boundary 2

He's Back - WSJ.com

2007-03-12T08:27:00.000-04:00

He's Back - WSJ.com

Fallback strategy for Iraq: Train locals, draw down forces - Los Angeles Times

2007-03-12T08:18:00.000-04:00

Fallback strategy for Iraq: Train locals, draw down forces - Los Angeles Times

Feds Try to Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit - New York Times

2006-04-29T08:31:00.000-04:00

Feds Try to Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit - New York Times

April 29, 2006

Feds Try to Dismiss Domestic Spying Suit

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:56 a.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The Justice Department said Friday it was moving to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by the Internet privacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not include the government.

Instead, it names AT&T, which the San Francisco-based group accuses of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.

The government, in a filing here late Friday, said the lawsuit threatens to expose government and military secrets and therefore should be tossed. The administration added that its bid to intervene in the case should not be viewed as a concession that the allegations are true.

As part of its case, the EFF said it obtained documents from a former AT&T technician showing that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T's network, and those documents are under seal. The former technician said the documents detail secret NSA spying rooms and electronic surveillance equipment in AT&T facilities.

Next month, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will hold a hearing on whether they should be divulged publicly.

President Bush confirmed in December that the NSA has been conducting the surveillance when calls and e-mails, in which at least one party is outside the United States, are thought to involve al-Qaida terrorists.

In congressional hearings earlier this month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested the president could order the NSA to listen in on purely domestic calls without first obtaining a warrant from a secret court established nearly 30 years ago to consider such issues.

Gonzales said the administration, assuming the conversation related to al-Qaida, would have to determine if the surveillance were crucial to the nation's fight against terrorism, as authorized by Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The EFF lawsuit, alleging AT&T violated U.S. law and its customers' privacy, seeks to stop the surveillance program.

The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said it follows all applicable laws.

Evangelicals Debate the Meaning of 'Evangelical' - New York Times

2006-04-16T09:39:00.000-04:00

Evangelicals Debate the Meaning of 'Evangelical' - New York Times

If the flood comes too soon, this ark won't be quite ready

2006-04-16T08:37:00.000-04:00

If the flood comes too soon, this ark won't be quite ready

'Catch immigrant' game raises an outcry at PSU

2006-04-14T20:48:00.000-04:00

'Catch immigrant' game raises an outcry at PSU

Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray - The Archive - The New York Times

2006-04-05T16:10:00.000-04:00

Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray - The Archive - The New York Times
While attending a Pennsylvania Republican Party picnic, Jennie Mae Brown bumped into her state representative and started venting.

''How could this happen?'' Ms. Brown asked Representative Gibson C. Armstrong two summers ago, complaining about a physics professor at the York campus of Pennsylvania State University who she said routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq. As an Air Force veteran, Ms. Brown said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate for the classroom.

The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.

A committee held two hearings last month in Pittsburgh and has scheduled another for Jan. 9 in Philadelphia. A final report with any recommendations for legislative remedy is due in June.

The investigation comes at a time when David Horowitz, a conservative commentator and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, has been lobbying more than a dozen state legislatures to pass an ''Academic Bill of Rights'' that he says would encourage free debate and protect students against discrimination for expressing their political beliefs.

While Mr. Horowitz insists his campaign for intellectual diversity is nonpartisan, it is fueled, in large measure, by studies that show the number of Democratic professors is generally much larger than the number of Republicans. A survey in 2003 by researchers at Santa Clara University found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans on college faculties ranged from 3 to 1 in economics to 30 to 1 in anthropology.

Mr. Horowitz said he was pushing for legislation only because schools across the country were ignoring their own academic freedom regulations and a founding principle of the American Association of University Professors, which says schools are better equipped to regulate themselves without government intervention.

''It became apparent to me that universities have a problem,'' he said in an interview. ''And nothing was being done about it.''

Mr. Horowitz and his allies are meeting forceful resistance wherever they go, by university officials and the professors association, which argues that conservatives are overstating the problem and, by seeking government action, are forcing their ideology into the classroom.

''Mechanisms exist to address these glitches and to fix them,'' said Joan Wallach Scott, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and former chairwoman of the professors association committee on academic freedom, in testimony at the Pennsylvania Legislature's first hearing. ''There is no need for interference from outside legislative or judicial agencies.''

In a debate with Mr. Horowitz last summer, Russell Jacoby, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, portrayed Mr. Horowitz's approach as heavy-handed. ''It calls for committees or prosecutors to monitor the lectures and assignments of teachers,'' he said. ''This is a sure-fire way to kill free inquiry and whatever abuses come with it.''

So far, the campaign has produced more debate than action. Colorado and Ohio agreed to suspend legislative efforts to impose an academic bill of rights in favor of pledges by their state schools to uphold standards already in place. Georgia passed a resolution discouraging ''political or ideological indoctrination'' by teachers, encouraging them to create ''an environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas.''

While comparable efforts failed in three other states, measures are pending in 11 others. In Congress, House and Senate committees passed a general resolution this year encouraging American colleges to promote ''a free and open exchange of ideas'' in their classrooms and to treat students ''equally and fairly.'' It awaits floor action next year.

Mr. Horowitz's center has spawned a national group called Students for Academic Freedom that uses its Web site to collect stories from students who say they have been affected by political bias in the classroom. The group says it has chapters on more than 150 campuses.

The student group has fielded concerns from people like Nathaniel Nelson, a former student at the University of Rhode Island and a conservative, who said a philosophy teacher he had during his junior year referred often to his own homosexuality and made clear his dislike for Mr. Bush.

Mr. Nelson, now a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, said in an interview that the teacher frequently called on him to defend his conservative values while making it clear he did not care for Republicans.

''On the first day of class, he said, 'If you don't like me, get out of my class,' '' Mr. Nelson said. ''But it was the only time that fall the course was being offered, and I wanted to take it.''

Marissa Freimanis said she encountered a similar situation in her freshman English class at California State University, Long Beach, last year. Ms. Freimanis said the professor's liberal bias was clear in the class syllabus, which suggested topics for members of the class to write about. One was, ''Should Justice Sandra Day O'Connor be impeached for her partisan political actions in the Bush v. Gore case?''

''Of course, I felt very uncomfortable,'' Ms. Freimanis, who is a Republican, said in an interview.

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are examining whether the political climate at 18 state-run schools requires legislation to ban bias. Mr. Armstrong said he discussed the issue in several conversations with Mr. Horowitz ''as an expert in the field'' before calling for the creation of a committee.

''But I don't know if his Academic Bill of Rights is necessary in Pennsylvania,'' Mr. Armstrong said in an interview. ''Before we have legislation to change a problem, we first have to determine whether the problem exists. If it does exist, the next question is, 'Is it significant enough to require legislation?' ''

''So the question I'm asking,'' he added, ''is, 'Do we have a problem in Pennsylvania?' ''

For now, the answer is unclear. While Mr. Armstrong said he had received complaints from ''about 50 students'' who said they were intimidated by professors expressing strong political views, Democratic members of the committee have called the endeavor a waste of time, and the Republican chairman, Representative Thomas L. Stevenson, seemed to agree.

''If our report were issued today,'' Mr. Stevenson said, ''I'd say our institutions of higher education are doing a fine job.''

Photo: Jennie Mae Brown told her Pennsylvania state representative, Gibson C. Armstrong, that she felt a physics professor's comments in the classroom about President Bush and Iraq were inappropriate. (Photo by Bradley C. Bower for The New York Times)

Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments - New York Times

2006-04-05T16:05:00.000-04:00

Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments - New York Times

David Price: How the FBI Spied on Edward Said

2006-01-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

David Price: How the FBI Spied on Edward Said

Inside Higher Ed :: Notes from the Underground

2006-01-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

Inside Higher Ed :: Notes from the Underground

University Channel - Home

2006-01-12T14:05:00.000-05:00

University Channel - Home

Here's the Problem With "Faith-Based" Religion

2005-11-27T11:56:00.000-05:00

November 27, 2005
Word for Word Church v. State U.
Here's the Problem With Emily Dickinson
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
INTELLIGENT design isn't the only flashpoint in the battle over religion in the nation's classrooms. On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describes itself as having stood for "the absolute authority of the Bible since 1927."
The plaintiffs, the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents more than 800 schools in California, and the Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, Calif., contend that their students are being discriminated against because of their religious beliefs. The university system counters that it has the right to set its own standards. Here are excerpts from the disputed texts. THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
•

"United States History for Christian Schools," written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson.
American believers can appreciate Jefferson's rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" (I John 2:22).

Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as "an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin."
The sin in this case was greed - greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. ... The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin's devastating consequences - for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).

The book also criticizes the progressive movement championed by Theodore Roosevelt, and the Progressives themselves.
On the whole, they believed that man is basically good and that human nature might be improved. ... Such a belief, of course, ignored the biblical teaching that man is sinful by nature (Ephesians 2:1-3). Progressives therefore also ignored the fact that the fallible men who built the corrupt institutions that they attacked were the same in nature as those who filled the political offices and staffed the regulatory agencies that were supposed to control the corruption.

On the other hand, the "devout Methodist" H. J. Heinz is praised for his fine products and humane treatment of workers, which set him apart from the typical 19th-century robber baron.
Heinz illustrates the Christian's response to the challenge of business management: "And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ" (Colossians 3:23-24).
•

"Elements of Literature for Christian Schools," by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001), faults Mark Twain for calling God "an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master."
Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless. Denying that he was created in the image of God, Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his Creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God's love. Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.

Emily Dickinson, too, is criticized for her lack of faith.
Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

By contrast, the piety of Christina Rossetti, the 19th-century British poet, gets high marks.
The loneliness she faced is often reflected in her poems. But stronger than her loneliness was her total confidence in and submission to her Lord and Savior. Rossetti filled her mind and heart with Scripture. She gained from it a unique appreciation of the sustaining and sacrificial love of God. Her poetry and uplifting devotional literature are the natural overflow of her complete dependence on God.
•

"Physics for Christian Schools," by R. Terrance Egolf and Linda Shumate (Bob Jones University, 2004), addresses the question, "What is Christian about physics?"
Some people have developed the idea that higher mathematics and science have little to do with the Bible or Christian life. They think that because physics deals with scientific facts, or because it is not pervaded with evolutionary ideas, there is no need to study it from a Christian perspective. This kind of thinking ignores a number of important facts to the Christian: First, all secular science is pervaded by mechanistic, naturalistic and evolutionistic philosophy. Learning that the laws of mechanics as they pertain to a baseball in flight are just the natural consequences of the way matter came together denies the wisdom and power of our Creator God. ... Second, physics as taught in the schools of the world contradicts the processes that shaped the world we see today. Trying to believe both secular physics and the Bible leaves you in a state of confusion that will weaken your faith in God's Word.

Even the abstract laws of energy and matter, the authors write, reflect the hand of God.
You are about to embark on an adventure. The study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God's creation - so orderly that it can be comprehended in terms of relatively simple principles (mathematical formulas). ... Physics is important because through it mankind learns how creation actually works. It satisfies our God-given curiosity about nature. Seeing that God does "great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number" (Job 5:9), men have dedicated their lives to unraveling the rich mysteries of creation.
Thomas Vinciguerra is deputy editor of The Week.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Michael Hays, Wexford, Free of Deaning!

2005-11-26T08:49:00.000-05:00

WSJ.com - At Some Colleges, Classes Questioning Evolution Take Hold

2005-11-14T08:56:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal
[]

November 14, 2005

PAGE ONE

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Darwinian Struggle
At Some Colleges,
Classes Questioning
Evolution Take Hold
'Intelligent Design' Doctrine
Leaves Room for Creator;
In Iowa, Science on Defense
A Professor Turns Heckler
By DANIEL GOLDEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 14, 2005; Page A1

AMES, Iowa -- With a magician's flourish, Thomas Ingebritsen pulled six mousetraps from a shopping bag and handed them out to students in his "God and Science" seminar. At his instruction, they removed one component -- either the spring, hammer or holding bar -- from each mousetrap. They then tested the traps, which all failed to snap.

"Is the mousetrap irreducibly complex?" the Iowa State University molecular biologist asked the class.
[Thomas Ingebritsen]

"Yes, definitely," said Jason Mueller, a junior biochemistry major wearing a cross around his neck.

That's the answer Mr. Ingebritsen was looking for. He was using the mousetrap to support the antievolution doctrine known as intelligent design. Like a mousetrap, the associate professor suggested, living cells are "irreducibly complex" -- they can't fulfill their functions without all of their parts. Hence, they could not have evolved bit by bit through natural selection but must have been devised by a creator.

"This is the closest to a science class on campus where anybody's going to talk about intelligent design," the fatherly looking associate professor told his class. "At least for now."

Overshadowed by attacks on evolution in high-school science curricula, intelligent design is gaining a precarious and hotly contested foothold in American higher education. Intelligent-design courses have cropped up at the state universities of Minnesota, Georgia and New Mexico, as well as Iowa State, and at private institutions such as Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon. Most of the courses, like Mr. Ingebritsen's, are small seminars that don't count for science credit. Many colleges have also hosted lectures by advocates of the doctrine.

The spread of these courses reflects the growing influence of evangelical Christianity in academia, as in other aspects of American culture. Last week, the Kansas state board of education adopted new science guidelines that question evolution.

Intelligent design does not demand a literal reading of the Bible. Unlike traditional creationists, most adherents agree with the prevailing scientific view that the earth is billions of years old. And they allow that the designer is not necessarily the Christian God.

Still, professors with evangelical beliefs, including some eminent scientists, have initiated most of the courses and lectures, often with start-up funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Established by famous stockpicker Sir John Templeton, the foundation promotes exploring the boundary of theology and science. It fostered the movement's growth with grants of $10,000 and up for guest speakers, library materials, research and conferences.

Intelligent design's beachhead on campus has provoked a backlash. Universities have discouraged teaching of intelligent design in science classes and canceled lectures on the topic. Last month, University of Idaho President Tim White flatly declared that teaching of "views that differ from evolution" in science courses is "inappropriate."

Citing what they describe as overwhelming evidence for evolution, mainstream scientists say no one has the right to teach wrong science, or religion in the guise of science. "My interest is in making sure that intelligent design and creationism do not make the kind of inroads at the university level that they're making at the K-12 level," says Leslie McFadden, chair of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico, who led a successful fight there to re-classify a course on intelligent design from science to humanities. "You can't teach whatever you damn well please. If you're a geologist, and you decide that the earth's core is made of green cheese, you can't teach that."

At Iowa State, where Mr. Ingebritsen teaches, more than 120 faculty signed a petition this year condemning "all attempts to represent intelligent design as a scientific endeavor." In response, 47 Christian faculty and staff members, including Mr. Ingebritsen, signed a statement calling on the university to protect their freedom to discuss intelligent design.

At stake in this dispute are the minds of the next generation of scientists and science teachers. Some are arriving at college with conflicting accounts of mankind's origins at home, in church and at school. Many of Iowa State's 21,000-plus undergraduates come from fundamentalist backgrounds and belong to Christian student groups on campus.

According to an informal survey by James Colbert, an associate professor who teaches introductory biology at Iowa State, one-third of ISU freshmen planning to major in biology agree with the statement that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." Although it's widely assumed that college-bound students learn about evolution in high school, Mr. Colbert says that isn't always the case.

"I've had frequent conversations with freshmen who told me that their high-school biology teachers skipped the evolution chapter," he says. "I would say that high-school teachers in many cases feel intimidated about teaching evolution. They're concerned they're going to be criticized by parents, students and school boards."

Avoiding Confrontations

Warren Dolphin, who also teaches introductory biology at Iowa State, says he's begun describing evolution to his class as a hypothesis rather than as a fact to avoid confrontations with creationist students. "I don't want to get into a nonproductive debate," he says. "What I'm saying is so contrary to what they're hearing in their small town, their school, their church that I won't convert them in 40 lectures by a pointy-headed professor. The most I can do is get them to question their beliefs."

In a 1999 fund-raising proposal, the Discovery Institute -- an intelligent design think tank in Seattle -- outlined what it called a "wedge strategy" to replace the "stifling dominance of the materialist worldview" with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic conviction." Its five-year objectives included making intelligent design "an accepted alternative in the sciences" and the "dominant perspective" at two universities which weren't identified.

While these goals weren't met, some intelligent-design advocates associated with the Discovery Institute, found a receptive ear at the Pennsylvania-based Templeton Foundation. Between 1994 and 2002, the foundation funded nearly 800 courses, including several on intelligent design. It has also supported research by William Dembski, who headed an intelligent-design center at Baylor University, and Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of a 2004 book, "The Privileged Planet." The book claimed to discern a designer from the earth's position in the cosmos. Mr. Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State, received $58,000 from the foundation over three years.

Foundation staff members now say that intelligent design hasn't yielded as much research as they'd hoped. Mr. Templeton, who chairs the foundation and will turn 93 later this month, believes "the creation-evolution argument is a waste of time," says Paul Wason, the foundation's director of science and religion programs. Mr. Wason adds that Mr. Templeton is more interested in applying the scientific method to exploring spiritual questions such as the nature of forgiveness. Nevertheless, staff members remain reluctant to dismiss intelligent design entirely, in part because the doctrine's popularity could help achieve the foundation's goal of persuading evangelical Christians to pursue scientific careers. The foundation also complains that academia is too quick to censor the doctrine.

Templeton-funded proponents of intelligent design include Christopher Macosko, a professor of chemical engineering at University of Minnesota. Mr. Macosko, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, became a born-again Christian as an assistant professor after a falling-out with a business partner. For eight years, he's taught a freshman seminar: "Life: By Chance or By Design?" According to Mr. Macosko, "All the students who finish my course say, 'Gee, I didn't realize how shaky evolution is.' "

Another recipient of Templeton funding, Harold Delaney, a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, taught an honors seminar in 2003 and 2004 on "Origins: Science, Faith and Philosophy." Co-taught by Michael Kent, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, the course included readings on both sides as well as a guest lecture by David Keller, another intelligent-design advocate on the New Mexico faculty.

The university initially approved the course as qualifying students for science credit, as had been the custom with many interdisciplinary courses. Then the earth sciences chairman, Mr. McFadden, heard about the course. In an email to the chairman of biology, he described Mr. Delaney and Mr. Kent each as a "known creationist." The course, Mr. McFadden wrote, was "clearly 'designed' to show that 'intelligent design' is legitimate science.' " He added that he was "absolutely opposed" to classifying "Origins" as a science course.

The biology chairman and other faculty members agreed, and Reed Dasenbrock, then dean of arts and sciences, re-categorized "Origins" as a humanities course.

Mr. Delaney complained in a letter to the director of the honors program that the reclassification was "a violation of my academic freedom." But Mr. Dasenbrock, now interim provost, says the principle of academic freedom was not at stake in the decision. "People didn't buy it as science," he said.

The controversy didn't end there. Once the course started, a retired neuroscientist, Gerald Weiss, sat in on several classes, passing out evolution literature and heckling the teachers. Intelligent design is "deception," Mr. Weiss said. "They had the students in the palm of their hands. I wasn't welcome at all, and I finally gave it up."

Despite the humanities classification, Mr. Delaney says, other faculty continued to object to "Origins" and regard it as an embarrassment. He doesn't plan to offer the course again.

Some well-respected scientists have fostered the spread of intelligent design. Henry F. Schaefer, director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia, has written or co-authored 1,082 scientific papers and is one of the world's most widely cited chemists by other researchers.

Mr. Schaefer teaches a freshman seminar at Georgia entitled: "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?" He has spoken on religion and science at many American universities, and gave the "John M. Templeton Lecture" -- funded by the foundation -- at Case Western Reserve in 1992, Montana State in 1999, and Princeton and Carnegie Mellon in 2004. "Those who favor the standard evolutionary model are in a state of panic," he says. "Intelligent design truly terrorizes them."

This past April, the school of science at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, abruptly canceled its sponsorship of a lecture by Mr. Schaefer in its distinguished scientist series. According to David Seybert, dean of the Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Mr. Schaefer was invited at the suggestion of a faculty member belonging to a Christian fellowship group on campus. The invitation was withdrawn after several biology professors complained that Mr. Schaefer planned to speak in favor of intelligent design. The school wanted to avoid "legitimizing intelligent design from a scientific perspective," Mr. Seybert said. Faculty members were also concerned that top students might not apply to Duquesne if they thought it endorsed intelligent design. Mr. Schaefer gave his lecture -- entitled "The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God" -- to a packed hall at Duquesne under the auspices of a Christian group instead.

High Tensions

Tensions are running high at Iowa State, with Mr. Ingebritsen playing a key role. Joining the Iowa State faculty in 1986, he specialized in studying how cells communicate, but ended his research about 10 years ago and took up developing online biology courses. Shortly before that career change, he had converted from agnosticism to evangelical Christianity. As he explored whether -- and how -- modern science could be compatible with his religious beliefs, intelligent design intrigued him.

He taught "God and Science" for three years starting in 2000 without incident. But when he again proposed the seminar in 2003, members of the honors curriculum committee sought outside opinions from colleagues in biology and philosophy of science. They reported that the course relied on a textbook by a Christian publisher and slighted evolution. "I have serious worries about whether a course almost exclusively focused on the defense of Christian views is appropriate at a secular, state institution," wrote Michael Bishop, then philosophy chairman. The committee rejected the course by a 5-4 vote.

After protesting to a higher-level administrator to no avail, Mr. Ingebritsen revised the syllabus, added a mainstream textbook, and resumed teaching the course in 2004.

On the Spot

On a brisk Thursday in October, following the mousetrap gambit, Mr. Ingebritsen displayed diagrams on an overhead projector of "irreducibly complex" structures such as bacterial flagellum, the motor that helps bacteria move about. The flagellum, he said, constitutes strong evidence for intelligent design.

