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glenn BeCK targets franCes piven

STEALING THE CONSTITUTION

GArreTT eppS

C o n f r o n T i n G C L i m AT e C r A n k S

Obama: TriangulaTiOn 2.0?

TUniSiA riSinG
LAiLA LALAmi
February 7, 2011 TheNation.com

mArk HerTSGAArd

Ari BermAn

JAmeS mArCUS

The enduring elizabeTh hardwick

The Nation.

February 7, 2011
SPEC IAL ISSU E

Letters
FEBRUARY 10, 2009 www.thenation.com december 27, 2010 TheNation.com

TO END THE WAR ON DRUGS

These Are Your Letters on Drugs

Noti, Ore.

Nation Books
Presents

Is America a Kabuki Democracy?

Eric Alterman Katrina vanden Heuvel
Other panelists to be announced
With

Thanks for devoting a special issue to the war on drugs [Dec. 27], a maladaptive, bigoted, dishonest and unjust policy that has been running for decades. When alcohol-consuming legislators decide their substance is the one acceptable choice, and they seek to punish all for the problems of a few, we have a hypocritical policy. Silence implies consent for its dishonesty, injustice and prejudice and the persecution of the people imprisoned because of it. Speaking out for drug policy justice shows real courage. R.C. Stilwell Tracy Velzquez, in The Verdict on Drug Courts, acknowledges that drug courts save lives but feels the money could be better spent on other community programs. Science says otherwise. Two decades of rigorous researchincluding a nationwide study sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, hundreds of evaluations and five meta-analyses (advanced statistical procedures)prove beyond a reasonable doubt that drug courts outperform all other programs for addicted offenders. For every $1 invested in drug courts, taxpayers reap at least $2 to $3 in net economic benefits, often considerably more. It is nave to expect the same results without the backing of a judge. Outside the courts, 25 percent of addicted offenders never enroll in treatment and another 50 percent drop out. Less than 5 percent achieve long-term sobriety. Drug courts double, triple and even quadruple the odds of success. Requiring a guilty plea is one critical ingredient. People who have hurt themselves and others are given a choice: go to trial or go to treatment. If they choose treatment, the guilty plea provides just the right leverage to keep them coming back when the cravings, withdrawal symptoms and drugusing lifestyle beckon. And after they have succeeded in treatment, the guilty plea and
Alexandria, Va.

its consequences are withdrawn. Drug courts draw on and expand the resources in their communities. No services are usurped and no one is arrested who would not otherwise have been arrested if the drug court never existed. Lets face it, substance abuse treatment professionals have little public recognition and almost no political influence. But in partnership with the courts, they can effect real change. Decades of political anomie are fading away as these professionals are making a real difference that can be felt at the societal level. Why would Velzquez want to turn back the clock? Douglas B. Marlowe, National Association of Drug Court Professionals

Velzquez Replies
Doug Marlowes comments miss my point: drug courts are an expensive attempt to use the justice system to fix a public health problem. He tries to address their expense by restating that they have greater benefits than costs, but the reality is that treatment in the community produces $18 in benefits for every dollar spent, clearly an exponentially greater benefit. Perhaps if the public were more aware of this value, treatment providers wouldnt, as Marlowe suggests, need the justice system to validate their worth! And recent experiences in places like Denver counter Marlowes assertion that drug courts dont cause more arrests. A judge there reported that the number of criminal drug filings increased three times in the two years following the implementation of the drug court, while the number of drug admissions to prison doubled. With corrections costs already straining state budgets, we just cant afford to continue dealing with addiction as a crime. Threatening people with legal sanctions and coercing them to engage in treatment would not be OK for any other public health issue, even those, like obesity, with social costs rivaling or surpassing illegal drug use. (continued on page 26)
Washington, D.C.

Thomas B. Edsall

Moderated by

Tuesday, February 8 at 6:30 PM

CUNY Graduate School of Journalism 219 West 40th Street (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues) New York City

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

www.nationbooks.org
Co-sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and The Nation Magazine

letters@thenation.com

The Nation.
since 1865

Healthcare Reality Check

Critics have denounced the Republican attempt to repeal the healthcare reform law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as an empty symbolic gesture, intended to make good on
health insurance because it creates a capa campaign promise to the Tea Party. Its tive market, and theyre delighted that all a bit of C-SPAN theater dressed up in theres no federal public option to comreality-defying buzzwords. The Repealpete against. What theyre not happy ing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act about are bans on using pre-existing conwould, in fact, kill jobs, since without ditions to deny consumers coverage, the ACA employers would face sharp which could apply to up to half increases in healthcare costs and reduce their workforce. And re- E D I T O R I A L of all Americans under 65. And they rankle at the new requirepeal would increase the federal ment that they spend 80 to 85 percent of deficit, which conservatives claim to be premium dollars on medical claims. so worried about. But no matter, RepubThe devil is in the details, and those licans can afford to grandstand because will be largely determined not in Conthey know the repeal bill has no chance gress but by state regulators and insurance of becoming law; even if it prevails in the commissions. (In Congress, the real action Houseat press time a vote was under will be during the appropriations process, waymajority leader Harry Reid has when Republicans will mess with the inpledged to block it in the Senate, never dividual mandate by stripping funding for mind Obamas veto pen. low- and middle-income peoplethats a Maybe voters will reward the GOP for fight Democrats can and should win.) Acposturing; maybe they wont. Polls vary cording to Potter, insurance lobbyists are on support for repeal depending on how already on the prowl. At a meeting of the the question is asked50 percent in a reNational Association of Insurance Comcent CNN poll; just 26 percent in a Kaiser missioners last spring, Potter was one of Family Foundation studyand by 2012 about twenty consumer representatives more tangible benefits of reform will have overwhelmed by the more than 1,000 inreached more people. But there is one surance industry hacks in attendance. Id group for whom the repeal show is an never seen anything quite like it, he says. undeniable boon: insurance companies, State action does create some poswhich are using the vote as a giant distracsibilities for progressive movement: tion to draw attention away from their Californias legislature twice passed a fifty-state strategy to subvert healthcare single-payer plan, only to have it vetoed law so that it skews even more in their by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, favor. As health insurance whistleblower whos been replaced by Democrat Jerry Wendell Potter puts it, The rhetoric of Brown. Connecticut is debating whether repeal is just a smoke screen to obscure to fund a public option, and Vermont the real objective of the repeal and reis considering a single-payer plan too. place caucus: to preserve the sections of But the Republican triumph at the state the law that big insurance and its business level in 2010 means that many Americans allies like and strip out the regulations and will face watered-down regulations and consumer protections they dont like. weak insurance exchangesunless theres Health insurance companies, Potter a movement to counter the insurance pointed out during a recent visit to the lobby with a peoples fifty-state strategy Nation office, are quite happy with the for meaningful healthcare reform. ACAs mandate that everyone purchase

Page 11: its our Constitution too

Inside
2

Letters Editorials & Comment

3 Healthcare Reality Check 4 Beck Targets Piven 5 Noted 6 Comcast-NBCU Leviathan 7 Tunisia Rising
laila lalaMi

RobeRt W. McChesney and John niChols

8 Stateside Gitmos

sally ebeRhaRdt and Jeanne theohaRis

Columns
6 Deadline Poet a short analysis of sarah Palins Video speech on the tucson shootings
CalVin tRillin

10 The Liberal Media a Worm in the neocons War Plans?

eRiC alteRMan

Articles
11 Stealing the Constitution inside the rights campaign to hijack the Constitutionand how to fight back.
GaRRett ePPs

17 Confronting the Climate Cranks lets take on those who are sabotaging our response to the climate crisisface to face.
MaRk heRtsGaaRd

22 Obama: Triangulation 2.0? in year three, will obama heed the lessons of Clinton or Reagan?
aRi beRMan

Books & the Arts

27 Wilcken: Claude lvi-strauss: the Poet in the laboratory
thoMas Meaney JennifeR ChanG

31 Dorothy Wordsworth (PoeM) 32 Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences (PoeM)

anne CaRson

33 HardWick: the new york stories

JaMes MaRCus

35 eltis, ricHardson: atlas of the transatlantic slave trade

Robin einhoRn
CoVeR desiGn by Milton GlaseR inCoRPoRated; illustRations by bRoWeR studios/Janna bRoWeR and Ryan inzana VOLUME 292, NUMBER 6, FEBRUaRy 7, 2011 PRINTED JaNUaRy 19

The Nation.

February 7, 2011

The Nation.
EDITOR & PUBLISHER: Katrina vanden Heuvel PRESIDENT: Teresa Stack MaNaGING EDITOR: Roane Carey LITERaRy EDITOR: John Palattella EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Betsy Reed SENIOR EDITORS: Richard Lingeman (on leave), Richard Kim WEB EDITOR: Emily Douglas COPy CHIEF: Judith Long aSSOCIaTE LITERaRy EDITOR: Miriam Markowitz COPy EDITOR: Mark Sorkin aSSISTaNT COPy EDITOR: Dave Baker COPy aSSOCIaTE: Lisa Vandepaer WEB EDITORIaL PRODUCER: Francis Reynolds RESEaRCH DIRECTOR/aSSISTaNT EDITOR: Kate Murphy aSSISTaNT TO THE EDITOR: Barbara Stewart INTERNS: Jed Bickman, Lisa Boscov-Ellen, Carmel DeAmicis, Kevin Gosztola,

Beck Targets Piven

Piven, a distinguished professor, legendary activist, writer and longtime contributor to this magazine, received an e-mail from an unknown correspondent. There was no text, just a subject line that read: DIE YOU CUNT. It was not the first piece of hateful e-mail Piven had gotten, nor would it be the last. One writer told her to go back to Canada you E D I T O R I A L dumb bitch; another ended with this wish: may cancer find you soon. Piven was unnerved but not surprised. These are not pretty e-mails, but they appear positively decorous compared with what has been written about her by commentators on Glenn Becks website, The Blaze, where shes been the target of a relentless campaign to demonize herand worse. There, under cover of anonymous handles, scores of people have called for Pivens murder, even volunteering to do the job with their own hands. Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and Ill give My life to take Our freedom back, wrote superwrench4. ONE SHOTONE KILL! proclaimed Jst1425. The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal. LEAD, declared Patriot1952. Posts like these are interwoven with ripples of misogyny, outbursts of bizarre anti-Semitism and crude insults about Pivens looks (shes actually a noted beauty) and age (shes 78). This fusillade was evidently set off by Pivens recent Nation editorial calling for a mass movement of the unemployed [Mobilizing the Jobless, January 10/17]. But Beck has had Piven in his cross-hairs for some time. In the past few years hes featured Piven, along with her late husband, Richard Cloward, in at least twenty-eight broadcasts, all of which paint them as masterminds of an overarching left-wing plot called the Cloward-Piven strategy, which supposedly engineered the financial crisis of 2008, healthcare reform, Obamas election and massive voter fraud, among other world-historical events (see Richard Kim, The Mad Tea Party, April 12, 2010). Cloward and Piven, Beck once argued, are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system. In his most recent diatribe against Piven (January 17) he repeatedly called her the enemy of the Constitution. In Becks telling, because Piven and her comrades on the left support civil disobedience in some circumstances, it is theynot the heavily armed militias of the radical rightwho threaten Americans safety. Its tempting not to dignify such ludicrous distortions with a response. But in brief: Piven, throughout her career as an activist and academic, has embodied the best of American democracy. It has been her lifes work to amplify the voices of the disenfranchised through voter registration drives, grassroots organization and, when necessary, street protest. The way economic injustice warps and erodes our democracy has been a central preoccupation. But passive lament has never been her game. Recognizing the leverage that oppressed groups haveand working with them to use itis her special genius. Its perhaps not surprising, then, that the pseudo-populist right finds her so threatening. The highly personalized and con-

On the afternoon of January 6, Frances Fox

Rachel Heise Bolten, Erica Hellerstein, Sara Jerving, Molly OToole, Ryan M. Rafaty (Washington), Riddhi Shah
WaSHINGTON: EDITOR: Christopher Hayes; CORRESPONDENT: John Nichols NaTIONaL aFFaIRS CORRESPONDENT: William Greider COLUMNISTS: Eric Alterman, Alexander Cockburn, Melissa Harris-Perry, Naomi Klein,

Katha Pollitt, Patricia J. Williams, Gary Younge

Sherrill; Defense, Michael T. Klare; Environment, Mark Hertsgaard; Films, Stuart Klawans; Legal Affairs, David Cole; National Security, Jeremy Scahill; Net Movement, Ari Melber; Peace and Disarmament, Jonathan Schell; Poetry, Peter Gizzi; Sex, JoAnn Wypijewski; Sports, Dave Zirin; United Nations, Barbara Crossette; Deadline Poet, Calvin Trillin
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Kai Bird, Robert L. Borosage, Stephen F. Cohen, Marc Cooper,

DEPaRTMENTS: Architecture, Jane Holtz Kay; Art, Barry Schwabsky; Corporations, Robert

Arthur C. Danto, Mike Davis, Slavenka Drakulic, Robert Dreyfuss, Susan Faludi, Thomas Ferguson, Doug Henwood, Max Holland, Michael Moore, Christian Parenti, Richard Pollak, Joel Rogers, Karen Rothmyer, Robert Scheer, Herman Schwartz, Bruce Shapiro, Edward Sorel, Gore Vidal, Jon Wiener, Amy Wilentz, Art Winslow

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Ari Berman, William Deresiewicz, Liza Featherstone, Dana Goldstein, Bob Moser, Eyal Press, Scott Sherman BUREaUS: London, Maria Margaronis, D.D. Guttenplan; Southern Africa, Mark Gevisser EDITORIaL BOaRD: Deepak Bhargava, Norman Birnbaum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard

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February 7, 2011

The Nation.

Noted.
ENDLESS EMBaRGO: Next year, the US
embargo against Cuba will be a half-century old, a mold-encrusted relic in the cold war museum; yet there it isand it doesnt look like the Obama administration is planning to end it anytime soon. On January 14 the White House announced a series of half measures that weaken American efforts to isolate Havana, welcome steps all: academic, cultural and religious groups can now freely travel to Cuba; American citizens are free to send money to nonrelatives in the island nation, up to $500 every three months; and any US airport may allow licensed charter aircraft to fly round trip. Its a follow-up to measures that President Obama announced in April 2009 lifting restrictions on travel and cash remittances by family members of Cuban residents. Yet the presidents actions hardly qualify as a profile in courage. He held off making the announcement this past fall, when hawks in Congress, including Democratic Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz and albio Sires, warned that easing anti-Cuba measures could hurt Democrats re-election chances; and when the decision was made, it was released late on a Friday evening, while Republicans were out of town on a retreat. Yet more than two-thirds of voters support easing travel restrictions on Cuba, and 75 percent (86 percent of Democrats) back the idea of a meeting between US and Cuban leaders. Conservative groups, from the Chamber of Commerce to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, want to end the isolation of Cuba. And in the end, what Obama did only gets American policy back roughly to where it was during the Clinton administration, before George W. Bush tightened the screws. The usual suspects made noise: Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, condemned Obamas decision, and Senator Robert Menendez called it a gift to the Castro brothers. It remains to be seen if Obama will quietly ignore their ilk and move forward to end the embargo once and for all. The Cuban Foreign Ministry, while

calling Obamas actions positive, concluded, They have a very limited reach and do not change US policy against Cuba. Its past time for change we do RobeRt dReyfuss believe in.

RNCS UNFaIR NEW CHaIR: The Republican National Committee has replaced the partys most prominent African-American leader, Michael Steele, with a new chairman whose state party organization has repeatedly faced complaints about moves to suppress minority voter participation. The new RNC chair, Reince Priebus, is the controversial head of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, where he has earned high marks for winning elections but low marks for the tactics used to attain those victories. Priebus lost a high-profile race for a state legislative seat in 2004, despite outspending the Democratic incumbent 3 to 1. A year after Priebus took over as state party chair, Wisconsin swung hard to the Democrats, providing Barack Obama with a landslide victory and sweeping Obamas ticket-mates into dominant positions in the legislature and the states Congressional delegation. In 2010, however, Republicans won, defeating Senator Russ Feingold, securing the open governorship and taking control of both houses of the legislature. That made Priebus a contender for the chairmanship, as Republican strategists began plotting to replace Steele. Priebus had been a big Steele backera stance for which he was well rewarded with an appointment as RNC general counsel. But when the chance came to grab for the top job, Priebus abandoned Steele. What makes Priebus such an appealing chair? Perhaps not his communication skills; this past fall he stirred national controversy after repeatedly transposing the names Obama and Osama in an interview about national security. Critics suggest Priebuss real skill is as a back-room operator with a taste for voter intimidation and suppression. In 2008 an e-mail leaked from his office appeared to advocate moves to suppress voting in African-American neighborhoods of Milwaukee. In 2010 the watchdog group One Wisconsin Now

(OWN) filed complaints with federal and state officials, charging that the Priebus-led state party was involved in voter caging strategies that targeted minorities and college students for disenfranchisement. Now that Reince Priebus will have the RNCs treasury at his disposal, warns OWN executive director Scot Ross, those across the country interested in fair and clean elections will be on high alert.
John niChols

JOHN ROSS, REBEL JOURNaLIST:

When John Ross was offered official honors by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009for telling stories nobody else could or would tellthe journalist refused the recognition. San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond recalled that he made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the motherfuckers who are driving poor people out of the Mission. Ross put this all in the context of his practice of journalism: Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence, he told the supervisors. Pardon me for having lived it so fully. As epitaphs go, that is a good one for Ross, who died on January 17 in Mexico, where he had for five decades chronicled the struggles for justice of indigenous people and the poor. Ross, who received the American Book Award for Rebellion From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press, 1995) and the Upton Sinclair Award for Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books, 2004), died of liver cancer at 72. His editor Carl Bromley recalls, I worked with John for seven years, on three books. It was an extraordinary education for me. Rosss El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books, 2009), was part peoples history, part love letter to the city where Ross lived on and off for decades. Of all his books, I think El Monstruo, his last, was my favorite, says Bromley. I rate him with Eduardo Galeano.
John niChols

The Nation.

