdown. They both deal (Monbiot more implicitly, Angell more explicitly) with questions of wealth and wealth-creation. Both writers are genuinely nice guys concerned about the direction in which the world is going (despite the prophet-of-doom tone of his book, Angell has admitted in a BBC TV interview that he wrote it partly with tongue in cheek, to stir things up amongst his readers).

Both also express libertarian sentiments, implicitly criticising government intervention, both stress individual freedom over security for the herd (even if they see different ways of achieving it), and both imply awareness of biological and alchemical processes of mutation involving transformative moments when we collectively get the feeling that the whole world is somehow on the move (u2018Business is alchemy,’ writes Angell).

Lastly — a sign of how much Karl Marx has to answer for — they both owe a debt to the tradition of the manifesto or political programme going back at least to Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, if not further. Consciously and subconsciously, both Monbiot and Angell draw on him, and find themselves obliged to bring Marx in to their arguments, even if only to demolish Marxist interpretations and viewpoints.

Hegel’s Dialectic is in there too, with philosophical contemplations on the dynamic interaction of opposites informing many of the arguments developed by both writers: winners/losers, reasonable/unreasonable, rich/poor, oppressors/oppressed, elected/unelected, order/chaos, knowledge/ignorance, dynamic/static — the list could go on ad infinitum.

Both writers are excellent at understanding the way in which good intentions backfire when converted into regulation. They even cover much of the same ground. Here for example is Monbiot on the effects of well-meaning campaigns in the developed world against child labour:

"A universal ban on child labour,.. which could be the effective result of punitive measures against poorer nations [to enforce labour standards], would be deeply resented by many families which are so poor that they have no option but to send their children to work. We are, yet again, pre-empting any decisions that the people of those nations might make, and punishing them if they make what we believe are the wrong ones." (Monbiot, The Age of Consent, p. 225).

Compare this with Angell, keeping in mind those Asian kids’ tiny fingers stitching soccer balls:

"Sentimentality has a habit of backfiring. When US senators passed the Child Labor Deterrence Bill blocking imports into the United States of any product made by children, the effects were unexpected. In Bangladesh children who earned a pittance in factories were thrown out of work, and reduced to scavenging and prostitution. u2018The road to hell is paved with good intentions’" (Angell, The New Barbarian Manifesto, p. 54)

Thus do humanitarian interventionists end up killing the targets of their good intentions if those targeted persist too long in u2018doing the wrong thing.’ And states with ostensibly humanitarian interventionist goals have no qualms in disposing of their own people according to the arbitrary will of those in power. Angell again:

"Citizens everywhere, from all social strata, are losing faith in the integrity of the nation state. They see a degenerate political class in an unseemly rush to satisfy vested interests, at a time when the state itself is becoming increasingly powerless. From their side of this unholy bargain, the leaders of the nation-state demand ownership of its citizens, body and soul. This is state-inspired slavery of its citizens. What is it but slavery when citizens are disposable, and leaders value individual freedoms far less than their own interests or, as they say, national interests? What is it but slavery, when leaders insist on the right to force young men (and now increasingly women) into military uniforms and demand that they kill and be killed for the good of the state? Over the past 200 years states have killed hundreds of millions of innocents. In comparison, the number of killings perpetrated by state-classified u2018criminals’ pales into insignificance." (Angell, The New Barbarian Manifesto, p. 140).

Spoken as a true libertarian, and I have no doubt George Monbiot would find little to quarrel with in this diagnosis.

The Attraction of Opposites

There is however, at least one point at which these two writers diverge, and for me that is at the old crossroads, long ago identified by Franz Oppenheimer and later taken up by the great libertarians Albert J. Nock and Murray Rothbard, between the only two means of creating wealth: the economic means (work, production and voluntary exchange) and the political means (forcible appropriation and compulsory exchange on terms laid down by the holder of the monopoly of force, usually the state).

This fundamental distinction lies at the heart of libertarian critical analysis: it ultimately defines whether you have an optimistic or a pessimistic view of human nature, and whether you hold hope for the future or tend to sink into the slough of despond. Of course, like me, you may do both from time to time — most of us have good and bad days.

Ian Angell focuses mainly on the economic means, and his book is in the final analysis an economic treatise with interesting sociological and political comments. It is the more entertaining of the two, but is also more depressing, and so is likely to turn your good day into a bad one.

Understandably, his book also owes a lot to managerial and information systems focus of his work: the cybernetic theory of management, originally developed by the late Professor Stafford Beer (1926—2002), which explains decision and control in terms of the idea of u2018requisite variety’ derived from operational research, is much in evidence.

In this theory opposing sets of human actions and events are judged to be in balance, and conditions reasonably stable, provided that enough u2018variety’ (opposing force or counter-force) is generated to keep them so. When too much or too little variety is generated, costs of all types increase, instability develops, and possible breakdown and revolution follow:

"Control doesn’t create order, quite the contrary. Order must be there first, and this order tolerates control. Order will have come about in the complexity of human actions, but not necessarily from human intent. Only by the concession of order does the consequent control impose structure and stability. All order is transitory regularity. Order allows controls to work, and then order fails. Consequently the certainty of structure and control collapses." (Angell, The New Barbarian Manifesto, p. 68)

George Monbiot is a knowledgeable, clear, courageous and sympathetic writer, who seems aware of the potential pitfalls of designing a political programme and prescribing how the world should be — but only in part. In my opinion he inclines too much towards a belief in the political means, despite some indications that he really has much better instincts lurking somewhere in the background. His book, the more earnest of the two, is full of such contradictions, but it is somehow less depressing, more full of hope. Whether that helps you to have a good day, only you can decide.

There are many thought-provoking comments in Monbiot’s book (and several interesting earlier reviews) which make me realize that there is a profound and realistic thinker — maybe even a compassionate libertarian — behind George Monbiot the campaigner for global social justice and purveyor of musty Marxist vocabulary like u2018the dictatorship of the vested interests.’ Likewise, behind Ian Angell’s pitiless quotes from Nietzsche and provocative sound-bites ("in the new order of things, social justice is an anachronism") there is not only a fascinating and innovative thinker, but a decent and compassionate fellow too.

Conclusion: back to the drawing board?

It is all too easy for us digital-age critical reviewers, sitting on our ergonomic chairs in front of our Internet-enabled Windows on the world, using our optical mouse/keyboard combinations (most likely now made in China, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan or Thailand), to criticize Monbiot’s overall scheme as unrealistic and utopian: he does place too much faith in the practical effectiveness of moral authority, and in his favoured mantras: democracy and its global implementation (even if one is prepared to concede, as many libertarians are not, that it is the u2018least bad’ of political systems), social justice, and the redistribution of wealth — whether it is done coercively, as by governments, or through the supposed force of that same moral authority.

Likewise, it is also too easy to be cynical or doggedly paleo-conservative in relation Angell’s mantras, which are the corporate and social-scientific buzz-words: knowledge workers, u2018hot-spots’ of innovation, the end of a decayed liberal democracy, trust and the security of information systems. It’s true that he gets over-excited about the glories of technological and corporate capitalism, and over-apocalyptic about the depths of the pit into which the fixed-abode homesteaders will fall. Most of us, after all, are not technological nomads forever in search of new data pastures, but have in-built attachments to our family roots, even if those roots are increasingly multicultural and diverse. But this is part of the test: after all, Angell is paid to stir the pot, and to deliver insights to those who have to believe that they are at the leading edge.

Today there are plenty of knowledge workers who could develop a computer program faster, better and more efficiently than I ever could. Moreover, Microsoft Excel now enables me to get at all the information I needed in 1983 and more, and I have my work cut out just learning a fraction of what modern software can do. So I would not dream of again writing my own computer program. Yet the lessons I learned were valuable: when a design or a structure is rickety, achieves the wrong results, and provides as little protection as a house of cards, then it is time to tear it down and start all over again.

So I say to the programmers, manifesto-writers and all givers of gratuitous advice: in building anew, think laterally, learn from past mistakes and run your proposals by your most bitter critics in order to anticipate the unintended consequences, not by those who are already converted. And put not your trust in government: for angry Big Brother is not content just to pry into our lives and regulate them. He is on a slash-and-burn rampage, and he (or some disgruntled hacker, left behind and in Big Brother’s employ) could well be coming to take virtual bricks out of your garden wall and throw them in through your virtual Windows!

October 13, 2003

Selected References to Books and Articles

• Francesco Balena, Programming in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 — Microsoft Press, 1999
• Stafford Beer, Decision and Control — John Wiley & Sons, 1966
• Stafford Beer, Platform for Change — John Wiley & Sons, 1975
• Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media — Pantheon Books, 2002
• Wendy McElroy, It’s the State, Stupid — LewRockwell.com, August 10, 2000
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World — Perennial Books, 1998 (1932)
• J. Micklethwait & A. Wooldridge A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization — Times Books, 2000
• Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State — Fox & Wilkes, 1994 (1935) (also available online)
• Franz Oppenheimer, The State — Fox & Wilkes, 1989 (1908)
• George Orwell, 1984 — Knopf, 1982 (1949)
• Plato, The Republic — Harvard University Press, 1969
• Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints — Scribner, 1975
• Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Confusion and Clarity in Cancun, LewRockwell.com, September 18, 2003
• Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: the Libertarian Manifesto — 3rd edition, Fox & Wilkes, 1989 (also available online at the Mises Institute)
• Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents — W.W. Norton & Co, 2002

Links to Other Reviews

George Monbiot

• Johann Hari (in The Independent newspaper)
• Jon Beasley-Murray: u2018Alternative Globalizations: From the Fiction of Order to the Experience of Joy‘ (forthcoming, linked by kind permission of the author)
• Bill Emmott (editor of u2018The Economist’) (in the New Statesman) (payment required)
• John Williams u2018Expanding the Politically Possible‘ (Federal Union)
• Reader Reviews at Amazon.co.uk

Ian Angell

• Peter C. Judge: u2018Wired for Anarchy‘ (FastCompany magazine)
• Reader Reviews at Amazon.co.uk

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

I fear that, in going to this remote hotspot to perform the abject ritual of impossible atonement for the sins of their ancestors, in emotional speeches, U.S. Presidents Clinton (P42) and Bush Jr. (P43) have established a dangerous, hypocritical ( [1] ), and truly time-wasting precedent for the holder of that office.

Let us just hope that P45 or P46, who could well be a woman, makes a sensible choice of outfit when her turn comes to deliver the now requisite speech over the under-floor, upwards-pointing air conditioning vent which reportedly kept Dubya cool while African dignitaries in their flowing and appropriately loose-fitting garments complained about the palpable intrusiveness of the frisking they had to undergo at the hands of the President’ssecurity men ( [2] ).

Against a backdrop of politically correct self-flagellation by a bemused president who has told us that u201CAfrica is a nation that suffers from incredible diseaseu201D ( [3] ) and the perceived need for a generous spreading of liberal social-democracy, West Africa has all the ingredients for righteous intervention by the empire in its on-going pursuit of benevolent global hegemony.

Liberia, with its warring factions requiring u2018peace-keeping,’ and innocent inhabitants caught in the cross-fire, is the perfect foil for the modern-day blame and atonement game typified by Bush-Clinton in Gore. Add to this the grinding poverty, the appalling disease, military establishments requiring aid (and no doubt training at Fort Benning, Georgia), and a u2018democratic deficit’ to be made good, and you have a field day for the men of good intentions — including, so it seems, P44 hopeful Howard Dean.

It is not hard to fathom that P43 and his entourage, who visited Nigeria and other countries on their recent whirlwind tour of Africa, were really on another mission altogether. For at the end of this rainbow of opportunity for humanitarian interventionists, weapons manufacturers and self-appointed experts in u2018good governance’— lies the glittering prize of all prizes: black oil.

u201CAfrican oil is of national strategic interest to us,u201D said Assistant Secretary of State for Africa and former Scowcroft group member Walter H. Kansteiner III at a January 2002 symposium on African oil held in Washington DC and organized by the Institute for Advanced Political and Strategic Studies (IASPS), the same Jerusalem-based think-tank which in 1996 brought us Richard Perle’s u201CA Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm.u201D This organization has been at the forefront of successful attempts to persuade the United States P43 administration that it needs to diversify its sources of oil supply, and move away from the u2018unfriendly’ old gulf (that’s the Persian gulf) to exploit the u2018new gulf’ — the gulf of Guinea in West Africa.

u201CAfrica…u201D said congressional Sub-Committee on Africa chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-California) at the same event, u201Cis less of a long-term threat in terms of our dependency on foreign oil. It is very difficult to imagine a Saddam Hussein in Africa… I think African oil should be treated as a priority for U.S. national security post-9/11, and I think that post 9/11 it has occurred to all of us that our traditional sources of oil are not as secure as we once thought they were.u201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, January 2002, p. 5)

It might reasonably be objected that the only oil that is no longer flowing as smoothly as it once did is Iraqi oil — largely due to the sanctions applied over the last 12 years, the March 2003 Anglo-American invasion and the now sorely-troubled occupation. And as for an African Saddam, perhaps the congressman had temporarily forgotten the depredations of the late, unlamented Idi Amin of Uganda, whom we now learn was an Israeli protg,and his good friend Bokassa of the Central African Republic, both of them u2018half criminal, half clown’ who left u2018in their wakes .. tales of fantastic self-aggrandisement and casual butchery.’

Never mind. The key concepts here are that no-one, just no-one, can be worse than Saddam Hussein, and this was all part of George W. Bush’s steep learning curve: u201CAfrica,u201D the candidate boy George had said in his 2000 election campaign, u201Cdoesn’t fit into the national strategic interests as far as I can see.u201D ( [4] )

It didn’t take long for an assortment of imperial handlers, ranging from members of the Council on Foreign Relations, to Congressmen, some of his oil industry buddies, and the afore-mentioned speakers at the IASPS symposium, to put him right, for two reasons:

1. The oil will run out — sooner, as his own advisers warn ( [5] ) or later, as P41′s (his father’s) advisers warn ( [6] ).
2. Even if it doesn’t run out as soon as some say it will, the oil supply is u201Cnot secureu201D — too much of it is coming out of the ground in those u2018unfriendly’ Muslim countries (cue Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and even the sabotage-plagued satrapy of Iraq).

To make it secure and ensure that the gasoline keeps flowing, and just in case there’s more trouble to come in the uncongenial Middle East, the policy is now to cozy up to untapped countries where new technology has made it possible to dig for oil in deeper parts of theocean around them.