One student, Mary West, disputed this conclusion. "These systems could have arisen through natural selection," the senior said, citing the pro-evolution textbook.

"That doesn't explain this system," Mr. Ingebritsen answered. "You're a scientist. How did the flagellum evolve? Do you have a compelling argument for how it came into being?"

Ms. West looked down, avoiding his eye. "Nope," she muttered. The textbook, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, asserts that a flagellum isn't irreducibly complex because it can function to some degree even without all of its parts. This suggests to evolutionists that the flagellum could have developed over time, adding parts that made it work better.

During a class break, Ms. West says that Mr. Ingebritsen often puts her on the spot. "He knows I'm not religious," she says. "In the beginning, we talked about our religious philosophy. Everyone else in the class is some sort of a Christian. I'm not." The course helps her understand "the arguments on the other side," she adds, but she would like to see Mr. Ingebritsen co-teach it with a proponent of evolution.

Ms. West and other honors students will have a chance to hear the opposing viewpoint next semester. Counter-programming against Mr. Ingebritsen, three faculty members are preparing a seminar titled: "The Nature of Science: Why the Overwhelming Consensus of Science is that Intelligent Design is not Good Science."

Write to Daniel Golden at dan.golden@wsj.com1
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U.S. Used Chemical Weapons In Iraq Veteran admits: Bodies melted away before us. :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch

2005-11-09T10:12:00.000-05:00

U.S. Used Chemical Weapons In Iraq
Veteran admits: Bodies melted away before us.
La Repubblica

Shocking revelation RAI News 24.

White phosphorous used on the civilian populace: This is how the US "took" Fallujah. New napalm formula also used.

November 7, 2005 - "La Repubblica" -- -- ROME. In soldier slang they call it Willy Pete. The technical name is white phosphorus. In theory its purpose is to illumine enemy positions in the dark. In practice, it was used as a chemical weapon in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah. And it was used not only against enemy combatants and guerrillas, but again innocent civilians. The Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons, the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused. An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.

A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci this: I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete'. Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone.

RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.

I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped, says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview. I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it.

RAI News 24 will broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a December 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighborhoods.

In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.

The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997.

Fallujah. La strage nascosta [Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 [5 pm] and over the next two days.

See also:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=12676

:: Article nr. 17559 sent on 07-nov-2005 20:32 ECT

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Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts - New York Times

2005-11-06T11:47:00.000-05:00

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts - New York Times

The New York Times
November 6, 2005
Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence.

An administration official declined to comment on the D.I.A. report on Mr. Libi. But Senate Republicans, put on the defensive when Democrats forced a closed session of the Senate this week to discuss the issue, have been arguing that Republicans were not alone in making prewar assertions about Iraq, illicit weapons and terrorism that have since been discredited.

Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the C.I.A., a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.

The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi’s claims.

But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.

In outlining reasons for its skepticism, the D.I.A. report noted that Mr. Libi’s claims lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.
“It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,’’ the February 2002 report said. “Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.’’

Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’

At the time of Mr. Powell’s speech, an unclassified statement by the C.I.A. described the reporting, now known to have been from Mr. Libi, as “credible.’’ But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated “the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.’’

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.
“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

The request to declassify the two paragraphs was made on Oct. 18 by Mr. Levin and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. In an Oct. 26 response, Kathleen P. Turner, chief of the D.I.A.’s office for Congressional affairs, said the agency “can find no reason for it to remain classified.’’

At the time of his capture, Mr. Libi was the most senior Qaeda official in American custody. The D.I.A. document gave no indication of where he was being held, or what interrogation methods were used on him.

Mr. Libi remains in custody, apparently at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was sent in 2003, according to government officials.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to meet beginning next week to review draft reports prepared as part of a long-postponed “Phase II’’ of the panel’s review of prewar intelligence on Iraq. At separate briefings for reporters on Friday, Republicans staff members said the writing had long been under way, while Senate Democrats on the committee claimed credit for reinvigorating the process, by forcing the closed session. They said that already nearly complete is a look at whether prewar intelligence accurately predicted the potential for an anti-American insurgency.

Other areas of focus include the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, that of the Pentagon in shaping intelligence assessments, and an examination of whether public statements about Iraq by members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as members of Congress, were substantiated by intelligence available at the time.

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More Family Values from the Red States [u]

2005-07-11T09:53:00.000-04:00

END:VCARD

July 11, 2005

A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan

By KATE ZERNIKE

TULSA, Okla., July 8 - The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38 children, but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but with foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and sometimes months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a cacophony of need.

In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-day-old boy taken from his mother at birth, the other to placate a toddler who is wandering from adult to adult begging, "Bottle?" A 3-year-old who arrived at dawn shrieks as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.

This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene increasingly familiar across the country as the number of foster children rises rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, the overwhelming number of them, officials say, taken from parents who were using or making methamphetamine.

Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-counter sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial ingredient needed to make methamphetamine. Even so, the number of foster children in the state is up 16 percent from a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are up 12 percent, or 753 children, with only seven new homes.

In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say the caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine problem suddenly went away. In Tennessee, state officials recently began tracking the number of children brought in because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in 2004 from 400 in 2003.

While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter because there are none.

Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.

It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because they are used to wearing dirty diapers.

"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes above and beyond anything we've seen."

Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, state officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster children created by it has spiked in the last year or two as growing awareness of the drug problem has prompted more lab raids, and more citizens reporting suspected methamphetamine use.

Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.

On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that methamphetamine had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes.

The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one percent of counties in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 69 percent in Minnesota reported an increase in the number of children removed from homes because of methamphetamine.

In North Dakota, 54 percent of counties reported a methamphetamine-related increase. At what was billed as a "community meeting on meth" in Fargo this year, the state attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, exhorted the hundreds of people packed into an auditorium: "People always ask, what can they do about meth? The most important thing you can do is become a foster parent, because we're just seeing so many kids being taken from these homes."

Officials also say methamphetamine has made it harder to reunite families once the child is taken; 59 percent of those surveyed in the national counties study agreed.

The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, enacted as babies born to crack users were crowding foster care, requires states to begin terminating parental rights if a child has spent 15 out of 22 months in foster care. It was intended to keep children from languishing in foster homes. But rehabilitation for methamphetamine often takes longer than other drugs, and parents fall behind the clock.

"Termination of parental rights almost becomes the regular piece," said Jerry Foxhoven, the administrator of the Child Advocacy Board in Iowa. "We know pretty early that these families are not going to get back together."

The drug - smoked, ingested or injected - is synthetic, cheap and easy to make in home labs using pseudoephedrine, the ingredient in many cold medicines, and common fertilizers, solvents or battery acid. The materials are dangerous, and highly explosive.

"Meth adds this element of parents who think they are rocket scientists and want to cook these chemicals in the kitchen," said Yvonne Glick, a lawyer at the Department of Human Services in Oklahoma who works with the state's alliance for drug endangered children. "They're on the couch watching their stuff cook, and the kids are on the floor watching them."

The drug also produces a tremendous and long-lasting rush, with intense sexual desire. As a result of the sexual binges, some child welfare officials say, methamphetamine users are having more children. More young children are entering the foster system, often as newborns suffering from the effects of their mother's use of the drug.

Oklahoma was recently chosen to participate in a federally financed study of the effects of methamphetamine on babies born to addicted mothers. Doctors who work with them have already found that the babies are born with trouble suckling or bonding with their parents, who often abuse the children out of frustration.

But the biggest problem, doctors who work with children say, is not with those born under the effects of the drug but with the children who grow up surrounded by methamphetamine and its attendant problems. Because users are so highly sexualized, the children are often exposed to pornography or sexual abuse, or watch their mothers prostitute themselves, the welfare workers say.

The drug binges tend to last for days or weeks, and the crash is tremendous, leaving children unwashed and unfed for days as parents fall into a deep sleep.

"The oldest kid becomes the parent, and the oldest kid may be 4 or 5 years old," said Dr. Mike Stratton, a pediatrician in Muskogee, Okla., who is involved with a state program for children exposed to drugs that is run in conjunction with the Justice Department. "The parents are basically worthless, when they're not stoned they're sleeping it off, when they're not sleeping they don't eat, and it's not in their regimen to feed the kids."

Ms. Glick recalls a group of siblings found eating plaster at a home filled with methamphetamine. The oldest, age 6, was given a hamburger when they arrived at the Laura Dester Shelter; he broke it apart and handed out bits to his siblings before taking a bite himself.

Jay Wurscher, director of alcohol and drug services for the children and families division of the Oregon Department of Human Services, said, "In every way, shape and form, this is the worst drug ever for child welfare."

Child welfare workers say they used to remove children as a last resort, first trying to help with services in the home.

But everywhere there are reminders of the dangers of leaving children in homes with methamphetamine. In one recent case here, an 18-month-old child fell onto a heating unit on the floor and died while the parents slept; a 3-year-old sibling had tried to rouse them.

The police who raid methamphetamine labs say they try to leave the children with relatives, particularly in rural areas, where there are few other options.

But it has become increasingly clear, they say, that often the relatives, too, are cooking or using methamphetamine. And because the problem has hit areas where there are so few shelters, children are often placed far from their parents. Caseworkers have to drive children long distances to where parents are living or imprisoned for visits; Leslie Beyer, a caseworker at Laura Dester, logged 3,600 miles on her car one month.

The drain of the cases is forcing foster families to leave the system, or caseworkers to quit. In some counties in Oklahoma, Ms. Rider-Salem said, half the caseworkers now leave within two years.

After the ban on over-the-counter pseudoephedrine was enacted - a law other states are trying to emulate - the number of children taken out of methamphetamine labs and into the foster care system in Oklahoma declined by about 15 percent, Ms. Glick said. But she said the number of children found not in the labs but with parents who were using the drug had more than compensated for any decline.

The state's only other children's shelter, in Oklahoma City, was so crowded recently that the fire marshal threatened to shut it down, forcing the state to send children to foster families in far-flung counties.

At Laura Dester, three new children arrived on one recent morning, the 3-year-old being treated for lice and two siblings, found playing in an abandoned house while their mother was passed out at home. The girl now wanders with a plastic bag over her hair to keep the lice salve from leaking. She hugs her little brother, then grabs a plastic toy phone out of his hand, leaving him wailing.

"Who's on the phone?" asks Kay Saunders, the assistant director at the shelter, gently trying to intervene.

Paul A. Bové

Distinguished Professor

Editor, boundary 2

517 M & N CL

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

http://btwoprojects.blogspot.com/

http://groups.msn.com/PaulBovesWebPage

Coming to Get us!

2005-07-06T08:41:00.000-04:00

House urges end to liberal bias on Pennsylvania campuses

Wednesday, July 06, 2005
By Bill Toland, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau

HARRISBURG -- Hoping to root out political intolerance at Pennsylvania's college campuses, the state House of Representatives is forming a committee to investigate claims among some college students that professors gave them unfair grades because of differing political ideologies.

But critics of proposals like these say political conservatives, emboldened by election successes over the past decade, are making a thinly veiled charge at the last bastion of liberalism -- college campuses -- armed with flimsy evidence and in search of a problem that doesn't really exist.

Rep. Gibson Armstrong, R-Lancaster, says he's collected about 50 examples of "intolerance" from college students. Armstrong's proposal, which parrots others made in legislatures across the country, is based on the concern among Republicans that conservative students are at worst graded unfairly, or at the very least feel intimidated because their views don't match those of their liberal professors.

The resolution was approved last night by the House, 108-90, after the House voted to end debate on the subject, even though several representatives remained in the speaking queue. By that point, debate on the resolution had consumed parts of two days, with the House interrupting debate Monday night, Independence Day, so everyone could go watch the fireworks.

Gibson, in explaining the proposal, said that he hopes to guarantee "free speech and tolerance" at the colleges that are owned or partly owned by the state. The resolution, which does not need the governor's signature, says that "students and faculty should be protected from the imposition of ideological orthodoxy," and students should be "graded based on academic merit, without regard for ideological views."

The investigative committee, composed primarily of the House's higher education subcommittee, plus two appointees, would explore whatever problems exist and then determine if corrective legislation is necessary.

The movement to temper the liberal stronghold on college campuses germinated quickly. So far this calendar year, more than a dozen state legislatures have considered bills that would either restrict professors, or set up a committee or grievance process that would explore the allegations of unfair treatment.

None of the proposals has passed into law, and wherever they have been advanced, they've created controversy among lawmakers, students and especially university professors. Pennsylvania's version has been percolating since April, and has already drawn opposition from teachers groups, like the American Association of University Professors.

One of the driving forces behind the movement is the Students for Academic Freedom, a Washington-based group founded by activist David Horowitz. In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he said the past six months have been a "watershed in the academic-freedom movement" and hopes the movement to monitor teachers for bias will eventually trickle down to public elementary and high schools.

Students for Academic Freedom says its goal is to "end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge." The group plans to distribute a book called "Unpatriotic University," which tells readers that colleges are full of "anti-American rhetoric, and [shut out] conservative points of view both in classrooms and on speakers' platforms."

Much of the Pennsylvania bill was borrowed from the Horowitz group's "academic bill of rights."

Rep. Mark Cohen, D-Philadelphia, referred to the Horowitz group and said the resolution is just "an attempt to respond to a national movement. ... We're just trying to fall in line."

(Bill Toland can be reached at btoland@post-gazette.com or 1-717-787-2141.)

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U.S. won't cede control of Internet's key computers

2005-07-01T10:04:00.000-04:00

U.S. won't cede control of Internet's key computers

U.S. won't cede control of Internet's key computers

Friday, July 01, 2005
By Anick Jesdanun, The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The U.S. government will indefinitely retain oversight of the main computers that control traffic on the Internet, ignoring calls by some countries to turn the function over to an international body, a senior official said Thursday.

The announcement marked a departure from previously stated U.S. policy.

Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, shied away from terming the declaration a reversal, calling it instead "the foundation of U.S. policy going forward."

"The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the Internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship," Gallagher said in an interview with The Associated Press.

He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the Internet globally for communications and commerce.

The computers in question serve as the Internet's master directories and tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them every day, likely without knowing it. Policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.

Though the computers themselves -- 13 in all, known as "root" servers -- are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so Internet suffixes, such as ".com."

In 1998, the Commerce Department selected a private organization with international board members, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to decide what goes on those lists. Commerce kept veto power, but indicated it would let go once ICANN met a number of conditions.

Thursday's declaration means Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions are met.

"It's completely an about-face if you consider the original commitment made when ICANN was created," said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor who has written about policies surrounding the Internet's root servers.

ICANN officials said they were still reviewing Commerce's statement.

The declaration won't immediately affect Internet users, but it could have political ramifications by putting in writing what some critics had already feared.

Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami professor who helps run an independent ICANN watchdog site, said the date for relinquishing control has continually slipped.

Some countries, he said, might withdraw support they had for ICANN on the premise it would one day take over the root servers.

The announcement comes just weeks before a U.N. panel is to release a report on Internet governance, addressing such issues as oversight of the root servers, ahead of November's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.

Some countries have pressed to move oversight to an international body, such as the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, although the U.S. government has historically had that role because it funded much of the Internet's early development.

Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department, insisted that Thursday's announcement was unrelated to those discussions.

But he said other countries should see the move as positive because "uncertainty is not something that we think is in the United States' interest or the world's interest."

Gallagher noted that Commerce endorses having foreign governments manage their own country-code suffixes, such as ".fr" for France.

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Interrogators Cite Doctors' Aid at Guant�namo Prison Camp - New York Times

2005-06-24T11:27:00.000-04:00

Interrogators Cite Doctors' Aid at Guant�namo Prison Camp - New York Times

June 24, 2005
Interrogators Cite Doctors' Aid at Guantánamo Prison Camp
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, June 23 - Military doctors at GuantÃ¡namo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators.

The accounts, in interviews with The New York Times, come as mental health professionals are debating whether psychiatrists and psychologists at the prison camp have violated professional ethics codes. The Pentagon and mental health professionals have been examining the ethical issues involved.

The former interrogators said the military doctors' role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes by exploiting their fears, in the hopes of making them more cooperative and willing to provide information. In one example, interrogators were told that a detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.

In addition, the authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said their interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at GuantÃ¡namo showed that the program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means to obtaining intelligence.

The accounts shed light on how interrogations were conducted and raise new questions about the boundaries of medical ethics in the nation's fight against terrorism.

Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, declined to address the specifics in the accounts. But he suggested that the doctors advising interrogators were not covered by ethics strictures because they were not treating patients but rather were acting as behavioral scientists.

He said that while some health care personnel are responsible for "humane treatment of detainees," some medical professionals "may have other roles," like serving as behavioral scientists assessing the character of interrogation subjects.

The military refused to give The Times permission to interview medical personnel at the isolated GuantÃ¡namo camp about their practices, and the medical journal, in an article that criticized the program, did not name the officials interviewed by its authors. The handful of former interrogators who spoke to The Times about the practices at GuantÃ¡namo spoke on condition of anonymity; some said they had welcomed the doctors' help.

Pentagon officials said in interviews that the practices at GuantÃ¡namo violated no ethics guidelines, and they disputed the conclusions of the medical journal's article, which was posted on the journal's Web site on Wednesday.

Several ethics experts outside the military said there were serious questions involving the conduct of the doctors, especially those in units known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, BSCT, colloquially referred to as "biscuit" teams, which advise interrogators.

"Their purpose was to help us break them," one former interrogator told The Times earlier this year.

The interrogator said in a more recent interview that a biscuit team doctor, having read the medical file of a detainee, suggested that the inmate's longing for his mother could be exploited to persuade him to cooperate.

Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former Army brigadier general in the medical corps, said in an interview that "this behavior is not consistent with our medical responsibility or any of the codes that guide our conduct as doctors."

The use of psychologists and psychiatrists in interrogations prompted the Pentagon to issue a policy statement last week that officials said was supposed to ensure that doctors did not participate in unethical behavior.

While the American Psychiatric Association has guidelines that specifically prohibit the kinds of behaviors described by the former interrogators for their members who are medical doctors, the rules for psychologists are less clear.

Dr. Spencer Eth, a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and chairman of the ethics committee of the American Psychiatric Association, said in an interview that there was no way that psychiatrists at GuantÃ¡namo could ethically counsel interrogators on ways to increase distress on detainees.

But in a statement issued in December, the American Psychological Association said the issue of involvement of its members in "national security endeavors" was new.

Dr. Stephen Behnke, who heads the group's ethics division, said in an interview this week that a committee of 10 members, including some from the military, was meeting in Washington this weekend to discuss the issue.

Dr. Behnke emphasized that the codes did not necessarily allow participation by psychologists in such roles, but rather that the issue had not been dealt with directly before.

"A question has arisen that we in the profession have to address and that is where we are now: is it ethical or is it not ethical?" he said.

Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health matters, said the new Pentagon guidelines made clear that doctors might not engage in unethical conduct. But in a briefing for reporters last week, he declined to say whether the guidelines would prohibit some of the activities described by former interrogators and others. He said the medical personnel "were not driving the interrogations" but were there as consultants.

The guidelines include prohibitions against doctors' participating in abusive treatment, but they all make an exception for "lawful" interrogations. As the military maintains that its interrogations are lawful and that prisoners at GuantÃ¡namo are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, those provisions would seem to allow the behavior described by interrogators and the medical journal. The article in the medical journal, by two researchers who interviewed doctors who worked on the biscuit program, says, "Since late 2002, psychiatrists and psychologists have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence."

The article was written by Dr. M. Gregg Bloche, who teaches at Georgetown University Law School and is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Jonathan H. Marks, a British lawyer who is a fellow in bioethics at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Dr. Bloche said in an interview that the use of health professionals in devising abusive interrogation strategies was unethical and led to their involvement in violations of international law. Dr. Winkenwerder said on Thursday that the article was "an outrageous distortion" of the medical situation at GuantÃ¡namo, according to Reuters news agency.

The article also challenges assertions of military authorities that they have generally maintained the confidentiality of medical records.

The Winkenwerder guidelines make it clear that detainees should have no expectation of privacy, but that medical records may be shared with people who are not in a medical provider relationship with the detainee only under strict circumstances.

Dr. Bloche said such an assertion was contrary to what he had discovered in his research. It is also in conflict with accounts of former interrogators who previously told The Times that they were free to examine any detainee's medical files. After April 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tightened rules on detainee treatment, one interrogator said the records had to be obtained through biscuit team doctors who always obliged.

The former interrogator said the biscuit team doctors usually observed interrogations from behind a one-way mirror, but sometimes were also in the room with the detainee and interrogator.

U.N. Inquiry on GuantÃ¡namo

By The New York Times

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 - A four-member team of United Nations human rights experts accused the United States on Thursday of stalling on requests over the past three years to visit detainees at GuantÃ¡namo and said it would begin its own investigation without American assistance.

"Such requests were based on information from reliable sources of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights," the four, all independent authorities who serve the United Nations as fact-finders on rights abuses, said in a statement.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the United States ambassador for war crimes, said the United States had been unable to meet the fact-finders' deadline to answer its request but intended to keep the matter open.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Review of Books: Selling Washington

2005-06-23T11:05:00.000-04:00

The New York Review of Books: Selling Washington
The New York Review of Books
Home · Your account · Current issue · Archives · Subscriptions · Calendar · Newsletters · Gallery · NYR Books
Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005

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Feature
Selling Washington
By Elizabeth Drew
Tom DeLay
(click for larger image)Tom DeLay by David Levine
1.

