Does Patriotism now come under the liberal column?

I always found it unsettling that in the 2004 campaign, John Kerry was considered the less patriotic of the candidates. Kerry who served two tours in the Vietnam war was considered somehow less American than Bush who dodged the draft and went AWOL from his Air National Guard duties.

One of the many things that was laudable about Barack Obama’s campaign, as Michael Kazin writes in the Washington Post, was that he recaptured the label of patriotism from the Republicans and made it a liberal trait again. Granted, he was aided by an even worse four years with Bush in office, an Iraq war that had escalated to the point of colossal failure, and an imploding economy. But then again, he ran against someone who has long been touted as the quintessential American hero. Regardless of what one thinks of McCain, I think almost everyone agrees that he is a true patriot.

Obama, as Kazin writes, made “compassion for the underdog” an American thing again. He carried his campaign on the shoulders of the same theme of uniting the country and restoring its values with which he first burst on the political scene in 2004. And it resonated with the people.

All that is well and good, but what is frightening is that Democrats seem to constantly have to prove their love for their country. Somewhere along the way, “unconditional” faith in everything your government does – be it start a pointless war, assume that global warming is not man made, threaten to thwart civil liberties – has acquired the label of patriotism.

The Bush administration, with all its secrecy and lies, seems to have established that dissent is not a patriotic faith, even if that dissent means questioning a war that majority of Americans agree was wasteful and unnecessary. Even if that dissent comes after being in the line of fire, realizing the unfairness of it, and protesting it after your return. Few would deny that one of the things that derailed Kerry in 2004 was the Bush campaign’s rehashing of his anti-war protest as contempt against his country.

While putting your life on the line for your country is second to none as far as patriotic acts go, when did having the best interests of the nation at heart, and questioning decisions gone awry become unpatriotic?

Obama managed to be on the side of dissent, and yet make it a patriotic viewpoint, aided by the mood in the country. This was not for lack of effort to prove otherwise from the McCain camp. Be it trying to pin unpatriotism by association through Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, Michelle Obama’s off –the-cuff, yet very tenable remarks about her long-awaited pride for her country, or Obama’s refusal to wear a lapel pin, Republicans once again tried to invoke the patriotism argument. The most laughable allegation came from Congresswoman Michele Bachmann who infamously claimed that the Obamas were anti-American and couldn’t be trusted in the White House.

Despite those efforts, however, Obama's call to let America be America again worked. In addition to his message, the very fact that he is an African American has reminded people of the true ideals of this country being about justice and liberty. As many newspapers around the country reported, Democrats literally went from hiding their flags to waving them proudly after the election.

But perhaps, the most fascinating thing about his campaign was not its Americanism, but its globalism - the 200,000 strong rally in Berlin, campaign volunteers from around the world helping out here at home, and the accolades that poured in from the most unlikely corners after his victory.

A Simple Proposal for Dealing with Alex Rodriguez

What with recent allegations first that his teammates called him "A-Fraud," and now the whole allegedly-clever nickname of "A-Roid," we should just all cut to the chase.

Therefore, I propose we just combine the two epithets and call Rodriguez "A-Freud." That way, we'll cover both bases, and if any daddy-issues pop up down the road, we'll have those taken care of too.

Black History Month

I want to build on our recent discussions of the effect of Obama's presidency on race relations (see here, here, and here), by linking to Karol Collymore's post at Blue Oregon asking why we need a Black History Month. Although African-American herself, she questions whether such a device is still necessary:

A more fleshed out, integrated history would serve us all well. We could be done with "months" of Black history, womens' history, Latino history, and the histories of other cultures we don't yet acknowledge or choose to ignore. Wouldn't it be nice to rid us all of these overtures of inclusiveness and just oh, I don't know, be inclusive?

That's a nice sentiment. Sure, it'd be great to just be inclusive. But again, I really want to warn people against believing Obama's election has led to a post-racial point. As the comments to Collymore's post shows, there are a lot of racists still out there. Diversity needs to be something we constantly fight for. Multicultural perspectives are a constant struggle against a power structure that reinforces traditional narratives of history. I was talking to a member of our administration the other day. He was talking about attending a conference of administrators recently where everyone was talking about sustainability and no one was talking about diversity. It amazed him because 10 years ago it was totally opposite. While we must stress sustainability, we shouldn't think that diversity has been achieved, in the academy or anywhere else. Racism is a powerful force in American society and the election of one non-white to the presidency doesn't mean it's gone away.

I also want to stress just how important Black History Month has been to the changes in race we've seen in recent years. Racial issues have improved over the last 20 years. Young people are far more progressive about race than their parents and grandparents. What's more important is that this stretches across political lines. Even the election of that schmuck Michael Steele to the head of the Republican National Committee would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The deification of Martin Luther King and the efforts to get black history talked about in schools is very important to this entire process. I would argue that without Black History Month, Barack Obama is not president of the United States. For as sanitized as King's message has become, it still stresses equality between the races. A lot of people now believe this. As constrained in a single month as black history is in the schools, it still serves as a yearly reminder to young people of the horrors of slavery, how African-Americans worked for equality, and what they had achieved. Students learn this over and over again and many of them truly believe it. If this was to go away in favor of a belief that we should just be more inclusive, I think many of these gains could be lost.

Oddly, I'm not sure that any similar improvement has been made in gender relations because of Women's History Month. This reinforces my belief that sexism may be much more entrenched than racism. But it could also be that women's history and gender equality don't get the same attention in the schools as African-American history. Who's the King of the women's movement? There's no single person to deify and use to explain the struggle, however simply, for children. Susan B. Anthony is so long gone and is from such a foreign time that she's not particularly useful. Plus there's no footage of her like there is of King. Who does that leave us? Gloria Steinem? Hillary Clinton? Bella Abzug? These are very important people, but I'm not sure that teachers can hang all of women's history on them. Of course, the answer is that the feminist heroes are every woman who has worked for wages, who has fought for the vote, who has fought to keep abortion legal. But not only are these issues more contentious than King's dream, but teachers also like simple, easily explainable figures, and this more complex view of women's history doesn't fit that well.

Collymore's solution is to improve the history books. As some of you know, these claims of al history textbooks stressing old white male history really makes me angry. If you look at any textbook taught on the college level, you will find them as diverse as you could possibly want; virtually every group in American history is discussed in depth and they are constantly revised to be even more diverse (as well as to make more money of course). The people who say the history textbooks are bad have rarely actually read any history textbooks.

Now, that doesn't mean there aren't problems in the schools around textbooks and diversity in teaching. Regardless of the textbook you use, if the teacher is a conservative white guy dedicated to dead white male history, this is what you are going to get. No small number of high school history teachers are conservative, as opposed to the colleges where conservatives are few and far between. Also, I'm sure there still are publishers who put out textbooks written in that old way. The problem ultimately comes down to decentralized schools and the power of local school boards. People sometimes get dead white male history because that is all the school board is going to allow. Or sometimes this is what they get because the school district is so poor that they are using 25 year old textbooks. How much historians can do about any of this is not a question I can answer.

Historical Image of the Day

Bell system switchboard, 1943.

To Hell with Good Intentions

Sorry I haven't been writing, but I haven't had internet access since last weekend...  On Sunday all the students in my study abroad program traveled to a small rural town called Ixtlilco el Grande, where we stayed until Wednesday.  While we were there we stayed with families, many of whom didn't have running water or refrigerators let alone any luxuries.  Then we moved to an ex-hacienda which had been turned into a resort/hotel, where we stayed for two nights.  At the ex-hacienda, we had various conversations about cultural issues and such, one of which was based on Ivan Illich's article "To Hell with Good Intentions."  

Many of the students in my program are Social Work majors, so they obviously rejected the notion that there is nothing we can do to help other people.  But I also think it's really important to recognize that even trying to help often does damage.  One student told a story about a village where a bunch of do-gooders put in a well for easier access to water, and they probably expected a giant "Thank you, you've saved our lives."  But actually the women were really unhappy with the well because it took away the time that they previously had to bond with the other women in the village when they went to the river for water everyday.  

