These Children Deserve to Have Someone Ask Why They Died

A brave and eloquent Congressman.

Hofstadter Again

Paul Krugman invokes the ghost of Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter was a Columbia historian who wrote an essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

A reaction to the perceived abused of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Hofstadter's essay was a middlebrow version of the Frankfurt School's "authoritarian personality" concept. In essence, the argument is that the people whose views one dislikes aren't mistaken or even corrupt, but crazy.

It seems that the voting cattle of the Republican Party, whom their pro-corporate leaders regularly betrayed or ignored, are taking over the ranch. Krugman, seeing rising unemployment and the retreat into the woodwork of the non-white and youthful voting cattle of the Democrats, fears the GOP will make gains in 2010, but becoming the party of no, as in California. Krugman of course ignores the fact that the Democrats in California bear a big share of the responsibility for the state's fiscal disaster.

There's not much to like about the current GOP, other than the fact that they vote "no," often a good idea. But they aren't crazy.

The accusation is vicious and unsupported, and the Dems aren't models of probity and wisdom. Krugman has a log in his eye.

We Are, Indeed, Doomed

I just finished John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed.

The style is sprightly and witticisms abound, concealing the fact that the arguments are deep and the conclusions founded in considerable erudition.

The conceit is the familiar one that conservatism is founded in a belief in the fallenness, or at least the imperfection of human nature, and the complexity and proneness to error inherent in social arrangements. Hence impulses to uplift frequently cause trouble, and social experiments regularly fail.

Running through diversity, foreign policy, immigration and economics, Derbyshire serves up a healthy dose of pessimism.

The one consolation, perhaps, is that when market observers are uniformly optimistic, the bubble is often about to burst, and when the bears rule, prosperity is just around the corner.

When it comes to public policy, however, fuggedabadit. The lampreys have battened on the entrails of the body politic, and will not be easily dislodged.

UPDATE: Edited to delete repetitions caused by careless copy-and-pasting.

Nanny State'll Getcha

Here's a story that creeped me out--how far surveillance by local bureaucrats has gone in Merrie Olde England.

Totalitarianism creeps in under the guise of benevolence. Beware your local gummint, the local enviro police, the school board, the zoners. It's not the hobnailed boots that'll getcha, it's the helping professions. They'll brainwash you in your childhood, therap you into conformity in your adulthood, and euthanize you when you're old.

African Conundrum

A Bolshevik whose blog I read regularly is Louis Proyect. Louis writes good review of foreign films from places such as Turkey, films we don't get to see very often. He writes interesting personal reminiscences (he grew up in what used to be called the Borscht Belt) and on anthropological topics, such as the controversies about the studies of the Yanomami and the pecadillioes of the ethnographers who studied them.

He also descends periodically into the depths of "unrepentant" Marxism, as in this piece, where he rakes Columbia B-school types over the coals for their doctrinaire free-market views about Africa.

The critique's easy enough. You can't understand modern Africa without an honest assessment of the ravages of slavery and colonialism. The colonialists built some infrastructure and to some extent, educated the predecessors of the current class of leeches who run the place. Current extractive industries, such as oil and diamonds, don't help the locals very much, and sometimes ruin things for them.

A socialist critic, though, needs to answer a few questions.

1. Since independence, many countries have been officially "socialist," without much to show for it. Why not?

2. Why have the small states of East Asia, also colonized, also ravaged by war, oppression and corruption, fared so much better than Africa?

3. Can any political and economic system develop African countries whose average IQs are in the 60s and 70s?

Health Care Realities No One Wants to Face

No blogging for many weeks. Much going on and the seduction of "Facebook."

The healthcare debate is hardly a debate. It seems full of slogans and anecdotes, and no doubt will no be freighted with Kennedy nostalgia.

There are home truths about healthcare that no one wants to face. Fundamental is that people will want more healthcare than any system can provide. If you make it free or lower the cost of any procedure, demand will increase. It is not a case of a certain number of people who need vaccines and appendectomies, and if the state provides them that ends the matter. The demand is not self-limiting.

It follows that one way or another, any system will deny health care to some people at some times. The only question is the mechanism. As it stands, the poor and improvident get the shaft. If the government takes over, some political mechanism will decide, as it did when the AIDS lobby and the dialysis lobby got vocal.

