September 22, 2008
Editorial Observer
Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race
By BRENT STAPLES
It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated “uppity niggers” and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.
The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.
Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.
This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche — and the national language — to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.
A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as “uppity” in response to a reporter’s question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.
The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. — and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” he said.
In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed “disrespectful,” the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.
In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.
The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.
Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.
These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Monday, September 22, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
WALTER BENJAMIN 1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War. [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, seeming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française. The author still holds the stage, as he seems to be becoming the nrf’s accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his ‘Pages from a Neutral’, presented as the start of a long series of reflections.
Ramuz’s language bears traces of the hold that Péguy must have exercised over him. It offers the same cascade of repetitions, the same series of minimal variations on a given phrase. But what in Péguy recalls the movement of a man driving in a nail by successive hammer strokes, rather suggests, with Ramuz, the gait of an individual interminably repeating his steps—like those neurotics who, when they leave the house, are obsessed by the idea of having left a tap running or forgotten to turn off the gas. A recent critic has rightly emphasized the tenacious anxiety of Ramuz. In other words, one will not be expecting certainty, trenchancy or established conviction from this author. The drawbacks of such an approach are obvious; but it is not without certain advantages. Ramuz is a relatively unbiased spirit. He proved this five years ago with his book What is Man, an interesting attempt to get to the heart of the famous Russian experience, which displays the same hesitations that are so striking in ‘Pages from a Neutral’ and in Paris: Notes by a Vaudois.
As to the latter: the first chapters, which tell how the ‘little Vaudois’ established himself in Paris around the beginning of the century, may be simply signalled in passing. Ramuz describes with great acuity the developing consciousness of the young provincial whose Parisian isolation makes him aware of his essential solitude and difference. Moving on to the theoretical notes in the second part of the book, a few samplings will suffice to bring out the characteristics noted above. Ramuz writes:
This is in sharp distinction to the denunciations of the great city as a centre of disorder and disruption, sheltering that ‘nomadic, floating and overflowing mass . . . corrupting by its idleness in the public arena, blown by the winds of factions, by the voice of whoever shouts loudest.’ This was Lamartine, but the same alarm bells ring all through the century—in Haussmann, and later Spengler. It is no less surprising to encounter Ramuz’s account of the alleged eclipse of the prestige of Paris—the great city par excellence:
You will understand, from this little internal debate, how greatly Ramuz seems designed by vocation for the role of Neutral. At all events, his gifts as observer and writer bring us some remarkable pages:
The reader can expand on such reflections in painful reverie: this wandering flock that Ramuz evokes has been enlarged by the war that has raged in Guernica, in Vyborg, in Warsaw.
Michel Leiris’s book, Manhood, is also based on the biography of the author. [2] But what a different biography this is! Before going further, I would like to draw out what it has in common with other recent Surrealist publications. Particularly notable is a decline in the power of bluff: a power that was one of the glories of Surrealist actions from the beginning. This drop is accompanied by a weakening of internal structure and an unwonted textual transparency. This is due, in part, to the grip that Freudianism exerts over these authors.
Leiris is in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, which I wrote to you about at the time of its foundation. In civilian life he is an ethnologist with the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro. As for the personal impression he makes, you met him yourself in 1934 or 35, at a soirée at Landsberg’s. [3] It would be no exaggeration to claim that his book would have been the greatest success of the literary season if the War had not intervened. I think certain pages of his autobiography might interest you and will take the liberty of sending you the volume.
You will not suspect me of an excessive tenderness, either for the milieu from which this production emerges, or for the literary genre (‘true confessions’) to which it belongs. In fact the book rather reminded me of Chaplin’s well-known gag where, playing the part of a pawnshop employee dealing with a customer who wants to pawn an alarm clock, he examines the object with distrust, then, to make sure, carefully takes the mechanism to pieces, finally putting all the parts in the customer’s hat and explaining that he cannot see his way to granting a loan on such an object. I have been told that, when Polgar saw this film, he exclaimed: ‘That’s psychoanalysis, the spitting image!’ [4] Leiris’s book, which the author explains was written after psychoanalytic treatment, may well trigger the same remark. It seems unlikely that a man who has been brought to list his mental assets so scrupulously can hope to produce future works. Leiris explains this clearly enough: ‘It is as though the fallacious constructions on which my life was based had been undermined at their foundations, without my being given anything that could replace them. The result is that I certainly act more sagaciously; but the emptiness in which I dwell is all the more acute’ (p. 167).
It is not surprising, after this, that the author should show little gratitude towards psychoanalysis: ‘Though the modern explorers of the unconscious speak of Oedipus, castration, guilt, narcissism, I do not believe this is any great advance in terms of the essentials of the matter (which remains, as I see it, related to the problem of death, the apprehension of nothingness, and is thus a question for metaphysics)’ (p.125). This passage delimits the intellectual horizon of Leiris and his milieu. His judgement of the revolutionary impulses that he experienced at one point is thus only to be expected: ‘I could not completely admit at that time that what triggered my anger . . . was not the condition that the laws of society have placed us in, but simply death’ (p. 553).
These positions, though they situate the book, would not in themselves have led me to bring it to your attention. The reason is rather that, for all our reservations, it must be admitted that the complexes recorded here are described with a remarkable vigour. If you will excuse a personal reference, I would say that the two dominant complexes, Lucretia and Judith, forcefully remind me of those colour plates that are to be found in certain books of the mid-nineteenth century. These were novels for petites gens, shop assistants or servants, and the illustrations were the work of anonymous artists. Plates with garish colours were covered with a coat of varnish that gave them an ambiguous glow. These illustrations (to which I consecrated my collector’s passion for many years) belong to what can be called the folklore of the great cities. In Leiris’s work this same folklore flows from places such as public swimming pools, brothels and racecourses. It is inspired by an eroticism that rejects socially acceptable forms and turns resolutely towards exoticism and crime. The author’s depictions of the fortune-telling prostitute (p. 33), of Judith (p. 116), of the museum as a site of debauchery (p. 40) are gripping. I was not surprised to find, in two interlinked sentences, the same interweaving of purity and corruption that gives this popular imagery I mentioned above its terrifying charm. Leiris actually writes: ‘I have always loved purity, folklore, all that is childish, primitive, innocent.’—And, immediately after: ‘I aspire to evil because a certain evil is necessary to entertain me’ (p. 110). Finally, I would like to signal to you two passages of philosophical interest: a theory of orgasm (pp. 65–6), and an erotic theory of suicide (p. 114).
Leiris’s book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. [5] This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother’s womb. [6] That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard’s studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established.
Bachelard points to the preponderant role played by animals in Lautréamont’s imagination. He draws up an inventory of the animal forms that proliferate in Maldoror. It is not, however, the bodily shape of these beasts that obsesses the poet, but rather their aggressive desire. Here again, Bachelard’s exposition seems unassailable. He explains how disturbed Lautréamont is by various forms of animal aggressivity. He shows how these different manifestations are constantly transforming into each other. They present the elements of an interminable metamorphosis. This must be emphasized, in Bachelard’s view, while taking into account the primacy of claw and muzzle as symbols of aggression. Among the living creatures of the earth, the ones that Lautréamont particularly identifies with, according to Bachelard, are those that swim and those that fly. (In fact the attempt is made to establish a kind of mystic identity between the two.)
It goes without saying that no elucidation of Lautréamont’s poetry can succeed outside of a historical analysis. Bachelard’s accommodation of a metaphysical concept of ‘spirit’ stands in total opposition to this. It is this concept—through which he reunites with Jung—that deprives him of any critical penetration, and which is finally responsible for a terminology both slovenly and pedantic. References to an ‘essentially dynamic phenomenology’ (p. 42), a ‘psychism that is not only kinetic, but truly potential’ (p. 174), sustained by a grandiloquent jargon—‘the animal is a monovalent psychism’ (p. 173), etc.—stud the text. Theorists such as Caillois, or ‘the eager young philosopher Armand Petit-jean’ (pp. 180 and 187) are appealed to as authorities. Nor is Klossowski’s study on Time and Aggression forgotten. The book’s methodological procedure, in other words, is far from promising. But before tackling the heart of his study, I would like to mention what is truly amusing about it—comic, even. And I am far from claiming that this comic aspect was not felt and intended by the author himself.
For Bachelard, Lautréamont’s death at the age of twenty-four—as well as certain passages in his oeuvre—justifies placing great importance on the experience of the poet as a schoolboy. The pages where he brings out the deep-seated nature of the poet’s cruelty—identified both with the severity of the teachers, and with the tortures inflicted by the older boys on those new to the class—are very welcome. Nor is Bachelard afraid to write that Lautréamont’s drama is one ‘born in the Rhetoric class’ (p. 99). In a conclusion, he connects Lautréamont’s famous ‘Hymn to Mathematics’ (model for Aragon’s ‘Hymn to Philately’) to the very essence of this cruelty:
I confess that I find highly seductive the idea that this book, full of outrageous assertions, emerged from a classroom, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is also backed up by quotations that show what a raging need for revenge his school years aroused in the poet: ‘The classroom is hell, and hell is a classroom’ (p. 101).
The third aspect that Bachelard’s book offers is far and away the most interesting; it is also one that has completely escaped the author himself. To stay within the circle of psychoanalytic experience, his book might be compared with drawings that certain analysands provide to help explain their dreams. Psychoanalysts treat the drawings as puzzles (Vexierbilder) and manage to find in them images that correspond to the subject’s latent preoccupations. Bachelard’s book likewise has a latent content, of which he allows himself to be the dreamer, I would say.
Lautréamont’s fundamental impulse, as Bachelard describes it—his ‘Platonic violence’ (p. 168)—suggests all-too-familiar features to the contemporary reader. But Bachelard is so unaware of the image these features compose that he is quite prepared to salute this new ‘Platonism’ as a philosophy of the future. His description of Maldoror’s aggression can be summarized in four tropes. ‘It is in the dream of action that the truly human joys of action reside. To act without acting, to leave . . . the heavy continuous time of practice for the shimmering momentary time of projects’ (p. 197)—here is the first distinctive feature of his conception. From this it follows that violence demands a ‘suspended time’, to which Lautréamont ‘knew how to give the temporal essence of menace, of deferred aggression.’ ‘Whilst animal aggression is expressed without delay, and is candid in its crime . . . Lautréamont integrates the lie into his violence. The lie is the human sign par excellence’ (p. 90). Here we encounter the third element of this unprecedented Platonism:
Finally, in the same order of ideas, this violence is essentially vindictive. ‘What is striking in . . . Lautréamont’s revenges is that these are almost never struggles against an equal. They attack the weakest or the strongest . . . they smother or they scratch. They smother the weak. They scratch the strong’ (p. 80).
Bringing together these indications—scattered throughout Bachelard’s analysis—the physiognomy of Hitlerite domination emerges with all the sharpness one could wish, like the figure hidden in the puzzle. Thus it should not be too much of an effort for Bachelard to grasp the insanity of his assertion that ‘It is necessary to graft intellectual values onto Lautréamontism’ (p. 199).
Reading these reflections, you will surely not accuse me of forcing the interpretation or seeing problems where there are none. And yet, to better explain the course that my thoughts have followed in such readings, I would like to interject a few words on a subject that has nothing directly to do with the present survey. I refer to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Without dwelling on the circumstances that led me to consult this book, I simply want to let you know the devastating impression it makes on anyone who opens it for the first time in these months. I have had the opportunity to do so, as well as that of finding not the German text but only the French translation, which, by sacrificing its nuances, shows all the more sharply the book’s key ideas. You are familiar with the work; I shall not repeat them here. The most I will say is that I found in Spengler a development of the idea of peace that is a perfect complement to Bachelard’s analysis of violence: ‘Universal peace is always a unilateral decision. The Pax Romana had one and only one meaning for the later military emperors and the German kings: to make a formless population of hundreds of millions into the object of the will to power of a few small bands of warriors’ (p. 266).
I do not flatter myself with making any new discovery when I say that a number of elements of the Hitlerite doctrine are ready to hand in this book. For example: ‘It is from an entirely metaphysical disharmony of “feeling” that a racial hatred is born which is no less strong between French and Germans than between Germans and Jews’ (p. 235). All this is too well known; the only thing that could perhaps detain us is that, when this second volume appeared in 1922, any decisive reaction on the part of the German Left seems to have been absent. The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.
Apart from all this, there is one element of the book whose meaning seems only to have surfaced at the present time. This concerns the very procedure of Spengler’s thought, which seems to prefigure that of Hitlerite strategy. Spengler, without any deep knowledge of the subjects on which he prognosticates, refers to the most distant epochs with the sole purpose of integrating them into a performance—Schau—which constitutes, quite precisely, a speculative model for the Reich. This Schau is, in fact, expressly defined as a ‘decree of blood’ (p. 69). Any historical epoch can form part of its metaphysical ‘living space’, just as any territory can form part of the Reich’s Lebensraum. The démarche in the physical world was thus preceded by a similar metaphysical procedure. Few books give a better sense of what is hideous and hateful in the claim of German profundity.
The poverty of the German intellectual milieux mentioned above is not without its counterpart in France. At the moment when the Hitler–Stalin entente has knocked away the whole scaffolding of the Popular Front, a book has appeared that provides evidence of the latter’s intrinsic weaknesses. To be sure, one does not approach Eugène Dabit’s Intimate Diary in any spirit of severity. [7] The author tells his story without pretensions of any kind—neither literary: ‘I speak here only of certain of my states of mind. And not always very clearly or deeply’ (p. 342)—nor moral: no search for a position of advantage, or even an interesting attitude. There is, besides, the question of his fate: the author was cut down, not yet forty, by an illness contracted during his journey to Russia. All this makes for a rather favourable disposition towards the book he left behind; but this inevitably evaporates in the course of reading. It is oppressive, and for reasons that, for the most part, necessarily escaped its author.
One cannot discount the fact that Dabit was a champion of the Popular Front, and one in whom the literary hopes of the movement were vested. Yet the first striking fact is the lacklustre colouring of his political memoirs. Interviews with men like Gide or Malraux; descriptions of meetings, such as the French writers’ protest in support of those persecuted in Germany; allusions to the various cultural congresses—all lack precision, and above all any vibrant communicative power. As for the European upheavals that took place during the eight years that his Diary covers (1928–36), their repercussion here is almost nonexistent. The advent of Hitler, the Abyssinian war, the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, serve simply as backdrop to the stage occupied by the author’s states of mind.
There is something typical in all this. The latest book by Guéhenno (Diary of a ‘Revolution’) is further proof: a commentary on the Popular Front government, and far more resolutely oriented to political actuality, it is no less vague and adopts no decisive stance. André Thérive, the best-informed of French critics, judiciously wrote (Le Temps, 22 June 1939): ‘M. Guéhenno sustains his confidence by his very defeats.’ In Dabit’s case, it is less a matter of confidence than of apprehension, derived from a tenacious fear of ‘missing out on life’. It is true that he confesses this fear without any affectation. But could a more sophisticated presentation lend worth to such reflections as these?
Complaints of this kind set the tone. Obsession with women recurs repeatedly, plaintive for the most part. Yet this is a man of thirty-seven. Most disconcerting of all is the insistence on the agony of war, which crops up like an idée fixe, no matter what the context. This obsession seems to have the function of draining any definite content from the political circumstances that fuel it. There is something sad in discovering that a man whom one had imagined sturdy and determined to change the course of events, in reality latches on to the first philanthropist to come along.
Closing this long parenthesis, let us return to Surrealism with the last-but-one book by Jules Romains, Volume 17 of his Men of Good Will: Vorge against Quinette. Its subject is quite curious. In the second volume of his story, Romains had introduced Landru as one of his characters (under the name of Quinette). [8] In Volume 17, he brings Quinette to the fore, while dissociating him quite unexpectedly from his original model. Quinette, in fact, is supposed to follow the Landru trial in the papers, and to find one of his own victims in the list of crimes imputed to Landru. It is around this time that a young Surrealist, Vorge, comes across Quinette, whom he alone sees in his true light, i.e. as the author of a series of murders, through a series of links that Romains cleverly constructs. It is only a short step from this to promote Quinette as the grand master of Surrealism, which Vorge cheerfully does.
