Lean Left

A Brief Discussion of The June Issue of F & SF
Posted by Kevin

Because I like to talk about writing and stuff.

• The Art of Alchemy by Ted Kosmatka. Not a bad piece to start off the issue. In plot and idea, it is a fairly standard action-adventure piece centered n a fairly standard notion of how economics and new technology interact. The plot moves along at a fun clip and manages to be not quite predictable and not opaque. The writing was very nicely done and there were several very nice, very compelling moments between the main characters. Plus, the setting was in a part of the country I know fairly well and the author didn’t make too many obvious mistakes. B-
• The Salting and Canning of Benevolence D by Al Michaud. I gathered that this was supposed to be an amusing story, a kind of made-up folk story that Mark Twain was so accomplished at, with perhaps a bit of satire thrown in for good measure. If that was the author’s intent, he failed miserably. The plot centers around a group of friends and acquaintances who set off to end a haunting in an alternate America where Native American and European folk lore have bended together. In the hands of someone like Twain or Terry Pratchett, this could have been very good. In Michaud’s hands it was interminable and depressingly predictable. The characters almost all spoke like refugees from Gasoline Alley and the plot points could be seen lumbering toward the readers from miles and miles away. easily the worst piece in the issue. Still, the apparent recognition by one of the characters of just how asinine the rest of the characters apeared did lend some levity to the pice and the writing was solid if not spectacular. D-
• Litany by Rand B. Lee. This piece is a much better example of how to do made up myths. It blends hints of New age mysticism with Old Testament horror and a compelling main character. The story is about a man trying to find a way to escape a curse, or a sentence, and what prices aren’t worth paying. It is suspenseful, has many well drawn characters and is well written. It feels like a myth, like a story told to teach children lessons and remind adults of wisdom they had forgotten. It was my second favorite piece in the issue. B+
• Fegus by Mary Patterson Thornburg. This was my favorite piece in the issue. It’s not much of story, really, short on plot and action. It is more of an emotion. But its powerful emotion and it was presented well. Parents, I think, will understand. B +
• Character Flu by Robert Reed. In the same way Fergus was less of a story and more of an emotion, Character Flu is less of a story and more of an idea. It’s a semi-interesting idea told professionally enough to make me wish the author had written an actual story. But he didn’t, so the experience is pretty underwhelming. C
• Monkey See by P. E. Cunningham. This is a fun little action story set in a magical, samurai-era Japan centered around the danger of giving monkeys too much power. The piece is fun and light, written in a fast-paced, breezy style that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It was a fun read. B-

Beyond the stories, the two book review columns both convinced me not to buy any of the books reviewed. Which, I suppose, means they did their job. Lucius Shepard was in full-on Lord of the Curmudgeons mode for is movie review column, making himfunnier than anything ese in the magazine. All in all, a solid effort. Two very good stories and only one stinker in the lot.

April 29th, 2008 | General, Reviews | no comments

Book Review: The World Without Us
Posted by Kevin

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is a remarkable book. Ostensibly, it is about what would happen if human being were removed from the planet in some sudden and total apocalypse (imagine, Weisman suggests, that the believers in the Rapture or in alien kidnappers are right). And that tale is fascinating. Weisman has done an enormous amount of research, talking to everyone from New York City subway engineers to insect experts to world renowned chemists. He weaves that research into haunting and amusing tales of decay and destruction. He takes the reader through the gradual destruction of their homes and the more spectacular destruction of New York City. He chronicles the attempts of large game, nearly extinct now, to re-colonize the suddenly human-less Earth and t sad fate of cockroaches who have followed humans too far north. The vignettes are well told, even moving on occasion, but they are not the point of the book; the research they are based upon is.

Weisman spends most of the book taking us through the research that lead to each chapter’s tale of a person-less world and that research is the real point of his book. Weisman isn’t really interested in the end of the human world, he is interested in preventing that end. The chapter on which African large animals can survive the end of humans is actually about the effect human settlement patterns are having on African wildlife. The chapter on what would and would not decay quickly without human care is actually about the enormous waste that modern industrial society produces. The chapter on how plastics will affect marine life and bacterial evolution is actually about how humans have rushed headlong into changes, the impact of which they don’t come close to understanding. Because the book touches every continent and almost every aspect of modern industrial civilization, Weisman is able to cover almost every aspect of environmental degradation, including those that receive almost no media attention despite their importance. Because the research is weaved into a mystery — what would happen if humans disappear — the tone of the book never approaches stridency or fear-mongering. Instead, it is matter of fact and curious and brings the reader along to its conclusions gently, even subtly.

Weisman’s conclusion is the only area of the book that falters. His proposed solution may be logically compelling, but it is not practical in anything like a reasonable timeframe using anything like reasonable methods. There is no doubt that Weisman suspects as such and so the reader is left with the nagging, depressing suspicion that Weisman doesn’t have any other alternatives to offer. But that is a minor flaw in an otherwise extraordinary book. Weisman has written an environmental call to arms that is literary, engaging, curious, and serious without being strident. The World Without Us is perhaps the best environmental book of the last several years and I strongly recommend it.

January 14th, 2008 | General, Reviews, Books | 3 comments

At World’s End
Posted by tgirsch

No, this isn’t another post about the mess W has gotten us into. It’s a movie review. This weekend, I went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The spoiler-free Reader’s Digest version? It was better than I expected (based on reviews, I had very low expectations), but not nearly as good as I’d hoped. Put simply, it was an incoherent mess, too dark, and too light on the fun. What made the first movie so good, after all, was that it was so much fun. That’s almost completely gone from the third installment. And if you’ve got kids under about 10 or 12, you’d probably be better off leaving them at home.

Oh, and if you do go, as with Dead Man’s Chest, be sure to stay all the way to the end of the credits, for a little lagniappe.

More detailed review with mild spoilers follows below the fold.

May 29th, 2007 | Reviews | no comments

Book Review: Dreaming in Code
Posted by Kevin

When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.

Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.

I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.

This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.

This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.

January 29th, 2007 | Reviews, Economics, Writing, Science, Books, Technology | 3 comments

Book Review: Redemption
Posted by Kevin

On Easter Sunday, 1873, white men — mostly former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, surrounded the courthouse where a group of black men where holed up. The black men represented the legal government of the county, the white men represented the absolute refusal of whites in Louisiana to treat blacks as anything even resembling human beings. The white men attacked the out gunned blacks and beat them back into the court house, where they used a captured black to set fire to the building. The black men were allowed to burn to death. Most of the captives were executed the next day.

In 1921, the town of Colfax put up a monument to the battle. It read:

In Loving
Remembrance

Erected
To the Memory
Of the Heroes

…

Who Fell in the Coulfax
Riots Fighting For
White Supremacy

April 13, 873

I left the names of the three whites who died in the massacre. After reading this book, you would too. It is the tale of how the civil war was finally lost, at least in Mississippi and Louisiana. In essence, Whites in the South refused to treat freed slaves as anything other than, well, slaves. They expected their former chattel to behave as if the chains still existed, and when Blacks attempted to claim for themselves the rights all people are entitled to, Whites killed them. They killed them without provocation, without reason, without mercy. They killed for the explicit reason of making sure that Blacks could not vote, could not participate as the equals of Jim Crow was not a system of laws; it was the pale reflection of the violent will of the White South. Former Confederate soldiers and the cream of Southern society banned together ot impose its will upon the

Nicholas Lemann tells this story through the history of Adlebert Ames, former war hero and eventually Senator and Governor of Mississippi, and tells it well. His research is impeccable; events are told with the backing of a wealth of period source documents. His prose is sparse and clear and the more powerful for it. And Lemann never flinches from the true horror of the period. This is an infuriating book. If your blood doesn’t boil over the depredations described in this history, then there is something wrong with you. Leman does a good job not only of cataloging what happened but also what it meant to the people involved. The horror of the time is abundantly clear. If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not always do a good job of making clear how much the events in Mississippi mirrored those in other parts of the South. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Mississippi was representative of the Reconstruction South, but it doesn’t always prove the contention.