Hence the "death panel" fear mongering, although demagogic, was not completely baseless. Sooner or later, if we have a public system, the government or some delegate of the government is going to decide who gets care, much as the anonymous nurse in New Hampshire now tells your insurance carrier whether to pay for your surgery. The fear of federal death angels is not far-fetched; it's happened before, and there are few moral barriers left.

Furthermore, once healthcare is nationalized, the Nanny State will have powerful arguments for intervening in the details of our lives. Just as Nanny Bloomberg banned trans-fats in restaurants, and Nanny school districts ban high-fructose sodas in vending machines, the pressure on the government to push people to live their lives in whatever the fashion of the day considers to be healthy will increase. Perhaps we won't have TSA agents search our pockets and purses for contraband Lifesavers, or ankle bracelets to shock us if we don't do our crunches, but the Nanny State will become more intrusive.

Finally, there's the deficit thing. Bush with his wars and his tax cuts destroyed the progress the country had made toward budget balance. In his waning days he further undermined fiscal sanity with the disastrous bank bailout. Obama has toed the Goldman, Sachs line. On the one hand, neither party can preach about the fiscal effects of healthcare spending, when they've wasted so much more on wars and bailouts for the rich. On the other, the country seems to have little stomach for more deficits.

What are we to do? Raise taxes in a recession? Hope that China and the Arabs continue to buy our increasingly questionable paper? Another question with no good answer.

Prediction. Either no reform or modest reforms this year. Republicans claw back a bit in 2009 and 2010 elections. Obama runs the risk of being a one-termer. Can anyone say "President Palin"? Oh noooooo . . .

Neocons Chicken Out, Give Me My Life Back

The crazed Zionofascists at contentions have closed the blog to comments.

This decision reflects Commentary's continuity with the Trotskyism of its forbears. Once the party line is laid down, a split is inevitable, and discussion is verboten. For a while, in spite of its odious, warmongering politics and its support for every trope of Israeli propaganda (hasbara), contentions commendably allowed pretty harsh criticism of its madness. I thought it important to challenge neocon vileness at the very head of the snake. It is a great national and international danger.

My tendency to foam at the mouth at the outrageous posts and comments--genocidal, bigoted, and invariably responding to any criticism with references to Hitler, Chamberlain and 1938--required great restraint on my part, which I did not always exercise. It is to my spiritual benefit (as well as a time-saver) that comments are no longer welcome there. Perhaps the result will be more frequent blogging here, although I'm contemplating rethinking this blog.

In any case, Podmadinejad has spoken. It's the party line, period, stupid!

Gay Translators

An Arabic Army translator from Tustin who announced to the world his homosexual predilections has been recommended for discharge by an Army panel. He invited this decision by making his genital inclinations into a cause, but still, discharging him seems unwise. Arabic translators are scarce as hen's teeth.

A Facebook friend (and relative) took offense at a comment of mine on this issue (I do despise PC language and got rather too pithy for her taste, and she was afraid I might offend someone else, which I did not intend to do).

So--a few words on the whole Gay thing and the gays-in-the-military thing. We spend much too much energy on this issue. About 2% of the population is exclusively or near-exclusively homosexual, and threats to family life stem less from this quarter than from the incontinent behavior of heterosexuals and the license the culture and the law give for same. Sex is a messy business and most people (including yours truly) have a great deal of difficulty controlling their impulses and staying out of trouble, whomever they are attracted to. In short, we are all sinners, and of sinners, I am chief.

That said, homosexuality is not just another variant on the spectrum of sexual behavior. It makes very little evolutionary sense, because as a near-exclusive practice its practitioners will fail to reproduce. It is, as some Pope or other said, "disordered." It's also scary to straight young men, who have enough trouble establishing a model of manhood that is neither predatory nor effete. Nevertheless, the preference for same-sex gratification seems deeply ingrained in some people.

One may exhort them to chastity, but good luck. The state should be chary of intervening in these matters, so long, as the Duchess said, as they don't frighten the horses.

