The Old Folks at Home

To its great credit, the national media did not focus on the somewhat comical aspects of two elderly Senators collapsing during the Inaugural Luncheon at the Capitol.  To my everlasting shame, I couldn't help but think of all the Mel Brooks and Woody Allen movies I have seen where such a tableau would have fit right into the story line.  I have great respect for Senator Ted Kennedy, I know he has fought tirelessly on education and health care issues, but it's not altogether surprising that a man who will be 77 next month might have some health issues of his own.  As for Robert Byrd, who is now 91, I guess West Virginia may seek at some point a Constitutional Amendment allowing posthumous reelection.

I'm not an agist, I hope, especially as I kind of get up there myself; I know one 91 year old guy living in South Florida who could take Byrd's seat and revitalize the whole Senate. Nevertheless, I think the injection of new blood into any organization, of members whose education is a little closer to their current careers, who are a little more up on what's going on in society in general, is salutary. Crucial, even.  The average age of the U.S. Senate is currently 62 years old; one must count down 59 Senators before you get to a Senator, in fact, who is younger than 60, and then you reach a group of Senators in their late fifties.

The talk these days is how to avoid another Great Depression.  A lot of the current Senators might have first-hand knowledge, because I count 29 of them who were born prior to 1940.  A group of about 4 of them will cross the age 70 Rubicon this year, including Mr. Mumbles himself, Harry Reid of Searchlight, Nevada, who allows the small Republican minority in his House of Congress to block any piece of legislation the Republicans don't like by handing him a note saying they would filibuster if the bill is introduced.  Mumbles rolls over for this; I suspect that a younger, more ambitious Democrat with fire in his/her belly who wanted to make a name for him/herself, would force these obstructionists to stand up at the podium and read the Manhattan telephone directory for weeks at a time instead of thwarting the nation's will.  But gentle Harry likes comity, collegiality, reelection. Once, in the entire history of the Iraq War funding debate, Reid made the Senate pull an all-nighter; then they rolled the day beds away and Reid went back to rolling over for the GOP.

It's a commonplace observation that one of Barack Obama's keys to success was his superior mastery of the new world of Internet communications.  He knew how FaceBook, MySpace, networking all fit together in the national grid.  He raised hundreds of millions of dollars and organized the country down to the block level.  It was a kind of below-the-radar virtual universe that Hillary Clinton and John McCain just couldn't get the hang of.

Barack is now the leader of a country which absolutely has to make some paradigm changes in housing, farming, autos, the electrical grid, photovoltaics and wind power, desalination, and passenger rail in order to revitalize the economy. We have to go from the old system of a corporate growth economy to a steady-state ecological economy, in order to (a) be prosperous again and (b) avoid destroying the natural world.  President O knows we are not going to be successful at "jump starting" the old consumer nonsense.  The serial bubbles have all popped, and you can't get people to spend when they don't have the money anymore.

Barack must sit at those conferences, with a vast frieze of gray hair arrayed around the giant oval table, and think to himself: oy vey iz mir. Thanks to his father, he may know how to say it in Swahili.  He has to work with a Senate Majority Leader who thinks the opposition of Arlen Specter (78), Jim Bunning (77), Richard Lugar (76), Chuck Grassley (75), Bob Bennett (75), Orrin Hatch (74), Richard Shelby (74, but dyed black), James Inhofe (74), among other senior citizens, should carry the day.  Well, the soon-to-be 70 Reid is just respecting his elders, I guess.

I have serious doubts that this ancien regime is going to be equal to the task at hand.  Maybe it's not that funny, but I bet Woody Allen could make a kickass movie out of it.

George W. Bush as America's Chernobyl

The Chenobyl nuclear reactor explosion on April 26, 1986, was in fact more catastrophic than is commonly believed.  The total radioactive contamination released, a full array of fissile products, was 400 times the total output of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  A permanent evacuation of 336,000 people from around the area of Pirpyat in the Ukraine was necessary.  The red cloud in the accompanying photograph demonstrates the worldwide distribution of radioactivity as it appeared the day after the steam explosion at Reactor 4 at Chirnobyl destroyed the containment building, exposing the reactor core to oxygen and igniting the graphite moderator.  The resulting fire from hell propelled radioactivity 20,000 feet into the air, where it drifted as far as the Pacific Coast of North America.

Reading a good book lately about the epic chess matches between Americans and Russians (White King and Red Queen, by Daniel Johnson), especially the famous showdown between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972, I was struck by a remark in passing about Chernobyl (Kasparov and Karpov, playing for the championship in 1986, donated their prize money to disaster relief in the Ukraine).  Gorbachev thought the disaster, and the botched Soviet response and attempted coverup of the extent of the damage, was the single biggest factor leading to the demise of the Soviet Union, which occurred within a few years.  The Soviet populace finally lost all faith in the ability of the government to do anything competently, even in mounting a propaganda campaign, something at which the Soviets had once excelled.

A tantalizing thesis.  Of course, we had our own non-radioactive disaster with Hurricane Katrina, and I doubt there is an American anywhere who doesn't have serious doubts about the competence of the federal government in the wake of that fiasco. Yet the Bush years provided so much more.  A war to eliminate weapons that did not exist, followed by an occupation so obviously botched that a book all about it entitled Fiasco was a best seller.  And as Bush left office, the American economy fell completely apart.

I am reading with amazement these days about the transmogrification of the "recovery plan" into yet another in an apparently endless series of "tax cuts."  The impetus for this compromise is Republican resistance to the spending bill, Republicans who, if I remember correctly, now comprise an almost irrelevant minority in both Houses of Congress.

Conservative estimates of the budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 run in the $2 trillion range, larger by a factor of 4 than any previous deficit in American history.  This estimate is based upon a fairly rosy view of the fate of the government "investment" in all the failed financial institutions it has been bailing out on a 24/7 basis over the last year, such as buying mortgage-backed securities with no known secondary market.  If this has been money down a rat hole, then the deficit might approach $3 trillion, according to prognosticators such as the always dour Paul Craig Roberts.  

In the face of such surreal deficits, if I understand things right, the federal government is proposing to reduce its income while simultaneously passing the hat among the usual American foreign benefactors, asking for unprecedented subscriptions. America seems to be settling into a kind of subprime mentality; if we can fog a mirror, they'll lend us the money.  I'm not so sure. We've been the linchpin of the world economy for a long time, and a worldwide recession is underway because of our slump, but I strongly suspect that money managers of all the "sovereign wealth funds" are asking themselves some hard questions right now about their dollar positions.  Such as, have the Americans just completely lost it?  And can we get out before the whole thing blows?

Blogito, Ergo Sum

Naturally a compulsive blogger such as myself is given pause by the Advent of the O.  Does it usher in a new Era of Good Feeling where my admittedly satirical instincts will be inappropriate, even mean spirited?  Maybe so.  I take heart, however, in early signs from the Obama Administration that many of the lampoonable features of the Bush years will survive in the Years of Change.

As one example, I am indebted to Chris Kelly for pointing out that Obama has already violated his own proscription regarding the "revolving door" between private industry lobbying and government service. And not just in a minor, marginally-relevant way: William Lynn, his choice for Deputy Defense Secretary, was the Vice President of Raytheon, and its government liaison, until Thursday of last week.  This falls somewhat short of the two-year blackout period of The O's new ethics rules; indeed, the ink was still drying on the rules when Lynn was tapped for a big new job where he can help decide whether new defense contracts ought to be signed with, oh, say Raytheon, the huge defense contractor.