As the criminal investigation of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff was underway this spring, a spokesman for the law firm representing him issued a statement saying that Abramoff was "being singled out by the media for actions that are commonplace in Washington and are totally proper." Abramoff has since said much the same thing. The lawyer was half right. Like many other lobbyists, Abramoff often arranged for private organizations, particularly nonprofit groups, to sponsor pleasant, even luxurious, trips for members of Congress, with lobbyists like himself tagging along and enjoying the unparalleled "access" that such a setting provides; i.e., they get to know congressmen and sell them on legislation. They take over skyboxes at sporting events, inviting members of Congress and their staffs.

But Abramoff has differed from other lobbyists in his flamboyance (he owned two Washington restaurants, at which he entertained), and in the egregiously high fees he charged clients, in particular, Indian tribes in the casino business. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee, headed by John McCain, found last year that Abramoff and an associate, Michael Scanlon, a political consultant and former communications director for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, received at least $66 million from six tribes over three years. Abramoff also instructed the tribes to make donations to certain members of Congress and conservative causes he was allied with. And he was careless—for example in putting on his credit card charges for DeLay's golfing trip to the St. Andrews golf course in Scotland in 2000, with a stop in London for a bit of semi-serious business to make the trip seem legitimate. It's illegal for a lobbyist to pay for congressional travel, but Abramoff is reported to have paid for three of DeLay's trips abroad. A prominent Republican lobbyist told me that the difference between what Abramoff did and what many other lobbyists do was simply "a matter of degree and blatancy."

Abramoff's behavior is symptomatic of the unprecedented corruption—the intensified buying and selling of influence over legislation and federal policy —that has become endemic in Washington under a Republican Congress and White House. Corruption has always been present in Washington, but in recent years it has become more sophisticated, pervasive, and blatant than ever. A friend of mine who works closely with lobbyists says, "There are no restraints now; business groups and lobbyists are going crazy—they're in every room on Capitol Hill writing the legislation. You can't move on the Hill without giving money."

This remark is only slightly exaggerated. For over ten years, but particularly since George W. Bush took office, powerful Republicans, among them Tom DeLay and Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, have been carrying out what they call the "K Street Project," an effort to place more Republicans and get rid of Democrats in the trade associations and major national lobbying organizations that have offices on K Street in downtown Washington (although, of course, some have offices elsewhere).

The Republican purge of K Street is a more thorough, ruthless, vindictive, and effective attack on Democratic lobbyists and other Democrats who represent businesses and other organizations than anything Washington has seen before. The Republicans don't simply want to take care of their friends and former aides by getting them high-paying jobs: they want the lobbyists they helped place in these jobs and other corporate representatives to arrange lavish trips for themselves and their wives; to invite them to watch sports events from skyboxes; and, most important, to provide a steady flow of campaign contributions. The former aides become part of their previous employers' power networks. Republican leaders also want to have like-minded people on K Street who can further their ideological goals by helping to formulate their legislative programs, get them passed, and generally circulate their ideas. When I suggested to Grover Norquist, the influential right-wing leader and the leading enforcer of the K Street Project outside Congress, that numerous Democrats on K Street were not particularly ideological and were happy to serve corporate interests, he replied, "We don't want nonideological people on K Street, we want conservative activist Republicans on K Street."

The K Street Project has become critical to the Republicans' efforts to control all the power centers in Washington: the White House, Congress, the courts—and now, at least, an influential part of the corporate world, the one that raises most of the political money. It's another way for Republicans to try to impose their programs on the country. The Washington Post reported recently that House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, of Missouri, has established "a formal, institutionalized alliance" with K Street lobbyists. They have become an integral part of the legislative process by helping to get bills written and passed—and they are rewarded for their help by the fees paid by their clients. Among the results are legislation that serves powerful private interests all the more openly—as will be seen, the energy bill recently passed by the House is a prime example —and a climate of fear that is new. The conservative commentator David Brooks said on PBS's NewsHour earlier this year, "The biggest threat to the Republican majority is the relationship on K Street with corporate lobbyists and the corruption that is entailed in that." But if the Republicans are running a risk of being seen as overreaching in their takeover of K Street, there are few signs that they are concerned about it.

When the Republicans first announced the K Street Project after they won a majority in Congress in the 1994 election, they warned Washington lobbying and law firms that if they wanted to have appointments with Republican legislators they had better hire more Republicans. This was seen as unprecedentedly heavy-handed, but their deeper purposes weren't yet understood. Since the Democrats had been in power on Capitol Hill for a long time, many of the K Street firms then had more Democrats than Republicans or else they were evenly balanced. But the Democrats had been hired because they were well connected with prominent Democrats on Capitol Hill, not because Democratic Congresses demanded it. Moreover, it makes sense for lobbying firms that want access to members of Congress to hire people with good contacts in the majority party—especially former members or aides of the current leaders. But the bullying tactics of Republicans in the late 1990s were new.

DeLay, Santorum, and their associates organized a systematic campaign, closely monitored by Republicans on Capitol Hill and by Grover Norquist and the Republican National Committee, to put pressure on firms not just to hire Republicans but also to fire Democrats. With the election of Bush, this pressure became stronger. A Republican lobbyist told me, "Having the White House" has made it more possible for DeLay and Santorum "to enforce the K Street Project." Several Democratic lobbyists have been pushed out of their jobs as a result; business associations who hire Democrats for prominent positions have been subject to retribution. They are told that they won't be able to see the people on Capitol Hill they want to see. Sometimes the retribution is more tangible. The Republican lobbyist I spoke to said, "There's a high state of sensitivity to the partisanship of the person you hire for these jobs that did not exist five, six years ago—you hire a Democrat at your peril."

In one instance well known among lobbyists, the Ohio Republican Michael Oxley, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, put pressure on the Investment Company Institute, a consortium of mutual fund companies, to fire its top lobbyist, a Democrat, and hire a Republican to replace her. According to a Washington Post story on February 15, 2003, six sources, both Democratic and Republican, said that members of Oxley's staff told the institute that a pending congressional investigation of mutual fund companies "might ease up if the mutual fund trade group complies with their wishes." It apparently didn't matter to them that House ethics rules prohibit congressmen or their staff "from bestowing benefits on the basis of the recipient's status as a supporter or contributor, or partisan affiliation." A Republican now holds the top job at the Investment Company Institute.

Last year retribution was taken against the Motion Picture Association of America, which—after first approaching without success a Republican congressman about to retire— hired as its new head Dan Glickman, a former Democratic representative from Kansas and secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. Republicans had warned the MPAA not to hire a Democrat for the job. After Glickman was hired, House Republicans removed from a pending bill some $1.5 billion in tax relief for the motion picture industry. Norquist told me, "No other industry is interested in taking a $1.5 billion hit to hire a Clinton friend." After Glickman was selected, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported last year, "Santorum has begun discussing what the consequences are for the movie industry." Norquist said publicly that the appointment of Glickman was "a studied insult" and the motion picture industry's "ability to work with the House and the Senate is greatly reduced." Glickman responded by hiring prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert's former spokesman, for major MPAA jobs.

Norquist's organization, Americans for Tax Reform, keeps watch on other K Street firms and calls attention on its Web site to the ones that are out of line.[1] According to a report in The Washington Post in 2003, an official of the Republican National Committee told a group of Republican lobbyists that thirty-three of the top thirty-six top-level K Street positions had gone to Republicans.

Despite its effectiveness, "the K Street Project is far from complete," according to Norquist, who says, "There should be as many Democrats working on K Street representing corporate America as there are Republicans working in organized labor—and that number is close to zero." He wants the project to include not just the top jobs in K Street firms, but "all of them—including secretaries."

A prominent Democratic Party fund-raiser believes that in 2001, after nineteen years as head of a trade association, he was fired because he was not a Republican. Another Democratic lobbyist told me that one of his major clients was put under pressure to drop him because he was a Democrat. A staff member in DeLay's office called the second of the two men and told him that he was "in DeLay's crosshairs," and warned him that if he attempted to work with any committees on Capitol Hill, he would get nowhere because of his political leanings.

Episodes of this kind have created a new atmosphere of fear in Washington. (Because of that atmosphere, these people as well as several others insisted on talking "on background," to protect themselves against retribution.) The Democratic lobbyist whose client was pressured by Republicans to drop him remarked, "It's a dangerous world out there," a world where, he said, "You'd better watch what you say. People in the Republican party, in the agencies, will say, 'I hear you were badmouthing X.' You know that you're being watched; you know that it's taken into account in your ability to do public policy things—[like] get a meeting with a government agency." Another lobbyist says, "It's scary now. People are afraid to say what they feel. It's had a chilling effect on debate." According to the head of a public policy group who frequently deals with lobbyists and corporations, "They don't have to say it," but he finds them now "intimidated by the atmosphere in this town—you hire Republicans."

Business groups are under heightened pressure to support the administration's policies—even those that are of no particular interest to them. A recent article in Business Week told of business organizations, including the Business Roundtable—an association of CEOs of major corporations—being summoned to meetings with Mike Meece, a special assistant to the President, various cabinet officers concerned with business affairs, and Karl Rove. They anticipated a friendly give-and-take about economic legislation but instead they were told to get behind the President's plan to privatize Social Security. As a result, these organizations have spent millions of dollars promoting Bush's new program, particularly through ads. Business groups have been notably reticent about criticizing administration policies—even ones they deeply dislike, such as the huge budget deficit. In the past, when they differed from administration policies, for example on trade or tax issues, they spoke out. An adviser to business groups says, "They're scared of payback, of not getting their own agenda through."
2.

The connections between those who make policy and those who seek to influence it have become much stronger in recent years because of lobbyists' increasing use of nonprofit groups to sponsor trips that give them access to lawmakers, as with DeLay's trip to Scotland and England. Jack Abramoff arranged for the trips of DeLay and other members of Congress to be officially sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, of which he is a member of the board. According to the congressional ethics rules a lobbyist cannot repay the cost of a free trip for a congressman by reimbursing the nonprofit group that organized the trip. But there's nothing to prevent him from giving large contributions to the organization or encouraging his clients to do so. Abramoff urged the Indian tribes he represents to contribute to the National Center, which paid for DeLay's trips. Owing to a major loophole in the ethics rules, nonprofit groups do not have to disclose their contributors. "It's a real abuse," the Republican lobbyist told me. Such trips are also a way of getting around the ban on gifts of more than $50 to members of Congress.

For the Washington lobbyist, the most-sought-after access is to someone who writes the nation's laws and appropriates federal money. Trips offer the best opportunity for the lobbyist to make an impression on a congressman. Since congressmen can no longer make use of soft money under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms, they are increasingly using golfing weekends and hunting trips for fund-raising. The politicians in effect charge the lobbyists to play golf or hunt with them. (Members of the middle class and the poor have scant opportunity to play golf with members of Congress.)

Many congressional trips have a serious purpose; some members restrict their travel to hazardous places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Such trips can be paid for out of congressional committees' funds—but they are usually less glamorous, harder to explain to the voters since the public pays for them, and they don't include lobbyists. The rules for privately funded trips, for example that they must be "in connection with official duties," have been interpreted quite loosely. Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that studies money in politics and its influence on public policy, says, "Even where they touch base with the rules, they don't take them seriously."

According to a study of congressional travel over the past five years paid for by nonprofit institutions, the Aspen Institute, a think tank based in Aspen, Colorado, and Washington, has spent the most on congressional travel; but Aspen is a serious organization that conducts seminars in the US and abroad, and lobbying isn't involved.[2] More interesting is the nonprofit that spends the next highest amount: the Ripon Society, actually the Ripon Educational Fund, an offshoot of the Ripon Society, which was founded in the 1960s by liberal Republicans as a serious organization concerned with public policy. Now that liberal Republicans are virtually extinct, Ripon has become an organization for relatively moderate Republicans.

Like other policy groups that also lobby, Ripon has set up an ostensi-bly separate "educational" group, or 501(c)(3), to which contributors can make tax-deductible donations. The Ripon Educational Fund sponsors a large annual "Transatlantic Conference," held in such pleasant places as Rome, London, and Budapest, to which it invites between 150 and 200 US citizens. These are vaguely described in the filings by the members of Congress who participated in them as "listening tour," or "fact finding."

The Ripon trips are famous among lobbyists for the opportunities they present for pressing their cases with members of Congress. A Republican lobbyist says that a Ripon Fund excursion has "become the trip to go on, because of the luxury and the access." The Washington Post reported that a Ripon Educational Fund trip to London in 2003 was attended by more than a hundred lobbyists, including representatives from American Express, AOL/Time Warner, and General Motors. They pay the Ripon Fund an annual membership fee of $9,500, and in addition finance their own trips abroad to Fund meetings.

Both the Ripon Society and the Ripon Educational Fund are headed by lobbyists. Former Representative Susan Molinari, of Staten Island, New York, a lobbyist whose clients now include Exxon, the Association of American Railroads, and Freddie Mac, is the chair of the Educational Fund. The president of the society itself is Richard Kessler, whose lobbying firm's clients include drug and cigarette companies. According to The Hill, the other Capitol Hill newspaper, Kessler's firm paid for a trip by five members of Congress to Ireland in August 2003, including four days at Ashford Castle, where the elegant grounds include a golf course. Of the members of Congress who went on Ripon Educational Fund trips, almost all took along their wives, an additional perk that contributes to the holiday atmosphere of the excursions. While lobbyists are prohibited from paying directly for congressional trips, trade associations and private corporations are allowed to do so—not much of an ethical distinction, since practically all of them engage in lobbying.

A recently released Congressional Quarterly study said that the disclosure forms filed by members of Congress "frequently show a direct correlation between a member's legislative interests and the sponsors of his or her trips." For example, Representative Michael Oxley, who is particularly concerned with corporate finance, took several trips underwritten by companies such as MCI. A political observer who closely studied congressional trips concluded that the Republicans are invited so they can be "worked on" to pass pending legislation, while the Democrats are there largely for "maintenance," in case they take power in the future. Moderate, "swing" Democrats who can affect the outcome of legislation come in for special attention.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill in 2002 didn't stop powerful companies and members of Congress from buying and selling influence. Representative Barney Frank, a major backer of the reform bill, says, "It works about the same as it did before." But, he adds, because the new law banned large soft money contributions by individuals, corporations, and labor unions to campaigns for federal office, and maintained overall limits on how much a person can contribute to federal elections—doubling them from $2,000 to $4,000 per election cycle—everyone has to work harder to raise the money.[3] Still, congressmen are seldom heard to complain that they can't raise enough money and in fact, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics,[4] both the political par-ties and individual candidates are raising more money than ever. Lobbyists still manage to deliver large amounts to legislators by "bundling" smaller contributions.

They contribute most of the money they raise to incumbents who can be depended on to do favors—a major reason (in addition to gerrymandering) why there is serious competition in only 10 percent of House races, and only about five seats change hands in each congressional election. Members of Congress expect to receive contributions from local industries (and their workers)—say, the coal industry in West Virginia—and they back legislation to help them out as a matter of doing constituent work. It's illegal for a firm to compensate employees for their political contributions, but, a Republican lobbyist says, a job applicant is often told that he or she is expected to make contributions, and salaries are adjusted accordingly.

It's virtually impossible to show that a particular campaign contribution resulted in a specific vote—such quid pro quo is illegal. Fred Wertheimer, of the public advocacy group Democracy 21, told me, "The system's designed so that you don't see who gets what for their money. It's designed for me to give money to you and you do something for me in the Congress—without either of us saying a word about it. But if I give money, I know it and the candidate knows it. It's an investment, and down the road you collect on it." While much of the money buys access to a member of Congress, or key staff members, that is only the entry point to making one's case. As John McCain puts it, "You give money, you get an ear." Still, one can sometimes even trace what Larry Noble carefully calls "correlations" between contributions and legislative successes.

The energy bill passed by the House in April is a striking case in point. The oil-and-gas industry, a top contributor of campaign money—80 percent of it to Republicans—benefited from several of its new provisions. A study by the staff of Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, shows that perhaps the most indefensible provision gave a waiver against lawsuits to manufacturers of MTBE, or methyl tertiary-butyl ether, a gasoline additive that's a pollutant and suspected carcinogen. According to Waxman's staff, this waiver is worth billions to energy companies; the major beneficiaries would be Exxon, which, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, contributed $942,717 to candidates in the last election cycle; Valero Energy, $841,375; Lyondell Chemical, $342,775; and Halliburton, $243,946. The bill also exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act the practice of hydraulic fracturing, which is used to make natural gas wells more productive and can also have an adverse effect on drinking water. Halliburton would benefit from this provision as well.

Another provision provided compensation to oil companies that bought leases, supposedly a speculative venture, on offshore sites where there is a moratorium on drilling. The compensation is worth billions of dollars to the oil industry. The bill also provided for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) to oil drilling—an invasion of the refuge that environmental groups have long tried to prevent. (Now that it contains more Republicans, the Senate passed a similar provision as part of its budget bill earlier this year.) The Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were effectively shut out of the drafting of the energy bill. House Democrat Edward Markey, a member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, told me, "The energy companies got everything they wanted. Eight billion dollars in subsidies go to the energy companies, but to say that the conservation measures in it are modest would be a generous description."

An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers, who received a windfall from the new prescription drug program in the 2003 Medicare bill—including a provision prohibiting the federal government from negotiating with drug companies on prices— contributed more than three times as much to those who voted for the legislation as those who voted against it. A bill passed this year in the Senate and the House to tighten the rules for filing bankruptcy had long been sought by finance, insurance, and real estate interests, and particularly by credit card companies. Taken together, they all contributed $306 million to congressional campaigns, 60 percent of it to Republicans, during 2003 and 2004. The richest interests also spend the largest amounts of money on lobbying. According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity,[5] the makers of pharmaceuticals and health products spent the most—$759 million —on lobbying between 1998 and mid-2004, when the last lobbying reports were filed. Next came insurance companies. Oil and gas companies were seventh on the list.

The effects of the new, higher level of corruption on the way the country is governed are profound. Not only is legislation increasingly skewed to benefit the richest interests, but Congress itself has been changed. The head of a public policy strategy group told me, "It's not about governing anymore. The Congress is now a transactional institution. They don't take risks. So when a great moral issue comes up— like war—they can't deal with it." The theory that ours is a system of one-person-one-vote, or even that it's a representative democracy, is challenged by the reality of power and who really wields it. Barney Frank argues that "the political system was supposed to overcome the financial advantage of the capitalists, but as money becomes more and more influential, it doesn't work that way."

Two House Democrats, Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, and Martin Meehan, of Massachusetts, have introduced legislation to tighten the rules on privately funded travel, strengthen the lobbying disclosure rules, and slow down the revolving door by which former members of Congress take jobs with the trade associations and, after a year, can lobby their former colleagues. Some Republicans are talking about placing more restrictive rules on trips. But the record shows that new regulations can often be evaded.

Perhaps the greatest deterrent to ethical transgression is that members of Congress don't want to read unfavorable stories about themselves. A Republican lobbyist says that the biggest factor in the growth of corruption has been "the expectation that all this goes undetected and unenforced." He added, "If Jack Abramoff goes to jail, that will be a big message to this town." Since the scandal broke over Abramoff's payments on behalf of DeLay, members of Congress have been scrambling to amend their travel reports, in some cases listing previously unreported trips, or filling in missing details. Public outrage can also have an inhibiting effect: after the Republicans changed the ethics rules earlier this year to protect DeLay, the adverse reaction in the press and from constituents was strong enough to make the Republican leadership back down.

But the public can't become outraged about something that isn't brought to its attention. The press tends to pounce on the big scandals but usually fails to cover the more common ones that take place every day. Some of the politicians I talked to hoped that the scandal over DeLay and Abramoff might lead to real changes, including more prosecutions and stricter disclosure requirements. But even they admit that, like so many other scandals, it may simply blow over.
Notes

[1] See www.atr.org/national/kstreet.

[2] See www.politicalmoneyline.com.

[3] In the 2004 presidential election such money was paid to so-called "527 groups," which spent $500 million in the 2003–2004 election cycle. This wasn't, as widely thought, the result of a loophole in the McCain-Feingold bill but of the failure of the feckless Federal Election Committee to enforce a section of a 1974 campaign finance law.

[4] See www.opensecrets.org.

[5] See www.publicintegrity.org.

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In New York, Billy Graham Will Find an Evangelical Force - New York Times

2005-06-21T12:18:00.000-04:00

In New York, Billy Graham Will Find an Evangelical Force - New York Times

The Ineluctability of American Empire_ [u]

2005-06-08T14:17:00.000-04:00

Talk paper from a conference on Forms of Empire at NDU. Comments welcome. PAB

Paul A. Bové

1354 Royal Oak Drive

Wexford, PA 15090

Friday, April 29, 2005

For delivery at Notre Dame

On May 3, 2005

The Ineluctability of American Empire

In this note, I want to propose a hypothesis built on the research of William Appleman Williams into what he called “empire as a way of life.” In fact, I intend to correct an important error in Williams’ analysis by exposing an unexamined presupposition that often misdirects a great deal of scholarship on US history, on US literary and cultural reality. In 1980, Williams insisted that the American people did not know that the US in an empire and his work clearly suggested that if intellectuals could bring that fact to public attention and incorporate it within the popular culture, American democracy would choose a non-imperial path for American politics and culture.

Williams’ book appeared in 1980, when the Reagan revolution took hold in US presidential politics. The book is not a merely belated expression of sixties optimism over participatory democracy or the literalization of Cold War faith in democratic republican forms. It is also a tactical intervention into a crisis that would see the US reorganize its economic, military, and security policies to adjust for the fall of the Breton Woods accords. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher foreshadowed the conservative movement’s transformations of US political rhetoric and practice and Jimmy Carter’s failures to deal with either material structural weaknesses or the ‘malaise that gripped the American people’ opened the door for a jovial savage politics of developing neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

Williams’ 1980 error was a simple one: he believed in the liberatory ideologeme of ‘democracy’ in the American myth or he thought it still a viable figure within the political arsenal of progressive politics, as it had seemed perhaps since Woodrow Wilson and Walt Whitman. Williams’s book is out of print, a minor fact in a longer story that has seen the neo-conservative intellectuals seize control of the word ‘democracy’ and its heritage to operate an openly forceful US national security policy. Williams’s book came at the end of a rapidly fading and embattled tendency in US history which fact accounts in part for the tonal pathos that competes with its utopian ambitions.