Similarly, I heard of someone who visited a small rural town (much like Ixtlilco) and noticed that there weren't any recycling bins.  So in her quest to "green" the town, she organized a project to have them collect their recyclable materials, but it took eight months for them to gather enough to make it worth anyone's effort to haul it off to be recycled.  Because the people of the town were forced to make their money stretch as far as possible, they lived by the first two R's of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle."  And because of that, they most certainly are much "greener" than any city with a shopping mall and a lame-ass recycling program.  

I don't agree with Illich that there is nothing we can do.  I think that there are a lot of really good programs that are doing a lot of good things for the people of Latin America.  But successful programs need to based on the needs of local peoples, not the "needs" that foreigners see.  Solving Latin American problems with U.S. solutions will never work.

Herring Review, Part XI

This is the eleventh installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

This week is about the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. Getting sleepy yet? It's not quite that boring, but it's not the most interesting period of American foreign relations either. I've always found the 1920s to be one of the most difficult periods of American history to talk about. It's a period of great modernization and a lot of continuity with the Progressive Era, but also is a major break from that previous time, sometimes it seems on the same issues, particularly on the role of reform in American society. It almost feels like an outlier of American history. What's really going on I think is a kind of last gasp of 19th century America--the craziness of the Progressive Era subsided and Americans got their beloved return to normalcy, but modernism couldn't be put away. Neither could science, social reform, a growing federal government, diversity, or women working outside the home.

And neither could the world. Herring's thesis here is that given the world of the 1920s and given American domestic policy, the United States could not have done much more than it did to change the future. He stresses that while the U.S. avoided most treaties that required actual commitment, the nation certainly was not isolationist, as many historians have asserted. I basically agree with Herring here. The U.S. thought was it was doing worked during the 20s. The nation wanted peace and the Washington Naval Treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and other agreements were designed with this in mind. Herring says that post-World War II criticisms about these treaties are ahistorical and again I mostly agree. It's not fair to accuse Americans of not being able to see the future of Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese expansion. After all, how many of us saw the financial collapse 2 years ago? You have to judge people based upon their possible range of actions. While there were Americans, particularly international businessmen, who saw some of the problems that would overtake the world in the 1930s, most Americans could not conceive of these disasters. Certainly the relatively dim lights of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge could not. If there is blame to be thrown around for American foreign policy during these years, it should go more to the American people than to the lame leaders they elected.

That said, while Herring does his best to enliven these years, they just aren't that exciting. He notes tentative changes in U.S. policy toward Latin America, with somewhat less military intervention. But ultimately Americans fell back upon invasion when they felt the need. Herring expresses relief that the U.S. didn't go to war with Mexico in the 1920s when Obregon and Calles were undermining American business interests in that nation. But at the same time, we did send in the Marines to put down Augusto Sandino's revolution in Nicaragua. This failed, but we did place Anastasio Somoza in power; he and his family would brutally rule that nation until the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. This is when Trujillo took over in the Dominican Republic and other pro-American brutal dictators established themselves around Latin America. So it's not as if the Republicans ultimately were that different from Wilson in this regard.

I did think it was interesting to be reminded of how American corporations gave crucial support to the Soviets in their darkest hours in the mid 1920s. One might argue that without American economic help, the Soviets would have fallen before 1940. Would this have been good? Probably not, though the Ukrainians might disagree. But a weak Russia would have been a disaster against the Nazis. In any case, the Soviets' desire for rapid modernization fit very well for American companies' desire for international markets. The Americans fooled themselves into thinking they could open up the Soviets through their investments; turns out you can have a brutal dictatorship and economic success at the same time.

There is probably more to say, but I'll pass it off to Rob now.

Weird (and very bad) Science

On the heels of the recent discussion about inoculations, the London Times is reporting that "the doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism" (MMR is the abbreviation for the vaccine given for the diseases measles, mumps, and rubella).

The article is interesting; the reporters unraveled the tale by obtaining some confidential medical documents and witness interviews. What is really surprising is that the original study was based on only 12 children, and was subsequently published in the venerable British medical journal, The Lancet. I'm certainly not a scientist, but that sounds like a rather small sample size. Is this common, those of you in scientific fields?

Of course, the sample size doesn't matter when the evidence is tampered with. The linked article lays out the investigators' findings as such:

"confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal."

That's pretty shocking, and not without consequence. Inoculation rates in the U.K. have fallen to below 80% from as high as 92%, and there were 1,348 cases of measles last year, versus 56 in 1998. The article was published in 1998, and eventually recanted in 2004 by most of the authors of the paper. The recent reporting comes out of an investigation by the U.K.'s General Medical Council into Andrew Wakefield, the center of the controversy.

It seems like a case where the peer-review model failed, but can we really hold the system accountable if the data are false? But what about the sample size? Where in the system are the controls for data integrity? I would assume that severe cesure and professional death are strong controls on most researchers not doing something like this. If Andrew Wakefield is found guilty of unethical behavior by the General Medical Council, I'm sure he'll likely face a number of nasty, career-ending punishments. Even though the study had been basically discredited over the last five years, this new information really seals the deal, it seems-- and certainly doesn't bode well for Wakefield.

In addition, I think this speaks directly to what my fellow bloggers on this site have been talking about with respect to the need for professional journalism. Brian Deer's decade long investigation of this fraudulent study is an example of the press doing something invaluable for society, something that could not be done by anyone but a supported, professional journalist. Especially when the people being investigated sue the journalist (as Wakefield did to Deer, though Wakefield had to abandon the suit and was forced to pay a settlement to Deer-- seriously, that is a great system to stop junk lawsuits). Deer also reported that Wakefield had applied for patents for a measles vaccine that would serve as an alternative to the MMR vaccine. Deer's site has an amazing run-down of the ten-year unfolding of this scandal.

In any event, this is more evidence that you need to get your kids fucking vaccinated, even if your religion requires a medieval distrust of science and book-larnin', or you choose to believe in mystic crystals, tarot cards, and Earth Godesses to keep your offspring healthy.

Denby on Slumdog

I find myself uncomfortable agreeing with the substance of a David Denby review. Usually I just assume I'll feel the opposite about whatever he thinks. But he sure sums up my criticism of Slumdog Millionaire, which is one reason why he's a professional film critic and I'm not.

The central plot mechanism of “Slumdog Millionaire”—Jamal (Dev Patel), a poor kid from Mumbai, overcomes his ragamuffin past and achieves fame, wealth, and selfhood by answering questions on a high-stakes game show—feels both cheesy and rigid. The movie is a Dickensian fable, but didn’t David Copperfield have to work his way up the ladder? As Jamal thinks over the questions put to him on the show, moments from his early life float through his mind, and some wrenching event delivers the right answer to him. Apart from a nagging implausibility—how could every question link up with an old memory?—I object to the way that the director, Danny Boyle, orchestrates Jamal’s life. Everything is seen in a flash—the boy’s mother is beaten to death, a man is set on fire, tiny goddesses appear out of nowhere—and nothing is prepared, explained, or understood. As slum children, Jamal and his friends are enchantingly beautiful, but the supersaturated color makes not just the kids but every surface and texture shine glamorously, including the piles of garbage that Jamal and his brother live among. Boyle has created what looks like a jumpy, hyper-edited commercial for poverty—he uses the squalor and violence touristically, as an aspect of the fabulous.

Yes, indeed.

Via Ari, who makes fun of Denby's writing a bit. Probably rightfully, but I'm not going there since I'm sure he'd eviscerate my writing.

Historical Image of the Day

Chinese owned dry goods company, St. Louis, Missouri, 1909.

Historical Image of the Day

Boiler shop crew. U.S. Navy Yard, Mare Island, California, 1901

Now everyone can enjoy Death.