This isn't just Change we can believe in; this is Change we can blog about.  And despite Barack's well-intentioned promises about avoiding a "Christmas Tree" approach in the "stimulus bill," the CongressClowns are already loading the thing up with baubles and trinkets for their constituents back home.  It does bring to mind the old joke about the shark who offers to help the castaway get from his leaking boat to shore, then eats the man halfway there.  "Why?" is the dying man's last word.  "Because it's my nature," answers the shark.

So asking the Clown Troupe to set aside partisan bickering, self-interest, obeisance to their corporate sponsors who buy their reelections, a chance to grandstand -- Obama & Biden (who surely knew better) were asking these people to act contrary to their nature.  In the face of the most gigantic appropriation bill in American history, with an opportunity to broadcast money like a farmer sowing the fields, was there any chance that Congress would actually exercise restraint simply for the sake of saving the country?

Of course not.  They can't.  One of the hardest lessons to take in, to internalize and believe, is that modern American legislators are careerists.  They are not otherwise successful lawyers, entrepreneurs, doctors, et alia, simply on leave from the private sector where they can make some real money.  These federal gigs are as good as it gets for them, and they hold on to their seats with a death grip.  As the U.S.A. has progressed toward Banana Republicanism, one feature we have come to share with those emerging African and Latin American republics of forty and fifty years ago is that the "civil service" is where the money is.  The "real economy" is an uncertain, scary place where businesses fail left and right, where jobs are scarce, where one lives by one's wits. Contrast this sorry state of affairs with a CongressClown with a full staff, a travel allowance, a salary approaching $200K, guaranteed health care, perks galore.  So their basic "cultural" norm is simple: don't do anything heroic or stupid to get yourself unelected.  Keep your face in front of the camera when some new gewgaw gets signed, appear on C-Span when your committee conducts a hearing, do what the corporate lobbyists tell you to do (let them write your bills, in fact, they're better at it), and spread the money around back home.  And you're good to go.

This behavior is the ultimate Bipartisanship, and its ubiquity is why bloggers will never run out of stuff to write about.  The satirical point of entry is Mark Twain's: "Congress is America's only distinct criminal class."  As things get worse in the Real World, the Clowns become more determined than ever to hang on to their jobs.  One can begin to appreciate why George W. Bush became such a pariah among Republicans, why they refused to be photographed in the same state he was visiting.  He screwed up the game for the Red Team and allowed the ascendancy of the Blues.

But be careful what you wish for.  The Blues now have such a dominant position that the real chance the whole economy could go in the dumper poses an existential peril.  This is not what they signed on for, but if they don't come through, it could be Game Over.  Then what?  They'd have to go back to living (gulp) in America.

Talking about prosecuting war criminals and other ways of pretending to care

We come now to the curious case of Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who is holdng up the confirmation of President Obama's choice for Attorney General, Eric Holder, until Mr. Holder comes clean on whether he intends to prosecute Americans for torture.  Since we live in Wonderland, you of course already know that Cornyn needs to be reassured that Holder won't. 

"Part of my concern, frankly, relates to some of his statements at the hearing in regard to torture and what his intentions are with regard to intelligence personnel who were operating in good faith based upon what their understandng of what the law was," Cornyn said yesterday. 

What Cornyn is trying to say is that both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 retroactively provide defenses to those who might otherwise be charged with war crimes or Geneva Convention violations; these might loosely be called "state of mind" defenses, and Cornyn is pretending to be worked up at the prospect of a new Administration nullifying the august and sacred pronouncements of the Senate in carefully "crafting" these loopholes.

You know -- as if.  Senator John, whose law degree from someplace called St. Mary's College in Texas probably does not entitle him to lecture Yale's Eric Holder about how to read criminal statutes, especially since Holder is an actual lawyer and Cornyn is another in an endless series of Lone Star Bullshitters, doesn't care about "intelligence personnel."  Cornyn is holding down the fort for Bush and trying to flush Holder out on whether he's going to prosecute the Big Dog.  Obama, Holder, and the American Public are not going to sit still for another Abu Ghraib bottom-feeding exercise where the Justice Dept. goes after some low-level staffer as a "bad apple." If the procedure of tying an Arab down to a table and pouring water into his lungs was the officially sanctioned policy approved by the "Principals" in the Situation Room, as reported, then there's your target.  Otherwise, forget it.

But it's nice of Cornyn to help Bush decide, while things are still up in the air for the ex-Preznit, between settling down on a ranch near Crawford or un rancho cerca de Asuncion.  But not to worry, W.  You're feeling a little vulnerable right now and your native paranoia has your mind working overtime.  But it's all good.  I know my fellow Americans, and this will all pass.  This is just a fun game for us.  It's all so dramatic  -- torture!  It allows us to pretend to care about other humans (even Arabs!), to simulate concern for our "standing" in the world, and even to feign reverence for the "rule of law."

Oh for crying out loud.  What a bunch of malarkey.  Obama knows it too, which is why he's settled into this "looking forward" mantra as a way to deflect the temporary mania for vengeance. Pres. O has one great gift: an unerring feel for the Zeitgeist.  He knows what works and what don't.  It's why he knew he could get away with Rick Warren and with voting for telecom immunity. And he knows that Americans don't want to see former presidents, vice presidents, attorneys general, secretaries of state or defense, or anyone else prosecuted as war criminals.

It isn't going to happen.  So let it go, Glenn Greenwald, Keith Olbermann, Dahlia Lithwick.  O can't go for that, no can do.  Now it's true that the international Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan and with the force of a treaty within the United States (thus: the supreme law of the land under Article 6 of the Constitution) requires us to prosecute torture against anyone found within our borders who is suspected of having engaged in it, with no excusing circumstances such as necessity, peril or anything else. The Convention is quite explicit and unqualified in demanding compliance from its signatories. But seriously folks, we also signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the U.N. Charter, and did that stop us from, respectively, (a) selling fissile materials and nuclear technology to India, a non-NPT party, or (b) unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty with Russia or (c) invading Iraq?  Hell no.

So our vaunted "respect" for international law and our "deep concern" about our international standing are simply more cudgels we use for domestic purposes, namely, to beat up on each other.  Americans are smug, indifferent, insular scofflaws whose sleep is never disturbed by any such considerations.  And this same mass media-mediated state of semi-consciousness we call our national "conscience" is not going to arouse us to prosecute anyone for torturing Arabs.  We wouldn't prosecute Jack Bauer, would we?  Of course not.  And he's a real TV character.