What was Williams’s error? In a word, he did not place enough weight on the structural arrangements the US state had imposed on the country for its imperial purposes. Without considering this brute fact, especially progressive historians and cultural critics will always imagine they see the possibility of resistance or of real social alternatives to the imperial arrangements of US power. For at least one hundred years, the state has disposed of the US in such a way that it can draw upon its resources for its own purposes and manage its institutional legitimacy without threat of more than temporary or local opposition. The powerful if not dominant conservative and reactionary tendencies in US culture and politics rest upon not a short-term manipulation of public opinion to form hegemony, but long-standing arrangements of material power that state intellectuals planned for some time. Everyone can adduce some seeming exception to my claims, from the struggles of the CIO, and the Civil Rights movement, to the expansion of the university population. Rather than be drawn into debates over the bite each particular might take out of my claim, let me rest its legitimacy upon the ease with which the American state has recently projected force around the world without regard for its opposition. Power is a measure of success. That state power is not absolute matters little in this discussion.

We might examine at least two lines of research. First, we can look at the arguments about turnout and participation in the recent presidential elections. This is an important topic because it might trouble Williams’s assumption that Americans would not choose empire if they knew the US were an empire! Second, and more important, we should look carefully at a persistent tradition among US state intellectuals who believe not only in the manufacture of consent—to invoke Chomsky—but also in the often globally expansionist capacities and requirements of US power and interest. Given time restraints, I will focus here on the second of these lines of work.

There are at least two avenues to these state intellectuals’ policies: US survival demands expansion and security comes only from global domination. Intentionally I set aside all the ideologemes of American exception and the like to concentrate on some more hardheaded expression of material vision. In these times, we can reward our reading by considering again the origins of modern US national policy in a vision of geopolitical and historically fated insecurity. Alfred Thayer Mahan is the most important US intellectual whose work understood these national problems and influenced state affairs.

Mahan’s 1889 classic on sea power in history exists to answer the question how the US, situated as it is, might become a great power. Knowing his audience, Mahan set a solid foundation for his book. “Men,” he wrote, “may be discontented at the lack of political privilege; they will be yet more uneasy if they come to lack bread” (38). Insecurity exists on just this continuum from poverty to weakness—although how the lack of bread would come about in the US is unclear. The metonymic anxiety is clear enough. The solution is also clear and marks the modern American state ambition: “Only an absolute control of the sea can wholly secure such [commercial] communications, since it is impossible to know at what point an enemy coming from beyond the visible horizon might strike” (39).

In an article for the Guggenheim Foundation, I studied the way in which Paul Wolfowitz theorizes the development of US power as the mechanism for controlling the globe in the 21^st century. As part of that paper, I commented on Wolfowitz’s invocation of his great predecessor, Mahan, whose work 100 years earlier, established the norm for US state intellectuals’ articulation of US power and its purposes. Since my purpose here is to suggest something of the iron-cage nature of American empire and to draw attention to the terms in which some of its principle theorists structured America as empire, I want to look at Mahan’s expression of foundational principles and policy. I know, in advance, that especially populist progressives (the children of Appleman Williams) will revolt against my effort, claiming not only that forces of historical resistance create spaces for freedom and difference against my notion of the iron cage, but also that a careful examination of historical detail shows the necessary compromises inherent in any structuration. I concede all of this, as I say, in advance, but add that it matters not at all to my analysis. The brute fact is that for more than 100 years America has been foundationally imperial. In fact, despite any form of anti-imperial developments, the nation-state has persistently arranged itself best to order the world and its power systems to its own interests. Even defeats, such as Vietnam, have not resulted in any weakening of the iron cage. We need to understand this if we are to think the question, ‘can there be a non-imperial America.’

Wolfowitz specifically invokes Mahan’s essay, “A Twentieth Century Outlook,”^{^[1]} in his own essay on the twenty-first century.^{^[2]} Wolfowitz found two important points in Mahan: peace must not be accepted as a good; and state politics must acquire priority over economy as the leading discourse for discussing power, action, and value.

Even more fundamental principles link Mahan and Wolfowitz than their basic claims for state power and sovereign will. Before addressing these directly, it is worth noticing some pertinent parallels of situation and person. Each is a secularist. Each makes strategic use of moral and religious languages and politics. Each works at a time when the force of liberal economics create movements that we now know by the term, global. Also, each contests the power of a seemingly natural ideological ally in the economic sphere—those we might call the free traders, the classic liberals, equally well represented by the Manchester School and the University of Chicago.

For each, though, the most important principle is historical in the deepest sense that civilizational concepts allow. We are familiar with the habit of victorious powers making history as they need. In the case of modern American state intellectuals such as these, it is their fundamental conception of the nature of history and of state actors in history that unites them in what we have come to call imperium—when it might be just as well to call it a state system of excess power.

Mahan was a strategic thinker whose work combined two central objects of thought: first, discovering the universal laws of power and advantage—military or geopolitical; and second, determined how best to dispose those laws in the historically specific and geographically determining realities of a particular moment. In short, Mahan’s concern was with the creation, development, and operation of great powers, the greatest of which acquire the status of imperia. Over and again Mahan writes in his treatises, his articles, his lectures, his reports, and even his letters to his friends and family, that a time is coming soon when the American people will accept—consciously and unconsciously—that their appetites and interests require not only action abroad, beyond the continent’s borders, but the installation of a political system that organizes America to become a great power extended wherever its interests roam.

Too often, normal accounts of this expansive impulse restrict themselves to the important and pertinent questions of race and class; they fail to take seriously the consciously articulated purposes of these reflective grand strategists, the effect of their thinking and rhetoric, and the tactical success of their work. In Mahan’s case, for example—an example that would not be lost on Hannah Arendt—the defining thought is clear, simple, traditional, and, some might conclude, dangerous. In the same article that Wolfowitz so admires, Mahan quotes Mommsen on Rome in a way that vividly presents how these strategic intellectuals think:

“When the course of history,” says Mommsen, “turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the Senate house and in the streets of Rome we may be allowed-—on the threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Cesar was not the most important result of that grand enterprise—far more momentous than the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as Cesar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano - Greek world, inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defense down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more re-mote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy’s country, he gained for the Hellenic-Italian culture the interval necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the East. Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that Cesar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result. . . . That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden—all this is the work of Cesar.”^{^[3]}

This vision is familiar to us in the humanities. What does it mean when those with power act on it? And how do they so act? There are two more points I want to make here, in defense of my iron cage theory about America, and Mahan is, as in so much, the perfect textual repository for some exploration.

Mahan answers the ‘how’ with nothing short of a new scientific development. He invents the science of logistics. Had we time, we would do two things here. First, we would explore this term logistics carefully for the philological markers of its importance. One reason I am comfortable reading Mahan as evidence of the iron cage theory of American empire is that as a logistician, Mahan full well understood that his grand strategy required Americans coming to be at home with the idea of being a great power and comfortable with living in a home always arranged to that end. Logistics in this sense derives from logis, which is lodging. Furthermore, logistic, as a singular form, derives from logos, which indicates the rationalized scientific ambition underlying Mahan’s intense preoccupations with logistics. What does logistics, which seems to be only a matter of moving materiel around for soldiers, have to do with a conference of American humanists, especially literary or theoretical humanists? It is part of our function as historical critical intellectuals to know about these matters and bring to bear our unique talents and techniques. Otherwise, important questions remain unexamined and so can be neither opposed nor displaced.

Logistics, in this case, matters because Mahan, the great naval historian and grand strategic thinker, realized that one of history’s universal laws required political economic organizations structured to allow the state to maximalize its access to national productive and ideological resources whenever necessary. Against peace, such intellectuals organize nations always on the model of war. Mahan’s extraordinary influence results not just from his monumental research into and agitation for sea-power, especially in the form of offensively capable strike battle-ships, but also his theory for organizing modern production and modern societies through powerful, moving, flexible vectors of force that served always raisons d’etat.

In writing on geopolitical conceptions of power, the contributors to the Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2001 recognize Mahan’s central place in global conceptions of modern state power. Following Mahan, “geopoliticians establish the claim that there exist a close correlation between the overall logical structure of environmental (or spatial) ‘logistics’ and the power control in the world. This is not simply a matter of military logistics but also an issue in regard to the strategic distribution of the world’s resource bases and how this is correlated with the world political system as a differentiated unit. This issue was later actualized as a topic by Hans Morgenthau.”

George Bush’s national security documents continue this line of state effort, especially by openly collapsing distinctions between national and international, between matters of domestic and security policy. If nothing else, the Department of Homeland Security is a powerful instrument, along with censorship, pressure groups, disciplined political parties, and the like, for intensifying the geopolitical logistical effort to make the nation seamlessly available to the state.

Normal authorities on Mahan admit his conceptual breakthrough in logistics, a thinking that earned the respect of US, Japanese, and German policy makers along with high intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt and George Kennan. “Mahan . . . defined logistics as the support of armed forces by the economic and industrial mobilization of a nation.” Gravity’s Rainbow is not, in this aspect, a story of paranoia, but a history of the US iron cage.

If logistics is the answer to the question of how state intellectuals imagined the convergence of US cultural and economic production within a permanent state of war preparation, as what we might call, a ‘being toward war,’ Mahan provides an equal solution to the puzzle of politics in what was at his time already a globalizing international arena with multiple albeit unequal even if aspiring new and old power centers. As Joseph Buttigieg emphasizes in speaking with me on these questions, we can find clear echoes of Mahan’s thinking even in such pygmy intellectuals as Robert Kagan, the latest ideologue of American exceptionalism.

I do not, however, intend to soil Mahan with the dirt of such a charge. His thinking is too cunning and careful for such familiar abuse. Exceptionalism, I would argue, is a minor element in policy makers’ thinking and decision making. Mahan explicitly holds to a great power thinking that recognizes the transient nature of status and capacity. In fact, Mahan’s commitments seem to rest on some sort of bureaucratic proceduralist model, especially for states and nations deciding on the truthfulness of their decisions to apply power.

In October, 1899, Mahan published another in the long series of magazine pieces he wrote to modify elite judgment about military and strategic matters. The essay, “The Peace Conference and the Moral Aspect of War,”^{^[4]} is a critique of the Hague Peace Conference that had set up restrictions on naval competition as well as boards of arbitration and judgment to negotiate peaceful settlements to conflicts. Mahan, although a member of government that supported these efforts, publicly attacked their very idea as unjustifiable morally and politically. Proleptically, he warned that nation-states cannot and should not seem to yield sovereignty to transnational entities. Furthermore, beyond the fact that only force can compel a state, Mahan objected that a sovereign state, defined in its highest essence as an ethical state, could not be constrained by law. Indeed, developing an elaborate analogy between individual conscience and national decision, Mahan concludes that states must act in agreement with their conscience as long as, after following procedure, they are sure of the truthfulness of their moral and political judgment—even if that decision flies in the face of what must be judged others’ erroneous or cowardly or immoral attitudes.

Mahan sets out to persuade by insisting that nations should act sincerely and according to their ethical commitments: “Nations, like men, have a conscience.” Under the long secular view of a Mommsen, according to which a state regime’s civilizational efforts can be neither known nor judged for centuries, nation-states’ sincerity requires they act to enforce right:

The resort to arms by a nation, when right cannot otherwise be enforced, corresponds, or should correspond, precisely to the acts of the individual man which have been cited; for the old conception of an appeal to the Almighty, resembling in principle the medieval ordeal, is at best but a partial view of the truth, seen from one side only. However the result may afterwards be interpreted as indicative of the justice of a cause,—an interpretation always questionable,—a State, when it goes to war, should do so not to test the rightfulness of its claims, but because, being convinced in its conscience of that rightfulness, no other means of overcoming evil remains. (436)

After Machiavelli, we might be excused for believing that a nation-state’s conscience, comforted by its bureaucratic procedures, fits the most self-interested form of truthfulness rather than the most self-sacrificing. Mahan himself insists on this obvious truth. Hoping to undermine the appeal of peace parties in the US and elsewhere, Mahan creates that uniquely American sense of insecurity by arousing anxiety about ubiquitous but unknown threats that not only call for the projection of force but achieve legitimacy based on decisiveness by a state convinced, at whatever point in its procedures is convenient, in the truthfulness of its cause. States use force to restore right.

Mahan is by no means the start of US intellectuals’ thinking about state power and war, but his lucidity, his place in the institutional history of war planning, his global influence, and his success as a critic of US imperial weaknesses—in 1898 and at other times—gives him something of an originary status. His works appear everywhere on the curricula of US military war colleges and academies. (As an aside, it’s worth noting that a computer search of the MLA online bibliography turned up only one article dealing with Mahan, by Chris Connery in b2.) He is a very successful figure and his concepts and histories have had enormous success. Keeping with Henry Adams’s advice that to deal with power one must study success, critics would do well to turn their attention to figures like Mahan and away, for a while at least, from the now all too familiar allegories of subversion, resistance, local difference, and so on.

What do we see if we keep our eyes on this success? Among other things, we detect a powerful, intelligent, and highly worked out set of arguments for the US to assume a certain form of great power self-definition that prophetically closes the distances between foreign and domestic affairs and assures the nation that it’s good conscience and commitment to truthfulness as it understands it, assures the rightness of its violence and demands something like obedience, or, if you prefer, the subsumption of individual agents as citizens within the fuller agency of the imperium:

Fidelity to conscience implies not only obedience to its dictates, but earnest heart-searching, the use of every means, to ascertain its tine command; yet withal, whatever the mistrust of the message, the supremacy of the conscience is not impeached. When it is recognized that its final word is spoken, nothing remains but obedience. Even if mistaken, the moral wrong of acting against conviction works a deeper injury to the man, and to his kind, than can the merely material disasters that may follow upon obedience. Even the material evils of war are less than the moral evil of compliance with wrong.

Sincerity demands obedience. What then of the nay-sayers who knowingly, like Cesar, cast a glancing eye and see the future, understand the directions of history, and yet find themselves thrown aside for bias or some other affective infelicity and breach of decorum? Lionel Trilling, in his 1971 Jefferson lecture, published in 1972 under the title, Mind in the Modern World, warned that disaster lays in such practices. Trilling, endlessly worried about the declining power of literature, knew that the loss of literature was the lost of criticism. Arnoldian to his core, Trilling took literature seriously as a criticism of life as it is. It is against such instances of alternative ways of being and thinking that Mahan casts the high style of his political philosophy, as an aesthetic performance using the allure of reason and morals to argue for the right to violence in the name of the good and the truthful. Note well, he argues not in the name of truth—historical, moral, or philosophical truth—but for the legitimacy of the nation-state coming to a decisive sense of its own truthfulness, even if wrong. For civilization carried by force is a value for which imperialists will seemingly roll the dice. Once America has become the great power and the die are cast, it seems clear that America cannot be without being an imperium incarnate.

^{^[1]} A Twentieth-Century Outlook, by Alfred T. Mahan, Harper's Magazine (Sept. 1897), at MoA-Cornell pp. 521 ff.

^{^[2]} “Managing Our Way to a Peaceful Century,” in Managing the International System over the Next Ten Years: Three Essays; Report to the Trilateral Commission: 50 (New York, Paris, and Tokyo: The Trilateral Commission, 1997), pp. 43 – 62.

^{^[3]} Quoted in Mahan p. 528

^{^[4]} North American Review. No. IDXV. October, 1899: 433-47.

Censorship and the Disciplines [u]

2005-06-08T13:57:00.000-04:00

This is the talk version of a paper given to the Florida Atlantic Foundation on April 15th. Comments welcome. PAB

©Paul A. Bové

1354 Royal Oak Drive

Wexford, PA 15090

Censorship and the Disciplines

As the case progressed, it became increasingly clear that the agitation against the Jews in France followed an international line. Thus the [Italian Jesuit Monthly] Civiltà Cattolica declared that Jews must be excluded from the nation everywhere, in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Catholic politicians were among the first to realize that latter day power politics must be based on the interplay of colonial ambitions. They were therefore the first to link anti-Semitism to imperialism.

--Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (116)

By its very structure colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them.

--Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (51)

Interdisciplinarity is an historical problem. At first, it seems to be an epistemological, methodological, or institutional problem and so we have largely treated it. How it is an historical problem is itself difficult. Writers and administrators place interdisciplinarity within many frames, each of which is itself specific to an historical context and which, as a gesture, is particular to modernity.^{^[1]}

As a problem of knowledge, interdisciplinarity is essentially historical. It is one way humans mediate their social lives through institutions. As such, it offers both a synchronic or planar field of examination and the possibility of genealogical accounts of human change. In other words, interdisciplinarity accords with the decline of Europe, the dominance of corporate and monopolistic power centers, and the nearly impossible cerebral demands of specialized disciplines themselves.

Moreover, in the last twenty-five years or so, especially academic humanists began to stress the word ‘discipline’ as a verb or gerund, emphasizing the shaping as a constraining element of discipline. Much of this line follows upon a reductive reading of Michel Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish. Despite Foucault’s admonition that power produces, and despite frequent verbal acknowledgement of that fact, academic cultural studies types, especially in the US, normalize ‘discipline’ as a repressive device in its very constraint of human knowledge and practice into certain forms. This story infuses interdisciplinarity with liberatory fantasies of alternative knowledges that exist outside, in the past, or in some forgotten or marginal range of life practice.

At more or less the same time as these humanists invoke the inter- of interdisciplinarity as a possible space of alternative life and knowledge, scientific labs, the state research establishment, and corporate research and publicity units embrace the same space as a point of innovation beyond the limits of any one discipline’s inventive capacity. As humanists embrace the fuzzy edges of disciplines for their catechetical and deconstructive effects upon normal orders of knowledge and practice, corporate power—including the universities—intentionally organize those catachreses in labs and research projects designed to make predictable and regular the innovatory processes. In one vision, inter- names a space of alternative possibility—much as multi- does in multi-cultural—while for the other, inter- names a solution to capital and the war machine’s needs profitably to invest and control space.

In English, ‘interdisciplinarity’ began as a term associated with the social sciences and the helping professions. The OED records the first use of the term as recently as 1937, in the December issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology: “Programs of study submitted should provide . . . for training of an inter-disciplinary nature.” Succeeding dictionary examples until 1972 also come from the softer social sciences—not from economics, for example. Along the way, the term enters public discourse appearing in newspapers and general magazines by 1965 and soon thereafter began to describe academic programs of all sorts that crossed or operated between disciplinary borders.^{^[2]} The OED’s definition of the term--“Of or pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning; contributing to or benefiting from two or more disciplines”—economically catches the complexity and apparent simplicity of the idea’s foundational use. Something is of interdisciplinary concern if it implicates more than one discipline as, for example, the study of American Civilization at Harvard implicates the literary and historical disciplines. Each discipline has a claim on the topic and each adds to a sum total of knowledge beyond the other’s reach. In the end, a new sort of knowledge other than that available to either discipline, to any existing discipline, emerges to validate the inter- and to weaken the claims of the subsidiary practices. Yet this last idea specifies the OED’s definition: the new knowledge benefits from the existing disciplines and it might contribute to them, but the resulting new knowledge need not reside in the conceptual or practical space of either. From this process, of course, one possibility is that a new discipline might emerge. In this fact, we have a common and for some an unfortunate result while for others the same result is the happy because profitable invention of a new field such as molecular biology or bioengineering or cultural studies.

Many people have applied their minds to this constellation of possibilities. From deconstruction’s concern with marginalities of knowledge to DARPA’s funding of interdisciplinary developments in weapons and technology, the inter- space has proven a profitable area of capital investment. A computer search of the Modern Language Association’s Bibliography returns over 225 items listing ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a topic. Similarly, a Lexus-Nexus search of other academic databases returns more than 275 hits. With the possible exception of terms such as margin or difference, no term rewards investment as much as ‘inter-.’ Not only do we have interdisciplinary, but intercultural and an entire range of compounds formed by, at, and between the borders that interest us.

The OED once more helps us along. Let us remember that disciplinarity is itself a modern formation of a noun from an adjective, and so recent that the OED does not list it. Normally, critics follow this term through its adjectival form, disciplinary, back to its noun origins—discipline and disciple.^{^[3]} If we pause on the adjectival basis of ‘interdisciplinarity,’ however, we catch an element of meaning and use that aligns with the prefix.

Adjectives, we recall, are adjuncts, that is, they provide adjunctive qualities to a substantive. So, soup becomes hot soup. Similarly, knowledge becomes ‘disciplinary knowledge’ or practice ‘disciplinary formation.’ In this weak sense, disciplinarity is the result of an adjunction rather than the singular substance of the noun discipline or its plural additive form. Items in a plural stand by themselves—one foot, two feet. In the interdisciplinary mode, disciplines cannot and do not stand each alone and whatever the interdisciplinary is that emerges, it is always in the ambiguous but definite form of an adjunct construction. Its independence is limited even as it undermined the substantives it modifies. For the OED, an adjectival noun of this kind is just “that which cannot stand alone; a dependent; an accessory.” It is a substitute and a dependency, an accessory denying the modified its independence.