February 7, 2011

certed campaign against Piven, already unsettling, takes on added gravity in the context of the recent shootings of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, federal judge John Roll and eighteen other people in Arizona. But while commentators debate whether the killer in that casethe mentally disturbed Jared Loughnerwas inspired by the ravings of right-wing demagogues, the forgotten story of Byron Williams provides a straightforward example of the way hateful rhetoric fuels violence. In July, Williams, a convicted bank robber, put on a suit of body armor and got in a car with a 9-mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308 caliber rifle equipped with armor-piercing bullets and set off for San Francisco. His destination was the Tides Foundation, which had been mentioned at that point in at least twenty-nine episodes of the Glenn Beck show, sometimes along with Piven. His goal, as he later told police, was to kill people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU in order to start a revolution. Williamss mother said that he had been watching TV news and was upset at the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing-agenda items. Or, as Williams himself put it, I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasnt for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for driving erratically and, after a firefight, subdued and arrested him before he could blow anyone elses mind away. For a responsible journalist and a responsible media outlet, such an incident would have spurred a process of intense selfscrutiny. But this is Glenn Beck and Fox, and as is evident from the campaign against Piven, nothing of the sort occurred. In the hundreds of posts about Piven on The Blaze, there is not one admonition to tone down the violent rhetoric, not one clear instance in which an editor intervened to moderate the thread. In fact, commenters seem at liberty to egg one another on: one poster pointedly noted that Piven lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY; another then linked to a website that listed Pivens home address and phone number. Why is this woman still alive? asked capnjack. Mainly because you havent killed her, I imagine. See, someone that really cares and has the cour-

age of their conviction must actually DO SOMETHING, responded Diamondback. And the calls for assassination are not limited to Piven. As Civilunrestnow put it in a post that perfectly captures the tenor of right-wing eliminationist fantasy, I say bring it. 90 million legal gun owners with over 220 million legal firearms, MOST in the hands of people who claim to be center RIGHT. I think its time to reduce the surplus population of leeches, lay abouts, left wing nut jobs, the main stream media, liberal politicians and MOST defense attorneys. Of course, crazed right-wingers enjoy the protection of the First Amendment, too. But the overwhelming and transparent calls for murder on Becks website, among other right-wing hot spots, cant be casually dismissed as just talk. At one time it was all just talk for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Dr. George Tillers assassin, Scott Roeder, too. We were lucky that police happened to pull over Byron Williams before he reached the Tides Foundations door. In a sense Glenn Beck was lucky too. How long will this luck hold out?

Comcast-NBCU Leviathan
Senator Al Franken, the former media
personality who has emerged as one of the savviest analysts of media policy in Washington, got it exactly right when he termed the anticipated merger of Comcast and NBC Universal a disaster. Like many critics of the deal the Federal Communications Commission approved by a 4-to-1 vote on January 17 (and that the Justice DepartCOMMENT ments anti-trust division OKd the same day), the Minnesota Democrat focused on immediate concerns about Americas largest cable and Internet company merging with one of the countrys oldest and largest news and entertainment producers. When the same company owns the content and the pipes that deliver that content, consumers lose, explained the senator. That complaint parallels objections raised by Stop Big Media, a coalition of consumer, labor and community groups that objected to the deal, which studies suggest will cost cable viewers as much as $2.4 billion over the coming decade. But a second objection voiced by Franken, echoing other critics of the merger, is even more unsettling: Allowing this merger to proceed could lead to subsequent deals, leaving Americans at the mercy of a few powerful media conglomerates. This deal, which confident Comcast executives were moving to implement even before receiving the formal approvals, will usher in an era of media conglomeration unprecedented in the history of a country where media ownership is already far too consolidated. The details of this plan are daunting: Comcast is poised to control one in five hours of all TV viewing in the United States; to own more than 125 major cable channels, television stations, websites, film studios and related production facilities; and to dominate local media controlling cable and Internet service and TV stations in major cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders overstates nothing when he argues that this new media giant will be the largest cable provider, the largest

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet

a Short analysis of Sarah Palins Video Speech on the Tucson Shootings
From what she has told us, We all can infer, When anything happens, Its all about her.

February 7, 2011

The Nation.

Internet provider and one of the largest producers of content in the United States. At a time when a small number of giant media corporations already control what the American people see, hear and read, we do not need another media conglomerate with control over the production and distribution of media content. What we need is less concentration of ownership, more diversity, more local ownershipand more viewpoints. Small cable providers joined consumer groups to object to the Comcast-NBCU merger, but most major media and telecom firms were conspicuously silent as Comcast (which ranked fourth among corporate contributors to 2010 election campaigns) spent an estimated $100 million lobbying for approval of the deal. Why? Comcasts competitors know that with the approval of this merger, it is hard to imagine any deal that might be considered too big, too monopolistic or too threatening to democracy. And make no mistake, deals of this sort pose a huge threat to the discourse that is essential to civil society. Under pressure to meet the requirement that a merger must serve the public interest, Comcast made vague promises to increase news and public affairs programming by 1,000 additional hours a year in media markets where it will dominate communications, and to forge partnerships between NBC stations and local nonprofit news sites. While that may sound like a concession, the 1,000 additional hours amounts to only sixteen minutes per day, per station. In a letter outlining the corporations commitment, Comcast tells the FCC that NBC and its stations will not be obligated to broadcast, publish on an NBCU-controlled website, or otherwise exhibit or endorse any material produced by an Online News Partner. Comcasts well-documented history of opposing and obstructing local journalism efforts at public access and community TV stations leads Josh Stearns, who monitors journalism issues for Free Press and the Stop Big Media coalition, to bluntly declare, Comcasts sudden commitment to nonprofit news seems suspect. Bernie Sanders is right when he suggests that the FCC will have a hard time keeping Comcast in line. Once we allow companies to become this powerful, the FCC does not regulate them. They regulate the FCC, says the senator. The FCC will have a hard time saying no to competing companies that demand permission to create equally powerful combines. The United States desperately needs a coherent media ownership policy for the digital era, and it also has to address the collapse of journalism forcefully, especially at the local level. But approving individual mergers as they occur is the wrong way to generate good policies, unless one is a shareholder in one of the new mega-super-conglomerates. This disaster points up the need for Congress and the FCC to open legislative and public hearings on the scope and character of media ownership in the digital age. We need hearings in which the communications firms and their battalions of hired guns do not dominate the proceedings and are not assumed to be the rightful rulers of culture and journalism. Let the 99.999 percent of Americans who have to live with the consequences of these mergersthe Americans who have a great if not always respected material stakejoin the debate. There is an important precedent: because of pressure from the courts, Congress and citizens generated during and after the 2003 debate over media

ownership rule changes, the FCC held a series of open hearings across the country on the future of media. The input was just the opposite of what the corporations and their hirelings were saying. We need another dose of popular common sense, as the rush to merge content providers and distributors goes to the heart of debates about diversity, localism and serving the public interest; if the American people are brought into those debates, they will be the best counter to telecom industry lobbying. The Comcast-NBCU merger will likely establish dangerous new precedents for media mergers that will make a mockery of anti-trust laws. Unless we have hearings and legislative and regulatory action now, we fear that Sanders will be proved right when he suggests that we are standing at the precipice of an era of mergers and acquisitions that will make an already bad situation of media consolidation far worse.
RobeRt W. McChesney and John niChols

Tunisia Rising
In conventional thinking about the Middle
East, perhaps the most persistent clich is moderate Arab country. The label seems to apply indiscriminately to monarchies and republics, ancient dictatorships and newly installed ones, from the Atlantic Coast to the Persian Gulf, so long as the country in question is of some use to the United States. And, almost always, it crops up in articles and policy papers vaunting the need for COMMENT America to support these countries, bulwarks against growing Islamic extremism in the Arab world. A perfect example is Tunisia. Just three summers ago, Christopher Hitchens delivered a 2,000-word ode to the North African nation in Vanity Fair, describing it as an enclave of development menaced by the harsh extremists of a desert religion. This is a country with good economic growth, a country where polygamy was outlawed in 1956, a country with high levels of education, a country with perfect sandy beaches. And, Hitchens wrote, it makes delicious wine and even exports it to France. Never mind that the president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in power for twenty-three years, was regularly winning elections with 90 percent of the vote. Never mind that his wife, Leila Trabelsi, a former hairdresser, had a stake in almost all of the countrys businesses. Never mind that the unemployment rate among college graduates was reportedly as high as 20 percent. Never mind that there was a police officer for every forty adults and that the Internet was censored. In January all these things added up, making the ouster of Ben Ali seem not only possible but probable, and later inevitable. The Tunisian uprising began on December 17, when Mohammed Bouazizia college graduate eking out a living selling vegetables whose unlicensed cart was confiscated by the policeset himself on fire, an act of desperation that inspired the countrys thousands of unemployed graduates to take to the streets in protest. Despite severe police repressionarrests, beatings and murdersthe protests continued for several weeks, spreading from Bouazizis hometown of Sidi Bouzid to

The Nation.

February 7, 2011

the rest of the country and culminating on January 14, when Ben Ali and his family fled the country. What is striking about the Tunisian revolution is how little attention it received in the mainstream American press. The Washington Post mentioned the protests for the first time on January 5, two and a half weeks into the unrest, when it ran a wire report about the burial of Bouazizi. Time ran its first piece about the protests later yet, on January 12. Even those who, like Thomas Friedman, specialize in diagnosing the ills of the Arab street did not show much interest. When the mainstream press finally paid attention, it was often to explain the success of the Tunisian revolution in terms of technology. Tunisian Protests Fueled by Social Media Networks, read one typical headline, from CNN. Was it Twitter, which allowed activists to communicate swiftly and widely with one another? Was it YouTube, where videos of protesters and police abuse were posted? Or was it WikiLeaks, whose cables revealed that Ben Ali and his entourage were mindbogglingly corrupt? But Twitter seemed to be most helpful in keeping those of us outside the country informed, since few in the Western media were reporting the story; YouTube was censored in the country; and WikiLeaks didnt reveal anything that the Tunisian people did not already know. In contrast, the Iran uprising of 2009 captured much of the American medias attention. The Atlantics Andrew Sullivan posted videos, tweets and eyewitness accounts during the weekend following the Iranian elections. William Kristol took to the pages of the Washington Post to applaud the brave protesters. In The Weekly Standard Michael Goldfarb urged the president to speak up for the Iranians on the street. Although Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were used widely to disseminate information, Ahmadinejad remained in power, highlighting the limits both of social networks and foreign media in affecting internal developments. The Tunisian revolution occurred thanks primarily to the men and women who protested despite the intimidation, beatings, tear gas and bullets. The death of Bouazizi, the refusal of Gen. Rachid Ammar to obey Ben Alis orders to shoot, the arrest of dissident Hamma Hammami and the solidarity of trade unions and professionals with college studentsall these factors played an incremental role in keeping the momentum going. In this modern revolution, the protesters had access to Internet tools that made it easier for them to get the word out, but those tools on their own could not topple a dictator. The initial lack of interest by the American press in the Tunisian protests may have something to do with the fact that there was no Islamic angle: the Tunisians were not trying to oust an Islamic regime, nor were they supporters of a religious ideology. In other words, this particular struggle for freedom was not couched in simple terms that are familiar to the Western mediaIslam, bad; America, goodso it took a while for our commentariat to notice. While Tunisia, the poster child of a moderate Arab country, was in revolt against tyranny, the French foreign minister, Michle Alliot-Marie, suggested to the Assemble Nationale that, as part of the cooperation between the two countries, French troops could be sent to help stamp out the protests.

The minister of culture, Frdric Mitterrand, said that calling Tunisia a dictatorship was an exaggeration. Yet after Ben Ali was ousted, President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly refused him entry into France. In a final irony, the dictator who had been praised in the West as a bulwark against Islamic extremism ran off to Saudi Arabia for safe haven. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was on a tour of Gulf countries, lectured Arab states about the need for democratic reforms but scrupulously refrained from mentioning the Tunisian protests. The only official statement from President Obama came after Ben Ali had been ousted. Perhaps the Obama administration remained quiet because it had learned from its experience with Iran that it is best to let internal matters play out. Or perhaps it was a stunned silence at the realization that all the conventional thinking about the Arab world is wrong and that a popular revolution against tyranny can occur without American involvement. The reverberations of the Tunisian revolution were felt almost immediately, when Muammar el-Qaddafi scolded Tunisians that they should have had the patience to wait for Ben Ali to step down in 2014 and warned them about civil chaos. Of course, this was a warning to the Libyan people, who might feel inspired to topple their own tyrant. In Mauritania and Egyptyes, two other moderate Arab countriescopycat self-immolations are creating deepening worry. And in Jordan the government has hurriedly put together a plan to lower the price of fuel and basic commodities. It is too early to tell whether Mohamed Ghannouchis interim government will be democratic. The appointment of the activist Slim Amamou as state secretary for youth and sports seems inspired, but the inclusion of several Ben Ali allies, particularly at the Interior Ministry, does not make for an auspicious start. Nor does the exclusion of parties banned under Ben Ali. The Tunisian people do not yet seem content with the government that is shaping up, and there are reports of continuing protests. The revolution is not over. In fact, it may have just begun. The Tunisian people are expecting justice for those who died, free and fair elections, and a new political order. But the three biggest lessons of their uprising have already been delivered far and wide. To the Arab dictators: you are not invincible. To the West: you are not needed. And to the Arab people: you are not powerless. laila lalaMi
Laila Lalami, the author of Secret Son, is associate professor at the university of California, Riverside.

Stateside Gitmos
As an increasing number of voices
question the inhumane conditions of detention endured by Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower, there has been growing pressure on the United States to alter this treatment. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other media outlets reported that the UN special rapporteur for torture was formally investigating the conditions of

February 7, 2011

The Nation.

