On a temporary hiatus until some things clear up.

Welcome to America, 2009. Thanks are due to Alan Fike.

Some context for the supposed anti-spending, anti-taxation demonstration yesterday in DC. Key quote (emphases mine):

[Glenn] Beck peddles a message that’s been around since America was born: They’re taking your country away. They—the non-white races, the immigrants, the urbanites, the communists, the elites—are stealing the country from nice, simple white Christians. They’re taking what rightfully belongs to us, to Real Americans.

This basic, gut-level fear of loss, fear of tribal obsolescence and irrelevance, is all the 25%-and-shrinking right has left. It has been overwhelmed by its most paranoid, bigoted elements. Not activists, not online petitioners, but U.S. senators and Republican thought leaders say the president wasn’t born in the U.S.; that he wants to kill old people; that he is not fit to speak to school children. They are banging drums and chanting just outside the campfire circle of rational civic discourse. Their din makes it impossible to think, to plan, to govern. They can not lead, but in their twisted fear they can prevent the rest of us from going anywhere either.

Our civic immune system has grown weak. There are no filters, no longer shared standards of evidence, truth, or decency. The poison courses unhindered through the body. Nothing, no matter how factually insane or morally repugnant, can be repelled.

A great send-off to an underrated, long-running TV show that taught us all the simple virtues of a small town called Arlen. Yep.

Right on.

Time to get our facts straight, people. President Obama hit one for the bleachers last night, and the G.O.P. revealed its true face with Rep. Heckler from the First Secession State. Embarrassing and sad, yes, but instructive. Hopefully we can be adults about this.

A suddenly more innocent time, when we thought that Will Ferrell and Tina Fey could change this country.

Robert Scheer seems to agree. Afghanistan is his war now and his campaign promise was to end it, eventually, after much pointless sacrifice in blood and treasure. Why do we think we can do what the British and Russians failed to do?

The newspaper of record reports today, with a few substitutions of my own (let me know if notice anything discrepant):

A new report by the top commander in South Vietnam detailing the situation there confronts President Johnson with the politically perilous decision of whether to deepen American involvement in the eight-year-old war amid shrinking public support at home.

The classified assessment submitted Monday by Gen. William Westmoreland, who took over American and ASEAN forces in Vietnam in June, did not request additional American troops, American officials said, but they added that it effectively laid the groundwork for such a request in coming weeks.

While details of the report remained secret, the revised strategy articulated by General Westmoreland in recent public comments would invest the United States more extensively in Vietnam that it has been since American forces helped topple the Diem government following the Tonkin incident in 1964. Taking a page from the 1967 strategy shift in Laos, he has emphasized protecting civilians over just engaging guerrillas.

For Mr. Johnson, who has already ordered an additional 210,000 troops to Vietnam this year, the prospect of a still larger deployment would test his commitment to a war he did not launch even as it grows more violent by the month.

He already faces growing discontent among his liberal base, not only over the war but also over national security policy, health care, civil rights and other issues.

An expanded American footprint would also increase Mr. Johnson’s entanglement with a Vietnamese government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate. Multiplying allegations of fraud in the Aug. 20 presidential election have left Washington with little hope for a credible partner in the war once the result are final.

The latest tally, with nearly half of the polling stations counted, showed President Pho Ngo Karzai leading with 45.9 percent against 33.3 percent for his main opponent, Abdullah Nguyen, Reuters reported.

But the White House left open the possibility that Mr. Johnson would send more troops. “There’s broad agreement that for many years, our effort in Vietnam has been under-resourced politically, militarily and economically,” George Christian, the White House press secretary, said Monday. He went on to use the words “under-resourced” and “under-resource” six more times during his daily briefing.

The report comes after a sharp escalation of violence in Vietnam, where more American troops died in August than in any month since the beginning of the war.

The military announced Monday that two American soldiers died in separate attacks involving homemade bombs, bringing the total killed last month to 510, according to the official tally. The number of such attacks has nearly quadrupled since 1966, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The situation in Vietnam is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,” General Westmoreland said in a statement…

Mr. McNamara said Monday that despite the “gloom and doom” that has characterized recent discussion, Vietnam today is a “mixed picture.”

He said he would consider any troop requests in the coming weeks, but told the UPI that he was concerned about “the implications of significant additional forces in terms of the foreign footprint in Vietnam, whether the Vietnamese will see this as us becoming more of an occupier or their partner, and how do you differentiate those.”

Shortly after taking office Mr. Johnson ordered 170,000 more combat troops and 40,000 more advisers to Vietnam, and once they all arrive the American force there will number 680,000. As the ASEAN commander, General Westmoreland also has 400,000 additional foreign forces available to him, but some of their home governments have placed restrictions on how they can be used.