The impression, though, is reinforced by history. In the end, the murders and terrorists won all over the South — the North was too tired of war and too racist itself to beat back the Klan and other White Supremacy organizations like the White Lines. Despite the struggle of people like Ames and others from the North — the “carpetbaggers” so reviled in Southern mythology — the North was unwilling to force the surrender at Appomattox to mean both Union and Freedom. In the end, the noble Lost Cause, the heritage that I am told over and over again I should respect, degenerated into barbarism, murder, terrorism, and the explicit goal of making sure that no Black would ever live a life of anything other than complete and abject subservience to Whites. That fact and the mythology that grew up to excuse that fact dominated American politics until at least the 1980s. You can see the outline of almost every piece of racial politics in this country in Reconstruction Mississippi, especially in the refusal of Whites to accept that Blacks were full human beings and in the easy recourse to violence by Whites in service of that bigotry.

Lemann has written a depressingly comprehensive history of how the Civil War was lost to the forces of racism and hate in Mississippi. If you want to understand the Reconstruction — and thus the last hundred and forty years of American history — you should read this book.

January 8th, 2007 | Reviews, Books | 5 comments

Book Review: 1491
Posted by Kevin

1491 is a re-examination of what life was like in the Americas before the permanent arrival of Europeans. It is based on the most recent scientific work and is written by someone who knows how to explain even the most complicated scientific process in a clear and enlightening fashion. And I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I think I should have.

The story itself is fascinating. The Americas before the arrival of Europeans turn out to have been much more populated than is generally understood. Places that we traditionally think of as largely empty — the Amazon and the interior of North America, for example — where actually the home of large, complex, city-building cultures. Those cultures were destroyed ahead of European history by the diseases that the first European explorers and their animals brought with them. The final numbers are in dispute, (a dispute covered very fairly by the author) but up to 95% of the original population of the Americas could have been killed by diseases and the resultant societal collapse. What is not in doubt that is that entire cultures disappeared after their first contact with European explorers. Further, the coastal Native Americans in North America more than held their own against European incursions for the first few decades of contact. It was only after diseases had shattered those nations that the conquest of North America could begin in earnest.

The portions of the book that focus on the lost cultures and the history of interaction between European invaders and Native Americans are the best portions of the book. The discussions of the science, as I mentioned, are nearly as interesting. Unfortunately, the book spends too much time dealing with the personalities behind the science. I am sure that most of the people profiled are nice, smart, and love kittens. But they are not one tenth as fascinating as the cultures they re-discovered, and time spent on them is time that could have been spent giving more detail about the fascinating and doomed cultures of the Americas.

It is th examination of those cultures — in many case, cultures that no school textbook has ever introduced you too — that make this book worth buying. For all its fault’s, 1491 does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of the lost cultures and a sense of the magnitude of that loss. And entire world, with cultures that were sometime much more enlightened (and some times not; 1491 is no hagiography of Native Americans), was destroyed in a handful of decades by greed, religious bigotry, and a terrible quirk of biology. 1491 is a good first attempt to explain what was lost and how it was destroyed.

January 2nd, 2007 | Reviews, Books | 10 comments

Michael Crichton: Politics and Hackdom, a Merry Tango
Posted by KTK

I have never been that impressed with Michael Crichton. Some of his work has been quite clever, most is lowbrow pulp nonsense (surprising only because he used science in interesting ways in a few of his books), and when he gets into territory he doesn’t understand he’s as clicheic and naive as the worst of them. He’s done a Christopher Hitchens in the last few years, making a sudden swerve to the right and cranking out talking-points propaganda disguised as plots - which came in for much-deserved lambasting from both literary and political/scientific critics. But that wasn’t bad enough: having discovered he can’t take the heat, he’s descended to the most scurrilous attacks on his critics.

When one commentator gave him a bad review for his recent garbled thriller on (the lack of) global warming, he wrote a one-scene character into his next book using that commentator’s name as the character name (changed from “Mike” to “Mick”), and describing him as a homosexual child rapist with a small penis.

The March [review] article that Mr. [Michael] Crowley referred to concluded: “And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence that he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong — a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms and even the Oval Office.” . . .

The character that Mr. Crowley says he believes is modeled on him mostly appears on two pages in Mr. Crichton’s [just-released] 431-page novel.

On Page 227 Mr. Crichton writes: “Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.”

Mick Crowley is described as a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” with a small penis that nonetheless “caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.”

Mr. Crowley writes that Mr. Crichton’s Mick Crowley not only has a similar name but is also a graduate of Yale and a Washington political journalist. Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule.”

The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.

Very classy, Crichton. Moving Republican science policy forward by leaps and bounds.

December 14th, 2006 | General, Reviews, Culture, Science, Media, Books, Technology, News & Current Events | 2 comments

Borat: Make Learnings of How to be a Total Jerk (Pt. I)
Posted by KTK

OK - I just saw the “Borat” film, and I have highly mixed feelings.

I should say first that, while I had been aware of Sacha Baron Cohen and his “Ali G.” and “Borat” characters, I had never seen an episode of any of his shows, and had the vague impression that “Borat”, in particular, was a childish stunt. I was surprised at movie reviews claiming that the Borat film was really a biting social commentary and that it showed how well he reveals the truth about the people he interviews - I hadn’t understood just quite what he was supposed to be getting at by acting like a fool with a funny accent. (And, as a friend of mine pointed out, with his “idiotic Kazakh” character that bears no relation to reality, he’s really just doing a trivial variation on “Pollack” jokes - which supposedly are passe’. So what’s to like?) So I decided to check it out, and came away feeling that there really is a profoundly revealing quality to his shtick, and also that I don’t necessarily like him any better for that.

November 13th, 2006 | General, Reviews, Culture, Media, News & Current Events | 16 comments

Review: Wait! Don’t Move to Canada!
Posted by Kevin

I was nervous when I started reading this book. As smart as Bill Scher is, the promo material that came with my review copy read as if this was going to be another stupid framing book. Whatever the academic merits of the “framing” concept, in practice, political books dealing with “re-framing” are almost exclusively about magical thinking. If only the left would use different frames, the thinking seems to go, then opposition will be left flummoxed and impotent, everyone will just fall in line and their will be universal health care, a sane foreign policy, civil rights, and ponies for all. This, fortunately, is not one of those books. Wait, Don’t Move to Canada does have some discussion about language and the use of terminology, but those sections are not ends in and of themselves: they serve the higher goals of the book. Bill Scher has written a book, to be blunt, about the importance of picking fights.

Picking a fight is the overriding theme of the book, even if it is never explicitly stated. But at every turn — from foreign policy, the environmentalism, to gay rights, to health care, to economics — Scher demonstrates that not picking fights, that trying to finesse difficult positions, does far more harm than it does good. He shows why it is important to pick those fights, even if we start out losing. Yes, there is discussion of language and terminology, but only in terms of how to effectively argue the points we need to argue. Scher doesn’t fall into the trap of believing that using the right term will suddenly shift people’s opinions. He, unlike too much of the framing crowd, doesn’t pretend that life long opinions will magically shift if liberals just recite the correct incantations. Scher is trying to teach people how to make effective arguments and even how to lose arguments in a manner that advances our goal. He isn’t framing issues, he is fighting to convince people that liberalism is the correct position.

But the tactical aspect of the book is of secondary importance. The real strength of the book is its central notion: that liberalism must be vocally defended if the Democrats are to have any long term success. In a world of supposedly non-ideological “netroots” and magical thinking hidden behind “frames”, it is refreshing to see a political book that celebrates the importance of ideas and the importance of defending and advancing those ideas. Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! might be disguised as a book on political tactics, but it is really a full throated defense of liberalism and the importance of liberal ideals to the country.

Political power is meaningless without ideology. Scher recognizes this, and his book both lays out a strong argument for liberalism as well as ways for you to help make that argument more effectively. The fact that it is written in a clear, punchy style and is often funny is a bonus. If you are a liberal who wants to make a difference, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! will certainly help you do so.