New Reality, Just Like the Old Reality

I imagine that at some point later in the day, maybe after he woke up from a nap aboard his flight to Texas, someone tentatively explained to George W. Bush that he had been dissed by the following passage in President Obama's inaugural speech: 

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

It was kind of the new President to use a word like "expedience," which was guaranteed to go over the former President's head.  It allowed Bush, at least while he sat on stage, to remain blissfully unaware that the major operative principle of his presidency (the Unitary Theory, under which he could do anything he wanted) had just been trashed.  Although it must be pointed out that O's hortatory examples are in fact false.  During World War II President Roosevelt rounded up, dispossessed, and shipped off to concentration camps thousands of innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry.  So American ethnocentrism and unconstitutional oppression of target groups have been around for a long time.  There was no "humility and restraint" about jailing the Japanese at Manzanar, Tule Lake and elsewhere, and after their ordeal was over, there was nothing "just" about compounding this disgraceful episode by refusing to return to them their houses, cars, fishing boats, businesses and other stolen property.  But it sounded so good to put Bush down by comparing him to an imaginary, idealized tradition.  If we want to commend ourselves, it would perhaps be better to argue that our concentration camps, such as Manzanar and Guantanamo have been "nice" (or "first rate," in Wheelchair Dick's description) compared to the Soviet Gulag or Auschwitz, and let it go at that. Our concentration camps are still monstrosities of injustice, they still completely ruin the lives of their inmates, but we're "good," as Bush always argued, and in a sense he's right.  We're much better in our injustice than Stalin or Hitler and for that we should commend ourselves.

Just as a general proposition, on the other hand, we might want to introduce the concept of realism as we move forward and give up once and for all the idea of American Exceptionalism because it's only getting in the way.  One way of looking at our economic problems, which are huge, is that they reflect that reality.  I think there is a lingering feeling that the object of Obama's "recovery" plan is to restore America to that level of wealth and prosperity which it seemed to enjoy at the height of the housing bubble in 2006.  This is entirely chimerical.  In corporate law the concept of "watered stock," a term which has surprisingly fallen out of general use, refers to common stock where the total worth of such stock is less than the capital investment in the corporation. When the "water" is squeezed out of the nominal value of the stock, it more closely approximates the true financial position of the company.  

The national epidemic of upside-down loans, of negative equity, of foreclosures, of plummeting commercial real estate, of ravaged financial statements at all the major banks, the trashed Dow Jones -- these are all signs of that squeezing process. We're about 40% down across the board, and it is futile to attempt to reinflate the bubble which sustained our artificial level of wealth because it relied on conditions which will not be repeated.  

I think President O gets all this; unlike the idiot who preceded him, Obama thinks rationally and arrives at consensus reality the way smart people usually do.  He's not a "free market" ideologue who worships at the throne of Milton Friedman.  I think he'll do what can be done to transform the American economy, but he's going to meet with powerful resistance from the tiny sliver of America's business world who profited from the Bush/Clinton Casino days and the legislators who work for them. But great men are those who meet great challenges and succeed against all odds.  You go, O.

Lessons from MLK

This is my own photograph of the Dr. King mural in the basement of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor there from 1954 to 1960, in the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement.  I stood looking at the mural for a long time one afternoon in April, 2004, in the course of a long drive across the United States and through my distant memories of the Deep South. I was emotionally overcome by the sheer power of the art; the painting is simple, direct, but it contains everything.  You can see Rosa Parks, the buses organized by Dr. King as an alternative to the segregated buses of Montgomery, George Wallace, the Klan, the Capitol just up the street.  It was a quiet afternoon in this little museum, this shrine to Dr. King.  I was just about the only patron, and it felt almost silly to stand there with tears rolling down my cheeks. Almost, but not really.

Dr. King was that rarest of humans, a truly great man.  A noble being.  He graced our lives during his short span on Earth, gave us an insight into what true courage looks like.  How to stand up to evil power when you really don't know if you'll win or not, whether you even stand a chance.  He was, of course, the greatest orator in the history of America.  There are really no close seconds.  He was to public speaking what Muhammed Ali was to boxing, Jordan to basketball, Beethoven to the symphony. Simply in a class by himself..  He was as well a deep and courageous writer, a powerful and complex thinker, a visionary.

It is just and fitting that Barack Obama should be inaugurated the day after Dr. King's birthday, the national holiday finally installed after a battle with old guard racists like Dick Cheney and John McCain, who doggedly fought it.  Barack's ascension is in a sense the end of Dr. King's journey, the final resting place for the march that began on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma so long ago.  I know that Barack Obama reveres and emulates Dr. King, that he has internalized some of King's oratorical flourishes and cadences, and that his attitude of nonviolent inclusiveness is modeled on King, to a certain degree. It's important, however, to recall that Barack Obama got to the mountain top by a route different from that traveled by Dr. King.  Martin Luther King suffered through the sweltering heat of Southern racial bigotry and segregation, played always with a deck stacked against him,and came from nothing to become the unrivaled leader of the Civil Rights Movement.  I think Barack Obama still has to learn some of the things that Dr. King instinctively knew from the cradle.  If Barack really wants to be the "People's President," he's going to have to learn how to piss people off sometimes, to challenge their sense of power and supremacy.  Not all, not even most, opposition can be charmed and mollified.  He's taking on a power structure that is dedicated and consecrated, more than anything else, to the preservation of the perogatives of the very rich: tax structure, government funding of the military-industrial complex, health care - over the last 30 years, it has all been set up to serve their interests.  They are not going to give Barack what he says he wants; he's going to have to take it.

That's what Martin Luther King did.  He gladly accepted the help and good wishes of the sympathetic and well-intentioned.  And as to those who opposed him and his cause, he took it to the street.

And Now for the Future

My recent screed on George W. Bush will be my last.  At this point (well before this point, really) we have crossed the line of diminishing returns in talking about W.  He was never that personally interesting; he was only interesting as a phenomenon, to wit, how could an advanced country, the world leader in so many ways, find itself in the position of having Bush as its President? Herein lie the disturbing riddle and the question fraught with significance.  

As a parting shot, I would only say that in some ways Bush was the Opposite President, in the same way that Opposite George once served as the theme of a Seinfeld episode.  Bush's particular gift was to achieve disaster when the aleatory processes of flipping a coin or using a Magic 8-Ball would have assured him of at least a 50% better overall result. For example, presented with the famous PDB of August, 2001, if Bush had asked his Magic 8-Ball, is this a serious threat?, and the Swami within had answered, "As I see it, yes," Bush would have demanded a follow-up to FBI reports that probably would have thwarted the 9-11 plot.  Or, after various experts had expressed opinions on the presence of WMD in Iraq, a shake of the Ball might have floated up, "My sources say no."  Was the Mission Accomplished in May, 2003?  "Outlook not so good."

Et cetera.  On his way to the worst approval ratings in American history, Bush defied probability theory by achieving bad results which are almost statistically impossible.

We will no longer have this kind of diversion.  If America continues to flounder, to go broke, to obstruct the greatly-needed changes in our energy regime and approach to environmental crises (chief of which is climate change), then we will not be able to simply blame the leadership.  Our failure will reflect something far more sinister about American society, something hinted at by its election of Bush in the first place, of course, but will confirm how deep the problems run.  Did we become too greedy, too under-educated, too distracted by shiny baubles, too distorted by ideas of American Exceptionalism to see straight anymore?  The election of O militates against such sweeping generalizations, as Obama himself points out.  Americans actually did rise up, in astonishing numbers, to meet the fierce urgency of Now.

Obama is everything that Bush was not: sane, organized, reasonable, informed, hard-working, forward-thinking, non-delusional, ego-realistic, inclusive, collegial, intellectually competent and confident -- in his own way, O is the Opposite W. Objective science will again be accepted as the basis for public policy involving science.  The U.S. Constitution will again be used as the legal framework for American government. Once the United States becomes acquainted again with Objective Reality, instead of forced to make decisions on the basis of apparitions appearing only to Bush, then we can take steps appropriate to dealing with that reality.  