There is of course the small matter that many of them are decidedly unsavoury, like Equatorial Guinea — dubbed the u2018Kuwait of Africa’ in Ken Silverstein’s fascinating April 2002 article for The Nation ( [7] ). But that can be overlooked because, together with many of its neighbours in the new Gulf, it is now oil-rich.

Of course, we already foresee a need to protect u2018our oil’ from threats of terrorism. u201CIn the past three years,u201D as then US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski informed the symposium, u201Cwe nearly doubled [the number of] our defense attachs in the sub-continent,u201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, p. 26). Rep. Royce expanded on the security theme:

u201CFew Americans really appreciate that Africa is now the third largest source of our [oil and natural gas] imports. The importance of US oil production in the Gulf of Guinea points to developing a strategy to protect this production from terrorism, and this raises critical concerns about the role of the US military in the region and its relations with African militariesu201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, p. 7).

From this point it is but a short step to the US, in Congressman Royce’s words, u201Cexporting security arrangements to protect offshore energy resources in selected ECOMOGcountriesu201D and — who knows? — beginning to pour the concrete for a naval base.

In the words of Congressman William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) of the same Africa congressional Sub-Committee, u201Cthese [African] countries are not averse to having us forward-place assets there of all sorts, including military assets.u201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, p.25)

Bring on the tiny two-island state of So Tom e Prncipe (this is pronounced roughly as u201CSowng Tomay ee Preenspu201D in Portuguese, but it can be rendered in English as St. Thomas and Prince Islands, and is usually abbreviated to STP in the military jargon).

The Cocoa Harvest of So Tom — 1908
c

This impoverished former Portuguese colony of 170,000 inhabitants was known until now mainly for its cocoa plantations — it was at one time the world’s top cocoa producer. Like Gore, it was once also a place of no return for slaves brought from the African mainland to work those plantations, because there was no local labour ( [8] ).

But it is now talked of as another potential Kuwait, and has been earmarked by the imperial strategists as a possible location for the regional homeport of a future US Forces Southern Atlantic sub-command, as proposed in a list of regional security recommendations of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group’s 2002 white paper ( [9] ). That paper goes on to suggest that u201Ca US-Nigerian compact on regional security issues should be established to make the area more secure and thereby more attractive for direct foreign investment.u201D

u201CSo Tom and Prncipe just signed a joint exploration agreement with Nigeria. Whoever thought about that little place?u201D said congressman Jefferson. u201CBut they are now estimating four billion barrels of oil in So Tom and Prncipe. And that’s just the beginning.u201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, p. 23).

It is just the beginning, but of what, precisely? The historical record shows that the onset of sudden large oil revenues, like lottery prize money, can be a mixed blessing, especially in poor countries. Professor Teri Karl of Stanford University, co-author of the Catholic Relief Services June 2003 report u201CBottom of the Barrel: Africa’s Oil Boom and the Pooru201D ( [10] ) was another speaker at the IASPS African Oil Symposium, and she warned:

u201CAcross the board and across regions, oil over time reduces welfare, lowers growth rates, leads to political instability of oil exporting countries, causes great environmental damage, and also buffers regimes, authoritarian regimes that are violators of rights. This is not a Middle Eastern phenomenon; it’s not an African phenomenon; it’s not a Latin American phenomenon; it’s an oil phenomenon inserted into weak political and economic institutions.u201D

She went on, u201CLet me add one more thing…. There is very powerful statistical evidence linking oil and war. [..] In a series of statistical tests World Bank economists Collier and Huffler show that the most powerful risk factor for perpetuating civil war is the export of primary commodities, particularly mineral commodities.u201D (IASPS African Oil Symposium Proceedings, p.17)

Recent events seem to attest to the truth of these observations. Last month, STP was the scene of a military coup which temporarily deposed President Fradique de Menezes ( [11] ), apparently brought about by internal competition for the revenue to come from deep-water oil extraction in the oceans around the islands. Existing oil exploration rights are held by ERHC, a Houston-based subsidiary of the privately-owned Chrome Group, which operates mainly in neighbouring Nigeria, but, as reported by BBC News, further licenses to develop the offshore fields are due to be auctioned in 2004. Neither the oil nor the revenue has yet started to flow, yet already there is a scramble for the spoils. The doctrine of pre-emption is indeed pervasive.

To all this there is a small dose of irony. Fradique de Menezes, who was brought home and put back in the saddle by Nigerian President Obasanjo after multilateral negotiations with the coup leaders, is a former cocoa trader. So is US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner ( [12] ).

Meanwhile, President Obasanjo has revealed that Nigeria will henceforth u2018protect’ STP through a joint military pact ( [13] ). US marines have disembarked and some of them are already u2018embedded’ (yes!) with the Nigerian military in Liberia ( [14] ), in operations which, to the apparent chagrin of the neocon Defense establishment, are seen by some as a dress rehearsal for further West African involvements of the humanitarian and nation-building variety.

All we are missing now is the Hollywood movie version. I can already see that great actor Cuba Gooding Jr. playing the new Top Gun: as he and his girl stroll along a palm-fringed equatorial beach in u2018that poor little place’ So Tom, and the patrol boats and fighter jets roar off into the distance to fight the terrorists, the locals, as in Okinawa ( [15] ) and 63 (or is it 64?) other countries and places around the world, will dutifully service the employment-providing military base. But that’s a story for another time.

Additional Links

• Hector Igbikiowubo: West African Oil Draws Growing U.S. Interest, AllAfrica.com — July 22, 2003
• Eric Margolis: The Lion of Africa Roars, Foreign Correspondent — July 14, 2003
• Martha Honey: Bush and Africa, Counterpunch — July 4, 2003
• Charlotte Denny: Scramble for Africa, The Guardian (UK) — June 17, 2003
• Ken Silverstein: Small Houston company finds a good deal in Africa — Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2003
• International Energy Outlook 2003: World Oil Markets, Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy — May 1, 2003
• Jean-Christophe Servant: The new gulf oil states, Le Monde Diplomatique — January 2003
• Kevin Clarke: Our Oily New Friends in West Africa, US Catholic, November 2002
• Stephen K. Boit: Alarming Developments in US-Africa Relations, Profile Africa — November 10, 2002
• Mark Doyle: US eyes African Oil, BBC News, October 9, 2002
• Dena Montague: Africa: The New Oil And Military Frontier, World Policy Institute — September 20, 2002
• Keith Somerville: US looks to Africa for ‘secure oil’ BBC News — September 13, 2002
• Who’s Who at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies

Notes and References

[1] Bakari Akil II: George Bush’s Goree Island Speech: Truth or Hypocrisy? — Global Black News, July 14, 2003

[2] John Dickerson: In Senegal, Bush Speaks Against Slavery — Time Magazine — July 9, 2003

[3] John Cochran: Not Out of Africa: Bush Visits Africa u2014 But Why Now? — ABC News — July 8, 2003

[4] Candidate George W. Bush on "Newshour With Jim Lehrer" — PBS, February 2000

[5] Matthew Simmons onPeak Oil and Natural Gas Depletion — transcript of May 27, 2003 speech to Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO).

[6] Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century — Report of an Independent Task Force sponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations — April 2001

[7] Ken Silverstein: U.S. Oil Politics in the ‘Kuwait of Africa’ — The Nation — April 4, 2002

[8] The story is told in E. D. Morel’s The Story of Angola and the Cocoa Islands — (extracted from The Black Man’s Burden, Manchester, National Labour Press, 1920)

[9] African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG): Africa White Paper (PDF file) — 2002

[10] Catholic Relief Services, Press Release: Africa’s Oil and the Poor: No more business as usual

[11] Coup Leaders Hand Power Back To Civilian President —UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs — July 23, 2003

[12] Ann-Louise Colgan: Walter Kansteiner, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa — Foreign Policy in Focus — April 2001

[13] Obasanjo reveals military pact with So Tom — UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs — August 6, 2003

[14] Robert Burns: U.S. to Add u2018Quick Reaction’ Liberia Force — Associated Press — August 14, 2003

[15] Alexander Cooley and Kimberly Zisk Marten: Lessons of Okinawa — The New York Times — July 30, 2003 (abstract only, purchase required to view)

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

• In April 1952, Ben-Gurion spoke to his senior officials about Israel’s vital interests and stated: "First and foremost, we have to see to Israel’s needs, whether or not this brings improvement in our relations with the Arabs. The second factor in our existence is American Jewry and its relationship with us (and the state of America, since these Jews live in it). The third thing — peace with the Arabs. This is the order of priorities." (~ The Iron Wall, p.78)

• In 1956, after the Suez invasion, "President Eisenhower was fuming with anger at having been deceived [by Britain, France, and Israel]… Privately [foreign minister] Abba Eban was told that if Israel did not withdraw, all official aid from the US government and private aid from American Jewry would be cut off and that the United States would not oppose the expulsion of Israel from the UN." (~ The Iron Wall, p. 181)

• In 1963/4, after President Kennedy had "continued to tilt America’s Middle Eastern policy in Israel’s favor" (p. 211), "Israel’s relations with America continued to improve when Lyndon Johnson became President…In early June [prime minister] Eshkol went on a state visit to the United States, an honor that had been denied to Ben-Gurion…. No less important than the contribution the visit made to Israel’s power of military deterrence, said Eshkol, was the enhancement of its power for political deterrence. The visit thus carried Israel a significant step closer to the goal that had persistently eluded Ben-Gurion, namely, an American guarantee of the country’s territorial integrity" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 222)

• 1975 saw an early documented instance of Israel calling the bluff of American threats. Writing about the negotiations for peace with Egypt and Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy mission to this end, Shlaim states, "On 21 March, President Ford sent Rabin a very tough message, warning that the failure of Kissinger’s mission would have far-reaching consequences for the region and for US-Israel relations. The message achieved the opposite effect to the one intended. Even the waverers in the cabinet now resolved that the negotiating team must remain adamant in its policy. Kissinger’s mission failed, and Kissinger blamed Israel for the failure."

In the steps which were subsequently taken to mend fences, both a public and a secret u2018memorandum of agreement’ between Israel and the US were signed. In the public document the United States pledged American support "on an on-going and long-term basis to Israel’s military equipment and other defense requirements, to its energy requirements and to its economic needs." In the secret document, the United States "confirmed that it would not negotiate with or recognize the PLO, nor initiate any moves in the Middle East without prior consultation with Israel… Israel now had an alliance with America in all but name. The cost of the agreement to the United States was roughly $4 billion annually for the next three years, or 200 percent above the existing level of American aid to Israel. The package was criticized in some American quarters as being excessive, and even extortionate…" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 338)

• In 1977, President Carter became "the first American president to champion the Palestinian right to self-determination… Convinced that the PLO was ready for compromise, he used the terms PLO and Palestinians interchangeably…" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 350)

• By 1982, we have Ronald Reagan — and it may seem surprising to read this — continuing in similar vein: "He said that the departure of the Palestinians from Beirut dramatized more than ever the homelessness of the Palestinian people. His plan was for self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan. He ruled out both a Palestinian state and annexation to Israel. Additional Israeli settlements in the territories would be an obstacle to peace, said Reagan" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 415)

• May 1989 saw the speech of James Baker at the annual convention of AIPAC. "In a pointed reference to Shamir’s ideology, Baker said u2018For Israel, now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel. Israeli interest in the West Bank and Gaza — security and otherwise — can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation. Stop settlement activity. Allow schools to reopen. Reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights.’ Baker’s speech was not well-received by his large American-Jewish audience, and it raised worries in Israel." (~ The Iron Wall, p. 469).

Murray Rothbard had the following to say about James Baker and the position of George Bush Sr. on US-Israel relations, just before the Presidential elections of in 1992 which pitted George Bush Sr. against Bill Clinton:

"Bush has by far the most pro-American policy on the Middle East since Jack Kennedy; he is the only president since Kennedy not to serve as a lick-spittle for the State of Israel, the only one not to function as an abject tool of the powerful Zionist lobby, led by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Action Committee, which somehow escapes being a registered agent of the State of Israel). The greatest credit, of course, goes to Secretary of State James Baker, who formulated this policy, and maintained it under the most vicious pressure. But Bush deserves credit for picking Baker and backing him up; further, with only a little stretching, Bush/Baker can take credit for the Israeli election that deposed the little monster Shamir, and brought in a more rational government in Israel. Bush-Baker stood firm on delaying the $10 billion loan guarantee until Zionist settlements are slowed down on the Arab lands of the West Bank." (Murray N. Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard, "Working our way back to the President").

- August 1990 to January 1991 saw the Gulf Crisis. Shlaim comments (my own comments are in italics):

"Likud leaders used the invasion [of Kuwait by Iraq] to drive home their point that Iraq was a greater threat to Middle Eastern stability than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler (sounds familiar?) …This analogy was usually accompanied by calls on the Western world, and especially the United States, to intervene in order to stop the Iraqi dictator in his tracks. The underlying fear was that unless the Western powers intervened, a showdown between Israel and Iraq would become inevitable sooner or later, and the unstated hope was that Israel’s greatest ally would seize the opportunity to defeat Israel’s powerful enemy." (It is salutary to remember that these words were written in 1999 and referred to policies which were being advocated in 1990/91)

One of the peculiarities of the Gulf crisis was that Israel found itself on the same side as the great majority of the Arab states… But there was fundamental difference…. The Arabs …wanted the reversal of the Iraqi aggression… while Israel wanted the destruction of the Iraqi war machine and war-making potential. Syria in particular was worried that the destruction of Iraqi power would tilt the overall Arab-Israeli military equation in Israel’s favour. It was precisely for this reason that Israel wanted to see a thoroughgoing devastation of Iraq. Some Israeli experts, including Rabin, were of the opinion that nothing short of unconventional arms would stop Iraq in the wake of its invasion of Kuwait."

~ The Iron Wall, p. 474

• In February 1991, Operation Desert Storm was brought to a close with the executive decision not to press on to Baghdad. "From Israel’s point of view, Operation Desert Storm ended too soon. Israel’s objectives were three-fold: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the destruction of Iraq’s war machine, and the neutralization of its capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction (sounds familiar too…). The first aim was not achieved by the [first] Gulf War, and the last two were achieved only in part."