The novel is a pleasant read. If I mention it here in particular it is because it provides grounds for thinking more about its author. (Another reason, of which I assume you are aware, is that Romains has been very active in support of the intellectuals in the detention camps. He was intervening on my behalf when I was released.) Two questions may be asked about Romains: why does he have such a great influence on the public? And what is his political ‘line of force’? The two questions are connected. As for the second, I would refer to my letter of 24 January last year. Here it is appropriate to signal the broad political developments in the volume under discussion, which appeared towards the end of last year, in other words just after the declaration of war. This confers a very particular interest on its final chapter ‘The Festival of Victory’. It makes a gripping read. One of the principal passages loses scarcely anything in being taken out of context:
One might say this is simply reportage. But it is reportage impregnated not just with the atmosphere of past events, but also with the actual situations of the many readers of this account. This leads me to the first of the two questions. One of Romains’s achievements lies in the fact that his work, starting from the post-War era, is entirely devoted to a recent past, yet combines this portrayal of the past with a constant concern for actuality. This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past. Romains’s speciality within contemporary French literature is the richness of information on the play of the social machine, the routines of government, church, parliamentary, commercial and military action. On this point his books are comparable to the novels of Dumas père, with their inexhaustible detailing of Parisian life. At all events, Romains possesses an extraordinary faculty for putting a range of psychological and social experiences within public reach that it would be hard to access through reasoning or moral feeling. The way in which Surrealism is presented in Vorge against Quinette is further proof of this.
I have waited until the end of this survey to discuss a rather slim volume presented as a series of essays—Georges Salles, Le Regard. This is an enchanting work. I bring it to your attention not so much for some of the theoretical passages, which I shall note, but rather for its beauty, which strike the reader more or less throughout in its happy formulations. Salles is curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre, and writes only incidentally. His book is all the richer from the experiences accumulated in the course of his work. Nothing reveals this better than when the author laments:
In defining such a vision, the author uses terms close to Proust’s. I was particularly struck to find a description of the aura similar to the one I used in my Baudelaire. Salles sees art objects as
Salles considers the connoisseur’s contribution as essential to the life of museums. He fears the day when the state becomes the sole collector. In the meantime, he ascribes to the museum the task of educating the public’s sensibility, over and above that of instruction.
The author rails against a misplaced modernization, and expresses reservations about some of the initiatives at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, with particular allusion to the Van Gogh exhibition where the canvases were surrounded with documentation, as much photographic as written. The public was overwhelmed with far more material than it could take in. (One of the principal contributors to this exhibition was John Rewald. Along with the novelist Noth, he is almost the only German émigré to have made a name for himself in France. He is a hard worker, very well-informed on certain subjects, a young man in command of his world—yet a mind without real scope.) Salles’s critique of this false scientific complacency is also an attack on excessive material comfort. He denounces the danger ‘of pandering too much to the ease of the visitor or the comfort of the art-object’, and thus neglecting ‘the timely inconvenience that provokes their encounter and initiates debate’ (pp. 90–1).
Salles’s concern for clarity, and for the riches of sensuous reception, are combined with a perfect understanding of the workings of theory. He understands its necessarily indirect and roundabout character, and grasps its aim. ‘An art’, in effect, ‘differs from what has gone before, and comes into being precisely because it expresses a completely different reality, not merely a material modification: it reflects a different man . . . The moment to grasp is that at which an expressive fullness responds to the birth of a social character’ (pp. 118–20). Salles seems to understand very clearly what the theoretical penetration of the art object, provided this is sufficiently far-reaching, can teach us about ‘the birth of a social character’. ‘To study the fundamentals of an art, we must, in the end, shatter our frameworks and steep ourselves in those hallucinations of which this art yields us only a clotted sediment; we must journey through the depths of social species now extinct. A hazardous task, with much to tempt a sociologist aware of his mission’ (pp. 123–4).
There is no need to force the text to see that in these lines the author pursues an identical goal to that envisaged in the third part of my essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. I hope these few notes will suffice to persuade you to read this book, which has such an essentially Parisian atmosphere: the gentle and powerful light of knowledge, filtered through the unstable, cloudy layer of the passions.
In my letter of 3 November 1937, I informed you about Merinos by Henri Calet. I can now recommend Fever of the Polders, by the same author, published after an interval of three years. The quite remarkable quality of this novel explains why Calet cannot conform to the normal rhythm of production for novelists, of one or two books per year.
As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know. His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago. [9]
Caillois has published a ‘Theory of the Festival’ in the nrf, rather pretentious reflections that contain nothing really new. The same author—he is now in Argentina, where he has just got married—has launched a manifesto there against Hitlerism. It is a series of points that simply repeats what honest people have been saying unceasingly for seven years.
By way of information: a History of Art Criticism by Lionello Venturi. The author, son of the famous historian of Italian Renaissance painting, left for America at the start of the War. His book is only a compilation, complete but hurried. A young normalien, Georges Blin, has just published a book on Baudelaire (with nrf). I shall tell you about it next time.
A few days ago, I heard from Mme Adorno that M. Kraft wrote to you from Jerusalem to claim priority for ‘Jochmann’. She said that you would be forwarding me his letter. This has still not reached me. But in any case I want to tell you right away that M. Kraft’s letter relates to a conflict following which I broke off relations with him. This was early in 1937, and my ‘Jochmann’ text was at the root of it. M. Kraft was familiar with Jochmann before I was; but I came across him independently from Kraft, in the course of my studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Seeing M. Kraft issue the claim to reserve this author for himself, I did not hide the fact that I deemed this inadmissible, and will consider it totally unacceptable. I await his letter to send you a detailed exposé of the facts.
Death has reaped an ample harvest in recent times, even in ‘peaceful’ quarters. You will naturally have been informed of the deaths of Fuchs and Bouglé. The great critic Charles Du Bos shortly preceded them. A few days ago, Paul Desjardins died; I described him to you last year during my visit to Pontigny. And personally, I have just lost a very young friend, a graphic artist of exquisite talent, who took his own life together with his wife. [10]
One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire.
Since neither my health nor the blackout makes me want to go out, I live a very reclusive existence. Perhaps that can excuse the unwarranted length of this letter.
I end with my most cordial greetings to you and your friends.
Walter Benjamin
Translated by David Fernbach. Reprinted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vi, pp. 403–21, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
[1] C. F. Ramuz (1878–1947): Swiss writer. [Footnotes by nlr]
[2] Michel Leiris (1910–90): ethnographer, Surrealist.
[3] Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901–44): German philosopher.
[4] Alfred Polgar (1873–1955): Austrian essayist; the remark also appears in Polgar, Ja und Nein, Hamburg 1956.
[5] Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962): Lautréamont, Paris 1939.
[6] Adrien Turel (1890–1957): Swiss philosopher and psychoanalyst; see ‘Dantes “Inferno” als Gegenwart und Wirklichkeit’ in Die Literarische Welt 3, 1927.
[7] Eugène Dabit (1898–1936): author of Hôtel du Nord.
[8] Henri Landru (1869–1922): conman convicted of 11 murders in 1919, the year in which the action of Vorge against Quinette unfolds.
[9] Panait Istrati (1884–1935): Romanian novelist, collaborator of Serge and Boris Souvarine. Istrati in fact only wrote the first volume of the 1929 trilogy to which Benjamin refers—Towards the Other Flame; Serge wrote the second, Souvarine the third, but by agreement all three appeared under Istrati’s name.
[10] Eduard Fuchs (1870–1940): collector; Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940): sociologist; Charles Du Bos (1882–1939): literary critic; Paul Desjardins (1859–1940): organizer of the annual gatherings of writers and intellectuals at the Décades de Pontigny, 1910–39. The graphic artist and his wife are probably Augustus Hamburger and Carola Muschler.
By the same author:
Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois
A Radio Talk on Brecht
Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia
Conversations with Brecht
The Author as Producer
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
copyright: The New Left Review
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War. [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, seeming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française. The author still holds the stage, as he seems to be becoming the nrf’s accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his ‘Pages from a Neutral’, presented as the start of a long series of reflections.
Ramuz’s language bears traces of the hold that Péguy must have exercised over him. It offers the same cascade of repetitions, the same series of minimal variations on a given phrase. But what in Péguy recalls the movement of a man driving in a nail by successive hammer strokes, rather suggests, with Ramuz, the gait of an individual interminably repeating his steps—like those neurotics who, when they leave the house, are obsessed by the idea of having left a tap running or forgotten to turn off the gas. A recent critic has rightly emphasized the tenacious anxiety of Ramuz. In other words, one will not be expecting certainty, trenchancy or established conviction from this author. The drawbacks of such an approach are obvious; but it is not without certain advantages. Ramuz is a relatively unbiased spirit. He proved this five years ago with his book What is Man, an interesting attempt to get to the heart of the famous Russian experience, which displays the same hesitations that are so striking in ‘Pages from a Neutral’ and in Paris: Notes by a Vaudois.
As to the latter: the first chapters, which tell how the ‘little Vaudois’ established himself in Paris around the beginning of the century, may be simply signalled in passing. Ramuz describes with great acuity the developing consciousness of the young provincial whose Parisian isolation makes him aware of his essential solitude and difference. Moving on to the theoretical notes in the second part of the book, a few samplings will suffice to bring out the characteristics noted above. Ramuz writes:
This is in sharp distinction to the denunciations of the great city as a centre of disorder and disruption, sheltering that ‘nomadic, floating and overflowing mass . . . corrupting by its idleness in the public arena, blown by the winds of factions, by the voice of whoever shouts loudest.’ This was Lamartine, but the same alarm bells ring all through the century—in Haussmann, and later Spengler. It is no less surprising to encounter Ramuz’s account of the alleged eclipse of the prestige of Paris—the great city par excellence:
You will understand, from this little internal debate, how greatly Ramuz seems designed by vocation for the role of Neutral. At all events, his gifts as observer and writer bring us some remarkable pages:
The reader can expand on such reflections in painful reverie: this wandering flock that Ramuz evokes has been enlarged by the war that has raged in Guernica, in Vyborg, in Warsaw.
Michel Leiris’s book, Manhood, is also based on the biography of the author. [2] But what a different biography this is! Before going further, I would like to draw out what it has in common with other recent Surrealist publications. Particularly notable is a decline in the power of bluff: a power that was one of the glories of Surrealist actions from the beginning. This drop is accompanied by a weakening of internal structure and an unwonted textual transparency. This is due, in part, to the grip that Freudianism exerts over these authors.
Leiris is in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, which I wrote to you about at the time of its foundation. In civilian life he is an ethnologist with the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro. As for the personal impression he makes, you met him yourself in 1934 or 35, at a soirée at Landsberg’s. [3] It would be no exaggeration to claim that his book would have been the greatest success of the literary season if the War had not intervened. I think certain pages of his autobiography might interest you and will take the liberty of sending you the volume.
You will not suspect me of an excessive tenderness, either for the milieu from which this production emerges, or for the literary genre (‘true confessions’) to which it belongs. In fact the book rather reminded me of Chaplin’s well-known gag where, playing the part of a pawnshop employee dealing with a customer who wants to pawn an alarm clock, he examines the object with distrust, then, to make sure, carefully takes the mechanism to pieces, finally putting all the parts in the customer’s hat and explaining that he cannot see his way to granting a loan on such an object. I have been told that, when Polgar saw this film, he exclaimed: ‘That’s psychoanalysis, the spitting image!’ [4] Leiris’s book, which the author explains was written after psychoanalytic treatment, may well trigger the same remark. It seems unlikely that a man who has been brought to list his mental assets so scrupulously can hope to produce future works. Leiris explains this clearly enough: ‘It is as though the fallacious constructions on which my life was based had been undermined at their foundations, without my being given anything that could replace them. The result is that I certainly act more sagaciously; but the emptiness in which I dwell is all the more acute’ (p. 167).
It is not surprising, after this, that the author should show little gratitude towards psychoanalysis: ‘Though the modern explorers of the unconscious speak of Oedipus, castration, guilt, narcissism, I do not believe this is any great advance in terms of the essentials of the matter (which remains, as I see it, related to the problem of death, the apprehension of nothingness, and is thus a question for metaphysics)’ (p.125). This passage delimits the intellectual horizon of Leiris and his milieu. His judgement of the revolutionary impulses that he experienced at one point is thus only to be expected: ‘I could not completely admit at that time that what triggered my anger . . . was not the condition that the laws of society have placed us in, but simply death’ (p. 553).
These positions, though they situate the book, would not in themselves have led me to bring it to your attention. The reason is rather that, for all our reservations, it must be admitted that the complexes recorded here are described with a remarkable vigour. If you will excuse a personal reference, I would say that the two dominant complexes, Lucretia and Judith, forcefully remind me of those colour plates that are to be found in certain books of the mid-nineteenth century. These were novels for petites gens, shop assistants or servants, and the illustrations were the work of anonymous artists. Plates with garish colours were covered with a coat of varnish that gave them an ambiguous glow. These illustrations (to which I consecrated my collector’s passion for many years) belong to what can be called the folklore of the great cities. In Leiris’s work this same folklore flows from places such as public swimming pools, brothels and racecourses. It is inspired by an eroticism that rejects socially acceptable forms and turns resolutely towards exoticism and crime. The author’s depictions of the fortune-telling prostitute (p. 33), of Judith (p. 116), of the museum as a site of debauchery (p. 40) are gripping. I was not surprised to find, in two interlinked sentences, the same interweaving of purity and corruption that gives this popular imagery I mentioned above its terrifying charm. Leiris actually writes: ‘I have always loved purity, folklore, all that is childish, primitive, innocent.’—And, immediately after: ‘I aspire to evil because a certain evil is necessary to entertain me’ (p. 110). Finally, I would like to signal to you two passages of philosophical interest: a theory of orgasm (pp. 65–6), and an erotic theory of suicide (p. 114).
Leiris’s book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. [5] This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother’s womb. [6] That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard’s studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established.
Bachelard points to the preponderant role played by animals in Lautréamont’s imagination. He draws up an inventory of the animal forms that proliferate in Maldoror. It is not, however, the bodily shape of these beasts that obsesses the poet, but rather their aggressive desire. Here again, Bachelard’s exposition seems unassailable. He explains how disturbed Lautréamont is by various forms of animal aggressivity. He shows how these different manifestations are constantly transforming into each other. They present the elements of an interminable metamorphosis. This must be emphasized, in Bachelard’s view, while taking into account the primacy of claw and muzzle as symbols of aggression. Among the living creatures of the earth, the ones that Lautréamont particularly identifies with, according to Bachelard, are those that swim and those that fly. (In fact the attempt is made to establish a kind of mystic identity between the two.)
It goes without saying that no elucidation of Lautréamont’s poetry can succeed outside of a historical analysis. Bachelard’s accommodation of a metaphysical concept of ‘spirit’ stands in total opposition to this. It is this concept—through which he reunites with Jung—that deprives him of any critical penetration, and which is finally responsible for a terminology both slovenly and pedantic. References to an ‘essentially dynamic phenomenology’ (p. 42), a ‘psychism that is not only kinetic, but truly potential’ (p. 174), sustained by a grandiloquent jargon—‘the animal is a monovalent psychism’ (p. 173), etc.—stud the text. Theorists such as Caillois, or ‘the eager young philosopher Armand Petit-jean’ (pp. 180 and 187) are appealed to as authorities. Nor is Klossowski’s study on Time and Aggression forgotten. The book’s methodological procedure, in other words, is far from promising. But before tackling the heart of his study, I would like to mention what is truly amusing about it—comic, even. And I am far from claiming that this comic aspect was not felt and intended by the author himself.