General Westmoreland wants a large expansion of Vietnamese security forces and an acceleration of their training, according to American commanders. The Vietnamese government currently has about 134,000 police officers and 82,000 soldiers, although many of them are poorly equipped and have little logistical support.

Under the strategy described by General Westmoreland and other commanders in recent weeks, the overriding goal of American and ASEAN forces would not be so much to kill Vietcong guerrillas as to make ordinary Vietnamese feel secure, and thus isolate the guerrillas. That means using force less and focusing on economic development and good governance.…

With polls showing falling support for the Vietnamese war, critics in Congress have grown increasingly vocal in calling for withdrawal.

Congressman Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, returned from Vietnam last week and said that despite the capable Americans now there, he was pessimistic about the chances of success and did not even know how to define it.

“I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that we’re getting sucked into an endless war here,” he said in an interview.

An ongoing issue is US codification of and complicity in torture, and efforts to make a reckoning for it that has finally started arriving in fits and starts. A long-awaited report came to light (Aug. 24, by the CIA’s Inspector General). In a remarkable turn, the Attorney General of the United States decided to investigate CIA brutality in connection with the voluminous documentation of “abuse” of detainees captured in some fashion during the last eight years or so. Critics may argue that targeting low- to mid-level operatives in a clandestine agency carries less political weight, less risky, than prosecuting people who decided policy at the Office of Legal Counsel, which is under the AG’s purview.

Several things capture my interest so it is hard to narrow it down and stay focused on one thing at a time. Indeed, these days a lot of things appear interconnected and, upon closer inspection, actually are, even if those webs of connections end up tenuous.

Questions: who is going to be investigated? Will there be prosecutions? How much will actually come to light, given the use of “state secrets” protections? Given what we already know, what will more information actually uncover? Will it become political ammunition or lead to better transparency and an end to the abuses (crimes, in layman’s terminology)?

Why has it taken so long for the C.I.A. to be prosecuted for its crimes? I think the usage of “crime” is acceptable if we define criminal acts are those that are unlawful. The biggest question then becomes, Does international law have any force? do our own laws? The NYT reports, “The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.” (my italics)

We can, for now, safely assume that a democratic country needs a clandestine service to do its dirty work, the kind that does not necessitate public deliberation — or awareness. But for some reason, national security is such a potent drug that even normally staid concepts like the rule of law (not rule of reckless arrogant men) gets distorted into a bizarre shape. Our representatives refuse to place the detainees at Gitmo into their home districts, never mind the multitudes of US prisoners already jailed in them. The subtext is that Americans are not capable of Qaeda-like brutality. Refuting that assumption ought to be unnecessary.

It has been a few weeks since anything has captured my interest to the point at which I wanted to delve into it, uncover what can be laid bare, and report. At the moment, in this trendy Brooklyn neighborhood, a lot of things are happening. But this was never a personal journal; instead I wanted to give context for the discoveries that do merit note.

Michael Massing, in the latest New York Review of Books, observes that digital media need not spell doom for the traditional norms (sometimes ignored) of integrity and accountability and the commitment, stated but less often practiced, to “fact-checking.” Instead, he writes, we are at a fateful crossroads, a hinge point. Massing approvingly cites the work of Clay Shirky, who observed much along the same lines. The latest Columbia Journalism Review is also full of seasoned observers who seem to cohere along a practical solution: charge for access. Before that can be explored, first it is necessary to bemoan the fact that print and Web journos feel respectively like dinosaurs and the small mammalian critters that herald the evolutionary future, for good or bad.

One paradox that is not-so-often pundited captures the issue of journalism “as content,” as a “monetizable” product that is one part original reporting, which involves depth, expertise and field work, and another part soulless aggregation of the reportage. It is paradoxical for the same reason it is so ubiquitous: all of the time the dispatches of real observers are linked, disseminated and repackaged; all of the time the predominant majority of consumers heavily depend on being fed constantly-updated information, which can entirely bypass the very working people without whom the news cannot arrive in the very medium that is “corroding” the old models.

There is a lot of buzz around the topic of erecting pay walls, for example, which contains positives and negatives. On the plus, it generates more revenue for the providers than can be supplied by ads. On the other hand, millions of people expect information to be free. A key assumption is that quality journalism is integral to democracy. Yet that very democratic impulse represented by the internet is challenging the institutions that are supposed to foster informed decision-making. What the current climate may lead us to is highly specialized super-niche markets in which microaudiences pay for content suited to them. To survive the major media entities will have to go much more local, just to differentiate themselves. The idea of a mass media may soon disappear in the process.