Mannings detention. And on January 3 Psychologists for Social Responsibility issued an open letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling for a rectification of the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment Manning is suffering. The outrage over Mannings confinement is to be applauded, but sadly, his experience is not a rarity. For many facing terrorismrelated charges and held in US jails within COMMENT the federal system since 9/11, most of them Muslim, it has become standard procedure. And despite attempts for years by Muslim-American community leaders and activists to draw attention to these domestic cases, few commentators or news outlets have raised the issue of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement when it was being applied to Muslim defendants. Commentators question the national security justification for Mannings severe detention conditions and note its punitive nature, but the draconian conditions many Muslim suspects face in the United States are too often treated as understandable security measures. Indeed, most civil libertarians have restricted their public condemnations of US practices in the war on terror to the prisons at Guantnamo Bay and Bagram. The growing attention to Manning stems in part from people who have visited him, most notably his lawyer David Coombs and MIT researcher David House, a co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. In detailed reports recounting Mannings confinement, Coombs and House could very well be describing the conditions of many domestically held suspects allegedly innocent until proven guiltywho, like Manning, face months, sometimes years, of isolation awaiting trial. Visitors to Manning can speak about their conversations and provide detailed comments directly from Manning to counter Pentagon claims about how he is being treated (as House has done). But those who visit pretrial Muslim detainees held in solitary confinement under the governments Special Administrative Measures (SAMs)lawyers and immediate family members are customarily the only ones permitted to do soare legally forbidden to speak about the detainees situation, including any communication they have had. This has created a wall of silence around the abuses being committed. Indeed, in many cases lawyers and family members risk prosecution if they provide any detail from conversations or quotes from the detainee. SAMs were instituted in 1996 for cases with a substantial risk that a prisoners communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons. These measures were intended primarily for gang leaders and criminals with a demonstrated reach beyond prison walls, but the standards for imposing and renewing them were significantly relaxed after 9/11, leading to their pretrial use. Today SAMs provide the legal apparatus for domestic rights violations that can stretch on for years. What information we do have about detainees held under SAMs echoes many of the horrifying conditions faced by Manning, most notably solitary confinement under constant video surveillance, including monitoring of the toilet and shower. SAMs add a layer of isolation that exceeds even the fearsome conditions Manning is encountering. For instance, David House, who is neither Mannings lawyer nor a member of his family, has been allowed access to Manning, but under SAMs only the lawyer and immediate family (if cleared) can have contact with

a detaineeno letters, visits, calls or even talking through walls. Page after page, a prisoners SAM spells out in intricate detail the nature of his isolation, down to how many pages of paper he can use in a letter or what part of the newspaper he is allowed to have and after what sort of delay. Manning is allowed to watch television, but pretrial prisoners under SAMs are often forbidden television or radio and read newspapers often delayed at least thirty days and redacted by prison officials. Manning is allowed to write multiple letters to an approved group of family and friends, but prisoners under SAMs are typically allowed only a single letter on three pieces of paper once a week to an immediate family member. House says that Manning told him he has not been outside to exercise for four weeks. Compare this with Syed Fahad Hashmi, an American citizen who spent three years without access to fresh air at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, or Canadian citizen Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, who spent six yearsnearly all of them in pretrial solitary confinementunder SAMs in Minnesota. Indeed, many Muslim detainees have faced this isolation for years on end as they await trial. These conditions, whether pretrial or not, violate the Geneva Convention and are increasingly drawing the condemnation of the world community. Last summer the European Court of Human Rights stayed the extradition to the United States of four terrorism suspects because of the inhumane conditions in the US federal system. Yet such conditions continue to be imposed by the Justice Department and sanctioned by federal district judges. Solitary confinement, in addition to threatening an inmates mental health, threatens his ability to participate in his defense. Such treatment has great value to federal prosecutors. Medical and scholarly evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates the severe damage solitary confinement causes after just sixty days. Indeed, Senator John McCain writes that it was the worst part of his POW experience in North Vietnammore devastating than the physical torture. Tortured until proven guilty is how some commentators have termed the way Mannings conditions are being used to coerce his cooperation. What becomes evident from Mannings treatment as well as that of a number of Muslim defendants is the utility of this form of torture in producing convictions. The increasing number of plea bargains in the Justice Departments roster following years of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement suggests that it will continue these practices until the public insists that the United States will no longer torture. Two years ago, on January 22, President Obama pledged to halt the use of torture. As peoples condemnation mounts against the unconscionable treatment of Bradley Manning, their outrage must highlight such practices within the federal system and call for their end. Torture is torture, whether it happens to a young white soldier in a military brig or a Muslim defendant facing terrorism charges in the federal system.
sally ebeRhaRdt and Jeanne theohaRis

Sally Eberhardt has worked for human rights organizations in Britain and the United States and is a founding member of Theaters Against War. Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY, is cofounder of Educators for Civil Liberties.

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Eric Alterman
A Worm in the Neocons War Plans?
In September The Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg published a lengthy article examining the case for an attack on Irans nuclear facilities.
While describing his position on his blog as deep, paralyzing ambivalence, he nevertheless offered an extremely sympathetic ear to the most hawkish side, as well as a favorable context for its arguments. While Goldberg admitted the possibility that foiling operations conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powersprograms designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientistswill have hindered Irans progress in some significant way, he dismissed this alternative as decidedly unlikely. But hey, thats just what happened. According to a detailed report in the New York Timesfar and away Americas greatest news organization in these days of degraded reporting budgetsthe Israelis, with help from Siemens AG, created a computer worm called Stuxnet that not only sent Irans nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control but also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators to hide what was happening. Now that a number of technological challenges and difficulties have beset Irans program, Moshe Yaalon, Israels minister of strategic affairs, explains, Irans nuclear timetable has been postponed. This development ought to be a cause for joy among all people outside the Iranian leaderships anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying circles. A military attack, whether American or Israeli, might have postponed the timetable as well, but at a horrific cost in human and strategic terms. As Nobel Peace Prizewinning Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi recently warned, The military optionis the worst option. The Iranian peopleincluding myselfwill resist any military action. It would, she added, give the government an excuse to kill all of its political opponents, as was done during the Iran-Iraq war. Ebadi even suggested that for these reasons, the Iranian government wouldnt mind the U.S. throwing a missile at them. The departing head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, gave a series of exit interviews in which he echoed this view, adding that an attackas paraphrased by Amos Harel in Haaretzwould make the Iranian people rally around the regime, would make IsraeliAmerican relations extremely difficult and could result in a war, in which the Israeli home front will be bombed by thousands of rockets and missiles from Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. So who are the people who wished to expose Israel and the United States to this fate, and wholike, quite possibly, Mr. Ahmadinejadwould have welcomed an American or Israeli attack? Not surprisingly, they are almost exactly the same folks who agitated for an American attack on Iraqan attack, by the way, whose myriad catastrophic consequences involved vastly increasing the influence of Iran not only in Iraq but across the entire region. Among the biggest boosters were Israelis, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren, writing in The New Republic (before the latter was appointed by Bibi Netanyahu as ambassador to the United States), along with armchair warriors William Kristol, Newt Gingrich, R. James Woolsey, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Sarah Palin, Elliott Abrams, Daniel Pipes and David Broder. The last four made the argument in the context of trying to goad Barack Obama into a war for the purposes of improving his standing at home. Shocking, I know, but check the evidence: Abrams: The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one. Palin: I think people would, perhaps, shift their thinking a little bit and decide, Well, maybe hes tougher than we think. Pipes: A strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obamas feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It wouldmake netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon. Broder: With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Irans ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. While one expects such shamelessness from neoconservativesmost of whom to this day cannot admit their role in pushing the United States toward a ruinous war in Iraqthe willingness of Broder to resort to a war is the health of the state argument presents perhaps the saddest chapter in the decline of a once-respected pundit who should have been forcibly retired long ago. The ability of the Israelis to find a peaceful, albeit temporary solution to the problem of Irans nuclear ambitionsand contrary to the view of many on the left, it is a problem not only for Israel but for the entire worldought to serve as a warning to Obama and company against listening to any of these incautious warmongers ever again. After all, Bolton went so far as to insist in August that Israel had only eight days left to initiate an attack before it was too late. Yet every last one of them has been proven wrong. The Stuxnet worm has helped to save the world from the horrific consequences described by Iranian human rights leaders and the recent head of the Israeli spy service. Youd practically have to be Sarah Palin to imagine that the likes of Abrams, Kristol, Bolton and Broder know any better. n

The Nation.

Inside the rights campaign to hijack our countrys founding textand how to fight back.
by GARRETT EPPS

Stealing the ConStitution

Americans today are frightened and disoriented. In the midst of uncertainty, they are turning to the Constitution for tools to deal with crisis. The far rightthe toxic coalition of Fox News talking heads, radio hosts, angry patriot groups and power-hungry right-wing politiciansis responding to this demand by feeding their fellow citizens mythology and lies. The seminar I attended was organized by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, nestled securely in the metropolis of Malta, Idaho (2000 Census population 177, white population 174). The NCCS was the cold war brainchild of the late W. Cleon Skousen, a prominent John Bircher. The center and its crazed ideology have been taken up by Glenn Beck, who touts its educational programs on his TV show. Civic groups, school districts and even some city governments across the country have been persuaded to sponsor daylong seminars by the nonpartisan NCCS; its speakers are visiting high schools to distribute pocket copies of the Constitution. Skousens massive guide to the Constitution, The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, is currently No. 14 on Amazons constitutional history bestseller listand has ranked as high as No. 4 in the past year. Beck is not the only commentator who is espousing such extremist notions. Popular authors Thomas Woods Jr. and Kevin Gutzman, in their book Who Killed the Constitution?, argue that Brown v. Board of Education should be overturned. Not even the Constitution is safe from the constitutional-

n October I spent a crisp Saturday in the windowless basement of a suburban Virginia church attending a seminar on The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution. I was told the secrets the elite have concealed from the people: the Constitution is based on the Law of Moses; Mosaic law was brought to the West by the ancient AngloSaxons, who were probably the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; the Constitution restores the fifth-century kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. Theres more: virtually all of modern American life and government is unconstitutional. Social Security, the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, hate crime lawsall flatly violate Gods law. State governments are not required to observe the Bill of Rights; the First Amendment establishes The Religion of America, which is nondenominational Christianity. The instructor was Lester Pearce, an Arizona judge and the brother of state senator Russell Pearce, author of Arizonas anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. (Perhaps not surprising, Lester tended to digress about how he cracks down on Mexican immigrants in court.) Pearce got rapt attention from the fifty people in the audience, although one boy near me spent his time perfecting a detailed sketch of an assault rifle. These were earnest citizens who had come to learn about America and its Constitution. What they were being taught was poisonous rubbish.

brower studios / janna brower

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ists: Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano recently called the popular election of senators the only part of the Constitution that is itself unconstitutional. A gathering of conservative law professors and activists at the 2010 convention of the Federalist Society, after gloating about the rightwing triumph in the off-year elections, advocated calling a constitutional convention to strip Congress of its current powers. House majority leader Eric Cantor supports a constitutional amendment to permit the state legislatures to repeal federal laws. The new Republican majority in the House decided to kick off Congress with a televised reading of the Constitution by members. I use the quotation marks because the Constitution they read was edited so that members wouldnt have to read embarrassing anachronisms like Article I, Section 2, which counted a slave as three-fifths of a white person. (Poignantly, the language in the First Amendment about the right of the people peaceably to assemble was read by Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot at a constituent meeting two days later.) They also have enacted a rule requiring that every new piece of legislation include a constitutional authority statement explaining why Congress has the power to pass it. (The false implication is that previous Congresses enacted laws willy-nilly, with no attention to that bodys powers.)

recently cast doubt on its constitutionality in an opinion that cited, among other things, a Wall Street Journal op-ed as its authority. Its easy to understand why conservative politicians and judges are trying to align their political program with a strained reading of the Constitution: Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection and aid to education have broad popular support. Even the healthcare program, so reviled by the Republican Party, will be almost impossible to repeal using the legislative process.

Conservatives argue that the Constitution was set up to restrain the federal governmenta claim for which theres precious little evidence.
Conservative lawmakers increasingly claim that the original intent of the Constitutions framers and the views of the right wing of the Republican Party are one and the same. Newly elected Senator Mike Lee of Utah has endorsed state nullification of the healthcare law. And far-right Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has set up a Constitution school for new members of Congress; Justice Antonin Scalia (in other contexts a stickler for the separation of powers) has agreed to join Bachmanns faculty. Scalias injudicious involvement with House Republicans underscores the new boldness of conservative federal judges in adopting the rhetoric and ideas of the hard right. Scalia has repeatedly said that direct election of senators is a bad idea. He recently said that the Equal Protection Clause provides no protection for women against discrimination because when it was adopted nobody thought it was directed against sex discrimination. Federal District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida, who is hearing a challenge to the new healthcare program,
Garrett Epps, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former reporter for the Washington Post, is a legal correspondent for The Atlantic Wire. He is the author of Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America. This essay is adapted from his work in progress, tentatively titled Unhinged: Reclaiming Our Constitution From the Lunatic Right.

o the right is seeking to win by changing the rules. Progressive, democratically enacted policy choices are unconstitutional, they argue. A document that over time has become more democratic and egalitarian is being rewritten as a charter of privilege and inequality. This shouldnt be allowed to happen. Why has the right done such a good job of putting out its invented Constitution? Some of the responsibility lies with progressive legal scholars, who are well situated to explain the Constitution to the public. It isnt that they have failed; its that they seldom try. Scholars from top schools hold forth with polysyllabic theories of hermeneutics that ordinary citizens cant fathom. Meanwhile, conservatives dont hesitate to speak directly to the publicand, often, to dumb down the Constitution. They purvey a simple myth: anyone who doesnt support the far-right version of the Constitution is at best unpatriotic, at worst a traitor. Enough of that. The Constitution belongs to all of us. Its time to take it back from those who are trying to steal it in plain sight. Our Constitution wasnt written to rig the political game but to allow us to play it without killing one another. It created a government and gave that government the power it needed to function. That seems elementary, but the right claims that the Constitution was designed to prevent America from abandoning the tallow-candle purity of the Anglo-Saxon past. Any innovative government program, the argument runs, must be unconstitutional, or the framers would have predicted it in so many words. But the Constitution wasnt a revival; it was something brand-newthe first national written constitution in Western history. The framers wanted to impel change, not prevent it. Conservatives also claim that the Constitution was set up to restrain the federal government. If so, theres precious little evidence of it. The actual text of the Constitution is overwhelmingly concerned with making sure the new government had enough power; the framers thought the old Articles of Confederation were fatally weak. Sure, they didnt want to set up a government that could throw people in jail without a good reason, or steal their property, or do away with free elections. The original Constitution prohibited oppressive practices, and the Bill of Rights added other restrictions. But the document as a whole is much more concerned with what the government can donot with what it cant. From the beginning it was empowered to levy taxes, to raise armies, to make war, to set the rules of commerce and to bind the

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The Nation.

February 7, 2011

nation through treaties and international agreements. Theres no sign of the libertarian fairyland many on the far right have invented. Rather, the Constitution allowed for a government adequate to the challenges facing a modern nation. In particular, the Constitution was not written to weaken an overreaching Congress but to strengthen an enfeebled one. The old Articles of Confederation had set up a Congress with the power only to beg states for money and recommend laws for them to enact. That didnt work; the country found itself headed for bankruptcy and disaster. To replace that old Congress, the Constitution created a bicameral Congress with a long and impressive list of textual powers. It also gives this Congress the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution, not only those specific powers but all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof. Thats a lot of power. And over the years, the government has sometimes needed it, to deal with civil war, economic calamity and internal disorder. Another myth is that the Constitution was created to

The notion that theres a fixed, binding, single intent hidden in each phrase of the Constitution confuses the Constitution with the Bible.
protect the states from federal power. Again, if thats true, its not because of anything actually in the Constitution. The Constitution includes limitsbut they are mostly limits on state governments and corresponding increases in federal power. The idea that states have rights, or that they are sovereign, appears nowhere in the original Constitution. And constitutional amendments have repeatedly imposed further limits on the states while granting more power to Congress. One of the pet peeves of the right is the intrusion of ideas from international law into American law. Senators at the confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor demanded (and, regrettably, got) a promise that she would never rely on international law. A measure adopted by voters in Oklahoma in November forbids state courts from even looking to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures or international law. This is not a defense of the Constitution; it is a mutilation. The framers knew a great deal of international law. The document itself mentions many sources of international law: treaties (a major source of international law, they are part of the supreme law of the land); the law of nations, which designates customary international law; and admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, among others.

he most important truth about the Constitution is this: it was written as a set of rules by which living people could solve their own problems, not as a dead hand restricting their options. Strikingly many important questions, from the nature of the Supreme Court to the composition of the cabinet, are left to Congress. Theres

ample evidence in the text that the framers didnt think of themselves as peering into the future and settling all questions; instead, they wrote a document that in essence says, Work it out. These conclusions come from a careful reading of the Constitution, not from some hazy idea of a living Constitution. The living Constitution is a whipping boy of the right. Progressives supposedly believe, in Ron Pauls words, that government may unilaterally change the terms of its contract with the American people. Right-wing historian Kevin Gutzman writes that Supreme Court justices use the myth of a living Constitution to write their own views into law on some of the most contentious issues of our day. This debate is a mystification. The far right views the Constitution as something like the killing jar scientists use to preserve butterflies, freezing the country under glass, preventing social change and stripping the democratic process of its effectiveness. The issue in constitutional interpretation is not whether the Constitution is a living document; it is whether the United States is a living nation. That simple reality is often obscured by conservatives claim that they, and only they, follow the framers original intent. Originalism, writes scholar David Forte in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, implies that those who make, interpret, and enforce the law ought to be guided by the meaning of the United States Constitutionthe supreme law of the landas it was originally written. Who could be against that? Nobody, Forte writes, except those who believe that the Constitution has no fixed meaning. This notionthat there is somehow a fixed, binding, single intent hidden in a each phrase of the Constitutionconfuses the Constitution with the Bible. The idea of a single, literal, intended meaning of a biblical text gained primacy during the Reformation. The religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan sees in early Protestant theology the origins of American constitutional discourse. Luther and the other Reformers believed that Scripture had to be not interpreted but delivered from interpretations to speak for itself. What mattered to Luther was the original intent and sensus literalis [literal meaning] of the words of the Bible. The general Protestant notion of original intent was elaborated a century ago, when a group of American evangelical Christians published a set of essays on the fundamentals of Christian belief. In large part, fundamentalism was a revolt against higher criticismscholarship that studied the Bible like any other literary work in history. Rejecting this approach, fundamentalists believed that the Bible is the literal word of God; all parts of it are created directly by the breath of God into the human soul. The inspiration is not general but verbalGod has fixed not just the ideas in the Bible but the very words in which they were written. Thus every word has a fixed meaning, immune from question by history; and all the words fit together into one divine whole. This true meaning must be zealously guarded against corrupt worldly forcesthe higher critics seeking to contaminate it with modern, un-Christian ideas.