Notwithstanding the rantings of the homosexual lobby, however, the issue is hardly on a par with racial discrimination. The black-white divide in America is sui generis. All the other movements we have seen are essentially parasitic on the black civil rights movement, even though their issues and history are quite different. The case for official action in all other cases is much weaker. Let families and communities work these issues out. If two men want to be a maison de vieux garçons, leave them in peace. Calling this sort of thing "marriage" is a social experiment with little basis in history or reason and with unpredictable results, and offends the religious traditions of most of the world. Good enough reason for caution on that score.

Now to the military. We need Arab translators. Better to have fluent Americans than potential double agents, or do without, if we are to mess around in Arabic-speaking countries as we currently are doing. If an officer is discreet about his sex life, and otherwise honorable, let him do his job.

The phrase that concerned my relative was something to the effect that not having been in the military, I had no opinion on the issue of "queens in foxholes." The blander way of saying this is, I do not know whether the presence of homosexuals in close quarters, especially when their demeanor is most salient, would affect good order and discipline, by freaking out their comrades-in-arms. Perhaps this danger can be mitigated by the command structure; perhaps not. Young men at war, or about to be at war, often look for sexual outlets. In any event, the potential for disruption in barracks and bivouacs is the principal argument of the opponents of a change in the policy.

My impression, though, is that our military is rather good at overcoming this sort of problem. Our military will not collapse if homosexuals do serve, on the understanding they will be careful and discreet about their sexual activity. As a cause célebre, however, I leave this to the annoying Frank Rich.

Trita Parsi's Book on the US, Israel and Iran

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fascinating, if too academic account, of the Iran-Israel-US triangle. Things are not what they seem. Both Israel and the US did business with Khomeini, and later Israel managed to scuttle a rapprochement between the US and Iran.



Although the régime in Iran is currently acting quite brutally, a strategic understanding with the US, which might well also reduce pressure on Israel, is possible.



I'd like it if more footnotes referenced sources other than newspapers, and if the geopolitical analysis were more concrete, but it's an important, revealing book.


View all my reviews.

The Worm Will Turn Here in Barackistan, But Who Cares?

The admirable Daniel Larison explains the eclipse of the GOP as follows: Of the three GOP factions he identifies, social, economic and national security conservatives, he blames the national security conservatives. The GOP in power under Bush did little or nothing for the social conservatives, and followed corporate welfare policies, not economic conservatism or libertarianism. It did, however, follow hawkish policies--war in Iraq and Afghanistan, worldwide interventionism, heavy spending on defense, and so forth. These led to its decline in popularity, the election of Obama, and the fall of the Congressional GOP.

As an aspiration, Larison’s hope that the GOP will “break with the aggressive pursuit of hegemony that has so ill-served American interests” is admirable but probably vain.

The truth is that for all the sound, fury and hatred that abounds, we have two political parties that peddle what Huey P. Long called “high populorum” and “low popahirum.” The former was taken from the bark of a tree from the top down, the latter from the bottom up. As Huey said, “The only difference I’ve found in Congress between the Republican and Democratic leadership is that one of them is skinning us from the ankle up and the other from the ear down.”

Indeed, the political boundaries that seemed to have grown wider between Reagan and Bush 43, have now been thoroughly fudged. During last Fall’s financial hysteria, Bush and the Democrats joined to promote the ill-considered and disastrous TARP bailout. Initially, the House Republicans, closer to the grass roots, resisted. After the market tanked for a few ways and major arm-twisting, they caved. We now have government control of the world’s largest insurer and its largest banks, whose profligate leaderships remain largely intact. Socialism? Well, when enterprises lose money, hell yes!

Bush’s predecessor, the “centrist” Clinton, had Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, and afterwards of Citigroup, as his Treasury Secretary. Bush ended up with Henry Paulson, alumnus of Goldman, Sachs. Obama, the “leftist,” has as his advisers Boy Geithner, protégé of the same crowd, and the aging boy wonder, Larry Summers, grown fat with speaking and consulting fees gobbled at the Wall Street trough.

Nevertheless, some people still think Obama is a Bolshevik and Bush a conservative paragon. Obama may be more of a statist on a few matters, and appeases different constituencies from the GOP on the sexual issues, abortion and the gay agenda. He’s more urban and bicoastal than the old white guys in the GOP, but if there are differences they are more of diction and dress than on anything fundamental.