Barack Obama expressed regret for appearing to side with a victim of racial profiling, and personally called the police sergeant in question to apologize for suggesting that the Cambridge Police Dept. had acted on any racial assumptions. (Henry Louis Gates, the famed Harvard scholar, was arrested about two weeks ago under the charge of “disorderly conduct” after a burglary call had been made by a neighbor who saw, around midday, two men jimmying a door—it was Gates’ house, his key wasn’t working—and Gates allegedly called the cop a racist among other minor details, reportedly involving the cop’s “mama”; it has just been disclosed that the 911 caller did not describe the men as black, though prompted to classify by race by the station.) In an effort to downplay any appearance of controversy, the president reiterated that he had poorly chosen his way of framing the issue. Gates—his nickname is “Skip”—is said to be a personal friend.

“Look, I want to be clear on this,” Obama declared, in an imaginary conference he never made. “What I should have said is that all of this ‘post-racial’ discourse is, frankly, bullshit. There are undoubtedly structural barriers to Black advancement in the United States, even today, and for those who make it to prestigious positions of influence and privilege like my buddy Skip at times find that institutional or systemic forms of racism has surmounted the older, explicitly interpersonal forms that seem more obvious, especially to white Americans.” Obama cleared his throat. “What I should have expressed is that this whole episode is just a small indicator of a much larger social problem we still face…”

The president paused to vocally mull his thoughts over for what the press corps described as an uncomfortable half-minute.

“Look,” he continued. “I’m conflict averse. ‘No drama Obama.’ Some could call that cowardice, you know, that I’m backtracking on principle and defending ‘the Man,’ by which I mean the correctional complex that disproportionately dragnets Blacks in this country, but I am just trying to say that the issue is not whether the Cambridge PD acted professionally or ethically. These men and women are just agents of law enforcement, working at the surface of a much more complex superstructure of racial injustice.”

He would be shot within the hour, and the perpetrator would likely be among the thousands of terrified white Americans who stocked up on guns and ammo since he rode a wave of popular revulsion against the last incumbents. But Obama is anything but stupid and, therefore, would never say anything like this. One can only hope that he, in private moments, thinks along these lines—if he really is the humane and sensible reformist people thought he was.

It is terribly upsetting and disappointing, but alas not too surprising, that the president found himself incapable of exerting clear moral leadership for fear of upsetting (mostly irrelevant, still feral) political forces, even in the face of clear realities. To recapitulate, he wants to avoid a “racial controversy,” but that is odd considering the lack of controversy among social scientists about the de facto apartheid-like conditions many Blacks face in these United States with respect to extravagant entitlements like decent housing, health care and education.

Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project reported in 2007 that “nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites” (Alec MacGillis, “Neighborhoods Key to Future Income, Study Finds,” Washington Post, 27 July 2009, p. 6). In the new Pew study, we read,

Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 [ages 9-24] were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior. (my emphases)

The 2009 report was written by Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at NYU.

This is supplemented by Glenn Loury, an economics and social sciences professor at Brown, who argues that the correctional system, known somewhat euphemistically as criminal justice, also stacks the deck (“Obama, Gates and the American Black Man,” New York Times, 26 July 2009). Combined with an utter dearth of respectable economic opportunities, conditions are bleak. Over the “last 30 years,” Loury writes, “a historically unprecedented, politically popular, extraordinarily punitive and hugely racially disparate mobilization of resources for … the institutions of domestic security” has disproportionately fallen on the shoulders of the undesirable underclass of our society.

Loury specifically points to “racial and class segregation in our cities; inadequate education for the poor [mostly vocational track if anything—Ed.]; and the collapse of the family as an institution in some communities.” The family-values argument can be deployed by racist whites and “Uncle Tom” blacks, but there is still merit in it to the extent that a family is a more or less stable and cohesive social unit. What the Civil Rights movement accomplished, through the effort and sacrifice of thousands and the work of decades, was the abolition of an unjust legal structure that denied equity, advancement and dignity to millions of ostensible citizens.

What evidently has not changed is the de facto realities of black Americans, not as Americans who can fully share the economic opportunities given to most of their white counterparts, but as an exploited and subjugated stratum of entertainers (ranging from “magical Negroes” to minstrels), sports players and gangbangers—the third option the only real remaining possibility for those dwelling in the ghettoes, which originated as liberal-minded social engineering projects. These are under near-total surveillance (a “ghetto bird” is a police helicopter, for example). Then there is the threat of gentrification, which serves the purpose of “development.”

We do not live in a “post-racial” age. The complexion of our first biracial president will remain symbolic if the actual conditions most Black Americans face persist in their current form. In Miller-McCune magazine, Ryan Blitstein cites the research of Arline Geronimus, who investigated why blacks and other minorities seem to age faster and seem more prone to disease than whites. Blitstein recounts that “Black residents of high-poverty areas … are as likely to die by the age of 45 as American whites are to die by 65” (“Weathering, The Storm,” p. 49). Geronimus’ “weathering framework” posits that “environmental pollution, high crime, poor health care, overt racism, [and] concentrated poverty” are better explanations for the disparity than innate differences (p. 50).