October 9th, 2006 | Reviews, Books | one comment

I Wish He’d Quit Sugar Coating Things
Posted by tgirsch

And tell us how he really feels!  Here, included in its entirety, with permission, is a eSkeptic review of Ann Coulter’s Godless:

a review of
Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Matthew Provonsha

Ann Coulter’s new book is vulgar propaganda that goes against both science and reason. She has made a living as the cruel darling of the Religious Right, and in this book she aims her harsh rhetoric against, among other things, evolutionary biology, atheism, and what she calls “liberalism.” The entire book in fact is a sustained attack on a group that doesn’t even exist, namely “liberals,” in the sense of the word that Coulter has made up.

In her own words, Coulter’s thesis is that “Liberalism IS a religion.” She even refers to liberalism as “the state-sanctioned religion.” This is borderline conspiracy theory, from the woman who called the Branch Davidians “harmless American citizens.” In a kind of transubstantiation, we are supposed to believe that despite all outward appearances, our government is actually controlled by atheists. She says, “Democrats revile religion,” and “liberals love to boast that they are not ‘religious.’”

This is absurd. Coulter sticks to generalizations because she can’t give any cogent examples. Martin Luther King Jr. was undeniably Christian and liberal, but I doubt she had him in mind when she wrote, “I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven.” Ann Coulter is going to heaven and Martin Luther King Jr. is not? For shame.

Coulter can’t name a godless president or member of Congress. The last two Democratic presidents have been born-again Christians, and the vast majority of liberals are Christian, yet Coulter defines “liberals” as people who reject notions of God and an immortal soul. Meanwhile, the overtly Christian Republican Party is in control of all three branches of government. In this aspect of the book, as in others, it is exceedingly difficult to take Coulter seriously, and it is hardly surprising that many commentators on the left and right have questioned her sincerity.

ID proponent William Dembski wrote on his blog that he takes full responsibility for any errors in the last few chapters of the book, which deal with evolution. Several websites have pointed out plenty of them, so if he was being honest, he has got his work cut out for him. But it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is against Coulter because she just lies when the truth gets in the way of her agenda. She lies brazenly in the book about the Dover trial, which ruled the teaching of ID in science classrooms unconstitutional. According to Coulter: “They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter.” Here Ann Coulter shows herself to be either completely incompetent or deliberately deceptive. The judge that presided over Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a life-long Republican and a church-goer, appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush. Clifford A. Rieders, the former president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association and a Democrat, said Judge Jones is “universally well regarded.” Coulter’s attempt to smear him is transparently motivated by her ideological concerns, not the facts.

Like other bigots, Ann Coulter attacks what she perceives to be easy targets. In the past she has attacked Arabs, Muslims, and homosexuals, and in this book she saves some of her harshest words for environmentalists and America’s most mistrusted minority, atheists. She writes, “The theory of vegetarianism is that Americans consume ‘too much’ energy.” To the contrary, vegetarianism is not a theory at all, it is the practice of not eating meat. There are a variety of reasons for practicing vegetarianism, and an individual vegetarian’s choice to avoid meat may have nothing at all to do with concerns about over-consumption or inefficient consumption. She adds, “Environmentalists’ energy plan is the repudiation of America and Christian destiny, which is Jet Skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing.”

This consumerist position is untenable in light of much of Christian and American intellectual history. Coulter can’t point to a verse in the New Testament promoting self-indulgence that could justify the conspicuous consumption of the rich while tens of thousands die every day due to malnutrition and easily treatable diseases. Jesus exhorts his followers, “Sell that which you have, and give gifts to the needy,” and seek treasures in heaven instead of on earth. Nowhere in Coulter’s book does she express concern for the troubled people of the third world where there are food and drug shortages, or for the poor in this country who can’t even afford healthcare, much less jet skis or night skiing.

Coulter’s religion is not like that of the author of the Book of Proverbs, who prayed for neither poverty nor riches but, “only the necessaries of life.” Her religion is not like St. Thomas Aquinas’s, who went so far as to say that anything held in superabundance must be given to provide for the sustenance of the poor. If we are to infer “Christian destiny” by looking at Christian history, we see that Coulter’s ideal is nothing like the ideal put forth by most Christian leaders of the past. St. Francis of Assisi prayed, “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek,” but Coulter has said that the Biblical view is to “rape the planet.”

Coulter’s distortion of history in order to misrepresent atheism is particularly disturbing. She wants us to believe that the horrors of Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the People’s Republic of China are in some way due to atheism and acceptance of evolution. “Hitler’s world-view was based on Darwinism, not God,” she writes. This is clearly a lie designed to denounce Darwinism by association. It is contrary to Hitler’s own words, as even a cursory reading of Mein Kampf shows. In it Hitler writes, “Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Though she claims that Hitler cited Darwin, she can’t substantiate it, and thus this is yet another baseless assertion. Hitler was obviously either heavily influenced by Christian beliefs, or wanted to appear as though he was. Along with various other influences, Nazism undoubtedly drew from a long-standing Christian tradition of anti-Semitism. As far as I can discern, Hitler never even mentioned Darwin; rather, he repeatedly claimed to be doing the will of Providence.

Coulter’s attempt to blame Darwin for the horrific famines in China is ironic given that they occurred partly because Communist scientists rejected Darwin. Denying what they called “capitalist science,” they paved the way for agricultural catastrophe. Coulter even suggests that Darwin is to blame for “Stalinist gulags.” In reality, Stalin sent scientists to gulags for espousing Darwinian evolution.

Throughout the book Coulter never argues her points, but makes ad hominem attacks and false analogies, attacks straw-men and blatantly misrepresents history. She can’t even distinguish between Darwinism and Social Darwinism. She is as bad on ethics as she is on science, and is completely inept regarding logical reasoning. When she says atheists are always the ones practicing genocide, she shows that she hasn’t even read her scriptures.

There is no “church of liberalism,” there isn’t even “liberalism,” in Coulter’s sense. Liberals are not “pro-abortion,” and no atheist hates God. Godless is a ridiculous book and Ann Coulter lies flagrantly and is as self-righteous as she is malicious. The most controversial line in the book is her condemnation of four 9/11 widows who chose to involve themselves in politics: “I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.” But it’s not the only nasty thing she wrote in the book and she has said even worse things in the past. She has used epithets like “raghead,” “paki,” and “gay boy.” She actually said, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

Coulter’s fans apparently consider death threats and violent rhetoric humorous, and she doesn’t disappoint them. She is a hate-mongering reactionary who has said she is for public flogging, and against women’s suffrage. I wish I were making this up. Godless is a boring collection of rants filled with utterly mind-boggling absurdities, like, “public schools are the Left’s madrassas,” “The most important value to liberals is destroying human life” (in reference to abortion), and “liberals made up Watergate.” We needn’t worry about misinterpreting her words because she has repeatedly told interviewers that she believes everything she wrote in the book. She has even said that she never regrets anything she has ever said and she wouldn’t have said anything differently. Even if the cynics are right to say that Coulter is laughing all the way to the bank and that she doesn’t really believe any of it, it still reflects horribly on our media that gives her a national platform, and on our culture in which she is thriving with a lucrative speaking career and best-selling books.

September 21st, 2006 | Reviews, Books | 6 comments

Book Review: Fiasco
Posted by Kevin

Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, is an important if unpleasant book. Its title captures its essence perfectly: this is the tale of the disaster that the American occupation of Iraq has become. In clear, precise and often powerful prose Ricks methodically builds the case that the American occupation has failed and the many reasons, causes, and poor decisions that lead to that failure. He has interviewed Americans at all levels of the occupation, in both civilian and military circles, and skillfully connects the decisions made in Washington and Baghdad to the daily failures and struggles of US troops and civilian administrators. Ricks spends some time on the failures of Congress and the press, but failures of the occupation of Iraq had two parents: the Bush Administration and the United States Army.

When the history of the Iraq occupation is written, it will largely be the story of the failures of the Bush Administration. And those failures were the direct result of the decisions made by George W. Bush. Put bluntly, the Iraqi occupation was doomed by decisions made in the White House. It was the White House and the neo-cons advisors in it that based their post war planning, such as it was, on ridiculously optimistic scenarios. There is nothing wrong with optimism, but the Administration did not admit for the possibility of pessimism. As a result, the roses and cheers of Paul Wolfowitz’s imagination dictated that the occupation be built around the assumption that the Iraqis would quickly fill the power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and as a result, the occupation would require far fewer troops than the invasion. Of course, the opposite was predictable, predicted, and came to pass. For most of the occupation, the number of troops either equaled or surpassed the number used to topple the regime.