February 7, 2011

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o influential has biblical fundamentalism been in this country that these attitudes are now cultural rather than specifically religious values. In fact, originalists have an enemy just as the fundamentalists did. Like the higher critics, the supposed advocates of the living Constitution are smooth-talking elite deceivers who want to replace the good old Constitution with their personal views. But thats one of the rights biggest lies. We are all federalists, we are all republicans, Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural address. And we are all originalists. But many constitutional interpreters find the intent of the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution in, well, what the Constitution says. If the Constitution says that Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes, we look around us and see what commerce today consists of. If the village barber chirurgeon has been replaced by a nationwide for-profit hospital chain and a system of group health insurance, then the power of Congress tracks that change. Thats an act of interpretation, to be sure; but its no more of one than the Da Vinci Codestyle charade engaged in by many far-right originalists. At their baldest and strongest, originalists claim that the nation is bound by their own opinion of what was in the minds of the framers. For all their claims of superior virtue, originalists agree that what the framers said governs; they just want to control what counts as what the founders said. Recognizing the problems inherent in the quest for original intent, a number of originalists have moved on to what they call a quest for original public meaning, or the original understanding. That is, they say, we should consult history to determine what ordinary people in 1787 (or 1866, or whenever a specific provision was written) would have thought the words meant. Justice Scalia, for one, considers that inquiry pretty straightforward: OftenI dare say usuallythat is easy to discern and simple to apply. But as practiced by Scalia, that tends to reduce itself to, Trust me, I knew the framers and heres what they would have said. Consider Scalias concurrence in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In that case, the conservative majority gutted federal restrictions on expenditures by corporations during elections. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens challenged the right on originalist grounds. During the founding period, he noted, most political thinkers distrusted the corporate form of organization. That might be true, Scalia replied, but only because in the eighteenth century corporations were associated with monopoly privileges: Modern corporations do not have such privileges, and would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders. This dishonest contortion exemplifies the problems with original meaning. Scalia is essentially saying, They didnt really know what they thought; luckily, I do. If we adopt his definition of the founders intent, then we the people lose all right to interpret or even really read our own Constitution.

At best, we must accept the dictates of historians, who often disagree. At worst, though, we are delivered into the hands of Justice Scalia and his ilk. Judges usually know very little about history. But an originalist like Scalia is utterly confident about his power to pluck the easy, simple meaning from the air. By a bizarre coincidence, the easy, simple meaning usually coincides with the program of the twenty-first-century judicial right. Serious originalist scholarship is very useful as one way of learning more about the Constitution. But in the hands of judges like Scalia or demagogues like Glenn Beck, it is really a kind of intellectual weapon designed to hide from ordinary citizens what is in plain sightthe text of the Constitution and the present circumstances to which it must be applied. That text, and those circumstances, are the tools we the people need in order to fight back. To save our Constitution, we have to read it. Whats remarkable is how few people actually do this before proclaiming their opinions. God knows lawyers dont. In most law schools, constitutional law courses

Reading the Constitution requires the tools that Nabokov urged readers to bring to any text: imagination, memory, a dictionary.
dont even begin with the text. Instead, on day one, students read the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison. Thats the case in which the Supreme Court for the first time announced the doctrine of judicial review, which allows it to review state and federal laws and invalidate those that, in its judgment, dont comply with the Constitution. Marbury is a terrific case; but the doctrine it embodies isnt written in the Constitution. So at the very beginning of their study, most lawyers leave the text behind, and never return to it. Ordinary citizens also resist reading the Constitution. They think its dull. In 1987, the American novelist E.L. Doctorow found no poetry in it. It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand, he reported sadly. It lacks high rhetoric and shows not a trace of wit, as you might expect, having been produced by a committee of lawyers. It uses none of the tropes of literature to create empathetic states in the mind of the reader. Doctorow was wrong. The Constitution as a whole takes effort to read; but once one puts in the effortseveral readings, all the way through, and some serious thought about what one has readit reveals a surprising, indeed sometimes dazzling, array of meanings. By turns political, legal, epic and poetic, it shows us a number of strategies for dealing with contemporary challenges. How do we read the Constitution then? A citizen who seeks to understand the Constitution should not assume that the answers lie in Supreme Court cases. For one thing, many important constitutional questions have never come before the Court. Some, indeed, can never be heard by any court

NOBODY OWNS THE NATION.

Not GE (or Comcast). Not Disney. Not Murdoch or Time Warner. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of our own conscience. This independence is why great writers have always used The Nation as an Early Warning Systemto expose before its too late the frauds, felonies and follies of the all-too-private enterprise we call Our Government. And its why week in, week out were read by an audience as illustrious as our authors. If you believe, as our readers do, that the highest form of patriotism is demanding to know exactly what Governments doing in your name, why not sign on today at this very low rate? You can save a lotnot least of which could be your country.

Walter Mosley is a longstanding Nation reader.

THATS WHY SO MANY SOMEBODIES READ IT.

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February 7, 2011

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they constitute what judges and scholars call political questions, which must be worked out by other branches of the government. Second, the courts may get it wrong. In 1857, the Supreme Court announced that Americans of African descent were not and never could become citizens. A bitter political struggle, and an even more bitter Civil War, produced a national consensus that this decision was profoundly wrong even on the day it was announced. More recent decisions, from Roe v. Wade to Citizens United, have provoked profound criticism by political leaders and ordinary citizens. Citizens are not wrong because they disagree with the Court. At its most basic level, reading the Constitution requires the tools that Vladimir Nabokov urged readers to bring to any text: imagination, memory, a dictionary and a willingness to use all three when the going gets tough. Read the Constitution and measure it against the absurd

claims we hear every day. This is a matter of life and death for our Republic. We wont find the Tea Party manifesto there; nor will we find the agenda of progressive advocacy groups. What we will find is a set of political tools and a language that fair-minded citizens, progressive or conservative, can use to talk through our disagreements. Trapped in that ghastly church basement last year, I made a resolution that I would try to help rescue the Constitution from constitutionalists. Here and now I say to Nation readers that if any group of citizens anywhere wants to meet in a church basement to discuss these issues, I will either go there to help or try to find someone who will. Its time for progressive constitutional scholars to stop mumbling about deconstruction and speak up for democracy. Ordinary Americans love the Constitution at least as much as far-right ideologues. Its our Constitution too. n Its time to take it back.

Confronting the Climate Cranks

Its time to take on those who are sabotaging our response to the climate crisisface to face.
by mARk hERTSGAARD
didnt realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means clear and bright in Italian. I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British governments chief science adviser. The interview changed my life. King, who had done as much as anyone except Al Gore to awaken the world to the dangers of climate change, helped me understand that the climate problem had undergone a profound, largely unexpected paradigm shift that carried the gravest of implications for little Chiara and all the worlds children. No longer was climate change a preventable future threat; it was now a punishing current reality, one that was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better. My interview with King led me to write HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which has just been published. My hope was to find a way for my daughter and her peers around the world to cope with all that lies in store
Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com) is the author of six books, which have been translated into sixteen languages, including HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in January by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, from which this article is adapted.

for them. After four years of investigation that took me across the United States and around the world, Im heartened to report that there are many practical steps we all can takeas individuals, as communities, as countriesto protect our societies and our young people from the changes in our climate that are unavoidable over the coming decades. Still, I am saddened and angry that we find ourselves in this position in the first place. After all, humanitys failure to take action in time against global warming was a conscious decision, a result of countless official debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Much of the blame for this unfortunate outcome belongs to people I have come to refer to as climate cranksthe corporate lobbyists and rightwing ideologues who for twenty years have done all in their power to keep this country, especially the government, from seriously addressing the problem. In my journalism I have frequently pointed out the nefarious role the climate cranks have played in our national politics, but I confess I have often wondered how much good this did. I revere the profession of journalism and have long believed that it is best kept separate from activism; each of these callings has its own role to play in the endless struggle to make a better world. But I am not only a journalist. I am also a father. And as a father who during all of my now 5-year-old daughters life has been watching governments, especially my own, do next to nothing about the climate catastrophe hurtling toward us, I
ryan inzana

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have come to feel obligated to reach beyond the tools of journalism, vital as they are. Like my colleagues Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell, two journalists and fathers who have also come to embrace climate activism, I now feel compelled to take more direct action. If Chiara and her peers around the world are to have a decent chance of inheriting a livable planet, the status quo cannot stand. We need transformative change, above all in Washington, and we need it quickly.

hich is why I will go to Washington the week of January 31 to confront the climate cranksin Congress, in the media and in the corporate sectorand try to stop them from further sabotaging our response to the climate crisis. My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mothers Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our childrens future matters; Grist, Americas leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined. On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local

Every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot, roughly 2 billion young people in total.
young peopleactivist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion. We will highlight the ludicrousness of their antiscientific views, which alone should discredit them from further influence over US climate policies. And we will show how our nation could still change coursefor example, if the federal government were to use its vast purchasing power to kick-start a green energy revolution that would create jobs and prosperity across the land. We welcome your help and constructive suggestions for how to achieve these goals and invite you to join us. (You can find out more and get involved by visiting the Generation Hot Facebook page at facebook.com/pages/ Generation-Hot/175293409175720.) But now let me turn to the question of why such direct action has become necessary. From the time global warming emerged on the public agenda in the late 1980s, it was regarded as a grave but distant future threat and, crucially, one that could be neutralized if humanity acted quickly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I shared these assumptions until my October 2005 interview with David King shattered them. The science adviser told me that in fact global warming had already triggered outright climate change, and had done so a hundred years sooner than even the most concerned scientists had expected. One early manifestation, according to three British scientists writing in Nature, was the record heat wave that brutalized Europe in the summer of 2003. King cited government statistics indicating that the heat

had killed 31,000 people, making it the deadliest disaster in modern European history. Yet this turned out to be an underestimate. An epidemiological study conducted in 2008 for the European Unionreported here for the first time concluded that the 2003 heat wave had caused at least 71,449 excess deaths, a toll considerably higher than the United States suffered during the Vietnam War. As a new father, most alarming to me was Kings next point: this newly triggered climate change is bound to intensify for the rest of my daughters life. The inertia of the climate systemthat is, the laws of physics and chemistryguarantee that average global temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how fervently humanity might embrace solar energy, electric vehicles and other options for reducing emissions. And as temperatures rise, this global warming will unleash still more climate change: deeper droughts, stronger storms, wilder wildfires and so on, as well as faster sea level rise. No, no, its not too late, King hurried to reply when I asked if this paradigm shift means all is lost. But the early arrival of climate change does transform the nature of the problem, as paradigm shifts tend to do. To wit, humanity now faces a double imperative. The traditional goal of climate policyto reduce global warminghas now become more urgent than ever, for if global temperature rise isnt halted soon, it could gain too much momentum ever to reverse. Yet at the same time, humanity has no choice but to adapt to the impacts that are in the pipeline over the coming decades, said King. In short, we have to live through global warming even as we try to reverse it. ll of this makes my daughter an involuntary member of what I call Generation Hot. In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot, roughly 2 billion young people in total. I choose that date because it was the day humanity was put on notice that human activities were unwittingly raising temperatures on this planet. The warning was in NASA scientist James Hansens testimony to the Senate, boosted by the decision of the New York Times to publish the story on Page 1, thus making global warming a common phrase in newsrooms, government offices and households the world over. But Hansens and countless subsequent warnings have gone unheeded, largely because of stiff resistance from the carbon lobby, to borrow author Jeremy Leggetts termthe energy and auto companies that profit from carbon dioxide emissions, the politicians and propagandists these companies sponsor and the right-wing ideologues who share their antigovernment sympathies. My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot are fated to pay the price for this foot-dragging. One of the most unpleasant facts about climate change is that, once triggered, it cannot be turned off anytime soon. Even if humanity somehow stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, King told me, temperatures will keep rising and all the impacts will keep

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February 7, 2011

changing for about twenty-five years. Since it is likely to take us at least a quarter-century to leave fossil fuels behind, the reality is that were locked in to at least fifty more years of rising temperatures and the harsher climate impacts they bring. Thus the young people of Generation Hot are condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilizations history. You want specifics? By the time she is my age, Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in todays Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the

Its outrageous that the climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. They have no more credibility than the Flat Earth Society.
summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such lowlying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders.

global warming worse. That, in turn, increased the likelihood of unleashing climate change. Viewed in this context, the obstructionism of the carbon lobby and climate cranks played a decisive role. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twentyfirst century, the climate cranks blocked our government from taking serious action against emissions. By doing so, they also stalled international action (since other countries were understandably reluctant to reduce their emissions when the worlds biggest polluter was unwilling to do so). Thus limits on global warming were avoided at the very time they would have mattered most. Had some individual countries, especially the US, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have [avoided dangerous climate change], Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton who ranks among the worlds most eminent climate scientists, told me. But we didnt, and now the impacts are here. This was a crime, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Germanys former chief government adviser on climate told me. But the wrong people are being punished. My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didnt commit. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are reaping record profits, enjoying prominent media coverage (and not only on Fox) and even gaining control of the House of Representatives, where they plan to launch an inquisition against climate scientists who dont share their loony ideas.

recisely how much blame the carbon lobby and climate cranks deserve for the fate of Generation Hot cannot yet be scientifically determined. In theory, its possible that global warming would have prematurely given rise to outright climate change even if the United States and other countries had scaled back their emissions beginning in the late 1980s. After all, it is the historic accumulation of greenhouse gases, not the annual emissions, that drives global warming. Scientists are still debating exactly when global warming sparked climate change, as well as the related question of how much responsibility global warming bears for any particular climate impact. (In their Nature study of the 2003 heat wave, for example, the three British scientists estimated that global warming was responsible for about 75 percent of the excessive heat Europe experienced that summer.) But these are scientific nuances. As a practical matter, there is no denying that the large amount of greenhouse gases emitted since June 23, 1988about 40 percent of humanitys total emissions since the Industrial Revolutionmade

t is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes. Dont rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. Theyre not skeptics. Theyre cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that its all a leftwing plot. One crank recently took me to task for supposedly having no respect for science. In my reply, I assured him I respected science as much as anyone who lives in the modern world, where we take for granted air travel, Wi-Fi Internet, modern medicine and a host of other blessings. Then I asked, If you respect science so much, how do you explain the fact that virtually every major scientific body on earth disagrees with you about climate science? Are they all in on the conspiracy? He

February 7, 2011

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never replied, but of course that is the logical implication of his camps insistence that they do too have science on their side. The scientists who say otherwise are all part of a conspiracy towell, take your pick: to keep the research dollars flowing, to expand government control of the economy, to dismantle modern society and return us to hunter-gatherer primitivism. As I said, these are the ravings of cranks. You can hear much the same from Congressional Republicans, starting with Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the vice chair of the House Science Committee, who will be leading the charge to debunk mainstream climate science. I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything human beings do, Sensenbrenner has opined, repeating a talking point favored by many climate cranks but definitively refuted by many peerreviewed scientific studies. For his part, the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is so scientifically illiterate that he apparently thinks the environmental complaint about carbon dioxide is that its a carcinogen. Uh, no, Mr. Speaker, thats actually the rap against those cigarettes you like smoking (and whose manufacturers youve defended all these years). Newly emboldened by the midterm elections, the Republicans are gearing up to put environmentalists and climate scientists on the defensive and block progress against global warming for the rest of Obamas presidency. Its time to turn the tables on them. The first step is to connect the cranks to the terrible consequences they have set in motion, and thereby discredit them from further influence over the nations climate policies. How? Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the publicby posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations. (In the run-up to these confrontations, we will invite the participation of the members or readers of The Nation, Grist, Kids vs Global Warming and the other partnering organizations, polling them on which cranks to target, what questions to ask and so on. Thus we hope to build momentum before arriving in Washington, as well as generate continuing attention and activism after the confrontations.) By no means is our initiative alone sufficient to turn the tide in the climate fight, but we believe it can make a valuable contribution, especially if others lend a hand. By naming and shaming the climate cranks, we hope to shift the political terrain of the climate fight. By highlighting the specific climate impacts that have already begun and will intensify in the coming years, we aim to shift the debate away from abstract ideology toward the actual consequences the cranks have wrought for Generation Hot. And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope youll join us. n

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Obama: Triangulation 2.0?