  "The most important consequence of the Gulf War for Israel, however, concerned its special relationship with America. One way of looking at the Gulf War is to say that Israel was the greatest beneficiary because, without having to lift a finger itself, it witnessed the defeat of its most formidable foe at the hands of its most faithful friend. But such a view involves a serious oversimplification. For Israel had traditionally been regarded, not least by itself, as a strategic partner and a strategic asset to the United States in the Middle East. The Gulf conflict was a real eye-opener in this respect. Here was a conflict that threatened America’s most vital interests in the region, and the best service that Israel could render its senior partner was to refrain from doing anything. Far from being a strategic asset, Israel was widely perceived as an embarrassment and a liability."

(~ The Iron Wall, p. 483/4)

At this point, things had come almost full circle to the moment (in 1958) when John Foster Dulles had described the Jewish state privately as "this millstone round our necks" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 204). But the Democrat administration of Bill Clinton was yet to come:

• 1992: "As soon as Bill Clinton entered the White House, the pro-Israeli bias in American policy became more pronounced. The even-handed approach of the Bush administration was replaced by an Israel-first approach reminiscent of the Reagan days. Clinton refused to put pressure on Israel and adopted a hands-off approach to the peace process" (~ The Iron Wall, p. 511).

Shlaim outlines a case for seeing Bill Clinton’s u2018master of ceremonies’ role in the Oslo accords as being more showmanship than real substance. I plead ignorance and leave the question open. What is certain is that the arrival of Democrat administrations has tended to be viewed with greater delight in Israel than the arrival of Republican ones, and the public positions of Democratic Party candidates for the forthcoming presidential elections would seem to justify such an attitude. However, the administration of George Bush the younger may yet turn out to be the exception which proves the rule.

Back to main article

Richard Wall (send him mail) has a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics & Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently works as a freelance writer and translator.

Richard Wall Archives

"Truth may be the first casualty of war, but culture is always another. Those who are indifferent to its destruction are apt to be indifferent to the destruction of life itself," writes Joe Sobran in a recent article on the looting of Iraq.

If of late you've had a little too much of the philosopher Leo Strauss and his followers — the ones who failed or did not care to prevent the looting which has taken place in Iraq — take a break from the cultural and media wars. I recommend sitting down quietly to listen to the glorious music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

"Over 250 years after his death," writes the Catalan musician and conductor Jordi Savall, "the mysterious current of Bach's genius continues to transport us to the depths of the human spirit. [His music] provides the inexhaustible impulse for a spiritual and aesthetic journey into those sublime realms where the human and the divine communicate and are sometimes united in harmony."

Heady words, but no exaggeration for anyone who has experienced the frisson that runs down the spine when listening to Bach's music. It is an invidious task to recommend any of it in particular. To connoisseurs and Bach aficionados who are reading this I therefore apologize, since no choice of this sort would ever command a consensus, but for those who might like to experiment, or perhaps revisit the music, I have picked three introductory items: the Violin Concertos (BWV 1041-1043), the Easter Oratorio (BWV 249), and The Preludes and Fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (Part 1 BWV 846-869, Part 2 BWV 870-893).

For further exploration, I have compiled a small suggested discography at the end of this article. In addition, the Internet is a rich source of material on Bach. There are many excellent websites detailing and cataloguing his life and work, some offering music samples for downloading, and I have listed a few of these as well.

For preference, your audition should be uninterrupted, as in a live concert. Of course, modern living is not conducive to this, but it is still a worthwhile goal. No phones, no getting up to order a pizza or cook supper in the middle, and visits to the little room should be got over before you start. Otherwise, as a good school friend of mine once said to me and I have never since forgotten, every time you interrupt, stop the music, or walk out, you are insulting the composer. To say nothing of diminishing the experience and your own enjoyment of whatever you are listening to.

I say this half in jest, and half seriously, because Bach's music, like the best of art and culture, is in the true sense inspired by the divine. It is a journey in search of ultimate consolation for the soul, in a material world of trouble and tribulation. Therefore it is best experienced in a straight-through sequential performance, with all its stirring climaxes, moments of deep contemplation or even despair, and waves of elation and joy.

While the experience of listening to recorded music does not match the experience of attending a live concert, audio technology, lately in the form of Digital Radio, Super Audio CD (SACD), and home theatre DVD for example, has been moving us closer and closer to the live performance experience. I count myself fortunate that I grew up in the age of the high fidelity stereophonic sound recording and the long-playing vinyl record. While some say they still prefer vinyl records as giving the more mellow (analog) sound than the (digital) CD, despite the penalty in clicks and scratches, I have for almost all of its 20 years been a dedicated fan of the now universal iridescent compact disc, which makes it possible to listen to music in the way I have recommended above with a high degree of clear and faithful sound.

In Bach's day, the early 18th century, it was a different matter. The music was written most often for church performance at particular solemn occasions or ceremonies, requiring significant organizational skills to marshal all the necessary human and musical resources, and Bach would probably not have seen any one work performed more than two or three times in his lifetime. This meant that when composing new works he would liberally cannibalise older works (and, as all artists do, pinch ideas from the work of earlier composers as well, such as Vivaldi), and re-arrange or transcribe for another instrument works which had originally been written for one particular instrument, so that several different versions of the same works abound.

It has also meant that, down to our own day, Bach's works lend themselves to brilliant and infinite improvisation: they can be set to voices as was done by the Swingle Singers in their "Jazz Sebastian Bach" series of the 1960s, to different groups of instruments, or be played by solo instruments, especially the harpsichord, or jazzed up like the work of the Jacques Loussier Trio in his highly listenable-to Play Bach series, which some scandalized lovers of classical music viewed as a sacrilege when they first came out in 1960.

Many other composers and performers have been profoundly influenced by Bach and have paid tribute to his inspiration in their own adaptations and variations on his works — the names of Felix Mendlessohn, who was responsible for reviving the music of Bach in the 19th century and incorporated Bach's chorale "Now thank we all our God" in his second symphony, and the Brazilian composer Villa Lobos with his haunting and beautiful Bachianas Brasileiras, are just two which spring to mind.

That we have such a rich legacy of passionately intense and inventive music today is due in no small measure to Bach's ability to transcend the limitations of his own human (and financial) condition. Dr. Percy Scholes, the original editor of the classic one-volume Oxford Companion to Music, first published in 1938, places his life as a composer in its material context thus:

"He lived in Protestant North Germany in the days when music there made an important part of the splendour of the courts, of municipal dignity, of religious observance, and of the daily happiness of the people, and he occupied successively the posts of choir-boy, violinist in the orchestra of a prince, organist of town churches, chief musician in a court, and cantor of a municipal school with charge of the music in its associated churches."

In career terms, according to Scholes, u2018he experienced a good deal of that tribulation that often comes from contact between the clerical outlook and the artistic temperament.' In 1723, Bach, who had been Kapellmeister — official composer — twice before, had taken a step down in career terms, to become the Cantor (Precentor or Choirmaster) of St. Thomas school and Director of Music in the churches of Leipzig.

A remarkable example of Bach's divine inspiration during this period is the haunting Cantata for Solo Bass voice of 1727, "Ich habe genug" (I have enough/It is enough), BWV 82, with its famous aria, "Ich freue mich auf meinem Tod" (I look forward to my death). u2018The entire score,' writes Italian musicologist and Bach specialist Alberto Basso, u2018is suffused with an intimate and personal tone… the cantata becomes a contemplation on death considered as a liberation from the afflictions of this world.'

Afflictions which, for Bach as for most of us, included keeping body and soul together in this short earthly lifespan. In 1733 the reigning monarch in Saxony, the Elector August the Strong, died. A period of mourning was decreed during which, for five months, no musical performance was allowed. Bach took advantage of this time for creative work, and produced the early part of what was to become his Mass in B Minor, which he planned to dedicate to the new Elector and send in to him with a request to be appointed to the (better-paying and more secure) position of HofKapellmeister — Court Composer. He wrote in the following terms:

Most Illustrious Electoral Prince, Most Gracious Lord,

It is with the deepest devotion that I lay before your Royal Highness this trifling product of that science which I have obtained in music, with the most humble request that you will deign to look upon it with a gracious eye, in accordance with your Clemency, which is renowned throughout the entire world, and not judging it according to the poorness of its Composition; and that you will also deign to take me into your most mighty Protection. For some years and up to the present-day I have had the Direction of the Music of the two principal Churches in Leipzig, but have also been obliged to suffer one slight and another quite undeservedly, and also a diminishing of the additional honoraria connected with this function; the which might entirely be withheld unless your Royal Highness shows me the favour of conferring upon me a Predicate in your Hoff-Capelle, and in respect of this places before the appropriate authority your high command for the bestowal of a decree; this most gracious accession to my most humble petition will impose upon me an infinite obligation, and I offer myself in most dutiful obedience and will show my constant and indefatigable diligence in the composition of music for the church as well as for the orchestra at your Royal Highness’s most gracious desire, and will also devote all my powers to your service, and remain in an unceasing loyalty your Royal Highness’s

most humble and most obedient servant Johann Sebastian Bach Dresden, July 27th 1733.

The career guidance industry was not even in its infancy here. No-one to help with an upbeat resumé and summary of skills and achievements either. Despite this masterpiece of grovelling to supreme officialdom, Bach was not to get his appointment by decree until over three years later, in late 1736. To celebrate it he gave an organ recital at the Frauenkirche in Dresden, an occasion at which the famous Georg Silbermann organ was inaugurated.

From this time until his death in 1750, Bach was to remain settled at Leipzig, and would compose or complete some of his most intense and most inspired music, such as the three works which have come to be regarded as his musical monument – u2018The Art of Fugue,' u2018Musical Offering' and the u2018Mass in B Minor.' These are intense and difficult pieces of music which reflect his turning in on himself in his later years, when he tried to collect together what he himself already saw as a legacy for the future, and when, although betraying u2018few signs of having grown tired of his job,.. he spent his time on things which interested him, even if there was no immediate necessity to write them,' as eminent Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has written. He says of the B Minor Mass:

"Setting the text of the mass means, above all else, giving direct musical expression, without periphrasis or ambivalence, to invocation, praise and the confession of faith. Such an undertaking could not but be close to Bach's heart, for it was the supreme opportunity to unite his creed as a Christian with his creed as a musician in a single statement. But that statement had to meet his own very high standards of perfection, and so it is no wonder that it took him more than 15 years, from 1733 to 1745, to complete. There was, after all, no deadline: in this task the only obligation Bach acknowledged was his personal responsibility to his Creator, to tradition and to posterity."

It is a cruel irony of history, but no surprise to those who know what war and barbarism can do to culture, that the same Frauenkirche where Bach inaugurated the organ in 1736 was destroyed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945, a militarily unnecessary operation which, using conventional weapons (not WMD), killed 135,000 human beings – almost twice the number of people who died at Hiroshima.

Ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, destroyed by firebombing in 1945

For many years the Frauenkirche was left in ruins, its u2018hot stones' and moon landscape a memorial to those who died, as Kurt Vonnegut has so aptly described them in his classic, sad, funny and serious masterpiece and u2018book of the Dresden experience,' Slaughterhouse 5. But now the church is being rebuilt, and a webcam view of progress on the construction site is available on the Internet.

Posterity is fortunate indeed to have the legacy of J S Bach, but sadly, as all the human and cultural atrocities of war in the 20th and 21st centuries show, it has not learned to be any more civilized.

Nor are the state officials of today any better able than their predecessors were in 1945 to discriminate as to when to conduct u2018operations' with fancy names which are militarily unnecessary.

And, unlike Bach the composer and creative genius, whose works really have taken him into the realms of immortality, they certainly do not know when it is appropriate or not to invoke the name of God. I am thinking here of Mr. Blair's statements that he is ready to answer to his Maker for the invasion of Iraq.

Compared to the infinite journey to the depths of the soul which Bach's music offers us, what kind of legacy to posterity are the hot and radioactive stones of that poor bombed and looted land?

______________________________________________________________

A suggested J .S. Bach Discography:

Orchestral:  

Catalog/Performers (*)  

Violin Concertos, BWV 1041-1043

Harmonia Mundi GD77006

La Petite Bande/Sigiswald Kuijken  

Brandenburg Concertos 1-6, BWV 1046-1051    

Works for Organ and Orchestra, BWV 1052a, 1053a, 1059 and Sinfonia BWV29    

Double Concertos for Harpsichords, BWV 1060-1062

Archiv

The English Copncert, Trevor Pinnock  

Concertos for 3 and 4 Harpsichords, BWV 1063-1065

Archiv

The English Copncert, Trevor Pinnock  

Orchestral Suites 1-4, BWV 1066-1069        

Choral Works:      

Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

Archiv 415 514-2

Monteverdi Choir/John Eliot Gardiner  

Easter Oratorio, BWV 249

Harmonia Mundi HMC 901513

Collegium Vocale/Philippe Herreweghe  

Magnificat, BWV 243a    

St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244

Archiv 427 648-2

Monteverdi Choir/John Eliot Gardiner  

St. John Passion, BWV 245

Archiv 419 324-2

Monteverdi Choir/John Eliot Gardiner        

Cantatas:    

Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51    

Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, BWV 66    

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80    

Ich Habe genug, BWV 82

Harmonia Mundi/HMA 151365/ Peter Kooy      

Organ Works      

Trio Sonatas BWV 525, 526, 529

Archiv 431 705-2

Ton Koopman  

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565

Sony Classics SBK 46551

E Power Biggs  

Fantasia in G Major BWV 572

Archiv 431 705-2

Ton Koopman      

Solo Keyboard Works      

English Suites, BWV 806-811

Sony Classics SK 60276 /SK 60277

Murray Perahia  

French Suites, BWV 812-817

Decca/London 433 313-2

Andras Schiff  

Partitas BWV 825-830

Decca/London 411 732-2/Andras Schiff  

The Well-Tempered Clavier – Part 1, BWV 846-869 and Part 2, BWV 870-893

Decca/London 414 388-2/417 236-2/Andras Schiff  

Italian Concerto BWV 971

DG 419 218-2

Angela Hewitt  

Goldberg Variations BWV 988

DG 439 978-2

Wilhelm Kempff        

Suites for Solo Cello, BWV 1007-1012

Archiv 449 711-2

Pierre Fournier        

Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014-1024

Archiv 427 152-2

Reinhard Goebel/Robert Hill        

Musikalishes Opfer (Musical Offering), BWV 1079

Alia Vox AV9817

Hesperion XX/Jordi Savall        

Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue), BWV 1080

1) Harmonia Mundi 1951169

Davitt Moroney, Harpischord    

2) Alia Vox AV9818

Hesperion XX/Jordi Savall

Some Bach websites (*):

1) "Bach Central Station" — a directory of J S Bach resources on the Internet

2) David Grossman Bach Pages

3) Audio Download Pages at David Grossman's website

4) Bach Index from Teri Noel Towe website

5) J S Bach Homepage

______________________________________________________________

Note:

(*) I have no affiliation with any of these websites, artists or labels, but have personally listened to and enjoyed the versions of the works in question. Not all catalog numbers may be correct for all regions of the world.