Interdisciplinarity is all these things as a game of spatial operators that reduces the historicity of knowledge to the apparent manageability of administration. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s attempt to draw world-historical conclusions from the end of the Cold War declared the end of history and the reduction of all social, political, and human processes to management issues.^{^[4]} The more recently published results of his interest in the interdisciplinary field of ‘biotechnology’ suggests that this new knowledge field might, in fact, achieve what state political economy seems to have ended in the last decade, something like human history.^{^[5]} Fukuyama warns that biotechnical intervention in the human genome might make liberal democracy impossible by making irrelevant all talk of democratic equality resting on something like the universal rights of man. This profound ethical and political problem presents another managerial dilemma: how to anticipate, plan for, and control possible outcomes—with a full awareness that prolepsis in the face of organized invention is impossible. Fukuyama cannot think of any way to deal with this potentially critical problem other than to circumscribe it within management, to reduce its historicity and its potentiality to restart human history.

Perhaps we expect too much from Fukuyama if we think the ‘inter-‘ of interdisciplinarity is a hope for history. ‘Inter-‘ does afford us a sense of time, but ‘intervening or happening in the time or period between,’ as the OED puts it—as in the word, intercessional or interwar—is a form of spatialization, a cognate of the fundamental meaning, “Situated, placed, or occurring locally, between or among.” This is why whatever is inter- whether it be interdisciplinarity or the interregnum of politics seems eminently manageable.

Only when the very constellation of this emergent ‘inter-‘ appears do we see its historicality. At first, interdisciplinarity simply marks the historical beginnings of the traditional disciplines and the increasing need for their transformation or reorganization. Institutional and cognitive inertia maintain disciplinary formations as often as their continuing intellectual vitality. In fact, as we all know, the weaker the discipline, that is, the less innovative, productive, and remunerated the field the more likely it will slide into some inharmonious relation of interdisciplinarity. When strong disciplines, such as economics or philosophy, join interdisciplinary efforts, it is as an individual contributor to a second line project rather than an effort to sustain or revivify the discipline’s own first-line ambitions. Universities with strong analytic philosophy departments rarely form ‘literature and philosophy’ majors while strong schools of materials engineering must join with chemists to do work in emerging fields like nano-technology. At this point, it seems as if inter-disciplinarity can be nothing more than a shortly open space, a spot of time, colonizable by the same post-historical forces of knowledge production and management as we expect on the most basic levels of our polity. That interdisciplinarity cannot satisfy utopian ambition counts against utopian desire within the framework of our moment—no matter how much ‘new knowledge’ or how many ‘new ways of talking’ seem to open in its spaces. We can make interdisciplinarity a worthy subject of intellectual historical reflection, to do so, however, we must refuse the terms of the ongoing conversation and join a much older thinking buried by the din of our anxious self-congratulations.

Lionel Trilling delivered the first Thomas Jefferson lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972. Published under the title, Mind in the Modern World, this lecture now seems to be nothing more than a reactionary warning against affirmative action, government involvement in university education, and academic reluctance to defend its own standards.^{^[6]} Indeed, anticipating both the theory wars and the culture wars that raged from the 1960s to the recent past, Trilling speaks on behalf of an Arnoldian critical vision at a time when such humanism had, as Trilling notes, acquired the presumed status of political repression. Trilling’s willingness to discuss the fate of mind is what should interest us right now.

As Daniel O’Hara’s remarkable book on Trilling’s style makes inescapable, Lionel Trilling never came close to expressing a simple thought directly.^{^[7]} The aesthetic self-formation enacted in and implied by his style, simultaneously records Trilling’s awareness of the reasons to doubt mind’s ability to improve the physical and moral world while it also records his faith in human mind nonetheless. We can apprehend something of what this means from Trilling’s own comments on the ancient Greeks’ inauguration of the wonder the Renaissance gave us for mind.

In some respects this is a very long line indeed. It goes back to the philosophers of ancient Greece both in what might be called its aesthetic appreciation of mind, its admiration for the mental faculties almost for their own sake, apart from what practical ends they might achieve, and also in its assumption that mind can play a decisive part in the moral life of the individual person. In other respects its extent is relatively short, going back only to the Renaissance in its belief that what mind might encompass of knowledge of the physical universe has a direct bearing upon the quality of human existence, and also in its certitude that mind can, and should, be decisive in political life.^{^[8]}

We need not agree with all the elements in Trilling’s arsenal of ideological sensitivities to see the importance of his acute description of historical burden. In this quotation, Trilling provides not a definition but a general understanding of ‘mind’ that demarcates the continuing, fragile, and fluctuating faith of Western society in secular humanism, in human intellect free of mythical or dogmatic presumptions. If ‘mind’ is another name for secular humanism’s fragile historical existence then its historicality leads us to the time of its development and to its contemporary formations; without considering these together, we betray mind itself.

Trilling’s Arnoldian position, like that of his great successor at Columbia, Edward Said, depends upon the Victorian’s obsessive commitment to criticism. Trilling was a frightened conservative humanist, who literalized Arnold’s “famous characterization of literature as ‘a criticism of life,’” thereby unduly constricting the work of mind, of criticism, and of ‘literariness.’ Literature’s critical function, Trilling insisted, existed only in the print formations of the Renaissance raised to the central institutional and social place it had seemingly acquired by the 1930s. Trilling would never have written Benjamin’s essays appreciating, for example, the historical human transplanting of the literary critical into film and other electronic arts.

What matters for us, though, in Trilling’s text, beyond the anxiety and misunderstanding of cultural tendencies? It is the humanist’s fear that both criticism and the earned accomplishments of humanity’s efforts at social secularization would disappear with the suppression of print’s authority. More important that Trilling’s fear for literature is his fear for criticism. Literature matters so much because Trilling cannot imagine any human formation as essential to the act of criticism. If literature is a criticism of life, then what is criticism? Arnold’s answer: “to see the object as in itself it really is.”^{^[9]} It is essential that we set aside for now all possible epistemological and socio-cultural debates about either what this realist demand might mean or whose reality he envisions. As important as these matters are within a secular humanistic and historical society, they matter only if such a society, enabled by ‘mind’ stands as an ideal for achieving justice and equality, truth and beauty.

One might discuss many milestones profitably on the way from the Greeks to the Italian Renaissance in following the unfolding of mind.^{^[10]} Two major figures catch my eye in this context—Vico and Kant.

Let me explain something of where I am going now. I will contend that the fundamental concern for all interested in the interdisciplinary must be opposition to religion in the name of that humanism Trilling calls mind. Along the way, one sees other possible topics for investigation. Not accidentally, Vico’s disagreement with Descartes develops as a defense of poetry against analysis and reduction—one of the prototypical ideals underlying both Arnold and Trilling’s concern for the literary. That is, as Vico’s poetry embodies the secular processes of human social creations, analysis stands as its opponent, as the turning away from a study of what humans do in pursuit of a method independent of circumstance and a truth aspiring to apodictic certainty. In a word, Descartes speaks for ignorance; Vico for learning. Even between these opponents, there is discipline.

In The Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant ran the risk of upsetting his prince and censors with a defense of thinking against the authority of faith especially as it aligns itself with state power and presumed social obligations to stable values and social truths.^{^[11]} We need to remember only that Kant reserved the Higher Faculties—Theology, Law, and Medicine—to the domain of the state, of obedience to right—whereas he characterized Philosophy as the lower faculty and free of state right. Kant’s brief historical characterization of the university’s functional beginnings resonates still. While its founders’ identity might be unknown their intent is clear: form a ‘public institution’ “to handle the entire content of learning (really, the thinker devoted to it) by mass production, so to speak—by a division of labor.” Each discipline or branch of learning, each field would be supervised by a professor who functioned as a trustee responsible as a public figure for the authenticity and legitimacy of learning and teaching. Taken together, the participants in this structure form a community, dealing with all areas of knowledge, and so best known as a university. The division of labor required divided responsibility and expertise so that separate faculties “would be authorized to perform certain functions”—admissions, examinations, and conferring degrees—or, as Kant says, the right “to create doctors.”^{^[12]}

In this story of the university’s founding intent, the state accepts a specific limit upon its right to discipline and censor the professors, the teaching, and the public circulation of produced knowledge. The higher faculties belong to the state that relinquishes care for the sciences to secular reason. Kant insists that the higher faculties are so-called not with reference to “the learned professions” but “with reference to the government.”

A faculty is considered higher only if its teachings—both as to their content and the way they are expounded to the public—interest the government itself, while the faculty whose function is only to look after the interests of science is called lower because it may use its own judgment about what it teaches. Now the government is interested primarily in means for securing the strongest and most lasting influence on the people, and the subjects which the higher faculties teach are just such means. Accordingly, the government reserves the right to itself to sanction the teachings of the higher faculties, but those of the lower faculty it leaves up to the scholars’ reason.^{^[13]}

Kant chooses to name the lower faculty left to its reason, the faculty of philosophy. It does us well to remember Kant’s little story when we worry about state intervention into the university. Kant took pains to make clear that the university’s largest social function is sanctioned teaching. He carefully reserved not only reason to a subsidiary element of the university, but truth itself. Setting aside for the moment later criticisms of the confusions of truth and falsehood in philosophical truth—the sort of stories associated with many from Nietzsche to Derrida—dwell on the fact that Kant recognized that the Higher Faculties had no obligation to the truth or to judgment. The state arrogated both and created the university to its ends. “For the government,” Kant writes, “does not teach, but it commands those who, in accepting its offices, have contracted to teach what it wants (whether this be true or not).^{^[14]}

Of course, Kant’s text arrogated to philosophy what he considered the highest qualities of mind and human life—reason, truth, and judgment. He could do this, however, because the state had not (or had not yet) come to understand its own proprietary relation to science. Moreover, it did not feel itself threatened by the independent production of secular and secularizing knowledge as long as it could control its distribution and effects. Censorship along with tenured loyalty assured the containment of reason’s ability, in Arnold’s terms, to see things as they really are—even if such seeing produced Kant’s own critiques. Either the university itself would be a caldron of conflict—a streit or struggle—contained by state power or the impossibility of the state’s project for the university—if and when the conflict of faculties made the point about the lower faculties’, the secular faculties’, great power. In essence, Kant’s book begins from the first and ends in the second alternative. ‘Higher’ derives from power, against which the enlightened ideal of speaking critical truth in public cannot compete for distinction. Famously, Kant opposes this power’s discipline to command—Believe!—with the freedom to speak the truth—I believe! It is an historical error in an as yet ignorant human nature that allows power to dominate truth. The height of reason grovels within the powerlessness of irrationality and ignorance. For Kant, explicitly, the battleground for freedom is the political sphere of what he calls “human nature.”^{^[15]}

Kantian humanism has had a difficult time in the last century. Hannah Arendt traced the processes that made it tragically impossible to speak of the universal rights of man. Intellectuals from Nietzsche to Lyotard and beyond have revealed the violence of its anthropological universality, even though various heroes of decolonization, such as Fanon, have often appealed to those very standards.

Writing in the occupied city of Naples, under the frightening eye of the Inquisition, Vico imagined a realm called secular human life, lived by those peoples not determined by the book. He declared, in opposition to analysts of all kinds, that the only things humans can know and understand are those things humans have made—primarily themselves and their societies. He followed on Dante, Scaliger, Machiavelli, and those other especially Italian intellectuals whose remaking of the ancients’ wisdom produced the world of modern humanity. In Vico’s case, always and literally, the church and state in their combined violence, threatened mind by burning those who would speak or think heretically.

Secular human knowledge has in theory and in its practical initiation always been a form of conflict, of threatened existence, of dramatic tension with state and religion. Each of these forms has its own discipline, of course, so that these conflicts are and always were conflicts of discipline with life and death stakes. When the stakes are indifferent, mind is absent—whether God returns as recompense or not. When Ian Hacking, for example, blithely congratulates himself for the freedom to carry his own discipline anywhere he wants by virtue of wit and curiosity, he recalls the evident root of his untroubled interdisciplinarity as an escape from discipleship. Disciples can be secular or religious, as Aristotle to Plato or Xavier to Ignatius. Hacking must quite not mean it when he describes his personal role model, Leibniz, as ‘predisciplinary man.’ Immediately, he tells us what he takes from Leibniz is curiosity and discipline! Hacking is actually a little clearer on what he wants to say than this. He means that Leibniz worked across an enormous range of topics that, today, we subsume under different disciplines. In this simple sense, Leibniz comes before the Kantian division of labor. But curiosity requires discipline to be productive and Hacking admits to learning it. So what is the ideal? It might be Mary Douglass who, Hacking writes, “applies her keen and totally unconventional mind and skills where she is interested. I shall have to ask her next time I see her, does she think of herself as anything other than a (non-conformist) anthropologist of a particular kind, education and tradition?” The Vichian and Kantian passionate struggles have become this ‘complacent’ liberalism.

Trilling’s Arnoldian conservatism regretted institutional changes that threaten not only critical dominance but also the academy’s very commitment to mind. Trilling’s humanism worried complacency as an intellectual transgression against the history of mind’s efforts. At the center of Trilling’s commitment is a Kantian concern for critical reason’s relation to truth and so citizenship. Danger lies in the social transformations of mind’s value into professional or social status: “By an inevitable inference, the intellectual disciplines in which [professors] give instruction are to be regarded not as of intrinsic value, but, at best, as elements of a rite of social passage and, at worst, as devices of social exclusion."^{^[16]} Trilling knew his Kant and his contemporaries. The state’s police authority became the social authority of passage and credentialing. More important, the professors came to have no passion: they all profess as if teaching in the higher faculties, without reason, judgment, or freedom. Passionate politics had made the university into an agency of freedom for Tilling when the upper classes came to realize the power of free knowledge. They

had somehow got hold of the idea that mind, not in one or another of its specific formal disciplines but in what any one discipline might imply of the essence of mind, was of consequence in statecraft and in the carrying on of national life. What they would seem suddenly to have identified and wanted to capture for themselves was what nowadays we might call the mystique of mind--its energy, its intentionality, its impulse toward inclusiveness and completeness, its search for coherence with due regard for the integrity of the elements which it brings into relation with each other, its power of looking before and after.^{^[17]}

For those who understand, discipline implies the “mystique of mind.” Disciplines are a capacity of mind’s quality and evidence of its desirability as the ethical, aesthetic possibility of human political life. That Trilling sketches mind’s political character in terms critics recognize as poetic—intentionality of form; integrity of parts; placement in context; and visionary coherence—is hardly accidental. Rather than dismiss Trilling as nostalgic or elitist take seriously his metaphoric transference of the qualities of secular humanism—mind as historicity—from the literary to the political. This Vichian moment explains why Edward Said, whose politics were overtly quite different from Trilling’s, would nonetheless approvingly cite Trilling as a predecessor. Common ground is the intellectual critical commitment to the priority of human mind and life at work in purely historical secular terms building societies on the bases of knowledge, experience, judgment, and justice.

Reducing the allure of mind to a management problem as US universities have done so much recently, corresponds not to the death of literature but to the death of criticism. If the inter- space were transgressive of limits or creative beyond the boundaries, then it would attract us as mind did Vico, Trilling, Said and others. We would feel its allure as the guarantor of both seeing reality and passionately carrying out a criticism of life. Pathetically, inter-disciplinarity formalizes a social disregard for mind essential to a polity that increasingly censors the chances to intend form as Trilling defines mind’s visionary energies.

Hannah Arendt is the most important thinker of how societies turn against human mind and its historicity, in part, of course, because of mind’s own actions. The turn against mind, so to speak, is nothing but more human history. Trilling could not quite think how mind lost its way and so in the best US tradition created a paranoid Manichaeism. Arendt, however, makes imponderably clear that American forms of mass democracy destroy more thoroughly Kant’s humanistic ideals than the worst forms of twentieth century utopianism. Arendt, in a manner typical of her generation, and like Trilling with his emphasis on mind’s intent, avoids the worst despairing conclusions by stressing that the human capacity to begin, to take a step, affords alone some potential solace that human history can survive the mind’s destitution. This puts mind in its historical place, of course, but it offers little solace not because the capacity to begin seems so slim but because no beginning in itself offers any possible reason to believe that what might come is in any way better than what has been or now is. Difference is not betterment.

Arendt’s deeper concern is that American power arrangements aspire to arrest the possibility of beginning. Arendt concludes specifically that post-European global arrangements, dominated by the US and American forms, will prohibit all political being and organize loneliness and isolation in such a way as to make alternatives seem impossible if not undesirable. Fact and illusion come under control in a finally managed end of history. Fukuyama and his allies merely embody the end of Arendt’s tale.

Interdisciplinarity productively contains beginning within the managed administrative forms of the ahistorical. I believe that Trilling used the term ‘mind’ rather than other terms such as reason because he both continued and modified the position most associated with the Frankfurt School. He did not deny their kind of claim that reason had abused itself in becoming bureaucratic rationality; rather, he chose a more complexly encoded term than reason to define the critical historical complexity of human intention and formative intelligence. If you will, reason as rationalization is a threat to mind, but Trilling does not categorize mind as a potential threat to itself. Reason as rationalization is close to Arendt’s image of American forms, but those forms do not exhaust mind precisely because they threaten it. They are not an expression of mind as bureaucracy is of reason.

In my retelling of this tale, America appears as hostile to mind—as its censor. I think there is a clear reading of Trilling and Arendt that would make a convincing case for this notion. If so, then interdisciplinarity is important as one censoring device the chief of which must be those American revivals that exist, in fact, to arrest mind.

Kant’s text defines the lower faculty, which is interested in truth and judgment, as a secular faculty that might make even faith responsive to its questions. Simultaneously, he allows the state the right to act as censor through its powerful management of populations via god, law, and the body. He opts for a domain outside the censor, and he is not foolish enough to believe it might be the university itself. Rather, as with Said, Kant asserts the right of the university to contain the utopian space of judgment and truth. The censor surrounds it as a wasteland does hope. Kant has anticipated recent discussion on ‘bio-power’ by underlying Foucault’s thinking on power, knowledge, and the body. Kant, however, importantly begins his discussion with religion:

By public teaching about the first of these [eternal well-being], the government can exercise very great influence to uncover the inmost thoughts and guide the most secret intentions of its subjects. By teachings regarding the second [civil well-being], it helps to keep their external conduct under the reins of public laws, and by its teachings regarding the third [bodily well-being], it make sure that it will have a strong and numerous people to serve its purposes.^{^[18]}

In this practice, the state acts according to reason. Trouble starts, as it were, when the censor extends its power into the domain of judgment and truth. Knowing that truth and judgment have no place in the realms of god, law, and the body, Kant allows that the state’s schema is rational because its censorship paradoxically does not confuse itself with right judgment.

If human nature as secular historicism creates and accepts this politics, it does so because mind survives. When power extends itself through the domain of dogma into the realm proper to mind, then the intellectual and mind come under threat; indeed, freedom itself comes under threat because, as Arendt concluded, the capacity to be human flickers.

Milton had already argued passionately but futilely that no rationally self-interested state or social order would be so ‘pusillanimous’ as to threaten “that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the prelates, and learnt by them from the Inquisition.”^{^[19]} Anticipating Kant, Milton warned, “A man may be a heretic in the truth,” if the state censor thinking and coerce assent from a man “without knowing other reason.” The social result is disaster for humans live in a false relation to each other: “Truth,” Milton writes, “is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.”^{^[20]} Of course, Milton warns against a certain sort of theocracy, a social arrangement in which precisely those activities of mind which Trilling says the English came to see as essential to statecraft—a society that would deny the humanistic conception of nature by arresting mind’s intentionality in turgidity. What would dogma destroy? “There is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.” Those who hope to defend the Gospel “are found the persecutors.” Milton’s god makes use of “men of rare abilities . . . in the discovery of truth,” which need not lie always in the rigidity of the present’s enshrined past. Zealots do not see the value of human mind, even in god’s service, and cannot make needed distinctions, to “resolve to stop their mouths because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions.”^{^[21]}

In Trilling’s sense, mind intends as for Arendt it begins. For Milton, this is how the social universe so dependent on truth must be. Milton, more radical than Kant, equates licensing books with constraining invention at the grace of god. Only hypocrisy would bind books to good behavior.

Recall that the censor originally dealt with the population and that in Rome the censor conducted both the census and regulated morals. In its Latin root, censere means, “to estimate, rate, assess, be of opinion” [OED]. Almost all the Higher Faculties’ functions reside in the term.

Post-Foucauldian opinion, especially in the English-speaking world, leans toward eliding censere with ‘discipline.’ As we know from Milton, this is a traditional and well-founded claim, since Milton could identify censorship with being ‘bejesuited’^{^[22]}—and it is harder to imagine a more rigorous discipline than that of the Jesuits and their founder, Ignatius. We should not follow this line too far, however, because there was no more critical mind than that of the classically trained Foucault, who began his education in what was formally a Jesuit college. As David Macey says in The Lives of Michel Foucault, “for the adult Foucault, disciplined devotion to intellectual work was almost an ethic.”^{^[23]}

In Milton’s terms, intellectual discipline is not quite enough; to be properly rated as a truth-bearer, god must grace the talented to reveal it. I ask again that we set aside momentarily ideological predispositions to notice that Milton recognizes the world as the place of historical human life, no matter god’s interventions. For grace does nothing but align human capacity with the truth’s demands for recognition. Secularized, this is not far either from Arnold’s view of criticism’s necessity or Trilling’s judgment of mind’s human essentiality.

Perhaps there is no fairer test of Milton than the life of Charles Darwin. He had no disciplinary home, and yet had remarkable discipline; he destroyed the discipline of dogma, and so provoked the censorious fear of human mind at work. There is no better tale of secular mind than Darwin’s well-known account of his discoveries. I do not want to draw special attention to his growing into atheism because of science. Rather I want to relate two points: first, that Darwin’s developed habit of mind seems rather close to the general qualities of mind Trilling so admires; and second, that such mind leads toward the materialistic and human and inevitably away from not only god but the authority of censorship. These two points taken together culminate in the avowed hostility to Darwin that characterizes contemporary American religious hostility to mind and they culminate my attempt to place the discussion of inter-disciplines within a more historical analysis of how we might preserve the university’s founding purpose as a venue for mind.