I think Barack Obama will have to take a considerable amount of time to come to terms with what's he dealing with, but at least progress is now possible. Anyway, there is not much upside in looking back.  I do feel for the kids who, for the sake of an arithmetically simple example, are now 16 years old and have spent half their lives under the bumbling, corrupt leadership of Bush. Their public consciousness, in other words, was formed on the basis of what they saw and heard from Bush and his cronies. In my own youth, Eisenhower and Kennedy were the Presidents during similar passages, sane, emotionally complete men who obviously cared about the country and did not use the position as a place to work out the tiresome Oedipal dramas of their own inner demons.  I will assure our youth that you will now see what the country is like when someone who worked hard to become President and is a decent human being takes control.

I'm trying to remember what it was like myself.

Bush in the Rear View Mirror

With any luck, George W. Bush will simply disappear into the gated suburbs of Dallas, ride his bike around his ranch, pretend to stock his library, play golf in his sweat-soaked shirts and stay out of the way.  His astonishing ego has compelled him lately to make the rounds, burnishing his "legacy," rewriting history, and distorting a clear recent public record, still fresh in everyone's mind, with ludicrous fantasies about his "competence."  I think he argued that FEMA's handling of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans was actually first-rate, just as one example.  The most stupendous screwup in U.S. military and foreign policy history, invading a country to disarm them of an arsenal which they absolutely and completely lacked -- Bush called this a "disappointment."  Bush is that most tiresome of human specimens, a dull and slow-witted man who for reasons known only to himself thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.

Everyone is ready to turn the page.  Various liberal commentators have urged that investigations and/or prosecutions of members of Bush's "team" move forward under the Obama Administration, given the manifold (and manifest) prima facie felonies under the FISA law and the War Crimes Statute. Regardless of Alan Dershowitz's opinion as a "criminal trial attorney" that Bush/Cheney could beat the rap on the basis of national security (just like Jack Bauer), I doubt that's the case.  (Having watched Alan get his clock cleaned by Johnny Cochran in a mock trial a few years ago, I think Alan must have meant to say a "criminal appeals attorney.")  Once the full extent of the gratuitous abuse of prisoners came to light, the rampant, sadistic torture for no reason other than the appearance of being tough guys, an inflamed jury would go to town on those two erstwhile cowboys.

Dershowitz misses the salient point -- Bush's secret weapon, what (real) lawyers call an "affirmative defense."  Bush's unwatchable, intolerable person. Prosecuting Bush would mean that W would not go quietly into that goodnight.   He'd be in our living rooms for years to come, doing his girlish mincing and head-ducking, slaughtering the English language in front of an array of microphones, strutting from the court house with a splayed-finger wave of his little right hand.  And we'd have to watch. After eight interminable, awful years, eight full years of my life as an American tarnished and devalued by the incompetent bumbling of this pretentious goof-off -- and we still wouldn't be done.  More Bush, all the time.  

I don't think I could take it.  So okay, O.  You're right again.  You're really a smart kid, I'm starting to see that.  I'm going to check my own ego at the door for awhile.  I was over-employing it, trying to figure out too much, because I knew I could trust absolutely nothing that Bush ever said.  If I wanted to have any grasp of objective reality in these United States Under Bush, I had to build that comprehension from the ground up, because Bush went to work every morning (well, maybe half the mornings, whatever was left after deducting his 77 vacations while in office) with the express determination to mislead, obfuscate and lie.

It's true that not dealing with Bush's crime spree will leave the country with a damaged collective psyche.  We're not going to think of ourselves in quite the same way ever again, not after eight years of this guy and his gang.  That's part of the price of Bush.  But for a little peace, a break from all that he stood for, maybe it's for the best.  Dealing with the problems he left us will remind us everyday of his true legacy.  That's inevitable.  But at least we won't have to look at him, or listen to him, or watch him fake his way through another Presidential day.  That's pretty good.  Ordinarily, I never wish any part of my life away.  Every day is precious.  But man -- is it Tuesday yet?

Collective American Denial and the Prior Japanese Experience

I have mused over the parallels between the imploding American economy and the deflationary spiral which gripped Japan in the early 1990s.  The considered opinion of most American economic experts is that our fast and massive response to the bursting of the housing bubble will avoid the prolonged malaise in the Land of the Rising Sun.  To put the Japanese problem in perspective, to this day the real estate market in Japan has only recovered to a level of about 40% of the 1989 high (when land around the Imperial Palace was said to equal all the real estate in California), and the Japanese Nikkei Index is still only 80% of its value for the same year.  This is a very long time to get stuck in deflationary quicksand.  

One frequently-voiced criticism of the Japanese approach is that the banks were "enabled" in their perfidy by the government; instead of forcing the bad real estate loans to the surface, the government helped hide them.  This simply prolonged the damage to financial liquidity.  I suppose sometimes the cultural mandate to "save face" can be counterproductive.  Here, of course, any sense of honor is completely irrelevant to the banksters who brought on our own mortgage-backed security catastrophe. Instead of committing sepuku, they were more likely to pay their bonuses early before the federal regulators could seize the money.

Anyway, the analogy fascinates me, probably a sign that writing this blog is making me increasingly weird.  Japan is the second largest economy in the world, despite its difficulties over the last twenty years, and the world's largest creditor nation. It has many of the same "structural" problems of the U.S., e.g., a reliance on imported oil and an aging work force, but is in much better shape in terms of its balance of trade and its national savings. Nevertheless, it has a large national debt, larger than the U.S. in terms of a fraction of GDP.  To say the least, however, America is going to close ground fast once we start posting those $1.5 trillion annual budget deficits, as we seem fated to do.

 

"One more thing: even with the Obama plan, the Romer-Bernstein report predicts an average unemployment rate of 7.2 percent over the next three years.  That's a scary number,  big enough to pose a real risk that the U.S. economy will get stuck in a Japan-type deflationary trap."

Thus spake Paul Krugman in his Monday opus.  So everyone seems to have Japan on the brain because, when you get right down to it, we can of course draw distinctions between ourselves and the Japanese (they speak Japanese, we speak English, for example), but the actual determinative factors seem more favorable to the Japanese situation, not less.  The Japanese have a vibrant export economy, as one factor, which allows them to earn money in international trade.  72% of our economy depends on consumerism, and a lot of that is based on domestic trade in imported goods.

So I understand that the U.S. has "aggressively" tackled the problem of its failing financial institutions by appropriating colossal sums of money to recapitalize the banks and shore up the insurance and mortgage guarantor companies.  Now Obama promises to follow that up with a large "stimulus" program to "jump start" the economy.  What I still don't get is this: how is all this supposed to help in the long run?

I sometimes think that the quality of national discourse on matters of profound importance has become so impoverished by a culture of sound-bites and cheesy political sloganeering that public dialogue has simply parted company with logic and coherence.  "Jump starting" the economy sounds swell, as one example, but does the phrase have any meaning?  

Prior to the accelerating collapse of the economy in mid-summer 2007, we inflated a huge housing bubble with cheap mortgage loans and used the "income" derived from lines of credit and refinance to supplement inadequate earnings.  Nothing about the "recovery package" is going to change that much.  As I've said before, putting people to work rebuilding a lot of failed and failing infrastructure is in and of itself a good thing.  It's miserable to be broke, for one thing, and our tax-cutting mania over the last 28 years has left us with a severely underfunded public realm.