Richard Wall (send him mail) is a freelance translator specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril, Portugal.

Richard Wall Archives

So long
Saddam Hussein Al-Takriti
That name has a good ring to it, doesn’t it?
But most of us know you
As just plain
Saddam

Your regime lasted 24 years
That’s quite a long time as dictators go
Two years longer than Mussolini
whom the people done strung up good and true,
Double Hitler
And about as long as
Your hero
Jo Stalin
But not as long as Franco
Or Salazar
Who fell off a deck chair and lost his mind
They still brought him papers to sign
Until they decided one day
To pull the plug
On his life support

The Americans came in from the sea
And with them — oh my gawd! — the post-imperial Brits
You would have thought in Iraq
That they’d have learned their lesson
In 1920
But no.

You came from Tikrit
Originally
But now
You’re gone.

Or maybe not.
For I hear
You wrote a letter
On your sixty-sixth birthday (just the other day)
Exhorting your people (sic)
To rise up,
Something you would never have allowed
During your time
In the gilded palaces

The pen is indeed mightier than the sword
Osama
(the bogeyman before you)
prefers Video
But then I suppose he’s a bit younger than you
A true child
Of his time
The television age

That is a difference
Between him and you
But there are
Uncanny similarities:
You’ve both vanished
Into thin air
After working so long
For the CIA
An occupational hazard,
It seems

Your top goons made a deal
And will, it is said, become citizens
Of the United States
Some say meanwhile
You’ve gone to Switzerland
To rearrange your face
Isn’t it ironic
That in your time
You had the faces of so many others rearranged
Now you pay
To have yours done

Switzerland’s the place
Where people like you
Keep their stash of loot
So no doubt
You can still afford it

Along with
The six point six million Americans
Who had cosmetic surgery
In 2002

Osama (if he’s still with us)
Has to spend his money
On kidney machines
But you,
You always looked pretty healthy
I have to say

One way or another
I don’t expect to see your face again
On TV
Or on posters
But maybe we’ll meet
Some Sunni day
In Oklahoma City
Or somewhere along
Route 66

For it’s odd how the Gulf Wars
Bring floods of Iraqis
To the United States
They call it
Open borders

There you could melt
Into the crowd
Just like John Doe
Number Two
Or you could become
A lone nut

Will it be you who takes out
George W. Bush,
Who has a knack for making history
And has produced a road map?
But they say he does not read
Either

Who knows?
Maybe even Time
Will never tell

So long, Saddam!

Richard Wall (send him mail) is a freelance translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril, Portugal.

Richard Wall Archives

The
ship is loved, its controllers are not. To the outside observer,
the government space agency NASA seems to be a constant target
for criticism and thinly veiled ridicule, both from
the media and other government departments. With the Columbia disaster
it seems to have taken an even bigger beating than usual, with
calls for its recently appointed director to resign. I can hear
the charges already: ‘failing to safeguard a national treasure,’ ‘accident
waiting to happen,’ ‘organic incompetence.’

The space agency itself
seems almost too ready to blame its own apparent incompetence
and stupidity. We read that the shuttle maintenance
program has been neglected and under-funded. The federal government
states publicly that funding of NASA is “ineffective.” And
yes, even by the extravagant standards of the welfare-warfare state,
a shuttle journey is a very expensive trip: you don’t get
much change from $500 million.

All this is so much
smoke. While all bureaucracies tend to scrabble furiously to
cover their tracks when things go wrong, I would guess
that NASA, given its responsibilities and high visibility, is actually
better than other departments in respect of attention to safety
issues. Repairs have been carried out, and flights have certainly
been postponed when conditions did not allow for safe missions.
Second, the success of previous missions demonstrates that, despite
all the backbiting, NASA as a technical organization is manifestly
not completely incompetent or stupid. Third, under-funding arguments
are to be mistrusted: their hidden logic is that if the cause of
accident is indeed proven to be the result of under-funding, no-one
would be held responsible, because ‘they did the best they
could with available resources.’ In short, they are a cop-out.

The rush to put the shuttle program on hold is also deceptive.
As a mere interested observer with no knowledge of rockets, I believe
the space shuttle is still the only reasonably functional vehicle
which the US possesses for getting manned flights into space, and
is scheduled to remain flying for at least another 10 years. News
stories on the web have quoted a possible shuttle life-span of
some 40 or 50 years, and Columbia was only 28. While there is some
debate on the relative merits of manned and unmanned space flight,
the reality is that everyone is anxious to get the shuttle program
back on track.

That desire will not
stop the recriminations and reorganizations, which are the lifeblood
of bureaucratic politics. As they continue,
so the state apparatus grows in size and appetite, notwithstanding
all expressed intentions to achieve “better stewardship of
American tax dollars” (bureaucratic translation: ‘taking
money from your department, giving it to my department, and then
getting some more’).

It is also axiomatic
that those in command of the apparatus tend to try to increase
their own power and reach over time. Fierce
in-fighting takes place between government agencies as they compete
for resources — money and people, and as individual directors
compete for positions of power. In the specific and prestigious
domain of space exploration and its uses, the hierarchy of US government
organizations involved is incredibly complex, and is complicated
by the overlap of civilian bureaucracy with all three arms of the
military.

The military applications
of space exploration have been brought into much sharper focus
over the last 2½ years. New York
professor Karl Grossman,
who has written extensively on the dangers of the use of nuclear
power in space, wrote in an article in
December 2000 for example, how US preparations to wage war in and
from space would be getting a huge boost with the assumption of
power by George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. But these concerns
are not new. There has always been something of a military flavour
to space exploration, even in the early years when ‘superpower
rivalry’ was expressed in the ‘space race.’ Soothing
noises were made about the value of scientific experiments and
the aspirations of all humanity, but the underlying reality was,
and is, that it is in the nature of nationalist-statist undertakings
constantly to be seeking a power advantage over real or imagined
rivals. This has historically been done through the combination
of technological superiority and territorial control, which expanded
to aerial control (command of the air), and now increasingly is
seen as ‘spatial’ or ‘universal’ control
(command of space).

Greater emphasis on
the military usefulness of space programs would be consistent
with a bureaucratic tussle scenario in which,
sooner rather than later, the monies spent on the ageing shuttle
(ineffective in terms of actual weaponry although still militarily
useful for tests of ancillary equipment such as long-range cameras),
could be re-allocated to funding some faster and sexier form of
rocket propulsion, thereby facilitating the aggressive military
aim of the “conquest of space” in the future.

The appointment of Sean O’Keefe to the directorship of NASA
in early 2002 should be seen in this light. At a simple level, the appointment
can legitimately be regarded as an effort at greater budgetary rigour, based
on his good reputation as a manager and prior experience in the Office of Management
and Budget. A closer look at his background however — almost
exclusively in defense and national security-related issues — would confirm the much more plausible hypothesis that his appointment was designed
to ensure NASA is placed under the military wing, and brought firmly into line
with the overriding objectives of ‘pre-emptive hegemony’ as defined
in the National Security Strategy.

For NASA, the current
situation is described semi-officially as being a cross-road,
or dilemma. At the basic level, that’s
a clear signal that more money will be required. Sure enough, we learn from
the director that the agency faces a “distance and time dilemma” — meaning
in essence that it needs to find faster systems of propulsion and
to deal with the problems of keeping humans in space for longer
periods. These and other problems may be couched in the language
of a universalist, peaceful and scientifically-based space program,
but they are quite transparently “dual-use,” in that
faster propulsion systems and “longer dwell times” will
be also required to achieve the vital (read ‘nationalist-imperial’)
goal of racing to seize the military high ground of space against
an adversary who “might have space capabilities.”

The problem with all
this has always been that it is impossible to know if you are
ahead of or behind the phantom menace. When
the adversary does not exist, it has to be invented. So now we
get the insane abstraction of the “war on terror” being
used to justify a ratcheting up of the discourse and language of “space
supremacy.”

To confirm this, I strongly recommend
a reading of a speech given
by Peter B. Teets to
the Air Force National Symposium in Los Angeles on November 15th
2002, which includes these memorable words:

“We in the military
space business are part of the nation’s warfighting team,
and we will make a vitally important contribution to any conflict
that we face!…. The work we are doing now will make a very
real difference to the outcome of our war on terrorism.”

The appointment of
Teets, almost at the same time as Sean O’Keefe
took over at NASA, to the dual roles of Under-Secretary of the
Air Force and Director of the National
Reconnaissance Office, has to be understood against a slightly
different background.

It is a classic example of the ‘revolving door’ between
industry and government. Teets retired from the chairmanship of
Lockheed Martin in October 1999,
reportedly admitting (graciously, it would seem) that he was in part responsible
for the company’s lack-lustre performance at the time. Lockheed Martin
and Boeing are equal partners in United Space Alliance, a company
which, “as a contractor for NASA, is responsible for the day-to-day operation
and management of the U.S. Space Shuttle fleet.” Finally, Teets’ appointment
should be viewed in the light of the work of the so-called “Rumsfeld
Commission,” also known as the “National Security Space Commission,” which
in January 2001 issued its massive report containing
recommendations on the management and organization of ‘National Security
Space.’

A few weeks after his appointment, Teets announced:

“I intend to create
an integrated national security space capability… In moving
ahead with this war on terrorism, it’s going to be important
for us to have persistent intelligence — universal in terms
of time, but also universal in terms of space, and on the surface,
under the surface, etcetera…. ”

~ US
Air Force Press
Briefing, February 7, 2002

The
newspeak buzzwords of national security space capability are “space
transformation,” the “joint warfighting concept” and “usa” — which stands not for United States of America, as it did on Columbia’s
right wing, but for “universal situational awareness.” In plain
language, that means knowing what’s going on everywhere, all of the time.
And it is one of the goals of National Security Space Integration.

This “paving
of the road of 21st century warfare,” with its triple
objectives of gaining and maintaining control of the high ground, applying
the capabilities of the new medium to all conceivable forms of
warfighting and developing
a new cadre of “space professionals” reads
a little bit like something out of “Alice in Wonderland” — a
Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Meet players like the “National
Security Space Architect,” who brings to the party not
only “impressive space credentials, but a strong warfighter
perspective to space”; meet also the “Director of
National Security Space Integration,” the Director of Air
Force Space Acquisition” and the at the time as yet unappointed
(NRO) “Deputy for Military Space.”

It is tempting to
think of all these members of the team as fighting each other,
and of reorganizational and resource allocation battles
taking place all over the shop: indeed, just as one example, the
US Space Command was last year absorbed by the US Strategic Command.
And all this ‘warfighting’ talk ignores a small legal
problem. Just as in the parlance of “homeland security,” bureaucrats
refer to the “civil liberties hurdles which still need to
be overcome,” meaning they haven’t yet managed to destroy
all freedom, so in the race to militarize space the would-be space
warriors face the small matter of international law, although in
all their utterances they sound blissfully unaware of it. The US
is a signatory to the United Nations Outer
Space Treaty of 1967, which effectively bans the weaponization
of space.

Even in this context,
however, it seems (and we should perhaps no longer be surprised)
that international treaties do not count
for much. When in November 2000 a resolution reaffirming the outer
space treaty was voted on in the UN, nearly all member countries
voted in favour. Just three states abstained: the US, Israel and
Micronesia (What’s that, you may well ask. Answer: “a
small developing island nation in the Western Pacific”).

I am prepared to go
along with arguments that the UN is redundant, and that there
is not much point to “all that useless talk” when
states can ignore resolutions as it suits them and the final resolution
comes down to military power and the will to inflict absolute annihilation.
Also, in terms of free enterprise, the outer space treaty is a
poor instrument, insisting as it does that only states have rights
when it comes to space exploration. But none of that makes it morally
right for any one state to wield absolute power in an aggressive
manner, be it over its own people, a small portion of humanity
or, who knows, the whole of it some day.

In closing, I come back to Columbia.

It is premature to jump to any conclusion,
though it is well worth reading about the possible explanations
for the disaster circulating on the Internet, many of which have
fascinating ramifications. To me the most promising
explanation so far seems to be that leading-edge experiments
involving the use of spectral imaging were being carried out on
board, both for the purposes of obtaining “see in the dark” long-range
pictures from space and for testing possible new, highly radioactive,
propulsion fuels. In the process of these experiments an unintended
and probably unforeseeable miscalculation of the effects of electromagnetic
energy may have occurred, leading to a devastating lightning or
similar electrical strike on Columbia’s left wing.

The plausibility of
this explanation increases if you bear in mind what I mentioned
earlier about the military focus behind the
appointment of O’Keefe a year ago, the stated need for quicker
launches and much faster propulsion in the future, the publicized
key role of universal surveillance from space in “times of
war,” and the increasingly tight integration of NASA into
military planning.

However, if it were
true, this explanation of the event would involve considerable
loss of face, and might also be judged to
be too revealing of the military applications of the space program.
In a sane world, it would not be difficult for NASA to admit to
such things: that experiments do sometimes go wrong, and in this
case that the ultimate price was paid for one that went totally
wrong. But given the insane world of the “war on terror” in
which we find ourselves, and the time-honoured cult of conspiratorial
secrecy which prevails in all matters governmental, there is a
strong likelihood, despite all assurances to the contrary, that
the panel of military
brass now charged with investigating what caused the disaster
would not be permitted openly to publish what went wrong. The all-encompassing
shroud of ‘national security’ is pretty thin and threadbare,
but time and again, investigators are either told to put it on,
or themselves decide to wear it, so as not to let the cat out of
the bag.

For the time being, there seems to be no alternative to the shuttle
for manned space flight, so the only real conundrum the investigating
panel would thus be likely to face is how to devise and offer up
for public consumption an explanation which would enable the program
to get going again. For this purpose their explanation would have
to point preferably to some plausible outside factor, rather than
to any structural faults in Columbia, or, if such could not be
found, to a fault on the shuttle which could subsequently be demonstrated
to have been successfully repaired. This was how the Challenger
disaster was handled in 1986, and provides a politically expedient
precedent.