In year three, will Obama heed the lessons of Clinton or Reagan?
by ARi BERmAn
mmediately following the Democrats 2010 electoral shellacking, a broad spectrum of pundits urged President Obama to pull a Clinton, in the words of Politico: move to the center (as if he wasnt already there), find common ground with the GOP and adopt the triangulation strategy employed by Bill Clinton after the Democratic setback in the 1994 midterms. Is triangulation just another word for the politics of the possible? asked the New York Times. Can Obama do a Clinton? seconded The Economist. And so on. The Obama administration, emphatic in charting its own course, quickly took issue with the comparison. According to the Times, Obama went so far as to ban the word triangulation inside the White House. Politico called the phrase the dirtiest word in politics. Obamas distaste for the Clinton-era buzzword seemed a tad ironic, given that he had packed the White House with insiders from the Clinton administration and began year three with prominent Clinton alums as his chief of staff (Bill Daley), top economic adviser (Gene Sperling) and budget director (Jack Lew). Obamas first legislative deal after the election, on the Bush tax cuts, included major concessions to the GOP in a highly Clintonian compromise. And there was the Big Dog himself, at the White House press podium on December 10, defending the agreement while Obama was under fire from the left, a predicament Clinton was no stranger to. One could be forgiven for believing that the Clinton era had returned. The parallels between now and then are indeed striking. After his partys midterm rebuke in 1994, Clinton delivered a prime-time address in December of that year to preempt incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrichs Contract With America by unveiling a Middle Class Bill of Rights consisting mainly of tax cuts. Congressional Democrats were furious at the proposal, and noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that Clinton had hoisted a white flag and did so before a crowd that wont be satisfied by anything short of unconditional surrender. Sixteen years later, following his own midterm thumping and in an attempt to preserve the sort of tax cuts liberal Democrats once vilified Clinton for, Obama agreed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts temporarily, including those for the wealthiest Americans. The deal demonstrated how far the pendulum had swung to the right, especially in the wake of George W. Bushs tenure, and raised
Ari Berman, a Nation contributing writer, is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.

alarming questions about how Obama planned to govern against the backdrop of a divided Washington. If Obama continues to adopt Republican ideas, what was previously regarded as the center will shift even further to the right. At the hopeful beginning of his presidency, Obama devoured biographies of Lincoln (Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan) and FDR (The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter, FDR by Jean Edward Smith), two unquestionably great presidents who put their unique stamp on history. By the end of a productive yet rough two years in office, as he departed for a much-needed vacation in Hawaii, Obamas reading list was replaced with biographies of Clinton and Reagan, presidents who stumbled in their early days and suffered bad losses in their first midterm election yet eventually regained their footingthough in markedly different ways. Clinton, for much of his presidency, shaded the difference between liberalism and conservatism in favor of a third way, while Reagan held to an unabashedly conservative ideology on foreign and domestic policy. On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama argued that Reagan had changed the trajectory of Americain a way that Bill Clinton did not. A few years later, however, Obama looks far more like Clinton than Reagan, a largely transactional, rather than transformational, leader (although there have been times, most recently during his mesmerizing speech at the Tucson memorial service, when Obama has powerfully risen to the occasion). The big question for years three and four of his presidency is, Which model will Obama follow?

efore dissecting Obamas strategy, its worth remembering the moves Clinton made after the 94 election and whether they worked as popularly described. That December, Clinton summoned his old Arkansas friend Dick Morris, a shadowy and controversial political operative whod worked for GOP senators like Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, for an urgent strategy meeting. Morris, using the code name Charlie, urged Clinton to fast-forward the Gingrich agenda and find a Democratic way of achieving GOP priorities. Heeding such advice came naturally to Clinton, whod already cut deals with the GOP on issues like NAFTA and would continue to do so after facing a Republican Congress, most notably on welfare reform, reducing the size of the government (The era of big government is over) and balancing the budget, while emphasizing less consequential issues, such as school uniforms and V-chips, that polled well with the electorate. Yet the half-dozen exClinton advisers I interviewed

ryan inzana

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for this article pointed out that Morris typically receives more credit than he deserves in the saga of Clintons comeback, and that triangulation was less responsible for Clintons re-election than conventional wisdom posits. The truth is, triangulation was much more what Dick Morris said than what President Clinton did, says former Clinton adviser Paul Begala. In fact, during his first major confrontation with the GOP Congressover the 1995 budgetClinton ignored Morriss advice, according to Begala, and refused to cut a deal with Gingrich, pledging to resist cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. Begala recounts an oft-told story in which Clinton, during a meeting with Gingrich, pointed at the Oval Office desk (named The Resolute, a present from Queen Victoria in 1880) and told the GOP leader, If you want to pass your budget, youre going to have to put somebody else in this chair. Begala wants Obama to study that Clinton, not the Morris concoction. It is that Gary Cooper type of leadership, Begala says, that people are now looking for in President Obama. Gingrich stubbornly plowed ahead with his spending cuts and forced a government shutdown, which backfired spectacularly and jolted Clintons sagging poll numbers upward. Clintons outmaneuvering of Gingrich, his reassuring handling of the Oklahoma City bombing and the steady growth of the economy since he took officeby 1996 the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.4 percentpropelled him to a second term. Morris had little to do with it, which is one reason the former Clinton advisers I interviewed unanimously urged

Obama not to follow Morriss triangulation formula. What Obama should take from the Clinton experience is that you absolutely have to pick some early battles to stand strong on, says Mike Lux, Clintons special assistant to the president for public liaison. The Republicans will give us a hundred different opportunities, between bills they introduce and crazy shit they say. The hardest decision will be picking which ones to focus on. Former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg says Obama should be drawing red lines on things that are central to the purpose of his presidency and ought to be looking to get work done with the Republicans in other areas. Even Morris doubts that his strategy is applicable today. A New York Post column after the election was titled This Time, Triangulations Not an Option. Morris and his co-author, Eileen McGann, pointed out that Republicans have little desire to work with Obama. If they compromise to suit Obamas big-government objectives, theyll muddy the waters, antagonize their energetic base and provide no clear alternative to his socialism, he wrote. According to Morris, Obamas socialism can only be defeated, not appeased. Despite calls for a more civil dialogue in the wake of the Arizona shootings, Republicans are unlikely to abandon their oppositional strategy. The concept of the third way or triangulation is that reasonable people from both sides can come together and strike a deal, says Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democratic Network and a veteran of Clintons war room in 1992. And I think what weve learned in the last few years is that formula requires both sides to

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be reasonable. And weve discovered the Republicans are not. Not only is the political context between now and 1994 different; so too are the backgrounds of Clinton and Obama. Clinton viewed himself as a liberal in a conservative era and governed accordingly. Obama was elected at the very moment when conservative governancein the form of George W. Bushwas being widely repudiated. Clinton hailed from the center/center-right of the Democratic Party and consciously tried to shed the big government, tax and spend stigma of the McGovern/Mondale years by associating himself with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and New Democrat movement. Obama represented a new day for his party and appeared less bound by the ideological baggage and fights of the boomer generation. In part because of his early opposition to war in Iraq and his progressive record as a state and US senator, he was more enthusiastically embraced by liberal Democrats and linked to a younger, diverse, more grassroots constituency. As a state senator, Obama had found Clintons maneuvering on welfare reform disturbing, identified himself as a member of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 1999 and, in a signature speech in Iowa during the 2008 primaries, promised an end to triangulating and poll-driven positions. Obama has already accomplished some major things Clinton did not, such as the stimulus bill, healthcare reform and financial regulatory reform, and he will not be able to fast-forward the agenda of new House Speaker John

both sides. Yet the president has often gone too far in adopting the other sides arguments, watering down his own agenda in an attempt to lure GOP votes that never materialize. In the spirit of trying to find common ground, the president sometimes gave too much ground, says Rosenberg. Washington Post blogger Adam Serwer has persuasively argued that what in the past the administration has referred to as pragmatism is merely triangulating by another name. The difference is rhetorical, not substantive. Obama makes it clear that he agrees with liberals on substance, before arguing that the political situation necessitates some kind of compromise, Serwer writes. Obama may profess not to like the compromise hes agreeing toabandoning the public option on healthcare, loading up the stimulus with tax cuts, agreeing to extend tax cuts for the wealthiestbut he compromises all the same. This impulse will likely become more dominant as he negotiates with Republicans over the next two years.

Over the past two years Obama has won a number of legislative battles, but he has lost the broader philosophical war.
Boehner without disowning his signature achievements. Triangulation, to the extent that he pursued it, was a political strategy for Clintonhe believed in policies like welfare reform and balancing the budget, but he deliberately highlighted the issues that brought him the largest gain among the center of the electorate. Obama, on the other hand, has disparaged the bitesized politics of the Clinton era and has said that hed rather be a transformational president in one term than a middle-of-theroader for eight years. When his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, another Clinton alum, urged him not to pursue healthcare reform in 2009, Obama responded, I wasnt sent here to do school uniforms, according to Jonathan Alters book The Promise: President Obama, Year One. Yet heres the rub: compromise, for Obama, appears to be even more of a core value than it was for Clintonhe believes instinctively, from his days as a community organizer onward, in getting what he can out of a deal, even if its less than he wanted, and moving on. What he considers the purism of the left bothers him as much as the ideological extremity of the right, and as president he has often lumped both poles together, even as the center continues to drift to the right. I dont believe that either party has cornered the market on good ideas, Obama said when he signed the tax cut compromise. And I want to draw on the best thinking from

bama said he wanted to be like Reagan, not Clinton, but he has yet to make a sustained case for his corresponding ideology or vision for the country, as Reagan successfully did. Reagan attacked liberalism throughout his presidencybig government was the problem, and lower taxes and fewer regulations were the solution. No matter the deals he eventually struck, whether it be with Tip ONeill or Soviet Russia, capitalism was the hero and government the villain. Reaganism became an ideology, and the GOP is still following that script today. One can scarcely say the same about Obamaismwhatever that may be. Just where Mr. Obama actually lives on the ideological continuum, wrote Matt Bai of the New York Times, is the most vexing question of his presidency. Obama has been quite clear about his allergy to ideological thinking. I dont think in ideological terms, he told The Nation in 2005. I never have. But the presidents relentless attachment to pragmatism, which has become an ideology unto itself, has allowed the GOPs dominant narrative about the economic crisisthat big government, once again, is to blameto go unchallenged, especially when Obama sides with Republicans thematically on issues like deficit reduction and freezes on discretionary spending and federal pay. In the absence of an alternative narrative the Republican story is the only one the public hears, Robert Reich, Clintons labor secretary and a onetime Obama economic adviser, noted on his blog. Hence the rise of the Tea Party and the potency of antigovernment right-wing populism nowadays. Over the past two years Obama has won a number of legislative battles, but he has lost the broader philosophical waras Democrats passed bill after bill, the electorate drifted further away. Reagan often gave ground on policy substancemost notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently noted. But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong. Reagan had what Obama needs mosta master narrative and rationale for his presidency. Reagan took his case to the people and sold his program, says Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, whose

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book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime Obama read on his latest vacation. During his first two years in office, Reagan really stuck to his guns during the recession, Cannon says, defending his massive tax cuts and increase in military spending while backing Federal Reserve chair Paul Volckers controversial management of monetary policy. By the time the 1984 election rolled around, the economy was growing rapidly and unemployment had eased from 10.8 percent in 1982 to 7.2 percent. Reagan could legitimately claim it was morning again in America. Obama, according to Cannon, needs to look less like a legislator and more like a president; to focus on communicating with the American people and not become preoccupied by negotiations with Congress. Obama is inspirational, but hes not a salesman, Cannon says. Obamas speech in Arizona reminded Americans that his rhetorical skills are unparalleled; now he must display that same eloquence and urgency when it comes to solving the economic crisis, especially since many Americans remain perplexed by the length and depth of the recession. Whats missing is a story line, says Reich. What caused the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression, and why are we having such a hard time getting out of it? Why are working- and middle-class people hurting so much, and what are we going to do about it? That story line has to be reiterated over and over. The opportunity is ripe for Obama to pull a reverse Reaganarticulating a progressive populism that is more relevant now than at any time since the 1930s, indicting the excesses of corporate conservatism and runaway capitalism. We often talk about how upset Americans are at government, says pollster Cornell Belcher, who has worked for Obama and Howard Dean. You know who theyre also upset with? Theyre upset with the big corporations and the banking industry, who they think have been gouging them and not playing by the rules. The best estimates for 2012 forecast unemployment above 8 percent, a statistic no president since FDR has recovered from in his first term, which underscores the need for Obama to side with struggling Americans. The narrative is obvious, says Stan Greenberg. We have an economic philosophy centered on making the middle class richer, and they have an economic philosophy which says trickledown. Making that story stick would require both a rhetorical and policy shift from the Obama administrationsharpening the populist language and outlining ambitious proposals to turn the economy around. Yet theres little evidence that Obamas team is prepared to adopt such an approach, especially given that his core advisers are former Wall Street insiders or policymakers sympathetic to them. Obamas aversion to populism has turned him into what Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne calls a Wall Street Liberala big-spending friend of the banks. Progressive Democrats have pushed Obama to shed that label. Last summer Roger Hickey of the Campaign for Americas Future, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Robert Kuttner of Demos/The American Prospect met with Obamas senior adviser David Axelrod and urged the White House to unveil an ambitious job-creation

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plan that Democrats could run on in 2010 and 2012. They wanted the White House to embrace a more expansive economic vision, not just to think tactically about legislation before Congress. Axelrod rejected the advice, arguing that the Senate didnt have the votes to pass a jobs plan and, anyway, polling showed that the public didnt want the government to spend more money. They think theyve done a great job and its just a matter of time before the economy recovers, Hickey says. The public evidently disagrees. Roughly 50 percent of Americans say Obama has spent too little time trying to create jobs and fix the economy, according to a December New York Times/ CBS News poll. In another postelection poll, 56 percent of Americans ranked the economy and jobs as their top priority for the new Congress, while only 4 percent named the deficit. Despite those numbers, these days the Obama team seems far more preoccupied with deficit reduction than job creation.

What I want to hear is jobs, Begala says of the upcoming State of the Union address. What I predict is the deficit. Indeed, the administration just hired Bruce Reed, former head of the DLC and executive director of the presidents deficit commission, as Vice President Joe Bidens new chief of staff. The president has been boxed in by the GOP: unable to raise taxes or spend money. Under the GOPs formula, budget cuts are his only option. Austerity politics rules the day. As a result, Hickey and other progressive organizers are looking outside the White House for leadership on the economy. We need the highestlevel group in Congress to say to the White House, We need a jobs plan, Hickey says. The Local Jobs for America Act, introduced last year by Representative George Miller and Senator Sherrod Brown, could be the basis for those discussions. Ultimately, though, the president has the nations bully pulpit. Its up to Obama to use it. n

Letters
(continued from page 2) And its not the way people with means generally get to handle their own or a family members addiction. Old school is to think the justice system can solve our social problems; lets move to a paradigm where our resources are focused where they do the most good, namely on front-end social investments that improve the well-being of people and their communities. Tracy Velzquez, executive director Justice Policy Institute In Obamas Drug War Michelle Alexander unfortunately ignores important antiracist, budget-based antiprison organizing. As the prison system has metastasized, spending on cages and cops has drained funds from education, housing, health and other programs. The burden of such cuts falls on poor people of colorthe same people being rounded up to fill Americas new prisons. Antiprison activists are making common cause with advocates for public schools, health and housing programs, aiming to shrink the prison system and channel funding spent on prisons toward programs that meet the needs of our most vulnerable residents. Were not worried that the race card will be played. It is played daily in courts, police stations and prisons. Our protection against the next Willie Horton ad will come from work that insists that public safety is a matter of more preschools, not more cops; of more health clinics, not more prisons. Such antiracist, budget-based, antiBrooklyn, N.Y.

prison organizing provides fertile ground where a large-scale movement to transform the New Jim Crow state can grow. Craig Gilmore California Prison Moratorium Project Living happily in the pot culture here in the Emerald Triangle of cannabis cultivation, I was interested in Sasha Abramskys Altered State. I voted against Prop 19 pots virtually legal here as it is. I agree that the local economy would be decimated if Big Tobacco moved in, and I, too, have heard that it is already acquiring land. My greatest concern is for the health of this planet, related to the GMO revolution. The reason Big Tobacco and the medicalindustrial complex are so threatened by cannabis is that anyone can throw a few seeds in his backyard and have enough supply for a year. The craze over the miraculous healing from cannabis oil is all over the Internet and is fueling the AMA and Big Pharma to gain control over another inalienable rightto grow our own God-given herb for personal health and well-being. GE companies like Monsanto are already on their way to holding the patents on all plants in our food chain, and this would be another coup for control of our choice in safe health remedies. Just one dusting of terminator pollen would wipe out any independent outdoor grower. I am not nave; were heading toward legalization. But I would send an urgent message to start growing seed crops indoors. And lets all keep fighting hard against genetic pollution. Kim Castilla
Fort Bragg, Calif.