Where does this leave the GOP? At the moment, stymied.

However, the worm will turn, as it always does. The Great Recession may be entering a phase of greater decline, but the recovery, if it comes at all, will not come soon and will not be pretty. Bonds, upon which the whole stimulus and rescue program depends, will get harder to peddle, and inflation will come out of the jungle roaring as a lion. We are still up to our necks in Af-Pak, as the pundits now call it, with no particular end in sight, and things in Iraq are touch-and-go. Zionism continues its peculiar brand of vileness, when only several sharp jerks of the chain will prevent a disastrous Israeli assault on Iran, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.

The Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, are a sorry bunch of hacks, and that fraction of the public that follows such matters can see that for itself.

All of this suggests that peace and joy will not reign forever in Barackistan, and the GOP will have a revival, not because of its virtues, but because it’s out of power and the public wants to throw the rascals out. The dearth of talent evident at the moment is unimportant. The GOP always finds a standard-bearer somewhere--a victorious general, an eloquent over-the-hill actor, the simpering scion of a transplanted New England dynasty.

The sad part is that so far the Stupid Party has learned nothing. To shackle itself to fiscal probity after the Reagan and Bush deficits is sheer deception. There appears to be no appetite for anti-corporate populism. The party has never had much stomach for the sexual issues, riddled as it is with closet cases and serial adulterers. Patrioteering is mother’s milk to the GOP.

Thus, although the political worm will turn so long as the poor Republic persists, we can expect nothing particularly new or improved.

I wish I liked politics less. I could learn a language, read a classic, take a hike, and cultivate my garden. Each of these pursuits seems more promising than hoping someone will remake the GOP into something that might offer a bit of hope to the Republic.

More on Zionism

Sinner that I am, and easily provoked, too, I have been back on contentions. A commenter challenged me thus:

The enemies of Israel and of the Jews lie shamelessly about them. To “grumpy old man”: It is the Muslims (and maybe some Christians) who want to destroy Israel and the Jews. The war against the Jews in Eretz Yisroel was started by Haj Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who organized attacks on Jews in 1921, before there was the modern state of Israel. The objections Muslims have to Israel is religious, that it is a Jewish state; the objection that some Christians, like Edward Said, have is that they are Greek Orthodox, a very anti-semitic church, or that they are buttering up to the Arabs.

I drafted a reply, and then decided not to post it there, where the response most often is to call me a Nazi or a wanker. Instead, I'll post it here:

Your facts are partly correct, but you are fundamentally in error. From the beginning, most of the Arabs in what became the Palestine Mandate opposed the entry of any large number of Jewish colons [settlers], knowing that they claimed the land and sought to build their state there. This enterprise could not be accomplished without the dispossession of most of the then inhabitants, as Jabotinsky, his vision uncorrupted by socialist dreaming, well understood. This claim was religiously specious in Christian and Mulsim terms, and indeed in terms of the Judaism of the era, and so regarded by the observant. In secular terms, Zionism was a typical colonial enterprise, and the yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine before independence], pieds noirs ["black feet," the French, Spanish and Italian settlers in French Algeria, now gone] who did not believe in the Trinity. Like all such enterprises, Zionism involved courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity and injustice to those who were there before.

Would most of the Arabs still like to see the Jewish state gone? Probably, having lost several wars, their homes and villages. No doubt this attitude are unforgiving, and perhaps unrealistic, but what else do you expect?

However flawed their rationale, the Israeli Jews won the important wars, and created a nation that for most is the only home they know. Moreover, as many Jews were pushed from Arab lands and Arabs from Palestine. A population exchange happened and will not be undone.

One dreams that the two nations could somehow live together quietly, whether as separate ethnic groups in one nation or as separate nations. Pessimism in this regard is warranted. It is likely that like the last religiously-inspired European interlopers, the Israelis will disappear in the next 50 to 10 years. Even now, emigration exceeds immigration, and taking quality into account, exceeds it all the more.

Meanwhile, Israel becomes ever more thuggish and degraded, the strategic reasons for the US to subsidize, arm and protect Israel become ever more attentuated, and as American Jews disaffiliate and intermarry, the political reasons for the old US policy are also weakened.