After recounting how boring and unrewarding he found medical and theological courses, Darwin laments not studying enough mathematics but praises certain friends and professors, especially at Cambridge, who accommodate and stir his thinking. Not until the voyage on the Beagle, though, does Darwin acquire what Milton might call the grace needed to make use of his exceptional talents:

I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, although they were already fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play . . . . [added to observation] always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible.^{^[24]}

It takes little explication to see the aesthetic nature of this training and its resultant apprehensions. While the older Darwin lost his taste for art, he retained it for landscape. Most important, however, he refused to assent to any idea that the aesthetic emotions themselves might account for the existence of an extra-human intelligence as it impinges on the affects:

The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music.^{^[25]}

Fundamentalists can respond to this apprehension in various ways. The most evidently censorious might be the most important in public life—that is, biblical literalists and others who demand that we acknowledge the legitimacy of their private fantasies—but for the intellectual and academic world, the greatest danger lies in the censorship that replaces ‘difficulty’ with final settlements. What are these? Final settlements are frames of interpretive reference that seem to the administrative mind to account for all possible events. While they do not imagine themselves as master narratives, they do present themselves as the inevitable key to all elaborations, which they variously see as after-effects of the fundamentals they alone envision.

‘Difficulty,’ which here I use as another metonym in the long chain I have stretched over our topic, is the life of the mind. It is not explicable ab ovo and certainly not ever merely recognized. It is history, and it is history as people live it, not simply as those great minds Milton admires. Recall that Milton’s Puritanism might play a role in his delimiting grace to the few. On that topic, great American writers have sometimes, although in the minority, offered different opinions. Darwin thought of our topic: difficulty is nothing less than the conflict of faculties, in this case, what we might call the aesthetic and what we might call the humility of intellectual discipline. ‘Dif-‘ is ‘dis-‘ which is the Greek that means two. Some this complexity ‘disses’ our faculties—but that is a good thing. We must ‘dis’ ourselves. How else will we learn the humility of living minds?

^{^[1]} This is what Heidegger refers to as “The Age of the World Picture.”

^{^[2]} (Oddly enough, though, ‘interdisciplinarity’ is absent from the online edition of The American Heritage dictionary.)

^{^[3]} Cf. Ian Hacking, “The Complacent Disciplinarian,” at the following URL: http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/7 as of April 1, 2005. This is a site sponsored by Science Po.

^{^[4]} Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992.

^{^[5]} Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

^{^[6]} Lionel Trilling, Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (New York: Viking Press, 1972).

^{^[7]} Daniel T. O’Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 57 – 59.

^{^[8]} Trilling, pp. 5 – 6.

^{^[9]} Trilling, p. 17.

^{^[10]} See, for example, Henry Adams’s treatment of Abelard in Mount Saint Michel and Chartres as well as Paul A. Bové, "Abandoning Knowledge: Disciplines, Discourse and Dogma - Henry Adams's Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," New Literary History 25 (Summer 1994): 601 - 620.

^{^[11]} Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. & introduced by Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

^{^[12]} Kant, p. 23.

^{^[13]} Kant, p. 27.

^{^[14]} Kant, p. 27.

^{^[15]} Kant, p. 29.

^{^[16]} Trilling, p. 25.

^{^[17]} Trilling, p. 38 - 39.

^{^[18]} Kant, pp. 31 – 33.

^{^[19]} John Milton, “Areopagitica,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 739.

^{^[20]} Milton, p. 739.

^{^[21]} Milton, p. 748.

^{^[22]} Milton, 748.

^{^[23]} David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 8.

^{^[24]} Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882. Ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1969; reprint of Harcourt edition of 1958), p. 77.

^{^[25]} Darwin, Autobiography, pp. 91 – 92.

Henry Adams and Europe A Reply [u]

2005-06-08T13:55:00.000-04:00

This is a fragmentary talk given in Boston to the Henry Adams association, ALA. Comments welcome. PAB

©Paul A. Bové

1354 Royal Oak Drive

Wexford, PA 15090

Henry Adams and Europe: A Reply

(ALA Boston May 29 2005)

Bombs educate vigorously—but what could be a greater condemnation of shock and awe than reducing bombing to the inferior and ineffective status of teaching? Professors in the Gymnasium educate vigorously as well—a fact that should make us suspect of both teachers and vigor.

In thinking of how little confidence Adams had in teaching, consider why. Moreover, consider that even though we earn our bread and Volvos in the pay of some university or college, we need not identify our intellectual obligations and our paid labor. Down that path lie either the incapacities promised by the pro-professionals among our leaders or the narcissism of our quest romance. That is, either we stand with Stanley Fish et al who tell us that we are just professionals so shut up about efficacy and politics or we welcome the liberal activist self-justification that we teach against oppression and empower our students. Of course, there are endless variations on these themes, chief among which is the altruistic claim that teachers have a vocation, a graceful career path, self-sacrificing and sure. Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, has published Against Depression, a book at the center of which stands, according to Natalie Angier, a rather momentous demythication: “That Kramer has not been depressed may in fact allow him to resist doing what depressives, and those who love them, too readily do, which is romanticize and totemize and finally trivialize the illness.”^{^[1]} I find it immensely ironic that so many people who worry about Adams’ putative pessimism and political despair so embrace the inefficacy of their favored and final role as teacher.

Adams took teaching and education too seriously to be much of an example for those hooked on the disease. Adams had a mind that belongs to the intellectual class. For clear historical reasons, we have come to identify the term intellectual as a social category, as a role consequent upon a place within the order of production. However, it need not be that way; indeed, we should wonder if we do not harm ourselves by continuing to use this term in its modern and modernist meanings. In English, “intellectual,” as a substantive describing a certain kind of mind working person, is a 19^th-century creation. Indeed, the term is notoriously part of the Dreyfus Affair. The time has come to revise our usage to get a clearer sense of the value that might inhere in the work of becoming and then being an intellectual. In partial fulfillment of my obligation to respond to Pierre and Arthur’s talks, and to resume the topic Adams and Europe, let me propose that Adams was an intellectual of the same general type as Vico. I insist that what it means to be an intellectual in this type is to be able to write an autobiography of a certain kind that we see ideally easily expressed in the call for papers to which Vico’s memoir is a response.

We might easily infer that Adams knowing Michelet knew Vico, but I do not claim influence especially since Adams never includes Vico’s autobiography in the list that includes Augustine, Franklin, Rousseau, and some few others. My aim is to point a direction for critical reflection, namely that Adams is an American intellectual but in the tradition of historical humanism embodied by Vico and instantiated by the latter’s ability to meet Porcía’s demands. It would not be too much to say that Adams’s ambiguous relation to things French comes from something like an antagonism to Descartes, to the analytic and geometric style so averse to historians and literary scholars such as Auerbach.

Porcía proposed that his readers take Vico’s autobiography as a model fulfilling his own editorial project. In Frisch and Bergin’s summary, here is the original call:

The prospective contributor is asked to relate the time and place of his birth, his parentage, and all the episodes of his life which make it remarkable or curious, so far as they can without shame be published to the world and to posterity. He is asked to weave into his narrative an exact and detailed account of all his studies. Beginning with grammar, let him say how it was taught him, whether by the methods in common use, or by some novel one; if the latter, whether it merits approval or not, and why. Proceeding thus from art to art, from science to science, let him point out the abuses and prejudices of schools and teachers, or praise their orderly curricula and sound methods, as the case may be. Let him say not only what is well and what is ill taught in the schools, but what is not taught there that should be. Let him then pass on to the particular art or science to which he has devoted himself; the authors he has followed or shunned, and why; the works he has published or is preparing; how they have been criticized, what he has said or might say in defense of them, and what he would now retract. Let him candidly confess his errors, and defend only what seems defensible after due consideration, “with generous neutrality.”^{^[2]}

Frisch and Bergin reserve Porcía’s most demanding requirement until the end: “Finally, it is emphasized that the proposal is addressed only to creative scholars. ‘Those who have published nothing but sonnets or the like slender poems, or legal books or treatises on moral theology, or other things of that sort, will find no place among our men of letters.”^{^[3]} Therefore, a hammer strikes against the professionals and the populists in their attitudes toward “intellectuals,” towards “creative scholars.”

I submit that Porcía’s call closely describes important elements of Adams’s Education. Moreover, it gives us an idea of how intellectuals live lives in terms foreign to the aesthetic narcissisms of self-conscious subjectivity. The final sharp distinction between Henry James and Henry Adams waits its author. Nonetheless, Adams’s mind is not indifferent or non-participatory; rather, it is as a mind, different. Over and again, one hears the dangerous populist call for engagement and participation as the measure of an intellectual’s worth within democracy. If recent politics have not taught us the dangers of populism, then a scholarly look at our Sorelian predecessors might clarify matters. More to the point, however, what appears to be distanced non-participation, such as Posnock claims for James, while it might aesthetically re-eroticize democracy, is in no way distant, as Redding suggests, from its essential place within the imperial regime of state power’s liberal democratic forms.

Vico and Adams, by contrast, recognize their double relation not only to those struggling to make their histories, but to those others who share in the qualities of mind that drove Machiavelli in exile to speak of communing with the great dead, alone, robed, in his candle-lit study. To put the matter as simply as possible, Adams educated his mind because it was an instrument best suited for thinking in the form of making. This puts him on the side of neither the philosophers nor the historians, but the poets—another fact that places him comfortably near the Neapolitan according to whom all secular peoples live only poetically. We normally think of Leibniz and Vico as among the last of those for whom knowledge existed as a unified field. Adams at times plays with this motif, not as an affective matter, but as a matter for thought in relation to the intellectual’s task of learning and thinking. Is this a romantic goal for democracy? Probably yes, but only because censors first wish to stop all thinking. The judge who imprisoned Gramsci did so not to prevent his activism but to stop his brain from working. Without mind, there is no creation, no making, no secular life, no poetry, and no democratic experiment.

To be an intellectual in Adams’s tradition is to be a creative scholar. What should concern us is that such lived activity appears to some of us as indifference or elitism or escapism. We should question how that perception has come about. Moreover, we should accept the gift that comes with rare minds that can display intellect’s ability to think matters through to the creation of tangible objects for thinking and learning. Take, for example, Adams’s remarkable portrait of Napoleon as Milton’s Satan and the chance this allows him to play the serpentine and more dangerous Talleyrand against the fierce and despairing Moloch. There are so many traces of mind working in such writing that we must conclude it is both a perfect embodiment of the historical complexity of human life forming itself in history—and so part of that process—as well as a very rich example of how humans have gone about thinking autopoetically. In essence, Adams’s Miltonic play allows him to think Napoleon and so all that Napoleon as historical figure—and I stress all possible elements of that phrase—might or does represent, whatever work it does or might do. Adams’s Napoleon is a problem for thought approached as a complex of historical poesis, requiring in turn epic poetry and philological method to ‘comprehend’ or ‘illuminate’ it. But comprehension and illumination are themselves also creations, work done in the areas of thinking and language, resources offered to others and based on the consequences of Adams’s own education—to say nothing of Milton’s and the scholars who have collected Bonaparte’s materials.

Most picturesque of all figures in modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte, like Milton’s Satan on his throne of state, although surrounded by a group of figures little less striking than himself, sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or, when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight. His conduct was often mysterious, and sometimes so arbitrary as to seem insane; but later years have thrown on it a lurid illumination. Without the mass of correspondence and of fragmentary writings collected under the Second Empire in not less than thirty-two volumes of printed works, the greatness of Napoleon’s energies or the quality of his mind would be impossible to comprehend.^{^[4]}

That Adams should present Napoleon as picturesque rather than sublime—despite his Satanic epic declension—is the first result of thinking, with particular effects as representation and important as a sign of thought that has come before, of judgment grown from careful knowing consideration. There is even more brilliance in Adams’s choice of ‘or,’—in “or, when he moved.” For why should the weight of air in movement seem an alternative to being unapproachable on his bad eminence? Why indeed except because these phrases are not descriptions but attempted figurations to catch not only Milton’s language but the varied ways in which Napoleon comes to mind as a problem for thought. If you will, here is some part of the creativity that Porcía demanded of his autographs. Of course, the scholarship is there as well. In a passage that anticipates such modern remarks as Edward Said’s gestures towards Napoleon’s record of Egypt’s invasion, Adams notes the essential role of edited texts, of assembled materials for study—alone for the creative mind the necessary anchor to the tasks of consequential illumination, weighty consideration. In that most typical of Adams moments, he tells us that Napoleon interests as energy but also as quality of mind. Moreover, these are no qualities of mere subjectivity, fit material for quest romance or cultural studies. That mind’s qualities form an imposing list: ambition, restlessness, selfishness, energy, genius, resources, ignorance, “and a moral sense which regarded truth and falsehood as equally useful modes of expression.”^{^[5]} They form not a subject but an historical political reality. It has returned from a seemingly original time to a present vulnerable because of its amnesia and ignorance: “such a combination of qualities,” Adams writes, “as Europe had forgotten since the Middle Ages, and could realize only by reviving the Eccelinos and Alberics^{^[6]} of the thirteenth century”—but now, of course, American characters had to face it down—if nothing else the mark of an American need for proper intellectuals.

If Milton plays Moloch against Lucifer, Adams plays Talleyrand against Napoleon, but Talleyrand is in some ways the greater figure and the greater sinner against history. For Henry Adams, who justified his partial support of the anti-Dreyfusards on the grounds of support for the French Republic, Talleyrand committed the gravest sin: he led Napoleon to destroy the republic. “Superior to Bonaparte in the breadth and steadiness of his purpose, Talleyrand was a theorist in his political principles; his statecraft was that of the old régime, and he never forgave himself for having once believed in a popular revolution.”

“^{^[1]} 'Against Depression': Anatomy of Severe Melancholy,” NATALIE ANGIER NY Times

May 22, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/books/review/22ANGIERL.html

^{^[2]} P. 2f.

^{^[3]} P. 3.

^{^[4]} History, p. 227.

^{^[5]} History, p. 227.

^{^[6]} One of the three corrupt Roman families that created and used Popes, especially during the 10^th century. Eccelinos held power for Frederick the Great in Italy during the 12^th and early 13^th centuries, of the Este famiy (Pound) and written of by Browning in Sordello.

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2005-03-24T08:13:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: DeLay, Deny and Demagogue

The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: Wolfowitz Nod Follows Spread of Conservative Philosophy

2005-03-17T15:19:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: Wolfowitz Nod Follows Spread of Conservative Philosophy

The New York Times > AP > National > Bush to Recommend Wolfowitz for World Bank

2005-03-16T09:48:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > AP > National > Bush to Recommend Wolfowitz for World Bank

Guardian | The last of the utopian projects: Eric Hobsbawm

2005-03-09T07:52:00.000-05:00

Guardian | The last of the utopian projects

Columbia U. Professor, Criticized for Views on Israel, Is Banned From Teacher-Training Program

2005-02-22T09:27:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle: Daily news: 02/22/2005 -- 02

Historians in Cahoots [signed]

2005-02-16T10:55:00.000-05:00

[Ad]

Historians in cahoots

Tristram Hunt

Wednesday February 16, 2005

Guardian

In his messianic inauguration address, President Bush spoke of America's global duty being defined by "the history we have seen together". Inevitably, this was a reference to the events of 9/11. But given how much a sense of US revolutionary heritage is now informing current policy, the broader history that Americans are experiencing together should be an equal cause for concern.

The latter half of the 20th century saw US scholars lead the way in popular social history. The world of the workplace, family life, native America and civil rights was chronicled with verve and style. The delicate oral histories of social chronicler Studs Terkel opened up the local and working-class past to mass audiences. He showed how the second world war was as much the people's as the statesmen's war. On National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, history was dissected professionally and polemically.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to find such broad-ranging investigations of the American past. Instead, the bookshelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble are dominated by a very specific reading of the 18th century. This does not, in God-fearing America, represent a new found interest in the secular ideals of enlightenment and reason. Rather, an obsessive telling and retelling of that great struggle for liberty: the American Revolution.

Heroic biography has become the bestselling history brand of Bush's America. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Abraham Lincoln are all speaking from the grave with new-found loquaciousness. Barely a week passes without another definitive life of a Founding Father, Brother or Sister, each one more adulatory than the last.

Not least the vice-president's wife, Dr Lynne Cheney, whose recent contribution, When Washington Crossed the Delaware: A Wintertime Story for Young Patriots, is the kind of "history" that any ministry of information would have been proud of. Museums and TV schedulers have not been slow to catch the mood. The New York Historical Society currently hosts a vast exhibition celebrating the life of Alexander Hamilton ("The Man who Made Modern America"); the History Channel has even cut into its second world war telethon to offer a series of bio-pics of great American revolutionaries.

Sadly, none of this has resulted in any substantive reinterpretation of the revolution or its principal actors. As Simon Schama rightly puts it, this is history as inspiration, not instruction. Instead of critical analysis, the public is being fed self-serving affirmation: war-time schlock designed to underpin the unique calling, manifest destiny and selfless heroism of the US nation and, above all, its superhuman presidents.

Needless to say, this goes down very well at the White House. We are told that the president's current reading matter includes biographies of Washington as well as Alexander Hamilton. For the biographical emphasis on the Great Man who has the character and vision to transcend as well as define his times fits well with a presidency that values personal instinct and prayer above reason and empiricism.

In fact, the historical community seems to be providing the ideal conditions for the Nietzschean approach of the Bush administration. As one senior presidential adviser scarily informed journalist Ron Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ... we'll act again, creating other new realities ... We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Rather than tempering such terrifying ambition, US scholars are happy to play up to it. Historian Eliot Cohen penned an administration-friendly account of how former US presidents have instinctively been right in matters military, compared with their hapless, diffident generals, while prolific biographer Joseph Ellis has sought to offer posthumous suggestions from George Washington to George W.

At a time when the US imperium is rampaging across the globe, you might have thought there would be a historical concern to enlighten the domestic citizenry about foreign cultures and peoples. Instead, public scholars are feeding the nation's increasingly insulated mentality with a retreat into the cosy fables of their forebears. Amid the biography and hagiography, stories of Islamic civilisation or Middle East nation-building are among the many histories the American people are not seeing.

· Tristram Hunt is the author of Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

tristramhunt@btopenworld.com

Paul A. Bové

Distinguished Professor

English Department

Editor, boundary 2

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

http://btwoprojects.blogspot.com/

http://groups.msn.com/PaulBovesWebPage

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FW: Guardian Unlimited: This Pollyanna army [signed]

2005-02-09T08:23:00.000-05:00

-----Original Message-----
From: lindsay_waters@harvard.edu [mailto:lindsay_waters@harvard.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:44 AM
To: bove@pitt.edu
Subject: Guardian Unlimited: This Pollyanna army

lindsay_waters@harvard.edu spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and
thought you should see it.

-------
Note from lindsay_waters@harvard.edu:

read it and weep
-------

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go
to http://www.guardian.co.uk

This Pollyanna army
Bush will not admit that his troops are too exhausted to sustain his
vengeful global missions
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 27 2005
The Guardian

The most penetrating critique of the realism informing President Bush's
second inaugural address, a trumpet call of imperial ambition, was made one
month before it was delivered, by Lt Gen James Helmly, chief of the US Army
Reserve.

In an internal memorandum, he described "the Army Reserve's inability under
current policies, procedures and practices ... to meet mission requirements
associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. The Army
Reserve is additionally in grave danger of being unable to meet other
operational requirements and is rapidly degenerating into a broken force".

These "dysfunctional" policies are producing a crisis "more acute and
hurtful", as the Reserve's ability to mobilise troops is "eroding daily".

The US force in Iraq of about 150,000 troops is composed of a "volunteer"
army that came into being with the end of military conscription during the
Vietnam war. More than 40% are National Guard and Reserves, most having
completed second tours of duty and being sent out again.

The force level has been maintained by the Pentagon only by "stop-loss"
orders that coerce soldiers to remain in service after their contractual
enlistment expires - a back-door draft.

Re-enlistment is collapsing, by 30% last year. The Pentagon justified this
de facto conscription by telling Congress that it is merely a short-term
solution that would not be necessary as Iraq quickly stabilises and an Iraqi
security force fills the vacuum. But this week the Pentagon announced that
the US force level would remain unchanged through 2006.

"I don't know where these troops are coming from. It's mystifying,"
Representative Ellen Tauscher, a ranking Democrat on the House armed
services committee, told me. "There's no policy to deal with the fact we
have a military in extremis."

Bush's speech calling for "ending tyranny in all the world" was of
consistent abstraction uninflected by anything as specific as the actual
condition of the military that would presumably be sent scurrying on various
global missions.

But the speech was aflame with images of destruction and vengeance. The
neoconservatives were ecstatic, perhaps as much by their influence in
inserting their gnostic codewords into the speech as the dogmatism of the
speech itself.

For them, Bush's rhetoric about "eternal hope that is meant to be fulfiled"
was a sign of their triumph. The speech, crowed neocon William Kristol, who
consulted on it, was indeed "informed by Strauss" - a reference to Leo
Strauss, philosopher of obscurantist strands of absolutist thought, mentor
and inspiration to some neocons who believe they fulfil his teaching by
acting as tutors to politicians in need of their superior guidance.

'Informed" is hardly the precise word to account for the manipulation of
Bush's impulses by cultish advisers with ulterior motives.

Even as the neocons revelled in their influence, Bush's glittering
generalities, lofted on wings of hypocrisy, crashed to earth. Would we
launch campaigns against tyrannical governments in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, or China?