During this time, the Department of Defense and the State Department were in something very much like a war. The working relationship between members of the two departments was beyond awful, verging into adversarial. More than once Ricks described members of one department or the other rejecting out of hand valid information form the other side simply because it came from the other side. Towards the end, Rumsfeld and Powell appeared to openly despise on another. And Bush did nothing to bring the two camps together. As a result, the first CAP head was forced to leave behind talented and experienced State Department people when he went to Iraq. The Defense Department forced Garner to take to Iraq ideological hacks with no experience instead of accomplished diplomats. Iraq paid the price in terms of bugled reconstruction, corruption, and a loss of stability due to ideological correctness being placed far ahead of the needs of the Iraqis. The Heritage Foundation neophytes that ran the CAP invariably choose to attempt to transform Iraqi society along their notions of an ideal society over providing stability, security, and opportunity to the Iraqis.

As damaging as those failures were, however, much of the problems in the Iraqi occupation stemmed from the Administration’s original error: lying about WMDs and Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections.

Ricks doesn’t spend a lot of time in the build up to war, but he does clearly highlight when the Administration — generally in the form of Cheney or people who worked for Cheney — ether said things that it knew to be untrue or claimed intelligence support for contentions where such support was extremely tenuous or nonexistent. Colin Powell’s famous speech in front of the United Nations is the most prominent example of the way the Administration used half truths and deception to suggest a certainty that did not actually exist, but it was not the only one. And Ricks leaves no doubt that such deception happened on purpose. Those deceptive WMD claims and links to Al Qaeda hamstrung the US occupation form the moment they crossed the Iraqi border.

The initial invading forces were reluctant to destroy arms caches and weapons bunkers that they came across for far that they contained chemical or nuclear weapons and would thus cause fallout related deaths among US troops and Iraqi civilians. Those undestroyed bunkers become the armory of the insurgency, once it became clear that the US did not have enough troops to effectively guard those bunkers. In addition to facilitating the arming of the insurgency, the search for WMDs took intelligence gathering resources away from the fight against the insurgency, leaving the Army severely disadvantaged.

The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda provided a subtler kind of problem, one of attitude. Ricks talks to many soldiers, and details the actions of many more, than seemed to regard the Iraqis as the enemy from the moment they crossed the border. Instead of looking on Iraqis as victims of a totalitarian regime, many soldiers appeared to be suspicious of all Iraqi males under the assumption that some of them were involved with the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Obviously that worked against US forces attempts to win over Iraqis to their cause.

The Army, however, didn’t always seem to be interested in winning over Iraqis. The Army came out of Vietnam a broken institution, with poor morale and ever poorer discipline. In the sixteen years between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the officers of the Army did a remarkable job re-creating the Army. They took a beaten organization and turned it into perhaps the finest strike force the world had ever seen. But in doing so, they made two mistakes that would haunt the Iraqi occupation: they threw away everything that they learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam and they decoupled their operational planning from considerations of the operations political goals.

The Army that rose form the ashes of Vietnam was an Army built around overwhelming firepower and maneuverability. It was designed to destroy an opposing conventional army, and it was very good at it. But it seemed blind to the notion that it would be asked to fight counter-insurgency campaigns. The Army did not train its soldiers in how to deal with an insurgency in their day to day operations. Ricks paints a picture of an Army where counter-insurgency was, at best, an afterthought and at worst a never thought of at all. As a result, US forces were unprepared to deal with the reality of an insurgency. Some commanders - -such as the commander of the 101st Airborne — used their own instincts, intelligence, and common sense to great effect, leading to a relatively stable and supportive Iraqi population in their area of control. Others, such as the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, treated the Iraqis in the harshest, most punitive fashion possible and thus did the insurgency’s recruiting for it. Most commanders were somewhere in the middle, but somewhere in the middle generally meant that the wrong decisions were made far too often.

Classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a troops to live among the populace to gain a feel for the situation and the people and for force to be a last resort and used in a minimal fashion when required. In general, US forces concentrated on force protection over Iraqi protection, which lead to housing US units far form contact with ordinary Iraqis, the use of overwhelming firepower in response to any provocation, and rules of convey conduct — speeding, brushing aside civilian traffic, firing on civilian cars that got too close — that worked counter to the need to win over the Iraqi people. With almost every action most US commanders took, they made their job much more difficult.

But those decisions were generally in line with US doctrine. And that was largely the fault of the decision to treat wars as nothing more than the clash of arms. The US army lost the connection between military means and the larger war aims. Without that connection, it was too easy for US forces to fall into the trap of thinking only about the means to destroy the enemy without given proper consideration to second and third order effects of those action on the larger political goals of the conflict. Part of the reason that they post war planning on the part of the Army was so poor was that the culture of the Army just assumed that after the battle their troops would be drawn done and sent home. Their was little conception of what happened after the opposing force had been driven from control because that was the realm of politics and the modern US army spent very little time thinking about those issues. And that lead directly to things like Abu Gharib.

Absent the connection between tactics and the political strategy, US forces generally concentrated on the tactic that brought about the immediate victory as quickly as possible with the smallest risk to US personal. An army whose officers were accustomed to thinking in terms of how their tactics affected the broader political goals would have made very different decisions. Officers who knew that the goal was to convince the Iraqis to join the new Iraq would respond with much less force, far fewer mass roundups, and much more culturally sensitive searches and interactions with locals. The Army as a whole would have been prepared to quickly process prisoners and so the overpopulation that lead to the command breakdowns in Abu Gharib would not have happened. In those places where the commanders did think in larger, political terms, the US occupation went much, much smoother than in places were officers could not shake off the prevalent military culture.

The Iraqi Occupation stands a very good chance of being remembered as the greatest strategic disaster in American history. Ricks book is a wonderful history of the early years of the occupation. It is not perfect, but its flaws do not overwhelm the scholarship of the book. Ricks is a military reporter, so the majority of his interviews are with military personal. To a certain extent that is a justifiable decision. US soldiers were in much more direct and constant contact with Iraqis and thus were both the prime movers on the US side and the people best able to know what was happening in the country as a whole. However, the discussion of reconstruction could probably have benefited somewhat with a few more voices form inside CAP in Baghdad. And the book cannot be said to be a complete history of the time because it does not deal with the Iraqi side of the conflict, for obvious reasons. Ricks does make a good effort to get the opinions and thoughts of Iraqi citizens into the discussion, but Iraqi voices are still too few and they are often filtered through the recollections and biases of US officers and soldiers. And, of course, there is nothing from the Iraqi insurgency, meaning that how the insurgents reacted to US actions is missing.

These small problems aside, Fiasco is a marvelous book. It takes a complex subject with hundreds of players and dozens of conflicted motivations and teases out the story of why the Occupation has gone so poorly. It is written too soon to be the last word on the history of the occupation and invasion, obviously, but it is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what has gone wrong and what problems in our political and military cultures need to be addressed in order to prevent a repeat of this fiasco. Thomas Ricks has written a book that all other serious histories of the Iraqi Occupation will be built upon.

August 21st, 2006 | Reviews, Writing, Iraq, Terrorism, Books, Fiasco | 4 comments

Urinetown: The Musical
Posted by tgirsch

So this afternoon, my wife and I caught a matinee of Urinetown The Musical at Playhouse on the Square.  What a fun show.  That’s really the best way to describe it.  It was a hoot.  I can’t really tell you anything at all about the story without spoiling anything, so I’ll just say that if you live in Memphis, go see it.  Bill Andrews, Carla McDonald, Megan Bowers, and Rachael Saltzman turned in show-stealing performances.  There are only four shows left (Thursday thru Sunday), and it’s worth it.  The Saturday night shows tend to sell out, so reserve tickets now.

Also this weekend, we went to see The Story, and while it was quite good (and quite serious), it wasn’t up to the level of Urinetown (a phrase that sounds as odd to me as it does to you).  The Story is a good one-act tale about a newspaper tracking down leads on a racially-charged murder.  It has a very good (and very candid) look at subversive racial issues that still exist beneath the surface today.  By the end, I found myself unable to really like or dislike anyone — all of the characters had a little of both.  It’s the kind of play that leaves you with more questions than answers, and I mean that in a good way.  The Story is playing at TheatreWorks through July 30th, so see Urinetown first if you can.