I haven't been this excited about a punk rock record in a long time. Death were a short lived band from the mid-70s Detroit scene that managed to record 7 tracks in 1975 and self-released a single in 1976 before disappearing. Drag City Records is releasing there entire recorded output in a couple weeks. Their sound is heavily influenced by the MC5 and The Stooges, but unlike those bands, they also have a lot in common with the sound of UK punk bands from 1976 and 1977. I pre-ordered a copy of the LP and it came in the mail today. I've already listened to this 6 or 7 times, it is great stuff that I highly recommend. Listen here, more info and background here and here. 

Concert Review: Chris Knight or, Slumming from a Glass

Last night, I had the pleasure, for the third time, to see Chris Knight perform. Erik and I have said plenty about him in the past, and this show was just as fantastic as the other two times he's come. He was with his band this time, so it's the second time I've seen him this way and once as a solo act. I'm not sure which I like better. The solo voice and guitar is certainly easier to understand and allows you to better take in the power of his lyrics, which is significant. With a band, however, there's a great energy both on stage and in the audience. I suppose I like both equally.

I see a fair number of shows, and Knight is uncanny. Where equally good acts can't draw beans on a Thursday night, understandable for a relatively small town, he packs the place; most of the audience had to be at work the next morning, myself included, but that didn't stop anybody from staying the whole time and drinking themselves silly (two separate shipments from the Budweiser man arrived during the show), singing every song. Not only that, most of the crowd was able to identify every song after the first couple of notes. These people really love their Chris Knight. For a dedicated country artist, he draws a more diverse crowd than anybody: mixed races, equal parts women and men, old men, eighteen year olds, cowboys and punks, all united under the banner of Slaughters, KY's favorite son. Twice, old men randomly pulled out song sheets they hoped to hear, like kids at a Christina Aguilera show thrilled to death that they'd heard all but one song on their lists. If I can help it, I'll never miss a Chris Knight show and, for any fan of country, even marginal ones, I recommend the same.

A couple of observations, though. I was disappointed to find, at the Danny Barnes show, that Dan's had ridded themselves of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A lot of you may be gagging, but it's the cheapest beer there, so fuck it. Dan had a plan, though: he now has it on draft, for the same price no less. This means a full 1/3 more Pabst for $2 and, in the glass, it looks like I'm drinking something high tone...I felt like some kind of tycoon with my pint glass in hand without the expense.

Finally, as some of you may know, I've done on-camera work (and a little voice over work, which is way more fun) for the past two years for ol' Sally Beauty training videos and, last night, it finally bit me. I was standing in line for the restroom when I got a tap on the shoulder. I turned around and some guy is looking and smiling at me. I give a standard, banal response that is supposed to let somebody know that I'm not much for talking right now, but instead, he introduces himself to me...ok, I tell him my name (though I think he heard "Dan," which is not my name, but it's better he doesn't really know it, I suppose) and we shake hands. While still smiling at me, he tells me that he recognizes me from the videos. Wow, buddy, should we kick everyone out and lock the bathroom door? Now, I'm not a man who much likes to be recognized by people I don't know, so this made things uncomfortable to me for a little while, though I was able to shake him and not have to see him again. Jeez...is this how I'm to be known? Some jerk on a video that talks about salon mats? This was before the show, though, and Chris Knight made it all better.

A great time, all in all, and I'm going to see the reunion of Slobberbone tonight. You know what that means. That's right: $2 PBR!

Seattle General Strike

90 years ago today, on February 6, 1919, the Seattle General Strike began.

The Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of radicalism in the early 20th century. The large Scandinavian population brought a tradition of socialism with them when they immigrated to the region. The longshoremen that worked the region's ports were among the most radical labor unions in the country. The logging industry became a center of radicalism because the conditions workers lived in were so bad that people turned to the Industrial Workers of the World out of desperation. Although many of those terrible living conditions had been ameliorated during World War I, radical loggers still dominated many lumber camps and mills. Seattle had one of the most respected labor newspapers in the country, the Seattle Union Record, and this publication whipped up support in favor of various radical causes.

The precipitating event for the General Strike was a strike in the Seattle shipyards. In solidarity, the Seattle Central Labor Council called the larger action with the active support of the I.W.W. This became the first and only general strike in U.S. history. For 5 days, Seattle shut down. 25,000 workers joined the 35,000 already on strike. The strike committee worked hard to keep basic services running in the city, though the lack of cooperation from the Seattle city government and the strike's disorganized nature made this very difficult.

The Seattle power structure went nuts. Mayor Ole Hanson, elected the year before with labor's support, armed the police and threatened to declare martial law. Although the strike was entirely peaceful from the workers' side, the threat of police or military violence grew daily. The strike had the rapt attention of the nation. Radicals hoped it was the first step on America's revolutionary road. Politicians and business leaders were mortified that the Russian Revolution had spread to America and called for a crackdown. In response to heavy pressure, the Central Labor Council declared the strike over on February 11, though many workers had already gone back to their jobs as the threats mounted.

Perhaps the worst effect of this was that it made Hanson a national figure for the rest of the year. He took advantage of the Red Scare dominating the country in the immediate post-WWI years to launch his a national political career. He toured the nation, giving speeches about the threat we faced from radicalism. Hanson turned completely on his base of support, and in one of the greatest acts of hypocrisy in American political history, called for the suppression of labor. His stock faded with the end of the Red Scare. He tried to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, but the Republicans, wary of the crazy Seattle mayor, went for the bland Warren Harding instead. Awesomely, the Wikipedia site on Hanson claims he ran in 1922, which of course was not a presidential year. Classic.

This is one of the most forgotten about events in American history; even among those who are aware of the major events of American labor history, the General Strike gets short shrift. Perhaps this because nothing came of it, but most of the major American strikes of this period were also failures. It was something of a last gasp of pre-communist leftism in American thought. Because of the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the outright suppression of the I.W.W. after World War I, many radicals turned to the Communist Party and Soviet leadership. There was something beautiful, if almost completely futile, about pre-communist labor radicalism in America. That almost undefinable something was central to the Seattle General Strike, but it was soon lost. Incidentally, Seattle lost its radical edge during the 1920s. The most prominent labor leader to come out of Seattle during that period was Dave Beck, the Teamster head before Jimmy Hoffa, who cut his teeth opposing the General Strike. Beck, like Hoffa after him, lost his position as Teamster president when he was sentenced to prison for corruption. Beck's rise serves as something of a metaphor for the general fall in labor's power in Seattle after the General Strike's failure.

After his 15 minutes of fame ended, Hanson decided to leave Washington altogether. He ended up founding the town of San Clemente, California. There is a beach club named after him there today.

In Which Mr. Trend's Skewed Sense of Priorities Manifests Itself in Potentially Embarassing Ways

As is known to regulars of this blog, while I am a Cleveland Sports supporter through and through, the Indians are far and away my team of teams, and baseball the sport I love more than any other.

As many may also know, I am a broke graduate student living in New York city, which only worsens my financial situation.

That said, when looking at question #48 ("Which would you rather have? $5,000 [or] Your favorite team win a championship?") in this survey, I didn't think twice - "An Indians World Championship!" Then I remembered I'm broke, and I paused and thought, "well, would I rather have $5,000?" Upon further reflection, I came up with my answer.

No, I'd still rather see the Indians win the World Series. That's worth more than $5000 to me. I suppose if we were talking larger sums of money, I'd probably take the money, but I so desperately want to see my team win a championship, I could easily say "no" to $5000 (though, given that neither a World Series Ring nor the $5000 are likely to present themselves to me anytime soon, it's not a major concern).

I'd like to say, "but hey, at least I'm not materialistic!," but really, I fear I'm just pathetic.

And I'm OK with that.

Moneyball the Movie?

Via Reel Fanatic, it seems that Steven Soderbergh is going to turn Moneyball into a movie, with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane. Note that it's at the bottom of the link.

Like Fast Food Nation, I have no idea how someone is going to try and turn this book into a film. Other than that it completely lacks dramatic tension, has no obvious story line, and is entirely about an intellectual change in how we should think about baseball players, it's a brilliant idea! I guess Fast Food Nation wasn't terrible as a movie, but it was also pretty unnecessary even though it did touch on some good political points. I can only imagine this being even less essential.