For Bachelard, Lautréamont’s death at the age of twenty-four—as well as certain passages in his oeuvre—justifies placing great importance on the experience of the poet as a schoolboy. The pages where he brings out the deep-seated nature of the poet’s cruelty—identified both with the severity of the teachers, and with the tortures inflicted by the older boys on those new to the class—are very welcome. Nor is Bachelard afraid to write that Lautréamont’s drama is one ‘born in the Rhetoric class’ (p. 99). In a conclusion, he connects Lautréamont’s famous ‘Hymn to Mathematics’ (model for Aragon’s ‘Hymn to Philately’) to the very essence of this cruelty:
I confess that I find highly seductive the idea that this book, full of outrageous assertions, emerged from a classroom, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is also backed up by quotations that show what a raging need for revenge his school years aroused in the poet: ‘The classroom is hell, and hell is a classroom’ (p. 101).
The third aspect that Bachelard’s book offers is far and away the most interesting; it is also one that has completely escaped the author himself. To stay within the circle of psychoanalytic experience, his book might be compared with drawings that certain analysands provide to help explain their dreams. Psychoanalysts treat the drawings as puzzles (Vexierbilder) and manage to find in them images that correspond to the subject’s latent preoccupations. Bachelard’s book likewise has a latent content, of which he allows himself to be the dreamer, I would say.
Lautréamont’s fundamental impulse, as Bachelard describes it—his ‘Platonic violence’ (p. 168)—suggests all-too-familiar features to the contemporary reader. But Bachelard is so unaware of the image these features compose that he is quite prepared to salute this new ‘Platonism’ as a philosophy of the future. His description of Maldoror’s aggression can be summarized in four tropes. ‘It is in the dream of action that the truly human joys of action reside. To act without acting, to leave . . . the heavy continuous time of practice for the shimmering momentary time of projects’ (p. 197)—here is the first distinctive feature of his conception. From this it follows that violence demands a ‘suspended time’, to which Lautréamont ‘knew how to give the temporal essence of menace, of deferred aggression.’ ‘Whilst animal aggression is expressed without delay, and is candid in its crime . . . Lautréamont integrates the lie into his violence. The lie is the human sign par excellence’ (p. 90). Here we encounter the third element of this unprecedented Platonism:
Finally, in the same order of ideas, this violence is essentially vindictive. ‘What is striking in . . . Lautréamont’s revenges is that these are almost never struggles against an equal. They attack the weakest or the strongest . . . they smother or they scratch. They smother the weak. They scratch the strong’ (p. 80).
Bringing together these indications—scattered throughout Bachelard’s analysis—the physiognomy of Hitlerite domination emerges with all the sharpness one could wish, like the figure hidden in the puzzle. Thus it should not be too much of an effort for Bachelard to grasp the insanity of his assertion that ‘It is necessary to graft intellectual values onto Lautréamontism’ (p. 199).
Reading these reflections, you will surely not accuse me of forcing the interpretation or seeing problems where there are none. And yet, to better explain the course that my thoughts have followed in such readings, I would like to interject a few words on a subject that has nothing directly to do with the present survey. I refer to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Without dwelling on the circumstances that led me to consult this book, I simply want to let you know the devastating impression it makes on anyone who opens it for the first time in these months. I have had the opportunity to do so, as well as that of finding not the German text but only the French translation, which, by sacrificing its nuances, shows all the more sharply the book’s key ideas. You are familiar with the work; I shall not repeat them here. The most I will say is that I found in Spengler a development of the idea of peace that is a perfect complement to Bachelard’s analysis of violence: ‘Universal peace is always a unilateral decision. The Pax Romana had one and only one meaning for the later military emperors and the German kings: to make a formless population of hundreds of millions into the object of the will to power of a few small bands of warriors’ (p. 266).
I do not flatter myself with making any new discovery when I say that a number of elements of the Hitlerite doctrine are ready to hand in this book. For example: ‘It is from an entirely metaphysical disharmony of “feeling” that a racial hatred is born which is no less strong between French and Germans than between Germans and Jews’ (p. 235). All this is too well known; the only thing that could perhaps detain us is that, when this second volume appeared in 1922, any decisive reaction on the part of the German Left seems to have been absent. The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.
Apart from all this, there is one element of the book whose meaning seems only to have surfaced at the present time. This concerns the very procedure of Spengler’s thought, which seems to prefigure that of Hitlerite strategy. Spengler, without any deep knowledge of the subjects on which he prognosticates, refers to the most distant epochs with the sole purpose of integrating them into a performance—Schau—which constitutes, quite precisely, a speculative model for the Reich. This Schau is, in fact, expressly defined as a ‘decree of blood’ (p. 69). Any historical epoch can form part of its metaphysical ‘living space’, just as any territory can form part of the Reich’s Lebensraum. The démarche in the physical world was thus preceded by a similar metaphysical procedure. Few books give a better sense of what is hideous and hateful in the claim of German profundity.
The poverty of the German intellectual milieux mentioned above is not without its counterpart in France. At the moment when the Hitler–Stalin entente has knocked away the whole scaffolding of the Popular Front, a book has appeared that provides evidence of the latter’s intrinsic weaknesses. To be sure, one does not approach Eugène Dabit’s Intimate Diary in any spirit of severity. [7] The author tells his story without pretensions of any kind—neither literary: ‘I speak here only of certain of my states of mind. And not always very clearly or deeply’ (p. 342)—nor moral: no search for a position of advantage, or even an interesting attitude. There is, besides, the question of his fate: the author was cut down, not yet forty, by an illness contracted during his journey to Russia. All this makes for a rather favourable disposition towards the book he left behind; but this inevitably evaporates in the course of reading. It is oppressive, and for reasons that, for the most part, necessarily escaped its author.
One cannot discount the fact that Dabit was a champion of the Popular Front, and one in whom the literary hopes of the movement were vested. Yet the first striking fact is the lacklustre colouring of his political memoirs. Interviews with men like Gide or Malraux; descriptions of meetings, such as the French writers’ protest in support of those persecuted in Germany; allusions to the various cultural congresses—all lack precision, and above all any vibrant communicative power. As for the European upheavals that took place during the eight years that his Diary covers (1928–36), their repercussion here is almost nonexistent. The advent of Hitler, the Abyssinian war, the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, serve simply as backdrop to the stage occupied by the author’s states of mind.
There is something typical in all this. The latest book by Guéhenno (Diary of a ‘Revolution’) is further proof: a commentary on the Popular Front government, and far more resolutely oriented to political actuality, it is no less vague and adopts no decisive stance. André Thérive, the best-informed of French critics, judiciously wrote (Le Temps, 22 June 1939): ‘M. Guéhenno sustains his confidence by his very defeats.’ In Dabit’s case, it is less a matter of confidence than of apprehension, derived from a tenacious fear of ‘missing out on life’. It is true that he confesses this fear without any affectation. But could a more sophisticated presentation lend worth to such reflections as these?
Complaints of this kind set the tone. Obsession with women recurs repeatedly, plaintive for the most part. Yet this is a man of thirty-seven. Most disconcerting of all is the insistence on the agony of war, which crops up like an idée fixe, no matter what the context. This obsession seems to have the function of draining any definite content from the political circumstances that fuel it. There is something sad in discovering that a man whom one had imagined sturdy and determined to change the course of events, in reality latches on to the first philanthropist to come along.
Closing this long parenthesis, let us return to Surrealism with the last-but-one book by Jules Romains, Volume 17 of his Men of Good Will: Vorge against Quinette. Its subject is quite curious. In the second volume of his story, Romains had introduced Landru as one of his characters (under the name of Quinette). [8] In Volume 17, he brings Quinette to the fore, while dissociating him quite unexpectedly from his original model. Quinette, in fact, is supposed to follow the Landru trial in the papers, and to find one of his own victims in the list of crimes imputed to Landru. It is around this time that a young Surrealist, Vorge, comes across Quinette, whom he alone sees in his true light, i.e. as the author of a series of murders, through a series of links that Romains cleverly constructs. It is only a short step from this to promote Quinette as the grand master of Surrealism, which Vorge cheerfully does.
The novel is a pleasant read. If I mention it here in particular it is because it provides grounds for thinking more about its author. (Another reason, of which I assume you are aware, is that Romains has been very active in support of the intellectuals in the detention camps. He was intervening on my behalf when I was released.) Two questions may be asked about Romains: why does he have such a great influence on the public? And what is his political ‘line of force’? The two questions are connected. As for the second, I would refer to my letter of 24 January last year. Here it is appropriate to signal the broad political developments in the volume under discussion, which appeared towards the end of last year, in other words just after the declaration of war. This confers a very particular interest on its final chapter ‘The Festival of Victory’. It makes a gripping read. One of the principal passages loses scarcely anything in being taken out of context:
One might say this is simply reportage. But it is reportage impregnated not just with the atmosphere of past events, but also with the actual situations of the many readers of this account. This leads me to the first of the two questions. One of Romains’s achievements lies in the fact that his work, starting from the post-War era, is entirely devoted to a recent past, yet combines this portrayal of the past with a constant concern for actuality. This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past. Romains’s speciality within contemporary French literature is the richness of information on the play of the social machine, the routines of government, church, parliamentary, commercial and military action. On this point his books are comparable to the novels of Dumas père, with their inexhaustible detailing of Parisian life. At all events, Romains possesses an extraordinary faculty for putting a range of psychological and social experiences within public reach that it would be hard to access through reasoning or moral feeling. The way in which Surrealism is presented in Vorge against Quinette is further proof of this.
I have waited until the end of this survey to discuss a rather slim volume presented as a series of essays—Georges Salles, Le Regard. This is an enchanting work. I bring it to your attention not so much for some of the theoretical passages, which I shall note, but rather for its beauty, which strike the reader more or less throughout in its happy formulations. Salles is curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre, and writes only incidentally. His book is all the richer from the experiences accumulated in the course of his work. Nothing reveals this better than when the author laments:
In defining such a vision, the author uses terms close to Proust’s. I was particularly struck to find a description of the aura similar to the one I used in my Baudelaire. Salles sees art objects as
Salles considers the connoisseur’s contribution as essential to the life of museums. He fears the day when the state becomes the sole collector. In the meantime, he ascribes to the museum the task of educating the public’s sensibility, over and above that of instruction.
The author rails against a misplaced modernization, and expresses reservations about some of the initiatives at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, with particular allusion to the Van Gogh exhibition where the canvases were surrounded with documentation, as much photographic as written. The public was overwhelmed with far more material than it could take in. (One of the principal contributors to this exhibition was John Rewald. Along with the novelist Noth, he is almost the only German émigré to have made a name for himself in France. He is a hard worker, very well-informed on certain subjects, a young man in command of his world—yet a mind without real scope.) Salles’s critique of this false scientific complacency is also an attack on excessive material comfort. He denounces the danger ‘of pandering too much to the ease of the visitor or the comfort of the art-object’, and thus neglecting ‘the timely inconvenience that provokes their encounter and initiates debate’ (pp. 90–1).
Salles’s concern for clarity, and for the riches of sensuous reception, are combined with a perfect understanding of the workings of theory. He understands its necessarily indirect and roundabout character, and grasps its aim. ‘An art’, in effect, ‘differs from what has gone before, and comes into being precisely because it expresses a completely different reality, not merely a material modification: it reflects a different man . . . The moment to grasp is that at which an expressive fullness responds to the birth of a social character’ (pp. 118–20). Salles seems to understand very clearly what the theoretical penetration of the art object, provided this is sufficiently far-reaching, can teach us about ‘the birth of a social character’. ‘To study the fundamentals of an art, we must, in the end, shatter our frameworks and steep ourselves in those hallucinations of which this art yields us only a clotted sediment; we must journey through the depths of social species now extinct. A hazardous task, with much to tempt a sociologist aware of his mission’ (pp. 123–4).
There is no need to force the text to see that in these lines the author pursues an identical goal to that envisaged in the third part of my essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. I hope these few notes will suffice to persuade you to read this book, which has such an essentially Parisian atmosphere: the gentle and powerful light of knowledge, filtered through the unstable, cloudy layer of the passions.
In my letter of 3 November 1937, I informed you about Merinos by Henri Calet. I can now recommend Fever of the Polders, by the same author, published after an interval of three years. The quite remarkable quality of this novel explains why Calet cannot conform to the normal rhythm of production for novelists, of one or two books per year.
As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know. His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago. [9]
Caillois has published a ‘Theory of the Festival’ in the nrf, rather pretentious reflections that contain nothing really new. The same author—he is now in Argentina, where he has just got married—has launched a manifesto there against Hitlerism. It is a series of points that simply repeats what honest people have been saying unceasingly for seven years.
By way of information: a History of Art Criticism by Lionello Venturi. The author, son of the famous historian of Italian Renaissance painting, left for America at the start of the War. His book is only a compilation, complete but hurried. A young normalien, Georges Blin, has just published a book on Baudelaire (with nrf). I shall tell you about it next time.
A few days ago, I heard from Mme Adorno that M. Kraft wrote to you from Jerusalem to claim priority for ‘Jochmann’. She said that you would be forwarding me his letter. This has still not reached me. But in any case I want to tell you right away that M. Kraft’s letter relates to a conflict following which I broke off relations with him. This was early in 1937, and my ‘Jochmann’ text was at the root of it. M. Kraft was familiar with Jochmann before I was; but I came across him independently from Kraft, in the course of my studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Seeing M. Kraft issue the claim to reserve this author for himself, I did not hide the fact that I deemed this inadmissible, and will consider it totally unacceptable. I await his letter to send you a detailed exposé of the facts.
Death has reaped an ample harvest in recent times, even in ‘peaceful’ quarters. You will naturally have been informed of the deaths of Fuchs and Bouglé. The great critic Charles Du Bos shortly preceded them. A few days ago, Paul Desjardins died; I described him to you last year during my visit to Pontigny. And personally, I have just lost a very young friend, a graphic artist of exquisite talent, who took his own life together with his wife. [10]
One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire.
Since neither my health nor the blackout makes me want to go out, I live a very reclusive existence. Perhaps that can excuse the unwarranted length of this letter.
I end with my most cordial greetings to you and your friends.
Walter Benjamin
Translated by David Fernbach. Reprinted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vi, pp. 403–21, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
[1] C. F. Ramuz (1878–1947): Swiss writer. [Footnotes by nlr]
[2] Michel Leiris (1910–90): ethnographer, Surrealist.
[3] Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901–44): German philosopher.
[4] Alfred Polgar (1873–1955): Austrian essayist; the remark also appears in Polgar, Ja und Nein, Hamburg 1956.
[5] Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962): Lautréamont, Paris 1939.
[6] Adrien Turel (1890–1957): Swiss philosopher and psychoanalyst; see ‘Dantes “Inferno” als Gegenwart und Wirklichkeit’ in Die Literarische Welt 3, 1927.
[7] Eugène Dabit (1898–1936): author of Hôtel du Nord.
[8] Henri Landru (1869–1922): conman convicted of 11 murders in 1919, the year in which the action of Vorge against Quinette unfolds.
[9] Panait Istrati (1884–1935): Romanian novelist, collaborator of Serge and Boris Souvarine. Istrati in fact only wrote the first volume of the 1929 trilogy to which Benjamin refers—Towards the Other Flame; Serge wrote the second, Souvarine the third, but by agreement all three appeared under Istrati’s name.
[10] Eduard Fuchs (1870–1940): collector; Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940): sociologist; Charles Du Bos (1882–1939): literary critic; Paul Desjardins (1859–1940): organizer of the annual gatherings of writers and intellectuals at the Décades de Pontigny, 1910–39. The graphic artist and his wife are probably Augustus Hamburger and Carola Muschler.