Of course, the White House briefed reporters, Bush didn't mean his rhetoric
to suggest any change in strategy.

Unfortunately for Condoleezza Rice, such levels of empty abstraction could
not glide her through her Senate confirmation as secretary of state without
abrasion.

With implacable rigidity, she stood by every administration decision. There
was no disinformation on Saddam Hussein's development of nuclear weapons of
mass destruction; any suggestion that she had been misleading in the rush to
war was an attack on her personal integrity. The light military force for
the invasion was just right. And it was just right now.

Contrary to Senator Joseph Biden of the foreign relations committee, who
stated that there are only 14,000 trained Iraqi security forces, she
insisted there are 120,000. Why, secretary of defence Rumsfeld had told her
so.

Then, implicitly acknowledging the failure to create a credible Iraqi army,
the Pentagon announced that the US forces would remain at the same level for
the next two years. Rice's Pollyanna testimony was suddenly inoperative.

The administration has no strategy for Iraq or for the coerced American army
plodding endlessly across the desert.

Representative Tauscher wonders when the House armed services committee,
along with the rest of the Congress, will learn anything from the Bush
administration that might be considered factual: "They are never persuaded
by the facts. Nobody can tell you what their plan is and they don't feel the
need to have one."

On the eve of the Iraqi election, neither the president's soaring rhetoric
nor the new secretary of state's fantasy numbers touch the brutal facts on
the ground.

Sidney Blumethal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of
The Clinton Wars

sidney_blumenthal @yahoo.com

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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The New York Times > Health > Mental Health & Behavior > For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil'

2005-02-07T20:38:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Health > Mental Health & Behavior > For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil'

I like this, a secularized use of evil. I could do without the diagnostic rhetoric, but the project is admirable. I say this given how I began in Montreal more than a decade ago to try to bring the concept back into criticism, as I tried with 'boredom' several times in the last few years.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | No monopoly on modernity

2005-02-04T22:46:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | No monopoly on modernity

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Our Battered Constitution

2005-02-04T07:59:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Our Battered Constitution

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The Year of Living Indecently

2005-02-03T16:49:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The Year of Living Indecently

VDH's Private Papers::Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

2005-01-28T18:13:00.000-05:00

VDH's Private Papers::Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows

2005-01-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows

Commentary :: Evan Coyne Maloney :: AcademicBias.com

2005-01-15T09:13:00.000-05:00

Commentary :: Evan Coyne Maloney :: AcademicBias.com

WSJ.com - The Darker Side of Colonial Hong Kong

2005-01-12T19:15:00.000-05:00

WSJ.com - The Darker Side of Colonial Hong Kong

FW: Reuters.co.uk - Humanists and atheists look to higher profile - Mon January 03, 2005 05:27 AM ET

2005-01-03T12:07:00.000-05:00

Reuters News Article

Humanists and atheists look to higher profile

Mon January 03, 2005 05:27 AM ET

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Humanist and atheist groups around the world are looking to boost their profile in 2005 to counter religious fundamentalism and efforts by some Western leaders to relaunch faith as a keystone of national life.

Under pressure from the rise of militant Islam, Vatican activism in the European Union and the re-election of a "born-again" Christian to the White House, they feel they must resist to ensure the ideas of secularism survive and spread.

"In the face of the religious onslaught on Humanist values, we have to speak out and get our message over," says Roy Brown, Swiss-based president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) which links groups totalling millions of members.

Two central events will be a World Atheist Conference at Vijayawada in India in early January and the IHEU's World Congress in July at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

"We must work hard to combat the encroachment of religion on public policy and on the rights of non-believers everywhere," said IHEU executive director Babu Gogineni.

Atheists, who see no evidence for the existence of a deity, and Humanists, who are mainly atheists but include some believers, share that core concern: to keep religion out of politics and limit it to the private sphere.

They draw their inspiration from freethinkers down the ages, from ancient Greek and Indian philosophers through the 18th century Enlightenment that shaped much of modern political thinking in Europe and North America.

PRINCIPLES ATTACKED

But they see key Humanist principles -- respect for human rights and racial and sexual equality with morality based on reason rather than on the dictates of a supreme being through a holy book -- as under assault, and not just in Muslim countries.

The re-election in November of George W. Bush, U.S. Humanists fear, strengthened the influence of Christian fundamentalists dedicated to restoring the Bible, "God's word," to a central role in public life and foreign policy.

Many of Bush supporters appear to see the war in Iraq in the same terms as the president, and Muslim fundamentalists, as one arena of a cosmic struggle between good and evil in which what Humanists would regard as crimes are permissible on both sides.

Bush's triumph has also boosted opponents of abortion and homosexuality, as well as supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) which rejects evolution -- the development of all life on earth from lower forms through natural selection of the fittest -- as elaborated by 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin.

The ID movement emerged from the ranks of U.S. creationists, who believe the Bible is literally correct and that their God created the world and all in it. ID limits itself to arguing that an intelligence must have shaped life.

In many U.S. states, fundamentalists on school boards ensure that creationism -- taught widely until the late 1960s -- is still present in some form. ID supporters are now demanding that their beliefs be taught alongside evolution.

Last month British philosopher Anthony Flew, long a champion of unbelief, announced to the dismay of some fellow atheists that he was now convinced an intelligence must have provided the spark of life and perhaps even done some designing.

His "conversion" was greeted with delight on creationist and Catholic websites. But Flew hastened to clarify that he believed that the intelligence involved was not the Christian, Jewish or Moslem "personal" deity, and that there is no "afterlife."

GOD OF THE GAPS

Atheist scientist-thinkers, like British biologist Richard Dawkins, said Flew had simply come to "the god of the gaps" -- a view held by some philosophers but few scientists that some "force" must have been at play because science has not pinned down how life could have begun otherwise.

In Britain, many Humanists feel that Prime Minister Tony Blair -- a strong religious believer -- and members of his government are undermining secular traditions.

They point to his promotion of faith schools run by various religious communities, including two financed by a fundamentalist businessman where creationism is taught as science.

Blair's push for a new law that would protect all believers from "incitement to hate" on the grounds of their faith -- a key demand of Muslim activists -- is bound to restrict criticism of religion as such, Humanists argue.

His readiness to bend government policies to the views of "faith" leaders, they say, has led religious hard-liners to demand ever more concessions on social and cultural issues such as limiting the right to stage plays that might offend religion.

In most Muslim countries, religion and politics are closely intertwined and apostasy or renunciation of the faith is often a criminal offence. Penalties include execution, but "apostates" are routinely treated as outcasts and harassed.

Secular and evangelical Christian groups launched a campaign at the United Nations last year to convince Islamic leaders to work to change this, but to little effect.

SOME ADVANCES

However Humanists see some advances over the past year in Europe, Asia and even in Africa where atheists have begun to organise.

In Europe, Vatican efforts to have the EU constitution include a reference to the continent's Christian heritage were blocked. The European Parliament voted to bar a traditionalist Italian Catholic from becoming the new justice commissioner.

France's ban on Muslim headscarves in state schools was imposed in September with few problems, despite warnings that it would unleash protests and alienate many in Europe's largest Islamic minority.

In Spain, the Socialists replaced the Catholic-inspired Popular Party after its decade in power and began a series of secular reforms angering the Church hierarchy, including a move to allow gay marriage.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in India's general elections to the firmly secular Congress Party.

Even at the United Nations there was good news from for Humanists.

Bangladeshi writer and medical doctor Taslima Nasrin, living in exile after criticising Islam and an active campaigner for the rights of women and the non-religious, was awarded a UNESCO prize for promoting cultural tolerance.

But at the same time a Vatican campaign led to the world body adding "Christianophobia" to "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as issues its human rights bodies report on -- a sign for many that religious forces are reinforcing their grip.

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Christian Conservatives Turn to Statehouses

2004-12-13T08:56:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > National > Christian Conservatives Turn to Statehouses

Argentina

2004-12-06T13:37:00.000-05:00

Wlad Godzich recommends greater attention to Argentina to comprehend the present. In his spirit, I make a small list of some materials.

Books:

Articles:

Films:

Fernando Solanas’ 2004 documentary Memoria del Saqueo
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, The Take

Titles on Current Crisis

2004-12-02T11:55:00.000-05:00

I will try to keep a reasonably current list of titles that come to my attention and strike me as worth reading. I will also attach reviews or comments. I hope you will all add to this effort.

PAB

Books:

Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire. Norton, 2004. For a review see, "The Kantian imperative and the war on terror," Nicholas Lezard Saturday, November 27, 2004. The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1360575,00.html

Articles:

"Taking back America," Anatol Lieven. LRB Vol. 26 No. 23 dated 2 December 2004
"Interrorgation Policy Proves Elusive," WSJ December 13 2004

Boston.com / News / Nation / From left, religious figures make a push

2004-12-01T20:30:00.000-05:00

Boston.com / News / Nation / From left, religious figures make a push

The New York Times > Education > Court Allows Universities to Bar Military Recruiters

2004-11-29T21:19:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Education > Court Allows Universities to Bar Military Recruiters

The Supreme Court will reverse this decision. PAB

Los Angeles Times: GOP Plants Flag on New Voting Frontier

2004-11-22T08:21:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles Times: GOP Plants Flag on New Voting Frontier

Tony Bogues wants to give attention to regionalism in the US. This is the second report in major papers to cover the emergence of voting blocks outside urban aggregations. Not quite country, but certainly not city, these people and these living clusters represent an important anti-modern and anti-urban viting block, whose economic life seems determined by modernity's 'virtues'--cars, satellites, cable, internet, etc. PAB

Neo-Cons Consolidate Power, Retain Foreign Policy Ambitions

2004-11-20T09:31:00.000-05:00

Reuters News Article

Reuters

Print this article Close This Window
Neoconservatives Gain Strength in New Bush Team
Wed Nov 17, 2004 02:31 PM ET

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Neoconservatives, seen as the ideological architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, appear to be gaining strength in President Bush's second administration, foreign policy analysts said on Wednesday.

The "neocons," as they are known in Washington seemed in ideological retreat a year ago after the U.S. occupation of Iraq was shaken by a bloody insurrection.

Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, they argued that U.S. interests and values in the Middle East were best pursued through "regime change" in Baghdad. They predicted that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators and that a democratic Iraq would quickly emerge and lead to the spread of democracy throughout the region.

Although these rosy scenarios have not played out, at least not yet, Bush seems more than ever committed to them and to those who advocated them.

"The neocons are feeling quite confident right now. Things are breaking their way. A group of people who in any rational culture should be looking for other jobs are being promoted," said Jonathan Clarke of the conservative Cato Institute, co-author of a book on the neoconservative movement.

Many key appointments in Bush's second term remain to be made. But analysts believe the replacement of Colin Powell as secretary of state by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has already strengthened the neocons' hand.

Many are watching to see whether undersecretary of state John Bolton, a hard-liner on confronting Iran and North Korea, is promoted to the number two position at the State Department. Meanwhile at the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and undersecretary Douglas Feith, both key neocons, remain firmly in place.

"Bush has made it clear he wants to fight and win the war against various radical Islamic terrorist movements and he wants to expand the boundaries of the free world. He will use all available tools but diplomacy is always more effective when backed by the credible threat of force," said Clifford May, a former communications director for the Republican Party, now with the Center for Defense of Democracies.

Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think-tank, said it did not matter much who in the administration took which position. What mattered was what Bush himself believed and said.

SUCCESS IN IRAQ POSSIBLE

"Bush has never moved away from his policy agenda and since winning reelection has asserted it again. He thinks success is possible in Iraq and he has no intention of allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons," he said.

Iraq was a key issue in the U.S. presidential campaign with the defeated Democratic challenger John Kerry arguing that decision to invade was based on false premises and that the U.S. occupation had been badly mismanaged.

"Bush regards the election as a vindication of his Iraq policy. All the nay-sayers, the doubters, the defeatists have emerged as losers," said Clarke.

Some argue that the Iraqi experience has made it virtually impossible for Bush to contemplate another such war. With its troops badly overstretched and the costs of the occupation mounting, it is hard to imagine he would enjoy much domestic support, let alone international backing.

"Whatever some hawks might like to do, the reality is that the Bush administration will face a series of constraints -- military, diplomatic, political and economic -- that will curb its ability to launch new preventive wars," said James Mann, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in an online article for Foreign Policy Magazine.

In the case of Iran, Bush might have little appetite and little ability to launch a full-scale invasion. However, he could still order lesser military action, such as massive air strikes to destroy the Iranian nuclear program.

"That could happen. It's absolutely feasible," said Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim.

Naim noted that U.S. administrations for decades had employed air strikes as an instrument of policy. Former President Bill Clinton used air power against Serbia and launched missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan.

"There's nothing new about using air strikes. That would be the continuation of a traditional tool of U.S. foreign policy," he said.

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The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

2004-11-20T09:23:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

Rich analyzes far beyond the Ryan incident itself. PAB

LRB | Corey Robin : Dedicated to Democracy

2004-11-20T09:16:00.000-05:00

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/print/robi02_.html

[London Review of B]

LRB | Vol. 26 No. 22 dated 18 November 2004 | Corey Robin

Dedicated to Democracy
Corey Robin

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin
Chicago, 311 pp, Â£40.00

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, EfraÃn
RÃos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. 'Well, I
learned a lot,' he told reporters on Air Force One. 'You'd be
surprised. They're all individual countries.' It was also a useful
meeting for RÃos Montt. Reagan declared him 'a man of great personal
integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy', and claimed that the
Guatemalan strongman was getting 'a bum rap' from human rights
organisations for his military's campaign against leftist guerrillas.
The next day, one of Guatemala's elite platoons entered a jungle
village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of
them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs,
swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older
children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where
a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The
platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for
last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among
them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it
with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies
later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and
umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan's death in June, it was
probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with RÃos
Montt. After all, it wasn't Reykjavik. But Reykjavik's shadow - or
that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall - does not
entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents.
While it's tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a
more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under
which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was
a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and
won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over
nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders.
Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of
the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and
Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin
America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and
Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major
contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew
Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had
worked closely with the country's small but influential Communist
Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico,
where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that
1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform
and promised his followers that 'Cuba will not be Guatemala.' In 1966,
Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the
'disappearances' that would come to define the dirty wars of
Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike,
US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured
and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the
Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote:
'The execution of these persons will not be announced and the
Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into
custody.' With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the
Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold
War finally came to an end - in the same place it had begun - making
Guatemala's the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere's civil
wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at
the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina,
Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and
roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the
victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only
military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to
have committed acts of genocide.

The Last Colonial Massacre reminds us that when we talk about
America's victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like
Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the
mass slaughter of civilians. But Grandin is interested in more than
tallying body counts and itemising atrocities. The task he sets
himself is to locate this most global of contests in the smallest of
places, to find beneath the duelling composure of superpower rivalry a
bloody conflict over rights and inequality, to see behind a simple
morality tale of good triumphing over evil the more ambivalent
settlement that was - and is - the end of the Cold War. Mounting the
most powerful case to date against the know-nothing triumphalism of
Cold War historians and the smug complacency of the American media,
Grandin's book also performs a modest act of restorative justice: it
allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words. In a
series of remarkable biographies Grandin shows how men and women made
high politics and high politics made them, demonstrating that the Cold
War was waged not only in the airy game rooms of nuclear strategists
but 'in the closed quarters of family, sex and community'.

The book opens with an epigraph from Sartre: 'A victory described in
detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.' The victory Grandin refers
to here is singular and by now virtually complete: that of the United
States over Communism. But the defeats he describes are various, their
consequences still unfolding. First is the defeat of the Latin
American left, whose aspirations ranged from the familiar (armed
seizure of state power) to the surprising (the creation of
capitalism). Next is the defeat of a continental social democracy
which would allow citizens to exercise a greater share of power - and
to receive a greater share of its benefits - than historically had
been their due. Finally, and most important, is the defeat of that
still elusive dream of men and women freeing themselves, thanks to
their own reason and willed effort, from the bonds of tradition and
oppression. This had been the dream of the transatlantic
Enlightenment, and throughout the Cold War American leaders argued on
its behalf (or some version of it) in the struggle against Communism.
But in Latin America, Grandin shows, it was the left who took up the
Enlightenment's banner, leaving the United States and its allies
carrying the black bag of the counter-Enlightenment. More than
foisting on the United States the unwanted burden of liberal
hypocrisy, the Cold War inspired it to embrace some of the most
reactionary ideals and revanchist characters of the 20th century.

According to Grandin, the Latin American left brought liberalism and
progress to a land awash in feudalism. Well into the 20th century, he
shows, Guatemala's coffee planters presided over a regime of forced
labour that was every bit as medieval as tsarist Russia. Using
vagrancy laws and the lure of easy credit, the planters amassed vast
estates and a workforce of peasants who essentially belonged to them.
Reading like an excerpt from Gogol's Dead Souls, one advertisement
from 1922 announced the sale of '5000 acres and many mozos colonos who
will travel to work on other plantations'. (Mozos colonos were
indebted labourers.) While unionised workers elsewhere were itemising
what their employers could and could not ask of them, Guatemala's
peasants were forced to provide a variety of compulsory services,
including sex. Two planters in the Alta Verapaz region, cousins from
Boston, used their Indian cooks and corn grinders to sire more than a
dozen children. 'They fucked anything that moved,' a neighbouring
planter observed. Though plantations were mini-states - with private
jails, stockades and whipping posts - planters also depended on the
army, judges, mayors and local constables to force workers to submit
to their will. Public officials routinely rounded up independent or
runaway peasants, shipping them off to plantations or forcing them to
build roads. One mayor had local vagrants paint his house. As much as
anything Grandin cites, it is this view of political power as a form
of private property which confirms his observation that by 1944 'only
five Latin America countries - Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica and
Colombia - could nominally call themselves democracies.'

And then, within two years, it all changed. By 1946, only five
countries - Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the
Dominican Republic - could not be called democracies. Turning the
anti-Fascist rhetoric of the Second World War against the hemisphere's
old regimes, leftists overthrew dictators, legalised political
parties, built unions and extended the franchise. Galvanised by the
New Deal and the Popular Front, reformers declared, in the words of
the Guatemalan president Juan JosÃ© ArÃ©valo, that 'we are socialists
because we live in the 20th century.' The entire continent was fired
by a combination of Karl Marx, the Declaration of Independence and
Walt Whitman, but Guatemala burned the brightest. There, a
decades-long struggle to break the back of the coffee aristocracy
culminated in the 1950 election of Arbenz, who with the help of a
small circle of Communist advisers instituted the Agrarian Reform of
1952. This redistributed a million and half acres to a hundred
thousand families, and also gave peasants a significant share of
political power. Local land reform committees, made up primarily of
peasant representatives, bypassed the planter-dominated municipal
government and provided peasants and their unions with a platform from
which to make and win their claims for equity.

Arguably the most audacious experiment in direct democracy the
continent had ever seen, the Agrarian Reform entailed a central irony,
critical to Grandin's argument about the Latin American left. The
legislation's authors - most of them Communists - were not building
socialism: they were creating capitalism. Scrupulous about property
rights and the rule of law - peasants had to back their claims with
extensive documentation; only unused land was expropriated; planters
were guaranteed multiple rights of appeal, all the way to the
president - the Agrarian Reform imposed a regime of separated powers
that was almost as cumbersome as James Madison's Constitution.
(According to one of the bill's Communist authors, 'it was a bourgeois
law.' When grassroots activists complained about the slowness of
reform, Arbenz responded: 'I don't care! You have to do things
right!') As Grandin points out, the Agrarian Reform turned landless
peasants into property owners, giving them the bargaining power to
demand higher wages from their employers - in the hope that they would
become 'consumers of national manufactures', while 'planters,
historically addicted to cheap, often free labour and land', would be
forced to 'invest in new technologies' and thereby 'make a profit'.

Guatemala's socialists did more than create democrats and capitalists.
They also made peasants into citizens. While liberals and
conservatives have long claimed that leftist ideologies reduced their
adherents to automatons, Grandin shows that leftist ideals and
movements awakened peasants to their own power, giving them extensive
opportunities to speak for themselves and to act on their own behalf.
EfraÃn Reyes Maaz, for example, was a Mayan peasant organiser, born in
the same year as the Bolshevik Revolution. 'If I hadn't studied Marx I
would be chicha ni limonada,' Reyes told Grandin. 'I'd be nothing. But
reading nourished me and here I am. I could die today and nobody could
take that from me.' Where other peasants seldom ventured beyond their
plantations, the Communist Party inspired Reyes to travel to Mexico
and Cuba, and he returned to Guatemala with the conviction that 'every
revolutionary carries around an entire world in his head.' The
Communist Party did not require Reyes to give up everything he knew;
it gave him ample freedom to synchronise the indigenous and the
European, making for a 'Mayan Marxism' that was every bit as supple as
the hybrid Marxism developed in Central Europe between the wars. When
anti-Communists put an end to this democratic awakening in 1954, it
was as much the peasant's newfound appetite for thinking and talking
as the planter's expropriated land that they were worried about. As
Guatemala's archbishop complained, the Arbencistas sent peasants
'gifted with facility with words' to the nation's capital, where they
were 'taught . . . to speak in public'.