Campbell Brown

Is there a more annoying media figure today than Campbell Brown? I don't watch her on TV, but her columns for CNN's website drive me up the wall. Today she rails against Congress for having retreats. I know it's a brave step to attack Congress, but Brown is here to lead us. This isn't a partisan thing either, ever since she started these columns and had her show (so I'm thinking the middle of last year), she been pontificating with the best of them.

She has real Dobbsian tendencies--millionaire TV news celebrities embracing a faux populism of which they declare themselves head, all the while living lives of incredibly luxury and privilege, completely separated from actual suffering.

Mostly, I just hate it when news personalities let their ego get to their head and they start using air space to self-important editorializing. Note that this is different than an O'Reilly or Olbermann--that is what these people do. What Brown does is declare herself a person speaking for "real Americans" and then goes on self-righteous tirades about whatever is bothering her.

Update: Trend points out in comments that she is married to Republican analyst Dan Senor. This doesn't necessarily make her points even more worthless, but it does reinforce the point that she lives a life of luxury and is certainly has no legitimate reason to be speaking for so-called "real Americans."

Historical Image of the Day

Women railroad workers, Great Northern Railway, Great Falls, Montana, 1919.

Although we always learn about Rosie the Riveter and the importance of women working industrial jobs in World War II, the same thing happened on a somewhat smaller scale during and immediately after World War I.

Free Speech (?) vs. Reproductive Rights

Well, it's not really that simple. But Matttbastard has a post up at Shakesville about the "Genocide Awareness Project" visiting the University of Calgary.

I had my own run-in with these assholes at Temple last year. My first reaction was shock at the giant display (no, I'm not finding pictures to subject you to). My second response was to do some quick searching on Temple's Web site and the Temple News to find out exactly why I was stuck dealing with pictures of people dead in concentration camps or hanging from trees, next to the usual shots of the fetuses.

Apparently, since my university is publicly funded, it counts as a public forum for speech, and so even massively-funded outside groups like the "Genocide Awareness Project," whose plan appears to be to completely alienate Jews, African-Americans, and anyone with good taste by comparing abortion to, y'know, actual racialized violence and genocide.

That said, the people behind the displays at Temple were pretty quiet, staying behind their hideous images unless someone tried to engage. And the radical cheerleaders came out to protest, which is always awesome.

I defend their right to speech and expression for sure. I believe in free speech, and though I think Woodrow Wilson was often a wanker (and no friend to women's rights), I agree with him when he said:

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

But I believe that right stops when it becomes harassment, and I don't think that a time, place and manner restriction on these displays (for instance, do they really need to have ten-foot dead fetuses? Just sayin') would be too much of an infringement on their rights to be factually wrong and offensive to boot.

I would LOVE to know where these groups get their funding to take their traveling picture show on the road, apparently across the US/Canada border, too...

Shorter Pete Sessions: "Republicans ♥ Taliban"

My favorite Texas asshat, Pete Sessions, has reached a new height of asshattery.

Frustrated by a lack of bipartisan outreach from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said today that the GOP should look to the Taliban for guidance in conveying its position on the stimulus package and, more broadly, in working to make the party's views on issues known. [...]

"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes.

"And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."

Well then! He's not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. He's saying he hopes the Republican Party becomes the Taliban.

Republican leadership circa 2009 my friends! Does Sessions hope to become the American Bin Laden?

Bad excuses and simple economics: Taxpayers subsidizing corporate excess AND religion

Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the country, received $25 billion in taxpayer money as part of the recent bank bailout. Apparently, running a business so poorly that you need a $25 billion handout is all the more reason to celebrate—only under increased public scrutiny did the Wells Fargo executives cancel a lavish Las Vegas junket. This did not come without some severely lame rationalization. The spokesperson for the company said that “recognition events are still part of our culture”. Recognition events are fine—how about a cake or after-work drinks on the boss? In the past, Wells Fargo’s “recognition events” have included performances by such bland celebrities as Huey Lewis, Cher, and Jay Leno (as well as camel rides!) Here’s the worst one—the official Wells Fargo statement about the eventual cancelling of the planned trip said that the bank had “never planned to use taxpayer bailout money to fund the trip”.

This is why these banks are losing their collective asses—I’m once again convinced that the people running them don’t really know that much about economics.

Floyd is on his way to buy groceries, with a $50 bill in hand. However, Floyd is out of gas, but if he spends his $50 on gas, he won’t have any money for groceries. Floyd’s neighbor, Hank, could give his friend $50. However, due to Floyd’s smaller than average penis and chronic premature ejaculation problems, he drives a Hummer. Hank has something of an environmental conscience, and doesn’t want his money buying gas for Floyd’s suburban tank. Floyd cleverly tells Hank that if he gives him the $50 that he is short, he’ll buy groceries with Hank’s $50 bill and use his own $50 to buy gas.

You see the problem? This is basically what Wells Fargo is saying, in their desire to convince the public that nothing about their conduct is/was wrong. The same kind of math is in play with respect to faith-based initiatives. The argument goes much like Floyd’s—religious groups can take the money provided they use it for social services (and thus freeing up more of their money for bigger buildings, missionary work, researching that cure for lesbianism, etc.) I’m beyond disappointed (though not entirely surprised) that Obama has announced he will continue and expand the Bush administration’s policy of funding religious groups that provide certain social services. It’s a political move, I know, and as I’ve said before, I’m loathe to second guess the guy’s political strategy (like SarahJ said, he just “gets” politics) but at a certain point, I’m ready for some principle. This is one of them. Funding religious groups is a bad idea, both for religious groups, religious freedoms, and social services. Let’s put that money to use fixing and expanding social services—certainly that would be more cost effective. Let’s avoid the divisive questions that come along—if a religious group is receiving funding from the government, do they still get to fire and hire based on religion? Are we impugning religious freedom if we say no? These are questions that are distracting from what should be the central point of faith-based initiatives: the increased access and quality of social services. Under Bush, I think it was more about throwing some dollars and a political bone to the right. Under Obama, this just ought to go away. This is the time to show some principle, Mr. President; let’s not buy gas for Floyd’s Hummer any more.

Elections Have Consequences: Supreme Court Edition

Disturbed about the last few days or not, I'm sure glad Obama won!

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman currently serving on the nation’s highest court, underwent surgery Thursday for removal of a cancerous tumor from her pancreas. … Ginsburg has served on the court since 1993. She was treated for colon cancer 10 years ago.

Ginsburg’s pancreatic cancer was discovered early, in the course of a routine annual screening, but medical literature says even in this circumstance, a patient’s five-year survival chances range from 10 to 30 percent.

I don't want to trivialize Ginsburg's illness, but of course death on the Supreme Court is always a calculation in national politics. If she does have to leave the Court, thank the higher power of your choice that she will be replaced by someone good.

Kilmer for Governor?

According to Marjorie, Val Kilmer is considering running for governor of New Mexico. He even held an impromptu press conference yesterday at the New Mexico capitol building.

Kilmer for Governor? I can't imagine any potential problems there!

On the other hand, it's New Mexico, so who knows what could happen.

The Myth of Shovel-Ready and the Fallacy of Tax Credits

Thanks to Congress, the economic stimulus package is turning into a soup of bad projects, gifts to lobbyists, and irresponsible tax cuts.

The conditions that create such a sludge is why I am so skeptical about the long-term health of the economy.

The more I examine the package, the more problems I see. I want to focus on two in this post.

First is the idea of shovel-ready projects. This sounds good and all--construction projects that will put people back to work immediately. As any resident of Minneapolis could tell you, the nation has some severe infrastructure problems. But who will work these jobs? To what extent will these jobs deal with unemployment? I'm flagging this as a problem because of the enormous changes in the workforce over the last 30 years. Construction is down and those people need work. They'll move into these jobs. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people laid off from the service sector? Is the laid-off manager of a Circuit City going to work a tractor? Is she going to dig ditches? Lay pipe? Maybe so since she needs the work. But I'm not so sure. We have sent such a huge percentage of our manufacturing jobs abroad that we lack people willing and able to do hard manual labor.