By the same author:
Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois
A Radio Talk on Brecht
Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia
Conversations with Brecht
The Author as Producer
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
copyright: The New Left Review
Wall St woes help Obama overtake McCain express
Wall St woes help Obama overtake McCain express
With Palin mania ebbing away, the Republican campaign looks suddenly vulnerable after a string of serious gaffes. A tumultuous week on the financial front and a drift of women voters back to Obama have eroded McCain's gains and made the election once more too close to call. The Democrats are now fighting on a ground of their own choosing - the economy
Paul Harris in Iowa
The Observer,
Sunday September 21 2008
Article history
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Photograph: Bob Brown/AP
The opening was superbly choreographed. To the sound of thundering rock music blaring from speakers, several thousand people watched as John McCain's campaign plane swooped out of the sparkling blue Iowa skies.
The plane taxied to a halt only 100 metres away from the crowd gathered at an airport outside the city of Cedar Rapids. They cheered wildly as McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, descended from the aircraft and trooped through the throng, smiling and shaking hands.
Then things started to go wrong. 'Thank you so much, Iowa. It's great to be here in Grand Rapids,' Palin said as she took the stage, naming a completely different city in the far-off state of Michigan. 'CEDAR Rapids!' came shouts from the crowd. Palin ignored her gaffe and ploughed on with a speech that was quickly interrupted by anti-war protesters. For several minutes the hangar was filled with shouts and chants, drowning out the Alaska governor's words. Then McCain took the stage, and the same thing happened to him, forcing him off his script to address an unruly scrimmage as security hauled out the shouting demonstrators. 'The one thing Americans want us to do is stop yelling at each other,' McCain said in exasperation.
Suddenly, after hauling his campaign back into contention for the White House, the wheels are starting to come off McCain's fabled Straight Talk Express. The gaffe-ridden rally in Cedar Rapids was only one indication. In a week of almost unprecedented economic crisis, when Wall Street seemed on the brink of meltdown, McCain's presidential bid was hit by mistake after mistake, varying from the serious to the surreal.
As stocks dropped off a precipice, McCain said the economic fundamentals were strong. Then a senior aide seemed to suggest McCain had invented the BlackBerry. His top economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, confessed she thought neither McCain nor Palin was capable of running a large company. Then, in the middle of the worst financial collapse since the 1930s, McCain got the public endorsement of Donald Trump, a celebrity tycoon who symbolises raw capitalism. For a candidate trying to strike a populist tone, the backing of 'the Donald' was poorly timed. 'It's like a Saturday Night Live routine,' quipped rival Barack Obama on a campaign stop in Nevada.
At the same time the remarkable surge of support inspired by Palin seems to be ebbing. Polls show women voters drifting back to Obama, who has established a slim lead again. Palin is increasingly mired in the 'Troopergate' scandal related to allegations that she fired a senior official out of a personal grudge against her sister's former partner. Palin's star, which shone so brightly for two weeks and reinvigorated the Republican base, is showing every sign of dimming. But the real problem is the biggest one: the stunning economic rollercoaster of last week. Americans in their tens of millions have been glued to their TV screens watching banks collapse, stocks slide and their own government pump billions of dollars into the system to bail out troubled banks and insurers. It has turned the election right back to the core issue that Democrats have wanted to talk about all along: the economy and its terrible woes. McCain, with the first presidential debate looming this week, is now fighting the election on his opponent's strongest turf. In an America shaken and scared by the spectre of a second Great Depression, no one is talking about pigs, lipstick or moose-hunting any more.
But McCain is nothing if not a fighter. In Cedar Rapids he came out blazing against Wall Street, reckless investors and the regulators who let them place such risky bets. His speech was full of fiery language as he vowed to sack government officials, defend US workers and clean up Washington DC. 'Right now you are hurting and it is not your fault,' he told the crowd of several thousand packed into an aircraft hangar. 'It started at the top. It started in Washington. It started on Wall Street and we are going to fix it.'
The crowd dutifully cheered its support, swinging behind this new image of McCain as a man of the people. The applause lines just kept on coming. 'They turned our markets into a casino,' McCain added, to more cheers. 'The regulators were asleep at the switch. They were asleep, my friends. They were not working for you,' he said. It seemed to work, too, though only with an all-Republican crowd that had long bought into his message. 'I am very excited about this. McCain right now is the best thing for this country,' said Harry Meek, owner of a local Iowa pest management company, who had driven more than 100 miles to get to the rally.
Outside the confines of a friendly Republican crowd, McCain's message is likely to meet greater resistance. For many years, McCain has been an outspoken advocate of easing restrictions on Wall Street, not tightening regulations. His campaign is closely linked to lobbyists and the financial industry is a huge donator to his cause. That has allowed Obama's speechwriters to hurl some sharply worded barbs. 'The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting,' is one of Obama's most popular lines in his current stump speech.
At the same time McCain is facing an American electorate likely to blame eight years living under a Republican White House for the current mess. The words that McCain never mentions on the campaign trail are 'President George W Bush'. In effect, McCain has to run against what his own Republican party has done for the last two presidential terms, almost turning his campaign into a third party. But the Bush legacy is still likely to cast a deep shadow over his efforts. 'It is hard for his message to ring true: "If you elect me I will finally clean up Washington, having been there for 30 years",' said Professor Seth Masket, a political scientist at Denver University. 'It is a really hard needle to thread.'
The economy is not the ground on which McCain wanted to fight the election. His line last week that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' was the latest in a long list of verbal mistakes he has made over economic issues. The subject has been a weak one for Republicans ever since the Bush administration turned a surplus into a massive deficit and jobless figures started creeping up.
A recent Washington Post poll found that people preferred Obama on the economy by 51 per cent to 39 per cent. Almost three-quarters of people said Obama understood their economic problems, compared with only 53 per cent who thought McCain felt that way. Certainly McCain's recent successes in the polls have not been built on his economic image. Instead they were boosted by a tough, disciplined message machine that had successfully torn into Obama's image and accused him of being elitist, liberal and sexist. But now that apparatus of attack is starting to splutter too. Reporters on McCain's campaign plane recently staged a protest against a decision to cut off access to McCain. They chanted 'Bring Mac back!' as they sat in their plane seats. The demonstration had little impact but showed how broken relations have become with the press corps that once fawned upon the candidate.
At the same time, the hard-edged anti-Obama attacks have become so extreme that many commentators have accused the campaign of outright lies. Even the conservative Fox News channel joined the debate when one of its anchors publicly ripped into a senior McCain spokesman on air for misrepresenting Obama's tax plans.
Finally, to add to the misery, there has been a slew of negative news about Palin. After first promising to co-operate in the Troopergate investigation in Alaska, she has now refused to testify. So has her husband, Todd. The McCain campaign is taking the whole issue so seriously that it has dispatched a rapid response team to Alaska to rebut the regular new revelations emerging from the state. The effort is being directed by lawyer Edward O'Callaghan, a McCain aide who was previously a terrorist expert. Polls have shown that the story has damaged Palin, and a carefully planned media rollout, via a series of TV interviews, has done little to blunt it. After massive swings in her direction after her stunning debut at the Republican convention, the pendulum of popularity has started to reverse course. Last week one poll showed Palin registering an 11-point drop in support among women. Another showed white women voters going back to Obama by a margin of 21 points. Not that anyone could tell that from Palin's performance in Iowa. When not shouting over the noise of protesters, she doggedly delivered her trademark speech, complete with introduction of her husband as 'First Dude' and touting her experience as a 'mom'. She exuded confidence and kept up the barrage of attacks on Obama. 'He likes to point the finger of blame,' she said of the Democratic candidate 'But has he ever really lifted a finger to help?'
The message is aimed at people like Ron Eversman and small towns like Newton, Iowa. Eversman, a baker, was sitting last week in the neat square at the heart of Newton, a town surrounded by cornfields and reeling from the closure of a factory and the loss of hundreds of jobs. It is a story repeated all over America and uppermost in voters' minds. Eversman had watched the events on Wall Street unfolding with a mixture of fear and grim fascination. 'It sure isn't good, is it? I have a little investment and it has taken a beating,' he said.
Eversman had good news for Obama. He plans to vote for him. 'McCain is too much like Bush. He's better than Bush, of course. But I want something different.' But it would be a mistake to think the Democrats have the support of Eversman - and millions of worried voters like him - sewn up. Eversman admitted that he could change his mind by November. 'I don't think Obama is any kind of saviour or anything,' he said with a shrug.
The economic crisis holds many pitfalls for Obama too. His style and rhetoric have been based on lofty idealism and inspiration. That created an astonishing political movement, based on young voters, black people and the well educated. But, as Hillary Clinton showed in the final weeks of her nomination run, Obama is vulnerable to a candidate who can tap into the deep concerns of working-class white America. His choice of Joe Biden as a running mate was meant to solve the issue, but so far the Delaware senator has had little impact, apart from developing a long line of mistakes, including opining that Clinton might have been a better choice. Obama himself might have trouble striking a populist tone, too. As the first black candidate of a major party, his staff is aware that he cannot afford to be portrayed as the 'angry black' candidate. His appeal is based on unity, good governance and an attempt to be 'post-racial'.
Like McCain, he has been hit by some unfortunate events in the past week. Both campaigns seem to be expert at attacking each other and less good at their own performance. First, Biden called for rich people to pay more taxes as their patriotic duty. That comment was co-opted into McCain's speech literally within hours. 'Raising taxes in a tough economy is not patriotic. It is not a badge of honour. It is just plain dumb,' McCain said in Cedar Rapids, getting the biggest cheer of the rally.
Then Obama was hit by the fund-raising needs of his campaign. As the economic crisis sloshed over the country, he held a celebrity-studded event in California, at which Barbra Streisand sang. The cost for a ticket was a staggering $28,500(£15,500). Obama was ruthlessly mocked on the late-night talk shows. 'All the big Hollywood stars were there... I believe the topic was how John McCain is out of touch with the common people,' quipped TV host Jay Leno.
But there is little doubt that the Democrats are now much happier to be fighting this election on economic issues. The past few weeks of 'Palin mania' threw them off balance. Now it has put their campaign where it always wanted to be: attacking McCain directly and making it about serious issues. The airwaves are full of Obama ads portraying McCain as out of touch and Obama as in tune with the needs of ordinary people. They even include a two-minute advert in which Obama outlines his economic agenda. 'That's a pretty amazing ad to be running. It shows how serious people are taking this,' said Masket. On the stump last week Obama launched salvo after salvo in McCain's direction. 'What we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed,' he said at a Colorado rally. The Democrats are sensing their chance again. The polls bear them out. They are back in the game. Obama has re-established a small but solid lead in recent surveys. The RCP average of polls has him two points ahead of McCain. In the key battleground states things are tight again.
A week ago all the buzz was about McCain closing the gap in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey. Now the stress is on Obama's growing strength in red states like Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. With seven weeks to go, the election is swinging to and fro but is still too close to call.
Yet as the economic crisis has swept all before it and dominated the headlines, a few people are beginning to question what it is that the next occupant of the White House is going to inherit. 'Whoever it is, Obama or McCain, I really don't envy the next President,' said Masket.
Locking horns
'I could walk [100 miles] from here to Lansing and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.'
Joe Biden, Monday
'The fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.'
John McCain, Monday
'Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's President he'll take on, and I quote, "the old boys' network in Washington" ... The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting.'
Barack Obama, Wednesday
With Palin mania ebbing away, the Republican campaign looks suddenly vulnerable after a string of serious gaffes. A tumultuous week on the financial front and a drift of women voters back to Obama have eroded McCain's gains and made the election once more too close to call. The Democrats are now fighting on a ground of their own choosing - the economy
Paul Harris in Iowa
The Observer,
Sunday September 21 2008
Article history
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Photograph: Bob Brown/AP
The opening was superbly choreographed. To the sound of thundering rock music blaring from speakers, several thousand people watched as John McCain's campaign plane swooped out of the sparkling blue Iowa skies.
The plane taxied to a halt only 100 metres away from the crowd gathered at an airport outside the city of Cedar Rapids. They cheered wildly as McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, descended from the aircraft and trooped through the throng, smiling and shaking hands.
Then things started to go wrong. 'Thank you so much, Iowa. It's great to be here in Grand Rapids,' Palin said as she took the stage, naming a completely different city in the far-off state of Michigan. 'CEDAR Rapids!' came shouts from the crowd. Palin ignored her gaffe and ploughed on with a speech that was quickly interrupted by anti-war protesters. For several minutes the hangar was filled with shouts and chants, drowning out the Alaska governor's words. Then McCain took the stage, and the same thing happened to him, forcing him off his script to address an unruly scrimmage as security hauled out the shouting demonstrators. 'The one thing Americans want us to do is stop yelling at each other,' McCain said in exasperation.
Suddenly, after hauling his campaign back into contention for the White House, the wheels are starting to come off McCain's fabled Straight Talk Express. The gaffe-ridden rally in Cedar Rapids was only one indication. In a week of almost unprecedented economic crisis, when Wall Street seemed on the brink of meltdown, McCain's presidential bid was hit by mistake after mistake, varying from the serious to the surreal.
As stocks dropped off a precipice, McCain said the economic fundamentals were strong. Then a senior aide seemed to suggest McCain had invented the BlackBerry. His top economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, confessed she thought neither McCain nor Palin was capable of running a large company. Then, in the middle of the worst financial collapse since the 1930s, McCain got the public endorsement of Donald Trump, a celebrity tycoon who symbolises raw capitalism. For a candidate trying to strike a populist tone, the backing of 'the Donald' was poorly timed. 'It's like a Saturday Night Live routine,' quipped rival Barack Obama on a campaign stop in Nevada.
At the same time the remarkable surge of support inspired by Palin seems to be ebbing. Polls show women voters drifting back to Obama, who has established a slim lead again. Palin is increasingly mired in the 'Troopergate' scandal related to allegations that she fired a senior official out of a personal grudge against her sister's former partner. Palin's star, which shone so brightly for two weeks and reinvigorated the Republican base, is showing every sign of dimming. But the real problem is the biggest one: the stunning economic rollercoaster of last week. Americans in their tens of millions have been glued to their TV screens watching banks collapse, stocks slide and their own government pump billions of dollars into the system to bail out troubled banks and insurers. It has turned the election right back to the core issue that Democrats have wanted to talk about all along: the economy and its terrible woes. McCain, with the first presidential debate looming this week, is now fighting the election on his opponent's strongest turf. In an America shaken and scared by the spectre of a second Great Depression, no one is talking about pigs, lipstick or moose-hunting any more.
But McCain is nothing if not a fighter. In Cedar Rapids he came out blazing against Wall Street, reckless investors and the regulators who let them place such risky bets. His speech was full of fiery language as he vowed to sack government officials, defend US workers and clean up Washington DC. 'Right now you are hurting and it is not your fault,' he told the crowd of several thousand packed into an aircraft hangar. 'It started at the top. It started in Washington. It started on Wall Street and we are going to fix it.'
The crowd dutifully cheered its support, swinging behind this new image of McCain as a man of the people. The applause lines just kept on coming. 'They turned our markets into a casino,' McCain added, to more cheers. 'The regulators were asleep at the switch. They were asleep, my friends. They were not working for you,' he said. It seemed to work, too, though only with an all-Republican crowd that had long bought into his message. 'I am very excited about this. McCain right now is the best thing for this country,' said Harry Meek, owner of a local Iowa pest management company, who had driven more than 100 miles to get to the rally.
Outside the confines of a friendly Republican crowd, McCain's message is likely to meet greater resistance. For many years, McCain has been an outspoken advocate of easing restrictions on Wall Street, not tightening regulations. His campaign is closely linked to lobbyists and the financial industry is a huge donator to his cause. That has allowed Obama's speechwriters to hurl some sharply worded barbs. 'The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting,' is one of Obama's most popular lines in his current stump speech.