What Congress is slapping together is a public works program (and direct subsidies to state and local governments which are also broke and have no means to borrow the deficits) based on borrowing massive amounts of cash wherever the Treasury can get it.  They're doing this not because anyone necessarily believes this is an optimal approach but because they can't face the Awful Truth: this is a crash program designed to conceal the underlying reality that the fundamental basis of the economy is shot.  A consumer economy doesn't work unless the consumers have cash to buy stuff with, and now, because wages have been stagnant for the great majority of Americans for the last thirty years, the wherewithal to keep the "growth economy" going has disappeared.  Can't earn it, can't borrow it?  Okay, the government will borrow it for you, based on "taxpayer" money, and then you can repay us with...with...Look, don't ask so many questions.

I've been reading an enlightening book called The Bridge at the End of the World by Richard Gustave Speth, who teaches environmental science at Yale.  His thesis is that an ecology-based sustainable economy is possible now using renewable energy and green technology, and that unless we move in that direction life on Earth will simply be unlivable by the end of this century. Books such as Prof. Speth's, when written in the 1970s by Barry Commoner and others, were of course laughed off as alarmist fantasies, especially by people heavily invested in the old regime of extractive industries and heavy pollution.  Now the things he describes are part of our day-to-day reality; on January 12, 2009, it was 82 degrees in downtown San Francisco.  We now have heat waves three weeks after the winter solstice, which is nice since it never rains anyway.  So we should have used the last 30 years to move in the direction of a transformed energy economy, as President Carter urged us to do.  Our predilection for basing opinions on the limited cranial space alloted to public affairs sealed Carter's fate: he couldn't rescue the hostages from Tehran.  He was therefore wrong about everything. Ah, what a frivolous people!

Oh, and I suppose it's worth asking what the Japanese themselves think about our immediate future:

"I don't think the Americans quite realize yet that behind this hill lies the Himalayas," said Takashi Watanable, a top official at the Bank of Japan in the 1990s and now a professor at Tokyo's Bunkyo University. "The U.S. is going to go through a lot more before this is over." 

Deft, spare, evocative - just like Japanese line art.

Free Bernie Madoff

I'm tired of all this piling on where Bernie Madoff is concerned.  I understand that there are those who are perhaps justifiably angry about his $50 billion Ponzi scheme, but a lot of the criticism has gone way over the top.  For example, he's been called a "sociopath," and among the reasons for this serious allegation is that he cheated his own sister out of $3 million, and she is now faced with the prospect of selling her Palm Beach house at a major loss.  I admit that this does not look good, on the surface.

Yet there is a pack mentality about the public outcry which I find personally unsettling.  Even the cable financial programs are joining in the lynch mob stuff, calling for Madoff's bail to be revoked, for the book to be thrown at him.

Is this really the time to be focused so intently on things which happened in the past?  Bernie Madoff did not kill anyone, at least not in a sense which any penal code actually defines as "murder."  Many, many rich people gave their money to Bernie in hopes of becoming even richer, in the expectation that because of their connections to this maven of Gilded Age Investment they could "outperform" the paltry returns of the ordinary market available to shlubs like, you know, you and me.  I'm not sure that's a compelling narrative; for my money, it lacks the essential elements of a long-running media scandal, unlike a disappearance of a Southern coed from a Caribbean Island.

But returning to the major point (and I'm heartened by the New York judge's ruling a moment ago that Bernie's bail will NOT be revoked and Bernie will be allowed to live in his $7 million penthouse while he awaits trial), anything that Madoff did, by definition (as suggested by my use of the past tense "did"), occurred before now, and our focus needs to be prospective, not retrospective.  

This sick, self-absorbed, self-indulgent obsession with things which have already happened ties up valuable intellectual and material resources which could otherwise be used in the serious battle to restore America's economic health, which, lying as it does in the future, has yet to occur.  Is anything likely to be recovered from Madoff?  No, of course not.  That $50 billion is gone, and we are simply throwing good money after bad in a futile attempt to "make an example" of Bernie Madoff, and the mood of the country, and more importantly, the mood of its political leaders, is impatient with such "nostalgic" indulgences as investigating crimes or "singling" people out for persecution.

So I think I would go beyond today's ruling allowing Bernie to remain free on bail.  I urge the dismissal of all charges against him.  In the largest sense, the problem is "self-contained;" only those who specifically represented that they could withstand a total loss of their capital were allowed this special opportunity to place their bets with Bernie in the first place.  The fact that, technically, there were no actual stocks, bonds or anything else in which they were investing does not materially change this crucial factor.  They said they could handle losing everything; they lost everything; and now they're all complaining.  

So the equities of the situation also favor an exoneration of Bernie.  It seems to me the investors are trying to change the rules of the game simply because they don't like the outcome, and the outcome, as I've pointed out, has already happened, which is a point on the space-time continuum where we simply can't afford to lavish our attention.  

This Week Under the Big Top

So I watched my president-elect this morning with George Stephanopoulos on This Week.  L'il Georgie was his usual amiable self.  I think I would have learned a lot more if they'd simply gotten out a B-ball and gone one-on-one.  

O worried me a little with his meandering answer about Guantanamo; turns out the issue is a "lot more complicated than people think," and closing it in the first 100 days is not realistic anymore.  I think he means that now that he's this close to the Oval Office, the campaign issue about American honor has lost some of its prior urgency.  He discussed the difficulty of trying some prisoners at Gitmo because of "tainted" (i.e., produced by torture) evidence, while at the same time recognizing the danger of simply letting them go in cases where that evidence, tainted or not, suggests they represent a threat.  So we need some "special" process to decide whether they can be released or detained even without a formal trial where they might actually have a chance to prove their innocence (or, in the language of due process, where the government could succeed or fail in proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt).  Someone's really gotten to this guy, I'm afraid.  Why not try these desperadoes in federal criminal court, as has been done with numerous other terrorists?  Convictions were obtained without compromising national security, and the American system of justice was both honored and vindicated. Unless, of course, the idea is to keep the torture under wraps...

This Week then transitioned to the panel, where the Resident Hysteric of the New York Times, Tom Friedman, gave his prescription for the recovery of the economy: credit must get moving again to business entrepreneurs, or nothing else can happen.  Friedman was wearing his trademark black turtleneck, which gives him a kind of techie, Steve Jobsy look, but with his bellows-like throat, it makes him look like an actual turtle.  I believe that if a contest were held to elect that human who takes himself most seriously in all the known universe, Friedman would win by acclamation.

The "recovery plan" was of course the hot topic of discussion.  Should it be $700 billion, $1 trillion, $2 trillion?  The general feeling is that it must be huge.  Newt Gingrich had the audacity to point out that of the first 50% of the TARP money, about $350 billion, no one can actually say where it went or what it's doing to help the economy.  That's a peculiar state of affairs; if the House of Representatives initiated the appropriation, as they must under the Constitution, didn't they include some process to see where the money went?  Apparently not.

This reinforces my view that the Congressional Clown Troupe, more than ever, spends its time at the Capitol Hill Big Top practicing juggling, slipping on banana peels and squirting seltzer down each other's pants.  It is for this reason that it seems highly unlikely that they will actually be able to devise a spending program to "jump start" the American economy, a strange phrase that O used over and over with George S.  The economy has a dead battery?