Altered states, pleasure, pain management and the pursuit of meaning have always been central to the richness of life. The list of these pursuits dwarfs our Calvinist preoccupation with drugs: sexual intimacy; religious mysticism; danger and violence; entertainment and sports; the arts and intellectual pursuits; lifelong hobbies [Rebalancing Drug Policy]. All drug use, including drinking and smoking, certainly needs to be approached with care. But as we rationally require drivers, pilots and gun owners to have training and licenses, we could choose to distribute drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) in a rational manner. Prescribing specialists would provide access and science-based information on safe use, health consequences and treatment. As with tobacco, costs would be kept high enough to minimize harmful use and low enough to suppress criminal enterprises. Manufacture and distribution would be provided by contractors, free of promotion by corporations and street dealers. Economic and social costs would be much lower than incarceration and current public health outcomes; drug-related crime and violence would be largely eliminated. Drug use will not go away; Prohibition taught us that. We have eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge, and more than ever we understand the biochemistry of our pleasures. Rational solutions are abundant. We need the political will to choose sensible policies. Russell Dehnel

Lakeside, Calif.

Books & the Arts.

Library Man
by ThoMas Meaney
hen Claude Lvi-Strauss died a little over a year ago at age 100, he left behind a curious and contested legacy. For the French, he was the intellectual equivalent of royalty. In 2008, editions of his works were published in the gilt-lettered Pliade collection, an act of canonization rare for a living French author; in his last appearances on television, he was less a commentator than an object of veneration; shortly before the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid him court to wish him happy birthday. All French anthropologists are the children of Lvi-Strauss, proclaimed Le Monde in its obituarywhich was an understatement, as there is scarcely a field in the humanities and social sciences Lvi-Strauss left unaltered. His ideas about myth dramatically collapsed the distinction between European high culture and so-called primitive society, and weaned a generation of French thinkers off Marxist orthodoxy and Sartrean existentialism. Though he did not like to claim intellectual patrimony, the careers of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are impossible to imagine without him. But for readers outside France, including many Anglo-American critics, the nature of his achievement is harder to define. No one doubts Lvi-Strauss was the author of important works and the purveyor of powerful insights, but the suspicion remains that behind his fantastically rigorous analyses of Amerindian culture there operated a deeply impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at odds with any general theory. Some accused him of reducing the meaning of human existence to an arbitrary stock of contrasting flavors: the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the wet and the dry. Others took his structuralist program to be a scientific alibi that concealed his fundamentally artistic enterprise. This was a man, after all, who once, while in the middle of the Amazon, wrote a tragedy about Augustus, and whose magnum opus, the four-volume Mythologiques (196471), was composed in a
Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and an editor of The Utopian.

series of musical movements that promised a key to all mythologies. For such critics, the very scale of Lvi-Strausss ambition belongs to a particularly heady moment in French thought. Patrick Wilckens new biography, Claude Lvi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, is an ambitious attempt to navigate between these two extreme perspectives. An Australian historian of Brazil with a background in anthropology, Wilcken is well positioned to deliver a coolheaded account of Lvi-Strausss life and career. He interviewed Lvi-Strauss twice for this book, and while his subject remained almost comically aloof during their sessionsMy emotional states werent that important to me, he once remarked Wilcken is alive enough to his dissembling ironies to read him profitably against the grain. If Lvi-Strauss was able to make scientific discoveries about aboriginal cultures, it was not despite his artistic predilections, Wilcken convincingly argues, but because of them. Countless anthropologists combed through the remains of the last aboriginal societies in the course of the twentieth century, many of them with more experience in the field than Lvi-Strauss. But they lacked his trained sensibility: the sharp eye for cultural patterns, the novelistic feel for the shape of a story, the patience for synthesizing masses of abstruse data into meaningful wholes. This is what Wilcken means when he calls him the poet in the laboratory, even if, as Lvi-Strauss liked to joke, his lab was inconveniently located 6,000 miles outside Paris.

Claude Lvi-strauss

The Poet in the Laboratory.

By Patrick Wilcken. Penguin Press. 388 pp. $29.95.

laude Lvi-Strauss was groomed to be an artiste. He grew up in a secular Jewish household on the edge of Pariss sixteenth arrondissement, surrounded by his fathers exotic curios and halffinished projects. Raymond Lvi-Strauss was a portraitist with a weakness for pastels. His livelihood was endangered by the rise of photography, and when his commissions dried up in the 1920s, his son helped him use scraps around the house to make a series of haphazard, artful knickknacks to pay the bills (a homegrown example of what the anthropologist would later call bricolage). Despite

his limited means, Raymond gave Claude a rich grounding in the arts. He schooled him in the grand masters at the Louvre, immersed him in the operas of Wagner and encouraged his sketching of set designs for the theater. But the young Lvi-Strauss was also tempted by the world beyond his fathers ken. He admired the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Cline and Andr Breton and made the rounds at the studios and galleries of avantgarde painters. In an early article published in Georges Batailles journal Documents, he made a case for Picasso as the greatest painter of the age but criticized Cubism for pretending to be a break from Impressionism when it was simply another manifestation of bourgeois art tailor-made for a band of insiders. By age 21, Lvi-Strauss was already playing the detective, deciphering the clues of culture. Lvi-Strausss early academic experiences were less exhilarating than his extracurricular escapades. In his memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), he bitterly recalled the claustrophobic, Turkish bath-like atmosphere of the French university system and its scholastic pretensions. After choosing to study philosophythe result less of a genuine vocation than of a dislike for the other subjectshe prepared for the inhuman ordeal of the Aggregation, the competitive examination that allows students in France to become university lecturers. I was confident that, at ten minutes notice, I could knock together an hours lecture with a sound dialectical framework, on the respective superiority of buses and trams, he remembered. Wilckens retelling of the period offers glimpses of the coming attractions of postwar French thought: we see Lvi-Strauss brush shoulders with Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir (Very young, with a fresh, bright complexion, like a little peasant girl, he remembered). Like many of his generation, Lvi-Strauss was intimately involved in politics: he served as the secretary general for the Socialist student union, worked for

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a Socialist deputy and became president of a left-wing advocacy group dedicated to mobilizing students worldwide. But with these solid leftist credentials came remarkably conventional views. The young LviStrauss emerges in Wilckens portrait as an advocate of the sort of mild paternalistic colonialism he would later abhor, and a champion of a vague kind of gradual social change he called Constructive Revolution. If Lvi-Strauss was a radical in anything, it was in his course of study. He eventually decided to abandon his pursuit of a doctorate in philosophythe traditional rite of passage for Frances intellectual eliteand cast about for an escape route. The relatively uncharted waters of anthropology made it an appealing refuge for the intellectually adept but rudderless LviStrauss. In later years, he made it seem like

contemporary novelist Paul Nizan and the sixteenth-century missionary-explorer Jean de Lry, Lvi-Strauss dreamed of the possibility of not only philosophizing about Rousseaus noble savage but of actually going out to find him. In 1934, when an opportunity came his way to teach at the University of So Paulo in Brazil, he jumped at the chance.

If the young Lvi-Strauss was radical in anything, it was in his course of study: anthropology.
he was hard-wired for the match: I sometimes wonder if anthropology did not attract me, without my realizing this, because of a structural affinity between the civilizations it studies and my particular way of thinking. I have no aptitude for prudently cultivating a given field and gathering in the harvest year after year: I have a neolithic kind of intelligence. Like native bush fires, it sometimes sets unexplored areas alight; it may fertilize them and snatch a few crops from them, and then it moves on, leaving scorched earth in its wake. For Lvi-Strauss, anthropology was a vocation akin to music or mathematics: you had to discover the aptitude for it within yourself. It was perhaps an advantage that he barely had any formal training in the field. He was too young to have signed on to the first major French ethnographic expedition across North Africa, undertaken by Marcel Griaule and Michael Leiris, and he neglected to attend the seminars of Marcel Mauss, who did pioneering work on reciprocity and gift exchange, at the Collge de France. Instead, he imbibed a mixed brew of the latest field reports by American anthropologists along with the Surrealist accounts of French writers who had made contact with indigenous peoples. Inspired by the travel books of the

t is astonishing how much of LviStrausss reputation still hinges on a nine-month voyage through the Mato Grosso of western Brazil that was, in many respects, a failure. The objective was to travel along an abandoned telegraph line and conduct a rigorous survey of the little-known Nambikwara tribe, but a series of setbacks meant Lvi-Strauss could spend only a few days among them. His account of his sole sustained fieldwork experience which makes up the bulk of Tristes Tropiquespresents a challenge to any biographer who wants to cover the same territory with matching vividness. But its in Brazil that Wilcken is at his best, providing the missing parts of Lvi-Strausss narrative, including his on-the-spot field notes, and filling in the supporting cast barely mentioned in the book. We watch as Lvi-Strauss, low on money and bartering supplies, placates a planted spy from the Brazilian government in the convoy, and copes with broken recording equipment and unreliable mules. After his young ethnographer wife, Dina, contracts a sight-threatening eye infection, he wastes no time dispatching her back to So Paulo. For a thinker who would be an armchair anthropologist for the rest of his lifeI realized early on that I was a library man, he once told an interviewerLvi-Strauss displayed a remarkable toughness in the bush. Wilcken treats us to a digression on the fate of another member of the expedition, a young Columbia graduate student named Buell Quain, who would later commit suicide from the pressures likely related to fieldwork. When Lvi-Strauss at last reached the Nambikwara after an 800-mile trek, the encounter shattered his romantic expectations. I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression, he wrote, and that of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it was individual human beings. The men of the tribe greeted him laughing; the women tried to steal his soap as he washed in the river. Malnourished, and on the brink of a breakdown, he nevertheless started to gather the material he would

use to shatter a generation-old consensus in anthropology. Whereas functionalist anthropologists following Bronislaw Malinowski believed the social lives of indigenous peoples were determined by basic needs like sex and hunger, Lvi-Strauss found something close to the opposite in the tribes he encountered: even in the most dire conditions, they were driven above all by an intellectual need to understand the world around them. When Amerindians chose animals for their totems, it was not because they were good to eat, Lvi-Strauss argued, but because they were good to think. The Nambikwara were every bit as scientifically minded as the ethnographers who studied them (their mental inventory for honey, for instance, included thirteen different varieties). The only major difference, Lvi-Strauss claimed, was the totalitarian ambition of the savage mind, which operated on the assumption that if you couldnt explain everything, you hadnt explained anything. Lvi-Strauss witnessed this rage for order in everything from their face-painting to the layout of their camps, and most especially in their myths, which they pieced together with borrowed scraps of older ones in the same way a computer programmer might patch together code. Lvi-Strauss left the Nambikwara with a hoard of impressions about their culture, but he hadnt yet cracked their riddles. The major theoretical breakthrough would come from an unexpected source during his wartime exile in New York City. He spent the war years teaching at the New School, having barely scrambled out of occupied France alive. It was there that his colleague Alexandre Koyr introduced him to Roman Jakobson, a globetrotting Russian linguist who specialized in the structural analysis of language developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Jakobson thought he had found a dependable drinking partner in Lvi-Strauss; he was disappointed on that frontLvi-Strauss was a teetotaling early riserbut their friendship blossomed into a rich intellectual exchange. Lvi-Strauss learned from Jakobson how language could be broken down into simple components called phonemes. As Wilcken explains, the r in rat and the m in mat operated like control gates on a circuit board, indicating alternate meanings. It was not the phonemes themselves that held the meaning of words but the relationship among them. This shift from studying single objectswhether it be a syllable, a sentence, a family or a culturein favor of analyzing the relations among them was the essence of structuralism. Lvi-Strauss applied its logic to the workings of myth, which he took to be

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#48 You can read it on the throne Go to: TheNation.com/50ways

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another form of language. Mythology, in his view, is an elaborate attempt to make cognitive sense out of our chaotic impressions of the natural world. We respond to our environment by breaking it down into manageable dualisms, which makes it possible to orient our existence in the world. By cooking the raw material of nature, we translate it into culture. Lvi-Strauss came to consider indigenous myths, as a form of aesthetic creation, superior to the Wests precarious investment in more dubious expressions of individual artists, since individual-centered meaning was almost guaranteed to pale in comparison to the power of a myth that had been fashioned by an entire community over time. There may have been no Tolstoy of the Nambikwara, but the culture and language they had made and shared was more fecund than War and Peace. Jakobsons structural method became Lvi-Strausss prize intellectual tool and brought anthropology closer to becoming a hard science. Lvi-Strauss could now process the huge amounts of data in his colleagues field reports by plugging their findings into his elaborate charts and tables. He wrote The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) in the now-vanished North American reading room of the New York Public Library, where he shared a table with a Native American chief taking notes in a buckskin jacket and full feather headdress. The Elementary Structures remains the most forbidding of Lvi-Strausss major works, but it revolutionized the way anthropologists understood kinship and caste systems. Instead of focusing on lineage and descent, Lvi-Strauss showed how indigenous families developed on a horizontal plane, with men exchanging their sisters and daughters in order to avoid the incest taboo, which LviStrauss interpreted as humanitys most basic attempt to rein in the randomness of nature. When he was not unraveling the mysteries of kinship systems, Lvi-Strauss led a cheerful bohemian existence in New York. He spent weekends prowling antique shops, surprised to find museum-quality Indian artifacts and pottery available for next to nothing. Anthropologists and Surrealists shared a passion for cultural fragments and provocative juxtapositions. With his friends Max Ernst and Andr Breton, he sought out the most enchanting pockets of the citys flourishing cultural ecosystem, stumbling on communities that preserved traditions long ago abandoned in the old country. In his mini-memoir New York in 1941, LviStrauss fondly recalled attending Chinese Operas under the first arch of the Brooklyn

Bridge, conducting a mock-ethnography of Fire Island and reading out translations of President Roosevelts speeches on Free French radio (the clarity of his diction made him a good fit for the job). He easily could have made a career for himself in his adopted homeland, but after the war he took a post at the cole practique des hautes tudes, where he rejoined his old tribe as a more formidable member.

ack in Paris in the early 1950s, LviStrauss wrote Tristes Tropiquesa memoir of his voyage to Brazil disguised as an anti-travel bookin a moment of despair, when he felt his academic career had stalled and he could risk a wider audience. From its opening line (I hate traveling and explorers) to its disenchanted declarations (the tropics are less exotic, than out of date), the book dealt in the cultural pessimism that would become his trademark. While Lvi-Strauss rails against the Western myth of the self-authorizing individual, he allows his subjectivity to shimmer throughout Tristes Tropiques. The prose bears a heavy Surrealistic stamp: two mountains outside Rio de Janeiro are like stumps sticking up here and there in a toothless mouth; the precipices between the skyscrapers of New York are sombre valleys, dotted with multicoloured cars looking like flowers. Lvi-Strauss shares with Proust the ability to cycle through the styles of great French writers, whether he is teasing out the colors of a sunset la Chateaubriand or sharpening an insight to the fine point of a Pascalian pense. Wilcken, a beautiful stylist, is well attuned to these shifts but also alert to the places where Lvi-Strauss feigns nonchalance or veers into preciousness. The question remains: how did a relatively obscure, taciturn anthropologist, who had written an unsupervised dissertation on a recondite subject and maintained only minimal ties with the French intellectual establishment, manage, within the course of a decade, to dethrone the leading thinker of the age? Jean-Paul Sartre hardly considered Lvi-Strauss a threat. He sent the anthropologist an inscribed copy of his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) in testimony of a faithful friendship, and cited The Elementary Structures approvingly in the course of his argument. But Lvi-Strauss was in no mood to return favors. By then installed at the prestigious Collge de France, he devoted a yearlong seminar to a detailed study of Sartres Critique, and when his Savage Mind appeared in 1962 it ended with a twenty-page assault on the fundamental underpinnings of Sartres

thinking. Power was passing from a chainsmoking, pill-popping haunter of Left Bank caf society to a sixteenth-arrondissement aesthete, writes Wilcken. But how exactly, and under what conditions, did the exchange take place? Sartre was an early hero of postwar French intellectuals for a reason. By articulating a philosophy based on acting responsibly in the face of history, he restored the confidence of a damaged intellectual elite and helped it prepare for its confrontation with the nations colonial past. The impossible ambition of the Critique was to reconcile Sartres existentialist ethics with the Marxist dictates of historical necessity. In Sartres system, history presents us with a limited range of possibilities and we act within them, which in turn gives rise to a new set of possibilities. For Lvi-Strauss, this blend of historical determinism and personal agency was doubly problematic. First, it put the individual front and center in the historical process, whereas, as LviStrauss believed he had shown, the underlying structures of society left little room for the whimsy of subjectivity. The self is not only hateful, he wrote in Tristes Tropiques, channeling Pascal, there is no place for it between us and nothing. Second, Sartre was still propagating the old European idea of history as a progressive narrative, whereas Lvi-Strauss held up indigenous cultures as examples of other, possibly more appealing ways of organizing human experience. The myths of tribes such as the Nambikwara and the Bororo were designed to insulate their seemingly unchanging social orders from the disruptions of history. By making history always be for something, and privileging the breakneck speed of Western history over the slow, recycling world of indigenous peoples, Sartre was committing a sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism. or French academics and intellectuals coming of age in the 1960s, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Lvi-Strauss, by painstakingly drawing lessons from indigenous peoples from across the world, was working on a much grander scale than Sartre. Bus-stop queues, strikes, boxing matchesthe examples out of which Sartre built his philosophical anthropologyseemed provincial in comparison to structuralisms global reach, writes Wilcken. While Sartre concentrated on working out the problem of individual emancipation within the narrow confines of