The militant supporters of Israel in this country nevertheless advocate interventions and stances that are not in our national interest. The "special relationship" draws us into an interminable conflict, and implicates us in more and more criminal acts. All of this gets transmogrified, in their propaganda, into a moral and ideological struggle.

Why should we be drawn into a conflict because some fascist Brooklynite wants to live in the "Holy Land" and proceeds to build a mini-Massapequa in some poor Arab's olive grove? It makes no practical or moral sense.

The Boots Are Always On the Staircase

There was a time that the central story of the Jews, commemorated in ritual and prayer, was God's freeing of the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, let by the prophet Moses, followed by wandering in the desert and the reception of the Law. The Passover Seder, the last ritual retained by secularizing Jews such as my own family, commemorated and discussed this.

No more. To be sure, observant and semi-observant Jews still have Passover Seders, and the Sabbath is a remembrance both of Creation and of the Exodus.

A new story, however, has replaced the Exodus in public discourse. Although the Nazi murder of the Jews was not given much prominence immediately after World War II, more recently, it has come to be central in Jewish discourse and in discourse about the Jews. Thus we have a National Holocaust Museum, but no national museum of Jewish culture or history.

When one dissents from the Likud-Zionist line, the enforcers invoke the genocide. This thread from Commentary's blog, contentions is a good example. With rhythmic regularity, the Holocaust is invoked to condemn the critic:

"From German: “put paid” == Die Endlösung == “Final Solution”."

"Judaize - how shocking. Can’t go around Judaizing places.
Julius Streicher wouldn’t approve."

Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life demonstrates the political agendas behind the increasing prominence of the Holocaust in American public discourse. Norman Finkelstein is considerably more radical and less measured in his account, but presents valuable information nonetheless.

Not only has the mass murder gained prominence over the Exodus, it has provided the basis for a revision of Jewish history. This history is now presented as simply an endless martyrdom. The Jew is not a scholar, a merchant, a middleman, an intellectual--simply a victim.

Increasingly, Zionists and other professional Jews describe Jewish present, not in terms of rescue from oppression, but as one in which the boots of some new SS are always on the staircase. The Reform Jewish rabbi Emil Fackenheim argued that a new commandment to the Jews was to not give posthumous victories to Hitler. Fackenheim was a Zionist who ultimately left Canada for Israel.

These are tendentious misreadings of the Jewish past and the present. Jews are not the only people to suffer from war and massacre, and they were not always poor; indeed, at many times, as a middleman caste, they did rather well for themselves. A cousin of mine went to Poland, and found the apartment where his father had lived as a boy. My liberal cousin was a bit disappointed to find the place comfortably bourgeois. As it turns out, an unsympathetic stepmother was the cause for his father's emigration, not so much oppression and not poverty.

As for the perpetual "boots on the staircase" theme, it lives on for two reasons.

First, it is politically useful. Benjamin Netanyahu calls the narrow pre-1967 waist of Israel an "Auschwitz border," not merely a strategic problem. Iran's Ahmadinejad, in spite of the fact that Iran is home to the largest remaining Jewish community in the Near East, represented in Parliament, is invariably compared to Hitler.

Second, many Jews have responded to this propaganda, and family history, by adopting the Holocaust story as the Jewish story.

Hence, when I point out that to the refrain about the Arabs wanting to throw the Jews in the sea, must be added the fact that the Jews of Jaffa, among others, really did take to the sea when they fled the Zionists, I am not merely reciting an inconvenient or unreliable claim, not merely dissenting from Zionist orthodoxy, I am said to be advocating a "Final Solution" and emulating Julius Streicher, editor of the antisemitic propaganda paper, Der Stürmer.

Factually, this is nonsense, but it's effective with many committed and older-generation Jews, far more so than arguing about what really happened or whether the US "special relationship" with Israel is in the national interest.

The shift in stories (nowadays called 'narratives' to sound more impressive) is also a response to the rapid abandonment of things Jewish by recent generations of Jews in America, with the exception of the 10% minority that remains traditional. Trading the parting of the Red Sea for the death camps, however, won't bring back the backsliders. The Lord delivering slaves from Egypt with a mighty hand can be inspirational. Thugs slaughtering one's relatives cannot be, not for any length of time.