Or, more ghoulishly, using defib paddles on a corpse.  The principal idea seems to be that the fed government is ideally placed to do what private enterprise cannot do now, put people back to work or keep them employed (such as with state and local government).  While the fed govt. does not have the kind of money on hand to fund this kind of recovery, and must raise it by borrowing, the fed can do this because of its unique status as the issuer of the world's default currency and its triple A rating as a borrower, which comes embossed with a seal stating "backed by the Full Faith & Credit of the United States [see other side for details]."  

Supposing that Mr. Gingrich's reasonable objection can be overcome.  (By the way, with the imminent departure of W, I find myself more open to any idea from anyone on the political spectrum as long as it makes sense, i.e., sounds true.  I realize that I had gotten so sick of Bush that I just couldn't stand to hear any idea associated with him, even if, down deep, I agreed with it. For example, I always agreed with Bush that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.  How could anyone seriously argue with that?  Yet among Bush's many pernicious effects was that he drove liberals to such desperation that they began reminiscing about the "good ol' days" of the Baathist regime in Iraq.)  The basic problem with the American economy is not that there aren't jobs; it's just that a huge percentage of them are crap jobs in the consumer economy, and it's that economy which is beginning to hemorrhage and die because consumer spending is plummeting.

I'm not an economist (although I play one on my blog). However, it seems to me you can roughly divide recent American economic history into three distinct eras, from 1930 to the present.  Era I is the Depression, which lasted roughly from 1930 to 1940.  War production (a form of government stimulus) got the economy moving at last, in ways that the alphabet soup of Roosevelt's social engineering did not.  For example, a serious recession hit in 1937-38, which the Stimulus Hawks (such as Paul Krugman) attribute to Roosevelt's temporary reduction in govt. spending; still, this tends to prove that five years of govt. tinkering had not pulled the nation out of its morass.

After the rest of the world's industrial bases were destroyed (Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan), America rose to unchallenged preeminence.  We held this position for about 30 years, until the first oil shock.  It was at that point, as President Carter warned us, that a transition to renewable energy (the lifeblood of the economy) was necessary.  Brilliant environmental thinkers, such as Barry Commoner, were writing the same thing.  Carter put solar panels on the White House roof.  

The American people then conducted their first experiment in Government by Idiot and elected Ronald Reagan, who promptly removed the solar panels and all hope for a transformative energy economy.  For 30 years we've been heading steadily downhill.

You can't do 30 years of work in two or three years, and the net effects of this Recovery Program will be (1) a temporary blip downward in unemployment, (2) some new highways and overpasses and (3) a large increase in the national debt.  It's good to put people to work, for whatever length of time, but America can't attend the equivalent of an EST weekend and come home transformed.  We borrowed the economy into a hyperinflated bubble, well beyond our means of sustaining it with wages,  and now the air is leaking out.  The Congressional Clown Troupe would rather not tell you that; so watch, intead, while 535 of them climb out of a yellow Volkswagen.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

I've always eaten lots of bananas.  Call it an atativistic sentimentality about our simian ancestors, call it what you will, but I like bananas.  Loaded with potassium, which is essential for muscle contraction.  I just ate one, a diminutive yellow number with a somewhat tasteless core.  Not much like the bananas of my youth, which were big yellow jobs with creamy, sweet centers.  Made the whole lunch bag smell like banana.

Those bananas were of the Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety.  Big Mike's gone now, felled by fusarium oxysporum or Panama Disease, a fungal infection which attacks the banana tree's roots and starves it of water.  There is no cure and it spreads like wildfire.  The big plantantion growers, like the United Fruit Co., substituted the Cavendish variety for Big Mike, and it's a Cavendish I just ate.  Smaller, not as sweet, derived from a Vietnamese strain.  Panama Disease has now hit the Cavendish and it's only a matter of time before it too goes extinct.  There is no successor in waiting.  We have to come up with something because bananas are just too important.  For example, when Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, hit on the idea in the early 1950s that Guatemalan peasants ought to own some of Guatemala's land, Eisenhower went along with Allen Dulles's idea (head of the CIA and also on the board of directors of United Fruit Co.) that Jacobo had to go. Arbenz was clearly a Commie sympathizer; what could be more Commie than the idea that poor people ought to own land? So the United Fruit Co., with the assistance of the CIA, overthrew Arbenz and installed a more banana-friendly dictator, thus giving rise to the term "Banana Republic."  I wonder if the company selling all those khaki pants and oversized cotton shirts ever reflects on the origin of the name?  Probably not - this is America!

I'm concerned that as America itself sinks into the economic status of a banana republic that we won't have any bananas to eat.  There are areas of the United States where we can grow okay bananas, like Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it's just a matter of time before Panama Disease shows up.  Naturally, big growers favor monocultured bananas (which is how we got into this problem in the first place), so they're looking for ways to modify the Cavendish genetically so it can resist fusarium, such as splicing in some fish genes or something. What if the bananas then get ich?  (That's a joke for tropical fish people.)  Or what if for some strange reason bananas start tasting good with a wedge of lemon and tartar sauce?  So much for the lunch bag memories.

I watched Barack yesterday give his "economic" speech.  To call his various nostrums "generalized" is probably too specific a word.  I wonder if he's having second thoughts.  Maybe this would have been the year for Hillary to become President.  The general plan of reducing interest rates to zero and pumping vast amounts of government money into the economy has already been tried, in Japan beginning in the early 1990's.  Fellow citizens of the American Banana Republic (Mackerel variety), I ask you: in all humility, and allowing for a perhaps understandable tendency toward feelings of Exceptionalism, between the two cultures, Japan & the U.S., which would you say is the harder working, better educated and more technologically advanced?  So would I.  Nevertheless, Japan has been in a deflationary slump since about 1991.  The problem was brought on by a real estate bubble, bank insolvencies and a credit freeze due to distrust among lending institutions.  Let me know if any of that sounds familiar.  Also, its manufacturing base had gotten hollowed out because of Asian competition where the cost of living was much lower.

Barack's general plan is reminiscent of a man standing on a ladder a few feet shy of the roof attempting to reach the roof by lifting the ladder on which he's standing.  (I know, I used that before, but doesn't it just get it?)  There's a Catch, and it's Catch-22, which says that the United States can borrow the money it needs to get the economy moving if the economy is moving so that Americans can buy stuff from countries like China who need our money in order to lend it back to us; but if the economy is not moving, then we can't buy stuff to give our money to China so they can give it back to us so we can get the economy moving.

That's some Catch, whistled Yossarian.  Indeed.  So perhaps, as the esteemed Nouriel Roubini prognosticates, the recession will end somewhere around mid-2010, meaning the economy will stop moving backwards.  At that point about 40% of the net worth of the United States will have been lost, and we will come into equilibrium.  But that's it.  We're there, just where Japan has been.  It's essential to recognize that the Congressional Clown Troupe is doing this Final Act, the one where they stack up four chairs on top of a unicycle and Bozo does a handstand on the top chair while holding three pool cues topped with spinning plates, not because they necessarily believe this can possibly work. They're doing it because Congress must always appear to be doing something.  Barack can't come out and say, hey, we just took a 40% hit.  Better learn to deal with it.  How do you start your Presidency with that?  And then follow it up by telling us the really bad news:  no bananas for you.