This change is a huge reason why immigration has spiked. Native-born Americans won't do these jobs. So immigrants will. Now they need jobs too. And it's entirely possible this could have a trickle-up effect that will cause immigrants and low-wage laborers to spend and more jobs to be created in the service and financial sectors. So it's not a bad thing, but I don't think it is a cure-all either. I do think that the focus on shovel-ready jobs not at all deals with the shifting nature of American work.

Everyone wants a public of spending consumers. Most of the people able to spend like crazy in 2006 were working white-collar or service jobs. Unless they decide to do hard physical labor that pays reasonably well, I don't see how these jobs re-create that credit-based economy. But maybe that's not such a bad thing. At the core of the problems facing the American economy is that people were spending beyond their means. This came back to haunt them. Until assets are properly valued and people pay off their debt, recovery is going to be difficult.

This is why I have such a huge problem with the tax credits being placed into the bill for home and car buyers. These are just props to hold up a collapsing American economic house of cards. How is giving people a $15,000 tax break to buy a home going to help the economy? First of all, it's going to take yet more money out of the Treasury Department, making it even harder to keep the nation solvent. Second, these provisions exacerbate the already existing fundamental problems of the economy. The banks are much more rational about this issue than Congress, which is why this tax credit probably won't do much. $15K tax credit or not, they aren't giving out credit. They are probably overreacting, but at least they understand something about why we got into this mess. The desire to put every American in a home they owned led to horrendous mortgages and people getting in over their heads. Giving them a tax credit to do the same thing all over again just puts off inevitable suffering down the road.

Historical Image of the Day

Woman working at A&W snack bar. Rifle, Colorado, 1973

Wasn't There Supposed To Be Some Kind of Change?

OK, that's a big overstatement.

But via Ezra Klein, Michael Hirsh points out that Obama's commitment to bipartisanship has emboldened Republicans. Why compromise when Obama and the Democrats are going to cede the rhetorical floor to you? These last couple of days have been kind of depressing, with the Daschle thing dominating the headlines and with discussions of the stimulus revolving around "waste" rather than the need to get things done. If Obama was supposed to be the 2nd coming of Franklin Roosevelt, it's as if FDR decided that changing the tone in Washington was more important than dealing with the depression and a sense of bipartisanship more valuable than forcing recalcitrant Republicans to accept the election results of 1932 and ram through necessary legislation.

At some point, you have to think that Obama is going to figure this out and change his priorities. But important momentum is being lost.

Decline in Green Energy Investment

One of the clearest long-term solutions for our economic and environmental problems is to invest heavily in wind and solar energy. It means more independence from oil-producing companies, less coal mining, and long-term energy stability. But because renewable energy doesn't have powerful political allies or senators and congresspeople beholden to it because of manufacturing jobs or corn production, it gets shorted in the stimulus and other bills. Now we see that the last several months has seen green energy investment fall off a cliff, largely because of a lack of credit.

This is exactly the kind of thing the Obama administration can invest in. It can put thousands of people to work in a variety of jobs, including manufacturing, research and development, construction, and infrastructure. It could lend the money directly to the energy companies, which would be a step toward nationalizing energy, something that would benefit the nation in the long run.

Eventually these wind farms are going up because it is in the nation's interest to make it happen. But it's not a top priority for a lot of people and this only hurts our environment, economy, and national security.

"Audit"-tions for public office

A colleague of mine and I were talking this morning about the tax problems dogging the various appointees. She had an interesting idea that has a lot of upside-- why not make holding public office (any public office, from city council up to the U.S. Senate and beyond) a trigger for an automatic yearly audit from the IRS?

Why not? It seems that those in charge of public money should be held to the highest standards of kicking in their share. This could arguably lead to a couple of great results:

1) People with shady business deals and fancy book-keeping would be discouraged from being in positions of political power.

2) People in power would likely think twice before making any kind transaction or accepting a good or service that could be considered questionable if they know that their finances will be scrutinized by the IRS.

This wouldn't necessarily have helped Daschle, since he was a private citizen while these tax problems mounted, but it could have helped in other cases. Plus, it would make public officials (and those hoping to be public officials) more aware of the consequences of any kind of tax problem. I suppose the argument against would involve the cost of doing these audits, but really, I can't imagine the cost even coming close to being greater than the benefit-- increased tax revenue and more importantly, a possibility to stave off impropriety by public officials or aspiring public servants. This could be even more useful at the local level, where some of the most egregious corruption takes place.

Historical Image of the Day

Miners coming out of mine shaft, Virginia City, Nevada, 1867.

I've decided that for the time being, I am going to have weekly themes for the images. In part, the images serve as a photo archive I can draw on for my teaching. Some areas I have a ton of photos for, others I have too few. So I am going to try and even it out this way.

These particular photos will be a series of Americans at work. They come from a series at the National Archives website you can look at here. I'll run this series for the next week and a half, since it makes sense to start a new set on Sunday or Monday and because I think there is great value looking at photos of work.

Stimulus Funding for Public Media

According to Current.org (h/t matttbastard), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and PBS have proposed $550 million for public media in the stimulus bill.

And I think it's an excellent idea. Hell, I think it doesn't go far enough.

I don't think anyone on here is going to argue with me that newspapers are dying. Yes, blogs are taking up a lot of the slack, but here's the biggest problem with blogs: most of us are responding and commenting on actual news reported by full-time journalists (even if a lot of said full-time journalists do a crap job).

Blogging is not journalism. You can do journalism on a blog, but journalism requires going out and gathering information, new information, and presenting it to the public. If the newspapers and news services go out of business, where would we get the stories that we write and talk about?

The newspaper industry was already in a death spiral, and don't get me started about the non-stellar reporting of television news. Now that the economy has crashed, newspapers are dying even faster than before--check out the interactive map of layoffs here. (h/t NewsTechZilla).

Where will we get our news when our newspapers are gone? Don't seriously tell me you learn anything from your local news affiliate.

Public media is more important than ever in these times. NPR's Web site has excellent interactive features, and could grow even more with proper funding. We need a news service that actually does original reporting and covers the world.

You can read a PDF of the letter sent to the transition team on the Current.org website.

I know a lot of bloggers like to pride themselves on contributing to the death of the MSM, but the fact remains that the original reporting doesn't get done without someone who is paid a living wage and can devote full time to really working on getting the story. Studies have shown that NPR listeners were the most informed citizens in the country on issues like the Iraq war.

I pride myself on actually doing original reporting, but I can't afford to go hit the trail of a big story that I'd like to dig up--I have a full-time job and freelance work on the site. We need to make sure that someone's doing the work of actually finding the stories on which to report.

The first Santo post!

Ever since Erik invited me to write for this blog, he has been bugging me to write about El Santo, the most famous Mexican lucha libre star. Now that I am, prepare to be underwhelmed. Maybe that is the point though, as El Santo made more than 50 movies from the late 50s to the early 80s that anyone would be hard pressed to actually consider "good."His acting skills were fairly atrocious, the plots of many of the movies are unintelligible, and nearly all of the movies feature long random dancing and music scenes just to fill time. Its not even clear that Santo used his own voice in any of his own movies (and sometimes even his own body!). Nevertheless, I love these movies for a number of maybe hard to explain reasons and I'm fairly close to having collected all of them. We also share the same birthday (September 23), so maybe there is some kind of special link between the two of us.

The reason for this particular post is that I finally got my hands on his first two movies from 1958, and watched them in the last couple days. In 1952, Santo, "el enmascarado de plata" (the Man in the Silver Mask) was asked to participate in a movie called El Enmascarado de Plata but refused, leading another wrestler, El Medico Asesino, to play his role. El Santo finally agreed to star in a pair of movies in 1958, "Santo contra Cerebro del Mal" (Santo Against the Evil Brain) and "Santo Contra Hombres Infernales" (Santo Against Infernal Men). (To read more complete synopses, go here). 

