Quote/Unquote 2006 July

Has Ehud Olmert indirectly killed 12 US Marines and soldiers, and wounded many more, this week? I mean, while thousands of US and British troops were essentially hostage to the good will of millions of Iraqi Shiites all around them, was this really the appropriate time to launch a total war on Lebanese Shiites?

I retired from Rice in 1997 because, as the fall term began, a freshman asked me if, long ago, I had taught at UCLA. My affirmative reply triggered his response that, forty-plus years earlier, his future grandfather (!!) had taken my US Constitutional & Legal History course and now sent regards. It was time.

Why, in the name of God, does the state owe her anything? All she's done is pay her $85 for a passport renewal. Do we have to put our people at risk to get her out of Lebanon? I'm not convinced that that's what's intended by citizenship.

"What is it about religion that it can inspire such absolutism, prejudice, and killing?" Have religious people no access or resort to the peaceful visions that go with their faiths? In the meantime, and as a starting step within our own religious culture, perhaps we can entertain a moratorium on the widespread use of this most recent hateful and -- say those who are victims of devastating forces -- godless motto being posted all around:"Give War a Chance." War has had and always will have a chance, and does not need God to authorize the killings.

WEEK of July 24, 2006

Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else -- if conceived in terms of military force -- has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force -- and the fool of history.

Dick Feagler recalls when an army of kids would stuff newspapers into every milk chute in town."Now a guy in an SUV pitches your paper out at 4 a.m." Feagler's sorry to read that the New York Times will be putting some news into digest form."The trouble is, the Times was never about 'digest form.' If it goes there, we'll all be in digest form. In fact, as you know, we are already."

WEEK of July 17, 2006

Thank you so much for your concern for those of us in the Arab world/Middle East. I wanted to blog something about the situation yesterday but I couldn't remember my password. All I want to say now is that those of us who live in the so far unaffected parts of the Arab world (unaffected militarily, that is), are very perturbed by the violence in Lebanon, Palestine and of course, Iraq. It is all linked, even though it seems separate to the world outside. For too long we have been pushed around, beaten, pummeled, pulled and of course, killed, for reasons that barely make sense in any other region of the world. All I want to say is this : stop playing with the peoples of the region. For whatever savage logic the West has begun its genocidal wars, stop at once. LEAVE US ALONE.

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

Traditionally, our best excuse for inaction in the face of genocide was that we didn’t fully know what was going on — until too late.

During the Holocaust, reports trickled out of Nazi areas of atrocities and extermination camps, but they encountered widespread skepticism. “I don’t believe you,” Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice, told Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic who at extraordinary risk had visited a Nazi death camp as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and finally escaped with hundreds of documents.

Likewise, the Turks mostly barred access to the scene as they industriously killed off Armenians (a pattern of denial that persists in Turkey today). Cambodia sealed itself off during Pol Pot’s rule. And when Westerners evacuated from Rwanda in 1994 (the French airlifted out their embassy dog, while leaving behind local employees to be butchered), few witnesses were left to chronicle the savagery day by day.

That’s what makes Darfur so unusual in the history of genocide: the savagery is unfolding in plain view, and yet as world leaders gather in Russia for the Group of 8 summit meeting, the basic international response is to look the other way.

WEEK of July 10, 2006

If we go back 100 years and look through the newspapers, we see what arguments the colonial powers of that time advanced to justify their expansion into Africa and Asia. They cited arguments such as playing a civilizing role, the particular role of the white man, the need to civilize ‘primitive peoples.’ If we replace the term ‘civilizing role’ with ‘democratization,’ then we can transpose practically word for word what the newspapers were writing 100 years ago to today’s world and the arguments we hear from some of our colleagues on issues such as democratization and the need to ensure democratic freedoms.

Re: Ken Lay, Hitler, ElvisEugene Robinson:

Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur. And now Ken Lay? It's easy to understand why so many conspiracy theorists were convinced that Hitler had staged his supposed death and somehow escaped the smoking rubble of Berlin; he was one of history's greatest monsters, a man responsible for millions of deaths, and it wasn't that much of a stretch to believe he had one last evil trick up his sleeve.

The fans who for years clung to the hope that Elvis was still alive, on the other hand, simply loved their King so much that they couldn't bear to believe he was gone. And as for Tupac, it will be easier for deniers to accept the Byronic rapper's death when the music industry stops putting out new Tupac records. The man has been so prolific from his Big Recording Studio in the Sky that even I have to wonder.

Hitler, Elvis and Tupac were all icons. So the existence of a Web site called kenlayisalive.org that places the Enron founder in that pantheon must mean Ken Lay is now an icon too.

Almost immediately after Lay's death was reported last Wednesday, Internet bloggers began speculating that he had somehow faked his demise, which" conveniently" came just before his sentencing -- doubtless to a well-deserved term in prison -- for his role in what was arguably the most spectacular business fraud in American history.

Re: Bill Clinton + Billy Graham = ?George Marsden:

Suppose that a man with Bill Clinton's charisma and wayward habits were the son of Billy Graham and had become the most famous liberal preacher in the country. He might be something like a contemporary equivalent of the 19th-century superstar pastor Henry Ward Beecher.