As an aside, the quality community theatre in Memphis is one of the unabashedly good things about this town.  I’ve seen at least half a dozen shows at POTS, and while I didn’t like them all (personal taste), they were all good productions, and I must say I very much enjoyed most of them.  Urinetown is probably the best production I’ve seen at the theatre, and that’s saying a lot.

July 16th, 2006 | Reviews, Culture | 2 comments

Unspeak
Posted by Kevin

Unspeak by Steven Poole is a fascinating book that I don’t think I can recommend highly enough. The basic premise is simple: that the language of today is not Orwellian — meaning designed to destroy all meaning — but rather designed to shift meaning and thus shift the perceptions of reality. It is a subtle difference, but one that is important. From the book:

Indeed, this book is intended as a corrective to the common idea that politicians do nothing but spout hot air: that their speech, when it is not frankly misleading, is just empty and meaningless. In an excellent anatomy of the logical fallacies in the rhetoric of Tony Blair, for example, philosopher Jamie White nevertheless claimed: ‘most politicians waste our time with platitudinous, visionary waffle.’ The most celebrated statement of such an opinion, meanwhile, was written by George Orwell himself, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, published in 1946:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. […] The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. […] Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

‘Cloudy vagueness?’ ‘Pure wind?’ On the contrary, we can often learn a great deal about what politicians’ ‘real aims’ are from taking seriously, and closely studying, their ‘declared aims’. Take the time to unravel the assumptions packed up in a piece of Unspeak, and you will be better able to attack that chain of reasoning at its base. Forewarned is forearmed. Even the most brutal kind of euphemism teaches us valuable things about the mindset of the people who employ it…

Modern rhetoric is not in the business of obscuring meaning, it is in the business of changing meaning. And that, as the book demonstrates, is a much more dangerous proposition. Changing meanings, “reframing” in the Lackoffian sense, Poole argues, does damage to democracy and society by cutting off avenues of discussion and by preventing the honest discussion in honest terms of the world around us. The book is structured simply as a series of case studies centered around the terminology of one issue. Those studies demonstrate clearly that this new political rhetoric does severe damage to political discourse wherever it happens to be deployed. If this sounds dry, it is not. Poole, a British journalist, does nothing to hide his anger and contempt for the practitioners of “unspeak” and his style is often caustic, dry, and viscous. Even when Poole is skewering causes and people I approve of, that style made the book very readable. Poole is above all fair in his assessments and evenhanded with his evidence; those looking for hatchet jobs will be disappointed.

But the fact that Poole can find examples of this new rhetorical style on all sides of the spectrum is disturbing. As reading Poole’s piece will show, the right wing is very good at this trick and has years of practice. On the left, it is common to speak of “reframing” and “Lackofian frames”. But if that process leads to unspeak, as Poole shows that it often does, then it does as much damage to the foundations of honest society as unspeak in the hands of the right. I don’t know what the solution to this dilemma is — the party of Nixon is not about to give up one of its most effective tools, and the media we are saddled with today is structured in such a fashion as to make unspeak easy to perpetuate and hard to combat. Doing nothing, or doing what we have been doing, is obviously not the solution. But I am not sure what is; destroying democratic society to save it is not something I would recommend. Unfortunately, and this is the one weak area of the book, Poole doesn’t have much of answer beyond a 21st. century version of “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!”.

But I am probably being too harsh to cll that lack of solution a “flaw”. The problem must be defined before it can be corrected, and Poole does a masterful job defining the problem. If you want to understand the political and rhetorical climate of the day, Poole’s book is simply the best guide produced in the last decade. I strongly recommend it.

May 24th, 2006 | Politics, Reviews, Media, Books | 4 comments

Divided Kingdom
Posted by Kevin

Taking the advice of Matt Cheney, I picked up Divided Kingdomby Rupert Thompson. This is an interesting book whose power and pleasure is more in the execution than the theme or the plot. The premise of the book is that the United Kingdom has been split into four kingdoms, with the people reassigned to live in a give land based upon their personalities. The kingdoms are color coded based upon the ancient conceit of humors. Greens are melancholy, Yellows are aggressive, Blues are emotional and Reds are even-tempered and optimistic. There are also people who fit into no class and are free to roam through all the countries. they are referred to as the White People and they are completely outside of society.

The story is simple enough. It follows the journey of one Red sector government official as he first decides to abandon his country for the Blue sector and then tries desperately to get back home, requiring travels through all the sectors and, eventually, with the White People. It will come as no surprise to learn that the protagonist discovers within himself each of the primary emotions that defines each of the individual sector, nor that when he joins the almost animal like White People, the process of abandoning all emotions turns him, well, animal like. As I said, there is no unusual or unexpected theme in this aspect of the book, but there is considerable pleasure in the experience. There is enough tension regarding the physical safety of the hero and his companions to keep the story flowing and the writing is superb. Thomson layers detail upon detail that are both dreamlike and unmistakably human. The process by which the protagonist becomes a full fledged member of the nation he currently inhabits is entirely believable, with each past personality sliding inevitably and clearly into the next. The interactions between people of different nations are tinged with a completely believable level of bigotry and contempt, flowing in all directions. Some characters are aware of that bigotry but even they have a hard time escaping the trap of other people’s expectations. Despite the outlandishness of the central conceit and the gaping flaws in the explanations of how the society now functions, everything feels emotionally true.

In some respects, the fact that Thompson hasn’t bothered to try to make all the aspects of his new society believable adds to the emotional power of the book. It reads almost like a dream in some respects, and that quality allows Thompson to use everything from the shape of the land to the politics of the rather implausibly drawn “resistance” to the physical manifestations of national grief — monuments and museums — to construct his tale. It isn’t a page turned in the classical sense, and people looking for a traditional dystopia in the manner of Huxley or Orwell are going to be disappointed. But if you are interested in people, and how they deal with lose and the processes by which they become fully human, Divided Kingdom should be on your reading list.

March 27th, 2006 | Reviews, Books | no comments

Crashing the Gate
Posted by Kevin

markkas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong probably don’t need an introduction - anyone reading this blog is likely to already know that they created two of the largest political blogs with the most active communities on the web. Both men have been active in trying to change the way the Democratic Party goes about trying to win elections, and both men have been instrumental in helping win special elections and helping dean win the DNC chair. And now they have taken what they do on the web and written a book to explain it and offer a way forward. Unfortunately, the book’s arguments are somewhat mixed and not convincing in some important respects.

Before I get to the review, just a quick bit of disclosure. Back when Kos was switching Daily Kos from Moveable Type to Scoop, I did a little bit of technical work for him. Kos then encouraged his readers to buy things from my wishlist, encouragement several of his readers acted upon.

The book itself, while short, is well written. Markos and Jerome have a voice that is sharp and direct and a prose style that is uncluttered and accessible. They where their opinions on their sleeves, and it makes for a refreshing read, but its is also based on the experiences of people at all levels of the Party. It seems sometimes that they personally talked to every member of the Democratic Party during their research for the book. The first section of the book, detailing the state of the GOP and the state of the Democratic party are the books strongest sections. Markos and Jerome don’t pull any punches, laying out GOP corruption, the GOP’s effective campaigning tools, and, most importantly the failing of the Democratic party in clear terms, even acerbic, terms. The discussion of the failings of democratic consultants is enlightening and infuriating. The same cast of characters keeps recycling through Democratic campaigns and losing those campaigns. There is no accountabilities and no penalty for failure. Even the financial incentives seem designed to reward losing: consultants get a percentage of the media buys as payment, meaning that the incentive is not to do a comprehensive job, but to buy as much traditional media as possible. The Democrats are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to running campaigns, and it shows. It is obvious that Kos and Jerome understand the new media and political environment well, and their suggestions for dealing with the structural problems in the manner in which democratic campaigns are conducted are the strongest parts of the book.