Despite the alluring titles, these two movies are terrible and lack coherent plots. There is hardly any wrestling in these movies, and Santo is really a minor and unimpressive character who says maybe a combined total of 5 sentences in both movies. The only real reason to watch these movies is that they were filmed in Havana, Cuba in 1958. You get at least a glimpse of part of pre-Castro Cuba, and lots of shots of bars, casinos, yacht clubs, and night clubs. Cerebro del Mal is the better of the two movies, with at least one other wrestler named "el incógnito." Hombres Infernales recycles a number of scenes from the first movie, including one with an actor who plays a completely different character in each movie. Santo spends most of the time in Hombres Infernales jumping in and out of water, inexplicably, as if he lived in the sea, and its really unclear what he is even doing throughout the entire film. 

Neither of these films are available with English subtitles, but if you are Spanish-challenged, you can read the synopses before watching them. Actually, don't read them, it doesn't really matter. There is so little relevant dialogue, and the stories so weak, you won't miss anything. 

Hopefully, I'll feel motivated to continue writing about El Santo. I plan on expanding upon this initial post with a review of Heather Levi's new book, The World of Lucha Libre (which I haven't read yet), more movie reviews, and a discussion of the music of lucha libre movies. 

 

For anyone interested in a quick biography of the man, go here. 

Action NOW on Stimulus Bill

The Nation sent this urgent call out over Twitter.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, currently being debated in the Senate, was passed last week by the House of Representatives. If enacted, the economic recovery plan will be one of the biggest and boldest pieces of progressive legislation in the past forty years...

Nonetheless, as Horn reports, "Here in Washington, DC, the word on the street is that the Right is killing us with phone calls to Congress. One congressperson said the calls are running 100 to 1 against the Obama economic recovery plan. The legislation is now on the Senate floor. If Senators perceive that Americans side with Obama in this fight, that will strengthen the power of progressives in the debate and we'll get a good bill. If, on the other hand, Senators are feeling the heat from conservatives, then our advocates will be weakened and we'll get a lousy bill. That's just the way things go on Capitol Hill."

As the invaluable Fact-esque blog wrote yesterday "This is the Superbowl of Activism and We're Losing Big." Progressives need to hit the phones and fast. Call your Senators toll-free at 1-866-544-7573 and demand immediate passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Please take just a minute to call.

Lithium: Unintended Environmental Consequences of Green Technology

The reality of all green technologies is that there is an environmental cost to developing them. Any kind of consumption that includes putting something together in a machine means that resources have to be gathered from somewhere. One of the most popular green technologies is cars that run on lithium batteries. This is a much better and cleaner alternative to fossil fuels.

But where does lithium come from? What do we have to do to get it? What are the environmental costs of acquiring lithium? And how much is there in the world? These are all key questions we need to be asking as we develop these technologies.

This very interesting Times article shows that the world's largest known lithium reserves are under the Uyuni Salt Flats of Bolivia. There are several tricky issues to acquiring these resources. First is Evo Morales' determination to get Bolivia off of resource exploitation and to ensure a fair profit for his people if foreign companies do develop resources.

I'd like to focus on another issue though. The salt flats are the entrance to one of the world's great wildernesses, the altiplano of southwestern Bolivia. Having visited here last summer, I can say that I have never been more isolated in my life. This is an amazing, rugged, and almost totally unpopulated place. For most people, the appeal of the 4 day tour of the area is the salt flats. This is the center of the small but growing Bolivian tourist industry.

Mining this lithium would have untold effects on the salt flats and would go a long ways to destroying the tourist industry. The leading argument Bolivians might make for the mining is that it would provide jobs and help pull them out of poverty. If this were in fact true, it's a legitimate argument. But multinational mining corporations are not exactly known for their labor or environmental standards, and while they might provide jobs, if they are jobs like they provide everywhere else in the world, it's hard to see people's lives improving. On the other hand, if the minerals are nationalized and any agreements ensure labor rights, it's something to consider.

This gets at the core question of environment vs. jobs. This is a false question though. An active tourist industry would provide lots of jobs for people--it's about all going on in Uyuni right now. With better infrastructure and strong national leadership, it's certainly possible that Bolivia could turn itself into an international tourist destination that might make more money than lithium mining.

But then, don't we want that lithium for our "green" cars? Is the sacrifice of this beautiful, remote, and surreal place worth a new consumer technology that is supposed to solve many of our problems? I am skeptical because I don't believe technology can solve our problems and that the mining of lithium will have unintended social and environmental consequences that will severely detract from whatever positives it may provide. And like many minerals, there are limited supplies on the earth and a widespread conversion to lithium to power our cars will create "peak lithium" on the same level as "peak oil" very quickly.

Appointments

While I'm a bit disappointed that Judd Gregg is being replaced by a Republican, I still have no fundamental problem with the appointment. Commerce is an almost meaningless agency (really, if we wanted to save money by cutting a large agency, it seems like Commerce is the place to start. You could merge a lot of its functions back into Treasury) and it eliminates a popular Republican senator in a Democratic state. This opens up the seat to a much easier Democratic takeover in 2010 and forces the Republicans to defend yet another tough open seat (along with Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas if Sebelius runs).

That said, I still don't understand Obama's bipartisanship. It's obvious that the Republicans are not going to play along. Still, for positions this meaningless, why not.

On the other hand, I'm really disgusted by the high number of appointees who haven't paid their taxes. Given that I think a Democratic government needs to make the argument that taxes are a good thing and that we should pay more of them for needed social services, appointing so many people with tax problems is not a good message. I would have no problem if Daschle were forced to withdraw his nomination; Howard Dean would make a perfectly good Secretary of Health and Human Services. I see that Nancy Killefer withdrew her nomination for Chief Performance Officer for the same reason. Clearly Obama wasn't going to expend political capital to defend a nominee of lesser importance.

But Obama needs to send the message (or the Senate if not Obama) that not paying your taxes is completely unacceptable. To me, this is a reminder of how Democrats joined Republicans in an all-out grab for money and orgy of greed in the last 30 years. How can we trust the Democrats to reinstate necessary regulations on industry and finance and lead the nation away from the policies of Reagan and Bush if they so clearly embraced that creed?

Update: And Daschle withdraws. It's too bad--I think he would have made a good health care czar. On the other hand, pay your fucking taxes.

Historical Image of the Day

Timothy O'Sullivan's photo, "The Harvest of Death," Gettysburg, 1863

The best Super Bowl ad none of us saw.

Well, unless you watched the Super Bowl in Mexico. Two of Mexico's major television stations, Televisa and TV Azteca decided to run a block of political ads throughout the Super Bowl, actually interrupting the game instead of during the commercial breaks. These block ads included a promo spot for the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and a group of spots for a number of Mexico's political parties. This also happened in a number of soccer games during the weekend and other types of programming. Needless to say, it seems people are pissed, and the IFE is as well. The IFE says it is going to investigate why the spots were run during programming rather than during commercial breaks.

What seems to be going on is the TV stations are angry with the IFE and the parties for the major 2007 electoral reform that prohibits parties from being able to independently purchase air time, a major source of revenue for the stations. So, they decide to take it out on their viewers and try to make them even more disgusted with the political parties. Not sure how well that strategy will work, the parties are already held in pretty low regard, and if further investigation shows the stations were being vindictive, they may face some (although likely minor) consequences.

I tried finding clips of the ads themselves this morning, but couldn't find any links. If anyone knows where I can see them, post in the comments. (Links in Spanish, sorry).

From Colony to Superpower, Part X

This is the tenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

This week we discuss Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Rob focuses a great bit on the buildup to World War I and has a lot of interesting things to say about the matter. I agree with his analysis about the Lusitania sinking being an overrated event. It didn't actually change anything. It led to a limited amount of bad press for Germany among the US public, but it's important to note that a lot of said public supported Germany. I think more importantly was that it turned American politicians and business leaders against Germany, but even this was limited and has relatively little to do with the nation's later decision to join the war. Likewise, I agree with Rob that it would have been very difficult for the U.S. to remain out of World War I--as soon as the Germans began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the only way for the U.S. to stay out would have been to give up trading with the British which was clearly not happening.