At the same time McCain is facing an American electorate likely to blame eight years living under a Republican White House for the current mess. The words that McCain never mentions on the campaign trail are 'President George W Bush'. In effect, McCain has to run against what his own Republican party has done for the last two presidential terms, almost turning his campaign into a third party. But the Bush legacy is still likely to cast a deep shadow over his efforts. 'It is hard for his message to ring true: "If you elect me I will finally clean up Washington, having been there for 30 years",' said Professor Seth Masket, a political scientist at Denver University. 'It is a really hard needle to thread.'
The economy is not the ground on which McCain wanted to fight the election. His line last week that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' was the latest in a long list of verbal mistakes he has made over economic issues. The subject has been a weak one for Republicans ever since the Bush administration turned a surplus into a massive deficit and jobless figures started creeping up.
A recent Washington Post poll found that people preferred Obama on the economy by 51 per cent to 39 per cent. Almost three-quarters of people said Obama understood their economic problems, compared with only 53 per cent who thought McCain felt that way. Certainly McCain's recent successes in the polls have not been built on his economic image. Instead they were boosted by a tough, disciplined message machine that had successfully torn into Obama's image and accused him of being elitist, liberal and sexist. But now that apparatus of attack is starting to splutter too. Reporters on McCain's campaign plane recently staged a protest against a decision to cut off access to McCain. They chanted 'Bring Mac back!' as they sat in their plane seats. The demonstration had little impact but showed how broken relations have become with the press corps that once fawned upon the candidate.
At the same time, the hard-edged anti-Obama attacks have become so extreme that many commentators have accused the campaign of outright lies. Even the conservative Fox News channel joined the debate when one of its anchors publicly ripped into a senior McCain spokesman on air for misrepresenting Obama's tax plans.
Finally, to add to the misery, there has been a slew of negative news about Palin. After first promising to co-operate in the Troopergate investigation in Alaska, she has now refused to testify. So has her husband, Todd. The McCain campaign is taking the whole issue so seriously that it has dispatched a rapid response team to Alaska to rebut the regular new revelations emerging from the state. The effort is being directed by lawyer Edward O'Callaghan, a McCain aide who was previously a terrorist expert. Polls have shown that the story has damaged Palin, and a carefully planned media rollout, via a series of TV interviews, has done little to blunt it. After massive swings in her direction after her stunning debut at the Republican convention, the pendulum of popularity has started to reverse course. Last week one poll showed Palin registering an 11-point drop in support among women. Another showed white women voters going back to Obama by a margin of 21 points. Not that anyone could tell that from Palin's performance in Iowa. When not shouting over the noise of protesters, she doggedly delivered her trademark speech, complete with introduction of her husband as 'First Dude' and touting her experience as a 'mom'. She exuded confidence and kept up the barrage of attacks on Obama. 'He likes to point the finger of blame,' she said of the Democratic candidate 'But has he ever really lifted a finger to help?'
The message is aimed at people like Ron Eversman and small towns like Newton, Iowa. Eversman, a baker, was sitting last week in the neat square at the heart of Newton, a town surrounded by cornfields and reeling from the closure of a factory and the loss of hundreds of jobs. It is a story repeated all over America and uppermost in voters' minds. Eversman had watched the events on Wall Street unfolding with a mixture of fear and grim fascination. 'It sure isn't good, is it? I have a little investment and it has taken a beating,' he said.
Eversman had good news for Obama. He plans to vote for him. 'McCain is too much like Bush. He's better than Bush, of course. But I want something different.' But it would be a mistake to think the Democrats have the support of Eversman - and millions of worried voters like him - sewn up. Eversman admitted that he could change his mind by November. 'I don't think Obama is any kind of saviour or anything,' he said with a shrug.
The economic crisis holds many pitfalls for Obama too. His style and rhetoric have been based on lofty idealism and inspiration. That created an astonishing political movement, based on young voters, black people and the well educated. But, as Hillary Clinton showed in the final weeks of her nomination run, Obama is vulnerable to a candidate who can tap into the deep concerns of working-class white America. His choice of Joe Biden as a running mate was meant to solve the issue, but so far the Delaware senator has had little impact, apart from developing a long line of mistakes, including opining that Clinton might have been a better choice. Obama himself might have trouble striking a populist tone, too. As the first black candidate of a major party, his staff is aware that he cannot afford to be portrayed as the 'angry black' candidate. His appeal is based on unity, good governance and an attempt to be 'post-racial'.
Like McCain, he has been hit by some unfortunate events in the past week. Both campaigns seem to be expert at attacking each other and less good at their own performance. First, Biden called for rich people to pay more taxes as their patriotic duty. That comment was co-opted into McCain's speech literally within hours. 'Raising taxes in a tough economy is not patriotic. It is not a badge of honour. It is just plain dumb,' McCain said in Cedar Rapids, getting the biggest cheer of the rally.
Then Obama was hit by the fund-raising needs of his campaign. As the economic crisis sloshed over the country, he held a celebrity-studded event in California, at which Barbra Streisand sang. The cost for a ticket was a staggering $28,500(£15,500). Obama was ruthlessly mocked on the late-night talk shows. 'All the big Hollywood stars were there... I believe the topic was how John McCain is out of touch with the common people,' quipped TV host Jay Leno.
But there is little doubt that the Democrats are now much happier to be fighting this election on economic issues. The past few weeks of 'Palin mania' threw them off balance. Now it has put their campaign where it always wanted to be: attacking McCain directly and making it about serious issues. The airwaves are full of Obama ads portraying McCain as out of touch and Obama as in tune with the needs of ordinary people. They even include a two-minute advert in which Obama outlines his economic agenda. 'That's a pretty amazing ad to be running. It shows how serious people are taking this,' said Masket. On the stump last week Obama launched salvo after salvo in McCain's direction. 'What we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed,' he said at a Colorado rally. The Democrats are sensing their chance again. The polls bear them out. They are back in the game. Obama has re-established a small but solid lead in recent surveys. The RCP average of polls has him two points ahead of McCain. In the key battleground states things are tight again.
A week ago all the buzz was about McCain closing the gap in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey. Now the stress is on Obama's growing strength in red states like Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. With seven weeks to go, the election is swinging to and fro but is still too close to call.
Yet as the economic crisis has swept all before it and dominated the headlines, a few people are beginning to question what it is that the next occupant of the White House is going to inherit. 'Whoever it is, Obama or McCain, I really don't envy the next President,' said Masket.
Locking horns
'I could walk [100 miles] from here to Lansing and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.'
Joe Biden, Monday
'The fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.'
John McCain, Monday
'Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's President he'll take on, and I quote, "the old boys' network in Washington" ... The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting.'
Barack Obama, Wednesday
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows.
What's Up, Doc?
The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows.
by Joseph Epstein
05/26/2008, Volume 013, Issue 35
Northwestern, the university where I taught for 30 years, appears to have caught its nether parts in a wringer. It seems they approached the Reverend Jeremiah Wright about accepting an honorary degree, and, now that Wright has made clear the kind of clergyman he is, Northwestern has withdrawn its offer. The president of the university, a man named Henry Bienen, in a letter to Reverend Wright, wrote that
in light of the controversy surrounding statements made by you that have recently been publicized, the celebratory character of Northwestern's commencement would be affected by our conferring of this honorary degree. Thus I am withdrawing the offer of an honorary degree previously extended to you.
Universities, those most cowardly of modern institutions, are never more beguiling than when caught out not having the courage of their lack of conviction. One can imagine the delight of the man or woman in Northwestern's provost office when he or she discovered Jeremiah Wright's name and put him up for an honorary degree. For it wouldn't do, when passing out honorary degrees each spring, not to have one go to an African American, and by now surely Northwestern must have awarded honorary degrees to all the usual suspects: Toni Morrison, Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, John Hope Franklin, et alia.
And then, as the song has it, Reverend Wright went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid: not I love you but that the United States government invented AIDS to kill poor black people. Imagine now the meeting at Northwestern where it was decided to withdraw the offer of an honorary degree to Wright, with all turning to the doofus who suggested Jeremiah Wright's name in the first place. ("A fine mess you've got us into this time, Stanley!") All those powerful minds devising ways to cover the university's fleshy but soft flanks. Although it left Northwestern with the burden of finding another African American in time for commencement, the conclusion was inevitable: Sorry, Rev, no honorary doctorate for you.
The larger problem, really, is the conferring of honorary degrees generally. The practice goes back to the 15th century; the first honorary degree was awarded by Oxford to the Bishop of Salisbury. For many centuries thereafter honorary degrees tended to be awarded to scholars and scientists and occasionally to artists. This remains the policy of the University of Chicago; no businessmen or politicians are given honorary degrees. The year President Clinton was the school's commencement speaker, the faculty agreed to allow him to speak only if he were awarded no honorary degree.
Benjamin Franklin became "Dr. Franklin" owing to honorary degrees given him by St. Andrews and by Oxford for his scientific work with electricity. Perhaps the world's most famous Dr., Samuel Johnson, was a Dr. by honorary degrees awarded him by Trinity College, Dublin, and by Oxford. Maya Angelou, who regularly refers to herself as "Dr. Angelou," has honorary doctorates only, and no undergraduate degree to go with them. As an African American and a woman, she may well have more honorary doctorates than anyone in the history of this strange ritual.
My late friend Sol Linowitz once told me that he had 64 such degrees. Linowitz combined modest fame for good works (he was ambassador to the Organization of American States) with heavy bread (he had been the chairman of the board at Xerox), which made him a near perfect candidate for an honorary degree: someone not disgraceful who just might donate a large sum to the school that had honored him.
Universities often award honorary degrees with such obvious motives in mind. Getting a rich person to drop some of his or her swag on them is only one. Sheer vulgar publicity is another. Many years ago my wife's school, DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, gave an honorary degree to the newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck. When my wife wrote to the president of the school to suggest that doing so lowered the tone of the joint considerably, the president wrote back to say that Mrs. Bombeck gave a commencement talk full of laughs and that the talk was very well covered by the press. Case closed.
A cultural historian may one day be able to measure the fall from seriousness of American universities by tracking the people to whom they chose to award honorary degrees. The first step in this descent I noted was the awarding of such degrees to television journalists (Walter Cronkite, the man who has a face only a nation could love, must have a closet filled with the damn things). From there these degrees went to movie stars and television comedians. Northwestern, I know, has given honorary doctorates to Robert Redford and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Yale gave one some years back to Meryl Streep. The motive here, at least in part, is to get a commencement address on the cheap, and to give the graduating students the right to say that at their commencement someone wildly famous spoke. Yet one wonders if the graduates of Long Island's Southampton College, allowed to reflect upon the matter in tranquility, were entirely pleased when their school gave an honorary degree to Kermit the Frog.
Controversy has surrounded the granting of honorary degrees from Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne in more recent years. Oxford went out of its way to refuse publicly to award such a one to Margaret Thatcher because she had severely cut university budgets in England. When in 2001 Yale granted an honorary degree to George W. Bush, one of its alumni, students and some faculty members refused to attend commencement in protest. Not a few universities have been caught by the twists of history, awarding an honorary degree to someone who later turns out to be a dictator or other species of political monster: the University of Edinburgh and the University of Massachusetts (Boston) conferred honorary degrees on Robert Mugabe that one may be sure they wished they hadn't.
The degree itself has never meant much but in recent years even the honor has been greatly diminished. The iron law of diversity has contributed to this in a significant way. No contemporary university dare not include women, African Americans, and other minority members among the honorary degree recipients at its annual commencement lest it be attacked for official bigotry. As soon as this harsh note of necessity enters the proceedings, distinction, and with it genuine prestige, departs.
Perhaps it is a little late to report that I have an honorary doctorate, though just one, and, let it be emphasized, from a not very famous school. I was also once called by the president of a university in Illinois, an institution whose name I cannot now recall, who asked if I would fill in for the person, recently become ill, who was supposed to give the school's commencement address. A modest fee was mentioned, and then the president added, "Of course, we'll toss in an honorary degree." I turned down the invitation but have never forgotten the phrase "toss in," and even now regret I didn't say to him that I'd much rather he toss in a rear-window defogger.
I like to think that I have personally warded off any more offers of honorary degrees by asserting, in print, that I'd rather have a sandwich named after me than an honorary degree from Oxford or any other institution of higher-learning.
So low has the prestige of honorary degrees fallen by being given to third- and fourth-class people that there are now even jokes about such degrees. One of the best is about the fabulously rich oil man, T-bone Tex Cunningham, who one day calls the office of the president of Southeast Texas A&M (at Langtry) to offer a donation of $100 million to the school. The president, in a mood of exultation at the size of the gift, asks T-bone if there is anything the school can do for him.
"As a matter of fact there is," the oil man replies. "I'd like an honorary doctorate for my favorite Arab stallion, Fertile Crescent by name."
"Mr. Cunningham," the president says, "I'm sure that this can be arranged without any difficulty at all."
At the next meeting of his board of trustees, the president of Southeast Texas A&M informs them of Cunningham's enormous gift and the request that goes with it. The trustees are, naturally enough, shocked by the request, but the president tells them not to worry, he'll bring it off just fine.
Commencement day in Langtry, seated on the stage behind the lectern are the recipients of the current year's honorary degrees: Amiri Baraka, Brett Favre, Raúl Castro, Germaine Greer, Yasser Arafat's son-in-law, and the horse. The president steps up to the podium, and begins:
Students, faculty, parents, and friends of Southeast Texas A&M university, I am proud presently to announce this year's recipients of honorary degrees from our great institution. But before I do, I want to point out that our school is today making history, and you all should be very proud that Southeast Texas A&M is first in the nation to award an honorary doctorate to an entire horse.
I hope that, in consolation, the morning of Northwestern University's commencement, someone tells this joke to Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His Fred Astaire will be published in September by the Yale University Press.
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
The prestige of honorary degrees falls to record lows.
by Joseph Epstein
05/26/2008, Volume 013, Issue 35
Northwestern, the university where I taught for 30 years, appears to have caught its nether parts in a wringer. It seems they approached the Reverend Jeremiah Wright about accepting an honorary degree, and, now that Wright has made clear the kind of clergyman he is, Northwestern has withdrawn its offer. The president of the university, a man named Henry Bienen, in a letter to Reverend Wright, wrote that
in light of the controversy surrounding statements made by you that have recently been publicized, the celebratory character of Northwestern's commencement would be affected by our conferring of this honorary degree. Thus I am withdrawing the offer of an honorary degree previously extended to you.
Universities, those most cowardly of modern institutions, are never more beguiling than when caught out not having the courage of their lack of conviction. One can imagine the delight of the man or woman in Northwestern's provost office when he or she discovered Jeremiah Wright's name and put him up for an honorary degree. For it wouldn't do, when passing out honorary degrees each spring, not to have one go to an African American, and by now surely Northwestern must have awarded honorary degrees to all the usual suspects: Toni Morrison, Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, John Hope Franklin, et alia.
And then, as the song has it, Reverend Wright went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid: not I love you but that the United States government invented AIDS to kill poor black people. Imagine now the meeting at Northwestern where it was decided to withdraw the offer of an honorary degree to Wright, with all turning to the doofus who suggested Jeremiah Wright's name in the first place. ("A fine mess you've got us into this time, Stanley!") All those powerful minds devising ways to cover the university's fleshy but soft flanks. Although it left Northwestern with the burden of finding another African American in time for commencement, the conclusion was inevitable: Sorry, Rev, no honorary doctorate for you.
The larger problem, really, is the conferring of honorary degrees generally. The practice goes back to the 15th century; the first honorary degree was awarded by Oxford to the Bishop of Salisbury. For many centuries thereafter honorary degrees tended to be awarded to scholars and scientists and occasionally to artists. This remains the policy of the University of Chicago; no businessmen or politicians are given honorary degrees. The year President Clinton was the school's commencement speaker, the faculty agreed to allow him to speak only if he were awarded no honorary degree.