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the Western philosophical tradition, LviStrauss, by peeling back the divergent expressions of a common human nature all over the world, was able to reveal how much of Western culture was an unhealthy aberration. This self-critical stance in the face of other cultures became a more compelling form of anticolonialism than Sartres calling for third world revolution from his table at the Caf de Flore. Ours was the only civilization, argued Lvi-Strauss, whose attempts to release humanity from the bonds of nature led to gross delusions that have underwritten everything from the destruction of the environment to the Holocaust. To Sartres Hell is other people, Lvi-Strauss answered: Hell is ourselves. The other reason for Lvi-Strausss unlikely triumph was that structuralism served as a convenient halfway house for disenchanted Marxists. Those who had lost faith in the iron laws of historical materialism during the war now placed their bets on structuralism as a more credible form of social criticism for resisting the advances of Anglo-American liberalism. Structuralism also exercised a hold on their minds because its core concept of social codes was a closed system invulnerable to empirical testing. Its imperialism of significance, as Ren Girard has called it, could explain almost anything, and turned Lvi-Strausss corpus into the intellectual buffet from which the next generation selected its defining ideas. For Lacan, structuralism revealed the system of symbolic forms that the mind unconsciously mapped onto reality. For Althusser, it helped explain how the capitalist mode of production drew on an intricate code of agreed-upon meanings that bore little relation to the actual reality of workers. For Foucault, who was deeply attracted to the antihumanist element in structuralism despite claiming not to be a structuralist, Lvi-Strauss showed how concepts like madness were arbitrary constructions whose salience depended on a complex web of shifting social values. Meanwhile, Barthes used its more formal techniques to unveil the realist conceits of the modern novel and champion the novels-without-a-subject of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Lvi-Strauss had little time for all this. I dont know and I dont care, he tells Wilcken when asked about his legacy. He never read a structuralist novel and confessed to finding Lacans seminars incomprehensible (to his fervent admirers, understand means something other than it does to me). He considered Althusser politically perverse, Foucault an illuminating but dubious historian and

Barthes mildly absurd. (Lvi-Strauss once Strauss never seriously considered returning performed a structuralist analysis of a Balzac to some primitive golden age, but there is story and sent it to Barthes, who responded little doubt he scanned native societies for elwith enthusiasm and urged Lvi-Strauss to ements that could contribute to the ongoing publish ituntil, Wilcken tells us, he was ethnographic critique of Western culture. informed it was a joke.) It was only with For this Lvi-Strauss has continually May 1968 that structuralisms star began to come under attack from critics as a cultural fade, relieving Lvi-Strauss of his place at relativist of the worst order. The charge was center stage. There was widespread agree- first leveled in the 1950s by the writer Roger ment among the student protesters that his Caillois, who condemned him as an inverted thought held no revolutionary potential ethnocentrist. Lvi-Strauss, he argued, epitoStructures dont take to the streets, read mized Western hypocrisy by putting primia famous pronouncementand they began tive cultures on a pedestal, when the very to question whether it even impeded so- existence of anthropology as a discipline was cial progress. Some of Lvi-Strausss more proof of Western cultural superiority. This fanciful critics claimed that structuralism pablum would become the familiar conservawas the theoretical expression of the stat- tive rebuke of anthropology throughout the ic authoritarian technocracy of de Gaulles government. Structuralism is the last barrier the bourgeoisie have erected against Marx, wrote a rehabilitated Sartre, momentarily back in The daffodils can go fuck themselves. the spotlight, where he would soon proselytize for Mao, his version of a Im tired of their crowds, yellow rantings noble savage.

Dorothy Wordsworth

ut Lvi-Strausss politics remain badly misunderstood. He had an intensely political project that Wilcken, stressing aesthetic concerns, fails to appreciate. While his hopes of becoming a socialist functionary may have died early, Lvi-Strauss admired the savage mind largely because he believed it proposed remedies for specifically Western maladies. For example, when considering cannibalism, he argues that the indigenous practice of eating part of ones parents deceased body, so that they might continue to live symbolically in their progeny, indicates more respect for humans than the scalpel work of the dissection table. In return, LviStrauss writes, Amerindians would be mystified by modern prison practices, which separate lawbreakers from society and attempt to reform them by destroying their social ties. The Plains Indians, argues Lvi-Strauss, had a more effective way of rehabilitating criminals. By temporarily ridding them of their possessions or living quarters, they put them in a tightly bound reciprocal relationship with society. The criminal would then perform a form of community service until the community had incurred a debt to him and so restored him to his place in society. Lvi-

about the spastic sun that shines and shines and shines. How are they any different

from me? I, too, have a big messy head on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. I flower and dont apologize. Theres nothing funny about good weather. Oh, spring again, the critics nod. They know the old joy, that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot of future growing things, each one labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang. If I died falling from a helicopter, then this would be an important poem. Then the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous youth. O, Flower, one said, why arent you meat? But I wont be another bashful shank. The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre, the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop interrupting my poem with boring beauty. All the boys are in the field gnawing raw bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
JENNIFER CHANG

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culture warsright up to the present. Last year the French social critic Pascal Bruckner published a book that singled out Lvi-Strauss as one of Europes leading guilt-peddlers. For Bruckner, the Wests self-flagellation has made it nearly impossible to criticize nonWestern societies. This claim not only mischaracterizes Lvi-Strausss position but also fails to grasp that he long ago anticipated the objection. In Tristes Tropiques he successfully answers the charge: Other societies are perhaps no better than our own; even if we are inclined to believe they are, we have no method at our disposal for proving it. However, by getting to know them better, we are enabled to detach ourselves from our own society. Not that our own society is peculiarly or absolutely bad. But it is the only one from which we have a duty to free ourselves: we are, by definition, free in relation to the others. As for the claim that only the West harbors interest in the others, Lvi-Strauss pointed to, among others, the Flathead Indians of the Rocky Mountains, who were so intrigued by what they heard about white settlers that they sent a series of expeditions to make contact with the Christian missionaries at St. Louis. In the closing pages of Tristes Tropiques, Lvi-Strauss argues that not all cultures are equally humanethe Aztecs, modern Europeans and modern Muslims occupy low rungs on his ladder. In a comparison that would become notorious, he equated the intransigent utopianism of Islam with that of postrevolutionary France.

Just as Islam has kept its gaze fixed on a society which was real seven centuries ago, and for the problems of which it then invented effective solutions, he wrote, so we [French] are incapable of thinking outside the framework of an epoch which came to an end a century and a half ago. By contrast, certain indigenous societies, he argued, have more salient lessons than others to teach when it comes to integrating mankind into a more intimate relationship with the world and many of these are by definition societies that have safeguarded themselves from outside influences.

till, the fusillades Lvi-Strauss aimed at his critics didnt deter him from settling into his own brand of conservatism toward the end of his life. As Wilcken points out, Lvi-Strauss pres reverence for established forms reasserted itself with renewed force in his son, whose youthful taste for the avant-garde proved to be spent. In 1980 Lvi-Strauss voted against Marguerite Yourcenars nomination to a seat in the Acadmie franaise because it went against centuries of tradition. (Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected.) A backslide into traditionalism is not unusual among old men. But less expected was that Lvi-Strausss scientific work would later be co-opted for explicitly conservative political ends: in the 80s, French deputies quoted from The Elementary Structures of Kinship in their arguments in favor of traditional marriage as the cornerstone of the Fifth Republic. Wilcken concludes his biography on a dismissive note. Lvi-Strauss ended up

as a one-man school, he writes, peddling a type of analysis that had become so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on. But his frustration with LviStrausss overall project is understandable. The scientific side of Lvi-Strauss expected his work to be superseded, but in practice he stubbornly resisted updating his thinking or responding to revisions proposed by thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Clifford Geertz. In Wilckens telling, Lvi-Strauss comes to resemble a medieval scholastic, rummaging through structures of his own imagining as he twirls three-dimensional myth mobiles that hang from the ceiling of his office. The best Wilcken can say, in the end, is that in a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition. But Lvi-Strausss legacy is more than a monument of aging intellect for us twentyfirst-century pygmies to marvel at. LviStrauss is better remembered as a moraliste in the tradition stretching back to Diderot and Montaigne. The French moralistes have fulfilled a uniquely corrective function in the West: they are not the custodians of social mores but the refurbishers, eager to scrap faulty moral assumptions. When LviStrauss surveyed indigenous cultures, he did so in the hope of expanding awareness of the repertory of social arrangements beyond the Wests increasingly monocultural civilization. From the practices most stigmatized by racismwedding rites, initiation ceremonies, creation mythsLvi-Strauss extracted precepts for understanding, if not sympathizing with, the internal logic of the most

sonnet of exemplary sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the nature of Pronouns in emile Benvenistes Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)
This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again. I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again. Although I eat this fish I dont know its name. Spirits watch over the soul of course. I suppose and I presume. I pose and I resume. I suppose I have a horse. How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said I had a good divorce. Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog. Whores have no business getting lost in the fog. Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable? Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache and the narrator concludes, The problem is insoluble.
ANNE CARSON

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foreign cultures. The sheer scientific rigor of his analysesand the respect for his subjects it impliedwas ultimately more effective in combating racial prejudices than the pronouncements of grand penseurs like Sartre. Lvi-Strauss was more forthright than many political thinkers today in spelling out the paradox of his antidiscrimination efforts. The struggle against racism, which enjoined humanity to adopt the norms of global civilization, was also, he believed, responsible for destroying the very cultural differences antidiscrimination was meant to protect. As human societies become more aware of the importance of preserving one anothers particularisms, their differences become harder to justify. When integral communication with the other is achieved completely, wrote

Lvi-Strauss in The View From Afar (1983), it sooner or later spells doom for both his and my creativity. Lvi-Strauss never ceased to mourn the loss of original wellsprings of aesthetic and moral meaning that could be found only in societies that turned a deaf ear to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, he came to see his work and that of anthropology in general as making us more cautious and careful as we inevitably come into closer contact with them. The charms of civilization may be due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, but for Lvi-Strauss this does not absolve us of the duty to reform it. For this realistic sense of responsibility and unwillingness to provide false comforts in a time of totalizing prophets, n he can still be read with much reward.

Perfect-Bound

by JaMes MarCus
lizabeth Hardwicks name is so synonymous with the essayespecially with the errant, genre-busting, quicksilver sort of undertakings that she brought to perfection during her long career that its hard to believe she made her initial breakthrough with a short story. Yet its true. In 1939 she arrived in New York City from Lexington, Kentucky, with the avowed goal of transforming herself into a New York Jewish intellectual. (She went two for three: not bad.) Her initial idea was to get a doctorate from Columbia, where she studied John Donne and the rest of the metaphysical posse. But Hardwick eventually drifted away from academia, and in 1944 she published her first short story, The People on the Roller Coaster, in The New Mexico Quarterly Review. These days, a debut in a respectable but somewhat off-the-radar quarterly would be the occasion for a well-deserved pat on the back plus two free copies of the magazine. In Hardwicks youth, it was possible to make more of a splashor so she told Hilton Als in a 1998 New Yorker profile. If you published a story then, she noted, even in The New Mexico Quarterly, the publishers would call. Soon Hardwick obtained a contract for her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, whose appearance in 1945 caught the attention of Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv. He admitted the newcomer to his stable of sharpshooting critics, which included James Agee, Mary

The new york stories of elizabeth hardwick

Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney. New York Review Books. 224 pp. Paper $15.95.

James Marcus is deputy editor of Harpers Magazine.

McCarthy and James Baldwin. Soon enough the preternaturally witty, gimlet-eyed essayist, who gave to the form everything and more than would be required in fiction, nudged aside the writer of short stories. Yet she kept writing them, in an on-andoff, left-handed manner. The collection that Darryl Pinckney has assembled in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick does not include all the short fiction by Hardwick published before her death in 2007 (it omits The People on the Roller Coaster and several other stories). Presumably Pinckney made these cuts in the name of quality control and geographical unity. Hairsplitting readers will protest that four of the thirteen tales in the collection are not set in New York. No matterthe thematic logic is still irresistible. The city always had a special claim on the authors imagination, long before she arrived there. As a Southerner, she once confessed, I had in my earliest youth determined to come to New York, and it has been, with interruptions, my home for most of my adult life. An exile of sorts, she felt exceedingly comfortable in the Valhalla of displaced people that was postwar New York. Yet she also saw the citys jittery impermanenceits

compulsive need to wipe the slate clean and start againas an obstacle for the fiction writer. Manhattan, she would later write, is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the citys inchoate density is a special challenge. None of which deterred Hardwick in the first of these stories, The Temptations of Dr. Hoffmann (1946). The narrator, like the author, is a Southerner who has established a fragile beachhead in Manhattan, living in one of those furnished rooms whose left-over, dim, vanquished occupants Hardwick would later recall in the autobiographical hybrid Sleepless Nights. Lonely, and less than captivated by her studies, the narrator becomes friendly with Dr. Hoffmanna German migr and theologian whose fresh-faced disciples like to congregate in his apartment. Surrounded by these ordinary boys who would later be in the Presbyterian pulpits throughout America, the good doctor is in fact quite bored. Perhaps that is why he welcomes the narrator, a self-described village atheist, into his household. The stage is set for a clash, or at least a close encounter, between faith and faithlessness. Yet this is a story in which nothing happens. The narrator, having smuggled herself into the Hoffmann mnage like a surveillance camera, records a number of domestic disputes between the theologian and his wife and daughter. She tells us, too, about her encounters with a young man from her Kentucky hometown, now a seminary student and one of Hoffmanns eager ecclesiastical beavers. But again, the only thing we come to understand about the narrator and Dr. Hoffmann is that she cant understand him: I lacked specific details of his experience and even if I had known him forever I could never have felt certain of my abstraction. his seems less like the utterance of an unreliable narrator and more like a veiled cri de coeur on the authors part. Hardwick, then 30, simply hadnt figured out what to do with fiction. An obvious model would have been Mary McCarthy, a close friend of the era with whom she shared numerous literary tastes, a fading attachment to the Communist Party and several high-profile love interests. But McCarthy was too successful, having already hit the big time with The Company She Keeps (1942). And anyway, Hardwick had little stomach for the sexual shenanigans and anthropological zest that were her friends stock in trade. Staking out her own, comparatively