But they also highlight my first small problem with the book. The remedies for the campaign problems in Crasing the Gate are essentially to swap out one group of managers with another. That is undoubtedly a good idea; the authors are exactly correct that the Democratic party needs people who understand modern methods of communication and voter identification and who are not tied, financially, to only one means of communication. But that is hardly revolutionary in any reasonable sense of the word. The book’s subtitle is “Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics”, but the book never really focuses on any of that, not really. Their solutions and the solutions they advocate are largely top down in nature. One of the ways they advocate for dealing with special interest groups is the Colorado model. In Colorado, the top donors to progressive causes established a system by which the special interest groups coordinated their fund raising and activities in such a manner that no group was compelled to give any of its money to a Democrat that did not meet their needs and yet the groups were able to still pool their resources. But that solution was the brainchild of the top four donors and was imposed by the threat of withheld donations. That is not what I would consider an example of people-powered politics, whatever its merits. This lack of emphasis on the dynamics of true grassroots powered change is particularly evident in their treatment of special interest groups and the place of ideology.

Kos and Jerome state outright that they decided to not discuss ideology. They contend that, at least in certain respects, ideology is not central to their purpose: laying out where the Democrats have gone wrong and what they need to do to correct those deficiencies. But I think this neglect of ideology leaves them with a few blind spots that manifest themselves most clearly on the issue of special interest groups. They hate ‘em, to put it mildly. Kos and Jerome see single issue groups as a cancer on the Democratic party. They argue that the single issue groups have ruined the party’s brand and that there focus on their own issues is destroying the Democratic Party. That raises several questions, though, starting with: is that a correct view? Kos and Jerome present several examples of how individual interest groups have worked against their own long term interests, such as NARAL’s support of Chafee over the pro-life Dem who appeared to be a lock to beat him in 2006’s Senate race. The Dem dropped out of the race, the seat went form a sure Dem pick-up to a much closer race and Chafee voted for Alito anyway. They have other examples, from various other interest groups. On the surface, the case looks compelling, especially in comparison to the behavior of Republican special interest groups. They tell the story of how the Christian Coalition backed the GOP’s Contract with America, despite the fact that the Contract had no mention of abortion or anti-gay rights or any of the other hot button issues for the Christian Right. After the GOP won, though, they backed the Christian Coalition’s own version of a Contract with America. The inference in the book is pretty clear: GOP special interest groups go along and get along, Democratic special interest groups tear the party apart.

Except that, recently, the Democratic Party has not delivered for the special interest groups. Labor got a NAFTA with no labor protections. Environmentalists got a half hearted effort behind global warming efforts and a retreat from the principles of sustainable development and renewable energy. Women’s groups got a welfare reform package that forces more and more hours of work on single mothers but does little to help pay for decent daycare for their children. Abortion rights groups got a pro-life Senate Minority Leader a rhetorical strategy - “safe, legal, and rare” - that tried to fight the battle on anti-choicers’ terms. This list is not meant to suggest that the Democrats have been bad for their constituent groups, only that they have not been as good as the GOP has been to theirs. The quid pro quo for the individual groups that make up the Democratic coalition has been absent. Lately, it would be hard to blame the members of those groups for feeling as if the Democratic party has nothing to offer them but an admonishment to sit down and shut up. Why would any of those groups trust that the dancer would generally do the right thing for them without an enormous amount of pressure?

The normal answer should be ideology. One of the reasons that the GOP has an easier time maintaining internal cohesion is because it has a public ideology that generally maps well across different interest groups. The Christian Coalition can be sure that the GOP will do right by it, even if the corporate faction is getting its issues worked upon. The Democrats used to have a similar set up, but it has broken down over the last couple of generations, in part because of the civil rights revolution, but also in part because of the triangulation strategies of the DLC. There is no assurance to an environmentalist or women’s right advocate or a labor organizer that the Democrats, once in power, will eventually try to advance their portion of the agenda. Without that overriding ideology there can be no trust and the only thing that the special interest groups can be sure of is that they need to look out for their interests themselves. In that situation, it only makes sense for the special interest groups to try and create the ideological environment outside of the party structure. The NRA did something very similar, completely changing the ideological landscape in large portions of the country and, in the process, making the GOP its handmaiden in the process. While groups like NARAL may have made tactical mistakes in their attempt to become like the NRA, they theory itself appears sound. In the absence of ideological assurances, the democratic special interest groups have little reason to be team players.

Obviously, Cashing the Gate packs a lot of ideas into its 182 pages, and I could probably right a book in response. I am glad this book was written, and I hope it is not the last of its kind. Markos and Jerome have started, hopefully, the kind of argument that is long overdue in Democratic party and progressive circles. Whatever I think of their arguments, the debate needs to happen. I would recommend the book for just that reason - Markos and Jerome have staked out their turf and started the fight, so to speak. If you want to be engaged with the changes and struggles the Democratic party and progressive movement are going to be facing in the next five years, this is a good place to start. You may not agree with everything they have to say, as I clearly did not, but they are tackling the important issues and problems in a way designed to get peole thiking and arguing.

March 20th, 2006 | Politics, Reviews, Books | one comment

The Closing of the Western Mind
Posted by Kevin

In the introduction to The Closing of the Western Mind, the author proclaims that he will show us how the growth of the Christian church meant the end of intellectualism in the West. He doesn’t quite make his case, at least not thoroughly, but the book is still a fascinating read. It traces the development of the early Church and how logic and the political needs of the Roman ruling class drove the adoption of positions that eventually became doctrine.

The Closing of the Western Mind has two distinct stories running through it, sometimes side by side, sometimes one story will fall way for a chapter or two as the other is explored in great detail. But the two threads are both well developed and weave together to create a picture much greater than its whole. The first thread is a lesson in comparative religions. The intellectual traditions of paganism and Christianity are laid out in great detail, and that of Islam and Judaism are also dealt with, if not as comprehensively as the former. The book traces how paganism, though generally supportive of the notion of monotheism, developed and intellectual tradition that welcomed, even required, the open pursuit of questions about doctrine. It also shows that Judaism and Islam had much more robust scientific and doctrinal traditions than did Christianity, demonstrating that monotheism itself is not hostile to open inquiry. But Christianity became so, and the book does a decent job of arguing that it did so because it lost the intellectual argument with paganism.

The book allows the participants to largely speak for themselves, though it is clear that the author leans a little on the side of the pagans, and the discussion is fascinating. But it is clear that the thinkers on the Christian side come up short in both their attacks on philosophy and in their defense of their own doctrine. The argument spans centuries, and you can see, over the course of the book and the spread of time, Christians losing the argument. From Paul to Augustine, the best minds of Christianity proved unequal to the challenge presented by Hellenistic philosophers. Time after time, they fell back on the argument that faith was superior to reason, usually after they had not been able to defend their faith against the logic of their opponents. The defensiveness eventually became doctrine.

But part of the reason Christian thinkers had such a hard time defending the tenets of their faith was politics. The Roman emperors who elevated Christianity did so in the hopes that it would help restore order to the Empire. Constantine, in particular, seems to have assumed that Christians would be happy with their new status as accepted members of the Roman empire and behave as other pagan cults did. Early Christians, however, were not a unified group. they argued bitterly about doctrine and what did and did not constitute the Scriptures. Christians were restless and contentious, not something emperors looking for unity appreciated. And so the emperors stepped in, trying to force some level of orthodoxy, either through consensus building or, when that inevitably failed, through the power of the purse and the sword. Imperial interference in the Church inevitably meant that orthodoxy was influenced as much by the desire to please the powers that were as by Scripture. The word of the Emperor often meant more than the Word of God. As a result, Christian intellectuals were often left trying to defend doctrine based more on political expediency than logical reasoning based on the text of the Scripture. The concept of the Trinity, for example, has almost no support in the text of the Bible but arose out of the need to support the Imperially approved orthodoxy that God and Jesus were one in the same. Christian intellectuals were often arguing with the severe handicap of having to defend the nearly indefensible.