Benjamin Franklin became "Dr. Franklin" owing to honorary degrees given him by St. Andrews and by Oxford for his scientific work with electricity. Perhaps the world's most famous Dr., Samuel Johnson, was a Dr. by honorary degrees awarded him by Trinity College, Dublin, and by Oxford. Maya Angelou, who regularly refers to herself as "Dr. Angelou," has honorary doctorates only, and no undergraduate degree to go with them. As an African American and a woman, she may well have more honorary doctorates than anyone in the history of this strange ritual.
My late friend Sol Linowitz once told me that he had 64 such degrees. Linowitz combined modest fame for good works (he was ambassador to the Organization of American States) with heavy bread (he had been the chairman of the board at Xerox), which made him a near perfect candidate for an honorary degree: someone not disgraceful who just might donate a large sum to the school that had honored him.
Universities often award honorary degrees with such obvious motives in mind. Getting a rich person to drop some of his or her swag on them is only one. Sheer vulgar publicity is another. Many years ago my wife's school, DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, gave an honorary degree to the newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck. When my wife wrote to the president of the school to suggest that doing so lowered the tone of the joint considerably, the president wrote back to say that Mrs. Bombeck gave a commencement talk full of laughs and that the talk was very well covered by the press. Case closed.
A cultural historian may one day be able to measure the fall from seriousness of American universities by tracking the people to whom they chose to award honorary degrees. The first step in this descent I noted was the awarding of such degrees to television journalists (Walter Cronkite, the man who has a face only a nation could love, must have a closet filled with the damn things). From there these degrees went to movie stars and television comedians. Northwestern, I know, has given honorary doctorates to Robert Redford and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Yale gave one some years back to Meryl Streep. The motive here, at least in part, is to get a commencement address on the cheap, and to give the graduating students the right to say that at their commencement someone wildly famous spoke. Yet one wonders if the graduates of Long Island's Southampton College, allowed to reflect upon the matter in tranquility, were entirely pleased when their school gave an honorary degree to Kermit the Frog.
Controversy has surrounded the granting of honorary degrees from Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne in more recent years. Oxford went out of its way to refuse publicly to award such a one to Margaret Thatcher because she had severely cut university budgets in England. When in 2001 Yale granted an honorary degree to George W. Bush, one of its alumni, students and some faculty members refused to attend commencement in protest. Not a few universities have been caught by the twists of history, awarding an honorary degree to someone who later turns out to be a dictator or other species of political monster: the University of Edinburgh and the University of Massachusetts (Boston) conferred honorary degrees on Robert Mugabe that one may be sure they wished they hadn't.
The degree itself has never meant much but in recent years even the honor has been greatly diminished. The iron law of diversity has contributed to this in a significant way. No contemporary university dare not include women, African Americans, and other minority members among the honorary degree recipients at its annual commencement lest it be attacked for official bigotry. As soon as this harsh note of necessity enters the proceedings, distinction, and with it genuine prestige, departs.
Perhaps it is a little late to report that I have an honorary doctorate, though just one, and, let it be emphasized, from a not very famous school. I was also once called by the president of a university in Illinois, an institution whose name I cannot now recall, who asked if I would fill in for the person, recently become ill, who was supposed to give the school's commencement address. A modest fee was mentioned, and then the president added, "Of course, we'll toss in an honorary degree." I turned down the invitation but have never forgotten the phrase "toss in," and even now regret I didn't say to him that I'd much rather he toss in a rear-window defogger.
I like to think that I have personally warded off any more offers of honorary degrees by asserting, in print, that I'd rather have a sandwich named after me than an honorary degree from Oxford or any other institution of higher-learning.
So low has the prestige of honorary degrees fallen by being given to third- and fourth-class people that there are now even jokes about such degrees. One of the best is about the fabulously rich oil man, T-bone Tex Cunningham, who one day calls the office of the president of Southeast Texas A&M (at Langtry) to offer a donation of $100 million to the school. The president, in a mood of exultation at the size of the gift, asks T-bone if there is anything the school can do for him.
"As a matter of fact there is," the oil man replies. "I'd like an honorary doctorate for my favorite Arab stallion, Fertile Crescent by name."
"Mr. Cunningham," the president says, "I'm sure that this can be arranged without any difficulty at all."
At the next meeting of his board of trustees, the president of Southeast Texas A&M informs them of Cunningham's enormous gift and the request that goes with it. The trustees are, naturally enough, shocked by the request, but the president tells them not to worry, he'll bring it off just fine.
Commencement day in Langtry, seated on the stage behind the lectern are the recipients of the current year's honorary degrees: Amiri Baraka, Brett Favre, Raúl Castro, Germaine Greer, Yasser Arafat's son-in-law, and the horse. The president steps up to the podium, and begins:
Students, faculty, parents, and friends of Southeast Texas A&M university, I am proud presently to announce this year's recipients of honorary degrees from our great institution. But before I do, I want to point out that our school is today making history, and you all should be very proud that Southeast Texas A&M is first in the nation to award an honorary doctorate to an entire horse.
I hope that, in consolation, the morning of Northwestern University's commencement, someone tells this joke to Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His Fred Astaire will be published in September by the Yale University Press.
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
The trillion dollar band-aid
The trillion dollar band-aid
Solving climate change will be the most expensive public policy decision ever. Half-baked thinking won't fix it now
All comments ()
* Björn Lomborg
* guardian.co.uk,
* Monday September 15 2008 09:30 BST
* Article history
One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.
The president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union's proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020, at a cost that the commission's own estimates put at about 0.5% of GDP, or roughly €60bn per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50% increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).
But Barroso's punchline was that "the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction". In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing "could even approach 20% of GDP". (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated – most models show about 3% damages.)
So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5% of GDP to avoid a 20% cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible – until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.
The 0.5%-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about 4%). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Thus, the EU's immensely ambitious programme will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.
In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20% of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5% payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.
The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.
For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at the Berlaymont headquarters, which will save one tonne of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1bn, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1bn windmill doesn't negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we still have to pay by the end of the century.
The EU's argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favorably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the aspirin doesn't prevent that outcome. The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that might actually save the leg.
Likewise, it is negligent to focus on inefficiently cutting CO2 now because of costs in the distant future that in reality will not be avoided. It stops us from focusing on long-term strategies like investment in energy research and development that would actually solve climate change, and at a much lower cost.
If Barroso were alone, perhaps we could let his statement go, but the same argument is used again and again by influential politicians. Germany's Angela Merkel says it "makes economic sense" to cut CO2, because the "the economic consequences of inaction will be dramatic for us all." Australia's Kevin Rudd agrees that "the cost of inaction will be far greater than the cost of action." United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon has gone on record with the exact same words. In the United States, both John McCain and Barack Obama use the cost of inaction as a pivotal reason to support carbon cuts.
California senator Diane Feinstein argues that we should curb carbon emissions because the Sierra snowpack, which accounts for much of California's drinking water, will be reduced by 40% by 2050 due to global warming. What she fails to tell us is that even a substantial reduction in emissions – at a high cost – will have an immeasurable effect on snowmelt by 2050. Instead, we should perhaps invest in water storage facilities.
Likewise, when politicians fret that we will lose a significant proportion of polar bears by 2050, they use it as an argument for cutting carbon, but forget to tell us that doing so will have no measurable effect on polar bear populations. Instead, we should perhaps stop shooting the 300 polar bears we hunt each year.
The inaction argument makes us spend vast resources on policies that will do virtually nothing to deal with climate change, thereby diverting those resources from policies that could actually make an impact.
We would never accept medical practitioners advising ultra-expensive and ineffective aspirins for gangrene because the cost of aspirin outweighs the cost of losing the leg. Why, then, should we tolerate such fallacious arguments when debating the costliest public policy decision in the history of mankind?
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Solving climate change will be the most expensive public policy decision ever. Half-baked thinking won't fix it now
All comments ()
* Björn Lomborg
* guardian.co.uk,
* Monday September 15 2008 09:30 BST
* Article history
One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.
The president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union's proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020, at a cost that the commission's own estimates put at about 0.5% of GDP, or roughly €60bn per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50% increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).
But Barroso's punchline was that "the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction". In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing "could even approach 20% of GDP". (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated – most models show about 3% damages.)
So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5% of GDP to avoid a 20% cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible – until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.
The 0.5%-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about 4%). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Thus, the EU's immensely ambitious programme will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.
In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20% of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5% payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.
The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.
For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at the Berlaymont headquarters, which will save one tonne of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1bn, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1bn windmill doesn't negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we still have to pay by the end of the century.
The EU's argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favorably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the aspirin doesn't prevent that outcome. The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that might actually save the leg.
Likewise, it is negligent to focus on inefficiently cutting CO2 now because of costs in the distant future that in reality will not be avoided. It stops us from focusing on long-term strategies like investment in energy research and development that would actually solve climate change, and at a much lower cost.
If Barroso were alone, perhaps we could let his statement go, but the same argument is used again and again by influential politicians. Germany's Angela Merkel says it "makes economic sense" to cut CO2, because the "the economic consequences of inaction will be dramatic for us all." Australia's Kevin Rudd agrees that "the cost of inaction will be far greater than the cost of action." United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon has gone on record with the exact same words. In the United States, both John McCain and Barack Obama use the cost of inaction as a pivotal reason to support carbon cuts.
California senator Diane Feinstein argues that we should curb carbon emissions because the Sierra snowpack, which accounts for much of California's drinking water, will be reduced by 40% by 2050 due to global warming. What she fails to tell us is that even a substantial reduction in emissions – at a high cost – will have an immeasurable effect on snowmelt by 2050. Instead, we should perhaps invest in water storage facilities.
Likewise, when politicians fret that we will lose a significant proportion of polar bears by 2050, they use it as an argument for cutting carbon, but forget to tell us that doing so will have no measurable effect on polar bear populations. Instead, we should perhaps stop shooting the 300 polar bears we hunt each year.
The inaction argument makes us spend vast resources on policies that will do virtually nothing to deal with climate change, thereby diverting those resources from policies that could actually make an impact.
We would never accept medical practitioners advising ultra-expensive and ineffective aspirins for gangrene because the cost of aspirin outweighs the cost of losing the leg. Why, then, should we tolerate such fallacious arguments when debating the costliest public policy decision in the history of mankind?
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Presidential Candidates’ Positions on Science Issues
September 16, 2008
Presidential Candidates’ Positions on Science Issues
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Both presidential candidates have now issued answers to a series of questions about science policy, Senator Barack Obama having done so in late August and Senator John McCain on Monday.
Their responses show clear areas of agreement on such apple-pie issues as ocean health, as well as sharp contrasts, as when Mr. Obama stresses the role of government and Mr. McCain that of business in addressing some of the nation’s main challenges.
What follows is a digest of their answers, as posted by Science Debate 2008. The private group, in an effort endorsed by leading scientific organizations, has worked since November to get candidates to articulate positions on science policy. The full answers are at www.sciencedebate2008.com.
INNOVATION Mr. Obama calls for doubling federal budgets for basic research over a decade and supports broadband Internet connections “for all Americans.” Mr. McCain stresses policies to provide “broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America,” as well as the streamlining of “burdensome regulations.” Mr. McCain also said Congress, “under my guiding hand,” adopted wireless policies that “spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and WiFi technology.”
CLIMATE CHANGE Both candidates talk of human activities’ warming the planet, with Mr. McCain saying that they “threaten disastrous changes” and Mr. Obama that “they are influencing the global climate.” In terms of 1990 levels of carbon emissions, Mr. McCain would ultimately have the nation’s output drop by 60 percent and Mr. Obama by 80 percent.
ENERGY Mr. Obama would increase federal investment in clean energy by $150 billion over a decade, including research on alternative fuels and conservation. Mr. McCain would speed the building of 45 new reactors and make government “an ally but not an arbiter” in developing alternative energy sources.
EDUCATION Both candidates advocate policies to develop a highly skilled workforce, partly with cash incentives for teachers. Mr. McCain would put $250 million into a program to help states expand online education.
NATIONAL SECURITY Mr. Obama would put his administration “on a path” to doubling federal spending on basic defense research. Mr. McCain is much less specific, speaking of ensuring “that America retains the edge.”
GENETICS RESEARCH Both laud the potential benefits and point out the social dangers, with Mr. Obama saying he backed the recently passed Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Mr. McCain speaks of “a new green revolution” in food development.
STEM CELLS Both support federal financing for embryonic stem cell research.
SPACE Both candidates say they want to revitalize space exploration, with Mr. McCain calling for “new technologies to take Americans to the Moon, Mars and beyond.” He also suggests possibly extending the space shuttle’s life. Mr. Obama would re-establish a White House Space Council to coordinate all the nation’s space efforts, including ones intended to aid understanding of climate change and expand “our reach into the heavens.”
SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY Both implicitly fault President Bush, whom critics have assailed as weakening the federal advisory apparatus and politicizing scientific panels.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Presidential Candidates’ Positions on Science Issues
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Both presidential candidates have now issued answers to a series of questions about science policy, Senator Barack Obama having done so in late August and Senator John McCain on Monday.
Their responses show clear areas of agreement on such apple-pie issues as ocean health, as well as sharp contrasts, as when Mr. Obama stresses the role of government and Mr. McCain that of business in addressing some of the nation’s main challenges.
What follows is a digest of their answers, as posted by Science Debate 2008. The private group, in an effort endorsed by leading scientific organizations, has worked since November to get candidates to articulate positions on science policy. The full answers are at www.sciencedebate2008.com.
INNOVATION Mr. Obama calls for doubling federal budgets for basic research over a decade and supports broadband Internet connections “for all Americans.” Mr. McCain stresses policies to provide “broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America,” as well as the streamlining of “burdensome regulations.” Mr. McCain also said Congress, “under my guiding hand,” adopted wireless policies that “spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and WiFi technology.”
CLIMATE CHANGE Both candidates talk of human activities’ warming the planet, with Mr. McCain saying that they “threaten disastrous changes” and Mr. Obama that “they are influencing the global climate.” In terms of 1990 levels of carbon emissions, Mr. McCain would ultimately have the nation’s output drop by 60 percent and Mr. Obama by 80 percent.
ENERGY Mr. Obama would increase federal investment in clean energy by $150 billion over a decade, including research on alternative fuels and conservation. Mr. McCain would speed the building of 45 new reactors and make government “an ally but not an arbiter” in developing alternative energy sources.
EDUCATION Both candidates advocate policies to develop a highly skilled workforce, partly with cash incentives for teachers. Mr. McCain would put $250 million into a program to help states expand online education.
NATIONAL SECURITY Mr. Obama would put his administration “on a path” to doubling federal spending on basic defense research. Mr. McCain is much less specific, speaking of ensuring “that America retains the edge.”
GENETICS RESEARCH Both laud the potential benefits and point out the social dangers, with Mr. Obama saying he backed the recently passed Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Mr. McCain speaks of “a new green revolution” in food development.
STEM CELLS Both support federal financing for embryonic stem cell research.
SPACE Both candidates say they want to revitalize space exploration, with Mr. McCain calling for “new technologies to take Americans to the Moon, Mars and beyond.” He also suggests possibly extending the space shuttle’s life. Mr. Obama would re-establish a White House Space Council to coordinate all the nation’s space efforts, including ones intended to aid understanding of climate change and expand “our reach into the heavens.”
SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY Both implicitly fault President Bush, whom critics have assailed as weakening the federal advisory apparatus and politicizing scientific panels.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Post-Olympic stress disorder
Protest in China
Post-Olympic stress disorder
Sep 11th 2008 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
The games over, time to hit the streets
IN BEIJING’S eastern suburbs, the end of the Olympics last month emboldened hundreds of residents to take their grievances to the streets. The government was claiming that the city’s air was cleaner for the Olympics than it had been in a decade. But stench from a waste-disposal plant was smothering their homes. Freed from Olympic constraints, they felt it was time to protest. They were not alone. After a lull, news of protests around China about all sorts of issues is again trickling out.