Re: On Asking too Much of Our PoliticiansPeggy Noonan:

We are asking our politicians, our senators and congressmen, to make judgments, decisions and policy on: stem cell research, SDI, Nato composition, G-8 agreements, the history and state of play of judicial and legislative actions regarding press freedoms, the history of Sunni-Shiites tensions, Kurds, tax rates, federal spending, hurricane prediction and response, the building of a library annex in Missoula, the most recent thinking on when human life begins, including the thinking of the theologians of antiquity on when the soul enters the body, chemical weaponry, the Supreme Court, U.S.-North Korean relations, bioethics, cloning, public college curriculums, India-Pakistan relations, the enduring Muslim-Hindu conflict, the constitutional implications of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, Homeland security, Securities and Exchange Commission authority, energy policy, environmental policy, nuclear proliferation, global warming, the stability of Venezuela's Chavez regime and its implications for U.S. oil prices, the future of Cuba after Castro, progress in gender bias as suggested by comparisons of the number of girls who pursued college-track studies in American public high schools circa 1950 to those on a college-track today, outsourcing, immigration, the comparative efficacy of charter and magnet schools, land use, Kelo, health care, HMO's, what to do with victims of child abuse, the history of marriage, the nature and origin of homosexuality, V-chips, foreign competition in the making of computer chips, fat levels in potato chips, national policy on the humanities, U.N. reform, and privacy law.

And that was just this week.

Just seven days in the modern political world.

Lucky for us our congressmen and senators are smart as Einstein, good as Mother Teresa, knowledgeable as Henry Kissinger times Robert Kaplan, and wise as Solomon.

Oh wait.

We are asking too much. Of ourselves and of the mere mortals who lead us.

Re: Israel Juan Cole:

Black humor alert.

The Israeli military still hasn't stopped the Qassam rockets or found its kidnapped soldier, but it has located some Palestinian farms and orchards with dastardly anti-Israel olive trees and other crops that have now been destroyed before they can strike again.

WEEK of July 3, 2006

Re: President Bush in HistoryAlan Wolfe:

Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance.

Re: Donald Rumsfeld's Mount MiseryRebecca Anne Goetz:

The new flap over the New York Times' travel section article about the small vacation community on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney have their summer homes is reaching ridiculous proportions, with some bloggers encouraging their readers to track down and photograph New York Times editors' children at school. But it seems to me we're missing the really interesting information in the article.

The houses have names. Mr. Rumsfeld's is Mount Misery and is just across Rolles Creek from a house called Mount Pleasant...there is some historical gravity to the name, too. By 1833, Mount Misery's owner was Edward Covey, a farmer notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers. One who wouldn't be broken was Frederick Douglass, then 16 and later the abolitionist orator. Covey assaulted him, so Douglass beat him up and escaped."

I find it oddly appropriate that the Defense Secretary who has endorsed torture lives on a plantation where another man once beat and tortured slaves.

Re: Obituary Headlines

NYT Headline:"Vern Leroy Bullough, 77, Noted Medical Historian, Dies"

LAT Headline:"Vern Bullough: 77; Prolific Author Was Scholar of Sex History"

WEEK of June 26, 2006

Re: Supreme Court & Civil Liberties Cass Sunstein:

For much of American history, the Supreme Court has refused to resolve the most fundamental conflicts between individual rights and national security. Instead it has required Congress explicitly to authorize any presidential intrusion into the domain of civil liberty--even when national security is threatened. In this way, the Court has enlisted the separation of powers on behalf of individual liberty. The Court's stunning decision in the Hamdan case is a ringing endorsement of this simple practice.

Re: Scoops NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., speaking of his paper's SWIFT scooooooooooooop:

We put it out on the web, I’m gonna say roughly around 9, 9 pm a couple nights ago. The Wall Street Journal matched us at 10, the Los Angeles Times matched us at 11. So, you know, a scoop is a scoop for about a nanosecond now– but it's a scoop.

Re: Bush Compares Iraq to Hungary Thomas Fleming:

Now, even George Bush’s speechwriters know that the Hungarians did not actually succeed in 1956, nor did they actually overthrow their own Communist dictatorship nor expel the Soviets. The Soviet Union was the “Evil Empire” that claimed to have liberated Eastern Europe and establish true democracy. Eventually that Evil Empire died of its own excesses, and the Russians had to abandon their subject nations.

What the President is obviously telling the world is that Iraq, too, has been occupied by an empire that promised democracy but delivered only tyranny and violence, and the only hope he holds out for Iraq is the eventual dissolution of the American Empire.

I conclude from this speech that David Frum has been replaced by Stephen Colbert.

Re: History Carlin Romano:

Years ago in Albuquerque, at a conference rich in themes of American Indian philosophy and the Southwest's Spanish legacy, a local journalist tossed a thought at me that I found epiphanic in its elegant yet caustic common sense.

"The difference between the Eastern establishment and us is really simple and geographic," he said, more or less."You think American history moves from right to left. We think it moves from left to right, except all those folks on the right started heading in our direction. You read American history like Hebrew. We read it like, if you will, Spanish!"