White House for Sale

I don't really know if there's an individual American citizen eliglible for the office of President who is actually capable, from the standpoint of education, experience and personal attributes, of leading the nation out of the economic morass into which it has sunk.  The big problem for Barack Obama is the two four-year terms of George W. Bush may have been way too much for the country to survive.  I realize that there are those Bush apologists who will insist, along with Bush himself, that the President was simply an innocent bystander with respect to the various disasters that occurred during his tenure.  For example, Ann Coulter recently attacked those who attack Bush for suggesting that the famous August 2001 PDB actually warned Bush that "Bin Laden was determined to attack within the U.S.," the way the PDB is titled. The leggy political satirist, blond hair flying, argued on her website that the PDB was the sort of thing a grade schooler would pull together from Google cites in a last minute effort to meet a term paper deadline.  

I mentioned recently that conservatives often do a better job of researching original source documents in their arguments as opposed to their liberal counterparts in the commentariat, who often tend to recite simply from memory Bush's Greatest Hits (on the country) without doing the same sort of fact-checking.  Here, however, I think Ms. Coulter's usually fine scholarship betrays her nonetheless, for the PDB does say:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Now if you stop right there, as Ms. Coulter, flashing exotic lengths of thigh from her little black dress, urges us to do on W's behalf, you must grant her main point, her main point being that she's a bimbo who's figured out how to parlay a cachectic body into many talk show appearances while writing very silly books.  And another point is that, in fact, W did stop right there and did not find out what those FBI reports of "suspicious activity" were, which included field reports about young Arab men learning to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools without bothering with the usual full curriculum, to wit, how to take off and land the damn things.  Now if George W. Bush was a serious man taking a serious job seriously, he would have raised holy hell about those reports.  Where's the follow up?  What's going on?  Who are these guys, and why are they doing this?  Instead, he read the report and then went out on the "ranch" and cut some more brush and went fishing with Barney.

Ann Coulter doesn't mention any of that, and she relies on our laziness in not cross-checking the PDB with the 9/11 Commission Report which reproduces the actual FBI field reports in full, all of which would have been available to our incurious President if he had been, you know, competent.

Anyway, the past is prologue and it's all kind of scary now.  I hate to see these pictures of Barack hanging out with Bush at these friendly lunches, just as I cringed when Nancy Pelosi went for tea at the White House after the Dems took over majority control of the House in 2006.  It's very collegial and all, but it tends to perpetuate business as usual and a reluctance to rock the boat, and rocking the boat till it capsizes is more what we need than "continuity of government," because our government has sucked.

And then Barack starts talking about "reforming" Social Security as part of his grand strategy for dealing with our many financial nightmares.  I understand that "everything must be on the table" when you're facing disaster, but Social Security is fully funded at the present level of benefits through about 2040 if the government grants full faith and credit to the trillions of dollars socked away in its "special issue" Treasury bonds purchased with excess FICA payments over the last 25 years.  So what Barry is actually hinting at is that maybe, just maybe, the government needs to default on its obligations to itself.  If Obama really believes that it's necessary to "reform" Social Security, meaning, of course, to cut benefits rather than to honor these IOUs, then his vaunted desire for "transparency" should also motivate him to announce to foreign creditors holding essentially identical debt instruments, such as China, Saudi Arabia and "Caribbean Island banking centers," that default is now the order of the day.

It's unlikely that Obama will take this second step, especially in light of the report in yesterday's New York Times that China is already pulling back on Treasury purchases in light of its own serious economic problems.  Without a funding source for America's huge deficits, there is simply no way that Obama or the Congressional Clown Troupe can possibly finance a "recovery program" or even the day-to-day operations of the federal government.  And at that point you can pound a For Sale sign in front of Obama's new home.

So man up, O.  Don't pull a Bush and start the shuck and jive crap of your predecessor.  On points like this, it's critical to spell out what the consequences of such "reforms" actually entail, and to describe in detail the embezzlement of FICA money that has been misdirected into the military establishment over the last quarter century.  Otherwise, you're going to slip inexorably into the Beltway conspiracy against the American people.  You promised, after all, to be our President.  We've had eight years of a guy working the other side and we need a change.

 

The Rotary Club & Other Espionage Agencies

I read through an interesting interview between conservative radio guy Hugh Hewitt (whose parents apparently lacked a certain felicity in choosing names) and Glenn Greenwald, whose column on Salon is linked to the right.  I admire Mr. Greenwald a lot; his analyses of media complacency in the face of the lawlessness of the Bush Administration are non pareil and frequently hilarious. It's hard to top his irony.  I assume that Mr. Greenwald is of Jewish lineage, though I don't want to jump to ethnic conclusions.  It's not essential anyway; Mr. Greenwald is a liberal and a civil libertarian (labels which can be applied to me as well, faut de mieux), and his attitudes about Israel represent the mainstream of the liberal position these days.  I'm not exactly sure what that position is, but it's definitely anti-Israel.

Mr. Greenwald begins the interview by affirming Israel's right to exist.  In my opinion, that would have been a good place to quit as well, because it's the essential question.  Mr. Greenwald, whose expertise is law and the Constitution, does not really need to join the cadres of Israel bashers with his own second-hand analysis of news reports from the battle zone.  But he can't help himself, because he's a Liberal and this is what Liberals do now, have opinions about Israel.  Negative opinions.  So he gives us this: 

HH: So what do you want, what do you think Israel ought to do?

GG: Well, I think that, for one thing, I think that real negotiations need to ensue, and I think those can only happen with a powerful and devoted mediator, which probably is a role that only the United States can play. So I think the Israelis need to be a lot more willing to make concessions than they’ve been in the past, and I also think that doing things like expanding settlements in the West Bank and blockading the Gazans to the point where they can’t even get nutrition and medical needs for their children are things that clearly harm their own interests, and make the conflict worse. I think stopping settlements, making concessions in the West Bank, and giving the Gazans more of a decent life so they don’t think it’s worthwhile to blow themselves up and shoot rockets at their oppressors is a really good first step.

I have to admit this sounds very nice: let's talk.  And what shall we talk about?  Well, one item that might be on the agenda would concern the 7,200 rockets that Hamas has fired at Ashkelon, Sderot and other southern Israeli cities during the last 5 years.  These rockets were fired at Israel with the intention of killing anyone near their point of landing; this sort of attack represents the most indiscriminate form of civilian targeting you can imagine.  That's inconvenient for Mr. Greenwald, and for the liberal view generally, but they have comebacks.  What about those illegal settlements in the West Bank?  Well, Hamas is not in power in the West Bank; they were elected in Gaza, and it is from Gaza that the rockets are launched.  So can we focus on that?  And why does Hamas fire rockets at Israel?  Because it denies Israel's right to exist. This is another inconvenient truth for the modern American liberal view of Israel.  One nasty habit of conservatives, including even the much-maligned Ann Coulter, is that they tend to read source documents.  This causes all kinds of havoc for the feel-good bromides of the liberal position.  The Hamas Charter of 1988, after menacingly warning the Freemasons, Lions Club and Rotary Club that they're on to their role as Zionist espionage agencies (some stuff you just can't make up), lays it out: 

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: “Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware.” From time to time a clamoring is voiced, to hold an International Conference in search for a solution to the problem. Some accept the idea, others reject it, for one reason or another, demanding the implementation of this or that condition, as a prerequisite for agreeing to convene the Conference or for participating in it. But the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is aware of the [prospective] parties to this conference, and of their past and present positions towards the problems of the Muslims, does not believe that those conferences are capable of responding to demands, or of restoring rights or doing justice to the oppressed. Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the nonbelievers as arbitrators in the lands of Islam. Since when did the Unbelievers do justice to the Believers? “And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed. Say: Lo! the guidance of Allah [himself] is the Guidance. And if you should follow their desires after the knowledge which has come unto thee, then you would have from Allah no protecting friend nor helper.” Sura 2 (the Cow), verse 120 There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. 