The authorities take a dim view of protests at the best of times. During the Olympics they were particularly anxious to keep the disgruntled out of sight. And many citizens themselves wanted the games to go smoothly. A handful of foreigners staged protests in Beijing, but none involving Chinese was reported. Those who applied for permission to protest were persuaded by police to change their minds, sometimes menacingly.
But residents of middle-class apartment compounds with odd-sounding names such as Berlin Symphony, Apple Pie and New Sky Universe were quick to test the post-Olympic waters. On August 30th hundreds gathered at an intersection near where they lived. Many wore masks to show their disgust for the fumes that sometimes emanate from Gaoantun, a large landfill waste-dump and now the site of China’s biggest waste-fuelled thermal power plant, an important Olympic project. Top officials attended its opening a few days before the games.
The protesters held up lorries heading for the plant. Nervous policemen watched. One held up a black banner calling on the chanting demonstrators to stop their “illegal behaviour” immediately. There were no reports of arrests, but residents say one man who attempted to sell T-shirts with protest slogans on them near Berlin Symphony on September 3rd was detained for several hours. He was accused of not having a trading licence.
Unusually, on September 4th, the local government apologised to residents and said it hoped the bad air could be cleared up within 20 days. Residents are sceptical, but only a hundred or so turned up at a demonstration a couple of days later. Some say they are worried about police retaliation. The Paralympics are under way in Beijing and do not end until September 17th, so the authorities are still edgy.
Elsewhere, however, there are signs that officials are beginning to turn their attention to problems they had shunted aside for the sake of preserving Olympic calm. In the southern province of Yunnan two senior officials have been sacked and two others reprimanded for their alleged mishandling of a riot in July involving rubber farmers in the remote county of Menglian on the border with Myanmar.
The government has also admitted for the first time that shoddy construction was partly to blame for the collapse of schools in the earthquake in Sichuan province in May that killed at least 69,000 people, including thousands of schoolchildren. In the build-up to the games, Sichuan officials tried to silence angry parents. Police broke up their protests, tried to stop journalists meeting them and blocked them from going to Beijing to air their complaints.
Officials had good reason to worry that protests might get out of hand. Liaowang, a magazine published by China’s government news agency Xinhua, reported this week that more than 90,000 “mass incidents” took place in 2006, up from 87,000 the previous year. The numbers, it said, had kept on rising, reflecting a rise of resentment at the grassroots level that “should not be underestimated.”
The Olympic hiatus (in Beijing at any rate—elsewhere news of protests may simply have been suppressed) is likely to be temporary. In Jishou in the southern province of Hunan on September 3rd and 4th thousands of people protested about a property company they said had cheated them of their money. They blocked roads and a train station and clashed with police.
With the games over, more debate is starting to surface in the Chinese press about the 30th anniversary in December of the launch of the country’s “reform and opening” policies. Some intellectuals have been arguing that China should begin paying much more attention to political reform and allow greater democracy. China News Weekly, a Beijing magazine, said that since the games senior officials and scholars had rapidly shifted their attention to internal matters such as how to deal with “complex” economic problems and, “even more importantly”, where to take reform in order to ensure long-term prosperity and stability.
In recent days Chinese newspapers have been abuzz with reports about a speech given in late August by Hunan’s Communist Party chief, Zhang Chunxian. He said “power should be returned to the people.” That, however, seems unlikely.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Post-Olympic stress disorder
Sep 11th 2008 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
The games over, time to hit the streets
IN BEIJING’S eastern suburbs, the end of the Olympics last month emboldened hundreds of residents to take their grievances to the streets. The government was claiming that the city’s air was cleaner for the Olympics than it had been in a decade. But stench from a waste-disposal plant was smothering their homes. Freed from Olympic constraints, they felt it was time to protest. They were not alone. After a lull, news of protests around China about all sorts of issues is again trickling out.
The authorities take a dim view of protests at the best of times. During the Olympics they were particularly anxious to keep the disgruntled out of sight. And many citizens themselves wanted the games to go smoothly. A handful of foreigners staged protests in Beijing, but none involving Chinese was reported. Those who applied for permission to protest were persuaded by police to change their minds, sometimes menacingly.
But residents of middle-class apartment compounds with odd-sounding names such as Berlin Symphony, Apple Pie and New Sky Universe were quick to test the post-Olympic waters. On August 30th hundreds gathered at an intersection near where they lived. Many wore masks to show their disgust for the fumes that sometimes emanate from Gaoantun, a large landfill waste-dump and now the site of China’s biggest waste-fuelled thermal power plant, an important Olympic project. Top officials attended its opening a few days before the games.
The protesters held up lorries heading for the plant. Nervous policemen watched. One held up a black banner calling on the chanting demonstrators to stop their “illegal behaviour” immediately. There were no reports of arrests, but residents say one man who attempted to sell T-shirts with protest slogans on them near Berlin Symphony on September 3rd was detained for several hours. He was accused of not having a trading licence.
Unusually, on September 4th, the local government apologised to residents and said it hoped the bad air could be cleared up within 20 days. Residents are sceptical, but only a hundred or so turned up at a demonstration a couple of days later. Some say they are worried about police retaliation. The Paralympics are under way in Beijing and do not end until September 17th, so the authorities are still edgy.
Elsewhere, however, there are signs that officials are beginning to turn their attention to problems they had shunted aside for the sake of preserving Olympic calm. In the southern province of Yunnan two senior officials have been sacked and two others reprimanded for their alleged mishandling of a riot in July involving rubber farmers in the remote county of Menglian on the border with Myanmar.
The government has also admitted for the first time that shoddy construction was partly to blame for the collapse of schools in the earthquake in Sichuan province in May that killed at least 69,000 people, including thousands of schoolchildren. In the build-up to the games, Sichuan officials tried to silence angry parents. Police broke up their protests, tried to stop journalists meeting them and blocked them from going to Beijing to air their complaints.
Officials had good reason to worry that protests might get out of hand. Liaowang, a magazine published by China’s government news agency Xinhua, reported this week that more than 90,000 “mass incidents” took place in 2006, up from 87,000 the previous year. The numbers, it said, had kept on rising, reflecting a rise of resentment at the grassroots level that “should not be underestimated.”
The Olympic hiatus (in Beijing at any rate—elsewhere news of protests may simply have been suppressed) is likely to be temporary. In Jishou in the southern province of Hunan on September 3rd and 4th thousands of people protested about a property company they said had cheated them of their money. They blocked roads and a train station and clashed with police.
With the games over, more debate is starting to surface in the Chinese press about the 30th anniversary in December of the launch of the country’s “reform and opening” policies. Some intellectuals have been arguing that China should begin paying much more attention to political reform and allow greater democracy. China News Weekly, a Beijing magazine, said that since the games senior officials and scholars had rapidly shifted their attention to internal matters such as how to deal with “complex” economic problems and, “even more importantly”, where to take reform in order to ensure long-term prosperity and stability.
In recent days Chinese newspapers have been abuzz with reports about a speech given in late August by Hunan’s Communist Party chief, Zhang Chunxian. He said “power should be returned to the people.” That, however, seems unlikely.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Why Obama's Message Resonates with Millions
Why Obama's Message Resonates with Millions
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 9, 2008.
On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.
In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.
And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.
Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" -- a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
Here in Chesapeake, Barack Obama offers up the same milky hodgepodge of middle-class tax cuts, investment in alternative fuels and consequences for job exporters and terrorists. And rhetorically, he uses the same old magic trick for his main theme, talking about how all Americans want is to leave a better world for their children.
"That's the essence of the American Dream," he tells the crowd, echoing his predecessors. He goes on to tell the already-famous story of John McCain's seven houses, then explains that someone who has seven houses can't possibly understand what the middle class is going through. "You need a president who's going to be fighting for you," Obama says, to thunderous applause. He concludes by declaring, "We are going to fundamentally bring about change in America" -- a message punctuated by the huge banner hanging behind him, emblazoned with his infuriatingly omnipresent campaign slogan: "Change We Can Believe In." Obama has even taken to borrowing some of his theme music from other candidates: I was mortified when his rallies began to feature the worst of the Hillary standbys, the excruciating "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. The painful predictability of it all was summed up by a front-page headline in The New York Times after the first day of the Democratic convention: "Appeals Evoking American Dream Rally Democrats."
All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work. After Kerry and Dean speeches, I often heard people say things like, "At least he's not as dumb as Bush." But after Obama speeches, I see audience members stumbling around in all directions with orgiastic smiles on their faces, as though they've been splashed with gallons of magic pixie paint. In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Obama knocked dead a massive town-hall crowd at a local fairgrounds with a speech that said almost nothing at all, I ask a woman named Melanie Threatt why she thinks her life would improve under an Obama presidency. "It just will," she says. When I press her for specifics, she says, "I just think doors are going to open." You hear stuff like this a lot on Planet Obama, and it makes you wonder just what it is you're encountering. Obama's followers implicitly believe in the things he says, and the fervor of their belief is more religious than intellectual, closer to faith than to reason. Watching him at work, you realize that Obama's remarkable success has almost nothing to do with the same-old product being marketed by the same-old political machine, and almost everything to do with the specific qualities of the individual who is selling it. The same stuff that sounded like hollow, invidious horseshit coming from Kerry and Gore sounds, as dispensed by Obama, like nothing less than a clarion call to collective action. And every time you feel his pitch working, you wonder: Is this some chat-room robot I'm falling in love with? Or is this an actual human being on the line, offering me an opportunity at last to fulfill my deepest desires?
Such, it seems, are the pitfalls of both love and politics in the Internet Age. Too many embarrassing false steps make it hard to take that leap one more time.
One thing that makes the cult of Obama difficult to dissect is the method of its dissemination. The technology of campaign propaganda has advanced to such a degree that the concept of campaign-trail "journalism" is now indistinguishable from corporate PR. The wall that once separated campaign staff from the press corps has broken down completely; those paid by the candidate and those covering him might as well be two different shifts on the same factory ship, working together to bring the world frozen fish patties by the ton. On the shimmering 757 that Obama uses to jet around the country, reporters have plastered the press section in the rear of the plane with cheery, offbeat photographs of themselves captured with campaign staffers in various goofy scenes (clowning with boom poles, quaffing beers, drooling while asleep on buses). The collage seems lifted straight from a high school yearbook; the press might as well have titled it "Our Cool Campaign."
Maybe it's natural that a certain camaraderie would develop between staffers and the press, given that the two groups are prisoners in the same campaign jail for months at a time. The constant Secret Service security protocol leaves everyone On the Bus roped off from all external human contact from morning till night; at the events in between, the press is often kept in windowless rooms behind closed doors or curtains, where reporters sit and listen to the candidate's speeches fed in via loudspeaker. This hilarious setup makes it possible for so-called "political journalists" to cover a candidate without (a) seeing him, (b) seeing his audiences and (c) receiving any information at all that is not fed to them directly by the campaign. On one recent swing through the South, I actually witness a reporter sitting in a concrete filing room during a town-hall session, checking his BlackBerry for an e-mail from the campaign staff to find out what town he is in.
Hemmed in by such restrictions, America's top political journalists have nothing better to do than flog their expensive college educations by playing games like Guess the Identity of Obama's Running Mate. At a VFW convention in Orlando, when Obama mentions "my friend, Senator Joe Biden," reporters -- we were all walled off in a basement room hundreds of yards from the actual speech, watching the candidate on a little TV -- actually break out in hysterical cries of "That's it! It's Biden! It's Biden!"
The rest of the time, reporters think about food. When's lunch? Will there be snacks in the filing room? Is there booze on the bus this time or no booze? When we roll into Richmond, Virginia, one night, I hear an older female reporter complain to another, "They didn't even have white wine on our bus!" Reporters on the campaign trail are like the migrant laborers I met on assignment years ago in an Orthodox monastery in central Russia. With every minute of every workday exactly the same, the laborers devoted themselves to guessing what would be served at lunch, the one slot in their schedule that was different every day. Would it be borscht or cabbage soup? Mayonnaise with their bread or no mayonnaise? I heard conversations an hour long on that theme.
This is what the journalists have been reduced to: the level of indentured field hands at a Russian monastery. With such a castrated press corps in tow, Obama doesn't have to work very hard to "sell" his message. The whole process has been streamlined, politically and culturally, to smooth the spread of the party's propaganda: The speech is already written, the press is already on board, and everybody's already working together to crank out those fish patties.
So here's the interesting part: It's surprising that there is an interesting part. Someone like me -- someone who has actually sailed on this factory ship long enough to get sick at the first whiff of fish -- is instantly dismissive of anyone who dirties himself by entering this world. If the second coming of Jesus Christ stepped on the bus to run on the Democratic ticket, I'd be wondering who paid for his robe and why his message cribbed so much from the New Testament. But even I find myself being seduced by Obama, despite everything I know about the party he represents, its record and where it gets its money. There's just something about the guy; he has that effect.
Obama manages to appeal somehow to that part of us that is tired of there always being another side of the story when it comes to our presidents. We don't want to live in a world where there's always a set of lurid secret tapes that will come out someday, or a mistress with a cigar in her twat hidden off-camera somewhere, or a backroom deal to juice a prewar intelligence report for a bunch of oil-fat-cat golf buddies.
We've become trained to look for the man behind the mask, for in real life there is no one whose emotional life is confined to a lifelong, passionate love for his high school sweetheart wife and their two children, an undying appreciation for the sacrifice of soldiers, awe before the flag and concern for the future of the middle class. Oh, and a burning passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil 30 percent by 2018 and for full federal funding for special education. Because that's the standard we set for our presidential candidates; anyone who reveals himself to have other things going on inside, to be more human than that, never makes it this far.
But I'm not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather's sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn't, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it's the same thing -- but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story -- putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
Obviously, Obama has some off-script moments of anger, and ill humor, and ego; his personality sometimes comes out looking well short of iconic. During his appearance in Chesapeake, a teacher gets up to complain about her long working hours since the passage of No Child Left Behind and starts to say something about how no one should have to work 13 hours a day, and --
"Not unless you're running for president!" Obama quips rosily, thinking the audience is with him. Instead, many in the crowd grow silent, drinking in the rock-star candidate's curious decision to compare his admittedly tiring-but-still-thrilling quest for ultimate earthly power with some dreary educator's slavish pursuit of a paycheck.
Obama also makes dumb jokes, and flirts with his audience ("Y'all are silly!" he told a group of girls who overdid the shrieking-Beatles-fan act when he took off his suit jacket), and overdoes it on the gooey poeticizing (his gushing over the beauty of America "from sea to shining sea" is particularly atrocious). But all in all, you never get a sense that there's a more interesting side of Obama lurking underneath somewhere. Oddly enough, the guy only really lights up when he starts delivering those same ham-handed lines about the American Dream that fell out of the mouths of Dean and Kerry like dead bullfrogs.
And maybe that's the difference. When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.
What's confusing about Obama is that he's so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery and onerous bullshit that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it's confusing is that we've grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don't even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I'm listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don't care. It's not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It's that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 9, 2008.
On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.
In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.
And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.
Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" -- a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
Here in Chesapeake, Barack Obama offers up the same milky hodgepodge of middle-class tax cuts, investment in alternative fuels and consequences for job exporters and terrorists. And rhetorically, he uses the same old magic trick for his main theme, talking about how all Americans want is to leave a better world for their children.
"That's the essence of the American Dream," he tells the crowd, echoing his predecessors. He goes on to tell the already-famous story of John McCain's seven houses, then explains that someone who has seven houses can't possibly understand what the middle class is going through. "You need a president who's going to be fighting for you," Obama says, to thunderous applause. He concludes by declaring, "We are going to fundamentally bring about change in America" -- a message punctuated by the huge banner hanging behind him, emblazoned with his infuriatingly omnipresent campaign slogan: "Change We Can Believe In." Obama has even taken to borrowing some of his theme music from other candidates: I was mortified when his rallies began to feature the worst of the Hillary standbys, the excruciating "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. The painful predictability of it all was summed up by a front-page headline in The New York Times after the first day of the Democratic convention: "Appeals Evoking American Dream Rally Democrats."