Hoping to stifle this riot of thought and talk, Guatemala's Cold
Warriors fused a romantic aversion to the modern world with the most
up-to-date technologies of propaganda and violence (imported from the
United States), making their effort more akin to Fascism than to a
fight for liberal democracy. Here, Grandin again breaks new ground,
capturing the delicate amalgam of reason and reaction, elitism and
populism, that was the Latin American counter-revolution. Relying on
the power of the Catholic Church, the regime that replaced Arbenz had
prelates preach the gospel against Communism and socialism, and also
against democracy, liberalism and feminism. Reaching back to the
rhetoric of opposition to the French Revolution, the Church fathers
characterised the Cold War as a struggle between the City of God and
'the city of the devil incarnate' and complained that Arbenz, 'far
from uniting our people in their advance toward progress',
'disorganises them into opposing bands'. The Arbencistas, they
claimed, were 'professional corrupters of the feminine soul',
elevating women with 'gifts of proselytism or leadership' to 'high and
well-paid positions in official bureaucracy'. Because the Church
elders were sometimes too fastidious to whip up the masses, emigrÃ©s
from Republican Spain, who were partial to Franco and Mussolini,
frequently took their place, calling for a more ecstatic faith to
counter Communism's appeal: 'We do not want a cold Catholicism. We
want holiness, ardent, great and joyous holiness . . . intransigent
and fanatical.'

While the Cold Warriors' ideals looked backwards, their weapons -
furnished by the United States - looked forwards. (Indeed, one of the
Americans' chief justifications for their interventions during the
Cold War was that US involvement would contain not only Communism, but
also, in the words of the State Department, a right-wing
'counterinsurgency running wild'. Instead of a savage 'white terror',
US-trained security forces would work with the anti-Communist
'democratic left' - yesterday's third way - to fight a more
'rational', 'modern' and 'professional' Cold War.) During the 1954
coup, the CIA turned to Madison Avenue, pop sociologies and the
literature of mass psychology to create the illusion of large-scale
opposition to Arbenz. Radio shows spread rumours of an underground
resistance, inciting wobbly army officers to abandon their oath to the
democratically elected president. In subsequent decades, the CIA
outfitted Guatemala with a centralised domestic intelligence agency,
equipped with phones, radios, cameras, typewriters, carbon paper,
filing cabinets, surveillance equipment - and guns, ammunition and
explosives. The CIA also brought together the military and the police
in sleek urban command centres, where intelligence could be quickly
analysed, distributed, acted on and archived for later use. After
these efforts achieved their most spectacular results, with the 1966
disappearance of Guatemala's last generation of peaceful leftists,
guerrillas began seriously to organise armed opposition in rural
areas. In response, the regime threw into the countryside an army so
modernised - and well trained and equipped by the US - that by 1981 it
could conduct the first colour-coded genocide in history: 'Military
analysts marked communities and regions according to colours. White
spared those thought to have no rebel influence. Pink identified areas
in which the insurgents had limited presence; suspected guerrillas and
their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing.
Red gave no quarter: all were to be executed and villages razed.'

Referring to a 1978 military massacre of Indians in PanzÃ³s, a river
town in the Polochic Valley, the title of Grandin's book brilliantly
evokes this mixture of modern and anti-modern elements. On 29 May that
year, roughly five hundred Mayan peasants assembled in the town centre
to ask the mayor to hear their complaints against local planters,
which were to be presented by a union delegation from the capital.
Firing on the protesters, a military detachment killed somewhere
between 34 and a hundred men, women and children. At first glance, the
massacre seems like nothing so much as a repetition of Guatemala's
colonial past: humble Indian petitioners ask public officials to
intercede on their behalf against local rulers; government forces in
league with the planters respond with violence; Indians wind up
floating down the river or go home. On closer inspection, the massacre
bears all the marks of the 20th century. The Indians were led by
leftist activists - one of them an indigenous woman - trained by
clandestine Communist organisers. They worked with unions, based in
the capital, reflecting the left's attempt to nationalise local
grievances. For their part, the soldiers firing on the peasants were
more than a local constabulary defending the interests of the
planters. They were a contingent of Guatemala's newly trained army,
spoke fluent anti-Communism, and wielded Israeli-made Galil assault
rifles, suggesting not just the nationalisation but the
internationalisation of Guatemala's traditional struggles over land
and labour.

Though the Cold War in Latin America began as a tense negotiation
between American rationalism and Latin revanchism, Grandin suggests
that it ended with the US careening towards the latter. In a rerun of
the fabled journey into the heart of darkness, US officials returned
from their travels south echoing the darkest voices of the
counter-Enlightenment. One embassy officer wrote to his superiors back
home: 'After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time
so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these
arguments from our people.' A CIA staffer urged his colleagues to
abandon all attempts at mass persuasion in Guatemala and instead
direct their efforts at the 'heart, the stomach and the liver (fear)'.
Seeking to destabilise Allende's Chile, another CIA man proclaimed:
'We cannot endeavour to ignite the world if Chile itself is a placid
lake. The fuel for the fire must come from within Chile. Therefore,
the station should employ every stratagem, every ploy, however
bizarre, to create this internal resistance.' As Grandin writes, 'Will
to set the world ablaze . . . faith in the night-side of the soul,
contempt for democratic temperance and parliamentary procedure: these
qualities are usually attributed to opponents of liberal civility,
tolerance and pluralism - not their defenders.' With this plangent
remark, Grandin concludes his remarkable tale, suggesting that the
greatest defeat of the Cold War could be said to be that of America
itself.

But there may have been one more defeat, which Grandin's book suggests
not by explicit argument but by the force of its analysis. For all its
violence and misery, the Cold War had the virtue of imposing on
Western intellectuals, Communist and anti-Communist alike, the duty of
historical intelligence. Marxism attracted its share of morally blind
and politically repellent followers, but its varied currents carried
scholars and writers - in happy or unhappy conveyance - to an
unparalleled appreciation of the effects of time and place. Whether it
was LukÃ¡cs discerning the failed revolutions of 1848 in the stilted
realism and archaic dialogue of Flaubert's SalammbÃ´ or Louis Hartz
attributing American liberalism to the absence of feudalism in the
United States or George Steiner hearing the 'hoofbeats' of Napoleon's
armies in Hegel's Phenomenology ('the master statement of the new
density of being'), Marxism pressed intellectuals of varying stripes
to think about history's wayward intrusions. Even W.W. Rostow - the
most anti-Communist of anti-Communism's 'action intellectuals', to
borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer - was forced by the challenge of
Marxism to offer an economic and political programme that tallied,
however minimally, the persistent effects of colonialism throughout
the postcolonial world.

But the collapse of Communism and disappearance of Marxism have eased
the burdens of intelligence. With the market - and now religion -
displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers
are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical
imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands
that Communism once did, today's intellectuals wave away all talk of
'root causes': history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the
bar of political analysis - or not for the time being. Mimicking the
theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer
catchwords such as 'evil' and 'Islamo-fascism' to the vocabulary of
secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is
a product of the end of the Cold War. When Marxism was banished from
the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language -
save religion itself - to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the
individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the
present and the past. That Grandin has managed to salvage some portion
of that historical vision from the dustbin of history suggests not
only his resourcefulness, but also the timeliness of this most
untimely of meditations.

Corey Robin teaches at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

copyright Â© LRB Ltd, 1997-2004 HOME | SUBSCRIBE | LOGIN | CONTACTS |
SEARCH | SITE MAP
20 November 2004

--
Paul A. Bove
Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh
Editor, boundary 2

The New York Times > Washington > Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion

2004-11-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Washington > Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Slapping the Other Cheek

2004-11-14T08:34:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Slapping the Other Cheek

MSNBC - Clash of Civilizations

2004-11-14T07:21:00.000-05:00

MSNBC - Clash of Civilizations

In Hideout, Foreign Arabs Share Vision of 'Martyrdom' (washingtonpost.com)If

2004-11-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

In Hideout, Foreign Arabs Share Vision of 'Martyrdom' (washingtonpost.com)

If you resist a secular position, consider this story to understand what happens to 'men of faith.' P

Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims

2004-11-09T10:42:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > AP > National > Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims: "The New York Times

More reason than ever, I suppose, to become religious and compromise with religious feelings . . . . Woe are we secularists who dare not believe!

The New York Times

November 9, 2004
Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:22 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Family values, traditional values and now, ``moral values.'' Most American adults would say they have them, and yet that two-word phrase is the focus of an ideological tug-of-war heightened by President Bush's re-election, with conservatives declaring principal ownership and liberals scrambling to challenge them.

``We need to work really hard at reclaiming some language,'' said the Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the liberal-leaning National Council of Churches.

``The religious right has successfully gotten out there shaping personal piety issues -- civil unions, abortion -- as almost the total content of 'moral values,''' Edgar said. ``And yet you can't read the Old Testament without knowing God was concerned about the environment, war and peace, poverty. God doesn't want 45 million Americans without health care.''

Many of the advocacy groups that helped mobilize conservative voters for Bush concentrate on a narrow range of issues -- notably opposing abortion and gay rights. Conservative leaders say these were the main issues on voters' minds when many, in exit polls, designated unspecified ``moral values'' as their foremost Election Day priority.

``Those who view the appeal to 'moral values' as mere political manipulation and ideological posturing have a basic misunderstanding of people of faith,'' said Janice Shaw Crouse of the conservative Concerned Women for America.

``The 'moral values' that were a top priority in this election -- abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, same-sex unions -- are rooted in deep religious beliefs.''

Such statements of moral grounding have frustrated Democratic-leaning activists -- in past campaigns and particularly this year. They question the vagueness of the ``moral values'' exit poll question and contend that their own political priorities, such as fighting poverty and discrimination, have moral weight and popular support.

Proponents of same-sex unions, for example, believe it is moral to afford partnership rights to two men or two women who have committed themselves to each other and, in many cases, are raising children.

``We have a thing or two to say about the 'moral values' involved with permitting a couple who wish to build a life together to enjoy full legal standing as a family,'' said Ron Schlittler, director of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Similarly, abortion-rights advocates believe it is moral to allow the option of abortion to a poor, newly pregnant woman, rather than compel her to bear a child she didn't plan for and cannot afford to raise.

``When the religious right co-opted the term 'pro-life,' that was a coup,'' said the Rev. Carlton Veazey of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. ``Sometimes 'choice' sounds too casual.''

``We have to go back and examine what we are we saying, why is it not resonating,'' Veazey added. ``We don't just cave in and say they've got a monopoly on morality.''

Asked if their rivals on the left indeed held viable moral values, several conservatives replied with a qualified ``yes,'' suggesting the liberals' social concerns were valid but not as important as opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage.

``We believe in biblical principles; I'm sure they believe in biblical principles,'' said Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America. ``But I don't understand how they can defend abortion and homosexuality. That's wrong.''

The Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life said poverty was far less urgent a problem then abortion, which he considers genocide.

``The other side has not been deprived of the opportunity to make their case,'' he said. ``Voters can think for themselves.''

Some put the issue even more starkly.

``There is no reconciliation between good and evil,'' wrote Mary Ann Kreitzer of Les Femmes, an organization of conservative Roman Catholic women. ``Voters rejected the party of gay activists, radical feminists, the Hollywood elite, pornographers, death-peddlers, anti-Christian bigots and apostate Catholics.''

For some moderates, the values debate is less simple -- they may oppose abortion and gay marriage yet share liberals' view on other issues.

Mike Allen of Catholic Charities of Trenton, which serves the needy in southern New Jersey, said his organization's mission entails seeking ``a more just and compassionate society'' on for the disadvantaged.

Regarding partisan promotion of ``moral values,'' Allen said, ``Oversimplifying is a technique that seems to win elections.''

The Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit weekly America, said John Kerry could have been more effective at portraying his goals -- fairer wages, better health care -- as ``moral values.''

``The Democratic Party seems almost embarrassed talking about family issues or religion,'' he said.

A future battleground in the values tug-of-war will be for black and Hispanic support. Some conservatives believe wariness of gay marriage will enable Republicans to steadily win more of their votes.

``You're seeing a bridge being built between African-Americans and evangelicals who tend to be Republican,'' said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. ``Right now that dialogue is focused on marriage, but as we share and learn, you'll see it broadening.''

However, the Rev. Stephen Bouman, a New York-based bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, worries that conservative Christians' definition of ``moral values'' may be too narrow to accommodate those of different faiths and backgrounds, including new immigrants.

``One thing Jesus was absolutely clear about was helping the poor, and the welcoming of strangers,'' Bouman said. ``Maybe this election was a wake-up call to have a serious conversation about what morality means, to look at what sort of country we're becoming.''

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The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Without the Facts

2004-11-08T10:10:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Without the Facts

Herbert is the counter-Kristof and his attention to ignorance should scare us, but it also allows us to make use of 'stupidity' as a critical sign. PAB

boundary 2: publishing agenda in the new age

2004-11-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

Here is the new agenda for boundary 2, agreed largely in Pittsburgh, Saturdy, October 30, 2004.

"The editors of boundary 2 announce that they no longer intend to publish in the standard professional areas, but only materials that identify and analyze the new tyrannies of thought and action spreading around the world and that seek to suggest alternatives to these emerging configurations of power. To this end, we wish to inform our readers that, until further announcement, the journal will not be accepting unsolicited manuscripts from contributors."

Zizek, The Liberal Waterloo

2004-11-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

The Liberal Waterloo

Mostly, Zizek gets it wrong. Here, he has several things right. PAB

The Liberal Waterloo
(Or, finally some good news from Washington!)
By Slavoj Zizek

The first reaction of progressives to Bush’s second victory was that of despair, even fear: The last four years were not just a bad dream. The nightmarish coalition of big business and fundamentalist populism will roll on, as Bush pursues his agenda with new gusto, nominating conservative judges to the Supreme Court, invading the next country after Iraq, and pushing liberalism in the United States one step closer to extinction. However, this emotional reaction is precisely what we should resist—it only bears witness to the extent liberals have succeeded in imposing their worldview upon us. If we keep a cool head and calmly analyze the results, the 2004 election appears in a totally different light.

Many Europeans wonder how Bush could have won, with the intellectual and pop-cultural elite against him. They must now finally confront the underrated mobilizing power of American Christian fundamentalism. Because of its self-evident imbecility, it is a much more paradoxical, properly postmodern phenomenon than it appears.

Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian fundamentalism, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s “Left Behind” series of 12 novels on the upcoming end of the world that have sold more than 60 million copies. The Left Behind story begins with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of millions of people—the saved souls whom God calls to himself in order to spare them the horrors of Armageddon. The Anti-Christ then appears, a young, slick and charismatic Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who, after being elected general secretary of the United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to Babylon where he imposes an anti-American world government that disarms all nation-states. This ridiculous plot unfolds until the final battle when all non-Christians—Jews, Muslims, et al—are consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the outcry in the Western liberal media if a similar story written from the Muslim standpoint had become a bestseller in the Arab countries! It is not the poverty and primitivism of these novels that is breathtaking, but rather the strange overlap between the “serious” religious message and the trashiest conventions of pop culture commercialism.

My next reflection concerns the basic paradox of democracy as revealed in The History of the VKP(b)—the Stalinist bible. Stalin (who ghost-wrote the book) describes the vote at a party congress in the late ’20s: “With a large majority, the delegates unanimously approved the resolution proposed by the Central Committee.” If the vote was unanimous, where then did the minority disappear? Far from betraying some perverse “totalitarian” twist, this paradox is built into the very structure of democracy. Democracy is based on a short-circuit between the majority and the “All.” In it, the winner takes all and the majority counts as All, obtaining all the power, even if this majority is merely a couple hundred votes among millions.

“Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by and for the people.” It is not enough to claim that in a democracy the majority’s will and interests (the two do not automatically coincide) determine state decisions. Today, democracy is above all about formal legalism—the unconditional adherence to a set of formal rules that guarantee society’s antagonisms are fully absorbed into the political arena. “Democracy” means that whatever electoral manipulation takes place all politicians will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the 2000 U.S. presidential election was effectively “democratic”: In spite of obvious electoral manipulations and the patent meaninglessness of the fact that several hundred votes in Florida decided who would be president of the entire nation, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the election, Bill Clinton made an appropriate acerbic comment: “The American people have spoken; we just don’t know what they said.” This comment should be taken more seriously than it was meant. To this day, we still don’t know what they said—perhaps because there was no “message” behind the result at all.

Those old enough still remember the boring attempts of “democratic socialists” to oppose the miserable “really-existing socialism” by holding up the vision of authentic socialism. To such attempts, the standard Hegelian answer provides the sufficient response: The failure of reality to live up to its notion bears witness to the inherent weakness of the notion itself. Why shouldn’t the same hold for democracy? Isn’t it too simple to oppose the “really-existing” liberal capitalist-democracy to a more true radical democracy?

This is not to imply that Bush’s victory was an accidental mistake, a result of fraud or manipulation. Hegel wrote apropos Napoleon that he had to lose two times: Only after Waterloo did it become clear to him that his defeat was not a military accident but the expression of a deeper historical shift. The same goes for Bush: He had to win two times in order for liberals to perceive that we are all entering a new era.

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the “happy ‘90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, and that the only obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time was over. In contrast, 9/11 symbolizes the end of the Clintonite happy ‘90s, heralding an era of new walls—between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote, “The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there … We stand at the cusp of a new historical era … This is a decisive moment … It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century.” One cannot but agree with them. It is effectively the future of the international community that is at stake now—the new rules that will regulate it, what the new world order will be.

A new vision of the New World Order is thus emerging as the effective framework of recent U.S. politics: After September 11, America basically wrote off the rest of the world as a reliable partner. The ultimate goal was no longer the Fukuyama utopia of expanding universal liberal democracy, but the transformation of the United States into “Fortress America,” a lone superpower isolated from the rest of the world, protecting its vital economic interests and securing its safety through its new military power. This new military not only includes forces for rapid deployment anywhere on the globe, but also the development of space weapons that enable the Pentagon to control the global surface from above. This strategy throws a new light on the recent conflicts between the United States and Europe: It is not Europe that is “betraying” the United States. The United States no longer needs to rely on its exclusive partnership with Europe. In short, Bush’s America pretends to be a new global empire but it is not. Rather, it remains a nation-state ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if U.S. politics is now being guided by a weird reversal of the ecologists’ well-known motto: Act globally, think locally.

Within these coordinates, every progressive who thinks should be glad for Bush’s victory. It is good for the entire world because the contours of the confrontations to come will now be drawn in a much starker way. A Kerry victory would have been a kind of historical anomaly, blurring the true lines of division. After all, Kerry did not have a global vision that would present a feasible alternative to Bush’s politics. Further, Bush’s victory is paradoxically better for both the European and Latin American economies: In order to get trade union backing, Kerry promised to support protectionist measures.

However, the main advantage involves international politics. If Kerry had won, it would have forced liberals to face the consequences of the Iraq war, allowing the Bush camp to blame Democrats for the results of their own catastrophic decisions. In her famous 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictators and Double Standards,” Jeanne Kirkpatrick elaborated on the distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes in order to justify the U.S. policy of collaborating with Rightist dictators, while actively subverting Communist regimes. Authoritarian dictators are pragmatic rulers concerned with power and wealth and indifferent towards ideological issues, even if they pay lip service to some big cause. In contrast, totalitarian leaders are selfless, ideology driven fanatics who put everything at stake for their ideals. So while one can deal with authoritarian rulers who react rationally and predictably to material and military threats, totalitarian leaders are more dangerous and must be directly confronted. The irony is that this distinction encapsulates perfectly what went wrong with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Saddam was a corrupt authoritarian dictator striving for power and guided by brutal pragmatic considerations (which led him to collaborate with the United States throughout the ’80s). But in removing him, the U.S. intervention has led to the creation of a “fundamentalist” opposition that precludes any pragmatic compromises.

Bush’s victory will dispel the illusions about the solidarity of interests among the developed Western countries. It will give a new impetus to the painful but necessary process of strengthening new alliances like the European Union or Mercosur in Latin America. It is a journalistic cliché to praise the “postmodern” dynamic of U.S. capitalism against the “old Europe” stuck in its regulatory Welfare State illusions. However, in the domain of political organization, Europe is now going much further than the United States has toward constituting itself as an unprecedented, properly “post-modern,” trans-state collective able to provide a place for anyone, independent of geography or culture.

No reason to despair, then. The prospects may be dark today, but remember one of the great Bushisms: “The future will be better tomorrow.”

The Truth Repeated

2004-11-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/03/politics/campaign/03assess.html?ei=5094&en=ef7a4aead2f32959&hp=&ex=1099544400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=

Paul A. BovÃ©

Professor

English Department

Editor, boundary 2

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

WSJ.com - Early Betting Is Bush's Foreign Policy Will Remain Hard-Line

2004-11-06T15:28:00.000-05:00

WSJ.com - Early Betting Is Bush's Foreign Policy Will Remain Hard-Line: "Early Betting Is
Bush's Foreign Policy
Will Remain Hard-Line"

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Time to Get Religion

2004-11-06T08:57:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Time to Get Religion

Kristof continues his line that defeating religious hatred and authoritarian politics requires engaging the enemy on its own terrain, in imitation of Blair's usurpation of a Thatcherite line. Kristof seems unaware that Blair's cunning rested on his desire to continue Thatcher's policies while some of us hope to displace the neo-cons. PAB

The Truth Repeated

2004-11-06T04:52:00.000-05:00

Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had long believed that if he
could draw out conservative and evangelical voters who stayed home four
years ago, he could "make the pie higher," as Mr. Bush once memorably said
of his goals for economic growth. Differences in the wording of exit-poll
questions between this year and 2000 made a definitive early assessment of
how well that succeeded difficult, but a third of all voters yesterday
identified themselves as evangelicals, according to surveys of voters
leaving the polls.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/03/politics/campaign/03assess.html?ei=5094&en
=ef7a4aead2f32959&hp=&ex=1099544400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position
=
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Paul A. BovÃ©
Professor
English Department
Editor, boundary 2
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PAÂ 15260
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The New York Times > AP > National > Books OK'd After Marriage Wording Changed

2004-11-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > AP > National > Books OK'd After Marriage Wording Changed

The cowardice of capital and the power of theocracy bring more prejudice to education. PAB