This is flowery, of course, but I don't think there's any great mystery about what Hamas is saying.  For one thing, Hamas uses an extremely broad definition of  "Palestine," including such areas as Tel Aviv, Haifa and all of Jerusalem, which we might otherwise think of as Israel.  They don't want "conferences," (none of that Camp David stuff) and they don't want to talk.  It's odd that liberals have such a hard time taking them at their word; they certainly demonstrate their disinterest in talking by firing 7,200 rockets at Israeli towns over the last five years.  The provocation of Israel is part of a plan for destroying Israel, not "retaliation" designed to bring Israel to the bargaining table.

One problem that Americans have in understanding Israel's response is that it's difficult for us to relate to a country that gives a damn about its own national security.  If you rain rockets down on Sderot and Ashkelon, then you're going to deal with the IDF. It's really that simple.  The United States was attacked on 9/11, and the most famous, the signature, response to that outrage was to use it as a propaganda tool for invading Iraq, which played no role in the terrorist strike.  When New Orleans drowned, most Americans saw the tragedy as a TV show; President Bush didn't even bother to watch it on TV.  He was playing air guitar in San Diego.  

These are important cultural differences.  Thinkers like Mr. Greenwald, so accomplished and effective in other areas, project American attitudes about crisis onto Israel and arrive at the dubious conclusion that Israel ought to be as sloppy, incoherent and soft about its safety as the United States is.  The point is that Israel can't.  Israel wants to get rid of Hamas because Hamas wants to get rid of Israel. If the liberal position is to favor Hamas, then stop the parsing of Israeli "tactics," stop the enumeration of schools hit by tank fire and the scenes of hospital corridors and the rest of it, and go to the jugular: simply state your concluding premise.  You agree with Hamas; Israel should not exist.  Then the liberal criticism of Israel has integrity and internal coherence. It's intellectually honest. If you are driven by anti-Semitism, that also has the ring of authenticity, because it's difficult to believe your real motivation is compassion for Arabs you've never visited and know nothing about. You have become a Hamas jihadist yourself, arriving at that position from whatever point on the compass brought you here.  You would like to see a "solution," as the Hamas Charter declares, take the form of a Second Holocaust.

My Peeps Come of Age

In that day and age at Berkeley there was, in truth, a kind of revulsion at the practical demands of everyday living.  Fraternities were in sharp decline because they were seen as institutions of outmoded values (connections, wealth, Old Boy networks), and the more free-form aspirations of the Information Age were taking root.  Not many of my contemporaries really aspired to make it as Organization Men.  Of course, the downside of such a conceit is that organizations have inherent power not generally available to the solo flyer.  I think this accounts, in some ways, for the ascendancy of such strange "leaders" as George W. Bush and Karl Rove: the field of "leadership" was to a large extent abandoned by what you might call the intellectual elite.

Many, if not nearly all, of my contemporaries moved into such fields as teaching, law, medicine and careers other than in Big Business and manufacturing (and I don't know anyone who went into politics).  The field of business was seen as somehow "co-opted."  One problem with this morally rarefied approach is that the things business does nevertheless remain absolutely essential--food, shelter, autos, furniture, energy--and whether my peeps wanted to get involved in the production end of such activities was not an answer to the necessity of participating in the consuming end.

The American Standard of Living, in terms of real earnings, peaked around 1974.  This coincides with the first Oil Shock, when America was held hostage by OPEC countries because of its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of the preceding year.  I doubt that it's coincidental that this was about the time my generation entered the Main Sequence of their careers.  It's always extremely difficult (as in impossible) to analyze a system as complex as American society in terms of rigorously controlled variables and equations.  Social science dabbles in such pursuits without any real hope of knowing anything; nevertheless, human curiosity always leads us toward a search for some understanding, however partial or notional, of the times we live in.  And whether we can really state as a series of provable propositions the factors that led America to its present state, we intuitively grasp that our condition must result from the aggregation, the Σ effect, of all the choices, lifestyles and belief systems of the people living in the society.  The "economy" is one powerful indicator of what's going on in a society; even Henry David Thoreau gave his longest chapter this very rubric in Walden.  And the economy flat-lined about the time my generation moved into positions of economic power.

That by itself is fascinating.  I recall writing earlier about Christopher Lasch's work of pop social psychology, The Culture of Narcissism, which attempted to get a handle on the "therapeutic society" he thought America had become: one less concerned about actually doing things than with the appearance of having done so and the maintenance of high self-esteem based on such images.  Lasch had his own agenda, which was driven by a curious mix of Freudian anti-capitalism, and I think he could have seen more clearly than he did if he hadn't been constrained by the Procrustean limitations of his a priori beliefs.  Still, I think he was on to something.

My generation might have taken its professed "idealism" and worked out a new way of having an economy; specifically, our generation was the one ideally placed to put the world on a course toward real environmental sustainability.  To place humans in a balanced ecological framework is the last frontier of existence and purpose.  It is the real solution to the Age of Anxiety, scarcity and the bad conscience that comes from our "Dominionist" arrogance.  All during the youth and early middle age of my generation, there were voices that wrote powerfully about what it would take: Wendell Berry, Barry Commoner, Stewart Brand, Amory Lovins, many others.  Sustainable agriculture, solar power, desalination of seawater, efficient habitats, mass transporation, localization of markets.

Instead, driven by the consumer choices of my generation, we moved in exactly the opposite direction.  The flat-lined Seventies were followed by the go-go Eighties.  You may recall the abbreviation "A&M" from that era, from such shows as "L.A. Law" and movies such as "Wall Street."  Acquisitions and Mergers.  The consolidation of economic power in fewer and fewer hands.  It was solid work for the vast phalanxes of lawyers produced by My Peeps.  Thus, the rise of holding companies, big box chain stores, franchise food, agribusiness, crap jobs and the "service" economy. By the time the Nineties rolled around, it seemed inevitable that all these bad choices would be followed up with the creation of the most popular form of transportation in American history: the SUV.

I sometimes wonder how a generation which prided itself in such an ostentatious way on the purity of its idealism could wind up in such a wrecked, wasteful, increasingly backward economy presided over by a cretin like George W. Bush.  The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ruminations of Christopher Lasch. Maybe what went on is that my generation substituted talking about the ideal society for the actual work of producing the real thing.  No one went into politics where policy might have been shaped.  We made choices reminiscent of our parents' choices in houses, cars, modes of living, except everything had to be much bigger, grander and more wasteful.  The money we didn't earn we borrowed, in increasing amounts.  In this we were only following the dubious example set by the federal government, which decided that nothing needed to be paid for now if the money to finance it (wars, a big defense budget, anything) could be borrowed, increasingly from foreign governments in nations where savings were not a thing of the past, as here.

And now we've hit the wall. The automatic assumption is that this "downturn" is cyclical, as all previous recessions have been. Here we return to the Analogy Axiom, which instructs us that apparently analogous situations are useful only if the facts are essentially the same in both cases.  And the really bad news can be stated in rather stark terms: they're not.