I'm more interested in how Herring shapes this chapter. Wilson's racist foreign policy leads to even more invasions in Latin America, including the disastrous attempt to apprehend Pancho Villa. This failure is a precursor for the failure of Wilson's foreign policy during and after World War I, ending in the watering down of his Fourteen Points at Versailles and the defeat of the League of Nations at home. While I certainly don't disagree with this analysis, I think it lacks useful context. Wilson's story is a Progressive story. In many ways, Wilson was the ultimate Progressive. Yet we get little context about internal developments in the U.S. during these years. I have long found to many narratives of U.S. foreign policy to exist in a contextual vacuum. A lot of recent scholars are moving beyond these traditional narratives, but Herring doesn't engage this work quite enough for my tastes.

As a scholar of Progressivism, I see these disparate movements as being tied together by a few basic themes. First, an overwhelmingly moralistic way of looking at the world and your involvement in it. Second, a belief that the reformer knew what was best for the world and if just the world would adhere to the provided solution, the problem would simply go away. Third, a lack of deep thinking about many of these problems and a lack of awareness of unintended consequences. Fourth, a view of the world infused with Anglo-Saxon superiority and racism toward other peoples. I'll avoid domestic examples here but can certainly provide them if anyone wants.

All of this describes Woodrow Wilson and his foreign policy. Sure he was racist. But so were most policy makers. Wilson though combined that racism with a self-assured superiority in regards to the rest of the world, a belief that America provided the best model for other nations to follow, and a simplistic idea about social and political problems that led him to catch-all solutions like the Fourteen Points.

Now, you might argue that I'm wrong here. But what you can't argue is that Herring deals with these ideas either way. To what extent do domestic issues and intellectual/political/cultural trends affect U.S. foreign policy? Herring, like most foreign policy scholars, does a good job during the pre-1815 period. But this gets lost in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This is too bad.

A lack of context hurts the chapter in other ways. For instance, what about immigrant groups within the US? Herring mentions that Irish-Americans were upset that the peace treaty didn't deal with Irish independence, but that's about all we hear about them. Yet there were many immigrant groups in the U.S. who openly supported Germany--including the Germans and Irish, which I believe were the 2 largest groups.

Moreover, there was a lot of residual anti-English sentiment among old-stock Americans dating back to the Revolution. I have read with my own eyes books published in 1916 and 1917 convincing Americans that those days are over, that we should get over our dislike of England and realize that Germany is the greatest threat the world faces. That Americans still needed convincing in 1917 that England was our ally was amazing to me. Yet we hear none of this in the chapter.

Similarly, I'd like to see more discussion and awareness of cultural issues. For instance, the same cult of masculinity that so influenced Americans to jump to war with Spain in 1898 played an equally important role against Germany in 1917. In fact, the industrial brutality of the war helped to kill that particular strain of upper-class men's obsession with their own masculinity that influenced hunting legislation, National Parks, the establishment of the Boy Scouts, early anthropology, the Marquis of Queensbury rules in boxing, making football a respectable sport, and many other things. Hunting, boxing, and the Boy Scouts were poor substitutes for the ultimate man-making exercise: war. The Spanish-American War was simply too short to satisfy upper-class men. This is a big reason why Theodore Roosevelt left his career behind to fight in Cuba and why he wanted to fight in Germany--he had prepared his entire life for these battles.

Moreover, these ideas of masculinity were international and influenced our foreign relations. Whether in England, Germany, or the U.S., young middle and upper class men rushed to volunteer for the conflict as soon as they could. That so many of them were slaughtered on the fields of northern France made them realize their romanticization of war was a lie and helped lead to the amazing literature of the war and postwar period. Before the war, the Boy Scouts was an international movement, men from around Europe and America traveled the globe looking for exploring and hunting adventures, and English and German investors went to the U.S. West to play cowboy like TR. People of the time were aware of these ideas and they talked openly in these terms. These constructions of masculinity influenced our interactions with the rest of the world. Yet I'm not seeing much awareness of this in the major works of U.S. foreign policy history and certainly not in Herring.

But it's not as if no historians are looking at cultural connections between the U.S. and the world during the Progressive Era . Daniel Rodgers' excellent history of transatlantic Progressivism, Atlantic Crossings, demonstrates how Progressives in the U.S. were talking to and were influenced by their counterparts in Europe and vice versa. Many of these Progressives entered government and influenced foreign policy. How did these Progressive ideas influence our relations with other nations? We really don't know from Herring.

Now, I'm not trying to be a jerk here. Readers of this series know that I like the book a good bit. I think it is a very solid overview of U.S. foreign policy history. My criticism is of the field more broadly, in particular the major narratives. There are many excellent historians working on the kinds of foreign policy history that I find increasingly satisfying; to a certain extent this is the difference between "diplomatic history" and "U.S. in the world" in the profession. It might seem like a semantic difference, but the latter works to decenter the foreign policy elite and traditional narratives from our understanding of the relations between the United States and the world. It seeks to complicate our narratives by showing how consumers, social workers, civil rights activists, everyday soldiers, and other nontraditional actors shaped our interactions with other nations. Herring is aware of this work and gives occasional nods to it, but ultimately is still writing a traditional foreign policy history with all its benefits and problems.

Rob also wanted to me to talk a bit about Mexico. I've blathered on for so long that I'll keep it short. I think Herring did a pretty good job with this, but I really wish that he would develop a broader narrative framework to encapsulate our interactions with Latin America. He signals changes and continuities between TR, Taft, and Wilson, but I'd like to see sharper clarity on how these Progressive Era presidents and the business interests they allied themselves with in Latin America would shape our dealings with that part of the world through the 20th century. Perhaps the reader can draw those connections for themself, but I'm not sure the non-specialist really would.

Sometimes Herring suggests at these larger frameworks in interesting ways. He points out that John Foster Dulles was a key advisor to Wilson at Versailles. It turns out that Dulles wrote the clause in the peace treaty ascribing all guilt for the war to the Germans. These two men allowed their overweening moralism to affect U.S. foreign policy, often in negative ways. It was Dulles after all who pushed Eisenhower to support Diem; he was confident in that leader because of his Catholicism. That was his major qualification, along with being anti-communist. Wilson and Dulles also followed similar foreign policies in regards to Latin America, using the military (and the CIA for Dulles) to crush resistance to U.S. hegemony and business interests. The Dulles brothers were close to the fruit growers in Guatemala who had their interests threatened by Jacobo Arbenz' government in the 1950s. Allen Dulles' position as CIA head and John Foster Dulles' position as Secretary of State made them unusually capable of using all means necessary to protect their friends and their own investments.

Ultimately though, I don't suspect Herring will draw these connections that sharply in the upcoming chapter on the Eisenhower years.

Overall though, I think Herring summarizes the complexities of the Mexican Revolution to my satisfaction, shows how U.S. racism negatively influenced Haiti, and how U.S. actions in the Dominican Republic led to the rise of the odious Rafael Trujillo. This represents the best of Herring's work--providing a coherent, if traditional, foreign policy narrative that takes at least some of the insights of more non-traditional work into account, while also being willing to call out U.S. presidents for their policies in ways older scholars might not have done so bluntly.

Again, I like the book and I want to stress that. But overall, I found this chapter unsatisfying because there are so many unexplored issues that I think are indicative of my problems with traditional narratives of the field as a whole.

There's more to say but I'll save it for Rob's response.

Historical Image of the Day

Downtown Los Angeles, 1929

A New Age of Responsibility

Post-inauguration, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the role of the blogosphere and the Internet in general in left political action.

I wrote a piece for Global Comment in which I said:

We’ve spent so long arguing that government doesn’t have to be the enemy, but the fact is that we’re used to government being the enemy. We’re used to disavowing the actions of our president loudly, to practically shouting “Not in our name,” to writing screeds of why we’re disappointed that this is our country.