Note

The
composition of the panel, known as the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board, is interesting, and seems to suggest that some may believe Columbia
was zapped by a bolt from the blue: apart from the chairman of the panel,
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Harold Gehman, who was in charge of the military investigation
of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte,
commander of the U.S. Naval Safety Center at Norfolk, Virginia, other members
are:

• Major General John L. Barry, director of Plans and Programs,
  HQ Air Force Materiel
  Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
  in Ohio. This base is the home of the notorious top-secret “Hangar
  18” which houses relics from the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico “UFO
  incident.”

• Major
  General Kenneth W. Hess, U.S. Air Force Chief of Safety, Kirtland
  Air Force base,
  New Mexico. The base runs the Directed
  Energy Directorate of the Air Force’s Directed
  Energy Laboratory: its charter is to improve the Air
  Force’s ability to track
  missiles and then destroy them with laser energy through
  the atmosphere.
• Brigadier
  General Duane W. Deal, for whom the USAF website provides the
  following information: “Brig. Gen. Duane W. Deal is Commander, 21st Space Wing,
  Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. The Air Force’s
  largest wing geographically and organizationally, the
  wing consists
  of a work
  force of more than 6,000 officer, enlisted, civilian
  and contract employees. This work force provides missile
  warning
  and space control
  for combat forces and the governments of the United States,
  Canada and the United Kingdom through its 35 units operating
  14 space
  weapon systems at 20 worldwide locations in six countries
  spread across 10 time zones.”

Thanks to Jim Rarey for the above information.

February
15, 2003

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal.

In
the year 1927 he opened his flagship hotel in the city of Boston,
Massachusetts — the Boston Statler Hotel. It had 1,300 rooms, each
equipped with a radio, an expensive innovation at the time. He also
fitted it out with a library containing 3,000 books.

Unlike
some of the other hotels in the original Statler chain, the Boston
Statler is still there, and it is still grand. It is today called
the Boston Park Plaza.
Statler's library, however, is no longer: it has become a meeting
room and private dining room (pictured below).

All
this I discovered and pondered when chance recently put into my
hands a booklet entitled  “A Helpful Catalog of the Library
of Hotel Statler, Boston,” published in that same year of 1927
by the Statler Press in Buffalo, NY, the in-house printing arm of
the Statler organization, and led me on an expedition into another
age, and to the land of pure nostalgia.

After
more than 75 years the hotel must surely resonate with the memories
of all those, the famous, the infamous and the not so famous, who
have passed through its doors. The magnificent chandeliers and arches
persist, alongside the ghosts of countless special occasions and
other, almost permanent, fixtures, such as the doormen with forty
years or more of service whose recent obituary notices populate
the World Wide Web. How many speeches have been given in its meeting
rooms, how many feet have danced the night away to the sound of
the big bands in its ballroom, how many princes and princesses have
wined and dined in its restaurants, how many men and women have
slept and loved in its luxurious bedrooms or stolen a surreptitious
kiss in some endless corridor?

Statler
would no doubt be proud, and possibly a little amazed, at what his
successor hoteliers provide to guests today — "in-room pay
movies" and "data ports," to name just two things.
Like most innovators, he would surely have grasped at new technology
with enthusiasm.

Potted
versions of his life, which is notable because he is a classic example
of someone coming from nowhere to rise to the top, are widely available
on the Internet, and there is also a biography by Floyd Miller,
originally published in 1968, now out of print. From a poor background
and a very early start in working life, hauling coal at the age
of 9 in a glass factory, followed by a spell as a bell-boy in a
hotel near his home, Statler became an innovating and resourceful
entrepreneur who reached the top of a profession – the hotel
business — which he seems to have set his sights on at the age of
13.

Even
more intriguing than the life-story itself are the philosophy and
the sense of purpose which guided Statler. His underlying principle
was "service with a smile" — commonplace and even overdone
today, but seemingly all too rare in the early part of the 20th
century. In his instructions to managers about what sort of people
to hire for hotel service, he wrote in 1917:

"From
this date you are instructed to employ only good-natured people,
cheerful and pleasant, who smile easily and often. This ought
to go for every job in the house, but at present I’ll insist on
it only for people that come in contact with guests… If it’s necessary
to clean house, do it. Don’t protest. Get rid of the grouches,
and the people that can’t keep their tempers, and the people who
act as if they were always under a burden of trouble and feeling
sorry for themselves. You can’t make that sort of a person over;
you can’t do anything with them profitably, but get rid of him.
Let the other fellow have him and you hire a man that can be taught."

Latter-day
champions of workers' rights, who might jump in at this point to
object that Statler had "no right" to sack people on account
of their temperament, could usefully be reminded that he was also
among the first to give hotel employees better conditions –
a six-day week, paid holidays and free health cover – and is
said to have devised a profit-sharing plan which gave employees
one free share for each one they themselves purchased. If they held
on to these shares long enough, they should have done well when
the Statler chain was eventually purchased by the Hilton hotels,
in 1954, for the sum of $111 million — at the time the largest real
estate transaction in history.

Statler
believed that you had to reach just that little bit further in order
to establish the difference which represents the competitive edge
in the service industry. He wrote, "Life is service. The
one who progresses is the one who gives his fellow human beings
a little more, a little better service." The provision
of a library of books in his hotels, while clearly part of the basic
philosophy, was also something more: it sought to console and to
comfort, providing company to those who might be feeling lonely.
Leading on from an inside cover which described the catalog as being
"For the use and pleasure of the hotel's guests," the
almost poetic preface started out thus:

“BOOKS
– at your service – The
books listed and described in this Catalog are here for your use
and pleasure. Few things in the Statler Hotels have afforded more
satisfaction to their guests than the libraries. For books can always
offer something to make up for the absence of familiar faces, in
a strange city, and can turn to pleasure and profit many an evening
or Sunday which would otherwise be lost or lonesome…."

And
it concluded with these words, an appeal to his guests to retain
something deeper than the memory of a mere visit to a hotel:

"May
we hope that the Library will be a source of pleasure to you during
your stay with us, that you will feel free to use it — and even,
that you may number among the pleasant acquaintances made under
this roof some book to which your memory will recur at times with
a kindly thought for the day on which the acquaintance was made.
It is in the hope of just such happenings that the Library is made
a part of Hotel Statler's service to you."

Statler
would turn in his grave at the thought of what the word "happenings"
later came to represent, but there is no doubt that he too was working,
whether consciously or not, on the psyche, on the cultivation of
deeper memories. So he did not stop at just putting the books into
the library at the Boston Statler: he also provided his guests with
annotations to each of the books. In what reads almost as a secret
and ever-so-discreet compact with the reader, he or his anonymous
author wrote, in A Word About the Notes:

"The
note appended to each title is intended to give some general idea
of the book further than that conveyed by its name merely. These
notes venture, sometimes, the expression of an opinion — when
it seems that it might be helpful, to one who does not know the
book, to have it characterized in one way or another by an opinion
which he can take as seriously (or otherwise) as he may wish."

A
brief glance through the “helpful Catalog” reveals singular, fascinating
and enduring tastes.  Alongside things like The Practical
Book of Oriental Rugs (5th edition 1920) and Mrs. Emily Post
on Etiquette, (look where she's got today, with an institute
named after her and her
own website), the hotel library had H. L. Mencken’s A Book
of Burlesque and Prejudices
(5 volumes), a collection of "Little Essays" by George
Santayana, Henry
Hazlitt‘s first book, Thinking
as a Science, Walt Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The
Conduct of Life, Whistler on The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and many others. This was
just in the category of "General Literature, Essays, etc.,"
or what used to be called "belles-lettres and criticism."
In fiction, you could have found works by Charles Dickens, Gogol,
Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Conrad,
but not yet Erskine
Caldwell, Ernest
Hemingway, or John
Dos Passos, because their most famous and successful works had
as yet barely been written, let alone published.

Superficially
at least, hindsight is easy. Think of what else had not happened
in 1927. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The New Deal.
Hitler's rise to power in Germany. The Second World War. The atom
bomb. The partition of India. The state of Israel. The Korean War.
The Vietnam war. Saddam. Space exploration. Personal computers.
Mobile cellular phones. Video games. People spending hours of their
lives in front of cathode ray tubes and liquid crystal displays,
alone. What spiritual comforts might Statler have dreamed up for
today's lonesome laptop warriors and late-night channel zappers?

And
yet, even as "Mona Lisas and mad hatters, sons of bankers,
sons of lawyers, said good morning to the night" under the
magnificent chandeliers, the seeds of all or nearly all of these
happenings, not to mention personal alienation, had already been
sown. The First World War
and its aftermath had produced the Treaty of Versailles and the
short-sighted humiliation of Germany, out of which came Hitler's
rise to power and the Second World War; the equally short-sighted
carve-up
of the Ottoman empire, and the craven ambiguity of the Balfour
declaration. In India, the Amritsar
massacre had taken place in 1919, and in 1920 Ghandi had launched
his first truth campaign, which would eventually lead to independence
from a declining imperial Britain and bloody partition in 1947.
We still live today with the overlapping consequences of all these
things — India, Israel and Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons,
for example – and with the fear that any one of those consequences
may bring on our own extinction.

In
the midst of all this sadness and nostalgia, a journey back in time
such as this also yields some startling surprises. Emerson, in his
chapter on culture, wrote:

"Let
us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work,
a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done,
the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal
of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting."

~
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The
Conduct of Life, chapter 4

He
could have been talking about the
repeal of Congress' Iraq war resolution or the infamous USA
PATRIOT Act, but no, he was writing in 1860.

Likewise
in 1917, long before Marshall McLuhan, Statler himself had a good
angle on the significance of form over substance when he concluded
his instructions to managers with the words: "I
believe that a majority of the complaints in a hotel are due more
to the guest’s state of mind than to the importance of the thing
about which he complains."

Finally,
who after 1974 would have believed that in a speech at the
Boston Statler delivered on November 13th, 1951, a certain
American politician, who had just become a US Senator, had once
made the following remarks:

"A
new class of royalty has been created in the United States, and
its princes of privileges and payoffs include the racketeers who
get concessions on their income tax cases, the insiders who get
favored treatment on government contracts, the influence peddlers
with keys to the White House, the government employee who uses
his position to feather his nest. The great tragedy, however,
is not that corruption exists but that it is defended and condoned
by the president and other high administration officials. We have
had corruption defended by those in high places. If they won’t
recognize or admit that corruption exists, how can we expect them
to clean it up?”

The
politician was none other than Richard M. Nixon. No doubt he spoke
these evergreen words in his idealistic period, before real politics,
a.k.a. corruption, had had a chance to catch up with him.

Notes

Some
further Internet links relating to E. M. Statler and his hotels:

• Web
  page relating to E. M. Statler and his hotels, from the Statler
  family genealogy website, compiled by David Statler.
• A
  sample page from a commercial site which sells pieces of the tableware
  used in the Statler hotels.
• The
  E. M. Statler page on the website of the Conrad N. Hilton School
  of Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of Houston.
• A
  page devoted to E M Statler in the Hall of Fame on the website
  of the Ohio County Public Library, Wheeling, West Virginia, the
  location of McClure House, where Statler worked as a bell-boy
  in the 1870s.
• E.
  M. Statler page on website of David Kohrmann, devoted mainly to
  pre-Depression architecture in Detroit including the Detroit Statler
  hotel.

February
6, 2003

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal.

~
Shakespeare, Richard III

Not
so long ago — perhaps 2 or 3 years — the cable TV operator where
I live broadcast a movie on one of its home cinema channels in which
American political and military men were debating around a table
and waving sticks at maps in a dramatic discussion of how and when
to drop a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. I only caught a part of this
frightening but unmemorable movie and so, regrettably, I do not
know its name, although its plot sounds similar to that of Deterrence
(1999). With its copious references to the earlier u2018Desert Storm'
operation in Iraq, and clearly positing a continuity of policy with
it, this film unambiguously conveyed a message that sooner or later
somebody somewhere would set about completing the unfinished business
(or perhaps I should say the u2018unfinished Bushiness') left over from
1991.

Mission:
Impossible – II, released in 2000, contains fascinating
twists and turns on the theme of stolen identity, which tie right
in to the never very certain, and now rapidly disappearing identities
of the September 11 hijackers: in the movie, several characters
are not who they appear to be (either to us or to each other) because
they are wearing carefully designed masks which make them look identical
to their enemies. Result: you confide in someone you believe to
be your friend, only to discover he is your assassin. In a neat
parallel near the end of the movie, employing the time-honoured
device of the bad guy u2018hoist with his own petard,' the chief villain
thinks he is shooting dead his enemy when in fact he is shooting
his own man.

These
two recent and superficially unremarkable films illustrate an uncanny
and often disturbing feature of artistic life — that accurate premonition
and foretelling of events are much more common than is generally
supposed. More often than not, people are reluctant to admit such
premonitions, and prefer to dismiss them as coincidence.

The
September 2002 issue of the
Fortean Times, which describes itself on its masthead
as "a journal of strange phenomena," was devoted to the
events of September 11, 2001. The actor Bruce Harwood is quoted
on the Internet as having subsequently written to that publication
as follows:

"Having
just finished your article on 9/11 conspiracy theories, I thought
I’d share with you my own peculiar relationship between the conspiracies
and the events. I was one of the lead actors on a short-lived
television series that aired on the Fox network in the US. It
was called The Lone Gunmen and intended as a spin-off from the
popular Fox series The X-Files. The so-called Lone Gunmen are
three conspiracy geeks who publish an underground newspaper named
The Lone Gunmen (hence our show title).

Although
our series aired in the spring of 2001, we had shot the pilot
episode in March 2000. The plot was fairly simple: the Lone Gunmen
uncover and defeat a government conspiracy to fly a commercial
jet plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center via
ground-based computer control of the jet’s auto-pilot. The intention
was to blame a foreign, ‘terrorist’ nation for the bombing, and
thus encourage the US to enter into a war against it – all
to guarantee weapons sales for the US military-industrial complex.
In the TV episode, of course, our characters save the day in the
nick of time, regaining control of the plane just as it soars
over the towers."

~
from Bruce Harwood,
letter to the Fortean Times, October 2002

Web
wisdom holds that the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen TV
series, of which 12 more episodes were aired in the US in the spring
of 2001, is probably still "the spookiest precursor of September
11." Some might say it is significant that Fox did not renew
the series for a second season, and that it has in fact been deliberately
"buried." This, together with its uncanny premonitions,
means that it has spawned its own Lone
Gunmen website, together with widespread derivatives. Like the
X-Files from which it was spun off, the series has generated its
own mythologies, its own cults and of course, that old favorite,
"conspiracy theories."