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buttoned-up turf, she seemed to be groping her way forward. Only once in her tale of Hoffmann do we get a glimpse of the impish author in her classic mode, when she notes that her church back home was very lax on social questions and prided itself, I thought, on being too sophisticated to condemn horse racing from the pulpit and on the fact that the minister was more likely to be stirred to eloquence by Lloyd C. Douglass latest book than by hellfire and damnation. We left the delineation of the vivid results of enmity with God to the crude Baptists. Evenings at Home, published two years later, finds Hardwick in more commanding form. This is partly because the story involves a trip back to Kentucky, whose social terrain the author already knows to her fingertips. But she has also discovered that plot the library paste, the very adhesive of conventional storytellinginterests her far less than a specific situation, a dilemma, a state of mind. Like the narrator of The Temptations of Dr. Hoffmann, but with much more skill and sparkle, Hardwick insinuates herself into a scene and quickly locates its paradoxical sweet spot. In this case, it is the contrast between the received wisdom about her Southern family (mostly borrowed from second-tier Faulkner and Tobacco Road ) and the more humdrum reality: My family situation is distinguished by only one eccentricityit is entirely healthy and normal. This truth is utterly disarming; nothing I have felt in years has disturbed me so profoundly as this terrible fact. he other issue in play is the troubled commerce between women and men, which Hardwick would continue to explore for the rest of her career. She was never a doctrinaire feminist in the bra-burning mold, and in a 1953 review of Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex she ridiculed the authors argument that women were slaves to procreation while men got to swan around writing poems, painting pictures and running for public office. There is an annihilating nothingness in these undertakings, she shot back, by comparison with which the production of one stupid, lazy, lying child is an event of some importance. On the other hand, she was acutely aware that in most of societys bargains, women got the short end of the stick, and

that many were all too eager to grasp it. Still, for Hardwick, these were personal rather than political matters. In Sleepless Nights, the author (or her fictional proxy) declares, I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man. Most of the female characters in The New York Stories follow suit, or just barely suppress this heat-seeking, misery-making instinct. So the narrator in Evenings at Home must face not only her refreshingly normal family but the man she almost married. What happened between us? No, no, merciful stars, not that! she exclaims, in an outburst of propriety that must

have made McCarthy roll her eyes. Still, her escape was a narrow one: I looked up the dark street in the direction of his house and thought, suppose, great heavens, that I had married him. The thought of the risk I had taken chilled me to the bone. I might at this moment have been asleep in his house, my stupid head pressed against his chest, touching the stony curve of his chin. By the time she produced The Oak and the Axe and A Seasons Romance, both of which date from 1956, Hardwick had become a much more supple, even sleek purveyor of what she ambivalently recognized as New Yorker fiction. (Six of the stories in this col-

lection, including the latter two, appeared in the magazine.) A Seasons Romance takes a leaf from Edith Wharton, whose avoidance of lush sentiments and moralizing tears always appealed to Hardwick. Here she manages a similar feat in this tale of a female art historian and her mother exploiting a deeppocketed suitor. The man is a cheerful sucker. The women are predatory. Yet the daughter, Adele Wayland (whose very name sounds like a certain other Wharton character), is predatory in the same way as Lily Bart. As Hardwick tells us, with alternating currents of irony and empathy: Adeles life could accurately be termed hard. She and her mother were inscrutable facts of social history, a mongrel blend of genuine deprivation and genuine loftiness of manner, training, and expectation. Of course the story ends badly, although not quite as badly as Lily Barts. The suitor, puffy and blond, with his alimony [and] his sharp-nosed sons who went to military school, decamps for Dallaswhere mother and daughter fear to tread. In the final paragraphs, they are poised for a slide down the social slope, although they are likely to dig in their heels before they hit the bottom. Between these stories and Crosstown (1980), there is a gap of more than two decades. Hardwick had, during these years, more than enough to occupy her: she wrote the essays collected in two classic volumes, published Sleepless Nights, helped to launch The New York Review of Books and willingly nursed her husband, Robert Lowell, through a series of catastrophic breakdowns. Yet the final pieces in the collection, which also include The Bookseller (1980), Back Issues (1981), On the Eve (1983) and Shot: A New York Story (1993), are also its strongest. Hardwicks proseelegant, pointillistic and somehow sketchy and baroque at the same time, like Tiepolo drawing on a dinner napkinis in full flower. And she has finally resolved the tension between her fiction and nonfiction by fusing the two. Her mature essays, in Cynthia Ozicks phrase, have plots, while her mature stories float along in clouds of rumination. Its hard to choose among these treasures. But surely Back Issues deserves some pride of place, if only because it closes the circle that began with Hardwicks first story in The New Mexico Quarterly Review. The back issues are old quarterlies, through which the narrator is rummaging at the New York
Dominique nabokov

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Public Library. The yellowing pages are, she notes, memorials to the thoughts of many therein. More hours of these lives were spent on book reviews than on lovemaking or even on making a living. Poems and stories, politics, reversals and discoveries, individually packed by hand and some, as they say, moving faster than others. The comparison

to five-and-dime merchandise that simply will not move, sounds belittling. So does the authors evocation of an ink-and-paper necropolis. But Hardwick couldnt be more tongue-in-cheek: the musty, fusty, perfectbound pages represent life, are life, and (to borrow one of her pet locutions) they go on n and on and on.

an atlas of reckonings

by roBin einhorn
Voyages
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
slavevoyages.org.

ne significant and possibly surprising fact about the Atlantic slave trade, the massive human-trafficking business that shipped more than 10 million Africans to the Americas between 1501 and 1867, is the small role of the United States in it. About 400,000 Africans were loaded onto slavers and shipped to Virginia, South Carolina and other North American destinations, but this was less than 5 percent of the total. About 3.5 million Africans were shipped to the Caribbean (Barbados, Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere) and almost 4.9 million to Brazil. Nor was the United States a leading player in the traffic itself. While about 300,000 Africans crossed the Atlantic in US-owned ships, 1.1 million crossed in Spanish vessels, 1.4 million in French ships and 3.3 million in British ones. Precisely because of Brazils leading role as a slave trade destination, the Portuguese topped this list as well: Portuguese-owned slavers carried 5.8 million Africans across the Atlantic. These larger and smaller numbers, of course, have no moral significance. Even the lower figures are shockingly high. But even if they werent, the relevant crime was any participation in the slave tradeor slavery itselfrather than some degree of participation. Still, as historian David Eltis explains in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a monumental trove of information publicly available online, the most striking point about the morality of the slave trade was that, for most Europeans, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar. Americans of European descent did not think any differently. From Rhode Island to Rio de Janeiro, slaving was usually treated as a legitimate business that
Robin Einhorn teaches history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of American Taxation, American Slavery.

atlas of the Transatlantic slave Trade

By David Eltis and David Richardson. Yale. 307 pp. $50.

atlantic slave trade and encourage community cohesion by developing a nature trail and erecting a freedom statue). Kicking off the proceedings, Prime Minister Tony Blair embraced the anniversary as an opportunity not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was and rejoice at the different and better times we live in today but to propose increased aid to Africa, celebration of African and Caribbean contributions to British culture, eradication of continuing racism in Britain and a campaign to end modern slavery and human trafficking. The US version of this commemoration a year later (the United States banned slave importation in 1808, the first opportunity under the slave trade clause of the Constitution) was more muted; although Congress passed a law to ensure a suitable national observance, it stripped the funding before passage. President George W. Bush did not participate. he public business of commemoration aside, the real questionthe difficult questionis, What kinds of things do nonspecialists actually want to know about the slave trade? Adam Hochschilds Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empires Slaves (2005) is a stirring history of the first wave of the British abolition movementaccurate, responsible and sophisticatedbut with a heroic plotline not unlike that of the biopic Amazing Grace (2006), in which a dashing young William Wilberforce (played by Ioan Gruffudd) sacrifices his health to steer slave trade abolition through Parliament, aided by the scenery-chewing Albert Finney (as the reformed slave ship captain John Newton, who wrote the hymn) and Michael Gambon (as the politician Charles James Fox). Marcus Redikers The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), meanwhile, is a horrifying account of the everyday torture and murder at the heart of the slave trade, epitomized by the sharks that followed slave ships to feast on the plentiful corpses of its victims. The Voyages database is not like Bury the Chains or The Slave Ship. There is nothing romantic about it, but its horror arises only through the cumulative weight of its abstract pieces of information: names of ships and their owners and sailors; voyage itineraries and commercial outcomes; the numbers of enslaved Africans on each ship with the places where they were bought in Africa and sold in the Americas; the percentages of men, women and children in the cargoes; the numbers who died on the voyages; and records of revolts and other acts of open resistance. Users can sort, tally, map and graph

built respectable commercial fortunes. There have been some striking modern reckonings with this history. Brown University, founded and endowed by prominent Rhode Island slave-trading families, established a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2003 that was charged, according to its 2006 report, with examining not only the Universitys historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade but also the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present-day confrontation with past injustice, a reference to the thorny problem of whether and how to pay reparations to African-Americans for the injuries and injustices of slavery. The report presented a great deal of research, ranging well beyond Rhode Island slave trading to the larger history of American racial oppression and worldwide efforts to cope with past injustices (reparations, prosecutions, truth commissions). While its conclusion was anticlimactic and even somewhat self-servingIf this nation is ever to have a serious dialogue about slavery, Jim Crow, and the bitter legacies they have bequeathed to us, then universities must provide the leadershipits intellectual earnestness and moral sincerity are beyond reproach. In 2007 Britain commemorated the bicentennial of its abolition of the slave trade on a lavish scale, spending $20 million on programs across the country, ranging from the solemn and scholarly (museum exhibits, public lectures, theatrical works) to the more or less fanciful (a school project intended to celebrate the abolition of the trans-

36

The Nation.

February 7, 2011

the data in various ways, such as choosing the voyages from particular years or longer periods, the voyages of ships of particular sizes or flying under particular flags, the ones that sailed from or to particular places, the ones on which revolts occurred and so on. Individual voyages can be studied in detail and identified through searches on the various characteristics of the voyages. With an interface that is fairly easy to navigate, the Voyages database is open to anyone for any reason: for scholarly research, idle curiosity or anything in between. This project, an international collaboration led by Eltis of Emory University and David Richardson of Hull University in Britain, is a remarkable scholarly accomplishment. Since its origin in 1990, when Eltis and Richardson were studying the British slave trade and shipping business, it has expanded to embrace the voyages of French, Spanish, Portuguese and other Atlantic slavers. The projects researchers proceeded to unearth thousands of previously unknown slaving voyages in business archives, newspaper files and personal correspondence. They also collated and standardized the records that earlier studies had gathered, mostly for single countries, to create one huge database for the slave trade as a whole. In 1999 the project published a CD-ROM with 27,233 voyages, which has been an essential source of data for historians such as Rediker. Since 1999 new research in Luanda, Havana, Lisbon and Madrid (and other places) has expanded the database to almost 35,000 of these murderous crossings. How murderous were they? About 12.5 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships; about 10.7 million emerged alive. In addition to documenting the voyages, the website includes other kinds of information. An Estimates database tries to correct for gaps in the documentary records by roughly calculating the actual volume of the slave trade, as a whole and in subsets by time period, origin, destination and so on. Users can categorize the data and view or download the results in tables, maps and timelines. An Images database collects digitized manuscripts such as ship registers, along with paintings, drawings, engravings and maps. Another database identifies 67,000 Africans by name along with their regional origin, age, sex, height and destination. This Names database was constructed from the registers that British navy officers made in the nineteenth century when they intercepted slave ships and brought them, especially, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. The

website also features interpretive essays about the history of the slave trade and, for teachers, a series of lesson plans in history, social studies and geography. he database has recently taken a fixed and smaller form. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is a handsome volumeof coffee-table dimensions that contains 189 colorful maps documenting, mostly, flows of slaves from African ports to the Americas. It also contains helpful essays by leading historians, telling quotations from slave trade participants and lavishly reproduced illustrations of artifacts: ship drawings, pages from ship registers, photos of shackles and instruments of torture, paintings of Caribbean plantations and lists of sick or dead Africans from slave ship captains. But the work is an atlas above all, and its overwhelming purpose is to illustrate numbers. These numbers begin as straightforward statistics, such as what proportion of the 12.5 million captives left each of the major regions of Africa, marked with larger and smaller circles and the numbers, of which the most impressive is the 45.5 percent of the total who were shipped from ports in West Central Africa (mainly modern Angola and Congo). Then there is a map marking the destinations of the 10.7 million survivors, with the biggest numbers in Southeast Brazil (21.5 percent) and Bahia (14.7 percent), followed by Jamaica (9.7 percent), Pernambuco (8.1 percent, the third of the three Brazilian destinations), Cuba (7.4 percent), St. Domingue, modern Haiti (7.3 percent) and smaller figures for the other American destinations, with inset text reminding us that fewer than 4 percent disembarked in the United States. Then things turn more complicated. Three maps examine the nationalities of the slave vessels that departed from particular African regions in particular periods, linking African regions of origin to American destinations with wider and narrower arrows and estimates of the populations transported. The next seven show origins and destinations by ownership of vessels, mapping the Spanish, the Portuguese and Brazilian, the Dutch, the British, the French and then the smaller North American and Baltic (mainly Danish and German) slave trades. The next series, of thirty-one separate maps, shows in which ports the slave ships were outfitted and then maps the numbers of captives that ships from these ports took from regions of Africa to destinations in Europe and the Americas. Thus, for example,

one map uses arrows of various sizes to show the numbers of captives that slave ships outfitted in Bristol took, both from each African region and to each American destination, adding an inset sketching the history of Bristols role in the slave trade. Other maps do the same things for, among other ports, London and Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux, Recife and Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Havana and, of course, the port towns of Rhode Island. The Atlas goes on like this, with one colorful data-filled map after another, each attesting to the monumentality of the Voyages research effort. After a while, though, the rationale for this combination of massive scholarship and lavish presentation starts to look very puzzling. What do you know when you know the home ports of the ships that carried the 2.8 million captives who left from Luanda and the American destinations of the 2.4 million who survived the trip? You know that Portuguese and Brazilian slavers dominated the trade at that African port, carrying their captives mainly to Brazil. The Atlas documents similar relationships for Gambia (mostly British ships, and Caribbean and North American destinations) and for twenty-five other African ports, some broken down into separate time periods (e.g., for Bonny, from 1659 to 1807 and from 1808 to 1838). It is clear that scholars, creative writers and some other interested readers will use the data to construct stories and social histories that will continue the work of bringing the transatlantic slave trade and all its horrors to life, but it is less clear that they are likely to use the Atlas for this purpose, as opposed to culling the data using the online Voyages database (for free). The fact that the Atlas is priced at $50dirt cheap for an elaborately designed coffee-table volumemay well increase its sales. While it is a little hard, at least for me, to visualize the audience who will want to keep it for casual perusal in the living room, it is easy to imagine the young people who might stumble across copies shelved in schools or home libraries. Like the old Time-Life books, the Atlas can inspire historical imagination and, most immediately, direct the curious to the Voyages database. All manner of further inquiries might be prompted by learning that the African populations shipped to the Caribbean included many more children after 1808 than before, by seeing the patterns of human and economic connection in the globalized worlds of previous centuries and by coming to fathom the terrible magnitude n of the Atlantic slave trade.

February 7, 2011

The Nation.

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38

The Nation.

February 7, 2011

Puzzle No. 1618 1`2`3`4`~56`7`8

F R A N k W. L E W I S
ACROSS

1 One reason the performance was canceledpossibly of Crusoe. (8) 5 Fends off with sticks. (Notes are possibly made on them.) (6) 9 Chief heading the CIA organization, no longer effective. (7) 10 Official who finds theres absolutely nothing in the business of creating monopoly. (7) 11 Tried to learn how to settle the dust when about to perish. (7) 12 Shakespearean wall-hangers. (7) 13 How the unwelcome might be thrown out, but you could check the answer. (3,3,7) 15 You might find it elapse in Straw Dogs, perhaps. (5,8) 21 Youll see it in going west, or on to the city. (7) 22 One absorbs a good deal of the spirit of the occasion. (7) 23 The soil may be turned over, but is not very amenable to treatment. (7) 24 A very low mark given to what Webster might have been doing. (7) 25 The prescribed amount for a riotous sea-god. (6) 26 A dessert thats said to be easily prepared. (8)
DOWN

`~`~`~`~~~`~`~` 9``````~0`````` `~`~`~`~`~`~`~` -``````~=`````` `~`~`~`~`~`~`~` ~~q```````````` w~~~~~`~`~~~~~` e`r`t`````y`u~~ `~`~`~`~`~`~`~i o``````~p`````` `~`~`~`~`~`~`~` [``````~]`````` `~`~`~~~`~`~`~` \`````~a```````
7 The leading position indisposed to take a possible extract of it. (7) 8 Underlined what comes up as a matter of course. (8) 10 What social aspirants are trying to do at clubs might help one reach the heights. (8,5) 14 One might get off the main track if so treated like a bad boy by some. (8) 16 Puts a point forward, perhaps. (7) 17 The thing a candidate is often found in. (7) 18 A way to hold things, superior to an L-bracket by implication. (7) 19 With transportation coming up, sits awkwardly just to remain in being. (7) 20 Fish-head completely inflexible with cold. (6)

This puzzle originally appeared in the February 7, 1976, issue.

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1617

1 Sounds like Santa could be dependent, perhaps. (6) 2 Whats the answer? Give up? (7) 3 Weakening one container with the contents of another. (7) 4 What one doesnt intend to take lying down? Such people might be covered only with extra expense. (8-5) 6 The oldest urn in Greece shows what the lathe-operator is doing. (7)

AIRCONDITIONING T~O~C~E~H~F~M~E TRUSTEE~RUFFIAN H~L~O~R~I~S~T~T EXEMPT~AFTERALL D~A~O~C~T~T~T~E ROUNDTABLE~GERM O~~~S~R~E~B~~~A POST~CRUSTACEON O~C~L~I~S~L~D~F FLOWERED~ELMIRA A~U~T~D~M~Y~T~R HORATIO~ATHEISM A~G~E~F~I~O~N~E THEARTFULDODGER

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