That politics stifled the wide ranging debates of the early Christian church is something of a shame. That imperial politics almost inevitably lead to a Church much more autocratic than it had to be is a tragedy. Time and time again, The Closing of the Western Mind details choices over the direction that doctrine would evolve towards. In almost every case politics drove orthodoxy in the direction of authoritarianism and close-mindedness. Modern Christianity is much less open, empathic, and humane than it could have been, and that can be traced almost directly to the early influence of the Roman Empire on its development. And that authoritarianism, in turn, lead directly to a culture that punished questioning of doctrine, often with the full weight of Imperial power behind it.

So the reality of political power and the culture within the Church that reality gave rise to clearly choked off the original spirit of intellectual openness within the Christian community. In that sense, The Closing of the Western Mind has a strong argument. However, it does a much poorer job extending that argument to the death of scientific inquiry in the Christian West. After all, Thomas Aquinas did argue for intellectual curiosity. The book does a poor job of teasing out just why the space between Augustine and Aquinas was such an intellectual wasteland even in areas that did not directly touch on Scripture. The book suggests that the attack on reason and the elevation of faith denigrated all logical pursuits. While that certainly had an effect, it doesn’t fully explain why Christianity in the West largely abandoned intellectual pursuits across the board when Islam and Judaism — two religions that also placed a premium on orthodoxy — did not.

That is a minor flaw, however. The Closing of the Western Mind is a fascinating intellectual tale told very well. If you have an interest in early Church history or theology and the process by which orthodoxy became orthodox, it is well worth a read.

March 10th, 2006 | Reviews, Books | 8 comments

When the Stars Go Out
Posted by Kevin

One of the advantages of being too sick to want to do much witting and then being computer less is that my “to read list” shrank considerably. But Spin wasn’t on my “to read” list — I purchased it during my down time. John Scalzi started a thread asking for Hugo nominations, and several commentators spoke about in glowing terms. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in a post on Making Light, called one of the best novels of the last ten years. I can confidently state that the praise is well deserved. This is the best novel I have read since The Years of Rice and Salt.

Spin is about what happens after the stars go out. One day, the earth is encased in a bubble that blocks out the stars and radically slows time within. After the event, called the Spin, time moves so slowly inside the bubble that within fifty years enough time will have passed outside of it that the sun will have expanded enough to swallow the Earth. The end of the world is literally a generation or two away. In most science fiction novels, the search for a solution and a reason why the Spin took place would be the focus of the book. Not here, and the book is much better for it. This is not to say that Spin ignores that aspect of the story; quite the opposite in fact. The answers to the readers’ questions are unexpected, flow perfectly from all that has come before, and generate a very real sense of pleasure at an intellectual challenge done well.

But what really makes the book worth reading is the author’s ability to convincingly portray behaviors that are quintessentially human in the face of something monstrous. The joy of the book is not really in the big idea it contains or the solving of the mystery of the Spin. They joy in he book is in the small details of the characters. Every person we come in contact with in the novel is convincing, and every coping mechanism that people deploy — from new religions to old bigotries to hopelessness to giddiness — is sadly believable. This isn’t really a book about the end of the world. It is a book about how people get on with their lives when there isn’t much reason to believe that getting on with their lives is worth the effort. It is told with exceptional economy of writing and emotion and it doesn’t have a single false moment or a single person who you can dismiss as unbelievable or unworthy of some measure of sympathy. I don’t think I can recommend this enough.

March 9th, 2006 | Reviews, Books | one comment

The Consensus Trap
Posted by Kevin

Greg Easterbrook has a rather telling review of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth in the New York Times. It starts well enough, with Easterbrook laying out the argument of the book — economic growth is inevitably leads to progressivism — and then highlights evidence to the contrary:

More important, Friedman’s attempt to argue that there is something close to an inevitable link between economic growth and social advancement is not entirely successful, a troublesome point since such a link is essential to his thesis.

For example, Friedman contends that economic growth aided American, French and English social reforms of the second half of the 19th century. Probably, but there was also a recession in the United States beginning in 1893, yet pressure for liberal reforms continued: the suffrage, good-government and social-gospel movements strengthened during that time. It was in the midst of a depression, in 1935, that Social Security, a huge progressive leap, was enacted. Economic growth has sometimes been weak in the United States for much of the last three decades, yet in this period American society has become significantly more open and tolerant - discrimination appears at an all-time low. On the flip side, the 20’s were the heyday of the Klan in the United States, though the “roaring” economy of the decade was growing briskly.

This is all well and good, but the Easterbrook falls into the consensus trap:

None of this disproves Friedman’s hypothesis, only clouds its horizon. Surely liberalization works better where there is growth, while growth works better where there is liberalization - as China is learning. But the relationship between the two forces may always be fuzzy; the modern era might have seen movement toward greater personal freedom and social fairness regardless of whether high-output industrial economies replaced low-growth agrarian systems. Repressive forces, from skinheads to Nazis and Maoists, may spring more from evil in the human psyche than from any economic indicator. Friedman’s thesis is now being tested in China, home of the world’s most impressive economic growth. If he’s right, China will rapidly become more open, gentle and democratic. Let’s hope he’s right.

“Surely?” Easterbrook has just demonstrated that a book arguing that economic growth is a prime generator of social justice has overlooked several instances where history demonstrates the opposite tendency. And yet he says that, surely, economic growth and expansion are better for progressivism. He then goes on to claim that growth is putting an end to destitution and implies that it, not the end of the Cold War, is the primary reason for the decline in armed conflict:

Though “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” may not quite succeed in showing an iron law of growth and liberalization, Friedman is surely correct when he contends that economic expansion must remain the world’s goal, at least for the next few generations. Growth, he notes, has already placed mankind on a course toward the elimination of destitution. Despite the popular misconception of worsening developing-world misery, the fraction of people in poverty is in steady decline. Thirty years ago 20 percent of the planet lived on $1 or less a day; today, even adjusting for inflation, only 5 percent does, despite a much larger global population. Probably one reason democracy is taking hold is that living standards are rising, putting men and women in a position to demand liberty. And with democracy spreading and rising wages giving ever more people a stake in the global economic system, it could be expected that war would decline. It has. Even taking Iraq into account, a study by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, at the University of Maryland, found that the extent and intensity of combat in the world is only about half what it was 15 years ago.

Easterbrook claims that the $1 dollar a day mark is an important marker of destitution, but offers know evidence of such. He makes no mention of income disparity, environmental degradation, or of the trend for privatizing the institutions that provide people in the third world with things like water and school, generally driving those cost significantly higher than they had been in the past. But none of those critiques is accepted as legitimate inside the neo-liberal/conservative consensus about economic. Easterbrook is a believer in that consensus, and the New York Times is its primary spokes-organ on the center-left. As a result, Easterbrook apparently cannot quite bring himself to ask the hard questions about Friedman’s book, because that means asking the hard questions about the consensus. As a result, we get a book review that refuses to look at the implications of its own findings, and the national debate on economic policies is whitewashed again.

December 6th, 2005 | Politics, Reviews, Economics, Environment, Health, Books | no comments

Another Movie List
Posted by tgirsch

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Joe Carter put up a list of the 100 most over/underrated movies in his opinion, and asks others to do likewise. He divided the list into fifty seemingly arbitrary categories and lists what he considers to be the most overrated and underrated movies in each one.

Go read it. Done? Good.

Now I don’t have the time or inclination to make my own such list, but I do want to comment some on his list (he lists the overrated movie first, followed by the underrated one):

2. Movie about fraternities: Animal House | PCU (I hesitate to include these two together simply because the criminally overhyped John Belushi shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath as comic genius Jeremy Piven.)

He can’t be serious, can he? Belushi overrated, maybe, if you’re not into sophomoric physical comedy, but Jeremy Piven? Gimme a break! Besides, PCU prominently featured David Spade playing, of course, David Spade — an automatic strike against it in my book.

To be fair, I recently had questioned whether or not my fond memories of Animal House were overblown, based on my immaturity the last time I saw it. But a few months ago, AMC played it and I caught half an hour or so of it, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I was still giggling like a little girl at most of it. I don’t know why the sight of Belushi stuffing his face full of everything at the school lunch line is funny, it just is, okay?!?