However,
there are many other contemporary novels, films, and TV shows which,
while often not memorable, and at time of publication even ridiculed
for being far-fetched, have turned out to be premonitory in some
degree. Examples of this are the ending of Tom Clancy's Debt
of Honor, in which a plane is flown into the Capitol in Washington,
his Rainbow
Six, which deals with anti-terrorism, and films such as The
Siege, in which a terrorist campaign in New York culminates
in an explosion which brings the Army onto the streets. And, although
I have not seen this myself, I have read that the recent (post 9/11/01)
DVD edition of the mediocre picture Escape
From New York somehow cuts out the key scene where Air Force
One crashes into an office tower in New York.

There
is no need to partake of conspiratorial notions – that these
films and novels are somehow designed to sow the seeds of plausibility
in the minds of the general public, or that authors and screenwriters
have been carefully planted by the globalist conspirators who rule
our lives and instructed to come up with plots, ideas and dummy
runs of "unthinkable" events – to realize that the
reason for these premonitions lies somewhere in what might be called
the collective consciousness. Artefacts quintessentially distil
and reflect the prevalent notions, culture and anxieties of the
times in which they are made, and not of the past or future times
which they may be about, even if on the surface the apparent subject-matter
of the film is either historical or futuristic. This much is demonstrated,
for the decade of the 1990s, by the supreme example of Chris Carter's
X-Files series.

At
least until someone makes a reality of the fantasy of time travel,
I like to think of the standard time-frame of a Hollywood movie,
or of a TV show episode, as representing the true vehicle for time
travel in our age, because into a real period of audio-visual experience
lasting say, 90 to 130 minutes, or the 50 minutes of a typical TV
episode, the makers of the film have control over powerful options
to compress into that real time-frame centuries, a lifetime, a period
of years, or just a few days or even minutes. At the same time the
search for a good plot, preferably the stuff of "drunken prophesies,
libels and dreams" is, for Hollywood, akin to the search for
the Holy Grail. Small wonder that the plotters in Washington, and
their spin-doctors, in power for a limited time only, should want
to come together with the purveyors of imaginary plots in Hollywood
and the weavers of cinematic dreams who turn those plots into celluloid
reality.

This
is especially true of the biblical and Roman-empire type blockbusters.
These are typically made and shown at times when the warfare state's
propaganda machine requires the celebration of stirring victories
in wars of conquest or ideology, or individual heroics of revenge,
and are rationalized and cheered on by subliminal appeals to fundamentalism
and easy audience identification with clearly demarcated goodies
and baddies. For this very reason, and because of their great special
effects, they also endure, despite some ham acting and well-documented
but unobtrusive technical hitches (four-wheel drive vehicles visible
on the horizon in El
Cid, and the like).

Now
once again we have a time when the drums of war are sounding. Thus
the movie
industry grapevine has it that, over the next few months, the
cinematic public is promised a new wave of epic antiquity movies,
following on from the ostensible success in 2000 of Gladiator,
a film which, for me personally, not even the wonderful Hans Zimmer
soundtrack,
the spectacular effects, and the regulation denouement in which
the bad boys and girls get what’s coming to them (give or take a
little), could save from being rather brutish and lacking in soul.

Apart
from the minor difficulties that Hollywood has had of late in deciding
which nation or group to cast as the bad guys — two recent New
York Times articles (link1,
link2)
describe the offence taken by the Koreans at the way they have been
caricatured in the latest Bond
movie – these developments no doubt represent the slowly
ripening fruit of Hollywood's moves to fall into line with the "war
effort" following September 11 — moves which, when viewed in
historical terms, need little encouragement.

A
report dated October 19, 2001 stated, "In an unusual two-hour
meeting held in Beverly Hills Thursday, White House officials and
top television executives met to discuss how Hollywood could help
support the war on terrorism. Roughly 25 people from the entertainment
industry were in attendance, including Oscar-winning actress Sally
Field, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences chairman Bryce
Zabel and CBS president Leslie Moonves." In a CNN piece entitled
"Uncle
Sam wants Hollywood," on November 9 2001, the Minister
of Propaganda himself was reported to be about to visit Hollywood
to meet with industry figures and strengthen their resolve, and
would later receive a return visit from the movie moguls, as reported
in August 2002 by the journalist Robert
Fisk, one of the two
men whom the well-known actor John Malkovich publicly
stated he would like to shoot dead, who writes, "After
the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington last September,
I suppose it was inevitable that the Pentagon and the CIA would
call on Hollywood for ideas — yes, the movie boys actually did go
to Washington to do a little synergy with the local princes of darkness."

In
late 2001 the most widely publicized cancelled or postponed movie
was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral
Damage, which has since been released, and seems to be yet another
instantly forgettable bone-breaker. Although we cannot know the
exact number of movies shelved or postponed in the aftermath of
September 11 (CNN quotes a number of "at least 45"), this
fact alone begs the question, if a movie was not fit to be viewed
after September 11 because it might offend sensibilities, then should
it not have been permanently shelved in any event on the much better
grounds that it was, and is, a lousy movie?

Of
course, that is not what it's all about, as the recent fuss over
the Philip Noyce film of Graham Greene's The
Quiet American demonstrates. This is, by all accounts, not a
bad movie at all. Nor is another recent movie, which has been well-received
but is contentious, and thus so far unreleased: Buffalo
Soldiers – the 2001 movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and
Ed Harris, not to be confused with an earlier film of the same name.
A Mr. Harvey Weinstein, of the Miramax film studios, in his wisdom
recently pronounced that most Americans would not be allowed to
see The Quiet American because the studio had deemed it "unpatriotic."
John Wiener, writing in the December 16, 2002 issue of The
Nation, stated:

“The
Quiet American”, which recently opened for a two-week run in a couple
of theaters in New York and Los Angeles, illustrates just how far
Hollywood self-censorship has gone in the year since 9/11.

Harvey
Weinstein, Miramax co-chairman, told the New York Times the studio
concluded that “you can’t release this film now; it’s unpatriotic.
America has to be cohesive and band together. We were worried that
nobody had the stomach for a movie about bad Americans anymore.”

Setting
aside for a moment a rightful libertarian gut reaction against censorship
in any form, and against the presumption of anyone, let alone a
mere film studio chairman, that he is entitled to prescribe what
u2018America' should be at this time, I feel a little qualification
is perhaps in order. The argument, if there is one, is primarily
about money. The Hollywood studios' main criterion for the "success"
of a movie is its relative position in the league table of box-office
takings, preferably on the first weekend it comes out. That the
film was released at all, at a time deemed politically unfavourable,
was due to the arguments apparently brought to bear by Michael Caine,
whose performance in the film has been highly praised by critics
and could win him an Oscar. Those arguments were based on the potentially
favourable knock-on effect that an Oscar award would have in improving
the film's eventual takings.

Censorship
of course, like any form of prohibition, also makes the forbidden
item more interesting and desirable. A little bit of trouble or
controversy never did any movie release any harm, and arguably could
be just what is needed to spice things up a bit in this time of
fear, apathy, and recession, not to mention cold winter weather
which keeps people at home. Or to prepare the ground for a later
release at a more propitious time of what appears to be an intelligent
film in the midst of the usual chart-topping idiotic pap.

Nevertheless
I find it galling when "mere" studio directors, and actors
and actresses, celebrated at best, and rightly so, for their fine
skills and performing talent, more routinely for their sex-appeal,
and at worst for their misdemeanours — but certainly not for their
political or philosophical opinions – are found pontificating
as to what the public should or should not see. In a recent article
on CounterPunch, Saul
Landau gives full vent to this irritation, but concludes optimistically:
"Hopefully, Miramax will soon re-release the film and make
a contribution toward the cause of understanding through cinematic
beauty – and thus virtue."

This,
to my mind, is undoubtedly the right approach. The sycophantic media,
true to their subservient attitude to the state and the regime
du jour, place a meaningless politically correct spin on the
studios' decisions whether to give certain films a wider release
or not, but such decisions in fact have little to do with the quality
of the movie and its ultimate artistic and critical destiny. How
many movies, released with a fanfare of publicity, have subsequently
faded into the oblivion of hasty u2018secondary exploitation:' released
ahead of time on video and sentenced to premature artistic death?
And how many other movies, not big box-office successes when first
released, or perhaps even subsequently rejected by their makers,
or banned on grounds of political incorrectness (think of Disney's
"Song of the South" just as an example), have surprised
all involved by making it to the sanctum of cult status or enduring
critical and public acclaim?

Even
so, given the quantity of troops and ordnance now sitting on the
edges of Iraq, there is no certainty that "The Quiet American"
will be shown in the US any time soon. In bringing out politically
correct arguments for putting this particular movie on hold, Harvey
Weinstein was reverting to the true and time-honoured Hollywood
form, which has generally been to fall rapidly into line in with
the desiderata of the imperial state, by both assisting in the fabrication
of its propaganda, and washing it clean when inconvenient historical
facts make their presence felt.

Here's
how John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman in April 2002,
describes the history of this u2018cleansing' process:

Foreigners
fell neatly into categories of worthy or unworthy: for America
or against America. In Hollywood, history was reduced to screen
“epics” such as Exodus, in which worthy (Jewish) refugees settled
in the Holy Land and unworthy Palestinians, made refugees in their
own land, were invisible. These dispossessed people are now portrayed
in American action movies, along with other Muslims, as terrorists.
Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese
were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed
and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood
came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that
invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided
a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to
mount other Vietnams – in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism”
is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black
Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing
spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing
starts again for real.

Robert
Fisk makes much the same point in the article I have referred to
above, which is entitled "Be very afraid – Bush Productions
is preparing to go into action: we are being prepared for an epic
supported by Hollywood and a plot of lies."

And,
as Butler Shaffer has written,

all of
this leads me to ask whether the entertainment industry is an
extension of the war system, or whether war is simply an extension
of our need for entertainment? What should be clear to us is that
entertainment is one of the principal means by which our thinking
can be taken over and directed by others once we have chosen to
make our minds passive, which we do when we are asked — whether
by actors or politicians — to suspend our judgment about the reality
of events we are witnessing. When we are content to be amused
(i.e. to have our attention diverted from reality to fantasy),
and to have our emotions exploited by those skilled in triggering
unconscious forces, we set ourselves up to be manipulated by those
producing the show.

~ Butler
Shaffer,
"Politics
and War As Entertainment,"
May 29, 2002

In
sum, even as we are being entertained, the fact of being entertained,
and indeed of enjoying the film, is no excuse for divesting ourselves
of our critical and discriminatory faculties.

Those
eager to apply censorship and prohibition repeatedly fail to learn
the lessons to be learned in this domain, and to appreciate and
understand the inherent paradoxes of communication. The simplest
of those paradoxes is that censorship and prohibition always have
the opposite effect to that which is intended: it makes the fruit
that much more attractive by making it forbidden (and by so increasing
demand it may also, where saleable commodities are involved, push
the price upwards).

More
subtle paradoxes of communication were cleverly encapsulated by
the late Marshall McLuhan in the early 1970s in his book Understanding
Media, and the now famous statement that "the medium is
the message." In terms of what the viewer is left with, of
what is actually communicated, the quality of the way the medium
is handled and crafted — in this case film – will in the final
analysis always win out over any bluntly presented "message."
Leni Riefenstahl's classic film, The
Triumph of the Will, which is a record of the 1934 National
Socialist party rally at Nuremberg, still banned in Germany to this
day and vilified by all sorts of worthy people because of its content,
is recognized as a masterpiece of cinematography. It does indeed
convey the terrifying nature of state-backed propaganda and its
powerful effect on mass consciousness, but unless you wish to believe
that human beings are incapable of any critical thought whatsoever,
it is naïve in the extreme to think that the viewer of this
film will react to it by engaging in spontaneous violence or other
extreme forms of behaviour, rather than reflecting soberly on the
nature of that violence as a result of his or her experience
of the film as film — as something not real, but an artefact.

Once
again Robert Fisk hits the nail on the head when he writes: "the
important thing, as my dad used to tell me, is to remember that
the cinema [does] not really imitate reality." Substance is
not everything, indeed it is possibly not even the half of it. A
message is often more effective for being presented in a more subtle
way. If it is shouted to the rooftops over and over again or if,
like the planes hitting the towers on September 11, it is a visual
message, shown over and over again, it eventually loses its effect
from repetition, and people simply turn off.

Children,
themselves so often portrayed by the movies as the true repositories
of premonitory wisdom and instinctive knowledge, as lately in the
film Signs by M.
Night Shyamalan, learn these lessons from an early age, and develop
powers of critical discrimination which enable them to distinguish
what "is" from what "is not." Cartoons are among
the most violent shows on earth, yet the kids know the violence
is not real. The clear and present danger today is rather that grown
men, who should know better, have taken possession of the plot,
or are trying to write it themselves.

I
leave the last word to Robert Fisk: "When Vice-President Cheney
and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld turned up together for the premiere
of Black Hawk Down,
I began to get worried. After all, if the Bush administration is
so keen on war, it better work out the difference between Hollywood
and the real thing. Yet what we’ve been getting is a movie version
of reality, a work of fiction to justify the prospect of “war without
end."

January
11, 2003

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal.

For
libertarians in particular, conspiracy theories share a common concern
with the abuse of power. In contrast to the cowardice and kow-towing
to the established political and economic order practised by the
mainstream and politically correct media, libertarians can actually
take much of the so-called conspiracy theory comfortably in their
stride – because they know that those in government are, in Murray
Rothbard's words, a professional criminal class.

Well-meaning
non-libertarians protest this attitude, with remarks along the lines
of u2018How can you be so cynical about our democratically elected representatives?'
or u2018How can you believe that such violent acts could be perpetrated
by these people?' To which one can only respond that they have not
learned the lessons of history, have not understood Lord Acton's
dictum that u2018power corrupts…,' have forgotten that Hitler was democratically
elected, and most likely have not taken in what Machiavelli
or Zbigniew
Brzezinski have to say about the strategic imperatives of empires
and their rulers.

Like
any other such grouping, the professional-criminal class of politicians
will conspire, that is to say, they will meet together to plan and
organize their actions. Who knows, they may even conspire to do
good – there is no golden rule which says that all conspiracy has
to be bad in intent: some of the worst outcomes of government action,
like the New Deal in its effects on agriculture, emerged from plans
and regulations made with the best of intentions by well-meaning
people.