All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work. After Kerry and Dean speeches, I often heard people say things like, "At least he's not as dumb as Bush." But after Obama speeches, I see audience members stumbling around in all directions with orgiastic smiles on their faces, as though they've been splashed with gallons of magic pixie paint. In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Obama knocked dead a massive town-hall crowd at a local fairgrounds with a speech that said almost nothing at all, I ask a woman named Melanie Threatt why she thinks her life would improve under an Obama presidency. "It just will," she says. When I press her for specifics, she says, "I just think doors are going to open." You hear stuff like this a lot on Planet Obama, and it makes you wonder just what it is you're encountering. Obama's followers implicitly believe in the things he says, and the fervor of their belief is more religious than intellectual, closer to faith than to reason. Watching him at work, you realize that Obama's remarkable success has almost nothing to do with the same-old product being marketed by the same-old political machine, and almost everything to do with the specific qualities of the individual who is selling it. The same stuff that sounded like hollow, invidious horseshit coming from Kerry and Gore sounds, as dispensed by Obama, like nothing less than a clarion call to collective action. And every time you feel his pitch working, you wonder: Is this some chat-room robot I'm falling in love with? Or is this an actual human being on the line, offering me an opportunity at last to fulfill my deepest desires?
Such, it seems, are the pitfalls of both love and politics in the Internet Age. Too many embarrassing false steps make it hard to take that leap one more time.
One thing that makes the cult of Obama difficult to dissect is the method of its dissemination. The technology of campaign propaganda has advanced to such a degree that the concept of campaign-trail "journalism" is now indistinguishable from corporate PR. The wall that once separated campaign staff from the press corps has broken down completely; those paid by the candidate and those covering him might as well be two different shifts on the same factory ship, working together to bring the world frozen fish patties by the ton. On the shimmering 757 that Obama uses to jet around the country, reporters have plastered the press section in the rear of the plane with cheery, offbeat photographs of themselves captured with campaign staffers in various goofy scenes (clowning with boom poles, quaffing beers, drooling while asleep on buses). The collage seems lifted straight from a high school yearbook; the press might as well have titled it "Our Cool Campaign."
Maybe it's natural that a certain camaraderie would develop between staffers and the press, given that the two groups are prisoners in the same campaign jail for months at a time. The constant Secret Service security protocol leaves everyone On the Bus roped off from all external human contact from morning till night; at the events in between, the press is often kept in windowless rooms behind closed doors or curtains, where reporters sit and listen to the candidate's speeches fed in via loudspeaker. This hilarious setup makes it possible for so-called "political journalists" to cover a candidate without (a) seeing him, (b) seeing his audiences and (c) receiving any information at all that is not fed to them directly by the campaign. On one recent swing through the South, I actually witness a reporter sitting in a concrete filing room during a town-hall session, checking his BlackBerry for an e-mail from the campaign staff to find out what town he is in.
Hemmed in by such restrictions, America's top political journalists have nothing better to do than flog their expensive college educations by playing games like Guess the Identity of Obama's Running Mate. At a VFW convention in Orlando, when Obama mentions "my friend, Senator Joe Biden," reporters -- we were all walled off in a basement room hundreds of yards from the actual speech, watching the candidate on a little TV -- actually break out in hysterical cries of "That's it! It's Biden! It's Biden!"
The rest of the time, reporters think about food. When's lunch? Will there be snacks in the filing room? Is there booze on the bus this time or no booze? When we roll into Richmond, Virginia, one night, I hear an older female reporter complain to another, "They didn't even have white wine on our bus!" Reporters on the campaign trail are like the migrant laborers I met on assignment years ago in an Orthodox monastery in central Russia. With every minute of every workday exactly the same, the laborers devoted themselves to guessing what would be served at lunch, the one slot in their schedule that was different every day. Would it be borscht or cabbage soup? Mayonnaise with their bread or no mayonnaise? I heard conversations an hour long on that theme.
This is what the journalists have been reduced to: the level of indentured field hands at a Russian monastery. With such a castrated press corps in tow, Obama doesn't have to work very hard to "sell" his message. The whole process has been streamlined, politically and culturally, to smooth the spread of the party's propaganda: The speech is already written, the press is already on board, and everybody's already working together to crank out those fish patties.
So here's the interesting part: It's surprising that there is an interesting part. Someone like me -- someone who has actually sailed on this factory ship long enough to get sick at the first whiff of fish -- is instantly dismissive of anyone who dirties himself by entering this world. If the second coming of Jesus Christ stepped on the bus to run on the Democratic ticket, I'd be wondering who paid for his robe and why his message cribbed so much from the New Testament. But even I find myself being seduced by Obama, despite everything I know about the party he represents, its record and where it gets its money. There's just something about the guy; he has that effect.
Obama manages to appeal somehow to that part of us that is tired of there always being another side of the story when it comes to our presidents. We don't want to live in a world where there's always a set of lurid secret tapes that will come out someday, or a mistress with a cigar in her twat hidden off-camera somewhere, or a backroom deal to juice a prewar intelligence report for a bunch of oil-fat-cat golf buddies.
We've become trained to look for the man behind the mask, for in real life there is no one whose emotional life is confined to a lifelong, passionate love for his high school sweetheart wife and their two children, an undying appreciation for the sacrifice of soldiers, awe before the flag and concern for the future of the middle class. Oh, and a burning passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil 30 percent by 2018 and for full federal funding for special education. Because that's the standard we set for our presidential candidates; anyone who reveals himself to have other things going on inside, to be more human than that, never makes it this far.
But I'm not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather's sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn't, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it's the same thing -- but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story -- putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
Obviously, Obama has some off-script moments of anger, and ill humor, and ego; his personality sometimes comes out looking well short of iconic. During his appearance in Chesapeake, a teacher gets up to complain about her long working hours since the passage of No Child Left Behind and starts to say something about how no one should have to work 13 hours a day, and --
"Not unless you're running for president!" Obama quips rosily, thinking the audience is with him. Instead, many in the crowd grow silent, drinking in the rock-star candidate's curious decision to compare his admittedly tiring-but-still-thrilling quest for ultimate earthly power with some dreary educator's slavish pursuit of a paycheck.
Obama also makes dumb jokes, and flirts with his audience ("Y'all are silly!" he told a group of girls who overdid the shrieking-Beatles-fan act when he took off his suit jacket), and overdoes it on the gooey poeticizing (his gushing over the beauty of America "from sea to shining sea" is particularly atrocious). But all in all, you never get a sense that there's a more interesting side of Obama lurking underneath somewhere. Oddly enough, the guy only really lights up when he starts delivering those same ham-handed lines about the American Dream that fell out of the mouths of Dean and Kerry like dead bullfrogs.
And maybe that's the difference. When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.
What's confusing about Obama is that he's so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery and onerous bullshit that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it's confusing is that we've grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don't even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I'm listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don't care. It's not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It's that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
Friday, September 12, 2008
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
September 14, 2008
Torture and Taking the Fifth
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Skip to next paragraph
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?
Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
By Alan M. Dershowitz
212 pp. Oxford University Press. $19.95
This admittedly slender volume is the third — yes, third — book by Alan M. Dershowitz to appear in the past year. Between his graphomania, his penchant for high-profile cases and the frequency with which he can be seen on cable television news programs, it’s easy to forget that Dershowitz is a serious scholar of constitutional law. In “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” he tackles one of the trickiest legal questions of post-9/11 America: does the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of that right prohibit law-enforcement officials from torturing an individual to prevent a future crime, like an act of terrorism?
The simple answer, at least according to the Supreme Court, is no. In Chavez v. Martinez, a 2003 police coercion case, the justices ruled that an individual’s right to remain silent is violated only if the information is then used against that person in a criminal case. The mere fact that he or she has been coerced into talking does not, in itself, constitute a breach of the Fifth Amendment. To put a finer point on it, it’s not necessarily unconstitutional for the United States government to torture prisoners.
Dershowitz has weighed in on the subject of coercive interrogation before. In the aftermath of 9/11, he wrote a provocative op-ed article advocating the use of government-issued “torture warrants” that gave many of his fellow civil libertarians fits. They will doubtless be much happier with Dershowitz’s take on the Fifth Amendment as well as with his rough treatment of the court’s findings in Chavez.
The facts of the case are straightforward enough. The petitioner, Oliverio Martinez, was shot several times on a street in Southern California during an altercation with the police. On his way to the hospital and in the emergency room, another officer questioned Martinez about what had happened. At first, Martinez limited his answers to “I am choking” and “I am dying” and, at one point, “I am not telling you anything until they treat me.” But the officer continued to question him, and Martinez eventually said he had taken a gun from one of the officers and pointed it at them.
Left blind and partially paralyzed by the episode, Martinez sued the interrogating officer, claiming that the policeman had violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court issued six different opinions in the case, but Dershowitz focuses largely on Justice Clarence Thomas’s, which carried the day. Even though his colleague Justice John Paul Stevens had described Martinez’s treatment as “the functional equivalent of . . . torturous methods,” Thomas concluded that Martinez’s constitutional privilege against self-incrimination had not been violated because nothing he said was used against him in a criminal trial.
Dershowitz acknowledges that the precise language of the amendment — “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” — doesn’t explicitly create a right to remain silent. But his generosity toward Thomas ends there. He attacks the justice’s opinion as narrow and overly literal, and accuses him of ignoring both the historical record and inconvenient case law to arrive at his desired outcome.
“Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” serves as a kind of primer in analyzing and interpreting constitutional law, the murky business of divining the framers’ intentions and of reconciling seemingly contradictory Supreme Court opinions. Dershowitz traces the origins of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, which (arguably) dates to the church’s use of inquisitorial oaths against political and religious dissidents in 13th-century England; runs through some of the relevant precedents, including the treason trial of Aaron Burr; and examines how our understanding of the Fifth Amendment has evolved since its passage.
All of this analysis is set against the familiar backdrop that frames any serious discussion of the Constitution: should we treat it as a “living” text designed to accommodate historical and societal change, or must we limit our reading to the actual words on the page and the original intent of their authors? Like many liberals, Dershowitz is wary of relying too heavily on our necessarily speculative efforts to understand precisely what our forefathers envisioned. Nevertheless, he makes a strong argument that the framers were, if nothing else, aware of the need to prevent coercive interrogation — even if the means by which they chose to prevent it was prohibiting the use of coerced testimony at criminal trials.
Reading this book, one is reminded why Dershowitz is one of the very few American law professors whose work has crossed over into the mainstream. He wears his erudition lightly. He has worked hard to make “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” accessible to nonlawyers, peppering it with references to Lewis Carroll, Stephen Jay Gould, Maimonides and Jerry Seinfeld. Despite his best efforts, though, this sort of detailed legal analysis inevitably gets technical. Those not already steeped in the issue of self-incrimination are likely to get bogged down.
It’s worth the effort to push ahead, though. Dershowitz calls the Chavez case a “bellwether” for a much broader shift in law enforcement after 9/11, the increasing focus on preventing future criminal acts rather than simply punishing the perpetrators of them. The emergence of this so-called preventive state will continue to present new and difficult questions concerning the rights of criminal defendants. Americans, he persuasively establishes, can’t afford not to participate in the debates over how these questions are answered.
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Torture and Taking the Fifth
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Skip to next paragraph
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?
Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
By Alan M. Dershowitz
212 pp. Oxford University Press. $19.95
This admittedly slender volume is the third — yes, third — book by Alan M. Dershowitz to appear in the past year. Between his graphomania, his penchant for high-profile cases and the frequency with which he can be seen on cable television news programs, it’s easy to forget that Dershowitz is a serious scholar of constitutional law. In “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” he tackles one of the trickiest legal questions of post-9/11 America: does the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of that right prohibit law-enforcement officials from torturing an individual to prevent a future crime, like an act of terrorism?
The simple answer, at least according to the Supreme Court, is no. In Chavez v. Martinez, a 2003 police coercion case, the justices ruled that an individual’s right to remain silent is violated only if the information is then used against that person in a criminal case. The mere fact that he or she has been coerced into talking does not, in itself, constitute a breach of the Fifth Amendment. To put a finer point on it, it’s not necessarily unconstitutional for the United States government to torture prisoners.
Dershowitz has weighed in on the subject of coercive interrogation before. In the aftermath of 9/11, he wrote a provocative op-ed article advocating the use of government-issued “torture warrants” that gave many of his fellow civil libertarians fits. They will doubtless be much happier with Dershowitz’s take on the Fifth Amendment as well as with his rough treatment of the court’s findings in Chavez.
The facts of the case are straightforward enough. The petitioner, Oliverio Martinez, was shot several times on a street in Southern California during an altercation with the police. On his way to the hospital and in the emergency room, another officer questioned Martinez about what had happened. At first, Martinez limited his answers to “I am choking” and “I am dying” and, at one point, “I am not telling you anything until they treat me.” But the officer continued to question him, and Martinez eventually said he had taken a gun from one of the officers and pointed it at them.
Left blind and partially paralyzed by the episode, Martinez sued the interrogating officer, claiming that the policeman had violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court issued six different opinions in the case, but Dershowitz focuses largely on Justice Clarence Thomas’s, which carried the day. Even though his colleague Justice John Paul Stevens had described Martinez’s treatment as “the functional equivalent of . . . torturous methods,” Thomas concluded that Martinez’s constitutional privilege against self-incrimination had not been violated because nothing he said was used against him in a criminal trial.
Dershowitz acknowledges that the precise language of the amendment — “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” — doesn’t explicitly create a right to remain silent. But his generosity toward Thomas ends there. He attacks the justice’s opinion as narrow and overly literal, and accuses him of ignoring both the historical record and inconvenient case law to arrive at his desired outcome.
“Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” serves as a kind of primer in analyzing and interpreting constitutional law, the murky business of divining the framers’ intentions and of reconciling seemingly contradictory Supreme Court opinions. Dershowitz traces the origins of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, which (arguably) dates to the church’s use of inquisitorial oaths against political and religious dissidents in 13th-century England; runs through some of the relevant precedents, including the treason trial of Aaron Burr; and examines how our understanding of the Fifth Amendment has evolved since its passage.
All of this analysis is set against the familiar backdrop that frames any serious discussion of the Constitution: should we treat it as a “living” text designed to accommodate historical and societal change, or must we limit our reading to the actual words on the page and the original intent of their authors? Like many liberals, Dershowitz is wary of relying too heavily on our necessarily speculative efforts to understand precisely what our forefathers envisioned. Nevertheless, he makes a strong argument that the framers were, if nothing else, aware of the need to prevent coercive interrogation — even if the means by which they chose to prevent it was prohibiting the use of coerced testimony at criminal trials.
Reading this book, one is reminded why Dershowitz is one of the very few American law professors whose work has crossed over into the mainstream. He wears his erudition lightly. He has worked hard to make “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” accessible to nonlawyers, peppering it with references to Lewis Carroll, Stephen Jay Gould, Maimonides and Jerry Seinfeld. Despite his best efforts, though, this sort of detailed legal analysis inevitably gets technical. Those not already steeped in the issue of self-incrimination are likely to get bogged down.
It’s worth the effort to push ahead, though. Dershowitz calls the Chavez case a “bellwether” for a much broader shift in law enforcement after 9/11, the increasing focus on preventing future criminal acts rather than simply punishing the perpetrators of them. The emergence of this so-called preventive state will continue to present new and difficult questions concerning the rights of criminal defendants. Americans, he persuasively establishes, can’t afford not to participate in the debates over how these questions are answered.
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