Needless to say the scholarly community has, in some quarters, blacklisted her and denigrated her reputation. Blitstein records that, fairly soon, Geronimus ran into the root of the problem: racism, in its structural, dominating social form, as opposed to the image of white-hooded thugs screaming “nigger.” Geronimus sees racism as “a fundamental cause of health disparities” because it leads to policies that contain “even middle-class blacks in crime-ridden, environmentally poisonous neighborhoods” (p. 53).

Jonathan Mahler chronicled the obliteration of the black middle class in Detroit, which Blitstein described (p. 57) as “a sort of urban reservation for black Americans.” Mahler observes that as the auto industry, a lifeline for black advancement following the exodus from the South, has crumbled so too have the prospects for a decent life. He writes that the atomization of social life, a lack of real community, has contributed to the decline (“G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class,” New York Times Magazine, 28 June 2009; full article here).

Race and class form a tight nexus of social problems in America, and it is difficult to disentangle them. But the talk that we all have somehow transcended race as a cultural factor of enormous force, even today, is naive and dangerous because it conceals the savage inequalities that exist in our land and does harm to actual advancement by making white liberals feel better about themselves.

A credible Iran portal, for the latest developments not only political but cultural, can be found here.

Billionaire cleric Rafsanjani stumps for Mousavi at Tehran University. My coverage of what has been happening in Iran has been negligent, of course due to other events. But it is still worth discussing, as things appear to be dynamic again after a frightening lull following the massive display of force and brutality against the demonstrators. Above, in the embed: the latest victim, an (as of now) nameless woman. It is remarkable that in such a stridently patriarchal society women have been at the forefront of many of the protests.

News roundup: Iraqi authorities have decided to put a tighter lid on the movements of US forces, in an apparent effort to enforce their sovereignty, probably as a political show for the people who apparently do not want to be kept safe by a foreign power. It would be sensible if the same applies for Iran, whose fighters the US has often cast as foreign to the region, implying it is naturally our backyard.



Walter Cronkite, the legendary television newsman who recognized the folly of the war in Vietnam (Robert McNamara, its troubled architect, passed last week), is dead at 92. This appears to be a fitting coda to the transition the craft of journalism itself is making, step by step, toward a new medium and style. He was a giant of broadcasting and one of my heroes.

The other day, the Democratic-led Senate slapped organized labor in the face by stripping a key provision of the Employee Free Choice Act, namely the section that guarantees a free choice vis-à-vis arbitration (if a simple majority of workers wish to unionize, they simply check a card). For mainstream liberals the enemy is usually the G.O.P., but they ignore their enemies among their own ranks at their peril. Labor unions have captured bankrupt auto manufacturers, endangered health benefits, and a denied life-line. This is a triumph for the Chamber of Commerce.

Speaking of money matters, on that same day it was reported that JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have emerged as the last titans standing on Wall St., which “underscores how the government’s effort to halt a collapse has ... set the stage for a narrowing concentration of financial capital” (Graham Bowley, New York Times) The largest banks have reported exorbitant profits, as well, but lending remains a trickle, posing a thorny “political problem” (Binyamin Appelbaum, Washington Post).

Bernard Madoff’s new inmates in Butner, North Carolina include:

Omar Abdel-Rahman, the terrorist known as the “Blind Sheik” who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and former Adelphia Commmunications [sic] Chief Executive Officer John Rigas… former U.S. Naval Intelligence Analyst and convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard; former Colombo crime family boss Carmine Persico; and Russell Weston, the perpetrator of a 1998 U.S. Capitol shooting that left two U.S. Capitol Police officers dead.

Honestly, though, why is the former chief of Nasdaq being roasted on a spit while other traders and financiers who were probably complicit in similar schemes, less audacious perhaps and more legalistic, have wholly escaped punishment or any sort of accountability? One could argue that the deregulation of derivatives, pushed by Larry Summers and Paul Volcker, among others, caused more damage than Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. But for now, though it is speculative, one could make that argument.

Free Press has been cooking up new business models for journalism, and are even considering “micropayments” to bolster Internet news content. The Wall Street Journal originally tried out that scheme, only to recently make it free for the public. Google is an ambiguous villain in this picture, and it’s certainly a force that cannot be ignored. This is going to take some time.

Good move, Aussies. Perhaps my country should follow suit. Bottled water, in my opinion, has always been a terrible idea, in terms of waste and unsustainability, in addition to the fundamental unfairness of paying good money for something that should be free to the entire human race. Compounded to that is the picture of (at least) a billion or so people in the world who lack something as basic as clean drinking water while Westerners like us have the luxury of bottling it up and selling it at a profit.

The Declaration of Independence, as translated by H.L. Mencken in 1921. Happy Fourth.