Nevertheless,
such groups will also conspire continually to develop and perfect
their techniques for staying ahead of opponents or potential challengers,
both domestic and foreign. When applied to government, this mission
statement, implicitly understood and absorbed by all members of
the group, leads to a natural tendency to consolidate power, to
conduct its proceedings in ever greater secrecy, to restricting
the free flow of information, and to the erosion of the personal
and civil liberties of the ruled. Thus too it is almost inevitable
that over time, the holders of office will want to restrict even
more whatever degree of freedom of access to information exists.

These
tendencies have long been understood, and underpin the institution
of all systems which limit executive powers such as written constitutions
and charters of rights. I have suggested earlier that conspiracy
theories flourish at the heart of empire, and indeed those in the
US are flourishing and are of particular interest today precisely
because the US is the heart of the global empire and the centre
of power, not just geo-strategically, but in economic and cultural
terms as well, and that is why it is relevant to examine specifically
what goes on there. But I also believe it is because many people
in the US feel that the limitations of power and popular rights
and liberties, whether formally embodied or not in the Constitution
or the Bill of Rights, are under a fiercer challenge today than
ever before, and this factor too has brought more sharply into the
limelight those specific events which conspiracy theories usually
address — the assassination of political opponents, transparently
improbable suicides, imprisonment without trial, spying and surveillance,
and imperial conquest, to name just a few which spring immediately
to mind.

In
the past the nature of the electoral process in the US meant that
the elected political class generally had a short (4-year) window
of opportunity for emptying the collective treasury to its own benefit,
or for pursuing other, even more ambitious, items on its agenda
such as conquering other nation-states — or perhaps I should say
u2018making them safe for democracy.'

What
is interesting, and perhaps sinister, about the current administration
— and could be another reason for the upsurge in conspiracy theories – is its close linkages to the past, both in terms of the personnel
line-up, and in the fact that many of its pet projects, like the
invasion and break-up of Iraq, have been much longer in the planning – as long as 10 years or more – than the normal, shorter period
covering the days preceding the take-up by a new administration
and its early days in office.

Truly,
for the figures behind the throne who have prepared and honed these
projects, I believe the reign of Clinton was seen as a mere interlude,
or what has jokingly been labelled ‘sex between the Bushes.’
All the while the plans were being refined, and occasionally road-tested,
as in the intense campaign for greater military intervention surrounding
the so-called ‘Iraq Liberation Act’ of 1998.

It
is in this context too that we should understand the moves to restrict
access to the presidential archives of the administrations which
ruled from 1980 to 1992: every effort is being made to hide and
play down embarrassing facts such as the continuity of policy by
default (masking the absence of any new policies of any substance,
a factor which had led to increasing institutional malaise and all-time
administration popularity lows in polls taken prior to September
11th 2001), the appointment of a Cold War expert to the position
of National Security Adviser some 10 years after that u2018war' had
ended, the re-emergence of previously indicted criminals into positions
of decision-making power and influence today, and who knows, the
true nature of some of the political covenants and deals made by
the corporations previously headed by officers of the present government
and their buddies.

This
perfecting of the techniques for holding on to power and expanding
the empire, by taking a longer-term view (one of those long-term
plans, incidentally, is called the u2018Project
for the new American century'), has tended to undermine the
rotational cycle whereby each of the major parties took its turn
at the trough (whether in Presidential or in mid-term Congressional
elections). Although it is by no means the only factor in the current
consolidation of state power and erosion of freedom, it has undoubtedly
helped to consolidate the power which remains in the hands of the
victorious party, to the ultimate detriment of the cause of liberty.

In
such a scenario there is a natural tendency for those who do not
hold power to incline towards the conspiracy theory view of things
— if only because the Leviathan has become much bigger and more
dangerous than before, and has made great strides in the art of
disguise, so that, while information is still coming out, no-one
knows for sure if it isn't disinformation, planted in the media
at strategic moments to befuddle and confuse the petrified masses
still further.

Conclusions

At
a certain point in the courtroom drama part of the 1992 film "A
Few Good Men," there is a dialogue, which has now become
legendary, between the army camp commandant Colonel Jessup (played
by Jack Nicholson) and the young naval attorney Kaffee (played by
Tom Cruise):

Col.
Jessup: You want answers?
Kaffee:
I think I’m entitled.
Col.
Jessup: You want answers?
Kaffee:
I want the truth!
Col.
Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!

Notice
how Jessup ignores Kaffee's ‘I think I'm entitled (to answers).’
As with so much in our age of political correctness, the debate
on conspiracy theories is dominated by those who fear that the truth
may be misinterpreted, or ‘get into the wrong hands.’
They are judge and jury, and they conclude that at a certain moment
in the process of consolidation of power it is better that the truth
get into no hands at all. Which of course is tantamount to usurping
total power for the rulers, and at the same time saying, for public
and international consumption, that individuals are incapable of
taking responsibility, of thinking for themselves, so the all-powerful
state must look after them.

But,
just as in education, if you have no expectations of people, you
should not subsequently be surprised if they fail to perform. You
have to have positive expectations of people, give them the benefit
of the doubt, and believe that they can indeed u2018handle the truth.'

And
so it should be with investigative reporting and uncomfortable truths.
As I have suggested in an earlier part of this series, it is up
to the individual man or woman, the individual reader or viewer
as the case may be, to decide if the u2018conspiracy theory' is the
whole truth, has elements of truth in it, has pointers to the truth
or to alternative angles on a given story, or is indeed a load of
rubbish. He or she may come to the wrong conclusion, but it is far
better that he should be free to make the investigative journey
and do so, that he should have the knowledge made available to him
and explore it fully, than that he should forever be mollycoddled
with comforting myths or diversions on the part of the state and
its media propaganda machine.

For
no state or government will ever protect him or her. At best, it
will perhaps provide a secretly located bunker for a few of its
own. For the rest, those myths and diversions may offer temporary
relief — but inevitably only until the next terrorist outrage takes
place, naturally arranged, conspiracy theorists would say, by henchmen
of the rulers, and hallmarked to look like the work of the latest
terrorist bogeyman. Or the next ever so conveniently timed plane
crash.

In
the final analysis, if my reader-viewer has the full information
but makes the wrong judgement, there is always a chance that he
will learn, and get it right the next time. If he stays in the dark,
or through private fear, social embarrassment or abject surrender
to the threat of intimidation decides that he will not open the
door and step out into the light, then he has only himself to blame
if he wakes up enslaved.

Oh,
and I almost forgot. Regarding November 22nd, 1963. Forget the conspiracy
theories. Lee Harvey Oswald did it. How can we be so sure? Because
he had a magic bullet, and it had u2018JFK' written all over it.

November
21, 2002

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal. This
article is the third in a 3-part series on the subject of “Conspiracy
— Fact or Fiction.”

So
what is it that makes the conspiracy theories continue to be fascinating,
why is there so much official and mainstream media fear of them,
and why are they again so much in the public eye? In the second
of this series of articles I shall look at some factors I believe
to lie behind the fascination of so-called conspiracy theories.

The
Hunger for Truth

If
you look at any of the conspiracy websites, it is quite clear that
what motivates and guides those who create and maintain them is
a passionate search for truth. Passionate may not always be right,
but it certainly is highly motivated.

In
some cases that search is all the more passionate because they themselves
have previously been government employees, or in the armed forces
or secret services. Being honest, open-hearted, and possibly idealistic,
and having become aware of the nature of what they were engaged
in, their spirit has rebelled: they have tried to do something about
it, and then have become whistleblowers. In some cases they may
have resigned voluntarily, in others they may have been hounded
out by those whose comfortable positions and privileges in the bureaucracy
would be undermined by their revelations.

This
situation is understandable if one recalls that public service in
the forces or in the government is marketed to young people from
an early age as an idealistic career path to embark on. Many who
do so go into it with the best of intentions to help their fellow
men, or to promote what they see as the common good, or to serve
their country. It is often precisely because they have high ideals
and a sense of honour that they cannot live with the realities they
find.

Becoming
a whistleblower often entails a very high price to themselves, involving
a combination of severe doubts, conflicting loyalties, loss of income
and status, ridicule, and later on personal suffering, harassment
and even – have no doubt about this — the risk of assassination.
Many who may sympathize with the whistleblower are constrained from
doing the same thing — for many reasons, perhaps because of family
commitments, a mortgage to pay, a yearning for a quiet life, stability,
fear of reprisals.

u2018Whistleblower'
is a word laden with ambiguity, and this is often exploited by government
and media alike, for while it conveys on the one hand admiration
for the person who may have stuck up for his principles or for universal
ideals, and uncovered corruption, malpractice, exploitation or abuse
of power, it also leaves, on the other hand, a none too subtle hint
that in blowing the thing open, the whistleblower perhaps ratted
on former friends and colleagues, or betrayed an explicit oath of
loyalty or implicit conspiracy of silence. These things are calculated
to make him feel really bad, whatever his conscience may have told
him about u2018doing the right thing.'

The
truth, to put it mildly, is not a guiding passion for professional
politicians and bureaucrats. Truth is subversive, and inconvenient
to those who hold and manipulate power. They will invent all sorts
of rational arguments as to why it is unnecessary. Or, worse still,
why it should be withheld from the people for their own benefit.
It is "better that they do not know."
As Al
Martin has said:   "I’m reminded of the words of George
Bush who said, u2018The truth will get you broke.' Or I am reminded
of the words of Oliver North who said, u2018The truth is useless. You
can’t deposit it in the bank. You can’t eat it. It’s absolutely
useless.' And
anyone who is interested in the truth doesn’t have any money."

So,
there is a ready community of opposition (from the left and right
of the established political spectrum and from the career bureaucrats
who service their purposes) to what is perceived as being too much
delving into the truth. To reveal the truth not only undermines
those who temporarily hold positions of power and influence, and
shows them up in front of the people they have been bombarding with
propaganda about how well they are performing their duty, either
as democratically-elected representatives or as public servants:
it also puts in question the very legitimacy of the two-party rotation
system which enables them to take their turn at the trough, the
myth of disinterested public service, and all the cultural baggage
of u2018democratic participation' that goes with these things. In opposition
to all this, the search for truth and the struggle for liberty posits
a world where the highest value is put on individual moral responsibility.

In
the population at large, there are certain psychological factors
at play in the search for truth, involving a spectrum of degrees
of ignorance and deception (or self-deception). At one end of this
spectrum you have those who remain blissfully ignorant of what is
going on. In the vast middle range of the spectrum you have the
state's entitlements clientele, and others in various stages of
denial or wishful thinking — from those who are afraid, to the well-meaning
innocents who feel that all those disagreeable things can't possibly
be true, or are just too horrible to contemplate, and those who
are in deeper denial — they know certain things are true but don't
want to admit it, or are likewise afraid to do so.

At
the opposite end of the spectrum you have those who are actively
engaged in the cover-ups and the disinformation, tacitly aided by
the countless numbers of faceless people in government and party
politics who maintain a conspiracy of silence. These conspirators
— for that is what they are too – have an interest in hiding the
truth because, when it does come out, it reveals how shoddy and
immoral are their machinations for staying in power and abusing
power, to say nothing of how inefficient they can be at accomplishing
their own plans, and indeed any plans by the state to regulate the
natural order of human activity by forcing good intentions down
people's throats. People rightly get angry when those who have told
them they could be trusted turn out instead to have been engaged
effectively in thievery and deception.

In
summary, is it any surprise that whistleblowers' revelations are
labelled crazy conspiracy theories or lies by those who have a vested
interest in preserving the evils those whistleblowers are denouncing?
And is it any surprise that they should continue, for these very
reasons, to be intriguing and fascinating as vital elements in our
understanding of history as it is being made?

The
Media

Of
course not all conspiracy websites are owned and maintained by whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers have a particularly strong sense of mission to reveal
the truth, but there are others belonging to a strong American tradition
which profoundly mistrusts the central (federal) government and
the officially sanctioned versions of events. They include mavericks,
independent-minded people who unwaveringly remain true to their
principles, some libertarians, some protectors of civil liberties,
leftists, ultra-conservatives, perhaps reactionaries – you name
it, everyone with just the tiniest sprinkling of political and economic
incorrectness is probably in there somewhere.

However,
it is this very diversity of potential conspiracy theorists which
enables the media to have a free rein in labelling, at its own convenience,
any particular view as being eccentric or conspiratorial, and therefore
as something which serious-minded people ought not to take into
consideration.

There
is a common misperception of the nature of the media, and of the
journalist's position therein, namely that the media are somehow
fearless in pursuit of the truth. It arises from a delayed collective
reaction to the fact that intrepid journalists, and especially radio
commentators, some of them the stuff of legend like Ed Murrow, used
to have the courage and the freedom to venture much further in their
investigative reporting and to reveal much more of the truth than
they can today. That sort of intrepid journalist no longer exists,
or if he does, his range and scope for in-depth investigative reporting
are much more severely curtailed. How did this happen?

I
am no expert on the media, but in the historical context it is obvious
that regulation, and crucially the introduction of the need for
broadcasting stations to be licensed by the government, had the
effect of restricting the operation of free markets in media. In
any society the first effect of such regulation, through so-called
u2018competition' for licenses, is that licenses become a largesse to
be distributed by the government, implicitly or explicitly in return
for u2018favourable' reporting and undertakings not to criticize the
established order which enables that government to exist, on pain
of having your license revoked.

In
the more modern, partially de-regulated (but now consolidated) media
world, there is a similar constraining effect from commercial advertising,
on which the media depend for their revenue (and ultimately the
journalists for their jobs). A journalist may not stick his or her
neck out too far in reporting contentious issues, for fear of offending
the advertiser, who will promptly take away his custom. If he does
so, the TV network may very easily punish the journalist with dismissal.
Naturally this has little to do with how good or bad the reporter
is at the job, or even whether what he or she has to report is true
or false, but merely with whether he or she has overstepped the
mark of acceptable discourse in the context of the politics of the
advertiser. At best, this makes for anodyne television. At worst,
it produces blatant propaganda in the interests of those who hold
on to and manipulate power or who have a particular agenda (or product
line) to promote.

Thus
it is that individual writers and reporters in the mainstream media,
however well-established their reputation, become unable or unwilling
to speak the full truth of all that they know – for the simple reason
that they are likely to lose their job if they do so. Increasingly,
they learn to become more and more cautious, and so lose the earlier
cutting edge which made their reputations, and the mainstream media
news programmes become virtually devoid of substance, failing to
explain events in depth and to provide real information.