December 6th, 2005 | I do too have a life, Reviews, Culture | 2 comments

Jack Shaefer Proves Clooney Correct
Posted by Kevin

Jack Shafer has a two part review of George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, a movie about Murrow and McCarthy. Shafer claims to find horrible historical inaccuracies in the movie, accusing Clooney and his screenwriters of “cherry picking” history to make their point. But I am afraid that he doesn’t appear to have actually understood what he saw. I think, instead, that Shafer is offended that Clooney has apparently used the picture to, at least in part, to highlight the poor job that the current media does. But first, let’s talk about Shafer’s historical take.

Schaefer’s first problem appears to be that he thinks the movie spends too much time on Murrow and not enough time on everyone else who helped take the loathsome, un-American McCarthy to his justly deserved end:

Good Night, and Good Luck never comes out and credits Murrow with single-handedly slaying McCarthy on March 9, 1954, with his famous See It Now program, “A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy.” But if you want to from that impression, the moviemakers won’t mind. David Strathairn plays Murrow as if he’s Gary Cooper in High Noon, an unblinking stoic facing down and defeating evil with solitary courage.

In reality, McCarthy’s takedown was much more complex. As the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson wrote in 1996, “McCarthy had been hanging himself quite efficiently in the several months before Murrow offered him more rope.”

What Shafer is complaining about is not an inaccuracy or cherry picking in any meaningful sense of the word. This is a movie about Murrow and CBS and what they did. It focuses on piece of the tapestry, and, as Shafer himself notes, does not say that Murrow saved the Constitution by himself. And yet Shafer is incensed that a movie about Murrow would focus on Murrow. Shafer’s real problem here is either that he doesn’t understand that “they didn’t make the movie I would have made” is not a valid criticism of a movie or he is desperately searching for reasons o discount the movie.

Shafer’s second primary complaint (he does think that a scene that shows Murrow’s show being shrunk in size compresses the actual events too much, but that, I submit, is a matter of interpretation, and Shafer does not claim the scene is materially inaccurate and grants that movies must often do such things in order to make their point) regards a meeting between Air Force officials and CBS executives:

There’s another scene in Good Night, and Good Luck worth reviewing. Two Air Force officers visit Friendly at CBS to pressure him about See It Now’s soon-to-be broadcast investigation of Lt. Milo Radulovich (Oct. 20, 1953). Radulovich, a reserve officer, was being drummed out of the service as a security risk because family members were suspected security risks. The officers look and act like cousins of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper as they confront Friendly.

In life, both Friendly and Murrow attended the session. Far from being an enemy of the Pentagon, Murrow counted many friends there. As a radio reporter during World War II, he had flown along on 24 combat missions, receiving a “Distinguished Service to Air Power” award from the flyboys. In the postwar period, Murrow maintained his close relationship with the military and did voice-over work for Department of Defense films. Friendly describes the encounter between See It Now’s aces and the Air Force officers as no more ominous than a routine visit from an institution a journalist is about to knee-cap.

“The dialogue with the officers was restrained and there was a minimum of discussion of Milo Radulovich himself,” Friendly writes. The Air Force general doesn’t want the show to run, but the closest he comes to threatening anyone is saying, “You have always gotten complete co-operation from us, and we know you won’t do anything to alter that.”

Notice that Shafer doesn’t present anything as being factually wrong — it is his personal interpretation that the scene was written in a harsher tone than the real life record supported. Notice also that Shafer provides no evidence that such is the case — he simply tells us that the actors portraying the Air Force officers acted as they were bit players in a bad mafia movie. It hardly seems as if Shafer has proven an inaccuracy at this point. But let’s grant his unsupported notion that the Air Force officers where portrayed as more threatening than one person involved in the meeting thought. We still are left scratching our heads as to what Shafer thinks he has uncovered. Whether or not the Air Force was threatening Murrow and CBS is not in dispute. The officers did, after all, make it clear that the Air Force would no longer cooperate with CBS news. That is a threat — removing sources is always a threat to a journalist. But considering the state of network news in the 1950s, it is hardly unreasonable to infer that the Air Force was indeed being more threatening than either Schafer or Friendly believed.

Shafer himself points out earlier in the review that television news was in a precarious state:

Good Night, and Good Luck viewers not fluent in McCarthyese might ask how Murrow could be knock-kneed about the Wisconsin mad dog when the newspapers obviously weren’t. We can pardon Clooney for not slowing to explore the topic, but Murrow’s trepidations were more institutional than personal. Newspapers had complete First Amendment rights to criticize whoever they wanted to in government without worrying that federal agents would shut down their presses. Broadcasters, on the other hand, lacked First Amendment parity with their print cousins (they still don’t enjoy parity, but things are much better now). They existed at the sufferance of the federal government, by virtue of the Communications Act of 1934, which required them to air news and public affairs. Irritating the government could prompt a congressional investigation or worse yet, a dressing down by the Federal Communications Commission and revocation of a network’s radio and television licenses.

If Murrow and his superiors where aware of the danger that government interference could create for them, it is hardly a leap into to the dark to think that the Air Force was also aware of the potential problems a hostile government could create. And it is hardly a stretch from there to read the Air Force’s visit as the first step down that path. What Shafer has discovered is not an inaccuracy, but a difference of interpretation. And, frankly, his interpretation is very charitable to the government and displays a lack of understanding about the situation Murrow and CBS faced. And Shafer clearly understood the actual situation, having written about it just a few paragraphs before. It seems odd that he would forget his own words in such a short space.

But Shafer saves his most egregious error for last:

Good Night, and Good Luck’s heaviest Hollywood airbrushing comes in its treatment of the See It Now program about Annie Lee Moss (”Senator McCarthy Against Annie Lee Moss,” March 16, 1954). In committee hearings McCarthy accused Moss, a matronly Pentagon Signal Corps employee, of being a member of the Communist party based on the word of an FBI infromant. Her job in a Pentagon code room, in McCarthy’s mind, makes her a communist spy. See It Now’s newsreel footage of the hearing makes her seem the simple-minded victim of mistaken identity by an inquisitional monster as she denies party membership. McCarthy correctly senses that things are going badly for his side and departs from the hearing, leaving his counsel Roy Cohn holding the bag. As other senators on the panel proceed to hector Cohn and coddle Moss, the hearing turns into a disaster for McCarthy.

How innocent was Moss? In Salon, Clooney says the issue for Murrow is Moss’ right to face her accuser, which she was denied. For the record, however, McCarthy appears to have been more right than wrong about her membership.

In 1958, the federal Subversive Activities Control Board reported that “the Communist Party’s own records, the authenticity of which the Party has at no time disputed … show that one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street SW, Washington DC, was a party member in the mid-1940s.” Joseph E. Persico’s 1988 biography, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original, reports this finding as does historian Arthur Herman’s 1999 revisionist account, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator.

Now, just because Moss was in the party doesn’t make her a traitor, as McCarthy would have it, although it would make her a perjurer. If Clooney has researched the story as deeply as I believe he has, he knows of the evidence against Moss and has chosen to ignore it to make his story as black and white as its film stock. Likewise, in the Radulovich program, Murrow made no effort to explore whether the reservist might be a security threat if his family members are. But is it journalism when the only question asked by a reporter is whether a beleaguered citizen is receiving due process? In a recent review of the Murrow DVD set, Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin posed the question this way: “Would we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belonged to al Qaeda?”

These paragraphs are astonishing. Shafer actually argues that the McCarthyism — that the denial of due process, that smearing people on unseen evidence, that trial by innuendo and association, that punishment without recourse or a chance to defend oneself — is only a problem when it catches absolutely innocent people. He somehow thinks that focusing on the fact that McCarthy and his defenders would tear the Constitution from the country as “cherry picking” history. Shafer asks why journalism should be so concerned with due process of citizens. Perhaps, Mr. Shafer, it is because due process is the foundation upon which all of our freedoms are based. And when it is removed for one person, as McCarthy’s horrible reign proved, it is removed for all. Shafer’s problem with McCarthyism, apparently, is not that it is an attack on the freedoms that make this country great. Pose the question this way: does the fact that some victims of lynching were guilty of crimes make lynching any less immoral or damaging to the fabric of American society? Shafer’s problem with McCarthyism, apparently, is that it didn’t catch enough guilty people. One suspects that Jack Shafer would not have been on Mur