No wonder we have a hard time believing that someone could get things right.

I was reading The Nation over breakfast this morning and came across this piece (which is excellent and should be read in its entirety) by Jonathan Schell.

Schell writes:

Yet in addition to being interconnected, the crises have striking features in common, suggesting shared roots. To begin with, all are self-created. They arise from pathologies of our own activity, or perhaps hyperactivity. The Greek tragedians understood well those disasters whose seeds lie above all in one's own actions. No storm or asteroid or external enemy is the cause. Today, the economic crash is the result of investment run amok: the "masters of the universe" are the authors of their own (and everyone's) downfall. The nuclear weapons that threaten to return in wrath to American cities were born in New Mexico. The oil is running short because we are driving too many cars to too many shopping malls. The global ecosphere is heading toward collapse because of the success, not the failure (until recently), of the modern economy. The invasion of Iraq was the American empire's self-inflicted wound--a disaster of choice, so to speak. All we had to do to escape it was not to do it. Here and elsewhere, the work of our own hands rises up to strike us.

I was trying to find a quote this morning in which someone complained of Obama's call for a new age of responsibility and said that it wasn't their fault and they didn't want to take responsibility.

And I think about the liberal blogosphere and how much of it has been defined, as I wrote before, by disavowing the actions of our government. Like leaving the Kerry 2004 sticker on your car after the last election, it seems like a big "don't blame me" gesture, an argument like the one I made each time I left the country in the Bush years.

"I didn't vote for him! I couldn't help it!"

Now that the guy we (most of us) voted for IS in office, we feel like his call for responsibility is roping us back into being a part of Bush's America. But responsibility isn't just that.

Obama is in office because millions of people gave money, and thousands upon thousands of people took it upon themselves to volunteer for the campaign. Here in Philly there was a controversy because the Obama campaign didn't want to pay "street money" to the folks who worked on election day, but they didn't need to; volunteers were everywhere.

We took responsibility. We didn't say "It wasn't my fault, why should I have to work to fix it?"

Obama's presidency isn't a fun party where we punish the people who screwed up, because we all are complicit in the screwups. Like acknowledging and dealing with any other form of privilege, whether it be racial, gendered, heterosexual, cisgender, Western, middle-class, or educational, it's not about feeling guilty. It's about looking forward and doing something to change it.

No, it's not my fault that Bush was elected. But I'm not going to let it be my fault that Obama doesn't get to do all he can do.

Obama is redefining responsibility with that inaugural speech and its follow-up actions, just like he's redefining the center. He's taken the word away from conservatives who use it to gut welfare spending, and made it part of our vocabulary by coupling it with his famous quote from his keynote speech back in 2004, when his election to the Senate was a lone bright spot in a horrible election cycle, where Democrats were crouching defensively, letting the Right define the argument.

"It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work."

That's responsibility. It's not covering your own ass and then crying out to punish the other guy. It's looking at your own involvement and seeing what else you can do.

The South vs. America

Via Mattbastard through Sarah, Michael Lind has been publishing some interesting articles of late about the relationship between the South and the rest of the United States. A southerner himself, Lind is extremely critical of what passes for economic thought and government among southern states.

Lind basically says that the South has declared war on the United States, trying to undermine the government, economy, and everything that makes the nation work. He hilariously goes to the Confederate Constitution to demonstrate the absurdity of southern economic arguments, showing how it explicitly banned the federal government from helping manufacturing in one article and then turning around and supporting internal improvements in another. For Lind, this shows the hypocrisy and short-sighted nature of southern politics. I don't disagree even if it is a bit of a facile historical analogy. He writes:

Imagine that. The Confederates, in their constitution, tried to ban all government infrastructure spending to facilitate commerce, but then had second thoughts and included lights, beacons, buoys, and harbors—but nothing else, really, we mean it! The political descendants of these people are the ones who today want to bind the Confederate—excuse me, I mean the US Congress to rigid and inflexible “pay-go” rules no matter what the circumstances and, like the Confederates, want to make transportation rely on user fees like tolls on interstate highways rather than pay for public goods out of taxes.

Of course, after a generation of kow-towing to Southern politicians and Southern politics, the American people have turned their backs on these ideas. This is why the Republicans are increasingly a regional party--obsessing with abortion and gay marriage, keeping America a white man's nation, supporting destructive wars wherever we can find them, and calling for lower taxes and no worker and environmental protections as a way to deal with economic crisis--and this is not a winning platform in a nation in trouble. What's more is that ever since Richard Nixon put the Southern Strategy into play, these ideas have been favored by the Republican Party and its not as if they have a strong intellecutal countertrend at this point to move the party in a different direction. The Republicans are stuck with these ideas right now, even as most Americans have rejected them. The South is trying to fight an economic and cultural civil war against the rest of the country, but it's 1864 and the 21st century equivalent of Sherman's army is marching on Atlanta's steps, waving the banners of freedom to marry who you want, of government equipped to help people through hard times, and of basic human rights, even for those we don't like. The war's been going on for 40 years, it's just that now we are on the verge on winning it, even as southern policies have taken the nation to the brink of economic destruction.

Lind also calls for a Third Reconstruction that wants massive federal action to ensure a more equitable economic future to everyone, destroying the South's race to the bottom economic theories. I do think he plays a bit of a parlor game here in defining Reconstruction. Let's be clear--the first and second Reconstructions (and by the second Reconstruction we are talking about the Civil Rights Movement and laws concerning it) were about African-Americans and their rights within the United States. Many African-American scholars have called for a Third Reconstruction, arguing that until the government forces changes to the non-legal but structural racism that ensures that African-Americans stay in a lower social and economic caste, equality has not been achieved. While I am certainly comfortable expanding that vision in modern America to include people of many minority groups, Lind leaves an explicit discussion of race out of his definition entirely. And that's not quite right. Reconstruction really is about race and a Third Reconstruction needs to be about race in no small part. It also has to be national, to include housing conditions in Chicago and police brutality in Los Angeles, not just a regional discussion of improving the South's economic standards.

But then again, Lind has shown his questionable racial policies in the past, as I have discussed here.

Despite these quibbles, I of course do think that a southern economic model is not good for America. Lind basically wants a progressive economic platform of high minimum wages tied to inflation, revenue-sharing among states and a national economic development plan that would help equalize development around the nation. This would stop the race to the bottom by eliminating states undercutting each other for economic development. He says that such measures "would not turn Mississippi into Vermont," but of course this would be a good thing if it did. The South wants to turn Vermont into Mississippi; how someone could argue this is a good idea is beyond me. One other minor quibble with this bit--he doesn't center strong unions as part of his plan. Escaping unions has long been a major reason for capital flight; federal action to eliminate this incentive would be a huge step in ensuring manufacturing jobs for Americans throughout the nation for years to come.

John Dean

I find this furor over John Dean having his role in Watergate sanitized as perhaps the least surprising thing ever. Dean was a close adviser to Nixon and there's no way he is as innocent as he has always claimed. Give Colson, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell, and the rest of that crew credit. They believed in what they did and didn't apologize for it, awful is it may be. Meanwhile John Dean has tried to weasel his way out responsibility ever since 1973. The most absurd and egregious instance of this was in Oliver Stone's Nixon film, where David Hyde Pierce played Dean as a man trying to do the right thing who was caught up in Nixon's shenangians. I was watching this thinking, you have got to be kidding me. Then I'm watching the credits, and low and behold! John Dean served as an advisor on the film!

About Stanley Kutler's alleged fooling with the evidence, I have no comment except to say that I hope it is not true. And there doesn't seem to be any hint that a relationship betweeen Dean and Kutler led to this happening. However, the Times article doesn't state there is no relationship between the two men and if Kutler did in fact sanitize Dean's role, there must be a reason why. Knowing the career of John Dean, I'd be surprised if his hand wasn't in this cookie jar somewhere.

Historical Image of the Day

German immigrants landing in New York City, 1858