Once
this happens, it is a just a short step to the media's function
being only to fulfill a propagandizing role, using above all the
techniques of self-censorship — in other words, omitting information
which the editors know in advance is likely to be critical of the
established political and economic order, and so confining debate
to those topics which will not seriously undermine key facets of
that order — such as the electoral system which favours two-party
rotation in power, conventional economic and monetary theory or,
in more recent times, politically correct discourse.

Where
omission fails – and it sometimes does, particularly where competing
economic interests are at stake – the mainstream media may resort
to the tactic of rushing in to damn a PC heresy as u2018wacky' or an
inconvenient truth as u2018conspiracy theory,' once again to exclude
it from debate and narrow the range of argument to politically and
economically acceptable ideas.

This
is nothing more than a tactic in the game of manipulation of power,
but because it is carried on the voice of a medium which advertises
itself as being authoritative, it is initially highly effective
with the often mesmerized and barely conscious u2018audience.' It is
used to discredit the person of the originator of a particular
interpretation of events in the minds of the audience, rather than
to attack his argument – the classic ad hominen attack which
casts doubt on certain personal attributes (intelligence, sanity,
motivation), and does not even begin to enter into a discussion
of the arguments or admit that what he has to say might have some
substance of truth to it.

This
u2018denial of entry' effect is enhanced by subtly creating in the minds
of the audience the notion that not only is the conspiracy theorist
somehow an oddball — through the use of such pejorative terms as
‘fruitcake’ and ‘nut’ (is it significant that
these are edible things?) – but also that the members of the
great TV audience should not want to be associated with the conspiracy
theorist because it will make them look silly too.  So it plays
on people’s fear of contamination by association, and of looking
stupid in the eyes of others, as in ‘Hey, you’re not one of
those who believe all that conspiracy stuff, are you?’

All
this is effective, and often mind-numbing stuff, but the appeal
of character assassination for its own sake is very limited and
short-term. In the end, when the content has no substance, and when
viewers, who are not fools, see and hear the same official or approved
line constantly rammed down their throats, they do eventually rebel:
some switch off, others zap to something else. How many times did
you have to watch the twin towers fall, or read "America strikes
back" in the lower left-hand corner of the TV screen, before
it made you sick enough to switch permanently away from, or just
switch off, the major u2018news' channels? Others still, who want information
and have critical intelligence, have long since started to look
elsewhere, and if they want to read really interesting stuff, and
indeed challenging or subversive stuff, and hear the truth, they
find the only place to be these days is the Internet.

Which
is why — at least for the moment – the Internet is now the home
of what the mainstream media love to call u2018conspiracy theories.'
But, subject to the caveat that readers must carry out for themselves
a critical evaluation of the information they find on those websites,
it is today far more likely that the true facts, and indeed the
history and background to current events, will be found in among
those conspiracy theory websites rather than in any mainstream news
bulletin or documentary report. Internet usage has grown exponentially
over the last few years, so there is correspondingly much more general
exposure to that essential history and to those truths. And, as
the records of increasing traffic for websites such as LewRockwell.com
show, people are all the time getting hungrier for even more truth.

November
20, 2002

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal. This
article is the second in a 3-part series on the subject of “Conspiracy
— Fact or Fiction.”

Are
you one of those who sees all sorts of coincidences in numbers and
dates? Theories abound about plots and conspiracies, real or imaginary,
and about number-obsessed plotters conspiring to bring about violent
events on symbolic, specifically chosen dates. This Friday, November
22nd 2002, is the 39th anniversary, to the day, of the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy on Friday, November 22nd 1963, still
the benchmark conspiratorial event of the American century.

The
body of Kennedy assassination literature, film and academic studies
must be a prime candidate for the biggest ever compendium of conspiracy
theory, and it is still growing. And yet there is hardly a better
debunking of the official version of events than Bertrand
Russell's essay of September 1964, written very soon afterwards.
And for a fascinating study which puts the events in context, none
better than Peter Dale Scott's Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK.

So
what's special about a 39th anniversary? Nothing at all, unless
and until you chance to be with someone who believes things always
come in threes, and points out to you that 3+9=12, that 12 splits
down to 1+2, which equals 3, or that 9+11+1 equals 21, which splits
down to 2+1, which equals 3, and so on ad infinitum.

I
am not the first person to point out that George Bush Sr. introduced
the phrase u2018New World Order' in a speech given before the UN on
September 11, 1991, or that 911 is the emergency telephone number
in the US. The World Trade Center was attacked on September 11,
2001. Bali was bombed on October 12, 2002. Numerologists are not
alone in asking: what price November 13, 2003 for another bombing
outrage? And yet, the doubters will say, this is time-wasting nonsense:
the arithmetical progression (9/11/01 – 10/12/02 – 11/13/03)
only works properly if you follow the American convention for dates
(MDY), or the Japanese (YMD), and not the European (DMY).

There
are, as they say, only two choices on the menu. Take it or leave
it.

2
— The Naming Game

If
you do take it up, then serious-minded people can get very agitated
about this sort of thing. Of late, it's been the turn of the columnists,
who have been getting upset and calling each other names for daring
to admit conspiracy theories into the arena of debate. u2018Fruitcake,'
u2018wacko,' u2018member of the grassy knoll school of thought,' u2018tin-foil
hat conspiracy theorist,' are just some of the milder terms being
bandied about. The immediate cause of all this has been another
event involving violent loss of life, the plane crash in which the
late Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed. But it's nothing new. Conspiracy
theory, always present in history but endlessly stigmatized by those
who, since the time of the Enlightenment, have preached politically
correct objectivity, civilized reasonableness and responsible reporting,
flourishes every time there is a major violent event of this sort.

Personally
I have no idea whether Wellstone's plane was sabotaged. For myself
as for countless others, I am sure, violent loss of life is deeply
upsetting. But, as an interested outsider observer, with no axe
to grind, I am aware of at least the following:

1)
When the history of empire in the late 20th century comes to be
written, airplane sabotage will be seen as having been one of the
methods of choice for getting rid of those whom the rulers wished
to have out of the way or those who came too close to the truth
(the other preferred method being u2018suiciding'). I have found no
one on the web better on this subject than the inveterate battler
against judicial corruption,
Sherman
Skolnick.

2)
There is no doubt that there is a prevailing feeling of discomfort
and suspicion about the Wellstone crash in many quarters, just as
there is a huge backlash of denial from the anti-conspiracy theory
brigade crying ‘if you believe he was murdered, show us the
evidence,’ as if the phrases u2018cover-up' and u2018airplane sabotage'
had never entered the vocabulary.

3)
There is debate even down to what the prevailing weather conditions
were, something which should be a matter of record (or are weather
stations also federalized?).

4)
The death was indeed so terribly convenient electorally.

5)
The form the death took was predicted with uncanny precision about
18 months back by a popular conspiracy website.

Political
assassination at the heart of the empire has existed since time
immemorial. Think of the Borgias. Think of ancient Rome. So what's
new? In this particular case it exists as a possibility, involves
a handful of coincidences, and there is no proof. Indeed there rarely
is positive proof of a possible conspiracy, as Judge Bingham pointed
out all the way back in 1865:

"A
conspiracy is rarely, if ever, proved by positive testimony. When
a crime of high magnitude is about to be perpetrated by a combination
of individuals, they do not act openly, but covertly and secretly.
The purpose formed is known only to those who enter into it. Unless
one of the original conspirators betray his companions and give
evidence against them, their guilt can be proved only by circumstantial
evidence…"

~ Special
Judge Advocate John A. Bingham, quoted in The
Trial Of The Conspirators,
Washington, 1865

All
this has been more than enough to light another fire in the perpetually
smouldering conspiracy theory debate, and to set off another bout
of furious name-calling.

When
political assassination takes place in the periphery, away from
the centres of power, it is generally because there is a perceived
threat to the centre. Here's an example which is close to home for
me personally. In December 1980 a plane was sabotaged in Portugal
(in imperial terms a small vassal state, significant only for its
strategic geographical location for arms transhipments, aircraft
refuelling, and satellite communications). The plane was carrying
the then Defense Minister, and also the Prime Minister (who had
originally not been scheduled to travel on the flight). It crashed
shortly after take-off, killing all aboard. It is now generally
accepted that the Defense Minister was about to go public, possibly
in the UN, about the involvement of senior US officials and Portuguese
army officers in the arms traffic to Iran, via Portugal and Israel,
and that a known professional hit man (who is still alive and in
prison in Brazil) had earlier been flown in to supervise the planting
of the necessary explosives. At the time, however – this was
at the height of the eventually successful campaign to avoid the
so-called u2018October
surprise' – the early release of US hostages in Iran which
might have given Jimmy Carter re-election, it suited all concerned
to treat the crash as an accident: British investigators, and even
the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an agency of the
US federal government, were brought in to give the official seal
of approval to this desired version of events. For the relatives
of the dead who are still campaigning for justice in this case,
22 years after the event, it is of little practical benefit that
the reports of these official agencies have subsequently been discredited
both by the Portuguese Parliament's commissions of inquiry and by
the US Congress.

3
— The Game of Theory and Practice

Conspiracy
theory is a huge area. But it would not be so if political theorists
and ideologues had their way, because they feel that speculation
about the coincidences and details of violent events, and especially
wider across-the-board interpretations of history involving on-going
conspiracies (such as the Illuminati, secret government, the international
bankers, and lately the so-called Jewish-Crusader alliance) are
a waste of valuable time, and detract from the broader, ideological
struggle taking place in the here and now. This problem is said
to affect particularly the left wing of the political spectrum.
Michael Parenti, in his book Dirty
Truths, has done a highly effective demolition job on those
so-called structuralists who deny the political relevance of conspiracy
theories:

"Those
who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you
actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a
room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed
to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But
where else would people of power get together – on park
benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate
boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in
the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels,
and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House,
the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot
– though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” –
and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts
at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than
political and corporate elites and their hired specialists."

~ Michael
Parenti, Dirty
Truths, City Lights Books, 1996.

Parenti
also has interesting things to say about the role of investigative
commissions, and how they are often designed to reach a pre-ordained,
desired conclusion. Discussing the false charge that the Warren
Commission was hasty and slipshod in its investigation, he writes:

"In
fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions over a
period of several months, much longer than most major investigations.
It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. It
had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its disposal,
along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty and
slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward
a foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only
a limited set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald’s guilt
as the lone assassin.

The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look
into such things as Oswald’s background, his activities in past
years and on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby’s background,
and his activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane
notes, there was a crying need for a seventh panel, one that
would try to discover who killed President Kennedy. The commission
never saw the need for that undertaking, having already made
up its mind.

While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the
Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its meetings
were classified top secret, and hundreds of thousands of documents
and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years. The Commission
failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people shooting from
behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely recorded the
testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to complain later
on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this took
careful effort. A “hasty and slipshod” investigation would show
some randomness in its errors. But the Commission’s distortions
consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured
hypothesis."

~
Michael Parenti, ibid.

The
Warren Commission could thus be said to have conspired, in its own
way, to bring about a particular, pre-planned outcome. Political
realists would say that this was u2018in everyone's best interests.'
Truth gets swept under the carpet for reasons of political expediency,
and in fact there is often little pretence that a concern for the
truth is even a secondary consideration in the political cost/benefit
calculations involved.

It
is as well to recall that in its Latin origin the verb u2018to conspire'
means simply u2018to breathe together.' So any group of people coming
together to plan for action or a defined objective — good or bad
— can in a sense be described as conspiring. Groups of people, especially
outside of government, conspire to achieve good things, with positive
intent, and may well succeed. It is only a paranoid fear of the
truth, together with the implicit assumption, particularly on the
part of the mainstream media, that only crimes against the state
are conspiracies, and not those of the state's servants or their
political masters, which has tended to push the notion of conspiracy
into the realms of wickedness in the public mind.

4
— The Linking Game

I
myself was recently chastised by a very articulate 21-year old college
student for allegedly believing too much in ‘those conspiracy
theories.’ So I was intrigued to see on the Internet lately
the website of a certain R. B. Ham of Canada, and that he had categorized
the Lew Rockwell website, in his listing of links, under the heading
‘Conspiracy – Fact or Fiction,’ alongside other well-known
conspiracy theory websites. LewRockwell.com
(LRC) is of course a libertarian website, perhaps even the
libertarian website par excellence.

Actually
there is no doubt that the conspiracy websites listed by u2018RB,' while
getting few awards for design, contain much interesting fuel for
the conspiracy theory fires. I do not know all the sites, and I
can think of some that are missing from the list, but of the ones
I do know I recommend those of Al
Martin, a former member of the US Office of Naval Intelligence,
who has written the book
"The
Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider," and Jeff
Rense, who has a radio talk show.

Others
on the list which I personally have visited are Jared Israel's Emperor's
Clothes, Mike Ruppert's From
the Wilderness Publications, MadCow
Morning News (Daniel Hopsicker), Questions
Questions, Serendipity,
UnanweredQuestions
(which focuses on Sept. 11th) and Mike Rivero's What
Really Happened.
All of
them are worth a visit but, as with any source of information,
you have to make up your own mind about their content.
Take
a look at this link – http://members.shaw.ca/rbham/print%20thinks/currentprint.htm
– and scroll down to the bottom to see the rest of the
company LRC is in.

I
grant that RB states that these links are a work in progress, but
perhaps because the stigma attaching to conspiracy theory is so
prevalent and so strong, a part of me felt that he could at least
have had the decency to put LRC
up there
in the respectable category of "Politics, Humour, Reference"
together with
the excellent
CounterPunch,
OnlineJournal,
Al Giordano's
Narco
News, Robert Parry at Consortium
News, Ted
Rall, Truthout
and Working for
Change, amongst many others.

But
let us be thankful for small mercies. At least LRC is not classed
in the category at the bottom of the page, which is called ‘Anomalous
Science!’ For, if we are to believe Thomas
Fleming, libertarian ideas ‘are irrelevant, not just to
present circumstances, but to the human condition.’ Hey, wait
a minute, that's even worse than being labelled a tin-foil hat conspiracy
theorist!

November
19, 2002

Richard
Wall (send him mail) is a freelance
translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril,
Portugal. This
article is the first in a 3-part series on the subject of “Conspiracy
— Fact or Fiction.”